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SC Nuclear Plant Gets Yellow Warning Over Another Cracked Emergency Fuel Pipe (go.com) 58

Posted by BeauHD from the substantial-safety-violations dept.
Federal regulators have issued a preliminary "yellow" warning to Dominion Energy after cracks were discovered again in a backup emergency fuel line at their South Carolina nuclear plant. ABC News reports: Small cracks have been found a half-dozen times in the past 20 years in pipes that carry fuel to emergency generators that provide cooling water for a reactor if electricity fails at the V.C. Summer plant near Columbia, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is the second most serious category and only seven similar warnings have been issued across the country since 2009, nuclear power expert David Lochbaum told The State newspaper after reviewing records from federal regulators.

A crack first appeared on a diesel fuel pipe in 2003, and similar pipes have had other cracks since then. During a 24-hour test of the system in November, a small diesel fuel leak grew larger, according to NRC records. The agency issued the preliminary yellow warning because of the repeated problems.
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SC Nuclear Plant Gets Yellow Warning Over Another Cracked Emergency Fuel Pipe More

SC Nuclear Plant Gets Yellow Warning Over Another Cracked Emergency Fuel Pipe

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  • venting prevents explosion (Score:3, Funny)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @02:03AM (#63914257)

    venting prevents explosion

    • Re:venting prevents explosion (Score:4, Interesting)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @02:20AM (#63914269)
      This is to do with emergency power during a power grid failure of the nuclear plant. Specifically, they need power to keep water flowing through the reactor after it has been shut down to keep it cool enough to not melt. What I do not understand is, why not use Megapacks of batteries? They are instantaneous, submersible, and their charge levels can easily be monitored.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Can'tNot ( 5553824 )
        I mean... they could also just use better pipes. This isn't a matter of lack of options, this is lack of will.

        • Re:venting prevents explosion (Score:4, Informative)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @03:58AM (#63914363)

          This isn't a matter of lack of options, this is lack of will.

          This isn't a lack of options or a lack of will. It's a lack of money.

          The V.C. Summer plant has serious financial problems. They tried to expand by adding additional reactors but completely mismanaged it, squandered billions of dollars, and eventually killed the project. Nuclear projects traditionally have massive budget overruns, but the Summer expansion was even worse than the Vogtle debacle. So now they're trying to cut costs to stay solvent.

          Nukegate scandal [wikipedia.org]

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            It's stuff like this that makes many people prefer their nuclear power plants 150 million km away.

            Nuclear power plants are fine in theory if you can be sure that stuff will be done properly. But in practice it seems too difficult in too many cases.

            Maybe China will get it right somehow. Seems they are building many nuclear power stations. If they can get safety up and costs down then that others might be able to benefit from that.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by rudy_wayne ( 414635 )

            This isn't a matter of lack of options, this is lack of will.

            This isn't a lack of options or a lack of will. It's a lack of money.

            The V.C. Summer plant has serious financial problems. They tried to expand by adding additional reactors but completely mismanaged it, squandered billions of dollars, and eventually killed the project.

            No, the problem that is plaguing the entire nuclear industry is not a lack of will or lack of money. It is a lack of competent management that isn't completely corrupt.

            • It's a lack of viability and sense.

              We don't need nuclear plants for terrestrial generation, and we never did. The only "valid" reason to build them originally was to produce weapons, and everything after that has been figuring out how to monetize that research at the expense of The People.

              They make sense on carriers (a little anyway — more if you used the power to make synfuel for aircraft while the carrier is parked) and subs (a lot) and of course in space, but not on land.

              If you can't operate a tech

          • So, a large area of the USA is potentially in danger of a catastrophic meltdown, e.g. from a power outage during a severe storm & the diesel backups failing, because one company can't/won't repair some pipes? Yeah, that's private enterprise at its best, baby!

            • Yeah, that's private enterprise at its best, baby!

              Except it wasn't really "private enterprise".

              The state of South Carolina ceded taxing authority to the utility to impose preemptive rate increases to fund the project.

              So it was more like quasi-socialism.

              The capitalist solution would have been to sell bonds or equity to investors.

          • Greed (Score:4, Interesting)

            by KalvinB ( 205500 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @11:29AM (#63915545) Homepage

            They had the money and wasted it because that's how Venture Capitalists work. The last thing capitalists want to do is spend money. You can't have billion dollar projects and trust that the people at the top have the moral integrity to manage it. There needs to be criminal penalties, not just civil penalties when corners are cut that result in safety issues.

            • They had the money and wasted it because that's how Venture Capitalists work.

              There was no involvement whatsoever by venture capitalists. Do you even know what VCs are or what they do?

              The last thing capitalists want to do is spend money.

              It wasn't funded by capitalists. It was funded by South Carolina utility customers.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by mspohr ( 589790 )

          I just replaced a bunch of pipes in my 2000 Land Rover. After 23 years they were starting to crack.
          I think nuclear reactors should be held to a higher standard.

      • Those generators have probably been there for decades. Replacing them would be very expensive. Dominion doesn't even seem to want to replace a few pipes.

      • I'm pro-nuclear power, without apology, but even I recognize that older, non-fail-safe designs need to be replaced with newer, cleaner and safer ones.

      • Batteries are a fire hazard not good for a nuke plant

      • Regulation is a safety hazzard (Score:4, Informative)

        by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @08:19AM (#63914799)
        As far as battery backup goes - What if the power goes out for a week? You are looking at very very big batteries. Plus the batteries degrade so you have to have batteries for X days plus be able to have Y batteries offline to be substituted. Worse you have to do a tone of paper work to make any change. So if your existing batteries have a problem or become obsolete you can't change them for better ones because the paper work might be insurmountable. Many engineers knew the backup power at Fukushima wasn't protected but they had been so beaten down by the regulations no one wanted to mitigate the risk because getting approval for a change would have been so time consuming and costly. I've seen cases where moving a wall to put more insulation around a pipe was cheaper than moving the pipe. I'm sure others in the industry could write books about the nightmares that the so called safety regulations have created.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Because they are very conservative when it comes to safety. Fossil fuel generators are a very mature, well understood technology. The requirements for maintenance and testing are well established, staff are used to working with them. They are off-the-shelf components too, cheap and easy to replace. In the event of an accident where they are damaged, it's understood exactly how to swap them out with readily available spares.

    • venting prevents explosion

      You're talking about venting steam? This is about diseal fuel pipe to emergency generators bringing cooling water to reactors, meltdown would happen without them.

  • Hey, they found the cracks. And they were little cracks. Tiny cracks. Nothing happened. No big deal. No harm, no foul. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Nuclear all the way!

    • Re:MacMann Say... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @02:57AM (#63914309)

      And they were little cracks. Tiny cracks. Nothing happened. No big deal.

      This is one of the most dangerous lines and is a predicator to every process safety incident (not just nuclear). Finding cracks is what in the industry is called a weak signal, finding them frequently is called a leading indicator.

      The reason process plants are safe is because inspection teams put effort into finding these problems and sorting them out and ignore people who say "no big deal" and "nothing happened".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The people saying this is no big deal are the same ones saying we should slash and burn nuclear regulation to make it more affordable. They also tend to dismiss these kinds of concerns when talking about SMRs and thorium, because cracking and aging in general are unsolved problems.

        • Thank you for getting the point. I'm so sick and tired of nuclear fanbois dedicated to the view that anything short of an outright catastrophe is just proof the system is working.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          Well lets be clear if engineers say they are safe then we are going to trust them more than we trust a known internet troll. Now then, nobody is talking about slashing all nuclear regulations. Just the useless ones that get in a the way of advancing research and safety.

          But let's be honest here. If anyone is the blame for any dangerous conditions in current nuclear designs, it is you and people like you. Really you guys fought tooth and nail, and you are still doing it, to keep us from designing and

      • Re:MacMann Say... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @10:33AM (#63915327)

        Yes and no. I have dealt with backup diesel power systems for a long time, in new buildings and old, and have encountered exactly one diesel fuel line crack. It was at a seismic or expansion joint in a utility tunnel on a 40 year old pipe that was had exterior corrosion and additional stress from movement. There have been plenty of leaks from other causes, but an actual crack (let alone 6) is a sign of poor materials (or slightly ironically excessive testing near the system pressure limits).

        There is something else going on here that the summary fails to communicate.

        • but an actual crack (let alone 6) is a sign of poor materials (or slightly ironically excessive testing near the system pressure limits).

          A crack is a crack. My point was that it's not a "non-issue" but rather a defect that needs to be investigated. Was it overpressure? How often does that happen? Was it contamination? Do we have process streams with unexpected contaminants that need to be addressed? Was it poor materials? Where else did we use these materials?

          The point is that the OP's blase approach is dangerous, not that this specific fault is.

  • There was a time when our government's regulations and protections for the environment, public health and safety, commerce, criminal justice and the courts functioned effectively for the people Today, not so much. I believe the size and scale of our challenges require leadership that can't be managed by legislators. We are a nation of 336 Million people operating an 18th century constitutional democracy implemented when our population was 2.5 million in a planet with a billion souls. Meanwhile, the plan

    • tech complacency, all the while seeking "the next big thing", assuming all that is already built will be here forever.

      Maintaining sewer pipes doesn't get you a place in history books (unless you're Joseph Bazalgette and solve the great stink, by building completely new sewers...), same as any career where the best outcome you hope for is "nothing happened in 30 years" , and everyone (myself included, naturally) is looking for a place in the history books, because that is the only place left since all commun

  • Perhaps the US government should take over the plant. Wipe out the board of directors and C level.

  • Headline should be: "SC nuclear facility found with crack pipe. Again."

  • That is in the well-understood, conventional systems. These fuckers are trying to run their emergency cooling cheaper than possible.

  • Instead of pushing for emergency fuel lines, they need to add in low-temp generators that use the heat from the reactors. When reactors are shut off, they still have plenty of heat that needs to be pulled off as they cool. Instead of just dumping to the outside, run it through a low-temp generator to provide the electricity. This way, as long as the reactors is still warm, it will continue to produce its own needed electricity. After that point, the emergency generator is no where near as important.

    • The decay heat removal system, even immediately after shutdown, isn't enough to power a 3 or 4 MW generator under load. The emergency diesel generators used at the plants I worked at were all EMD 20-645, EMD 20-710 or Cooper-Bessemer KSV-16-T generators. The two EMD's are what you would find in a 6-axle 3,600 HP / 2.7 MW diesel locomotives and 5,000 HP / 3.7 MW diesel locomotives, with the C-B's typical for stationary power generation - about 4.4 MW.

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