Bellona Waste Report

Bellona has issued a report stating that there are 21,000 spent fuel assemblies in a storage system that will explode if water leaks in, and that water is leaking in.

It's kinda flawed.

1. All uncontrolled reactions are not explosions. A reaction can be uncontrolled merely because a person or mechanism is not in charge of it--there were 16 natural nuclear reactors in an African uranium deposit, and they formed in a very similar configuration to this postulated accident. How did they stop? The energy released heated the water and eventually boiled it--and without the water, there's no reaction. After it shut down, it cooled off, letting the water back in; this process was repeated for millions of years until it simply ran out of fuel. No explosions were involved--it didn't even disrupt the ore.
2. There will never be a homogeneous mixture. Ceramic does not dissolve in water, there's no way to get enough water into the fuel assemblies even if it did, and expecting every single one of those 21,000 tubes to open up, let the water in, and not let any of it out afterward is ridiculous.
3. This isn't gasoline. A critical configuration in one area does not create a critical configuration in another nearby area.

Sounds a bit like the Brookhaven Report, which was written in 1957 with no access to computers, and said that if the core of a nuclear reactor were pulverized and deposited equally into the lungs of 10,000 people, they would die. Well, yes--but what's your point? The amount of water in a filled bathtub could drown 40,000 people. Blaming nuclear power for things it didn't, doesn't, and can't do doesn't save lives. It cynically manipulates tragedy for political purposes.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Right from the beginning of the nuclear power industry, we have been assured that the technology is safe."

-mng.org.uk

And it was, and still is. It's safer than fossil fuels, and (rather importantly) works.

The Nuclear Power Licensing Reform Act of 2007

Rep. Nita Lowey, that eminent friend of nuclear power (joined by woo-woo John Hall as well as Eliot Engel, Maurice Hinchey, and Christopher Shays), is sponsoring a bill intended to make it even more unnecessarily difficult to build a nuclear power plant--or relicense one.

-Require that the NRC determine that plants are safe. In other words, add another piece of paper onto a process that already works.
-Require that the NRC certify that each nuclear power plant doesn't have security vulnerabilities during the licensing process. In other words, the effects of a terrorist attack are the victims' fault.
-Add another level of bureaucracy to the evacuation plans requirement, and expand the EPZ to 50 miles. More stakeholders can veto the plan under this proposal than possible today--any state within 50 miles or any federal agency involved in emergency management--increasing the likelihood of Shoreham-type politics.
-Require that the NRC do the same reviews for a renewal that they do for a licensing, most of which are completely pointless, since the design doesn't change. In reality, all a renewal application should have to prove safety-wise is that a plant's designed-in safety effects won't be affected by aging.
-Require the NRC to determine in any relicensing that the population density around the plant hasn't changed to the point where it is defined as "urban siting," which is bad for some reason. In other words, shut down Indian Point.

Fortunately, the bill doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting past President Bush even if it did pass. But we're going to have to watch out for this in a couple years, when either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be eager to prove that they're tough on these "problems." Indian Point is going to have a constant fight on its hands come 2009.

Oh, and four Democrats and one Republican do not a bipartisan coalition make. Maybe they put the "coal" in "coalition" (or the "mental" in "environmentalist"), but not much more.

Yet Again, The Difference Between Safety and Performance

This Press of Atlantic City article starts with the predictable "A month after receiving a clean bill of health from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," neglecting the fact that they, well, did, and that determination still applies.

The plant can shut down without there being a safety problem. If there is a technical problem that prevents them from being able to efficiently generate electricity, the utility will shut the plant down, replace the part in question, and bring it back up. There is nothing about such a problem that would cause a nuclear accident--I refer you to the overblown reaction to an even less-relevant electrical problem at the Indian Point plant in New York.

Chill out.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The worst result thus far of these cost cutting practices occurred at BE’s Hunterston B nuclear station in Scotland. A loss of power accident there threatened to turn into a Chernobyl-scale disaster, due in great part to understaffing."

-Michael Steinberg

A power outage is not going to turn into Chernobyl, not because of staffing, but because of physics. Hunterston B is not Chernobyl, doesn't work like Chernobyl, and can't experience a Chernobyl-scale accident.

UK Pre-Licensing: Learning from the Lack of US-Canada Cooperation

The AP-1000, EPR, ESBWR, and ACR-1000 have been submitted. The ACR has the advantage of being able to consume waste from the others, as well as some from the British nuclear weapons program; I hope they can come up with a way to coordinate these two fuel cycles. US and Canadian governments take note.

They also seem to be using a design-basis site, which is something we really need to start using in the US.

Link.

Browns Ferry Update

Unit 1 shut down during testing at 3% power due to a hydraulic system leak. The part in question will obviously be replaced and the reactor restarted.

Unit 3 is a bit more interesting. The House Committee on Homeland Security wants the NRC to investigate an incident from last August in which an overloaded computer chip in the control system caused the reactor to shut down; they think it was a denial of service attack from the internet. Ignoring the fact that the controller in question was not connected to the internet, there was no way for this to actually cause a safety problem, meaning damage to the environment or injury to the public as opposed to broken parts. Broken parts need not result in safety problems if the overall system is configured to restore itself to a safer state in case of a broken part. That's how nuclear power plants work, with the notable exception of the design used at Chernobyl and at US and Russian nuclear bomb factories.
Unfortunately, airplanes and cars don't work like that, and people tend to think that all large machines are dangerous if badly maintained and/or operated, with nuclear machines being exceptionally dangerous. They see the management incompetence of the nuclear industry as indicative of safety problems.

Young people, on the other hand, are more familiar with technology and the engineering design process from seeing them up close in the form of computers. They're more likely to be uncomfortable with nuclear exceptionalism, and while it is a very tough case that would take a book-length rebuttal to make, I think it can be done.

NRC to Cooperate with China on AP-1000

Essentially, it means that they will share experience, lessons learned, and problems that come up with the AP-1000 in both countries.

Sounds good; let's see how they screw it up.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The suit was filed over the inadequate cleanup of the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory, site of one of the only reactor meltdowns in the world. Judge Samuel Conti declared that the DOE has violated and continues to violate the National Environmental Policy Act and permanently enjoined DOE from transferring ownership or possession, or otherwise relinquishing control over any portion of the nuclear area at SSFL until an Environmental Impact Statement has been completed.

This is a huge victory for the environment."

-Committee to Blow the Bridge

Amazing how it didn't kill anybody, and how they don't exactly mention that the meltdown wasn't the cause of the contamination.

And having a land sale overturned on a technicality is a huge victory for the environment. Sure.

Davis-Besse Rises Again

FirstEnergy commissioned a report saying that the corrosion ocurred in four months instead of four years; the NRC isn't buying it. I ask why it is necessary to promote Davis-Besse in a way that makes it difficult for a member of the public to draw any other conclusion than "we were two months from a meltdown that would have destroyed Ohio and given all our children cancer." The industry and NRC--who obviously dominate the discussion--have no sense of audience. They're so afraid of being viewed as spinmeisters that they think it's a violation of professional ethics to talk to people.

Davis-Besse is a prime example of the need for proper and full disclosure. Excessive RPV head corrosion is to be avoided because it's expensive to fix; it's not going to result in a threat to public health and safety even if the head fails. Presenting it to the public in raw engineering jargon without explaining it or even how a nuclear power plant works is not honest; it is misleading. Presenting it as a criminal case is even worse; this is one of the few times I agree with the Underground Cabal of Stoners.
I see no trend among either industry or regulators away from this approach.

I guess if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Link.

AP-1000 Cleared by European Utilities

They apparently want to modify the existing design to make it more resistant to superjumbos like the Airbus A-380.

Incidentally, the only other reactor design that has received this certification was the Russian AES-92 (their version of the AP-1000). That design is just as good as an AP-1000, but would probably be laughed out of the NRC design certification process.

Link.

Nuclear Accident Fails to End World, Kill Anyone

Even though it was at a military facility and covered up for over a year! It's amazing how neither condition was able to turn a nothin' chemical spill into the end of the world.

Must be sheer coincidence, not physics--like the creationists always love to say about evolution, as though it weren't deterministic.

Link.

NRC Finally Decides to Take the Time to Figure Out What Would Happen During a Meltdown

Wow. Nobody responds to new technology like the NRC.

This post might be two weeks late, but their study is about 20 years late. Here's my prediction of the result: Three Mile Island was a good predictor, defense-in-depth creates more problems than it solves by introducing more precursors, and probabilistic risk analysis encourages bad engineering practices by suggesting that the purpose of compliance is to game the system.

I sure hope they spend the time and money to do a good job, and replace the Rasmussen Report, WASH-740, CRAC-II, and NUREG-1150 with something physics-based.

Good luck to them; this is going to be the biggest and best source of information on reactor safety in history. That is, unless they act like the NRC and screw it up.

Link.

Alberta Going Nuclear?

via CBC.

1. The article says that the plant will be a two-unit 2200-megawatt CANDU, which almost certainly means an ACR-1000.
2. Chernobyl did of course melt down, but the meltdown was incidental to the major accident, which was a burst cooling system caused by a power spike. The heat produced by the power spike burst the metal cladding around Chernobyl's fuel rods, allowing some of the lighter already-split atoms to get into the destroyed cooling system and out into the environment. As that power spike is impossible (not improbable, but actually physically impossible) in an ACR-1000, Chernobyl isn't relevant to the discussion.
Also not mentioned in the article is the fact that Chernobyl was designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium; no civilian reactor would be designed like that. The Chernobyl-type reactors weren't even a "thing of the past;" they don't belong lumped in with nuclear power plants. In most places (read: everywhere but the Soviet Union) building them was never allowed--for example, they were banned in the United States in 1950, when the first American nuclear power plant started up in 1957.
3. It really should not cost $6.2 billion. They should be able to get 12 units for that amount of money, and would be able to if someone would get going on an IFR or MSR.
4. "Nuclear has been around" for 50 years, not 30. The excellent safety record mentioned in the article also applies for 50 years, as well.
5. The Chernobyl accident killed not "countless" people, but between 50 and 4,000, according to the UN. Greenpeace's estimate of 250,000 was obtained by drawing a line on a graph from the Japanese atomic bomb survivors' radiation exposure and cancer rate down to zero, taking the amount of radioactive material in the reactor and, assuming that it all got out (which it didn't) and all got to people (which it most certainly didn't), finding that amount of radiation exposure on their graph. Voila: 250,000 deaths--which is more than the total number of people who have died in the area since, of all causes.
6. They will be applying for the Canadian equivalent of a construction permit on June 15.
7. Why the Sierra Club needs to worry about how much environmental protection will cost--and how much not killing people with coal fumes cost Ontario in terms of nuclear power plant construction costs--is beyond me.
8. Nuclear waste does not have a half-life of 50,000 years. The actual waste decays to the radioactivity of the original uranium in about 500 years; that assumes an intelligent waste policy that separates the waste from unused and half-used fuel--the half-used fuel posing the greatest long-term threat. Plus, the term "half-life" is meaningless in this context: since it is a combination of many different radioactive materials, each with its own half-life (that combination depending on the composition of the fuel and the amount of time it spends in the reactor), it can't really be said that nuclear waste has one definite half-life.
9. No, it's not a "quick fix" (their term). Would you rather have a quick fix or something that works? And dare I mention that suing to stop the project sort of disqualifies one from complaining about how long the project is taking?

More from Rod Adams.

Weekly Nuclear Poll #16

Here or in the sidebar:

Chernobyl:
Is a lesson in the hazards of nuclear power
Is a lesson in the hazards of nuclear power in the hands of the Soviet system
Has nothing to teach us about civilian nuclear power
Has nothing to teach us but how wrong the initial projections were
Has nothing to teach us about the wonderful way my employer operates the plant where I work, but a lot to teach us about my employer's stupid competitors
Undecided
Other (please comment)

View Vote Stats
Discuss this Poll

The News-Journal on New Jersey New Build

No, the fact that there's another reactor doesn't mean that an accident could reach farther than it can; no, the probability of core damage at the existing ones hasn't gone up in the last 25 years (and in fact was way overestimated in the days before powerful computer models); no, the proposed new one isn't more dangerous (and is in fact safer--because it replaces backup systems with physics--although the old one was good enough); and no, incidents (read: trash can fires in the manager's office) aren't indicative of anything nuclear. The article basically uses the old "aging-means-we-shouldn't-build-new-ones" argument throughout; the good news is that we have at least a chance to be heard.
This isn't Nazi Germany; we shouldn't think we're so marginalized that we can't act like a counterculture.

Link (hat tip: Know_Nukes).

Safety of Floating Nuclear Power Plants

Yes, they are safe.

The reactors proposed by the Russians for floating nuclear power plants (KLT-40s) are uranium rods suspended in a tank of water; any postulated accidents would involve a loss of that water, resulting in the fuel overheating and melting (a meltdown). That absolutely does not mean that radioactive materials would get out; that same accident happened at Three Mile Island, and the fuel ended up as a puddle in the bottom of the tank--but the important part is that it stayed in the tank. Cut off the cooling pumps and the reactor is fine for three days before it starts to overheat. What if the barge transporting it sinks? Well, it's going to be in the Arctic Ocean, and thus surrounded by a great deal of very cold cooling water. A nuclear reactor of this type, no matter how much potential energy it contains, can only release it at a set rate determined by the concentration and composition of fuel and the geometry of the fuel assemblies and control rods (boron rods inserted between the fuel rods to slow the reaction down).
Neither the fact that something different is being done with the reactor nor the fact that the Russians are building it make it any less safe. Not even the Russians can make a machine do something that it cannot do--in this case, have some sort of catastrophic accident that releases radioactive materials. In fact, with this type of reactor, the Russians have a better safety record than we do (perfect as opposed to one accident--Three Mile Island).

Popular Science termed the KLT-40 "a floating Chernobyl"--even though they're completely different machines; this was the subject of the October 27, 2006 and October 28, 2006 Anti-Nuclear Quotes of the Day.

More from April 14 and April 20.

Chernobyl+21

More info here and here.

Performance vs. Safety

Salem Unit 1 shut down earlier today because of plants trapped in a cooling system component that handles river water (hat tip: Know_Nukes and follow-up).

It's hard to convince people, but that has no effect on nuclear safety. It's irritating, it causes a shutdown, it causes backup power plants to be started that release greenhouse gases, it affects plant performance, it costs the utility money, but it doesn't affect safety. Power plants without cooling towers have problems like this. It's a power plant thing, not a nuclear thing.

When people flip out over things like this, I generally as "what's it gonna do?" And people don't know; they just assume. Don't assume it's dangerous because it's thrice-removed from something nuclear. Use common sense--it's a machine like any other machine.

1999 Japanese Incident and BWR Safety

The Shika Unit 1 criticality incident in 1999, in which control rods slipped from their normal positions during a test, tells us something about the safety of the type of reactor used there.

1. Negative temperature coefficients work. We know this already; they're a basic physical phenomenon, not a device that can break, and prevent power spikes like that which occurred at Shika from causing an uncontrollable power increase. Chernobyl, if it wasn't clear enough already, cannot happen in a light-water reactor. The same initial power spike that happened at Chernobyl happened at Shika; however, Shika is not a converted bomb factory like Chernobyl was, so its designers did not have to compromise safety and economy for plutonium production (and didn't). This might be a good counterexample to use specifically when anti-nukes say that "Chernobyl can happen anywhere."
2. The whole "uncovering of records" flap was caused by safety problems at a hydroelectric dam. Talk about a low-probability, high-consequences accident--if a dam breaks above a city, like what happened in China in 1975, literally tens of thousands of people could die in a matter of hours. Yet nobody is worried about unsafe hydro dams. Where are the hydro watchdogs? Where are the environmental groups with "hydro safety" departments?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"In a deregulated market, nuclear plants will have to run at record availability levels to be competitive, possibly jeopardizing safety."

-Citizen Power

1. Only if you don't require their competitors to do something with their waste.
2. They're assuming cheap gas. It's not a good idea to assume cheap gas.
3. Why should it necessarily compromise safety? Steam systems and high-temperature hydraulic systems that are found in the second-generation reactors that operate today break when they're rapidly cycled through shutdown after shutdown, so even if you subscribe to the "part failures are indicative of safety" notion (which is not correct), keeping a second-generation reactor on longer doesn't introduce new safety problems.

On Russian Safety

Everybody (except the Russians) likes to beat up on their safety record, which includes Chernobyl and a couple of other military accidents.

But something has been bothering me for a while: they've built and operated VVERs very successfully. They've never had a Three Mile Island.

It's important to remember how different these accidents were; Chernobyl wasn't a progression from or a more severe version of Three Mile Island. It was an entirely different accident--if you even want to call it that, as it wasn't an operational failure, but an expressly-prohibited "safety test" performed on a military reactor whose design was entirely the result of plutonium production. Three Mile Island, however, was a tank of water with uranium rods suspended in it. When the coolant drained from a government-ordered valve, the residual heat and radiation produced by the highly-radioactive partly-used fuel rods caused them to melt and collect in the bottom of the tank.

It seems that the Russians, never having had an accident like that over a similar amount of operating time, might know a thing or two about light-water reactors. Their average occupational dose is lower, and they've never had a significant radioactive release despite not having containment structures at many plants. It would in fact seem to me that the Russian approach to LWR safety has been more successful, and that their leadership in fast breeders might be also due to this approach.

I'm led to a disturbing conclusion: that given a reactor that starts off safe, the Russians do safety better than we do.
Perhaps, even, that we might have something to learn from the Russians.

Molten-Salt Reactor Safety Myths on Usenet

Link.

The molten-salt reactor is safe; there's no question about that. The fuel and waste is not mobile; if it gets out, it freezes in place instead of dispersing into the environment. Even if it contaminates the building, it's more radioactive than uranium spent fuel (most MSR proposals run at least partly on thorium) and thus decays faster, allowing cleanup crews to reenter the area in less time. The problem is the on-power reprocessing that these units use, but the reprocessing apparatus can be placed in a sealed vessel to contain leaks.
The barriers to radioactive releases aren't absent, just different--and even more effective. A radioactive release from an MSR can be made to be physically impossible.

Problem is, it takes a great deal of literacy to understand the MSR; I had serious questions about its safety when I first learned about it. Kirk Sorensen definitely has a task on his hands.

New Soundbite?

I've always used "it will automatically shut down--not by any active intervention, but due to the physical properties of the reactor" to describe why a light-water reactor cannot continue to operate during a meltdown, but I think I might start using "stop working" instead--"shut down" in and of itself implies that some sort of action was taken.

Can anyone foresee any problems with that as a soundbite?

Fatal Coal Mining Accident

Two miners in Maryland were killed when a wall of an open-pit coal mine collapsed onto their equipment on April 17th. Apparently it's defensible because they haven't had a fatal accident since 1995.

If it had happened in a uranium mine, we'd have heard about it for 20 years afterward; yet the story is gone from the Google News front page a day later. It figures.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"No More Chernobyls"

-Greenpeace Canada, via the Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout

OK.

The only reason that anybody would build a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl is the production of weapons-grade plutonium. It is far more expensive and complex than a civilian reactor; none were built into American nuclear power plants, partly for that reason.

The other reason? The Chernobyl design was banned in the United States in 1950 for safety reasons.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Indian Point is a stationary radiological nuclear weapon, a weapon of mass destruction which Entergy & NRC feel it's fine to deploy at our collective expensense [sic]. These people belong in jail."

-NukeNet email list, April 8, 2007, p.6

For Christ's Sake, It's Only a Transformer Fire.

Submarine Collision Update

The Iranians are complaining that the USS Newport News, which collided with a Japanese oil tanker a while back, "released radiation into the Gulf."

Here's a hint: if it had sustained damage severe enough to make it release anything, it probably would no longer work. I was never in the Navy and hope never to be, but I'm not aware of a light-water reactor that can operate with severe core damage. If I'm wrong, please comment.

I suspect that this is simply another example of guilt by association; to some people, if somebody stubs their toe at a nuclear facility, it must always involve a radioactive release.

Link.

USA Today Publishes Interesting Collection of Nuclear Opinions

One of them is the infamous form letter from Gerry Wolff on Concentrating Solar Power, two are decent, and one is from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

1. The plant pictured is Browns Ferry, not Three Mile Island.
2. If you think that "building nuclear power plants is not cost-effective," you should have enough confidence in your projection to not push for political restrictions. Let 'em fail in the marketplace if you think they will, and if they don't, then all the better for the planet.
3. There doesn't have to be a long-term geologic waste storage site if we can get more energy out of the fuel than we already do (i.e., reuse the "waste" that is in fact 95%-97% fuel in more efficient reactors). There is in fact enough unused energy in nuclear waste to provide all of America's electricity for 500 years. That gets to #4:
4. Reprocessing nuclear waste to recover useful material is not dangerous, a proliferation threat, or a security threat. They're in fact talking about military facilities that recovered plutonium for bombs!
5. Being a terrorist target is a good thing; it means that you have value and are worth defending. Asking nuclear power plant operators to defend their facilities against military attack by enemies of the United States is not only ludicrously unreasonable, but is a structural subsidy for the ever-so-socially-responsible coal industry.
6. The US government's nuclear regulations themselves are micromanaging, inconsistent, and miss the point. They have a standard for everything but how to stock the breakroom refrigerator, and this missing-the-forest-for-the-trees control freak approach not only failed to prevent Three Mile Island but was its major institutional cause.

Link.

For Christ's Sake, It's Only a Transformer Fire

Over the past few days, anti-nuclear activists have been jumping up and down, bouncing off the walls, and raising six kinds of hell about a non-problem at Indian Point.

Power plants use devices called transformers to increase the voltage produced by their generators to the 575,000 volts required by long-distance transmission lines. These are essentially two coils, with the number of windings in the coils proportional to the voltage; for example, if you had 575 volts coming out of the generator, you would use 1,000 windings in the coil that's connected to the grid for every winding in the coil that's connected to the power plant. The problem is that 575,000-volt electricity will arc through the air quite well, so a better insulator must be placed between the coils or the transformer will short out. That insulator is a type of oil, and oil can catch fire if there's an ignition source (say a stray piece of metal that gets too close to the coils) and oxygen present. A few days ago, that happened at Indian Point, which, as a power plant, has transformers. Everything requires transformers. Windmills require transformers, for crying out loud. Not only is it not dangerous, it wouldn't even be solved by shutting down Indian Point, because you need some kind of power facility to generate power. When the media says "no radiation was released," they are not in fact saying that no radiation was released, but are implying that radiation could have been released but luckily wasn't (not to mention the fact that radiation isn't a substance and can't be "released"). And that is the height of irresponsibility.

What's worse is the author of an article linked below even knows all of the above, yet refuses to de-link it from the word "nuclear." Anything that has anything to do with anything nuclear gains super-powers, apparently, in the doctrine of Nuclear Exceptionalism that completely and totally ignores how things actually work. Replacing physics is a system of shooting-the-messenger associations with absolutely no basis in reality.

Everybody's been treating this as though it were some kind of close call, and that they were planning to run for the hills. Eve