Well I won’t do it again. I may not even post outside the pit. Too many complicated rules.
I will even go read the rules now. I feel bad.
I’ve heard third-hand that new designs were closer to the epicenter of the quake and survived without major mishap (which is different from surviving with no damage). Does anybody know if that’s true?
Interesting pics. It should be noted though that all the reactor building damage was caused by hydrogen explosions resulting from the ongoing situation rather than direct earthquake or tsunami damage. I’m rather more pro-nuke than anti, but I’m coming to the conclusion that the apparent high level of redundancy in the cooling systems of this design is an illusion. Someone should have noticed that over the past 40 years of operation. That doesn’t make me feel better about nuclear power than I ever have.
If Japan gets away with this at the current level of contamination, the wake-up call to the industry and to the regulators might make me feel better, but goddammit. The design basis for the plants was only for a 6.51 m tsunami surge! I know everything is obvious with hindsight, but they’ve had 40 years to think of, say, enclosing one or two of the backup generators and fitting them with snorkels so they can run with the site flooded. Or putting an extra diesel backup on each of those nice flat roofs, or having the capability to vent the headspace of the reactor building rather than letting it fill up with steam, and as it turned out, hydrogen.
This page has a nice summary of some of the technical details of what happened: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Insight_to_Fukushima_engineering_challenges_1803112.html Without AC power, the two cooling systems that can operate under battery power are the RCIC, which is an independent cooling loop powered by steam turbine, and the HPCI, which is an independent water injection system injecting straight into the core, also steam powered. Sounds good, but HPCI is supposed to be used when there’s a rupture in the system letting steam and water gush out into the containment. It isn’t designed to circulate cooling water for days or weeks to get rid of decay heat. RCIC is also short-term because the reactor steam its turbine runs off doesn’t have a dedicated condenser. The steam discharges into the wetwell pool, which gradually gets hot, and then the wetwell pressure rises, and eventually the steam pressure differential dissapears and you have no more turbine. That’s the end of RCIC however many batteries you have, unless you start venting the steam in the wetwell which basically means you no longer have containment. Emergency cooling needs to be able to operate for weeks, not days or hours. The only long term emergency cooling the reactors had depended on those bloody diesel generators, and they weren’t sufficiently protected.
Yes. I’ve posted it before. Onagawa was closer. Onagawa had a whole bunch of reactors of different ages, but none were as old as Fukushima. Wiki has the details.
http://msnbcmedia1.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Components/TEASES/!BIG-STORY/Japan-4-col.jpg
Thanks matt. You were the one I was probably thinking of but I didn’t want to troll trough nearly 1000 posts.
Well, there is what you feel and there are numbers:
Nuclear looks pretty cheap to me.
As for more plants I cited earlier that, per terrawatt/hour, nuclear plants are among the safest means of power generation there are in terms of lives lost so far.
More plants increases risk of course but as noted new designs are far safer. Some are inherently safe. There are methods for dealing with nuclear waste as well (actually turning it into power) so the nasty stuff left over is vastly diminished.
I am certainly of two minds on this. I think it would be bad if it were concluded that real risks have been overstated. Really, it is good luck, and a lot of hard work that has kept this from being much worse. Because it didn’t end in total disaster doesn’t mean the risk wasn’t there. People have a bad tendency to fail to acknowledge that the risk exists when the outcome is known to have been positive. “naw, I couldn’t have been that drunk, I drove home just fine!”
Many questionable design features have been highlighted, and I hope lessons will be taken from those.
My greatest hope is that this will spur the operators of similar vintage reactors to replace them with newer safer designs. Big hope that, cause those old nukes are long since payed for and are almost literally money printing machines at this point.
Still it may steer choices toward newer safer designs, even if they haven’t yet been proven to be low risks from a business standpoint. The reason so many similar BWR and PWR plants got built is they had a tried and proven return on investment record. And I think that may well be part of the problem here. The BWR and PWR, while customized to some extent, became to a larger extent turnkey “known to be safe” designs, and there probably wasn’t as much attention paid to site specific risks as there maybe aught to have been.
Sure Matt, that flaws went unnoticed for so long is no beuno, for sure. But, even then, an old design that was improperly disaster-proofed went through one of the worst natural disasters on record, and the result was less than cataclysmic. That really does encourage me, although I can understand that you might focus on the ‘improper disaster-proofing’ part.
Of course, this may serve as a wakeup call and help toughen regulation. I am honestly encouraged by events.
Uhh,
In all this fiasco, I don’t think I’ve seen anything that could called “good luck”. Any places where you could point this out?
I guess it could be worse if everything they did was absolutely wrong, but thats a bit different from luck.
You will note the design is irrelevant because the trouble is the pools protecting the nuclear waste. All nuclear plants have waste stored next to them because the waste is an unsolvable problem. There is no place to put it and it stays poisonous forever. Is there some design change in the new plants in regard to waste storage? Nope it sits in a huge swimming pool covered by 30 feet of water. Until it isn’t any more. Then we are all in trouble.
Well, as with many engineering projects they build to the 1-in-100 year storm and ignore the 1-in-1000 year event. Mainly due to cost.
The Japanese built a wall to withstand a 6.5 meter tsunami. They got a 7 meter one.
Also, in machines as complex as these, stupid things can get you. For instance a large part of Three Mile Island getting as bad as it got was due to an indicator light that, while working, didn’t mean what the operators thought it meant (light was out so they thought a relief valve was closed but it really meant power to the valve to keep it open was off…they assumed it was shut but in reality it was stuck open).
We see the same thing with air travel. Plane crashes per passenger mile used to be much higher. Over time they find each bug and improve things. Air travel is pretty safe today. Obviously the nuclear industry has nowhere near the evolutionary speed of airplanes but the same thing applies to them as well such that each newer plant (or retrofitted older plant) is progressively safer.
Thorium reactors comes to mind.
Traveling Wave Reactor is another idea. (this one eats waste from nuclear power plants…crap that is literally lying around today)
I was just about to say the Fukushima plant was closer. I plotted it correctly in Google Earth but measured the epicenter to the other power plant. That reinforces the idea that the newer designs worked better.
Tell me about it. I’m used to looking at my older posts for links, but that’s not so easy here!
Magiver, I’ve just read on BraveNewClimate that the “failed pumps” at no. 2 actually consists of a failed motor for a circulation pump for the spent fuel pool. Not as bad as originally thought. Power is also apparently hooked up to no. 2 but they’re just checking everything before firing up. BraveNewClimate - BraveNewClimate On edit: did you measure the relative plant distances? I never got that far.
gonzomax It’s not quite an impossible problem. After a couple of years in the fuel pool, heat generation isn’t an issue and the rods can be taken out and reprocessed to remove the plutonium and the remainder buried. After around 1000 years, only the actinides (uranium, basically) are left. Yes it’s still radioactive and poisonous, but no more so than when it was dug up out of the ground in the first place. Long half-lives are decieving. The longer the half life, the weaker the radiation is the rule. (Stable elements have infinite half-lives and no radiation at all!)
A 1000 years sounds a long time but Europe is full of cathedrals older than that. The Notre Dame, the Pantheon in Rome.. Then there’s the Pyramids, of course. humans CAN build things that last. Not that I think it will come to that. If we persist with the nuclear route, fourth gen and fifth gen designs will take the old spent fuel rods and use them as fuel directly. Even if we find an alternative, I’d still expect a couple of “waste-burning” reactors to be built just because it’ll be cheaper than storing stuff for a thousand years.
One thousand years is a long time. Our country was traveling over muddy tracks by horseback less than 300 years ago. The world has changed dramatically in that time. I would not be surprised in in 100 years we would look back and wonder how stupid people were to try and get energy from something as dangerous as nuclear fuel. They would look at the radioactive scars left on the globe by all the “accidents”.
Nuclear power is not the answer. It costs way too much to build. The energy is too damn expensive . They can not even get insurance,. The government has to guarantee the loans. Where is that miracle of the stock market that will take great risks to help build the future? They don’t want any part of those things. They know better.
We need a stopgap energy source until we get the clean energy of the future working. Nuclear is not it.
roughly 48 versus 95 miles (Onagawa vs Fukushima) or 77 km versus 153 km.
good news on the pumps. a motor should be easier to swap out than a pump.
And what will the same peopple think of the scars left by strip mining of coal? Of the pollution this causes, of the habitats destroyed?
What about the shafts left by deep mining of coal? What will happen to them
I guess they will dissappear?
Do you crusade against all industry? Because industry has left lots and lots and lots of scars on the planet. Not sure how many Superfund sites are currently in the US but it used to be several hundred. Here’s a copper mine in New Mexico. What about the Gulf of Mexico recently?
Frankly, nuclear power should be low on your radar. Except for Chernobyl has anywhere else in the world been “scarred” by nuclear power plants?
As for costs see post #905 just above. They considered all costs of a plant (building, running and so on) and nuclear power was about the cheapest overall.
From your cite:
Compared to what?
Nuke plants currently take something like 13 years to complete, assuming they’re ever completed. Add a new design like ones that “deal with waste” you’re talking even longer than that.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
One thousand years is a long time. Our country was traveling over muddy tracks by horseback less than 300 years ago. The world has changed dramatically in that time.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but the POINT was that even though our ancestors a thousand years ago road on muddy horse tracks they could (even then) build buildings that are STILL AROUND TODAY. And that was with technology that was very primitive compared to what we have today. No doubt a thousand years from now things will have dramatically changed. But we’ll still be able to build buildings that will be around then. Especially if you anti-nukes get the fuck out of the way and actually let us complete a freaking storage site somewhere.
Of course, they you won’t be able to set up these little situations where you can block the building of the things then point to the fact that we don’t have adequate storage as a major problem, right? You’d have to fall back on doing everything in your power to simply block, delay and make nuclear power as expensive as possible, so you can point to the fact that nuclear power plants aren’t being built, or take too long or cost too much…
And I wouldn’t be surprised if 100 years from now the anti-nuke crowd are looked on as we look on the kooky Neo-Luddites (or even the originals) today. They will probably ask themselves wtf was wrong with us…we had a clean energy solution at our finger tips, but the anti-nukes were too scared and stupid to see it, and so we ended up burning various fossil fuels for the next century and increasing the danger and problems from global warming…all the while hoping the magic ponies would save us.
Except that those radioactive scars only exist in your own head. This ‘disaster’ in Japan isn’t going to still be an issue 100 years from now…or next year for that matter. The only ‘radioactive scar’ today is from Chernobyl, and I seriously doubt we’ll ever have another nuclear accident on par with that.
Obviously you didn’t read Whack-a-Mole’s cite…or you just ignored it and continue the same rant. Leaving that aside, I always find this argument ironic coming from the anti-nuke crowd.
And these for the same reason. Especially the part where you still fail to grasp how capital and the stock market actually work.
Ok. What is it? What is the magical stopgap energy source?
-XT