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New Legislation Proposed For Nuclear Safety 144

Posted by kdawson from the did-you-say-springfield-vermont dept.
mdsolar writes "Recent problems at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant have spurred Congresspeople from Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire to introduce legislation that would allow State governors to request independent safety reviews of nuclear power plants. The reviews would exclude NRC employees who usually work on that plant and include non-NRC reviewers. This review model is based on one that found problems at Maine Yankee before it closed. Problems at Vermont Yankee have included a cooling tower collapse, a SCRAM caused by an un-greased valve, and failure of a safety system during the SCRAM. The plant is coming off of heightened review after shipping nuclear material with insufficient shielding. The plant's application for a 20 year license extension is also currently under review."
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New Legislation Proposed For Nuclear Safety More

New Legislation Proposed For Nuclear Safety

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  • Entergy safety culture (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mdsolar ( 1045926 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @08:07AM (#20527699) Homepage Journal
    Entergy, the company that has been buying up old reactors to try to run them harder as they reach then end of their design lifetimes gets quite a few safety related criticisms. They use solo guards at security posts so it is not too surprising that one was found asleep at Indian Point last month: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/27/ap405783 6.html [forbes.com]. They were recently reprimanded for for a worker taking a nap at the Pilgrim Reactor as well. The Simpsons is reality based television.

    They also try to cut costs by refueling quickly. They boast of 90% up-times because of their quick refueling, but with reduced staff, how can they manage to both refuel and to scheduled maintenance, or avoid deferring maintenance that cannot fit within the shortened down time window? In the present case they seem to even be willing to run at reduced power rather than to promptly address the broken cooling tower. Was the ungreased bearing that caused their SCRAM on a list that just got skipped to get more up time? They give the impression that controlling costs it their primary function. Installing required warning sirens at both Indian Point http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl e?AID=/20070830/NEWS01/708300442/1025/NEWS09 [thejournalnews.com] and Vermont Yankee http://www.reformer.com/headlines/ci_6835609 [reformer.com] has been lagging. In Vermont they want Boy Scouts to distribute warning radios rather than doing it themselves.

    Nuclear power does have a safety culture, using systems like lessons-learned to attempt to improve safety. But, pushing aging reactors past their design capacity or refueling faster with fewer people seem like lessons learned just waiting to happen. Shoestring methods lack the kind of redundancy that provides for safety margins.
    --
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    • Old reactors (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zeromorph ( 1009305 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @08:42AM (#20527845)

      I can't say how it is in the US but in Europe old reactors (that have been wriiten off) are very profitable - much more than newer ones. Since old reactors are more profitable but tend to be less secure, this is clearly a case were legislation has to intervene, it's just to dangerous.

      Extern, independent reviews in such critical businesses cannot be wrong anyway.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rei ( 128717 )
        There's a simple reason for that, and it has nothing to do with a security/profitability tradeoff. The basic facts are:

        A) Building nuclear power plants is *very* expensive.
        B) Running nuclear powerplants is, proportionally to other types of power plants, very cheap.

        Hence, any extension of the lifespan of a plant is a windfall, and any premature termination or even cost overruns in construction is an unmitigated disaster.

        In the US, building new nuclear power plants, by the 1970s, had become so uneconomical du

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by MrKaos ( 858439 )

          A) Building nuclear power plants is *very* expensive.

          Building a *safe* nuclear plant is expensive

          B) Running nuclear powerplants is, proportionally to other types of power plants, very cheap.

          The "economic" calculations do not factor the long term storage of Nuclear waste, the decommisioning of exising plants or the poorly researched medical consequences of long term exposure to the elements that Nuclear plants vent (Noble gasses that decay into deadlier elements) as standard operating proceedure. Additio

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Rei ( 128717 )
            Building a *safe* nuclear plant is expensive

            And since regulations require safe nuclear power plants, building *a* nuclear power plant is expensive.

            The "economic" calculations do not factor the long term storage of Nuclear waste

            Long-term storage of nuclear waste is not due to a lack of funding. A kilogram of *unenriched* uranium (like you'd burn in a CANDU) produces something like 10 million kWh of electricity (i.e., several hundred thousand dollars of income). For just a single kilogram. The funding is t

    • Refueling Efficiency (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tjstork ( 137384 ) <todd.bandrowsky@ ... UGARom minus cat> on Sunday September 09, 2007 @09:13AM (#20527967) Homepage Journal
      I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to have a mountain of people to refuel a reactor quickly. A lot of companies do refueling simulations apriori and can set up a pretty good refueling script without the need for as many drones.

      And, honestly, the need for safety at a nuclear power plant is so overstated that you can tend to drone it out and thus ignore those things that really do need to be safe. For example, when a company installed guard towers at its nuclear plants, the biggest dispute was that neither union or management could agree on the steps. It's just absurd, and to some extent, really, the union used the steps on the guard tower as a negotiating plank to get more money, more than any concern for safety or the obvious admonition - hang on to the rails.
      • Refueling still takes resources and during the down time there are other chores such as maintenance on valves and their bearing that need doing. If you reduce staff and shorten the down time, then there is a greater chance that something will be neglected, or won't fit into that peroid of time. We need to wait for the conclusion of the investigations but it would seem that sagging in the cooling tower or regular greasing of bearings might have been deferred or neglected owing to Entergy's policy on rapid

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nuclear power does have a safety culture, using systems like lessons-learned to attempt to improve safety. But, pushing aging reactors past their design capacity or refueling faster with fewer people seem like lessons learned just waiting to happen. Shoestring methods lack the kind of redundancy that provides for safety margins.

      I work in the nuclear industry. Decisions to uprate power reactors are not made willy-nilly. There is extensive engineering work done to provide technical justification to the NRC,
      • We need more people who know what they're talking about to cut through the damaging anti-nuclear FUD
      • The Simpson's bit was about the napping. I'm sure there are plants that don't eschew redundancy and post guards in pairs. The post doughnut nap is pretty classic in the show. In the case of Vermont Yankee, there are clearly problems with their over-rating generation since they keep pushing to up the temperature limit on their discharge into the Connecticut River. They also seem to be skipping steps in their refueling procedure. The degree that this impacts safety should likely be judged independently.

      • Re:Entergy safety culture (Score:4, Informative)

        by ushering05401 ( 1086795 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @01:41PM (#20529687) Journal
        Vermont Yankee has been a sore subject in Vermont for a while, and not because of FUD. Doing things like losing spent fuel rods, and then trying to spin the situation as not-such-a-big-deal is not going to endear you to Vermonters or their neighbors.

        Link: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/plant-specific-items/v ermont-yankee-issues/location-spent-fuel-rod.html [nrc.gov]

        The rods are not in the cooling pool, they weren't found, and after observing this and other Yankee Nuke related issues as a concerned citizen I am convinced that Entergy and Co should get the fuck out of Vermont.

        VT Yankee has been run too poorly for too long. Nuclear done right is a beautiful thing, nuclear done the VT Yankee way leads to disasters.

        Regards from Burlington 05401.
        • Did you read the article you linked to?

          On July 13, 2004, Entergy notified the NRC that the fuel rod segments had been located in the spent fuel pool. The pieces had been stored in a unique aluminum cylinder which was previously thought to be part of an existing in-pool structure.

          This directly contradicts your assertion that the rods (two pieces, on 7" long, one 17" long, about the diameter of a pencil) were not found. They were found, right there in the cooling pond where the rest of the spent fuel rods

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zerus ( 108592 )
      Refuelings can be performed faster these days because employees go through multiple dry-runs for the refueling and repairs before the system is brought off-line. This reduces exposure to maintenance crews and engineers. I can't fault them for going faster as the methods used across the entire industry are nearly identical and work over 99% of the time (103/104). Could it be a systematic problem at the plant? Maybe, as the number of tasks increase while the time each employee spends in the containment ar
      • I think it is hard to say that the safety at nuclear plants in the US is spectacular. The Three Mile Island accident is too large a blot on the record. It did have the effect though of reducing the growth of nuclear power and raising awareness so that some unsafe plants have been shut down. I think that finding ways to reduce worker exposure is an excellent thing, but double and triple checking is still needed. One worker's failure to complete a checklist should not cause a SCRAM since that failure shou

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by zerus ( 108592 )
          As far as reactor design goes, TMI was a overwhelming success as far as the containment structure went. On the other hand, their public relations was a abysmal failure, which is why people generally think that nuclear power may be unsafe. Had their incident response been better planned, it would not have snowballed into as big an event as it did. During and after the event, no radioactivity of any significance was released as a result of the safety mechanisms built into the design. So really, it wa
          • Well, contaminating ground water with tritium seems like a failure to me, a large one. There were a lot of things that went wrong at Three Mile Island, and I don't think that containment can be said to have been adequate to the accident. Hydrogen accumulation, in particular, might have gone either way.

            Entergy does seem to have trouble dealing with its union. The first reactions to the cooling tower collapse suggested sabotage owing to on going contract negotiations. With that kind of speculation going

      • as the number of tasks increase while the time each employee spends in the containment area decreases, you are bound to get a forgetful maintenance worker here and there;

        That's very simply to solve. Because of an accident I had I survived a Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI [wikipedia.org], and spent more than a year in therapy. Through that tyme it was constantly stressed that we keep a to do list. Note step 1, step 2, etc and make it as detailed as you need it. Next to each task, each task on it's own line or more than

    • Throughout the world people use the EPRI books that go into detail about modes of failure in portions of power stations because they give you a huge amount of information about what can go wrong in nearly every situation and exactly how bad it can get. We get this information because there are a lot of plants in the USA where problems are left to run to destruction that would have been halted earlier in most parts of the world. Part of it is due to the wage cost fixation and the different rates of pay. I

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by mdsolar ( 1045926 )
        I think this is an interesting point. Up until recently, problems at US plants had to be disclosed to the public and so there was a flow of information that could be broadly helpful. In Japan there have been coverups of problems that have lasted years and at the UKs Sellafield plant outside monitoring by non-governmental groups were needed to document the existance of problems. In the US, the culture is changing. For Official Use Only desiganations are being used to hide serious hazards and the DOE proj

  • Governor Douglas' reservation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mdsolar ( 1045926 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @08:17AM (#20527737) Homepage Journal
    Vermont Governor Douglas expresses reservations about the idea that governors of neighboring states could call for a safety review. He feels there may be jurisdictional issues. In the context of nuclear safety, border crossing effect would seem to make this provision pretty sensible. It should be remembered that New England has pushed for scrubbers for mid-western coal plants because of cross-border effects on water quality.
    --
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  • Vermont and renewables (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mdsolar ( 1045926 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @08:25AM (#20527769) Homepage Journal
    Vermont limits the amount of net metering in the state no more than 1% of peak capacity http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/incentive 2.cfm?Incentive_Code=VT02R&state=VT&CurrentPageID= 1&RE=1&EE=1 [dsireusa.org], while at the same time participating in the Northeast regional climate agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Perhaps the issues arising at Vermont Yankee will prompt Vermont to follow New Jersey and remove the cap, or at least follow Maryland and California and raise it.
    --
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  • I like solar, too, but eough of the spam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ishmalius ( 153450 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @09:34AM (#20528059)
    I know it's a slow Sunday, but please, enough of the sales pitch.

    I for one am hoping that US nuclear operators will begin investing in newer technology, like the pebble-bed reactor. This one is an old idea, but recently implemented. It is inherently safer than rods & dampers, and is unable to go into meltdown. And the reactors can be smaller and can be located closer to the power-users for efficiency and economy.

    • I disagree. I don't think we have any business at all building ANY more nuclear plants, and we should shut down the ones we do have. Nuclear is UNSAFE in America.

      This doesn't mean nuclear power is unsafe everywhere. There are other cultures where nuclear power works great, like France for instance.

      But we in the USA have no business messing around with nuclear power. It's a recipe for disaster. We're too greedy and shortsighted, and by letting private industry, run by greedy CEOs, run nuclear plants, it
    • I think that reactors are scaled up for economy. Vermont Yankee is small by commercial standards and its price for electricity is high (5 cents/kWh) compared to the industry average (a little under 2 cents/kWh). The larger scale to gain economy is also the reason why containment can fail and large scale accidents are possible. Going to smaller reactors, while safer, may not lead to reduced costs even considering reduced costs for transmission.

      I feel that the solution being offered in the sig is relevan
  • Why haven't they been allowed to do this previously?

  • Oh great (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09, 2007 @10:46AM (#20528379)
    There are probable 500 people in the entire country who are qualified to rate nuclear reactors and they are all employed working for the big energy companies or the NRC. Now the States want to get involved. I can guarantee that they are not going to rewrite their civil service wage scales just to accommodate nuclear regulators. Instead of ponying up the $250K+/yr needed for each qualified engineer they will instead hire inexperienced engineers from a "related field" for $80K/yr and the situation will look like it does for their state nuclear transportation officials: it will be a clusterfuck.

    But this is probably what they want. Instead of regulating the older plants they will hire a bunch of inexperienced engineers to throw a wrench in the works and slow down the commissioning of newer safer reactors. Brilliant!

  • Frustration (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kidcharles ( 908072 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @01:32PM (#20529633)
    I don't know who I am more frustrated with, the plant operators who allow safety/security to lapse, or the overreactors (no pun intended) who are knee-jerk anti-nuke and use every small thing to bash nuclear power. People need to wake up; we are facing massive climate change and in the short term (decades) there are two sources of energy that can serve as an energy backbone to meet global need: coal or nuclear. The only question is, do you want your pollution in the form of carbon, causing massive global warming leading to human and economic destruction in the form of wars over water and category 5 hurricanes, or do you want your pollution in barrels stored underground? How is this even a question at this point?
    • The problem with nuclear is that the pollution will create a huge uninhabitable radioactive zone when you have a meltdown. Look at Chernobyl. This is why we have no business running nuclear plants in America.

      Nuclear works fine in countries like France where they take safety seriously, and aren't worried about how to improve the next quarter's financials and create "shareholder value". Here, our plant operators will happily cut corners so they can save a few bucks. This is why we shouldn't be using nucle
      • There are new reactor designs that are literally meltdown-proof (such as pebble-bed reactors [wikipedia.org]. Also, while I agree that federal regulations at all levels have taken a beating under the current administration, we can't just sit back and go "oh well, can't trust the government" and just continue on an unsustainable path. That's defeatism. This country has the capability to do extraordinary things, good or bad. Also, this administration is coming to an end, I'm cautiously optimistic.
        • I disagree entirely. I think "oh well, we can't trust the government" is absolutely the right choice to make. Yes, it's defeatism, but we need to admit to ourselves that we as a nation are just not capable of extraordinary things any more, and it'd be better to just sit back and allow someone else to take over. Our glory days are long since over, and our empire is in its decline. It would be nicer to the rest of humanity if we stopped trying to cling to it. The Roman Empire collapsed too, and so is our

        • There are new reactor designs that are literally meltdown-proof (such as pebble-bed reactors [wikipedia.org]. Also, while I agree that federal regulations at all levels have taken a beating under the current administration, we can't just sit back and go "oh well, can't trust the government" and just continue on an unsustainable path. That's defeatism. This country has the capability to do extraordinary things, good or bad. Also, this administration is coming to an end, I'm cautiously optimistic.

          Nuclear p

          • You should probably not enter a grocery store or pharmacy. Every one of them has Pepto Bismol for sale, which is a compound of bismuth, a radioactive element with no stable isotopes, which has a half-life of over 20 billion billion years!!

            Unless you figure out the fact that "long half-life" is exactly the same thing as "weakly radioactive." Non-radioactive substances, after all, have a half-life of infinity.

            • You should probably not enter a grocery store or pharmacy. Every one of them has Pepto Bismol for sale, which is a compound of bismuth, a radioactive element with no stable isotopes, which has a half-life of over 20 billion billion years!!

              And the quantity of radiation in Pepto Bismol is a very small fraction of that in a nuclear power plant. But I rarely ever go near the pharmacy section of grocery stores and haven't been in a stand alone pharmacy in more than a year. That overlooks the fact that there

    • we are facing massive climate change and in the short term (decades) there are two sources of energy that can serve as an energy backbone to meet global need: coal or nuclear.

      Yes, we need to wake up. Conservation will do more than building new reactors. Something like 58% of the energy used in the US is used in the home. By using energy efficient building methods, appliances, and other electrical items energy needs can drastically be reduced. A properly designed home can reduce the energy needed for

  • IAEA (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BlueParrot ( 965239 ) on Sunday September 09, 2007 @02:15PM (#20529971)
    Ok, now call me naive here, but why not just do what everyone else does when they have trouble like this and ask the IAEA to inspect their power plants? This is what Sweden did after the incident at Forsmark, it's what Japan did after the leaks associated with the recent earthquake, and I believe quite a few other countries have done so as well. As an extra bonus, getting the thumb down from IAEA would be rather embarrassing for the NRC, so chances are it would make them actually do their job... Really, the US pays for a huge portion of the UN's budget, so why not actually use its services...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by turgid ( 580780 )

      Someone with a clue.

      Might I also add, that as a former Reactor Physics Engineer in the UK nuclear industry, the USA could learn a lot from the way we do things in the UK, IMNSHO.

    • Actually, you'd want INPO or WANO to the inspections; they actually have an impact.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • If you are concerned about the use of coal and want to replace it quickly, renewables are really your only choice. Nuclear power takes a long time to build, and the approval process is a bottleneck. Solar and wind are growing at 45% per year. For solar, this means replacing all generating capacity in 22 years, for wind sooner because it has a head start. Nanosolar is coming on line this year with a wholesale price of $1/Watt and prices are expected to fall further and faster than any other power source

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