I don’t think we’re in disagreement. I’ve worked with oil refinery operators most of my life, and there are great similarities in the two. Automation and redundency have taken a lot of the pressure away from the job.
All I meant was that if a high school kid shows promise and aptitude he/she can be trained to operate a power plant regardless of birthplace.
I work with an ex-navy nuke qualified IT. He served aboard the Enterprise IIRC. He is pretty smart, but mostly he can multi-task.
Cool with the knee-jerk reaction. If companies really really put safety before profits, then these things would really be rare events. Its a dangerous job, known to all who work in the industry. This is just a very unfortunate event. Bless the families involved.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100406/ap_on_bi_ge/us_mine_explosion_massey_energy Massey has been one of the worst mining companies for a long time. They are making a lot of money but are cited over and over for dangerous practices and non compliance.
There are a lot of dangerous occupations. Some companies care and do something, some don’t.
It’s odd. Cops and firefighters, way down the list, get all the attention. I’m not sure why.
Unfortunately, there are other industries with similar or worse mortality statistics:
http://www.e-z.net/~ts/ts/ts.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/03/20/oil.accidents/index.html
Enforced safety regulations are an answer in the short term. Long term solutions would be engineering safer practices and finding other options for producing electricity, moving our goods and powering our vehicles / heating our homes.
Life for the working class has never been a safe one. It has become much safer in recent years, but those who work with their hands and backs will always be more at risk than someone safely esconced in an office environment.
The o.p. did not have a single question mark. It advanced a proposal that appeared to lack any comprehension of the effort necessary to select an appropriate site, construct, and operate a nuclear planet. It also reduced the problems of dealing with nuclear waste–which isn’t just the spent fuel rods but all waste products through the nuclear fuel production cycle–to the simplisitc “dump it in a deep hole and forget about it,” which isn’t even well suited to vitrified fuel elements, much less the aqueous waste products that are a result of fuel production. It completely ignores the bottleneck of fuel element production, especially the development and process control of novel element configurations such as pebble bed reactors, and developing the safety and control processes and safeguards for new reactor configurations in a power production environment.
It takes a high degree of technical literacy to perform any of the major maintenance and operation tasks at a nuclear plant. Many of the jobs that would be performed by manual or semi-skilled labor in a coal or oil plant–even jobs like loading fuel or pipefitting–will require skilled labor owing to the particular criticality of environmental and safety hazards of handling radioactive materials. When the result of failure is significant, ‘smart’ becomes ‘barely reliable’ and ‘ignorant’ is ‘dangerously unsafe’.
Seismic events aren’t nearly as much of a hazard as subsidence and other site-related issues. (Indeed the Diablo Canyon Power Plant sits nearly astride the Northern San Gregorio line of the San Andreas and adjacent to the Hosgri line.) A larger problem is preventing the reactor and massive containment building–which is by necessity constructed as one large monolithic structure–from either subsiding and tilting, or suffering intrusion into the water table, suffering damage from frostline stress cycling, et cetera. It also needs to be built near some large natural water source like a river, large lake, or protected ocean bay, to use as coolant and heat dump for the secondary cooling loop. The appropriate siting of a nuclear plant is difficult enough without placing further geographic constraints.
Navy ‘Nucs’–even, or perhaps especially, the enlisted personnel–are not your average sailor. Officers in the Nuclear Propulsion Engineering designation (122X) will often have an advanced degree (M.S. or above) in engineering. Enlisted nuclear tech personnel will go from basic training directly into power school. which requires a pretty hefty dose of mathematics, physics, and chemistry in addition to all of the practical training, and receive an immediate promotion in rate to E-3 upon graduation. Both enlisted and officer nuc tracks are among the most highly coveted designations, but come with a high washout rate and the constant pressure to be prepared for the Operational Reactor Safety Exam, a practical and potentially career-ending surprise test of ability and fitness. Navy ‘nucs’ are, hands down, better trained and educated than non-Navy commercial operators (which, as with the commercial aviation industry, why power plants heavy recruit from the ranks of retired Navy engineers and techs.)
Unfortunately, the areas where coal mines are located in the United States are typically those areas with the lowest basic literacy and education funding, such that even students with good intellectual potential are rarely encouraged or have the opportunity to fulfill that ability. Taking even a relatively intelligent high school student with limited technical and functional literacy and trying to instill in them the knowledge and discipline necessary for the safe maintenance and operation of a nuclear power facility is a foolhardy plan at best.
Stranger
The US Government spent $10 billion building a test nuclear waste storage facility under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Upon completion of a successful test, Yucca Mountain would end up being the primary (only?) secure nuclear waste dump. Politics killed it this year. I’m told that an unknown fault line was also only recently discovered.
Politics aside, great lengths went into the process to protect the environment and humans for the long term (> 10,000 years). Assuming these folks knew what they were doing, using old coal mines as you propose would be insane.
You know a lot more about coal mine construction than I do, so I concur.
To be fair, a substantial portion of the decision to use Yucca Mountain (which technically isn’t actually a mountain but a continuous ridge line formed by the caldera volcanos that were once active along that line) was because it was in Nevada and adjacent to the Nevada Test Site where aboveground and underground nuclear testing was conducted from 1945 to the early 'Nineties. It was figured that since the area was already somewhat contaminated there would be little issue with using a remote range as storage. There are arguably some better locations for long term geologic stability, but none with a revenue base so focused on bringing dollars in. Unfortunately (for boosters of the YMNWR), the end of the Cold War and a population boom in Las Vegas and the surrounding area resulted in a lot more objection to the plan of storing nuclear waste.
At any rate, vitrification and permanent underground storage of spent nuclear fuel is really more of an “out of sight, out of mind” solution, not unlike that which led to the whole Love Canal mess (which was the fault of the federal and later Niagara Falls School Board). On-site storage in inspectable aboveground facilities adjacent to nuclear plants and fuel production facilities is easier to maintain and mitigate any leakage or contamination, if far less palpable to neighbors.
In any case, dumping waste in coal mines is not only unsafe from a contamination standpoint but also impractical for the reasons addressed upthread, nor is there any compelling reason to place energy production facilities in former coal production regions. From an economic standpoint, it is far cheaper to relocate the residents of mining communities to other areas, or to increase alternative industry in those areas, than to try to fit nuclear power production facilities into unsuitable locations.
Stranger
It’s been a well-known fact here in WV that Massey [or “Massive Energy”] has been known for cutting corners for years to make money. They currently have a “Clean Coal” campaign that’s going on which makes those of us with more than two brain cells to rub together laugh ourselves sick.
And of course, when inspectors from different government agencies are told to look the other way or else…well, you get my idea.
Cite?
I don’t have a summarizing citation, but you can go to National Center for Education Statistics State and County Estimates of Low Literacy and look at compare counties in which mining is a significant or primary occupation (say, by looking at the US Energy Information Agency’s list of major coal mines) and draw your own conclusions.
It also doesn’t take much poking around to find that occupational injuries and deaths attributed to coal mining have dropped by a couple orders of magnitude over the past century while coal production yields have increased. It is fair to point out that a lot of mining has become automated, thus placing fewer people in harm’s way and accordingly lower potential for injury and death, but regardless, “the killer mines” are a lot less deadly now than they have been for previous generations, and this sudden concern for the occupational safety of miners is more of an example of confirmation bias than it being a new and pressing issue.
Stranger
That’s pretty unscientific; even if literacy in some county were only 50%, the miners could very well be exclusively drawn from the the 50% that was literate.
There is plenty of technology in a coal mine and there has been for over 100 years. This notion that mining is just digging stuff out of a hole in the ground is naive. There is geology, structural engineering, electrical engineering and hydraulics involved. Every mine is different and requires a high level of on-site expertise.
And it’s not like everyone at a nuclear power plant has a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. Far from it. There is a lot of skilled trade work involved. People are needed to fit pipe, calibrate instruments, weld, run cable, and a bunch of other stuff that is also needed in coal mines.
The biggest problem with building nuclear plants where coal mines now are is that there usually isn’t a large supply of water nearby. Unless we go with some radical new gas-cooled design, nukes will always need to be near a large lake or river. And the idea of storing waste in old mine shafts indicates a lack of understanding that most underground coal mines are drift or slope mines. There isn’t a “shaft”. They go more or less straight into the side of the mountain. When a seam has been mined out, they usually “retreat” mine it, gradually taking out all the support and letting the roof collapse in sections. There isn’t any “hole” left. The only holes are from old room-and-pillar mines that haven’t been retreat-mined, and you wouldn’t want to go in one of those, much less put waste in it.
I’m not a mining engineer, but I have worked in the mining equipment industry, and I can assure you that miners are not drawn from the top 50%. Mining equipment in general is designed to withstand a lot of abuse from inappropriate use, lack of regular inspection or preventative maintenance, and controls that are as idiot-resistant as possible. The contrast in expectation of training and reasonable sense in operation between mining equipment design and general purpose heavy construction equipment, which is expected to be maintained by trained technicians and often licensed operators (in the case of cranes and other overhead lifting equipment) is dramatic; with heavy construction equipment, there is a lot more onus on the operator to follow safety procedures and be trained and literate. Failure/liability investigations invariably turned up that the root cause for failure was gross misuse of equipment or abject lack of understanding of the specified operation.
I agree that there is a lot of semi-skilled and skilled trade work that is done in conventional coal and oil fired plants, and to a certain extent, in commercial mining, that is also done in nuclear power production facilities (everything from the outer coolant loop on is not fundamentally different from conventional thermal power sources) but the log keeping and safety requirements are far more stringent owing to the criticality of a containment leak or other failure in operation or maintenance. Basically, you’re not going to go into an area with an untrained labor pool and turn it into the skilled job force needed to operate a nuclear power plant, and you’ll probably find it harder to attract the skilled labor force to an area without cultural amenities (good schools, professional sport teams, parks, museums, et cetera).
In general, the proposal of the o.p. is very poorly thought out from a variety of considerations.
Stranger
All industrial equipment is idiot-proofed - in a stamping plant, the presses are designed so that you have to hold two widely spaced buttons down before the die comes down, to physically prevent people from sticking a hand in. When equipment fails it is almost always because of operator error, from hammers to airliners. If there are more stringent safety standards for mining equipment, that could be because it is typically used in an enclosed, dark, poorly ventilated, cramped location.
I’ve worked in a nuke plant and am familiar with the extra safety measures. By your reasoning, it would all count as idiot-proofing and indicate low abilities on the part of the staff. But the real reason is, as you said, the greater consequences of a failure compared to a non-nuclear installation. The higher safety standards are as appropriate in a nuke plant as they are in a coal mine or an airliner. Planes have an automatic voice that yells “PULL UP” when the plane is about to hit a mountain. Does that mean pilots are stupid? No - it is a safety measure in case the pilot is distracted, incapacitated, or is being misled by other instruments.
Most miners today are not “untrained”. In the old days, you had a large number of unskilled loaders and helpers, but that has not been the case in years. Mining is as automated as any heavy industry, but in addition, it calls for experienced judgments constantly, for the simple reason that geology is irregular. The hazardous gases in a mine are liberated from the face, and you need to know something about the characteristics of the materials exposed at the face to understand the risk of suffocation or explosion. And generally, the miners do know what they are doing. That is one reason the fatality rate in coal mining is lower than it is for garbage men, and much lower than it is for airline pilots.