Officials Agree On Global Nuclear Stress Tests 122
Hugh Pickens writes "Government ministers and officials from the European Union countries who met to discuss atomic energy safety have agreed to carry out stress tests on nuclear reactors to test their capacity to withstand major incidents like the earthquake and tsunami that rocked the Fukushima plant in March. 'The accident at Fukushima in Japan has affected us all,' says French Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. 'It quickly became apparent there is a need to learn lessons from the accident and to improve and raise our standards and ways of cooperating on nuclear safety.' The stress tests will be performed on Europe's 143 working reactors and other atomic installations. 'You have to move the safety envelope,' says Roger Mattson, former leader of the US task force that investigated the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, and an organizer of the group issuing the letter. 'You have to take these severe accidents into account and do more to prevent the very low-probability events.'"
Re:Eep (Score:4, Insightful)
I know this isn`t _exactly_ the same (or really even close), but isn`t it this kind of thinking that caused the disaster at Chernobyl?
No not at all.
The "stress tests" phrasing comes from recent similar "stress tests" in the banking and finance industry where everyone important / major is guaranteed to pass, although they really want some more money etc.
Its a PR campaign, not a mechanical engineering accomplishment. The timing is even pretty similar, just long enough for the bad news to decay from the news cycle, and here comes "good news" that everyone passes the test.
Participation Trophies for All!
The reverse approach is needed (Score:4, Insightful)
The reactionary approach due to Fukushima is precisely the wrong way to look at things, the takeaway lesson should be that even with the worst possible scenario nuclear is vastly safer than coal, gas and hydro and possibly safer than solar. It's the small frequent events vs large singular event problem that plagues the car vs airplane safety disparity all over again.
We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better or at least try to be more fact based in global infrastructure matters.
Re:Simulator rods? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fuel rods are typically used for 3-4 years and go through several planned or emergency shutdowns, so normal SCRAM procedure does not make fuel unusable. A stopped reactor cannot be immediately restarted though, because of presence of neutron poisons such as Xe-135. While the chain reaction is still running, the neutron production is sufficient to overcome this barrier, but from a complete shutdown it's not easily possible. Chernobyl explosion was actually caused by an attempt to restart the reactor which was almost accidentally stopped (it was only supposed to go down to 50% output, but went to 5-10% by mistake) by removing all control rods in an attempt to restart the reaction, which it did, uncontrollably.
Boron injection however will require replacing the water and thorough cleaning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRAM
This concern is especially significant in a BWR, where injection of liquid boron would cause precipitation of solid boron compounds on fuel cladding, which would prevent the reactor from restarting until the boron deposits were removed.