Fukushima: the Removal of Nuclear Fuel Rods From Damaged Reactor Building Begins (theguardian.com) 154
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Workers at the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have begun removing fuel rods from a storage pool near one of the three reactors that suffered meltdowns eight years ago. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said on Monday that work had begun to remove the first of 566 used and unused fuel assemblies in reactor building No 3. The fuel rods stored in unit No 3's cooling pool were not damaged in the 2011 disaster, when a powerful earthquake and tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi's backup power supply and triggered the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, 25 years earlier.
Tepco said the operation to remove the fuel rods, which are in uncovered pools, would take two years, adding that transferring them to safer ground would better protect them in the event of another catastrophic earthquake. Workers are remotely operating a crane to raise the fuel from a storage rack in the pool and place it into a protective cask. The whole process occurs underwater to prevent radiation leaks. The utility plans to repeat the procedure in the two other reactors that suffered meltdowns.
Tepco said the operation to remove the fuel rods, which are in uncovered pools, would take two years, adding that transferring them to safer ground would better protect them in the event of another catastrophic earthquake. Workers are remotely operating a crane to raise the fuel from a storage rack in the pool and place it into a protective cask. The whole process occurs underwater to prevent radiation leaks. The utility plans to repeat the procedure in the two other reactors that suffered meltdowns.
That's nice but.. (Score:1)
When are we going to find out that all the older reactors similar to Fukushima are shut down safely... Seriously, I have no great problem with the newer designs, but the older ones need phased out, not renewed.
Re:That's nice but.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When are we going to find out that all the older reactors similar to Fukushima are shut down safely... Seriously, I have no great problem with the newer designs, but the older ones need phased out, not renewed.
When the NIMBYs stop fighting the deployment of newer designs. As long as pseudo-regulatory barriers erected by the general public make development of new plants based on new designs financially infeasible, companies will stretch the operation of their existing plants far beyond their original design lifespan. It is rather amazing just how much the anti-nuclear movement has made nuclear safety worse.
Re:Solars dangerous too (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeh, damn NIMBY's causing Fukushima with their pseudo-regulatory barriers. Solar's also dangerous! What if a solar panel fell and landed on a bird, it could chop the bird in two!...
NIMBY's kill birds!
Ok, let's look at the facts. Lets just start with the total deaths per energy produced [ourworldindata.org]. So even with the bad old nuclear designs from the 50s to 70s that we currently use are better than any other energy source. Even with that very few people want to build more BWR or RBMK's. Most scientists and engineers want to build MSRs but to build a nuclear plant you have to follow regulations that written for LWRs and BWRs. For instance, you have to have a Boron system in your nuclear plant by regulation. The Boron system is used to prevent water from splitting into H2 and O2 gasses in a high radiation environment. If too much gas builds up it explodes. So its a good regulation. Except MSRs don't use water for a coolant so there is no Boron system in an MSR. So technically, a MSR plant which can't meltdown and doesn't require external power isn't legal in the US. So an elected official(s) needs to change the regulations but nobody is willing to be the person who changes nuclear regulation due to the NIMBYs. So we have a design that we have been able to build for 60 years, can't meltdown and by any measure is far safer than the LWR and BWRs we are still building. Do you see any MSRs being built?
Consider this, have any of you ever seen an engineering situation where making something a political issue causes better decisions to be made? I doubt it, I never have and you probably haven't either. Making energy production a political issue is just the same as getting the VP of Marketing to choose which web framework you use. We've had a solution that works for decades and instead we delay and promise unicorns which never exist. Your arguments are largely out of ignorance. You probably know about your chosen profession but you clearly don't work in energy. You are expressing your largely uninformed opinions about a subject you haven't spent time researching deeply. And that causes you to believe things that just aren't so and often violate basic principles of physics. But energy production is about physics and physics alone and doesn't give a shit about what you wish was so. Perhaps it would be better to leave these topics to experts but as long as this is a political issue, I don't expect any progress.
Boron doesn't prevent radiolysis! (Score:5, Informative)
As I said, water radiolysis even at full power is generally negligible. The danger is in steam-zirconium reaction, that happens when fuel rods lose cooling and fuel temperature rises past about 800C. This is a purely chemical reaction - zirconium displaces oxygen from water, releasing hydrogen.
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Ruthlessly extrapolating the current rate of nuclear accidents contaminating their surroundings (3 incidents in 63 years of commercial nuclear energy contaminating about 4000 square kilometers) we'd make the entire land surface of the planet an exclusion zone in less than 8 million years. That may sound like a long time to you, but our future offspring may think otherwise. They don't really give a shit about how many people we kill today, though. Dead people only fertilize the earth so they're just great.
Ho
Re:You're looking at non-facts. (Score:5, Informative)
"So even with the bad old nuclear designs from the 50s to 70s that we currently use are better than any other energy source. " = HORSESHIT, moron! Falling off a roof is NOT A RESULT OF ANY POWER SOURCE yet is tabulated as one?
You are dumber than you ought to be given what you've invested time to know halfway. NOBODY DIED AS A RESULT OF SOLAR OR WIND POWER TECHNOLOGIES. They threaten nobody ongoing! Nuclear can't say that.
When dishonest faggots like you try to pretend the likelihood of morons falling off their roof proves industry-investment-dying nuclear power is somehow "safer" than anything else, you know you've hit rock bottom of the slag pool.
To date, 440 workers have died installing solar panels. [forbes.com] 150 have died installing wind turbines on windmills. Do you ever get tired of being wrong? And since those sources provide fuck all worth of power, when you divide to calculate deaths by terawatt hour you get that solar kills several times more people than nuclear. But yea, do go on and give us your completely uninformed opinion and continue to insist your guesses are equal to data and years of experience in the field.
Years from now, after nuclear finally gets us off of fossil fuels, how do you think your children or grandchildren will think of environmentalists from now? I bet that years from now, historians will lump you in with anti-vaxers (pro-plaguers), flat earthers and Trumpers. All of those groups deny basic data and facts and do so in the fact of that information for years. All of those groups have leaders who know that they are wrong and only care about that sweet, sweet donation money. Do you think the folks that run environmental lobbying groups actually want a solution to climate change? Don't get in the way of that money train dear.
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The risk to THE PUBLIC is what we're talking about, mining deaths are nothing.
Read that again. What sort of unpeople are you happily shipping to the death camps? It's the working class, isn't it. You're looking for power generation that only kills the working class, right? Because they are "nothing"?
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How many have died as a result from the radiation released by Fukushima? There have been some death's during the cleanup because people have fallen off high ledges, buried in gravel etc... So from your point of view we should not count them... So then we have 0 death's after the second worst nuclear disaster, that was caused by building in a tsunami/earthquake danged zone and not following the recommendations on building requirements. If they would have built it a bit more inland that would have been a lot
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So what's the long term plan to store the heavy metals and the byproducts from solar panel production?
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Oh? Perhaps you should do some research first [forbes.com].
I'm not saying that the drawbacks of solar outweigh the benefits, but their is a pollution problem in the manufacture and disposal of solar panels, and some of those products don't degrade, since their toxicity is due to them being heavy metals. If nuclear is held to the standard that we need a long term plan to store its waste, shouldn't solar meet the same standard?
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"So what's the long term plan to store the heavy metals and the byproducts from solar panel production?
Those byproducts don't exist, moron."
Perhaps you should bother to educate yourself before spouting off like a fool.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
https://principia-scientific.o... [principia-scientific.org]
https://spectrum.ieee.org/gree... [ieee.org]
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All byproducts, stay in the factory ...
So: no there are no byproducts to be disposed off. Solar panels are made from silicon dioxyde. Then doted with those "byproducts".
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Perhaps you simply should read how solar panels are made instead of spreading your FUD?
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We only store nuclear waste because it's valuable. Once it has been idle for about 5 years (and usually spent fuel is left onsite, often in the reactor, for that time) it's just run-of-the-mill industrial waste. Not something to be taken lightly, but no heroic measures are required either.
"Superfund" sites of all kinds are generally caused by carelessness (or deliberate cheapness) onsite when the waste is produced. Reactor designs that make it easy to get those first 5 years right are a good thing.
Re:You're looking at non-facts. (Score:4, Informative)
Well,
I mean.. if it's radioactive enough to be dangerous, it could still be used for fuel. Go far enough down the line with reprocessing and that waste goes from having a half-life of 10,000 years down to about 100.
Thank you Jimmy Carter.
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To date, 440 workers have died installing solar panels. 150 have died installing wind turbines on windmills.
Next up a discussion of the safest vehicle ever - the Space Shuttle.
Of course, that assessment depends on whether you use total distance travelled, or deaths per launch.
So is it 14 deaths for 537,114,016 miles travelled, 14 deaths for 833 total riders, or 14 deaths for 135 flights?
I really think that deaths is a rather silly metric for people to try to defend nuclear power generation safety. You can't get any agreement on total deaths, should deaths in the supply chain be counted?
It's probably b
Re:You're looking at non-facts. (Score:5, Insightful)
To date, 440 workers have died installing solar panels. 150 have died installing wind turbines on windmills.
Of course, that assessment depends on whether you use total distance travelled, or deaths per launch.
So is it 14 deaths for 537,114,016 miles travelled, 14 deaths for 833 total riders, or 14 deaths for 135 flights?
Next up a discussion of the safest vehicle ever - the Space Shuttle.
You are misleading with a bad analogy.
A Space Shuttle is used to get stuff to an orbit. So the correct metric is number of deaths per kg delivered to the given orbit. Trying to count it per mile travelled is completely stupid because travelling around Earth is not the goal of Space Shuttle.
On the other side, counting number of death per kWh is the correct metric in energy production area. The goal of a power plant is to produce energy. So we must count it per kWh.
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To date, 440 workers have died installing solar panels. 150 have died installing wind turbines on windmills.
Of course, that assessment depends on whether you use total distance travelled, or deaths per launch.
So is it 14 deaths for 537,114,016 miles travelled, 14 deaths for 833 total riders, or 14 deaths for 135 flights?
Next up a discussion of the safest vehicle ever - the Space Shuttle.
You are misleading with a bad analogy.
This is not an analogy, and was never meant to be an analogy. it is how data can be misconstrued. I was asking specifically which data set the poster wanted to use. It's just like airline miles. Very safe by miles flown, but if you have a crash, you're gonna die unless you get really lucky.
A Space Shuttle is used to get stuff to an orbit. So the correct metric is number of deaths per kg delivered to the given orbit.
Tell us about Columbia. It got everything to orbit quite nicely Not back to earth. Seriously my friend, your calling my example a bad analogy, while completely dismissing what happens to peopel when their vehicle disinte
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This is not an analogy, and was never meant to be an analogy.
You're comparing your hypothetical metric of travel safety with his metric of energy production safety in order to prove a point about how "data can be misconstrued". https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%20analogy [google.com]
It's just like airline miles. Very safe by miles flown, but if you have a crash, you're gonna die unless you get really lucky.
Are you suggesting that airline travel is not the safest form? If you need to go somewhere 300 miles away, the plane will get you there with less chance of death. This is statistical fact.
What do we do when the costs are not merely death?
Come up with statistics that take into account whatever other cost you're considering? If you can
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This is not an analogy, and was never meant to be an analogy.
You're comparing your hypothetical metric of travel safety with his metric of energy production safety in order to prove a point about how "data can be misconstrued". https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%20analogy [google.com]
It's just like airline miles. Very safe by miles flown, but if you have a crash, you're gonna die unless you get really lucky.
Are you suggesting that airline travel is not the safest form? If you need to go somewhere 300 miles away, the plane will get you there with less chance of death. This is statistical fact.
This is getting like arguing with a sack of weasels. This is exactly how stats can be lies If we take say, Chernobyl as metric, your stats should prove that there was no damage , or that it was not relevant even if there was a little bit of inconsequential damage that cause no one any problems. Of course, that is a trap, so you don't have to answer.
When in fact, a reactor that is sitting there, quietly generating power is just about as green as you can get. Have a picnic in the grass growing just out
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Of course it depends. You can bend statistics to mean what you want them to which is why we look at the primary purpose of an activity.
The space shuttle's primary purpose was not to commute, it's to get something somewhere so deaths per person / equipment would be a suitable metric. Quite unlike say powerplants which we don't build just for shits and giggles, but rather to generate power.
But sure we don't like deaths. Let's play with your metrics. A nuclear plant spewing its contents have devastated a small
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By the way my post contained more words than yours so clearly it's the better post too.
Well, that goes without saying. 8^)
I know I piss off a lot of people in here with being a Cassandra about nuc power generation. I'm not really anti-nuc power. But many of the pro nuc people need a kick in the ass to allow reality to set in.
Anti nuc people are not necessarily stupid. Accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima happened. The common element between each was hubris. It might be sobering to think that without the hubris of the guy in charge of the reactor that fateful evening, the RBMK reactors
Re: You're looking at non-facts. (Score:1, Insightful)
The way you pepper "faggot" throughout your text shows that you're just recycling text and arguements that you don't understand in order to troll and crapflood. Try again. Or better yet, just go away.
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I'm calling BS on this..
IF you look at the total life cycle cost of various industrial sources of electrical energy, Natural Gas is the cheapest. The only way renewables compete is though tax breaks, carbon surcharges, subsidies and accounting slight of hand (where they conveniently *forget* to include the total life cycle costs). https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a... [eia.gov] does a better job.
Renewables do NOT win on numbers. Never have and it's unlikely they ever will in my lifetime if you do a full cost accountin
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You are incorrect and your numbers are a decade old. Gas is only even competative because it's are record low prices of ~$2/mbtu. Historic prices for gas are triple that.
Wind generated power is already cheaper than the average natural gas price generated power without subsidy. And at the rate both Wind and PV solar are dropping in price both will be cheaper than gas generated power (using average gas prices not spot lows) when both subsidies expire in 2024.
And of course gas prices aren't stable, they can fl
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You are incorrect and your numbers are a decade old.
Did you even LOOK at the study? It's based on numbers from 2018 and projects an industrial scale power plant's cost per megawatt hour that goes into service in 2022 or later. My numbers are NOT out of date or a decade old. They are from last year.
Also, there is a HUGE difference between "scheduled" and "unscheduled" power generation here too. IF you have to store power generated by say solar panels to get you though the night (because solar is NOT scheduled capacity) then it goes from just more expensive
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Xcell energy last summer received competitive bids for 25 year energy supply contracts for Solar and Wind Plus storage that was lower than gas, coal and all other forms of energy.
The Wind + storage bids were at ~3cents/kwh, significantly less than the ~4cents/kwh than a modern combined stage gas generator bid. Solar with storage was nearly the same cost at natural gas. And again, that cost is fixed one constructed and is not dependent on an input fuel cost.
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BS...Receiving competitive bids on some hair brained idea is one thing.. Actually BUILDING it is quite another.
I dare say they didn't find a viable builder who could do what you claim for anything more than a tiny fraction of their customer's usage and Xcell will be turning a lot of natural gas into electrical power even if they build this thing.
So... Do you have a citation to make here? I'd love to see which idiots think they can do this at that price and how they got to their numbers. Somehow I get th
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How do you measure the ROI when returns are 'hippy chick pussy'?
I'll accept their are additional costs...lies will have to be told, hippy pussy will have to be washed. Duh!
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I installed a 9.5KV solar system in 2017. My ROIC (return on invested capital) is running 9.25% with the tax credits and 5.25% without. Both are far better returns then I could get putting the money in the bank or long term deposits. As power cost increases over the years to follow my return will increase. At my current rate of return my system will be paid for in 10 years and I have a 25 year warranty on the panels.
The only thing that would beat that return is investing in the market with significant addit
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There's nothing more silly than calling competitive open bidding for power purchase contracts a hair brained idea.
You clearly don't understand either the power market, competitive commercial bidding or how any of this works. Either that or you are a communist who hates the free market. Take your pick.
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Way to spin this you idiot.
The post you are responding to didn't say the industry should be deregulated at all, they said that the current regulations are incomparable with the state of the art of nuclear design.
Politicians often make such stupid rules. Rules that stifle innovation and the adoption of new technologies. The NRCC is similar, in that they have developed a set of regulations based on technologies from the 1950's and have made it harder to adopt safer alternatives. This is clearly true of t
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In fact, it's natural gas that's killing off nuclear power as we know it now.
... and revenge is coming as grid battery storage is killing off natural gas peaker plants due to batteries having faster response times and lower cost. The energy coming from nuclear and renewables.
Also distributed battery storage will benefit nuclear power such as electric vehicles during the night as the off-peak baseload level will increase.
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LOL...
Natural Gas is *cheap*. It's actually Cheaper than any other source out there if you look at the entire life cycle costs of the plant. That kind of throws a wrench in your fantasy land view of the electrical generation world. Nuclear plants are being killed off by the lower cost of NG, even for base load.
It just makes sense (and cents) to use the cheapest source for power. Natural gas is that source and thanks to fracking, will continue to be the cheapest source for decades, barring regulatory
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Politicians often make such stupid rules. Rules that stifle innovation and the adoption of new technologies. The NRCC is similar, in that they have developed a set of regulations based on technologies from the 1950's and have made it harder to adopt safer alternatives. This is clearly true of the regulatory structure today.
To understand how the regulatory structure of the NRC works, you have get the legal name correct. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission works with industry to develop legal requirements for Nuclear plant operation that improves the safety of the plants. They examine things like basis design issues and develop a regulatory framework that make safety improvements a legal requirement.
This is why Fukushima was criminal negligence. Rules like that don't stifle innovation, they create it, as the legal frame wor
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Not sure about solar panels. Building and maintaining a windmill and accidents associated with windmills should not be ignored. Especially if you people count every death as caused by burning coal and gasoline even if there is no proof of that. It is just a matter of using the same methods or else you cannot compare things. You can compare apples and pears if you use a firm method of comparison - shape, taste, color, texture etc. You can compare these. You can compare price. You just take comparable measure
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Go ahead, prove gasoline is safe: park your car in a closed garage and and start the engine.
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Yes, but uranium mining is an automated process (by necessity), and AFAIK none of that process involves leaving uranium ore lying around to contaminate runoff.
Re: "Solars dangerous" - lying idiot, fall off a r (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear is probably the only way if we want to reduce the amount of CO2 we release per year while not reducing our energy-needs.
Unfortunately, this: one need not like fission (it gives me the creeps) but the above observation simply can't be argued with.
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Every single one of the reactors that got shut down was more than 30 years old at the time it failed. And prior to the NIMBY movement, that was generally considered to be the design life of reactors, IIRC. So I would argue that the Fukushima failure would probably not have occurred at all had there been less NIMBY resistance to nuclear power, because it would have been replaced by a newer plant and shut down entirely by 2011.
Now I realize that the timing was entirely random, so it *could* have happened ea
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You're missing that regulatory costs are massively inflating the capital cost of new power plants. When it takes 20-25 years to get through the regulatory construction process, everything about building a new plant becomes way more expensive and the time to get a return on investment is ridiculous.
The NRC still treats newer, safer designs worse than it treats older less safe designs in the process. It requires $millions per power plant in ongoing compliance every year. It also still insists on analog everyt
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Have you got an example of a nuclear plant that took 25 years just to get through the regulatory process?
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Have you got an example of a nuclear plant that took 25 years just to get through the regulatory process?
Chalk Lake's replacement medical reactor has been held up for around 30 years at this point. And at this point it's "still in the planning stages" with other reactors(think it's darlington here in Canada and for the US) covering isotope shortages for nuclear medicine. The cost overruns because of NIMBY's and environmental groups has gone on so long that the reactor would never be profitable even at a 100 year license. And it's groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club that tried blocking the move of isot
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I don't mind people who disagree, I mind people who make things up and present them as if facts. That's what makes him a moron, and also not a nuclear engineer on any level. Frankly nuclear power can't afford morons.
Sorry, you can leave the pom poms and the enthusiasm though. Stop lying and we can even maybe have a discussion. Rather than pretend that nuclear power has never had any safety risks compared to solar, derp.
Dishonest morons don't get polite society and debates on the merits, they get the boo
Re: That's nice but.. (Score:1)
'Moron' is an inprecise term. Using it undermines your arguement. It turns you into a monkey in a cage flinging verbal shit at people trying to hold a discussion. I suggest you work on your name calling tendencies before trying to make your points in the discussion. Or if you're just a caged monkey flinging things (meant metaphorically, this isn't name calling) perhaps go someplace else to spread your verbal feces.
The grownups are holding a conversation.
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The grownups are holding a conversation.
Here's a peanut.
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When the NIMBYs stop fighting the deployment of newer designs.
Is there a worldwide list of reactors that are at risk, and that need to be replaced by newer designs ? And was the Fukushima reactor on that list prior to the incident ?
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Is there a worldwide list of reactors that are at risk, and that need to be replaced by newer designs ? And was the Fukushima reactor on that list prior to the incident ?
Yes. Every Generation I or II reactor [wikipedia.org] (everything built before 1996) should be replaced by or upgraded in place to being a Generation III reactor as soon as it is practical to do so. The last Generation I reactor was still online for about four years after Fukushima happened. Fukushima was generation II.
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The UK doesn't have a NIMBY problem with new nuclear. Permission was already granted, on the same site as existing reactors, no objections possible.
They still used the same old designs because the cost was already completely insane and adding further risk with new technology would have been unacceptable to investors and the government that was subsidising it.
The electricity it generates has a guaranteed price of £92.50/MWh, at least double current wind prices. By the time it's finished it will b
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They still used the same old designs because the cost was already completely insane and adding further risk with new technology would have been unacceptable to investors and the government that was subsidising it.
This is the crazy thing about nuclear regulation. In every other industry, engineering has improved in the last 50 years and we've got better, safer, more efficient designs for just about everything. Except because of the regulations we've somehow concluded the opposite to literally every other en
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The aversion to new technology is not regulatory, it's risk based. Investors have been burned by things like thorium reactors that were supposed to be wonderful but ended up being hugely problematic and going way over the expected budget.
The government had to offer that insane price for nuclear generated electricity because no-one wanted to built Hinkley C. Even with the massive subsidy they had difficulty convincing the French and Chinese to do it. The French company, EDF, has been struggling to come off g
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I'm not referring to new tech likes thorium. The reactor designs are ancient; it's the equivalent of building a brand new Ford Corinna because people are afraid to get a modern far with airbags, crumple zones and so on.
So we're stuck with 40 year old designs and a whole bunch of bizarre expense.
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Oh, and I should mention that we have more than enough renewable energy for the entire country in the UK. Particularly in the north there is a vast amount of untapped wind power, enough for us and to export to the rest of Europe.
The government isn't keen on exploiting it though, because it worries that being dependent on Scotland for energy could be a problem if/when Soctland becomes independent.
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Not much different than the Georgia reactor canceled last year. An already approved location, design and layout.
It was canceled after spending $8billion and it was projected to need another $8billion to finish it. The Georgia rate payers are now paying a couple hundred a year every year for the next 30 years for a reactor that never got built.
This isn't any different than the reactor under construction in Scandinavia (Sweden I think) that's projected cost is nearly 8 billion euro's (roughly $12billion US).
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When are we going to find out that all the older reactors similar to Fukushima are shut down safely... Seriously, I have no great problem with the newer designs, but the older ones need phased out, not renewed.
When the NIMBYs stop fighting the deployment of newer designs. As long as pseudo-regulatory barriers erected by the general public make development of new plants based on new designs financially infeasible, companies will stretch the operation of their existing plants far beyond their original design lifespan. It is rather amazing just how much the anti-nuclear movement has made nuclear safety worse.
Cool story bro! You just admitted that the older reactors were unsafe and should not have been built. Even if you had to blame the so called NIMBY's Why would someone want a reactor that you admit is unsafe to be built nearby?
A couple problems with that. First, and probably the biggest problem is that the public was told that these earlier reactors were safe. In some cases, reality proved otherwise. So you have no credibility whatsoever. Why should they continue to believe your dismissive assertions over t
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When are we going to find out that all the older reactors similar to Fukushima are shut down safely... Seriously, I have no great problem with the newer designs, but the older ones need phased out, not renewed.
When the NIMBYs stop fighting the deployment of newer designs. As long as pseudo-regulatory barriers erected by the general public make development of new plants based on new designs financially infeasible, companies will stretch the operation of their existing plants far beyond their original design lifespan. It is rather amazing just how much the anti-nuclear movement has made nuclear safety worse.
Cool story bro! You just admitted that the older reactors were unsafe and should not have been built. Even if you had to blame the so called NIMBY's Why would someone want a reactor that you admit is unsafe to be built nearby?
Nothing is perfectly safe. You can either hide in a cave and hope that it doesn't collapse on you or you can embrace technology and the benefits it provides. If you do the latter, each subsequent generation is more reliable and safer than the last, barring serious mistakes. Therefore, it is almost always better to replace existing technology with never versions. This is true whether you're talking about nuclear powerplants, cars, airplanes, etc.
A couple problems with that. First, and probably the biggest problem is that the public was told that these earlier reactors were safe. In some cases, reality proved otherwise. So you have no credibility whatsoever. Why should they continue to believe your dismissive assertions over their lying eyes?
Next up, I'll shock you by saying that a reactor can be built that will be very safe.
Nobody could have predicted a record tsunami. And yet in s
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When are we going to find out that all the older reactors similar to Fukushima are shut down safely... Seriously, I have no great problem with the newer designs, but the older ones need phased out, not renewed.
When the NIMBYs stop fighting the deployment of newer designs. As long as pseudo-regulatory barriers erected by the general public make development of new plants based on new designs financially infeasible, companies will stretch the operation of their existing plants far beyond their original design lifespan. It is rather amazing just how much the anti-nuclear movement has made nuclear safety worse.
Cool story bro! You just admitted that the older reactors were unsafe and should not have been built.
No, he said that running an older reactor long past its design lifespan is risky. This is surprising?
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No, he said that running an older reactor long past its design lifespan is risky. This is surprising?
Risky? Is that like............unsafe?
Boogers. An unsafe reactor is unsafe. If you operate an unsafe reactor that you know is unsafe, it is on you.Try blaming your boss for you not maintaining your car and you run over someone because your brakes don't work - "He didn't pay me enough to maintain my car, so it is his fault."
And running a reactor that he claims is unsafe (or risky) because it is being run in an unsafe (or risky) state is exactly and purposefully running an unsafe (or risky) reactor.
Y'
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You're conflating "risk at time built" and "risk at time well after design lifespan".
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You're conflating "risk at time built" and "risk at time well after design lifespan".
I'm not conflating anything. The point is that poster claimed that these reactors are running past their design date and are therefore a danger. They are not safe. He blames that on people who are anti-nuc.
Here ya go - Challenge time! Prove your thesis. There have been 57 nuclear power plant Accidents since the Chernobyl kerfuffle in the 1980's. How many of those have been the direct result of operating reactors that should have been superannuated?
Finally - how much regulation should be eliminated so
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NIMBY doesn't stop nuclear, cost does. You all want to blame regulation but the simple fact is nuclear reactors are expensive and the only way to make them cheap is to get rid of the containment vessel and anti-terrorist protections.
A modern nuclear reactor using proven 3rd generation technology costs upwards of $16billion dollars to build. A 4th gen reactor or experimental design will likely cost significantly more.
With a $16 billion dollar construction cost, even amortized over 75 years (way longer than f
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NIMBY doesn't stop nuclear, cost does.
Bullshit it doesn't. NIMBY was the reason that the research reactor at the University of Toronto was shut down. NIMBY was the same reason that Chalk Lake's replacement reactor is still not up and running. NIMBY was the same reason the Ontario Liberal Party(see gas plant scandal) shut down a multi-cycle natural gas power plant. NIMBY was the same reason for the literal decade long public hearings over refurbishment of Bruce and Pickering Nuclear.
The "generation costs" are so insane because environmental
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Now ask yourself why it costs so much. In 2002, the cost of building a third-generation plant was only $2 billion. I can pretty much guarantee the actual cost of construction hasn't gone up by almost an order of magnitude in 17 years. And the design hasn't changed significantly, either. So where did that extra $14B go?
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That $2 billion number you are quoting is bullshit.
Two reactors in under construction in the US in 2016, one at a TVA facility and one in Georgia. Both were on existing nuclear sites, have had approval to build since 1970 and are using existing designs (no regulatory cost whatsoever). Both were canceled half built after they blew through the $2billion projected cost to $4-5billion and were canceled midway through when the in construction cost estimates showed $12-16 billion to finish them after Westinghouse
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ad-hominem attack: you lose!
Thanks for playing!
Great News!!! (Score:4, Informative)
This is some very welcome news in developments at Fukushima as the foundations of Unit 3 are damaged. Workers at Fukushima have already removed 1000 fuel rods IIRC from that reactor building due to concerns about what would happen if the building collapsed.
To get a better understanding of why its an urgent issue, a report called Nuclear Power Plant Security and Vulnerabilities [google.com.au] explored vulnerabilities at nuclear power plants.
From that report the issue of spent fuel pool vulnerabilities warranted further study in the now declassified report Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report [google.com] by the Committee on the Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage within the National Research Council. It details variations of scenarios created from vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks, however the potential outcomes are similar if they are initiated by a natural disaster.
The most sobering scenarios came from analyzing what happens from loosing the cooling water from a spent fuel pool. Spent fuel rods are kept in a pool with a constant supply of water because the water not only cools them, it moderates the neutrons so that they don't become critical. One scenario examined from loosing the cooling water was a plutonium fire that creates plutonium oxide in the smoke with reactors that are MOX fueled, such as Unit 3 was. With several hundred tons of fuel it would be the largest plutonium fire we have ever faced, it would also be in open air.
You can find information about plutonium oxidization Evaluation of source-term data for plutonium aerosolization [osti.gov] which starts at around 500 centigrade. I think that because of the proximity to the sea, plutonium chloride would also be created.
Actions to reduce the possibility of these kinds of scenarios are simple and cost effective. Mainly by dry cask storing fuel that has cooled for 5 years and separating and dispersing spent fuel recently removed from the reactor throughout the pools of reactors that are still operating. All very practical, affordable actions for reducing this risk of reactors that are still operating.
Information about the fuel removal process and the damage to the Unit 3 spent fuel pool in Tepco's Fukushima spent fuel removal plan [tepco.co.jp].
There is very little point arguing about Nuclear power from an idealistic viewpoint. To idealize that nuclear power is perfect and requires no improvements means that the nuclear industry cannot evolve legal requirements for new processes. This, according to the official report into the Fukushima accident [nirs.org], is the main reason the disaster occurred.
So this is a great time to commend the workers and engineers at the Fukushima plant and express gratitude for their efforts to get this disaster under control. Thank you!!!!
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So this is a great time to commend the workers and engineers at the Fukushima plant and express gratitude for their efforts to get this disaster under control. Thank you!!!!
I don't know about commending them. Maybe just let them know they no longer bring dishonor to their ancestors
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How exactly do you think your thanks / prayers / donations really come off in JP? They are met with a big "Fuck Off".
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So this is a great time to commend the workers and engineers at the Fukushima plant and express gratitude for their efforts to get this disaster under control. Thank you!!!!
I don't know about commending them. Maybe just let them know they no longer bring dishonor to their ancestors
I was very specific about where I directed my gratitude. It was TEPCO engineers that warned the board about the dangers, who then faced ridicule for doing so.
The TEPCO board bought dishonor to Japan through their criminal negligence, one which threatened the sovereignty of the nation IIRC a opinion expressed by Abe to the TEPCO board. They were the ones who could have prevented this disaster but did not. NISA was also to blame for colluding with the TEPCO board, they failed to protect the Japanese p
Re:Great News!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is very little point arguing about Nuclear power from an idealistic viewpoint. To idealize that nuclear power is perfect and requires no improvements means that the nuclear industry cannot evolve legal requirements for new processes. This, according to the official report into the Fukushima accident [nirs.org], is the main reason the disaster occurred.
Nuclear engineers want to build newer and safer designs. Nobody says nuclear doesn't need improvement. The problem is two fold: 1) newer designs need new regulations, 2) no politician wants to be on the hook for being the person to change nuclear regulations. Also, the standard for nuclear is perfection from the public's viewpoint. It shouldn't be, that's a dangerous and spurious standard as it will cause 10,000s of deaths (at least) making up for that power some other way that causes more harm (even if its workers falling from roofs or windmills).
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It's really not a regulatory issue. If you look at a lot of the accidents in the nuclear industry, they were because the industry and the regulator were too close and the regulator lacked teeth.
The issue is that new designs are a risky investment. They take a lot of money to develop from paper to prototype to working commercial reactor, and often issues are discovered that delay things and add additional costs.
That's why it's mostly governments investing in new designs. The risk is too high and the time bef
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the standard for nuclear is perfection from the public's viewpoint. It shouldn't be, that's a dangerous and spurious standard
Nuclear's drawbacks are severe enough that the standard should be perfection. There should be failsafes for the failsafes for the failsafes, and no problem should ever actually result in a meltdown condition. If you can't guarantee zero meltdowns, then you simply shouldn't do nuclear, period.
Nuclear is fine in space. There are radioactives in some asteroids, so we don't even have to launch them if we actually get space-based industry going — which we could have done by now if we had kept spending mone
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Nuclear's drawbacks are severe enough that the standard should be perfection. There should be failsafes for the failsafes for the failsafes, and no problem should ever actually result in a meltdown condition. If you can't guarantee zero meltdowns, then you simply shouldn't do nuclear, period.
Children think in terms of back-and-white, all-or-nothing, because they can't yet deal with the complexity of the real world. Adults can balance risk and trade-offs.
Three-mile island had a meltdown, as a result of the operators doing the wrong thing at every opportunity and creating a worst-case failure for its design. But it was a US plant built to a reasonable (for the day) safety standards. Per Wikipedia "A variety of epidemiology studies have concluded that the accident had no observable long term he
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Three-mile island had a meltdown, as a result of the operators doing the wrong thing at every opportunity and creating a worst-case failure for its design. But it was a US plant built to a reasonable (for the day) safety standards. Per Wikipedia "A variety of epidemiology studies have concluded that the accident had no observable long term health effects."
TMI seems to be pretty well cleaned up today, but it did necessitate an evacuation. A lot has improved since then, though, so I'm not sure how much value discussing it has.
Nuclear in space for power generation for Earth is very silly. There's already a whopping great fusion reactor there, no need to build another.
It depends on how close you are to the Sun. If you're no further out than, say, Mars, maybe you're right. Otherwhere, nuclear will still make sense.
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So, historically, the two worst meltdowns in history caused fewer fatalities than died in traffic accidents today in the USA.
Now, the question seems to be "why must nuclear power be held to a standard that is orders of
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The plant site is mostly stable now, it will just take decades and trillions of yen to decommission. The big problem is that the decontamination of the surrounding area is still failing.
They have been trying to decontaminate the area since 2011. They tried things like removing the top layer of soil, removing vegetation, removing old buildings, and washing. Some areas have been decontaminated 5 times now and still have hot spots over the legal limits.
At this point it's too late to save those communities. Too
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Maybe...
The decommissioning is the part that will go on for generations, the legal and political fall out will eventually fall into obscurity.
Moving the spent fuel is emblematic of the struggle to make the reactor sites inherently safe, to make them less likely to again damage the environment around them. In this it makes sense to move this material to safer sites that are not compromised.
The "clean up" of the surrounding area is one that only time will really accomplish. Sure, they will find and remo
...one more book worth reading. (Score:3)
"Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima" by James Mahaffey is another enlightening source on what and why goes and could go wrong.
Whoop de shit (Score:2)
Just to be clear, this is just cleaning up [part of] the mess that was lying around before the disaster. This is making absolutely zero progress on the actual cleanup, it's just cleaning up things that should have been cleaned up long ago.
Spent fuel rods lying around in pools is proof positive that nuclear is bullshit.
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Spent fuel rods lying around in pools is proof positive that nuclear is bullshit.
What are you going on about? Spent fuel is particularly dangerous for the first 5 years or so after it goes idle. The best possible place for it is untouched in an idle reactor: no chance for an accident in transport, even transport within the site. After it sits for 5 years or so, it's just industrial waste: to be handled responsibly but nothing special.
An 8 Year-Disaster that Keeps Giving! (Score:2)
Re: Slashdot is complete shit and full of bugs (Score:1)
It is called 'farming.' The reputation of this site is being farmed by the group who were the highest bidder in buying the domain from Dice. The same sort of people who go around scavenging copper scrap and 'smelting' scrap aluminum, or buying up failed businesses to ride the value down to the ground.