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Merged nuclear power safe?

qarnos said:
The added life-span will only reduce costs if the reactors are allowed to remain in service for their full life-span. Yet, here you are arguing that the previous generation should not have been allowed to remain in service for their prescribed life-span because something better had come along.
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What was the planned life span for the reactors in question here?
 
Alferd_Packer said:
What was the planned life span for the reactors in question here?
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I can't find the site right now, but I recall reading that at least some of the reactors were due to be decommissioned this year, though upgrade works were planned to extend their life by 10 years.
 
BenBurch said:
Something better always comes along.

The first real public railroad, the Stockton and Darlington, there was a fatal accident with a person on the tracks the very first day. (And the person was an important politician, too.)

Locomotives back then did not have brakes. The tender did, but the braking action was fairly minimal. It was simply impossible to stop a locomotive quickly. Westinghouse's air brakes were 50 years in the future.

Should the S&D have been closed, or reverted to horse running until the air brake?

And that air brake? Not the last word in train stopping. It has been improved over the years so that we now have electronically-controlled air brakes that can apply brakes in the whole train at once rather than wait for the brake pipe pressure reduction to propagate back to the end of the train (a long time on a 10,000 foot train) and we have locomotive dynamic braking and we have mid-train power to apply locomotive braking mid-train.

Maybe railroads should have been put off 180 years?

Think of the tens of thousands of lives you would have saved!
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The question is are there any "renewable/alternate energy sources" that promise to be able to do the heavy lifting in the near future?
IMHO, no there are not. And even if we did a Manhattan type crash program, there is no guarantee of sucess within the needed time frame.
Nuclear power probably will continue because there really is no realisitc alternative around. Some of those now agains tit will change their minds when the economic reality sets in.
Be interesting to see what happens when the Germans see what their sudden Nuclear shutdown is going to cost them.
 
BenBurch said:
Locomotives back then did not have brakes. The tender did, but the braking action was fairly minimal. It was simply impossible to stop a locomotive quickly. Westinghouse's air brakes were 50 years in the future.
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I'm sure when the Westinghouse air brakes came along they waited another 50 years to start using them and replacing their models because, heck! they've been without them for 50 years why not an extra 50 more?

Ben, don't be ridiculous. You know very well what I'm getting at. Gen III reactors are way safer than Gen II and the cleanup costs involved now greatly outweigh any gains made by letting live 10 more years.

More so the plant is clearly is highly seismic area, by the ocean and these folks not only don't protect the cooling pools which are sensitive to the lack of power. They actually put the backups in the frontlines. It's ocean, sea wall, generators and then reactors. While clearly there is high ground surrounding the complex just a few meters away.

The more I've been thinking about this the more convinced that the owners of the plant were just going through the motions of doing a security checkup. Reactors, check. Cooling pools, check. Sea wall, check. Sturdy construction, check. Generators, check. Battery backup, check. But they never got around looking how it worked all together and figuring out how to overcome issues until last tuesday.
 
I'm sure they are busy right now making sure all the other plants are safe from a tsunami/earthquake.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Nice :)

Hopefully, this will go somewhere.
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They have gone from making ignorant, stupid, and illinformed statements about Nuclear Power to making ignorant, stupid, and illinformed statements about military operations. I laughes outloud at a couple of the statements.
And one CNN' s reporters statement that "military operations might involve violence" deserves some kind of "Duh" award.
 
Java Man said:
I'm sure when the Westinghouse air brakes came along they waited another 50 years to start using them and replacing their models because, heck! they've been without them for 50 years why not an extra 50 more?

Ben, don't be ridiculous. You know very well what I'm getting at. Gen III reactors are way safer than Gen II and the cleanup costs involved now greatly outweigh any gains made by letting live 10 more years.

More so the plant is clearly is highly seismic area, by the ocean and these folks not only don't protect the cooling pools which are sensitive to the lack of power. They actually put the backups in the frontlines. It's ocean, sea wall, generators and then reactors. While clearly there is high ground surrounding the complex just a few meters away.

The more I've been thinking about this the more convinced that the owners of the plant were just going through the motions of doing a security checkup. Reactors, check. Cooling pools, check. Sea wall, check. Sturdy construction, check. Generators, check. Battery backup, check. But they never got around looking how it worked all together and figuring out how to overcome issues until last tuesday.
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Railroads applied air brakes as they were able to, and finally forced to. It did not take 50 years. And the degree of resistance depicted in some accounts is wildly exaggerated. Same with the Janey coupler. Same with modern signaling. Same with (today) PTC.

Generation 1 reactors are actually very safe. And we see that playing out. Everything that could have failed did, and still we have a very minimal event here. The worst part is how costly this is going to be to clean up; The utility will be bankrupt and the government will wind up taking the costs. The number of deaths, even if you account for all types of radiation emitted or likely to be is extraordinarily small. Dwarfed by the general calamity they are in.

Generation 3 reactors are nice things to have. They would not cost so much to remediate in such an event, and that is a good reason to build them. But shutting down Generation 1 plants is simply not required and not a good idea.
 
qarnos said:
Ah, screw the kids.
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... because after the radiation hits, you may not have the time.

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Any Technical People Still Around?

One thing that continues to bother me about this entire situation is that all of the current problems were caused (ignoring the earthquake and tsunami here) by a lack of power to coolant pumps.

This is a power plant; they are designed to produce power. It seems that this should be one of the few places that would still have power in the event of a natural disaster.

I assume that these are shut down upon the news of the earthquake/tsunami because structural damages to the facility might make this disaster even worse had it played out slightly different (I am imagining a critical reactor with no way to shut it down because of damage to the buildings - this would make recent events seem minor by comparison). But couldn't they have pulled the control rods on one of these reactors once the danger had passed and run everything off the power it could supply? How long does it take to fire one of these up once they've been SCRAMed?

I can think of a multitude of reasons why this wouldn't work - they may produce too much power with no where to put it (but couldn't they vent steam?), they need to be hooked up to the grid in order to transmit the power to their internal systems, their internal systems were damaged and power could not be transmitted from the turbines, etc...
 
SalG13 said:
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I can think of a multitude of reasons why this wouldn't work - they may produce too much power with no where to put it (but couldn't they vent steam?), they need to be hooked up to the grid in order to transmit the power to their internal systems, their internal systems were damaged and power could not be transmitted from the turbines, etc...
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As I understand it, you can take a plant down to house loads, but typically they are not designed to function when there is no grid to attach to.
 
SalG13 said:
This is a power plant; they are designed to produce power. It seems that this should be one of the few places that would still have power in the event of a natural disaster.
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The power that they produce might well not be suitable to powering the plant itself and could rely on further transforming of that energy.

But basically I think it is a terrible idea to power up a plant in a situation where you were forced to shut it down if you've not had a chance yet to ensure that it was safe to do so.

They got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami - as far as I am aware, they did not examine the plant for any structural damage and therefore it was not determined that the plant was safe to use at that time. They went into shutdown and the shutdown had not been completed yet. I'd much rather some idiot at some plant was not given the option to run up a plant again after a necessary or emergency shutdown just by pressing a single button, so I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even have the option. There are cases where wearing a seatbelt will kill you - but the benefits of wearing one are so large that they outweigh that little of chance, so we do make it mandatory.
 
Java Man said:
No I wouldn't because they wouldn't have existed by then. Generation III reactors are a recent thing and came into service in Japan in the second half of the 90's. So expecting them to be replaced overnight and ready by 2001 is ludicrous. But move ahead 15 or 16 years and still no change is just negligent action trying to maximize profit from and outdated design. Notice that Gen III designs (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.html)

  • a standardised design for each type to expedite licensing, reduce capital cost and reduce construction time,
  • a simpler and more rugged design, making them easier to operate and less vulnerable to operational upsets,
  • higher availability and longer operating life - typically 60 years,
  • further reduced possibility of core melt accidents,*
  • resistance to serious damage that would allow radiological release from an aircraft impact,
  • higher burn-up to reduce fuel use and the amount of waste,
  • burnable absorbers ("poisons") to extend fuel life.

The benefits are right there, including the added lifespan and reduces upfront cost.

If this had happened in the first half of the 00's and work was underway to build the new replacement reactors, well it would say it was bad luck. It's hard to get a new design in the same decade as you roll out a replacement for all units. But a little over two decades later (from early 90s to early 10's) and they're just getting started on seeing when they'll start disassembling it, mmhhhh. Just plain negligent.
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Thank you. This clarifies your position quite nicely.

I may not agree with you entirely but the misunderstanding seems cleared.
 
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