Alabama Nuclear Reactor Gets 'F' Grade 436
GatorSnake writes "The US federal government issued a rare red finding against an Alabama nuclear power plant after an emergency cooling system failure. 'In an emergency, the failure of the valve could have meant that one of the plant's emergency cooling systems would not have worked as designed (PDF).' Does this further erode the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age?"
Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
zero (Score:5, Insightful)
that adds another zero to the zero deaths from nuclear this year. thats zero up from last year. gonna need some big design changes to catch up with fossil fuels.
Re:You can never rule out risks completely (Score:2, Insightful)
This is why we really need to spread out our research on fusion ; it's far more intrinsically safe.
Fission reactors are based on the premise of controlling something that runs away from you if you let it. So if you stop trying (cut costs, etc), something disastrous happens.
If you stop trying hard enough to make fusion work, it just stops working.
Re:You can never rule out risks completely (Score:3, Insightful)
In reactor design, we seem to have "Efficient, Cost Effective, Safe. Choose two."
I don't like it.
At least you put 'modern' in scarequotes (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern nuclear age? What?
The Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant began construction in 1966 (Fukushima Dai-ichi dates from 1971). Furthermore, both use General Electric boiling water reactors. The major difference seems to be that Browns Ferry is/was expected to continue to operate until 2033.
Similarly designed technology dating from a similar time has similar flaws. In most areas engineers learn from their mistakes and upgrade regularly for precisely this reason. Then we actually would be in the 'modern nuclear age', and discovering a new flaw would be disturbing news as opposed to being a wholly predictable consequence of expecting to keep dodgy, ancient crap running for well over half a century.
Re:Lack of development (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's apply free market mechanisms to nuclear power stations. Yup - awesome idea!
Global Fissile Crisis here we come...
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
All nuclear plants are not created equal. The far far bigger problem is continuing to use early reactor designs past their end of life! It's like a 30 year old car that has not spent those years in a garage. It needs considerable work to stay usable, often to the point of requiring it to be rebuilt. Well the same thing holds true to nuclear plants, but we just don't spend that sort of money renovating the old ones. So they start to fail. How much effort is actually required to have severe problems is rather interesting, but I for on do not expect them to simply keep working.
We should have continued building and updating designs over the last 30 or 40 years, but anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.
No... (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's the problem - the United States is not part of any "modern nuclear age.". We're stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, design-wise - retrofits really don't substitute.
Re:You can never rule out risks completely (Score:3, Insightful)
what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.
No, what Fukushima showed is that you can build a reactor that withstands a quake ten times the size it is rated to withstand, shut down gracefully (as graceful as a SCRAM can be) and still maintain enough power to engage its emergency cooling, but there's fundamentally no defense against having about the mass of the Great Lakes flung into your face at ~150km/h.
Re:At least you put 'modern' in scarequotes (Score:2, Insightful)
And similarly to Fukushima, Browns Ferry has had a natural disaster hit close by.
What would have happened if one of those 100+ tornadoes in the area had actually hit the plant rather than just close by?
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
All nuclear plants are not created equal.
This is obviously true, but (car analogies aside) "the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age" is meaningless. Each and every incident is isolated. Whether or not they can be collectively assumed to make some sort of judgement on the safety of nuclear power depends more on your point of view, which will usually remain unchanged.
Yes, if you're a simpleton, No if you're not (Score:5, Insightful)
Much like for a teacher who only gives out A's being a phoney, having a review hand out a failing grade give me more confidence in the system. It shows that the USG is not glossing over problems.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely NOT (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it merely underscores that we do not *have* a "modern" nuclear age.
People, please remember that the vast majority of nuclear reactors in use were built in the 50's and 60's. They were built based on early reactor designs. Reactor designs have improved considerably in the last 20 years but because the public basically has a "no nukes" position, very few new design reactors have actually been built. We are still basically running old reactor designs, many of which are long past their design lifetimes. Until we replace them with modern, safer reactor designs or forms of renewable energy, there will be a danger of another Fukushima/Chernobyl type of catastrophe.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
We should have continued building and updating designs over the last 30 or 40 years, but anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.
Blaming anti-nuclear people for the lack of upgrades/maintenance of existing nuclear plants is wrong.
The real problem is that energy companies don't allocate enough money to that matter. As long as it works and produces energy, they keep maintenance to a minimum level to maximize profits.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, yes. The anti-nuclear nuts prevented the construction of more nuclear plants. But the fact that we still use the old existing reactors has nothing to do with the anti-nuclear lobby.
It's ordinary economics. Profitability. A management has two choices:
1. Keep running the plant. As long as maintenance doesn't become too expensive, that's means income and profit.
2. Shut down, and take it down. That's awfully expensive.
Which of the two would you choose, if you had some shareholders breathing down your neck?
Re:Isolated? (Score:2, Insightful)
Lowest bidder and profit: Capitalists win, Everyone else lose. Dangerous things should not let in the hands of capitalists.
There should be a law saying that if someone put some money in an industry with the objective of making a profit, he should live with his family next to the most dangerous installation he put money in.
That must be why the worst nuclear disaster ever took place at a power station built, owned and operated by the famously capitalist Soviet Union, right? Right?
Re:Lack of development (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Good designs should last longer than 30 years. Most classic power plants have run for over a 100 years with the right upgrades. Heck, we have servers running that are older than 30 years (data warehouses) and those are supposed to be old and outdated every 3-5 years.
The problem is that nobody wants to do anything about it because it's political suicide to do so. Decommissioning might cause a small (inconsequential) spill but if the local populace hears the mayor approved it, he won't be re-elected. If they hear that a senator approved transportation of nuclear fuel or waste through their state, they won't be re-elected even though it's perfectly safe to do so. If they hear that a congressman approved building a modern-tech reactor or a bunker for nuclear waste storage in the area they come from, they won't be re-elected.
Nuclear energy is safer and cleaner than coal but it's pretty much a break-even industry (lots of risk and investment up front, lots of maintenance and thus jobs are created but a larger payoff the longer you keep it running) and because of that they don't have the political power like oil, coal or even corn producers.
Re:Run-to-Failure (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very much unlike, say, gas units, which are pretty cheap to put up and tear down; but burn fairly expensive fuel(and, worst case, just sort of explode a little bit, spreading not-very-scary natural gas combustion products), where the economic incentives to take down old plants and put up more efficient ones work out comparatively well.
The NRC, on the other hand, is pretty much in the business of delivering bad news in order to head off low-probability, but very bad, potential accidents. People that unpopular need institutional cultures of iron to avoid subversion.
Re:zero (Score:4, Insightful)
how does it compare to clean and safe energy sources?
Oh, that's easy - it actually exists. Take a look at the pollution in China around the factories that produce the components for wind and solar plants sometime...
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you can absolve the "invisible hand of the Free Market" from blame in this regard.
"Cost-cutting" has seemed to be an on-going theme in nuclear disasters.
Yet it was still in operation (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems every time there's a problem with a nuclear power plant, some people trot out the excuse "Oh, it was an old design", like that's supposed to make things better.
The fact remains, we keep nuclear power plants running for decades. Just like all power plants of that generating capacity, nuclear plants are hugely expensive to build, so you need to keep them running for decades to make them cost effective. If we're going to declare nuclear power designs obsolete and unsafe so soon after they are built, then there is no way they will ever be cost justified.
You can't handwave the problem away by saying "they're old".
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern? How can you call one of the oldest reactors in the world, which was originally scheduled for end-of-life decommissioning prior to the earthquake, modern?
Calling Fukushima Unit 1 (or even any of the other reactors at the site, which were newer but still very old) "modern" just eliminates any credibility you have and shows your complete and total ignorance regarding nuclear safety and the improvements in nuclear safety made in the past 40 years.
Browns Ferry is also NOT a modern plant - its reactors are about as old as those at Fukushima, but at least they're not in a tsunami risk zone, and as I understand it US-based reactors have all been retrofitted with hydrogen control systems that would have prevented the hydrogen explosions that made Fukushima so complex. Also, while it got a "red" incident based on failure of a significant control valve, there are backup cooling loops. (Note that the valve in question was in the decay heat removal system coolant loop. Said system functioned as needed a week or so ago when all three Browns Ferry reactors SCRAMed due to a nearby tornado.)
Re:You can never rule out risks completely (Score:4, Insightful)
You're wrong there - had the backup generators been at the top of the hill or possibly merely installed with snorkels, it would have been fine.
Had the reactors been ABWRs with a backup gas turbine inside the big concrete turbine building in addition to the diesel generators, it probably would have been fine. None of the buildings seem to have sustained any significant damage from the tsunami.
Had the reactors been ESBWRs (close to but not yet approved by the NRC), it would have been fine. ESBWRs don't need backup generators for decay heat removal. They don't need ANYTHING for the first 72 hours after a SCRAM, and the only thing they need beyond that is a fire truck to refill the ICCS pools. Probably once they're refilled you have longer since decay heat generation is constantly reducing.