Actually, there is very good data on how concrete and steel interact in an irradiated environment over the long term. Not 1000 years, but 100 years for a thick stainless steel and concrete container that has no need to serve as a pressure boundary is not hard to achieve, and its likely with more work needed that they can be shown to last for much longer, with some modifications if needed of course.
^I think that's a fair characterization of the path we took, I'll only add that PWR technology was a bit easier to develop and refine for defense applications, making it the 'most commercial ready' technology available at the time when commercial nuclear power emerged.
I certainly think we continue to miss the boat with other nuclear generation technologies as a country.
I would never imply that waste from nuclear power plants is not a problem. It certainly is. I was clarifying the differences between spent fuel "waste" and the stuff which is coming from these federal sites. Cold war and pre-cold war activities produced stuff of all types of liquid and semi-liquid compositions that is a nightmare to deal with. Yes, in comparison, solid nuclear fuel rods are quite easy to manage. Those differences are real despite your opinion of nuclear power.
I don't want to get off topic and into a benefits of nuclear power vs. its waste debate here. There's plenty of other opportunities on slashdot for that.
NWP is the cooperative of multiple companies that contract all this work. Yes, that includes both WIPP as well as those that retrieve and pack the waste. However, WIPP site management is separately run internal to that cooperative, and there is nothing in the article that places blame on the WIPP part of the operation. My point was to clarify the misconceptions that can come from simply calling the facility a "dump".
With that said, there is always room for improvement. WIPP people could require more checks on what comes in to verify it was properly managed.
I was talking about recognition of the failure at the waste facility right after it occurred. My wording maybe could have been sharper. There was definitely an f-up at LANL where those folks packed the waste. I maybe should have said "event", because the bigger "problem" and its cause were certainly not caught. Allowing a change of material in that manner is something that shows the NRC needs more authority over these activities, IMO. At a nuclear plant, for instance, you cannot exchange material or parts without doing some significant evaluations to prove compatibility.
I don't drive the content toward anything on this site. I do have my opinions, and I am very up front about them.
Anything I 'discredit' is done without relation to the submitter, his credibility, or lack thereof. I speak to the content of the article and the subject matter. I did not dismiss anything in this article. In the past I have shown how some of the articles submitted by the same person are misleading or dead wrong and many points, and directly from sources that are not credible. This article isn't one of those, but it was one of many written on this event, but one of the few to repetitively use the term "dump".
If you read the comments, these headlines breed confusion. Many people associate this type of waste with nuclear power fuel waste, and its a very different animal. Its a clarification that is perfectly reasonable for someone to make.
So, be specific. What truth don't I like that I am discrediting? Or did you just throw out that accusation with nothing to back it up? I certainly backed up mine.
I never stated that there was zero fault at any level at WIPP. Frankly, I don't have all the data. But its clear that they had monitoring in place to recognize problems with the stored waste, so that the breached container didn't just sit leaking (as has been a problem at the "cold war" sites).
If I were to guess why you may have been modded down, it was calling the container failure an "explosion". Of course, its a relative term, but I didn't see anything indicative the force of the breach being characterized that way. You could argue it was a very slow, low energy explosion, I suppose.
Don't take my word for it, look at who submitted this article, as well as a string of negative nuclear related headlines going back quite some time, for long stretches almost on a daily basis. You'll find its good ole mdsolar. So yes, I'll remind the community of it, because some folks don't really pay attention. I guess that includes yourself.
You should learn the difference between cold war waste and the spent fuel produce from commercial nuclear power plants. They are very different. Spent nuclear fuel from power plants is actually quite easy to handle, particularly compared to the mess of wastes that the government produced for weapons up to and during the cold war era and completely neglected once they no longer had use for them.
um, no. How can you call it quick recognition when we're talking about cold-war era waste and products from decades ago and the only reason they realized something was wrong was because of an 'explosion'?
I was talking in terms of the waste facility where the waste is being moved to, not the cleanup sites where it originated.
It should be noted that this waste is from cold war era defense programs, and not used commercial nuclear fuel which is much easier to handle and store. It should also be noted that although the writers make every effort to call the WIPP a "dump" in order to conjure up images of a simple landfill, it is actually an underground geological (saltbed) monitored storage facility created for storage of radioactive waste.
Unlike chemical from many industries that are dumped in many places with much less control, this is an example of quick recognition and response to a problem. Cold war nuclear waste comes in all kinds of nasty liquid, solid, and semi-solid forms and will continue to bring challenges as the slow cleanup slog continues.
Of course, this slashdot submission is one of an ongoing number of agenda driven submissions that intends to obfuscate the challenges of cold ware era defense program neglect with commercial nuclear power. Fortunately, most slashdot readers pick up on the obvious.
I still don't understand why the lethal injection isn't just a bunch of heroin that's been confiscated in the latest raid. People OD on heroin without being horribly uncomfortable.
Not fast enough. Throw in a little carbon monoxide.
Question is if I am actually breeding these little microbes and my lack of soaping is why I don't smell or if it's simply because I'm not a smelly person as some of my friends and family asserts?
Smelly is relative term.Are your relatives are smelly?
But seriously, I think a lot of folks don't soap their entire bodies when they shower. I just hit the critical spots in a normal shower. Full soaping only happens before a long flight or after doing something significantly dirty. Shampoo once a week at most, keeps my scalp from drying up.
A wall to prevent a tsunami from hitting the plant is not the same as designing the plant itself to withstand a tsunami. The failure was that they underestimated the size of a tsunami that could hit that area even though there was clear evidence that, even though unlikely, such a massive tsunami could happen. Interestingly, there were other towns on the cost with higher tsunami walls. But they didn't assume a tsunami would ever get past the wall and hit the plant, therefore they didn't feel the need to design the plant to withstand it. For example, the emergency diesel generator buildings were directly exposed to any tsunami that might breach the wall, on ground elevation.
I don't disagree with your point that operators maybe could have performed better under the circumstance, and maybe even violated something they were trained to do, but if the operators are in a position that one erroneous course of action leads to melting fuel then there is a bigger problem. Design basis of plants includes the ability to remain safe even with operator error. There should be multiple safeguards in place and functional even after a major event. If you are down to part of one train of a heat removal system being the only thing that can keep the plant safe, then you are way past the point where the design has failed to cope with the event.
Fortunately, due to good seismic design, which was included in the design basis, a lot of things held together. But it wasn't enough.
Be careful about the 'waterproofing' you refer to. You really can't waterproof a plant. You need to know the specific intention of the waterproofing. It was more likely to prevent internal flooding from a pipe break, or some other water intrusion, rather than being engulfed by a tsunami. If the EDG vents are below the flood level, you've already failed in design, no amount of waterproofing will help. If someone leaves a door open, flooding can still occur.
Don't put nuclear plants where they can be hit by a tsunami. It is well known at which points along the coast tsunamis bulge. Coves or bays like where Fukushima plants are located are one of those high wave areas. Only a short distance away, there are places where a tsunami can't build up nearly as much.
That's it for me. Thanks for the discussion. Good night.
But you don't seem to understand. The whole plant was completely outside of its design basis. Regardless of what was still intact, the massive damage to the plant, infrastructure, and loss of power left the operators with too much to deal with and uncertainty about what to trust or do. They were put in a position that never would have happened if 1) the tsunami did not hit or 2) the plant was designed to withstand a tsunami.
That fact that anything of use was left intact after the tsunami was a matter of luck, not design and not operator action. That operators were not equipped procedurally to handle such a situation is not surprising in the least, particularly when power was quickly lost and associated instrumentation. Regardless of what is actually available, expecting them to properly operate a plant that has experienced an event so far out of its design basis is not acceptable. You must design a plant so that operators are not put in that position for any postulated event. The tsunami was quite easily postulated. The plant was improperly allow to exist at that site. That is the root cause.
When you spread wind turbines out over a large area you also smooth out the variability.
You smooth at a little, but the problem is that the distance itself. Moving large amounts of power back and forth over distribution rather than transmission lines becomes the problem. Those lines are not sized to handle that type of load.
The problem with allocating that cost to wind is that the other power plants do not pay for the spinning reserve.
The cost is included in the total generation cost by the utility or power provider. So, yes, it is priced in. When a utility signed a normal power purchase agreement from another generator, it typically requires a certain amount of power and there is a reliability requirement. They power must be provided at the time and rate specified in the contract, or there are penalties. Most generators can supply at nearly a hundred percent reliability because they factor in the spinning reserve, and that is included in the contract price. But utilities are forced to buy from solar and wind at high rates, but they cannot ask for the same reliability, and if fact, they have to cover that deficiency themselves. So, solar and wind get to have their cake and eat it too, and then go off and boast about how they are competitive.
^You cannot operate injection without power. All power was quickly lost. It doesn't matter if the piping is intact. The system is not operable without power.
Regardless, the entire condition was outside of the plant design basis. You have to understand that simple concept.
Yes, its possible had the operators acted differently to mitigate the tsunami damage, the fuel melt may have been prevented. But that is not a cause. There reason the operators did not have the proper instrumentation to deal with a post tsunami wipe-out, is because the plant was not designed to cope with that event.
Had the plant been designed to cope with that event, emergency power sources would have been located in safe areas with protected feeds. Safety equipment would have been located above tsunami levels, and the plant would have had any extra needed instrumentation to perform the necessary operations during that event.
BTW, you can prove that a structure can withstand a force. It is quite easy and common.
The operator action is only relevant when judging the efforts to save the plant after the major damage that was done by a tsunami that the plant was not designed to handle in the first place. Had the plant been able to withstand the tsunami without such severe damage, then operators would have not had any problems continuing the shutdown.
The solution to the problem is to either design the plant to withstand the tsunami, or don't put it where it will be hit by a tsunami. The solution is not to expect the operators to make the right decision when they don't have the needed functional systems to do their job correctly.
You stated
The low pressure emergency cooling was not affected by the tsunami
This is absolutely false. While there may have been some functionality of the system left after the tsunami, it was not designed to operate under those conditions and it those limited functions were not available for very long, and therefore was not effectively operable is any reasonable sense. Not to mention all the other systems and redundancies that were no longer available. That is not fault of the operator or any decision they made. It is entirely, 100%, the result of being hit by a tsunami that the plant, nor its individual safety systems, was designed to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is very good data on how concrete and steel interact in an irradiated environment over the long term. Not 1000 years, but 100 years for a thick stainless steel and concrete container that has no need to serve as a pressure boundary is not hard to achieve, and its likely with more work needed that they can be shown to last for much longer, with some modifications if needed of course.
Why do you consider them inexpensive?
^I think that's a fair characterization of the path we took, I'll only add that PWR technology was a bit easier to develop and refine for defense applications, making it the 'most commercial ready' technology available at the time when commercial nuclear power emerged.
I certainly think we continue to miss the boat with other nuclear generation technologies as a country.
I would never imply that waste from nuclear power plants is not a problem. It certainly is. I was clarifying the differences between spent fuel "waste" and the stuff which is coming from these federal sites. Cold war and pre-cold war activities produced stuff of all types of liquid and semi-liquid compositions that is a nightmare to deal with. Yes, in comparison, solid nuclear fuel rods are quite easy to manage. Those differences are real despite your opinion of nuclear power.
I don't want to get off topic and into a benefits of nuclear power vs. its waste debate here. There's plenty of other opportunities on slashdot for that.
NWP is the cooperative of multiple companies that contract all this work. Yes, that includes both WIPP as well as those that retrieve and pack the waste. However, WIPP site management is separately run internal to that cooperative, and there is nothing in the article that places blame on the WIPP part of the operation. My point was to clarify the misconceptions that can come from simply calling the facility a "dump".
With that said, there is always room for improvement. WIPP people could require more checks on what comes in to verify it was properly managed.
I was talking about recognition of the failure at the waste facility right after it occurred. My wording maybe could have been sharper. There was definitely an f-up at LANL where those folks packed the waste. I maybe should have said "event", because the bigger "problem" and its cause were certainly not caught. Allowing a change of material in that manner is something that shows the NRC needs more authority over these activities, IMO. At a nuclear plant, for instance, you cannot exchange material or parts without doing some significant evaluations to prove compatibility.
Agreed, conflate fits better. Thanks
I don't drive the content toward anything on this site. I do have my opinions, and I am very up front about them.
Anything I 'discredit' is done without relation to the submitter, his credibility, or lack thereof. I speak to the content of the article and the subject matter. I did not dismiss anything in this article. In the past I have shown how some of the articles submitted by the same person are misleading or dead wrong and many points, and directly from sources that are not credible. This article isn't one of those, but it was one of many written on this event, but one of the few to repetitively use the term "dump".
If you read the comments, these headlines breed confusion. Many people associate this type of waste with nuclear power fuel waste, and its a very different animal. Its a clarification that is perfectly reasonable for someone to make.
So, be specific. What truth don't I like that I am discrediting? Or did you just throw out that accusation with nothing to back it up? I certainly backed up mine.
There you go, this has nothing to do with the nuclear power industry. Exactly the association the submitter wanted you to make, though.
I never stated that there was zero fault at any level at WIPP. Frankly, I don't have all the data. But its clear that they had monitoring in place to recognize problems with the stored waste, so that the breached container didn't just sit leaking (as has been a problem at the "cold war" sites).
If I were to guess why you may have been modded down, it was calling the container failure an "explosion". Of course, its a relative term, but I didn't see anything indicative the force of the breach being characterized that way. You could argue it was a very slow, low energy explosion, I suppose.
Should kids be allowed to ride trains/metros all by themselves? Same answer.
Don't take my word for it, look at who submitted this article, as well as a string of negative nuclear related headlines going back quite some time, for long stretches almost on a daily basis. You'll find its good ole mdsolar. So yes, I'll remind the community of it, because some folks don't really pay attention. I guess that includes yourself.
You should learn the difference between cold war waste and the spent fuel produce from commercial nuclear power plants. They are very different. Spent nuclear fuel from power plants is actually quite easy to handle, particularly compared to the mess of wastes that the government produced for weapons up to and during the cold war era and completely neglected once they no longer had use for them.
The waste was not packed at the WIPP. It is a problem that occurred at LANL before shipping. Yes, that was an F-up.
um, no. How can you call it quick recognition when we're talking about cold-war era waste and products from decades ago and the only reason they realized something was wrong was because of an 'explosion'?
I was talking in terms of the waste facility where the waste is being moved to, not the cleanup sites where it originated.
It should be noted that this waste is from cold war era defense programs, and not used commercial nuclear fuel which is much easier to handle and store. It should also be noted that although the writers make every effort to call the WIPP a "dump" in order to conjure up images of a simple landfill, it is actually an underground geological (saltbed) monitored storage facility created for storage of radioactive waste.
Unlike chemical from many industries that are dumped in many places with much less control, this is an example of quick recognition and response to a problem. Cold war nuclear waste comes in all kinds of nasty liquid, solid, and semi-solid forms and will continue to bring challenges as the slow cleanup slog continues.
Of course, this slashdot submission is one of an ongoing number of agenda driven submissions that intends to obfuscate the challenges of cold ware era defense program neglect with commercial nuclear power. Fortunately, most slashdot readers pick up on the obvious.
This has been done before.
I still don't understand why the lethal injection isn't just a bunch of heroin that's been confiscated in the latest raid. People OD on heroin without being horribly uncomfortable.
Not fast enough. Throw in a little carbon monoxide.
Or maybe they should simply not rape and murder that 9 year old girl.
Question is if I am actually breeding these little microbes and my lack of soaping is why I don't smell or if it's simply because I'm not a smelly person as some of my friends and family asserts?
Smelly is relative term.Are your relatives are smelly?
But seriously, I think a lot of folks don't soap their entire bodies when they shower. I just hit the critical spots in a normal shower. Full soaping only happens before a long flight or after doing something significantly dirty. Shampoo once a week at most, keeps my scalp from drying up.
Was the reduction of body stench independently verified? Maybe she just got used to it.
A wall to prevent a tsunami from hitting the plant is not the same as designing the plant itself to withstand a tsunami. The failure was that they underestimated the size of a tsunami that could hit that area even though there was clear evidence that, even though unlikely, such a massive tsunami could happen. Interestingly, there were other towns on the cost with higher tsunami walls. But they didn't assume a tsunami would ever get past the wall and hit the plant, therefore they didn't feel the need to design the plant to withstand it. For example, the emergency diesel generator buildings were directly exposed to any tsunami that might breach the wall, on ground elevation.
I don't disagree with your point that operators maybe could have performed better under the circumstance, and maybe even violated something they were trained to do, but if the operators are in a position that one erroneous course of action leads to melting fuel then there is a bigger problem. Design basis of plants includes the ability to remain safe even with operator error. There should be multiple safeguards in place and functional even after a major event. If you are down to part of one train of a heat removal system being the only thing that can keep the plant safe, then you are way past the point where the design has failed to cope with the event.
Fortunately, due to good seismic design, which was included in the design basis, a lot of things held together. But it wasn't enough.
Be careful about the 'waterproofing' you refer to. You really can't waterproof a plant. You need to know the specific intention of the waterproofing. It was more likely to prevent internal flooding from a pipe break, or some other water intrusion, rather than being engulfed by a tsunami. If the EDG vents are below the flood level, you've already failed in design, no amount of waterproofing will help. If someone leaves a door open, flooding can still occur.
Don't put nuclear plants where they can be hit by a tsunami. It is well known at which points along the coast tsunamis bulge. Coves or bays like where Fukushima plants are located are one of those high wave areas. Only a short distance away, there are places where a tsunami can't build up nearly as much.
That's it for me. Thanks for the discussion. Good night.
But you don't seem to understand. The whole plant was completely outside of its design basis. Regardless of what was still intact, the massive damage to the plant, infrastructure, and loss of power left the operators with too much to deal with and uncertainty about what to trust or do. They were put in a position that never would have happened if 1) the tsunami did not hit or 2) the plant was designed to withstand a tsunami.
That fact that anything of use was left intact after the tsunami was a matter of luck, not design and not operator action. That operators were not equipped procedurally to handle such a situation is not surprising in the least, particularly when power was quickly lost and associated instrumentation. Regardless of what is actually available, expecting them to properly operate a plant that has experienced an event so far out of its design basis is not acceptable. You must design a plant so that operators are not put in that position for any postulated event. The tsunami was quite easily postulated. The plant was improperly allow to exist at that site. That is the root cause.
When you spread wind turbines out over a large area you also smooth out the variability.
You smooth at a little, but the problem is that the distance itself. Moving large amounts of power back and forth over distribution rather than transmission lines becomes the problem. Those lines are not sized to handle that type of load.
The problem with allocating that cost to wind is that the other power plants do not pay for the spinning reserve.
The cost is included in the total generation cost by the utility or power provider. So, yes, it is priced in. When a utility signed a normal power purchase agreement from another generator, it typically requires a certain amount of power and there is a reliability requirement. They power must be provided at the time and rate specified in the contract, or there are penalties. Most generators can supply at nearly a hundred percent reliability because they factor in the spinning reserve, and that is included in the contract price. But utilities are forced to buy from solar and wind at high rates, but they cannot ask for the same reliability, and if fact, they have to cover that deficiency themselves. So, solar and wind get to have their cake and eat it too, and then go off and boast about how they are competitive.
^You cannot operate injection without power. All power was quickly lost. It doesn't matter if the piping is intact. The system is not operable without power.
Regardless, the entire condition was outside of the plant design basis. You have to understand that simple concept.
Yes, its possible had the operators acted differently to mitigate the tsunami damage, the fuel melt may have been prevented. But that is not a cause. There reason the operators did not have the proper instrumentation to deal with a post tsunami wipe-out, is because the plant was not designed to cope with that event.
Had the plant been designed to cope with that event, emergency power sources would have been located in safe areas with protected feeds. Safety equipment would have been located above tsunami levels, and the plant would have had any extra needed instrumentation to perform the necessary operations during that event.
BTW, you can prove that a structure can withstand a force. It is quite easy and common.
The solution to the problem is to either design the plant to withstand the tsunami, or don't put it where it will be hit by a tsunami. The solution is not to expect the operators to make the right decision when they don't have the needed functional systems to do their job correctly. You stated
The low pressure emergency cooling was not affected by the tsunami
This is absolutely false. While there may have been some functionality of the system left after the tsunami, it was not designed to operate under those conditions and it those limited functions were not available for very long, and therefore was not effectively operable is any reasonable sense. Not to mention all the other systems and redundancies that were no longer available. That is not fault of the operator or any decision they made. It is entirely, 100%, the result of being hit by a tsunami that the plant, nor its individual safety systems, was designed to handle.