Would You Trust an 80-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor? 429
the_newsbeagle writes "The worst nuclear near-disaster that you've never heard of came to light in 2002, when inspectors at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power station discovered that a slow leak had been corroding a spot on the reactor vessel's lid for years (PDF). When they found the cavity, only 1 cm of metal was left to protect the nuclear core. That kind of slow and steady degradation is a major concern as the US's 104 reactors get older and grayer, says nuclear researcher Leonard Bond. U.S. reactors were originally licensed for 40 years of operation, but the majority have already received extensions to keep them going until the age of 60. Industry researchers like Bond are now determining whether it would be safe and economically feasible to keep them active until the age of 80. Bond describes the monitoring techniques that could be used to watch over aging reactors, and argues that despite the risks, the U.S. needs these aging atomic behemoths."
Meanwhile, some very, very rich individuals have taken an interest in the future of nuclear power.
If only there were another solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Like building new reactors to replace the old ones.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Get rid of them, build new ones. Simple enough, but of course, there's always the usual group, saying how bad nuclear power is... The only thing that accomplishes is a mixture of more coal/natural gas power plants and increasingly old nuclear reactors, operating way beyond their designed lifespan.
No worries (Score:5, Insightful)
Well sure the regulators would not extend the license unless it was absolutely safe. And the power companies know they would get a painful slap on the wrist if anything went wrong.
Re:If only there were another solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree political opposition is a big problem, but afaict the capital costs and potential liability are a big problem as well.
The biggest problem is liability, which I believe is currently covered by a government guarantee. It is puzzling, though, that nobody big will take on construction of a nuclear plant without substantial government liability protection and guarantees. Dick Cheney even said that "nobody" would build a plant without that protection, because they don't want to take on the potentially unlimited liability if something really bad happens. But why would you be worried about a risk of an accident that basically can't happen due to modern safety protections? Skeptics suspect this reveals that the risk isn't as close to 0% as claimed. Another explanation is that it is but the management of power companies are out of date with their information, or irrationally conservative on the matter.
Would you trust an 80 year old dam? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait, we are [wikipedia.org].
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
Either science and engineering is right or it isn't. If you think engineers can safely build a nuclear reactor and operate it for 40 years, why is 80 years different if they can demonstrate strong engineering judgement? And if 80 years isn't safe, then what arbitrary number is it that it becomes unsafe?
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:2, Insightful)
Some may argue that they are unsafe even before they are built.
Re:If only there were another solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
They are safe and cheap...
But coal is "safer" [1] and cheaper.
I get a bit cynical when I see people grumbling about old nuclear technology. To use the car analogy, it would be akin to banning cars since someone's Edsel or Packard threw a rod.
[1]: Safer because it doesn't conjure up the radioactive boogyman, even though some statistics say coal plants toss up more radioactive crap in the air on an annual basis than nuclear reactors even use.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
If we were depending on anything as rational as science, engineering or judgement we wouldn't run them past their designed lifespans.
There's these things called "safety margins" that engineers like, and these things called "new designs" that scientists like, but none of that will be as important as what the rich political donors want. Because the people making the decisions, at the end, will be the politicians.
Re:If only there were another solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
More than enough fuel. Especially because nearly all plants currently in operation only go so far. You've only truly spent the fuel once it's stable (non-radioactive), and even then, you might be able to extract even more energy from it.
Unfortunately, that requires new reactor designs, which the usual crowd hates more than Satan himself. Ironic, isn't it? Hippies are more likely to contribute to our collective demise than the devil himself.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's all the fault of those damn greenies. There's no way the entrenched powers who actually control things could possibly have anything to do with it - secretly, you know, a bunch of dirty hippy flower children control all the world's investment banks, that explains everything!
Let's face it, in the USA "greens" have less power than dog fanciers. This Rush Limbaugh meme of blaming them for all US nuclear power issues is hilarious.
Re:What is there to turst? (Score:5, Insightful)
People keep comparing the deaths per capita from nuclear to things like car and plane accidents and especially other methods of power generation. I would suggest its NOT A USEFUL METRIC.
Our society has the means to absorb the geographically dispersed individual and and handfuls of people lost in car wrecks each day all over the place. Even the the total number is large, its dilute and the long term loss of economic resources such as land is minimal. The odd air craft accident that claims a few hundred is more painful but still manageable.
The slow deaths from coal and such get spread out across decades of somewhat elevated medical expenses and environmental clean up projects. Even an major accident like a slag spill can be contained and cleaned up with conventional equipment and means.
A major Chernobyl or Fukushima like accident however rare stands to displace tens of thousands of people at once and render major economic assets and surrounding land unusable for decades, all at once! That is the sort of thing that derails entire economies.
Its the difference between being shot and say having HIV. Over the long haul HIV and sympathetic infections probably do more total harm, but its spread out you can live with it for a long time. The bullet on the other though it might kill few cells on initial impact, often does enough damage that its immediately catastrophic anyway.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
I might trust an 80 year old reactor, but I wouldn't trust the suits running it.
Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner! (Score:3, Insightful)
I get the feeling the industry is making excuses to save money. I just don't buy that the anti-nuclear group is running the whole show.
Whenever industry - any industry- points fingers at environmentalists, lawyers, politicians, or anything else, they are lying.
Industry has Congress in their pockets. They can thumb their noses at environmentalists or anyone else.
When a company says, " We can't do 'x' because of liability or whatever" they are making excuses to cover their ass so that they don't have to admit - "We're not doing 'x' because we don't make as much money."
That is ALWAYS the real reason - not enough money.
I got a fix for this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Start letting industry build new ones! There are some excellent modern designs which would be a great improvement on safety and even some that can help us dispose of high level long half life waste by converting it to stuff with shorter a half life. We are simply storing this stuff at the plant that generates it right now and that's CRAZY. We should be using it to generate power with these new reactor designs.
Start reprocessing all the spent fuel into forms where we can use it again. There is 40 plus years of used fuel assemblies just sitting inside these plants that could be reprocessed and reused with the side benefit of making the physical size of the high level waste much smaller and easier to handle. The waste can be encased in glass or ceramics and made ready for long term storage. Which brings me to the final thing we need to do...
Get one or more high level waste sites completed ASAP so we can start dealing with the *real* problem here. I'm worried more about the thousands of fuel assemblies just sitting in storage pools corroding than the danger from aging power plants springing leaks and melting down. We need to get this really dangerous stuff into more secure locations and stabilized environment where it can be stored in a more permanent way.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Would you trust an 80 year old dam? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what your point is.
I really wonder who thinks the comparison between a huge chunk of steel reinforced concrete and the corrosive environment of a nuclear reactor is somehow insightful.
Ultimately, a dam's lifespan is determined by the build up of silt behind it.
The Hoover dam will be put to rest when either the silt builds up high enough or
the cost to maintain it is higher than the cost to remove it. Whichever comes first.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Either science and engineering is right or it isn't. If you think engineers can safely build a nuclear reactor and operate it for 40 years, why is 80 years different if they can demonstrate strong engineering judgement? And if 80 years isn't safe, then what arbitrary number is it that it becomes unsafe?
But in fact they designed and built it to operate safely for 40 years...
We have been lucky that they were being conservative (as most good engineers are) and it has lasted 60 years. I'd rather not push my luck to 80 years.
If it were designed and built to last 80 years, yes I would trust it to last 80 years. We know a lot more about nuclear physics than we did when these plants were designed. We have a much better understanding of what not to do, which gives us a much better understanding of what to do. If the engineers say that the new design is good for 80 years, great. If the engineers say that it is good for 40 years, I am certainly not going to try and talk them into 80 years. That would be the difference between engineering and politics.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, pretend you are a nuclear engineer. The reactor you built in the late 60s was designed with large safety margins because much of the material science and thermal hydraulics was not as advanced as it is today. Additionally, the instrumentation was of a poorer design and the accident analyses were performed with computers designed in the 60s. In 2012, the safety margin can be expanded based on what is known, as well as improvements to the plants over the years (like the post TMI changes). 40 years of operating reactors has given enormous amounts of data on material corrosion and neutron exposure.
These reactors were designed to operate for 40 years in the same way that the Martian rovers were designed to operate 90 days. The designed lifetime is engineering speak for a very conservative rough guess based on current conditions.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
So you think a 20-year-old car drive 400,000 miles runs the same as 10-year-old car driven 200,000 miles?
Do you think a 1 year old car runs as well as a 5 year old car?
Pick your poison. If you are going to pick an arbitrary number to label 'unsafe', there ought to be some sort of justification.
My argument is that if the engineering supports continued operation (with longevity modifications as necessary) then that is enough if we believe that engineering is a valid discipline that can design this type of technology. This logic isn't specific to nuclear reactors. It applies to airplanes, bridges, dams, ships, etc. I'm not saying that risk doesn't need to be factored in. It does. But not in a haphazard FUD dominated way without looking at the data.
Why do we operate dams for over 100 years? The engineering supports it.
Why do we operate airplanes for over 30 years? The engineering supports it.
Why do we sail ships that are over 50 years old? The engineering supports it.
Why do we operate nuclear reactors for over 40 years?
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
I see a problem. Although engineers usually have large safety margins, the margin is only relative to the known data at the time. Over 40-60 years, better data points become available which may not have been apparent when the original margin was computed resulting in a much smaller real margin.
The problem: although people can do recomputations for the problem that are obvious to newcomers (a 35yo experienced engineer 60 years later is 95yo consulting engineer long retired or dead), how many built-in assumptions did the original designers make that weren't thought to be critical design issues are now violated by new information? Probably quite a few. How will this likely be addressed? By ignoring this issue because is it too expensive to address.
Your attitude is similar to what was pointed to in the Challenger report, appendix F [nasa.gov]. To paraphrase: If it is true that if the reliability was so high that it could handle 120 years, it would take an inordinate number of tests to determine it (you would get nothing but a string of perfect results from which no precise figure, other than that the probability is likely more than the number of years so far). But, if the real probability of failure is not so small, similar reactors would show troubles, near failures, and possible actual failures with a reasonable number of trials and standard statistical methods could give a reasonable estimate.
However, sometime people attribute the lack of actual failure as proving the design and "go-with-their-gut" instead of using available statistical methods to do real analysis change the definition of margin to justify their conclusions.
Given the number of reactors is small and we have seen trouble and near failures in some reactors of similar design already (such as the one pointed out by this article), perhaps this estimate is a bit optimistic? Just sayn...
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
And then there's these things, called "profits" that corporations like, so fuck you very much, that reactor is going to stay online.
And they've got a $500,000.00 campaign contribution made out to your opponent's name that says so.
Re:If only there were another solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, a once in a thousand year event. But how many places on the planet experience a "one in a thousand years" event in a given year? How about after hundreds of new reactors are built around to world to meet increasing power needs and as replacements for old reactors?
There's the second side of the coin (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm assuming you are writing about TMI. The instrumentation wouldn't have been considered up to legal standards of even a fertilizer plant at the time, the "clean and safe" myth had won out and allowed some dangerous corner cutting to save cash. Nothing that generates large amounts of heat is safe unless you take care to make it so.
It's not like designing a lift with a known safety factor. These things are all prototypes to an extent. You don't go to the moon on Apollo 1, and you can't expect the first reactor of any design to be perfect.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.. yes.. yes... all good points.
The question was would you trust it. Considering the rampant corruption in the world, it's a pretty fair assumption that there are going to be financial and political interests steering the "engineering" decisions.
It's not the reactor that I don't trust. It's not the engineers I don't trust.
The managers, politicians, and those with financial interests I don't trust for two fucking seconds.
Put it another way... I would trust being transported from place to place with a transporter beam just fine.... in theory. However, not when operated by a capitalist corporation that is trying to save money on costly maintenance and inspections and has figured out that my accidental death is cheaper in the long run than hiring those expensive "Star Fleet" trained technicians and decides to go with somebody with an online degree.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what, should we get our power from unicorn farts? The energy has to come from somewhere. The people arguing that Nuclear isn't safe might have fingers in the Oil pie. Just like the people against pipelines who are in the rail-transport business....
It would be interesting if we could find a way to close the circle - each group preventing something because they profit from something else, but rely on something that is prevented by another group, etc.
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, just wow. I'm having trouble processing this.
That's exactly what I thought having to see his balls hanging off the edge of the couch every morning....
Re:I wouldn't. (Score:2, Insightful)
We can build enough solar panels and wind turbines to power the globe. That's easy. The hard part as you suggest is getting that power 24/7 from what are intermittent sources.
That needs research, yet people want to wait until it's available before funding it. It doesn't work like that, or rather, doesn't work like that 'quickly'.