All French Nuclear Reactors Deemed Unsafe 493
hweimer writes "A new study by a French government agency, commissioned in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, found that all French nuclear power plants do not offer adequate safety when it comes to flooding, earthquakes, power outages, failure of the cooling systems and operational management of accidents. While there is no need for immediate shutdown, the agency presses for the problems to be fixed quickly. France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology."
Germany must be pissed (Score:4, Informative)
That's unfortunate - France's nuclear power plants were a key part of Germany's decision to go non-nuclear but still buy tons of nuclear-based power from France. [slashdot.org]
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, coal power causes thousands of premature deaths per year under normal operating conditions, not to mention the significant contribution to global warming.
As for dam failure, it has been far more catastrophic [wikipedia.org] than nuclear power disasters.
Re:Riddle me this... (Score:5, Informative)
PS. TFA does say that they apparently aren't planning to close, only upgrade the plants, which sounds quite sensible.
Re:Wait! I know this one (Score:4, Informative)
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
The problem with your argument is reality. We are still building new coal fired plants today. Not just not shutting down old plants, building new plants. Because it's known, cheap, and legal.
So let's go with your argument that geothermal is better than both coal and nuclear for a second. That doesn't change the fact that nuclear is better than coal, does it? So until we shut down all the coal fired plants, any talk about shutting down existing nuclear plants is an instance of defective prioritization.
This editor should be shot! (Score:5, Informative)
This report isn't saying that France's plants are unsafe. The editor should be shot. In my opinion, Fukushima was a success. These plants were due to be taken out of service within a year, they were very very old, old design and old in age. Yet, even with a massive earth quake, and a beyond design basis fault that wasn't understood during their design phase, no-one died due to radiation and contamination is well controlled and understood. It's also worth noting that all the modern PWRs in Japan surrounding Fukushima all shut down properly with no issues.
Re:Funny that (Score:5, Informative)
TFA says they just need a more robust diesel generator backup. Doesn't sound very panic-worthy to me, but that's the media for you...
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
There are approximately 2300 coal plants worldwide [worldcoal.org]. Pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 1 million people worldwide each year, or 435 per plant per year. Chernobyl is estimated by the World Health Organization to have caused/will cause 4,000 long-term deaths. So on average, a coal plant operating normally (without any big fires) will kill as many people as Chernobyl every 9 years.
The worst power-generation related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams [wikipedia.org]. Nearly a quarter million people killed. Equal to about 50 Chernobyls.
Have you looked at the land requirements for the different technologies? Japan has about 47.3 GW of nuclear power generating capacity. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, meaning it generates an average 42.6 GW for them throughout the year.
Solar has a capacity factor of about 0.15. If you're using 15% efficient panels (125 W/m^2), that means you're getting an average 19 W/m^2 throughout the year. To get an average 42.6 GW throughout the year, you'd need to cover 2.27 billion square meters of solar panels, or 2270 km^2. The evacuation zone around Fukushima is pi*(20km)^2 = 1256 km^2. If Japan replaced their nuclear capacity with solar, it would permanently make more land unusable for agriculture than the Fukushima accident.
Three Gorges Dam in China generates about 80 TWh per year, which works out to an average of 9.1 GW. The reservoir behind it is 1045 km^2. So for every GW of power it generates, that's 115 km^2 of land was flooded and made permanently unusable for agriculture. Dividing Fukushima's evacuation zone by Japan's nuclear power generation comes up with only 29 km^2 of land made unusable per GW of power generated.
So if your concern is km^2 of soil being made unusable for agriculture, you should be even more critical of solar and hydro than nuclear.
The safety of any technology has to be assessed based on the severity of the danger(s), multiplied by the likelihood of accident, normalized by the amount of power generated. This can be simplified to number of people killed per unit of energy generated. The exoticness of the death is not a factor. Whether you're killed by radiation poisoning, a thrown turbine blade, a wall of water, or lung cancer, you're still dead.
When you analyze safety this way, nuclear turns out to be the safest power source [nextbigfuture.com]. i.e. If you wish to generate X amount of energy generated, the technology which can do so with the fewest casualties is nuclear.
The notion that nuclear power is dangerous and we can't make it safe is a myth. Its incredible power density and the exotic nature of its dangers mean we are much more careful with it than with other technologies. This has resulted in (based on statistics from decades of operation) the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. If you use a different measure of safety, like number of people inj
Re:Stunning (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that's kind of the whole point of pebble-bed reactors. The "pebbles" are designed so that when they get hot, they expand and move the fissionable materials apart from each other, limiting the maximum reaction rate. If you're pulling heat out of the system then the reaction will increase in an attempt to reach this stable state. As soon as you stop blowing dry nitrogen through the reactor it will heat up and idle.
In theory, you could handle the pebbles with thick gardening gloves and not actually die if it was a real MacGyver-level emergency.
you have traced sources incorrectly (Score:5, Informative)
The data doesn't come from an Oak Ridge Labs newsletter or Alex Gabbard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Human-caused_background_radiation [wikipedia.org]
It was already published in Science magazine in 1978.
Coal plants cause more deaths due to radioactivity (statistically) than nuclear plants. Even in this year, with Fukushima blowing up.
No, per gram fly ash doesn't contain more radioactivity. But coal plants emit a lot more fly ash in a year than nuclear plants consume fuel.
Re:Translation: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Stunning (Score:5, Informative)
The "pebbles" are designed so that when they get hot, they expand and move the fissionable materials apart from each other, limiting the maximum reaction rate.
No. It's way cooler than that. The physical expansion isn't all that great (though may serve if it is very, very close to critical), and not great enough to provide real stability.
The effect used for stability is actually Doppler boradening. Pebble bed reactors use slow neutrons (like most nuclear reactors except for fast breeders) for fission. The high temperature makes the fissile nuclei move fast, increasing the relative speed of the neutrons and therefore reducing the rate of the reaction. In other words, the hotter it gets, the less fission occurs.
As for handling pebbles, fresh ones made from Uranium are probably OK. Even pure U235 is not very radioactive.
Re:electricity != all power (Score:5, Informative)
This is a chart from 2004, but even when you count all energy sources (gasoline included) nuclear is still 40%. Electricity is around 50% of power usage, I had no idea that half started being "relatively small."
Re:Germany must be pissed (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the opposite is the case: France used to import nuclear power from Germany and now has problems to satisfy its needs.
( http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tagesschau.de%2Fausland%2Ffrankreich440.html )
Re:Wait! I know this one (Score:5, Informative)
Geothermal is downright dangerous when used too much (read on geothermal depletion for example). Wind has severe issues with material science, specifically we do not possess materials that are sturdy enough to survive the massive grind of a wind turbine long enough to even pay for themselves, and are enormously work-intensive to maintain.
Solar, in addition to obvious problems with "must have Sun visible", "must have as little atmosphere between Sun and panel" and others also suffers from massive problems with material technology as well. We simply do not have material technology to convert sun rays to energy efficiently enough for panels to ever pay for themselves (beyond the manufacture in places where energy and materials are dirt cheap because they're produced on coal/nuclear energy and materials mined in conditions that no one that can afford to buy a panel would ever work in).
Essentially current wind and solar are not only not "cost-effective" but simply lack necessary materials.
The one realistic third option we do have is hydro. Unfortunately it's very location-specific, and in many countries pretty much all places you could make a hydro plant on are already dammed up. So again, we're left with only coal and nuclear for places that can't be reliably supplied by hydro, or are small enough and are sitting in a place where small scale geothermal operation can reliably supply the demand without causing depletion.
Last option is burning various fossil fuels, from oil to natural gas.
Re:As the French would say... (Score:5, Informative)
the east of France is also threatened of earthquakes since Basel, a border city in swizerland was once almost completely destroyed in 18..hundred-something
That quake was on october 18th, 1356.
Re:you have traced sources incorrectly (Score:4, Informative)
You americans learn the "wrong definition of waste" for some reasons.
Waste is everythinig that needs to be stored save away, not only fissionable material.
Right now we have worldwide 400,000 metric tons of waste. That does not include the waste produced in uranium mining.
Reprocessing causes to have more waste to store than not reprocessing. Reprocessing only reuses uranium / plutonium to make new rods. Rest materials and chemicals used for it get contaminated and need to be treated as nucelar waste as well. For some reasons americans ignore this or don't get this tought in school. Bottom line every reprocessing cycle increases the amount of waste by a factor of roughly 10.
"Chernobyl: Consequences. . ." is Junk Science (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, nobody should be referring to the Yablakov book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Envirnoment". It has been reviewed by a number of scientific experts, and found to be complete junk science.
http://atomicinsights.com/2011/10/devastating-review-of-yablokovs-chernobyl-consequences-of-the-catastrophe-for-people-and-the-environment.html [atomicinsights.com]
(Someone might note that the link I've provided is to a pro-nuclear blog and say the conclusion is biased, but the pro-nuclear blogger in question is simply citing someone else's review).
What I really mean to say is: Don't get all your numbers from anti-nuclear zealots and realize that the picture is not even close to as ambiguous as you portrayed here. There's science, and then there's bullshit, and you need to sort one from the other.
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Driving_on_with_Fukushima_roadmap_1711111.html