That's not quite true. The Integral Fast Reactor was also a type of sodium cooled breeder though with much less waste and much harder for proliferation purposes. The prototype was working up at Argonne National Labs.
Carter didn't shut that one down. The congress did in the 90s and Bill Clinton mentioned it in his state of the union speech as one of his administrations achievements. He said it was a waste of money, since we would never need it.
It'll be interesting to see what the surface chemistry is like on a place that has such a high temperature solar wind blasted face and massive temperature gradients along the terminator. They loaded Messenger up with spectrometers for atmosphere (tenuous, I know) and surface element and chemistry analysis.
The magnetometer and orbit monitoring of the spacecraft are going to give a lot of info on what the core of the planet is like.
I love this kind of thing. Beats the daylights out of most of the other news around the world in the past week.
It can be used for that. At least at some plants. I recall that an engineer at one of the local nuke plants indicated that one could do it (a couple decades back). I don't know if it's mandated for all US ones. It's not for conventional ones but people get really twitchy when a nuke plant loses power.
I know a lot of Europe requires house load operation for nuclear plants. I'm not certain about the Japanese plants.
Well, the newer social media were a very useful tool in the hands of the uprisings. But, I wouldn't say a definite yes. Much of the organizing in Egypt, for example, was done after the internet was taken down. Many of the people involved in the areas outside of Cairo didn't have access to social media and cell phone use was heavily monitored and interfered with.
I'm also struck that similar uprisings were done in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before such things were available. Fax machines, copiers, typewriters and land line telephones were the technologies for those.
If you want to give that weight to it, you have to define modern technology pretty broadly to include some nearly century old ones.
Just an FYI before you start calling people asshole: It's not just the Japanese. Even the US Military started moving to Sieverts and Grays way back in 1984 when I was doing NBC (nuclear biological and chemical) for an artillery battalion in Korea. It was part of a move to standardize between different NATO armies.
Now, they kept training in Rads and REM up through when I left the army in 92 so whether they completed the change I don't know.
But, a quick check on google will tell you 1 Sievert = 100 REM and 1 Gray = 100 RAD.
If you can't handle things like micro and milli, I can't really help you.
I believe it can do it. Normally. That's what's called house load operation. Where the reactor is producing power just for itself when it's disconnected from the grid for some reason. It may be very temporary while it syncs itself back to the grid so it can reconnect.
The problem is, that the transformers needed to do that are in the switchyard of the plant (big oil coiled transformers). The quake and tsunami damaged that as well as the backup generators and took out the power lines to the plant as well. So, no self powering, no power from the grid, and no power from the emergency generators.
That left them with the steam powered RCIC cooling system that needs batteries for the controls. That failed. (I'm not clear if they failed due to batteries running down, malfunction or combinations. There are separate ones for each reactor so it could be any of them. There was word they were flying in batteries to power them at one point.)
They have the transformers needed, but they are in the switchyard that connects the plant to the power grid. The combination of the quake and tsunami damaged that. (Think. They both have to be able to change generated power to grid form to deliver it, and to take power from the grid to convert to the voltages and phase used by the plant when they are shut down but not on backup generators.)
In any case, they have to close the reactor steam connections to the turbines when they SCRAM the reactor as they often don't know yet just what sort of malfunction it is. There are quite a number of possibilities that could damage the turbines or piping and release steam that is contaminated with radioisotopes into area of the plant not made to handle it.
We have a church near where I work that has a prominent nuclear free zone sign on it.
I wonder what they're going to do about the uranium in the granitic rock that some of it is made of.
But, in any case, I'm sure the sign will make a lot of difference. If someone explodes a nuclear weapon, they'll be sure to do it across the street where there isn't any sign.
It wasn't just a proposal. The IFR was a project that had already been running for some time and was in the later stages. It was quite different from Clinch River. Sodium cooled fast reactors have been running for quite some time and even producing power in the FSU. Pyroprocessing was directed at helping both the waste and proliferation problems.
But all this doesn't really matter, does it? As I said in the other post, much of the antinuclear lobby has no desire to see any improvement in nuclear power. It is a priori something to never be used or contemplated, thus a better system is just an impediment to that end.
Unlike what it initially looks like, it is not from the newspaper USA Today.
USA Today (Society For Advancement of Education), note the extended title, is a monthly put out largely by one Wayne M. Barrett. It appears to be mostly his personal opinions and those of people he agrees with.
1) Pyroprocess it so that it the actinides are kept inside the plant and it never is in a form useful for bombs. Then you also have a much smaller amount of waste that is higher level and decays much more quickly.
But, in the early Clinton administration the testbed for it (Integral Fast Reactor at Argonne Natl. Labs) was cancelled. He mentioned it in his state of the union speech. Reason given? We would never need it. Actual reason? It made the waste problem less of a problem. Opposition to nuclear energy is not just technical, it's philosophical. Witness Ed Markey calling for the APS 1000 to have a moratorium on licensing in the light of Japan. The APS-1000 is designed to avoid these problems of overheating without outside cooling. Markey does not want a more effective reactor. He wants no reactors at all. A better reactor is a hindrance to what he wants. If he can't stop the nuclear industry he'll try to cripple it. He was a leader in stopping the IFR.
2) Plutonium from power reactors is quite difficult to turn into an effective bomb as it has high levels of Pu 240 and higher mass isotopes that spontaneously fission too much. The US did one test (That apparently fizzled. The DOE refused to release what yield if any they got.) with it in 1962. And that was with the combined efforts of the US and Britain.
The rationale for limiting reprocessing to limit proliferation is that the same chemical means (PUREX) that is used to process reactor fuel is used to process bomb fuel (but with properly prepared plutonium from a reactor made for that purpose). If you have a chemical reprocessing facility, you might be making plutonium bomb fuel. If you don't have one, you probably aren't.
Pyroprocessing keeps the fuel in the reactor building and it also doesn't separate the plutonium from other heavy elements thus making it hard to use for bomb fuel.
It could be done in principle if it had been designed in, but they were set up to use other backups, and they also had reasons to want to shutdown and block off the main generation system.
When they scram (shutdown suddenly) the reactor and isolate the core, they shut down the normal steam production system as that is an additional way for coolant or contamination to get out.
You may not know immediately what malfunction happened, and for some of them leaving the main steam system running would be real trouble.
A breach in the heat exchanger from the primary to secondary cooling loop for example. You'd be sending radioactive (at least potentially) coolant of whatever sort out through the part of the plant not designed to handle radioactive material. In this case, it's water in both loops. In some reactors it's very different materials like molten sodium and you can get very destructive chemical reactions happening.
You could also have debris dislodged in the malfunction make it out to the turbines. When they fail from that, it's usually pretty catastrophic.
The heat energy immediately shutdown is only a few percent of the heat generated when the pile is running normally and the heat production drops rapidly.
I don't know enough to know if or how long that can continue to spin the large turbo-generators that are normally running.
The electricity generated would also have to go to transformers in the switchyard that was flooded and damaged by the tsunami to be changed to a voltage and phasing needed for the plant's internal power system. The destruction of that was one of the reasons they couldn't try to restore power from outside the plant. And, of course, the water took out the backup generators at the same time.
They do power backup cooling at least as far as water injectors.
But, you're right in a way. The normal steam production system is a massively more effective heat management system than the backup cooling.
All those human failures and goofs you see and it STILL didn't leak? (See, I can use caps too.)
As to significant, I'd call it that when we have amounts that have had health effects that show up in actual statistics rather than the linear no threshold model that keeps being used as the gold standard when it's known to be flawed.
We've had a fair bit of actual exposure to radiation that doesn't show the dire consequences of the linear no threshold model, but it doesn't make any difference to the critics. A wonderful example of theory trumping experiment. Popper must be turning in his grave.
Radiation can be dangerous. Exposure can cause cancer long down the road. And too much will kill you dead. But that can be said of a lot of exposures.
In 1998 they released Godzilla in thousands of locations. Save for maybe a heart attack or two in the theater there weren't any fatalities.
Blow? They already had a massive explosion around two of them and no release.
More seriously, I just don't see it. Chernobyl was about as bad as it gets from a nuke plant and this type of plant won't release nearly that much mobile contamination as it doesn't have a flammable moderator like that one did.
Sure, you can make suppositions that lead to Armageddon in a soup can just waiting for a can opener, but they are pretty tenuous.
These have taken all of the worst case scenarios that we were assured would cause complete failure and they haven't done so yet.
Those opposed to nuke power want those in favor to question their assumptions in the light of new data. When do they revisit their own assumptions that predicted far worse than actually happened?
Sure. But if you want to make use of that, you have to build highly interconnected transmission systems that can respond reliably on the time scale of wind variation.
We do already to some extent to compensate for power plants failing/going offline, but it's sure not that level of reliability. Witness that big outage in the Northeast or the California power shortage some years back, etc.
But, there's a much bigger problem. Transmission systems are harder to get built than any power plant.
Why? Because a plant only has one location that you have to fight over (and with NIMBY, fight they do). Transmission lines go through large numbers of landowners/jurisdictions and each one has a good chance of being litigated.
That's why you see utilities re-conductoring their existing lines to increase capacity rather than getting new right of way. There are limits to that.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite true. The Integral Fast Reactor was also a type of sodium cooled breeder though with much less waste and much harder for proliferation purposes. The prototype was working up at Argonne National Labs.
Carter didn't shut that one down. The congress did in the 90s and Bill Clinton mentioned it in his state of the union speech as one of his administrations achievements. He said it was a waste of money, since we would never need it.
It'll be interesting to see what the surface chemistry is like on a place that has such a high temperature solar wind blasted face and massive temperature gradients along the terminator. They loaded Messenger up with spectrometers for atmosphere (tenuous, I know) and surface element and chemistry analysis.
The magnetometer and orbit monitoring of the spacecraft are going to give a lot of info on what the core of the planet is like.
I love this kind of thing. Beats the daylights out of most of the other news around the world in the past week.
You looked closely enough to see if he had worms?
Eeeeew...
It can be used for that. At least at some plants. I recall that an engineer at one of the local nuke plants indicated that one could do it (a couple decades back). I don't know if it's mandated for all US ones. It's not for conventional ones but people get really twitchy when a nuke plant loses power.
I know a lot of Europe requires house load operation for nuclear plants. I'm not certain about the Japanese plants.
Well, the newer social media were a very useful tool in the hands of the uprisings. But, I wouldn't say a definite yes. Much of the organizing in Egypt, for example, was done after the internet was taken down. Many of the people involved in the areas outside of Cairo didn't have access to social media and cell phone use was heavily monitored and interfered with.
I'm also struck that similar uprisings were done in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before such things were available. Fax machines, copiers, typewriters and land line telephones were the technologies for those.
If you want to give that weight to it, you have to define modern technology pretty broadly to include some nearly century old ones.
Not decorated. Unless you count a good conduct medal and a couple of AAMs. And all of those are a dime a dozen. Never been in combat.
Just some former army puke.
A lot of very good questions.
The answer to all of them is "We don't know."
Too late. He already is.
Do you actually read?
If you think wikipedia was around in 1984, you've got some serious misconceptions, youngling.
Just an FYI before you start calling people asshole: It's not just the Japanese. Even the US Military started moving to Sieverts and Grays way back in 1984 when I was doing NBC (nuclear biological and chemical) for an artillery battalion in Korea. It was part of a move to standardize between different NATO armies.
Now, they kept training in Rads and REM up through when I left the army in 92 so whether they completed the change I don't know.
But, a quick check on google will tell you 1 Sievert = 100 REM and 1 Gray = 100 RAD.
If you can't handle things like micro and milli, I can't really help you.
I believe it can do it. Normally. That's what's called house load operation. Where the reactor is producing power just for itself when it's disconnected from the grid for some reason. It may be very temporary while it syncs itself back to the grid so it can reconnect.
The problem is, that the transformers needed to do that are in the switchyard of the plant (big oil coiled transformers). The quake and tsunami damaged that as well as the backup generators and took out the power lines to the plant as well. So, no self powering, no power from the grid, and no power from the emergency generators.
That left them with the steam powered RCIC cooling system that needs batteries for the controls. That failed. (I'm not clear if they failed due to batteries running down, malfunction or combinations. There are separate ones for each reactor so it could be any of them. There was word they were flying in batteries to power them at one point.)
They have the transformers needed, but they are in the switchyard that connects the plant to the power grid. The combination of the quake and tsunami damaged that. (Think. They both have to be able to change generated power to grid form to deliver it, and to take power from the grid to convert to the voltages and phase used by the plant when they are shut down but not on backup generators.)
In any case, they have to close the reactor steam connections to the turbines when they SCRAM the reactor as they often don't know yet just what sort of malfunction it is. There are quite a number of possibilities that could damage the turbines or piping and release steam that is contaminated with radioisotopes into area of the plant not made to handle it.
But I'm still stuck with RCS you insensitive clod!
I sentence you to be perpetually mobbed by annoying talking animal anime sidekicks.
I'd have said the AFLAC duck, but they fired him.
We have a church near where I work that has a prominent nuclear free zone sign on it.
I wonder what they're going to do about the uranium in the granitic rock that some of it is made of.
But, in any case, I'm sure the sign will make a lot of difference. If someone explodes a nuclear weapon, they'll be sure to do it across the street where there isn't any sign.
It went out on its own.
Better luck next time.
It wasn't just a proposal. The IFR was a project that had already been running for some time and was in the later stages. It was quite different from Clinch River. Sodium cooled fast reactors have been running for quite some time and even producing power in the FSU. Pyroprocessing was directed at helping both the waste and proliferation problems.
But all this doesn't really matter, does it? As I said in the other post, much of the antinuclear lobby has no desire to see any improvement in nuclear power. It is a priori something to never be used or contemplated, thus a better system is just an impediment to that end.
Unlike what it initially looks like, it is not from the newspaper USA Today.
USA Today (Society For Advancement of Education), note the extended title, is a monthly put out largely by one Wayne M. Barrett. It appears to be mostly his personal opinions and those of people he agrees with.
I call shenanigans.
1) Pyroprocess it so that it the actinides are kept inside the plant and it never is in a form useful for bombs. Then you also have a much smaller amount of waste that is higher level and decays much more quickly.
But, in the early Clinton administration the testbed for it (Integral Fast Reactor at Argonne Natl. Labs) was cancelled. He mentioned it in his state of the union speech. Reason given? We would never need it. Actual reason? It made the waste problem less of a problem. Opposition to nuclear energy is not just technical, it's philosophical. Witness Ed Markey calling for the APS 1000 to have a moratorium on licensing in the light of Japan. The APS-1000 is designed to avoid these problems of overheating without outside cooling. Markey does not want a more effective reactor. He wants no reactors at all. A better reactor is a hindrance to what he wants. If he can't stop the nuclear industry he'll try to cripple it. He was a leader in stopping the IFR.
2) Plutonium from power reactors is quite difficult to turn into an effective bomb as it has high levels of Pu 240 and higher mass isotopes that spontaneously fission too much. The US did one test (That apparently fizzled. The DOE refused to release what yield if any they got.) with it in 1962. And that was with the combined efforts of the US and Britain.
The rationale for limiting reprocessing to limit proliferation is that the same chemical means (PUREX) that is used to process reactor fuel is used to process bomb fuel (but with properly prepared plutonium from a reactor made for that purpose). If you have a chemical reprocessing facility, you might be making plutonium bomb fuel. If you don't have one, you probably aren't.
Pyroprocessing keeps the fuel in the reactor building and it also doesn't separate the plutonium from other heavy elements thus making it hard to use for bomb fuel.
It could be done in principle if it had been designed in, but they were set up to use other backups, and they also had reasons to want to shutdown and block off the main generation system.
When they scram (shutdown suddenly) the reactor and isolate the core, they shut down the normal steam production system as that is an additional way for coolant or contamination to get out.
You may not know immediately what malfunction happened, and for some of them leaving the main steam system running would be real trouble.
A breach in the heat exchanger from the primary to secondary cooling loop for example. You'd be sending radioactive (at least potentially) coolant of whatever sort out through the part of the plant not designed to handle radioactive material. In this case, it's water in both loops. In some reactors it's very different materials like molten sodium and you can get very destructive chemical reactions happening.
You could also have debris dislodged in the malfunction make it out to the turbines. When they fail from that, it's usually pretty catastrophic.
The heat energy immediately shutdown is only a few percent of the heat generated when the pile is running normally and the heat production drops rapidly.
I don't know enough to know if or how long that can continue to spin the large turbo-generators that are normally running.
The electricity generated would also have to go to transformers in the switchyard that was flooded and damaged by the tsunami to be changed to a voltage and phasing needed for the plant's internal power system. The destruction of that was one of the reasons they couldn't try to restore power from outside the plant. And, of course, the water took out the backup generators at the same time.
They do power backup cooling at least as far as water injectors.
But, you're right in a way. The normal steam production system is a massively more effective heat management system than the backup cooling.
Well, you asked. They've detected 400 millisieverts between 2 and 3 after the fire in rector 4 and another explosion at 2. That's significant.
Ivanova is God.
All those human failures and goofs you see and it STILL didn't leak? (See, I can use caps too.)
As to significant, I'd call it that when we have amounts that have had health effects that show up in actual statistics rather than the linear no threshold model that keeps being used as the gold standard when it's known to be flawed.
We've had a fair bit of actual exposure to radiation that doesn't show the dire consequences of the linear no threshold model, but it doesn't make any difference to the critics. A wonderful example of theory trumping experiment. Popper must be turning in his grave.
Radiation can be dangerous. Exposure can cause cancer long down the road. And too much will kill you dead. But that can be said of a lot of exposures.
In 1998 they released Godzilla in thousands of locations. Save for maybe a heart attack or two in the theater there weren't any fatalities.
Blow? They already had a massive explosion around two of them and no release.
More seriously, I just don't see it. Chernobyl was about as bad as it gets from a nuke plant and this type of plant won't release nearly that much mobile contamination as it doesn't have a flammable moderator like that one did.
Sure, you can make suppositions that lead to Armageddon in a soup can just waiting for a can opener, but they are pretty tenuous.
These have taken all of the worst case scenarios that we were assured would cause complete failure and they haven't done so yet.
Those opposed to nuke power want those in favor to question their assumptions in the light of new data. When do they revisit their own assumptions that predicted far worse than actually happened?
Standard = double.
Sure. But if you want to make use of that, you have to build highly interconnected transmission systems that can respond reliably on the time scale of wind variation.
We do already to some extent to compensate for power plants failing/going offline, but it's sure not that level of reliability. Witness that big outage in the Northeast or the California power shortage some years back, etc.
But, there's a much bigger problem. Transmission systems are harder to get built than any power plant.
Why? Because a plant only has one location that you have to fight over (and with NIMBY, fight they do). Transmission lines go through large numbers of landowners/jurisdictions and each one has a good chance of being litigated.
That's why you see utilities re-conductoring their existing lines to increase capacity rather than getting new right of way. There are limits to that.