I like the old New Deal, where the great rivers of the heartland were harnessed to generate electricity, providing the electricity to perform isotope separation on uranium to vanquish a foe, saving the lives or limbs of perhaps a million American servicemen and perhaps multiple millions of civilian or combatant lives that would have been sacrificed to fight us.
The New New Deal seems like a pale imitation of the real thing. If one is going to do Socialism, do Socialism and put the collective might of the working man and woman to work taming the fundamental forces of nature instead of this weak-tea Socialism with its silly energy policy and missing economic development plan.
You mentioned the lack of containment, Rand, but I think it’s also worth mentioning the mind-bogglingly stupid design decision of using a graphite moderator with water cooling.
Not only is graphite amazingly flammable — basically, a big pile of charcoal — but the graphite/water system is unstable. When the power goes up, the water evaporates, and the absorption of neutrons is reduced, so the reactor power goes even higher and so forth. All reactor designs in the West use water as both moderator and coolant, so if you the power goes too high and the water evaporates, the moderation goes away and the fission stops.
Yeah, we need more nuclear for baseline power. IMO nuclear is so little used not because of any political concerns, which do exist, but because coal in the USA is so cheap. Countries like France and Japan, which have less natural resources, rely on nuclear more. But wind power investments do make sense and it can easily be used for 20% of electric power demands at a low cost. As long as it is constructed in sites with adequate wind. NASA, of all things, even had more than a little hand in that.
Regarding your lunar storage article, I was surprised you didn’t mention some type of projectile system as one of the alternatives. You know, process the uranium into slugs, maybe very big slugs, and then use a big gun, maybe a very big gun, to shoot them at the moon. A rail gun comes to mind, for example. Is this a ridiculous idea?
And, if you’re in the mood to revisit that 6-year old essay, why does it cost more to shoot things toward the sun than in any other direction?
Well, I’ll take a stab at that – a rail gun to the moon would need to leave the barrel at about 12km/s. That is so fast that the aerodynamic heating would vaporize a great deal of the uranium – so you would need a massive heat shield on the shell, and you would also need to fire from really high altitude to avoid crazy levels of drag. (Drag is proportional to the square of velocity.) In addition to those engineering issues, high velocity gun design is not easier than high velocity rocket design, in general.
The problem with shooting things to the sun is that it doesn’t work – if you are in orbit around an object, and throw something towards that object, the thrown item eventually reverses course and wacks you in the head. This is an area where typical human intuitions don’t really apply. I guess the easiest way to look at it is that the thrown item may continue moving forward, but since you are in orbit you will swing around in front of it after half an orbit.
To get something to the sun, what you are really talking about is deorbitting it. Solar orbit at Earth is about 40km/s so that is the delta-v to deorbit – we are closer to solar system escape, only 17 km/s away.
Personally I think only hysteria and public ignorance would justify shipping nuclear waste to the moon.
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.
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Hey, wait a minute! John Q. Public, give us our moon rockets NOW or we’re all going to MELT.
Godzilla,
if you think nukes aren’t, and weren’t, scuttled because of politics, try again.
Ask around among friends and acquaintances, and see what THEY think of more nuke plants. Most people are all n.i.m.b.y. about any new power plants, but especially about nuke plants. And politicians know the majority are anti-nuke, so that’s the way they lean.
I used to work at a nuclear construction site, and people were amazed that I would do “THAT” for a living. “Why would I threaten my kids like that?” “How could I threaten the environment like that?” Or a thousand other permutations of those lines.
if you think nukes aren’t, and weren’t, scuttled because of politics, try again.
If you think the economics was unimportant, try again also.
Political objections to new nuclear plants would mostly melt away if they really were as cheap to build as proponents are saying they’ll be. Unfortunately those claims are appearing to be somewhat optimistic.
I don’t know what’s the fuss about waste. There have been natural nuclear fission reactors before. Seems like the waste was pretty well contained around layers of limestone and granite.
s/limestone/sandstone
David — Thanks!
Paul.
I just re-read what I wrote. I never said the economics weren’t important. I don’t believe it’s unimportant, it’s just less of a topic where the public gets involved. I NEVER hear the anti-nuke kooks say anything about economics, it’s always about waste storage, transportation of waste and the China Syndrome.
As I said, I worked in the industry, no one I ever heard protesting the nukes, suggested that a nuke plant be stopped and a coal plant be built. In fact, “clean coal” is now getting the same reception nukes were 20 years ago. And regardless of the fuel costs, operating costs or supposed dangers, it’s all n.i.m.b.y. when plants or infrastructure is announced.
I dunno, Paul, I think the economics and the politics are closely connected. As I recall, the cost of building a nuke was huge in the 60s and 70s through 80s largely because of the political monkey wrenches thrown into the process — very expensive certification processes, mandated redesigns, extremely long an uncertain build times, yadda yadda. People used to demand that the plant not be issued a license to operate the day before it went into operation, after being under construction for 20 years. Just throw those $billions away.
Under the trying circumstances, I’m not surprised it became fantastically expensive. Nor were its opponents; indeed, since they lacked the science or political muscle to stop it outright, they undertook a campaign of delay and random interference and retroactive rewriting of the rules — kinda of like Obamaland TARP and auto industry behaviour, come to think of it — that they knew would drive the cost up to unsustainable levels. It was more or less a philosophy of economic terrorism. And it worked.
Contra Rand’s article, Bob Cringley offers his views on TMI and how events there were very close to very bad. Bob had front row seats to the events, so I give his opinion fair weight here. I think the key quote is this:
Robert X. Cringley said: Looking back at the accident with the benefit of knowing … what the workers found when they were finally able to send robots inside the containment, the TMI accident was very bad indeed. There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Fortunately the Unit 2 containment wasn’t average. TMI-2 was built on the final approach path to Harrisburg International Airport, a former U.S. Air Force base, and was therefore beefed-up specifically to withstand the impact of a B-52 hitting the structure at 200 knots. A normal containment would have been breached.
In other words, we got lucky it happened there and not somewhere else. A similar event at a different plant could have been much worse.
David said: To get something to the sun, what you are really talking about is deorbitting it. Solar orbit at Earth is about 40km/s so that is the delta-v to deorbit – we are closer to solar system escape, only 17 km/s away.
That’s very helpful. Thank you.
Carl Pham said: As I recall, the cost of building a nuke was huge in the 60s and 70s through 80s largely because of the political monkey wrenches thrown into the process
Correct. I’m trained in economics and law, not any sort of engineering, but my understanding (based on the operating costs of current plants and the materials and labor costs of building new ones) is that we would be damn close to “too cheap to meter” without the regulatory burden. We’d never actually reach that point, particularly with advances in metering technology, but we’d definitely be at “too cheap for the consumer to really give a hoot” by now. Especially if we took lessons from Henry Ford’s playbook, as the Chinese appear to be doing.
I suspect that the coal and gas industries are behind much of the anti-nuclear lobbying. Even with air pollution and global warming aside they cannot compete on cost.
There are 44 new large nuke power plants being built today,
including one that just started in the U.S. Several power plants in Eastern Europe have been shut down because they were built on the Soviet design of Chernyobl, where the other units stayed on line for years after the incident. The official fatality count from that accident (if you call the operators stupidity an accident) is now 58 total in the 21 years since. That’s not even the annual fatality rate mining coal for coal burning plants.
As for the land evacuated after the event, most of that has been resettled. Of course, several people refused to leave and they are under study for radiation effects by international monitors.
Contra Rand’s article, Cringley offers his views on TMI and how events there were very close to very bad.
Why contra? They both say the same thing…nobody died.
The article doesn’t really talk about nuclear safety. It talks about the incompetence of people and the malfeasance of politicians.
I see it saying that safe nuclear, ‘to cheap to meter’ is what we should have had for the last 30 years rather than this disgusting political theatre that we’ve had to live with to this day (and with great sorrow, many years to come.)
An excerpt from a paper describing the one new nuke being built in the US:
“While the focus is on new technology, TVA undertook a detailed feasibility study which led to its decision in 2007 to complete unit 2 of its Watts Bar nuclear power plant in Tennessee. The 1180 MWe reactor is expected to come on line in 2013 at a cost of about $2.5 billion. Construction was suspended in 1985 and resumed in October 2007 under a still-valid permit and is progressing on time and budget. Its twin, unit 1, started operation in 1996. Completing Watts Bar 2 utilizes an existing asset, thus saving time and cost relative to alternatives for new base-load capacity. It was expected to provide power at 4.4 c/kWh, 20-25% less than coal-fired or new nuclear alternatives and 43% less than natural gas.”
from: http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html
entitled: “Nuclear Power in the United States”
Note the equivalence of new nuke power and new coal fired power. Nuke plants are the only generators that include decommissioning in the purchase and operating cost. Unless, of course, you have Sacramento politicians that unplug a perfectly good operating plant and then add a “nuclear decommissioning cost” to my utility bills.
I recommend that website to any and all interested in a sane and logical nuke power discussion.
Why contra? They both say the same thing…nobody died.
Rand’s tone made light of the accident because nobody died. “Nobody died so there’s nothing to worry about.” Bob’s article points that no one died because we got lucky that it happened where it did. That is something to worry about – because bad luck can happen in the future.
I am a strong proponent of safe, clean & abundant nuclear energy – but we cannot make light of the risks. We must be accurate about the risks (something I agree that the media & politicians have not done either).
Something looks fishy about Robert Cringley’s statement:
Looking back at the accident with the benefit of knowing … what the workers found when they were finally able to send robots inside the containment, the TMI accident was very bad indeed. There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Fortunately the Unit 2 containment wasn’t average. TMI-2 was built on the final approach path to Harrisburg International Airport, a former U.S. Air Force base, and was therefore beefed-up specifically to withstand the impact of a B-52 hitting the structure at 200 knots. A normal containment would have been breached.
At normal operating temperatures for pressurized water reactors, mechanical failure of the pressure vessel will be ductile in nature. A slow distortion of the weak points in the vessel followed by a slow appearance of ductile failure. Not a sudden appearance of a crack (brittle fracture). This assumes that the multiple reactor pressure reliefs in your typical American reactor all fail at once, which is unlikely. There would be reactor coolant with fission products in it (due to damaged core) released to the outside but nowhere near chernobyl style levels. Also, one doesn’t use robots to find out the pressure spikes on the vessel, you have instruments and gages to use to monitor such spikes.
Well…with all due respect to Cringely, and I generally think well of him when he talks about computers, I think he’s off his rocker here.
In the first place, I suggest the major flaw in Chernobyl was not the lack of a containment vessel but a reactor design that was inherently unstable (you can google “positive void coefficient” to get the technical side of it; in essence, it’s that a graphite/water design provides positive feedback to a runaway reactor, duh). TMI had no such problem.
I realize this is a little like the argument between those who believe the correct way to prevent Tasha Richardson from dying was for her to be a more skilled skier and those around her to be more skilled emergency medical care providers, versus those who believe the correct solution is for her to wear a helmet or just stay home. Likewise, some people believe the best approach to highway death abatement is more skilled drivers, more responsive cars, versus seat belts, airbags, and 55 MPH limits. We can of course add in the best way to prevent mass shootings (more CCW holders versus gun-free zones), ha ha.
Basically it’s a question of whether you put your trust more in active management of risk or in massive passive defense. I tend to go with the former (which is why I focus on reactor design; no containment vessel is proof against a truly fscked up design operated by idiots).
Beyond that, this statement from his article is silly:
There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel,
Er…so? This is a failure to understand the distinction between peak and average power. There are voltage spikes on your generic household power line in the thousands of volts routinely, and up into 100 kV during a thunderstorm. Of course, that doesn’t mean your wiring is all going to go up in smoke from Ohmic heating and your house burn down. They only last microseconds.
Similarly, “pressure spikes” are perfectly harmless unless they represent enough integrated energy to puncture the containment. If they last microseconds — who cares? This stuff happens all the time in a dynamic system. Additionally, as a rule, in complex systems the dynamics of “spikes” is quite different from the dynamics of the average pressure, so you can’t reason from what the spikes do to what the average does, or will do.. It’s perfectly possible to have increasingly larger spikes on a increasingly smaller average, and vice versa. The spikes tell you squat.
The pressure spike at TMI-2 was in the containment building, not the reactor vessel. It was caused by combustion of hydrogen produced when the zirconium cladding reacted with water during the accident. This hydrogen was released into the building, where it eventually caused a pressure spike lasting ~8 seconds and measured at up to 28 psig,. The actual peak pressure was probably higher (80 psig?) because the gauge had a fairly slow response time.
I understand LWRs in the US now have systems for oxidizing released hydrogen in a controlled fashion, so this particular behavior is less likely.
Two atmospheres doesn’t seem like a lot, Paul, if I’m reading your numbers right. It depends on how that energy is directed, no doubt. But a smooth isostropic increase from adiabatic expansion of the air inside a hemispherical/cylindrical buiding doesn’t seem that dangerous. I can hold two atmospheres in a rubber bag a few mm thick, e.g. a tire. 24 inches of reinforced concrete should do OK. Or am I missing something?
systems for oxidizing released hydrogen in a controlled fashion
Ha ha, artfully put. Certainly oxidizing hydrogen in an uncontrolled fashion is to be assiduously avoided.
I can hold two atmospheres in a rubber bag a few mm thick, e.g. a tire. 24 inches of reinforced concrete should do OK. Or am I missing something?
The required thickness of the walls of a pressure vessel increases in proportion to the linear dimensions of the system, all else being held equal.
The pressure in the TMI-2 containment building did not overly stress the structure. They had strain gauges in place so they knew this. I think it may have exceeded the design pressure, but there was ample safety margin.
They were also worried about a possible explosion in the hydrogen gas bubble in the reactor vessel itself. The oxygen there would have come from radiolysis of water. This sort of explosion never occured.
the shutters and vents are not rigged for high pressure.
the point of the containment vessel is to contain
steam in case a valve or weld breaks and starts
spraying contaminated water on the floor of the
reactor room.
28 PSIG isn’t a huge amount for a concrete dome,
but it is a lot for all the penetration shutters.
Remember, that containment vessel needs to have
conditioned air circulated in it so the workers
don’t die, it needs to be dehumidified so the
equipment doesn’t rust, and water doesn’t pond,
it needs to be cooled so it doesn’t get too hot
to work in.
There are literally hundreds of penetrations
where cable trays come in, fluid lines come in,
air vents, you have big doors to drive equipment in,
you need enough room to get fuel rods in
and out.
imagine a 6″‘x24″ cable tray passing into the
containment vessel. you have to come up with
a hermetic seal, say, a big rubber diaphram,
that the wires pass through. that diaphram
now needs to handle a 1500 lb shock load
hitting it. if it displaces and slips out 2 inches,
you now have an unexpected radiation leak
path as gas begins rushing out.
trying to fix those leaks are a real problem.
The containment vessel is really designed for
no more then 4 PSI internal static load i’d bet.
think about a pressure cooker, it’s only got a
2-3 PSI internal load requirement.
The other design load for the containment
vessel is external keeping airplanes and
torandoes from wrecking the reactor.
Jack,
Just what is your major formatting malfunction?
Whatever you are using to type this before youc copy and paste it over, please stop!
Jack, I have to agree with Mike. My web browser can format your text better than whatever you are using. Please, let my browser do the work.
jack lee said:
Remember, that containment vessel needs to have
conditioned air circulated in it so the workers
don’t die, it needs to be dehumidified so the
equipment doesn’t rust, and water doesn’t pond,
it needs to be cooled so it doesn’t get too hot
to work in.
That doesn’t make any sense. Conditioned air inside the pressure vessel? The pressure vessel must be dehumidified? Dude, the pressure vessel is full of high pressure liquid water coolant at hundreds and hundreds degrees F temperature. Do you know what you’re talking about? I think you’re confusing the pressure vessel for the reactor room itself.
Robert
please try and understand the difference between the
reactor vessel, and the containment vessel. The Reactor Vessel is designed to hold operating conditions and support power generation levels of water/steam, while the containment vessel is designed to contain leaks. The point of the containment vessel is to allow say a broken water pump to spill radioactive primary loop water into a sump
and not allow the radioactive gas to escape into the neighborhood.
I would suggest the peak pressure was higher then 28 PSIG because of sampling error in the gauge, and the
clear reduction in static pressure post spike indicates the vessel breached. (I will note one caveat that i can’t source the graph to original source so it may be garbage)
At any rate if you believe this graph, TMI failed
containment and began leaking radiation. Badly.
Robert: the containment structure is also a pressure vessel, albeit one intended to contain pressures considerably lower than those in the reactor vessel itself.
At any rate if you believe this graph, TMI failed
containment and began leaking radiation. Badly.
If that were true, then there’d be other evidence of this. Leaked radiation has to go somewhere.
Not to mention the plant is surrounded by sensors that would have picked up any leaking radaiton in a heartbeat.
The government insures all nuclear plants, so they have a vested interest in downplaying any adverse results from the TMI meltdown. Is the Kemeny Commision report to be trusted? I personally have my doubts. Please read the following report:
I believe that we should develop nuclear power, I just don’t believe that the NRC safety regulations are stringent enough since many of them are based on the assumption that TMI did not harm anyone. If no one was harmed, why were so many lawsuits settled? Remember that the EPA said the air in NY was safe to breathe after 9/11.
If no one was harmed, why were so many lawsuits settled?
Often it is more costly to fight a lawsuit that is wrong than settle. Especially given the atmosphere of hysteria surrounding the Three Mile Island accident.
Remember that the EPA said the air in NY was safe to breathe after 9/11.
That evil Bush did Three Mile Island too? I should have known!
So, Scott is asking for a debate under the assumption that the evidence could be manipulated by the government in arbitrary ways?
Why don’t you just be honest and say, that like most conspiracy theorists, you’re not willing to have your mind changed, and that debate is futile?
I like the old New Deal, where the great rivers of the heartland were harnessed to generate electricity, providing the electricity to perform isotope separation on uranium to vanquish a foe, saving the lives or limbs of perhaps a million American servicemen and perhaps multiple millions of civilian or combatant lives that would have been sacrificed to fight us.
The New New Deal seems like a pale imitation of the real thing. If one is going to do Socialism, do Socialism and put the collective might of the working man and woman to work taming the fundamental forces of nature instead of this weak-tea Socialism with its silly energy policy and missing economic development plan.
You mentioned the lack of containment, Rand, but I think it’s also worth mentioning the mind-bogglingly stupid design decision of using a graphite moderator with water cooling.
Not only is graphite amazingly flammable — basically, a big pile of charcoal — but the graphite/water system is unstable. When the power goes up, the water evaporates, and the absorption of neutrons is reduced, so the reactor power goes even higher and so forth. All reactor designs in the West use water as both moderator and coolant, so if you the power goes too high and the water evaporates, the moderation goes away and the fission stops.
Yeah, we need more nuclear for baseline power. IMO nuclear is so little used not because of any political concerns, which do exist, but because coal in the USA is so cheap. Countries like France and Japan, which have less natural resources, rely on nuclear more. But wind power investments do make sense and it can easily be used for 20% of electric power demands at a low cost. As long as it is constructed in sites with adequate wind. NASA, of all things, even had more than a little hand in that.
Regarding your lunar storage article, I was surprised you didn’t mention some type of projectile system as one of the alternatives. You know, process the uranium into slugs, maybe very big slugs, and then use a big gun, maybe a very big gun, to shoot them at the moon. A rail gun comes to mind, for example. Is this a ridiculous idea?
And, if you’re in the mood to revisit that 6-year old essay, why does it cost more to shoot things toward the sun than in any other direction?
Well, I’ll take a stab at that – a rail gun to the moon would need to leave the barrel at about 12km/s. That is so fast that the aerodynamic heating would vaporize a great deal of the uranium – so you would need a massive heat shield on the shell, and you would also need to fire from really high altitude to avoid crazy levels of drag. (Drag is proportional to the square of velocity.) In addition to those engineering issues, high velocity gun design is not easier than high velocity rocket design, in general.
The problem with shooting things to the sun is that it doesn’t work – if you are in orbit around an object, and throw something towards that object, the thrown item eventually reverses course and wacks you in the head. This is an area where typical human intuitions don’t really apply. I guess the easiest way to look at it is that the thrown item may continue moving forward, but since you are in orbit you will swing around in front of it after half an orbit.
To get something to the sun, what you are really talking about is deorbitting it. Solar orbit at Earth is about 40km/s so that is the delta-v to deorbit – we are closer to solar system escape, only 17 km/s away.
Failure is an option:
http://www.jrganymede.com/2009/04/01/failure-is-an-option/
Personally I think only hysteria and public ignorance would justify shipping nuclear waste to the moon.
.
.
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Hey, wait a minute! John Q. Public, give us our moon rockets NOW or we’re all going to MELT.
Godzilla,
if you think nukes aren’t, and weren’t, scuttled because of politics, try again.
Ask around among friends and acquaintances, and see what THEY think of more nuke plants. Most people are all n.i.m.b.y. about any new power plants, but especially about nuke plants. And politicians know the majority are anti-nuke, so that’s the way they lean.
I used to work at a nuclear construction site, and people were amazed that I would do “THAT” for a living. “Why would I threaten my kids like that?” “How could I threaten the environment like that?” Or a thousand other permutations of those lines.
if you think nukes aren’t, and weren’t, scuttled because of politics, try again.
If you think the economics was unimportant, try again also.
Political objections to new nuclear plants would mostly melt away if they really were as cheap to build as proponents are saying they’ll be. Unfortunately those claims are appearing to be somewhat optimistic.
I don’t know what’s the fuss about waste. There have been natural nuclear fission reactors before. Seems like the waste was pretty well contained around layers of limestone and granite.
s/limestone/sandstone
David — Thanks!
Paul.
I just re-read what I wrote. I never said the economics weren’t important. I don’t believe it’s unimportant, it’s just less of a topic where the public gets involved. I NEVER hear the anti-nuke kooks say anything about economics, it’s always about waste storage, transportation of waste and the China Syndrome.
As I said, I worked in the industry, no one I ever heard protesting the nukes, suggested that a nuke plant be stopped and a coal plant be built. In fact, “clean coal” is now getting the same reception nukes were 20 years ago. And regardless of the fuel costs, operating costs or supposed dangers, it’s all n.i.m.b.y. when plants or infrastructure is announced.
I dunno, Paul, I think the economics and the politics are closely connected. As I recall, the cost of building a nuke was huge in the 60s and 70s through 80s largely because of the political monkey wrenches thrown into the process — very expensive certification processes, mandated redesigns, extremely long an uncertain build times, yadda yadda. People used to demand that the plant not be issued a license to operate the day before it went into operation, after being under construction for 20 years. Just throw those $billions away.
Under the trying circumstances, I’m not surprised it became fantastically expensive. Nor were its opponents; indeed, since they lacked the science or political muscle to stop it outright, they undertook a campaign of delay and random interference and retroactive rewriting of the rules — kinda of like Obamaland TARP and auto industry behaviour, come to think of it — that they knew would drive the cost up to unsustainable levels. It was more or less a philosophy of economic terrorism. And it worked.
Contra Rand’s article, Bob Cringley offers his views on TMI and how events there were very close to very bad. Bob had front row seats to the events, so I give his opinion fair weight here. I think the key quote is this:
In other words, we got lucky it happened there and not somewhere else. A similar event at a different plant could have been much worse.
That’s very helpful. Thank you.
Correct. I’m trained in economics and law, not any sort of engineering, but my understanding (based on the operating costs of current plants and the materials and labor costs of building new ones) is that we would be damn close to “too cheap to meter” without the regulatory burden. We’d never actually reach that point, particularly with advances in metering technology, but we’d definitely be at “too cheap for the consumer to really give a hoot” by now. Especially if we took lessons from Henry Ford’s playbook, as the Chinese appear to be doing.
I suspect that the coal and gas industries are behind much of the anti-nuclear lobbying. Even with air pollution and global warming aside they cannot compete on cost.
There are 44 new large nuke power plants being built today,
http://world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html
including one that just started in the U.S. Several power plants in Eastern Europe have been shut down because they were built on the Soviet design of Chernyobl, where the other units stayed on line for years after the incident. The official fatality count from that accident (if you call the operators stupidity an accident) is now 58 total in the 21 years since. That’s not even the annual fatality rate mining coal for coal burning plants.
As for the land evacuated after the event, most of that has been resettled. Of course, several people refused to leave and they are under study for radiation effects by international monitors.
A good history of the event is here:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html
Contra Rand’s article, Cringley offers his views on TMI and how events there were very close to very bad.
Why contra? They both say the same thing…nobody died.
The article doesn’t really talk about nuclear safety. It talks about the incompetence of people and the malfeasance of politicians.
I see it saying that safe nuclear, ‘to cheap to meter’ is what we should have had for the last 30 years rather than this disgusting political theatre that we’ve had to live with to this day (and with great sorrow, many years to come.)
An excerpt from a paper describing the one new nuke being built in the US:
“While the focus is on new technology, TVA undertook a detailed feasibility study which led to its decision in 2007 to complete unit 2 of its Watts Bar nuclear power plant in Tennessee. The 1180 MWe reactor is expected to come on line in 2013 at a cost of about $2.5 billion. Construction was suspended in 1985 and resumed in October 2007 under a still-valid permit and is progressing on time and budget. Its twin, unit 1, started operation in 1996. Completing Watts Bar 2 utilizes an existing asset, thus saving time and cost relative to alternatives for new base-load capacity. It was expected to provide power at 4.4 c/kWh, 20-25% less than coal-fired or new nuclear alternatives and 43% less than natural gas.”
from: http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html
entitled: “Nuclear Power in the United States”
Note the equivalence of new nuke power and new coal fired power. Nuke plants are the only generators that include decommissioning in the purchase and operating cost. Unless, of course, you have Sacramento politicians that unplug a perfectly good operating plant and then add a “nuclear decommissioning cost” to my utility bills.
I recommend that website to any and all interested in a sane and logical nuke power discussion.
Rand’s tone made light of the accident because nobody died. “Nobody died so there’s nothing to worry about.” Bob’s article points that no one died because we got lucky that it happened where it did. That is something to worry about – because bad luck can happen in the future.
I am a strong proponent of safe, clean & abundant nuclear energy – but we cannot make light of the risks. We must be accurate about the risks (something I agree that the media & politicians have not done either).
Something looks fishy about Robert Cringley’s statement:
At normal operating temperatures for pressurized water reactors, mechanical failure of the pressure vessel will be ductile in nature. A slow distortion of the weak points in the vessel followed by a slow appearance of ductile failure. Not a sudden appearance of a crack (brittle fracture). This assumes that the multiple reactor pressure reliefs in your typical American reactor all fail at once, which is unlikely. There would be reactor coolant with fission products in it (due to damaged core) released to the outside but nowhere near chernobyl style levels. Also, one doesn’t use robots to find out the pressure spikes on the vessel, you have instruments and gages to use to monitor such spikes.
Well…with all due respect to Cringely, and I generally think well of him when he talks about computers, I think he’s off his rocker here.
In the first place, I suggest the major flaw in Chernobyl was not the lack of a containment vessel but a reactor design that was inherently unstable (you can google “positive void coefficient” to get the technical side of it; in essence, it’s that a graphite/water design provides positive feedback to a runaway reactor, duh). TMI had no such problem.
I realize this is a little like the argument between those who believe the correct way to prevent Tasha Richardson from dying was for her to be a more skilled skier and those around her to be more skilled emergency medical care providers, versus those who believe the correct solution is for her to wear a helmet or just stay home. Likewise, some people believe the best approach to highway death abatement is more skilled drivers, more responsive cars, versus seat belts, airbags, and 55 MPH limits. We can of course add in the best way to prevent mass shootings (more CCW holders versus gun-free zones), ha ha.
Basically it’s a question of whether you put your trust more in active management of risk or in massive passive defense. I tend to go with the former (which is why I focus on reactor design; no containment vessel is proof against a truly fscked up design operated by idiots).
Beyond that, this statement from his article is silly:
There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel,
Er…so? This is a failure to understand the distinction between peak and average power. There are voltage spikes on your generic household power line in the thousands of volts routinely, and up into 100 kV during a thunderstorm. Of course, that doesn’t mean your wiring is all going to go up in smoke from Ohmic heating and your house burn down. They only last microseconds.
Similarly, “pressure spikes” are perfectly harmless unless they represent enough integrated energy to puncture the containment. If they last microseconds — who cares? This stuff happens all the time in a dynamic system. Additionally, as a rule, in complex systems the dynamics of “spikes” is quite different from the dynamics of the average pressure, so you can’t reason from what the spikes do to what the average does, or will do.. It’s perfectly possible to have increasingly larger spikes on a increasingly smaller average, and vice versa. The spikes tell you squat.
The pressure spike at TMI-2 was in the containment building, not the reactor vessel. It was caused by combustion of hydrogen produced when the zirconium cladding reacted with water during the accident. This hydrogen was released into the building, where it eventually caused a pressure spike lasting ~8 seconds and measured at up to 28 psig,. The actual peak pressure was probably higher (80 psig?) because the gauge had a fairly slow response time.
I understand LWRs in the US now have systems for oxidizing released hydrogen in a controlled fashion, so this particular behavior is less likely.
Two atmospheres doesn’t seem like a lot, Paul, if I’m reading your numbers right. It depends on how that energy is directed, no doubt. But a smooth isostropic increase from adiabatic expansion of the air inside a hemispherical/cylindrical buiding doesn’t seem that dangerous. I can hold two atmospheres in a rubber bag a few mm thick, e.g. a tire. 24 inches of reinforced concrete should do OK. Or am I missing something?
systems for oxidizing released hydrogen in a controlled fashion
Ha ha, artfully put. Certainly oxidizing hydrogen in an uncontrolled fashion is to be assiduously avoided.
I can hold two atmospheres in a rubber bag a few mm thick, e.g. a tire. 24 inches of reinforced concrete should do OK. Or am I missing something?
The required thickness of the walls of a pressure vessel increases in proportion to the linear dimensions of the system, all else being held equal.
The pressure in the TMI-2 containment building did not overly stress the structure. They had strain gauges in place so they knew this. I think it may have exceeded the design pressure, but there was ample safety margin.
They were also worried about a possible explosion in the hydrogen gas bubble in the reactor vessel itself. The oxygen there would have come from radiolysis of water. This sort of explosion never occured.
the shutters and vents are not rigged for high pressure.
the point of the containment vessel is to contain
steam in case a valve or weld breaks and starts
spraying contaminated water on the floor of the
reactor room.
28 PSIG isn’t a huge amount for a concrete dome,
but it is a lot for all the penetration shutters.
Remember, that containment vessel needs to have
conditioned air circulated in it so the workers
don’t die, it needs to be dehumidified so the
equipment doesn’t rust, and water doesn’t pond,
it needs to be cooled so it doesn’t get too hot
to work in.
There are literally hundreds of penetrations
where cable trays come in, fluid lines come in,
air vents, you have big doors to drive equipment in,
you need enough room to get fuel rods in
and out.
imagine a 6″‘x24″ cable tray passing into the
containment vessel. you have to come up with
a hermetic seal, say, a big rubber diaphram,
that the wires pass through. that diaphram
now needs to handle a 1500 lb shock load
hitting it. if it displaces and slips out 2 inches,
you now have an unexpected radiation leak
path as gas begins rushing out.
trying to fix those leaks are a real problem.
The containment vessel is really designed for
no more then 4 PSI internal static load i’d bet.
think about a pressure cooker, it’s only got a
2-3 PSI internal load requirement.
The other design load for the containment
vessel is external keeping airplanes and
torandoes from wrecking the reactor.
Jack,
Just what is your major formatting malfunction?
Whatever you are using to type this before youc copy and paste it over, please stop!
Jack, I have to agree with Mike. My web browser can format your text better than whatever you are using. Please, let my browser do the work.
jack lee said:
That doesn’t make any sense. Conditioned air inside the pressure vessel? The pressure vessel must be dehumidified? Dude, the pressure vessel is full of high pressure liquid water coolant at hundreds and hundreds degrees F temperature. Do you know what you’re talking about? I think you’re confusing the pressure vessel for the reactor room itself.
Robert
please try and understand the difference between the
reactor vessel, and the containment vessel. The Reactor Vessel is designed to hold operating conditions and support power generation levels of water/steam, while the containment vessel is designed to contain leaks. The point of the containment vessel is to allow say a broken water pump to spill radioactive primary loop water into a sump
and not allow the radioactive gas to escape into the neighborhood.
All reactors have a reactor vessel, some do not have
a containment vessel. And as for evidence the
Containment vessel breached, I’ve got a graph
here http://s4.photobucket.com/albums/y107/dragonfly_777/?action=view¤t=gundersen_pressure_spike_slide.jpg
which appears to show a breach.
I would suggest the peak pressure was higher then 28 PSIG because of sampling error in the gauge, and the
clear reduction in static pressure post spike indicates the vessel breached. (I will note one caveat that i can’t source the graph to original source so it may be garbage)
At any rate if you believe this graph, TMI failed
containment and began leaking radiation. Badly.
Robert: the containment structure is also a pressure vessel, albeit one intended to contain pressures considerably lower than those in the reactor vessel itself.
At any rate if you believe this graph, TMI failed
containment and began leaking radiation. Badly.
If that were true, then there’d be other evidence of this. Leaked radiation has to go somewhere.
Not to mention the plant is surrounded by sensors that would have picked up any leaking radaiton in a heartbeat.
The government insures all nuclear plants, so they have a vested interest in downplaying any adverse results from the TMI meltdown. Is the Kemeny Commision report to be trusted? I personally have my doubts. Please read the following report:
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/04/post-4.html
I believe that we should develop nuclear power, I just don’t believe that the NRC safety regulations are stringent enough since many of them are based on the assumption that TMI did not harm anyone. If no one was harmed, why were so many lawsuits settled? Remember that the EPA said the air in NY was safe to breathe after 9/11.
If no one was harmed, why were so many lawsuits settled?
Often it is more costly to fight a lawsuit that is wrong than settle. Especially given the atmosphere of hysteria surrounding the Three Mile Island accident.
Remember that the EPA said the air in NY was safe to breathe after 9/11.
That evil Bush did Three Mile Island too? I should have known!
So, Scott is asking for a debate under the assumption that the evidence could be manipulated by the government in arbitrary ways?
Why don’t you just be honest and say, that like most conspiracy theorists, you’re not willing to have your mind changed, and that debate is futile?