NRC Relicensing Old "Zombie" Nuclear Plants 260
mdsolar writes "In the Dec. 7 edition of The Nation, Christian Parenti details what he considers to be the real problem with nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions in the US: Not the high cost of new nuclear power, but rather the irresponsible relicensing of existing nuclear power plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The claim is that the relicensed plants — amounting to more than half ot the 104 original 1970s-era nukes in the US — operate like zombies beyond their design lifetimes only because of lax regulation spurred by concern over carbon dioxide emissions. But these plants are actually failing, as demonstrated by a rash of accidents. And some of the ancient plants are now being allowed to operate at 120% of their designed capacity. There is a video interview with Parenti up at Democracy Now."
High cost??? (Score:1, Interesting)
The high cost of nuclear power is mainly due to the cost of meeting regulations. Note that a typical coal-fired plant would not meet nuclear regulations because they emit too much radiation. How stupid is that.
Profits not power (Score:1, Interesting)
This is about squeezing every last cent out of existing power plants. New plants are extremely expensive to build and license so it's seen as just cheaper and easier to keep the current reactors churning out power. We aren't talking about offsetting fossil fuels just maintaining the power nuclear is contributing now. Under a best case scenario it takes around 10 years to build and license a nuclear reactor. Most also go radically over budget. I was around the unfinished reactor in South Carolina. Most think it was anti nuke people that killed it. It actually was the fact that they were 200% over budget and they only had one reactor half finished and were still many years away from producing their first watt of electricity. We literally can't build and license plants fast enough to meet demand. I know people don't want to hear wind and solar even though they are the fastest and easiest to get on-line. What does that leave us with? Coal. Coal doesn't just release CO2 there's heavy metals like lead and mercury that are released. Also guess how a lot of it is mined? They cut off the top of a mountain then fill in a neighboring valley with the mine tailings. Not only does it destroy the landscape but the tailings pollute the water supply. There is no simple and painless solution but we have to get it out of our heads that nuclear power is some magic bullet that will let us all us as much power as we want cheaply. It's slow to roll out and is very expensive to build the plants. It would cost north of a 100 billion just to replace the existing plants and that won't reduce dependance on fossil fuels. We simply don't have the money to replace all the coal plants with nuclear plants. Do the math and you'll be in for a shock. To replace coal it would cost more than the Iraq war and that doesn't cover clean up and storage. As a nation we simply don't have the cash to spend on replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. The catch-22 is we have to get off fossil fuels. We need to embrace cheaper clean options. The problem is the lobbyist are forcing us onto things like corn ethanol which is a joke and just lines corporation pockets. I always hear nuclear called "cheap". It's hard to call it cheap when we're talking around a billion dollars for one reactor. For the cost of one reactor we can put 30K in solar cells on 30,000+ roofs. Just using the cash needed to replace existing nuclear plants would put solar panels on 3 to 5 million roofs. The service life is similar to a reactor and they require little maintenance. Reactors still need fuel and constant care. We can't keep depending on 30 to 50 year old reactors that have already passed their life expectancy and we can't aford to replace coal with new nuclear plants. We need to consider other options. We need other options than solar but it makes more sense to put the cash into other high tech solutions instead of propping up the nuclear industry.
Re:Not so (Score:2, Interesting)
Yucca Mountain will probably never be used, because the Obama administration has said it won't and is looking to cut all funding. However, the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) seems like a better idea anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPP [wikipedia.org]
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:3, Interesting)
Using terms such as 'zombie', "decrepit" and 'unprecidented' without a shred of evidence makes me think that the article and the author have a bit too much bias to really believe.
On the other hand, maybe they're onto something.
Should I stop driving my 'zombie' car now that the warranty has expired?
Re:Yawn.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup, and about a million other things that aren't as perfect as a little baby. You realize though that you played into the OP's point perfectly...right?
So let's be realistic for...oh...30 seconds or so. The NIMBYism in the US has left us in a position where energy demand is outstripping production (well, it has but we import). Sure, an oil rig isn't ideal for your romantic sunset on the beach but if it's that have gas up at $10/gallon maybe we should give it some though. Sure the teary case of a child with lead poisoning hits all kinds of sore points but would you rather shut down the smelting plants and stop construction on anything containing steel or aluminium?
Now, I'll give a lot more weight to things that cause actual *problems* like mercury pollution. The cries over preserving the skyline/horizon at the expense of progress/growth are getting a bit much. On long island they want to build a rather tall hotel building. It will be the tallest building on the island...and people are all bent out of shape about it. Ok...except the *current* tallest structure is a smokestack. really people!
So...give us some technology that's available today and is even reasonably cost competitive and "clean". If you don't like the current game, come up with some new ones to play or STFU and don't play at all.
Re:New stations NOW (Score:3, Interesting)
I am a huge fan of Nuclear Power, however, I sometimes wonder if all the irrational fear of Nuclear Power was Good for the industry? I kinda think all the negative attention and scare tactics and stuff made the nuclear industry have to go over and above to continue proving, without doubt, that they were safe..
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. See, there's something important you need to understand about engineering, which apparently the submitter doesn't understand either:
The plants were designed back in the days of tables and slide rules. They were designed with large safety margins, because the understanding of the science and the engineering was imperfect. Today our understanding is much greater, and we have very advanced computer models to help the design process. Ever wondered why modern bridges and buildings are much more 'delicate' than older behemoths? Because we can compute the actual behavior of the structures to much higher precision and accuracy, so the needed safety margin is less. It's the same with nuclear plants.
The plants were built to a certain design that had large safety margins... not because they were needed per se, but because the designers couldn't prove they weren't. Today, we can model all the behavior of the plants to a high degree, so we don't need the same safety margins to keep these plants safe. You don't need a cooling system with 50% excess design capacity, since we can prove that 25% is sufficient. We know now that the containment wall is twice as big as it needs to be, for the original design load. So, we can use the safety margins to run the plants longer and to higher capacity than the original design.
In the engineering world, this is done all the time. The only 'news' here is that it's being done with nuclear power plants. But still, that's no big deal. This is just the new anti-nuclear luddite rallying cry.
Re:Yawn.... (Score:3, Interesting)
"pretend fossil fuels are harmless, and plan on increasing the population exponentially forever."
And yet you seem to be the one with the buried head.
Nuclear fuel ain't fossil fuels.
Many people wanted more nuclear plants, more people stopped them. If would hose the nuclear plants, there would be more coal and gas burning plants.
The US does not have an exponentially growing population. We have been around 2.1 to 2.2 children per household for decades. (In fact, the last government report I read on population growth showed that illegal immigration accounted for a huge population increase; I point this out because the pro-immigration crowd is usually seen as leftist, as is the NIMBY, anti-nuclear energy, and anti-fossil fuel crowd; I'm rather more better immigration policy than anti.)
People screwed around against all the solutions, then they are surprised that the current infrastructure is screwed up. Go ahead, raise energy prices, it's been shown again and again these past few years that the hardest hit are the blue collar workers and poor. Carbon tax, etc., and it still trickles down or, worse, exports jobs (as if we haven't been doing that fast enough already for other reasons).
You want a solution? Shift the defense budget to an energy one. If the advertising in many general science magazines is true, most defense contractors hold massive intellectual property and manufacturing potential in the energy sector. They can compete with our new focus on solving our energy issues on a level playing field along with smaller, innovative companies too.
Re:"Zombie nukes?" Puh-leaze (Score:2, Interesting)
I did work in the industry a few years ago and I have friends that do work in the industry currently. Your explanation is spot on. We simply know more now that we did back when the plants were built. It turns out neutron irradiation was not as destructive to plant material as we thought. As far as the power upgrades (called uprates by the NRC), they may actually be putting more fuel in the core (higher enrichment). The NRC has a good webpage describing uprates. http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/power-uprates.html
Odd (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it is odd in this, our age of progress and technological prowess that we can no longer afford the infrastructure of the past.
New nuke plants are now somehow out of reach, as are new oil refining facilities, rail, bridges, sewers. Somehow in the last 30 years we lost the ability to undertake large infrastructure, which you would think given the wealth, technology, etc... that it would be easier.
I wonder if this is political or simply part of a new phase. It just seems to me that everything was constructed in the 60's and 70's and now everything is crumbling and falling apart around us, and we lack the ability or will replace it.
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:4, Interesting)
More specifically, modern safe reactors have a negative void coefficient. As water vaporizes in an critically hot reactor, it reduces the rate of reaction. The hotter the reactor gets, the larger the void(s) in the coolant, the less reaction occurs.
Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient.
Re:"Zombie nukes?" Puh-leaze (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a perfect storm of design flaw and poor decision making that lead to the Chernobyl disaster.
The experiment the reactor was running was designed to test whether the pumps could circulate current through the reactor after a power loss on inertia alone (without using the backup diesel generators.)
It was surprising to find out that the direct death toll (discounting the increased cancer rates following the release of radiation) was 56 people, including the responders to the event, and workers on-site when the accident occurred.
Although the nearby town of Pripyat was abandoned after the disaster, Reactors 1-3 continued operation. Reactor number 2 was damage in a fire, and shut down in 1991. Reactor 1 was decommissioned in 1996, and reactor number 3 was shutdown in 2000.
Personally, reading heavily into the Chernobyl accident has gone a long way towards improving my opinion on nuclear power. To see what it took to cause the most recognizable and most cited disaster, really puts things into perspective.
Re:Considerable lack of knowledge (Score:3, Interesting)
Bingo. Uprating is a standard practice after a controls upgrade, and is often the very reason you perform a controls upgrade.
~Sticky