Still support nuke power plants?

Great Debates
761

I have a plan in case an F5 tornado rolls through my neighborhood, but I don’t put it into action every time it rains, or even when we get 50 or 60 mph wind gusts. Sure, there’s damage, but the roof isn’t falling in.

Yes, the worst case needs to be considered but this is NOT the worst of all possible cases. You’re mistaking a storm with 50 mph wind gusts for an actual tornado. Sure, there’s damage, but it’s not as bad as you make it out to be.

If you wanted to move 50 miles away that’s your choice - me, I might be OK with just 25 miles. Then again, I don’t plan to have any children (it’s likely I’m past being able to conceive anyhow), and cancer* doesn’t run in my family, so my circumstances are much different at this point than if I was 20 years old, pregnant, and from a family with lots of cancer cases.

Your OMIGOD OMIGOD RADIATION OMIGOD WHAT IF IT WAS WORSE WHAT IF THE WIND SHIFTED AND OMIGOD RADIATION!!! just makes you look like a hysterical teenager.

  • I have had exactly two blood relatives with cancer. An aunt, who had cancer in her late 20’s but died at the age of 75 of kidney failure, not cancer. And an uncle, who had been stationed in Japan downwind of the bomb sites for about 18 months - he came down with leukemia sixty years later and died in his late 80’s, exceeding normal male life expectancy despite the radiation exposure more than a half century before. Given that, cancer is not top on my list of worries in life. I don’t want it, I get screened, but frankly I’m much more concerned with heart disease - that’s what runs rampant in my family - or getting into a car accident. If I got a whiff of radiation that would give me cancer 60 years later, well, I’d be pushing 110 and most likely dead long since of something else.
762

AFAIK the GE plant design is not being built anymore. Corrections appreciated if I’m wrong. We already have a problem with building ANY power plant except maybe solar cell and those are a joke in their current state of development. I would expect triple redundancy plus a 4th Hail Mary system. The plant in question didn’t have anything beyond backup generators. It would be nice to have a 4th layer that assumes total failure of everything. Something simple like conduits designed for external water and portable pumping units (fire trucks) and retention ponds. If you lose control you can always cool it down until things can be sorted out. Maybe other plants have this already. Don’t know. Use to have a buddy who built these and he was always going on about which designs were better. Wish I retained what he said.

763

I keep correcting you on this and you keep ignoring it -

There WAS a back up to the diesel generators. It was an 8 hour battery back up for the cooling pumps which worked as intended for the 8 hours the charge lasted.

So YES, there WAS triple redundancy.

You may now return to your hysterics.

As for the GE plants - no, the Mark 1 is no longer being built. There are newer designs that have been developed since that design was shelved.

764

Here’s the google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jd2mfO6Zc6cJ:mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110318p2a00m0na014000c.html+japan+Elderly+patients+abandoned+at+hospital+when+workers+fled+due+to+radiation+fears&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
Maybe you’ll be able to see that if you hurry? Not sure why the article was nixed. Maybe it was too much of a bummer. Or, maybe someone made the whole thing up. We might not know now.

ETA: I also did a “save as” “webpage, complete” on it to my desktop. Maybe I could get that to you somehow. Don’t want you to think I imagined it.

765

How is 8 hrs of batteries a backup when it takes days to shut one down?

766

Here is Maincini Daily News “updated” version.

There is nothing else in their database on Okuma or Futaba or hospital and nuclear. One reasonably suspects they had been fed inaccurate information and pulled it. Or they are now part of the cover-up. :wink:

767

The explanation - take it for what it is worth - is that the engineers who originally designed the thing didn’t think it would take longer than 8 hours to restore power.

As I have also mentioned, MOST Mark 1’s around the world had that upgraded to a 96 hour battery backup. Four days worth. Maybe that’s not enough, either, but four days of steady cooling post-SCRAM is better than 8 hours, as it will lower the temperatures that cause all the pyrotechnic effects and make things that less bad. Or, maybe if it looked like they would restore power after 3 days they could make the decision to use the remaining battery power to dump seawater on the cores for a permanent kill. Either way, 96 hours would have been better than 8.

I’m sure we both agree that particular upgrade should have been done.

768

I didn’t think you’d imagined it, I just wanted to be sure we were talking about the same situation. Reporting from disaster zones is often chaotic.

My take on it, after reviewing the stories, is that there was some confusion about what, exactly, was happening in the area. It looks like some staff were dismissed, some left, and some stayed. On top of that, these people were elderly and fragile enough some of them might well have died without a disaster to help them.

The updated story is probably the more accurate one, but I might re-read everything again and try to make better sense of it all.

769

[QUOTE=Magiver]
How is 8 hrs of batteries a backup when it takes days to shut one down?
[/QUOTE]

Because the batteries were to backup the main power, which was backed up by the diesel generator which failed. It was a disaster, and it blew through two of the three layers of redundancy. The ultimate fallback worked, but battery backup doesn’t work forever. What would you have had them do? Possibly a small magic pony powered generator, backed up by a Mr Fusion plant and possibly put the gods in the loop somehow as well?

The diesel generator was put in an unfortunate place, in retrospect…right where a big ass tsunami could take it out if it hit the plant after a big ass earthquake took out the mains. And even with all of these low probability events hitting, they still did have a backup…and even when that failed the containment still hasn’t failed a week later. I really don’t know what some of you folks expect. Have any of you actually ever worked in the real world and tried to not only plan and predict disasters, but actually tried to engineer for them and figure out how to pay for them?? And this was a design from freaking 40 years ago, on top of the rest.

Now that this has happened you can be sure that, assuming anyone builds a new design, that some of the lessons learned here will be incorporated. At a minimum, if a new plant is built on the coast of Japan they will probably not put the diesel generator in a location where it can be take out by a big ass wave…

-XT

770

Yes, we can agree on that. It’s not like it’s a secret where the fault lines are.

To this day I don’t understand why they didn’t fly military generators in. I hope it’s not because Japan has 2 different power systems and the military used the other system.

771

8hr batteries do not represent a 3rd level of redundancy in a situation that requires days. I expect 3 levels of redundancy plus a non mechanical last resort external redundancy which would consist of nothing but multiple water conduits fed by outside sources (fire trucks or air lifted water tanks and pumps).

772

I found Futaba Hospital on Google Earth. It’s “B” on the map, assuming what you see is what I see. It’s basically WSW of the Fukushima plant.

Now if I could just figure out to get google to overlay tsunami flooding on that map, and I’d be happy. I’d like to see which hospitals in the area were evacuated because of tsunami, or because they were inside the 20k evac zone.

773

If you make the stupid assumption that I am pro coal, then you have an argument. I made no such claim. I hate coal plants. They are like nuclear plants, in that they spend a lot of political pull and money avoiding clean ups and regulation. Coal plants could be a hell of a lot cleaner. But the good citizens running coal plants use a lot of money and political pull to escape cleaning up and regulation. The pricks fight installation of scrubbers that would cut down on the spewing of poisons. They escape updating the plants to modern standards by claiming they are doing less than a 30 percent renovation. The legislation grandfathers the refitting at 30 percent. Then all retrofitting is less than 30 percent, because we trust them.
We are getting poisoned so coal operators can make more money. why would I object to such a fine American tradition as that.
Let me make it simple for you. All forms of energy could be made cleaner if we had the political will to do so. But money talks. Well maybe in this case it farts.

774

Well, there’s apparent redundancy and real redundancy. Having four backup diesel generators gives you quad redundancy against one of them breaking down, but having them side-by-side doesn’t give you redundancy against a tsunami (or a fire, or a runaway supply truck) taking them all out together. If they’re all fed off the same fuel tank (don’t know, but possible) then fuel contamination can also take them all out. If they all run to the same switchyard then again, you lose some real redundancy.

In theory, the reactors had normal primary cooling through the power-generating loop and condenser, two high-pressure backup emergency cooling systems, one of which didn’t need mains power to operate, and two low-pressure backup emergency cooling systems, one of which didn’t need mains power to operate. Looks good on paper. But some of these backups were designed as rapid-response emergency core cooling in case of a catastrophic failure of the power-generating loop e.g. a pipe fracture. They can keep the core cool for the time it takes to SCRAM a reactor and the couple of hours it takes for the decay heat to subside from 7% to 1% but not all the cooling backups are designed to remove decay heat for days at a time. The battery-operable cooling systems aren’t actually powered by the batteries - they use steam from the still-hot reactor running through a dedicated turbine to operate emergency pumps but they can’t run forever. (And why the hell isn’t there a generator hooked up to that turbine as well? You know, so some backup power generation is located within the actual reactor building?)

The true amount of redundant backup against long-term station blackout looks to be questionable on the GE Mark 1, and the post-mortem on these events will be interesting, to say the least.

One little factoid that caused me to raise an eyebrow was that the tops of reactor buildings 5 and 6 have now had holes cut in them to allow hydrogen to escape. Does this mean that the periodic steam venting I described in post 538 had to be done into spent fuel pool level of the reactor building? I assumed it had been done that way deliberately to give the vented steam a few minutes to lose its radioactivity, but after reactor 1 blew its roof off, that policy should have changed! If there was no choice, was that because of earthquake damage or is it a feature of the design? After reactor 1 had its hydrogen explosion and the danger was apparent, was any attempt made to ventilate the tops of reactor buildings 2, 3 and 4? Did anyone even think about what the spent fuel pools were doing before the fires in reactor 4?

I don’t think it’s going too far to admit we dodged a bullet here, and in some ways we got lucky.

775

No. Nobody in the US uses Plutonium due to political decisions. Outside the US there is Plutonium and U - Pu blends being burned. Plutonium can be chemically isolated without all the centrifugation (my spell checker says that is a word!) needed to enrich Uranium, so it is cheaper, and if you have a nuke power program and are reprocessing, it is free and you’d be stupid not to burn it. The US is stupid for not reprocessing, BTW. It makes most of the waste problem go away. We don’t reprocess fuel because it is easy to purify Pu and make bombs…well, easier than enriching Uranium anyhow.

Plutonium is normally present in spent Uranium fuel. This is one reason fuel rods are not all replaced at once. Some of the reactor fuel load is “spent” fuel that is there to get some of the Pu (and other stuff) burned out of it before going into the cooling pond.

If you are reprocessing and not building bombs, then you end up with some Pu you need to dispose of, and burning it in a reactor is a fine way to get rid of it, so you blend it with the enriched U, and make fuel. I don’t know for a fact that the Japanese were doing this, but since they are reprocessing, and nobody thinks they are building bombs, then it is a good bet that they are blending Pu into their fuel.

Fuel Pu content peaks well before U fuel is spent. The longer it stays in the reactor after that, the less Pu is left. Chernobyl was built the way it was so that the fuel rods could be pulled out (Under Load!) at peak Plutonium content. Graphite moderated reactors are also more efficient at making Pu than light water reactors. You can make more, or you can make less, but if you stick Uranium in a high neutron flux, there is pretty much no way not to end up with some Plutonium.

776

Oh paaallllleeeaaaaseeee. Power companies are regulated by public utility commissions. They are a monopoly that exist at the state’s discretion. There is no hidden agenda to poison you with evil badness for money. States set their EPA rules and utility commissions approve what can be charged. If my state mandates X pollution control then they approve the equipment necessary to make it happen plus a reasonable profit.

777

That is not only wrong, but ignorant. Please read up and return chagrined properly.

778

A slow killer, like air pollution from coal, (which contains a lot of mercury as well as natural radioactive material), slides smoothly past, and the destructive excavations are well out of sight, so why worry?

It’s almost exactly like how some people feel about nuclear. They convince themselves that the mining of uranium is clean, doesn’t really hurt anyone, and the massive pools of deadly waste fuel rods are not only under water, they are safe from prying eyes. And the plutonium, carefully crafted into countless hydrogen bombs, that’s hidden as well. So the whole massive ‘thing’ glides by, smooth and quiet, until something goes wrong. Something wrong enough it can’t be hidden of course.

How is a week of back up enough when you have to keep the pumps running forever? You can get a cool down on a reactor, but that doesn’t mean you can stop the pumps. If there is an actual serious country wide disaster, say in Japan, where all the plants were flooded, and nobody will be showing up with fuel and generators, much less a crew to help out, even a reactor that is shut down, and the fuel removed (numbers 4, 5 and 6) is a potential disaster greater than any known so far.

In fact a long burning fire is actually much worse than one explosive event. If the fuel rods just keep burning, even with no explosion, you end up with a constant source of fresh radioactivity, which will blow in all directions.

And since the amount at this site is hundreds, if not thousands of of times more nuclear material than blew up in Chernobyl, it’s quite fair to say the situation isn’t the same. After the inital fires burned out, Chernobyl wasn’t dumping fresh radioactive smoke into the air, constantly.

And it’s easy enough to bury an open pile of melted nuclear material. These multitudes of nuclear fuel rods, reactors and who knows what else are underneath structures and massive damage, and they are above ground in an area that has tsunamis and earthquakes.

And they just announced there is a problem at the remote fuel rod pools now. They are spraying water there.

And still nobody has said what the fires are, where they started, what is burning or what is in the smoke. But it’s no secret that in the ruined reactor building #3, there isn’t any oil or paper or such to catch on fire right now.

And just so you know, cesium burns underwater, oxidizing and creating hydrogen gas. As it burns the fuel, uranium or plutonium, in the rod, falls to the bottom. Wherever that actually might be in reactor #3

779

Almost 20 years ago I was in the BWR at Ringhals, Sweden. (They also had 3 PWRs) Not sure if this was a Mark I, but it certainly looked like the pictures coming out of Japan. The reactor is in the taller squarish building, and fuel pond is in the shorter, longer fueling hall next to it. The spent fuel pond was in the end of the fueling hall toward the reactor, with pretty much noting but clearance for a gantry crane above that. I don’t really recall what is in the end of the hall farther from the reactor, but I seem to recall that it was an open dry handling area where fresh fuel was brought in, and spent fuel left (after cooling).

I was wearing a dosimeter, and inside and around the BWR was a little bit hotter than background. The PWRs were all pretty much at background. This was in December, so all the reactors were running flat out. Notable that 20 years ago, the lone BWR at Ringhals was considered a bit of a relic. They had already done major overhauls (replaced steam generators) on two of the three PWRs at that point, and those were the “new” reactors at that station. (and they were preparing to overhaul the last PWR within a year or so).

The fuel pond is at the same level as the reactor to minimize the time it takes to pull fuel out of the reactor and get it into the pond. AFAIK, they are all above ground level, but I don’t know a lot.

780

[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
And they just announced there is a problem at the remote fuel rod pools now. They are spraying water there.
[/QUOTE]
Please please please please pretty please, for the love of God, when you drop us a little infobomb of breaking news, could you tell us where you read or saw it? CNN, ABC, some blog, just give us a tiny little clue?