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Nuclear Safety Push To Be Softened After US Objections 224

Posted by samzenpus from the take-it-easy dept.
mdsolar writes with news that the U.S. objects to a proposal to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety put forward by Switzerland. The United States looks set to succeed in watering down a proposal for tougher legal standards aimed at boosting global nuclear safety, according to senior diplomats. Diplomatic wrangling will come to a head at a 77-nation meeting in Vienna next month that threatens to expose divisions over required safety standards and the cost of meeting them, four years after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Switzerland has put forward a proposal to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS), arguing stricter standards could help avoid a repeat of Fukushima, where an earthquake and tsunami sparked triple nuclear meltdowns, forced more than 160,000 people to flee nearby towns and contaminated water, food and air.
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Nuclear Safety Push To Be Softened After US Objections More

Nuclear Safety Push To Be Softened After US Objections

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  • Site selection (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The first thing would be tougher rules for nuclear site selection.

    While it restricts the allowed area for a nuclear site, there'd be almost no additional cost for the site construction and maintenance (unless it's a really remote location). This would already help a lot.

    • Switzerland has put forward a proposal to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS), arguing stricter standards could help avoid a repeat of Fukushima, where an earthquake and tsunami sparked triple nuclear meltdowns, forced more than 160,000 people to flee nearby towns and contaminated water, food and air.

      How convenient it is to conflate the blame for mass suffering from the tsunami with the nuclear event.

      Many people have bought into the myth that the nuclear event at Fukushima was a human disaster of epic proportion, ignoring the real disaster which was the tsunami, and by doing so giving a big middle finder to those victims. Many people along the coast of Japan, well outside the Fukushima zone, are still struggling and displaced. They've lost loved ones and their homes. Many will not be able to rebuild

      • Re:The real disaster (Score:5, Informative)

        by NatasRevol ( 731260 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @05:46PM (#48954167) Journal

        How convenient it is to conflate the blame for mass suffering from the tsunami with the nuclear event.

        Pretty convenient when you put the nuclear power plants right next to the sea and near a huge crustal rift.

        not a single human has suffered any health impact due to radioactive releases from the accident

        Holy shit are you unfactual.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]

        Also, the impact was minimized BECAUSE THEY EVACUATED THE SITE.

        Downwind, it's a shit storm too.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]

        Again, minimized because of avoidance/restrictions.

        Sounds like 'not a single human has suffered any health impact' to you?

        • Re:The real disaster (Score:5, Informative)

          by Mr D from 63 ( 3395377 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @08:14PM (#48954789)
          Try looking for real perspective than repeating FUD and misreading facts;

          http://link.springer.com/artic... [springer.com]

          http://www.reuters.com/article... [reuters.com]

          http://blogs.scientificamerica... [scientificamerican.com]

          http://news.discovery.com/eart... [discovery.com]

          http://www.insidescience.org/c... [insidescience.org]

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Uecker ( 1842596 )

            Since you are obviously cherry-picking your sources again (which I have pointed out to you before), let me add some recent sources from highly respected journals about the risk of low-dose radiation. Ofcourse, according to Mr. D. all these journals just publish pseudo-science. Reminds me of the old joke with the wrong-way driver.

            "... First, it is clear that we have now passed a watershed in our field, where it is no longer tenable to claim that CT risks are "too low to be detectable and may be non-existent"

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward

              We estimate an additional 130 ... cancer-related mortalities. ... Radiation exposure to workers at the plant is projected to result in 2 to 12 morbidities.

              Even if these estimates prove to be correct (and so far there is little indication they will), when compared to the 16,000 killed in the flooding, this bears out OP's original observation:

              Many people have bought into the myth that the nuclear event at Fukushima was a human disaster of epic proportion, ignoring the real disaster which was the tsunami, and by doing so giving a big middle finder to those victims ...

            • What you don't realize is that those all base their 'predicted' cancer rates on a data model that was only validated for very high acute exposures, with an assumption of proportional rates for lower doses. Those models stem from post war Japan bomb research, but all physical evidence to date shows those models NEVER stand up and rates are ALWAYS much lower than predicted.

              So, citing a bunch of studies that based prediction on the old, inaccurate model is really of no help.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

              It's actually far worse than that. The exposure measured by dosimeters and other equipment deployed at the time is only part of the story. The real problem is material that has bio-accumulated and is now inside people. Inside the body there is no flesh or skin to block the radiation, so it damages the DNA of organs directly and causes cancer.

              It is going to be years before we see the real effect of this, but Chernobyl is already providing some evidence.

            • But unfortunately, all those are all estimations based on a model that was never validated. There is a good summary here.

              http://nuclearradiophobia.blog... [blogspot.com]

              The conservative LNT model works OK for risk management, but it is known to be inaccurate for risk assessment. There just has been no real impetus to develop an accurate model adn it is quite a difficulat thing to accomplish as the real rates of negative health impact are so low they have a hard time getting a statistical basis, and the conservative

        • Re:The real disaster (Score:5, Insightful)

          by quenda ( 644621 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @09:50PM (#48955249)

          Sounds like 'not a single human has suffered any health impact' to you?

          He means no direct impact. No radiation poisoning or excess cancers observed. The biggest health effect are psychological, e.g. people displaced from their homes.
          In the context of 20,000 dead from the tsunami, and zero from radiation poisoning (there were 29 at Chernobyl) , the media is making way too much fuss about the radiation, don't you think?
              Two worker deaths from heart attack have been blamed on overheating while wearing radiation suits.
          A big fear was thyroid cancer from iodine, but that has not materialised. Some models still predict a small increase in cases in future.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          So where's that health impact you claimed? Who got sick?

        • Re:The real disaster (no radiation injuries) (Score:4, Informative)

          by Retired Spy ( 1662229 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @11:47PM (#48955851)
          After reading your references, yes, actually it does look like no one was injured by radiation. There is mention of a 70% higher risk of developing thyroid cancer and a 7% higher risk of leukemia and lower percentages for other cancers. To this level of risk I have to say "so what?". These increases in risk are far far lower than the increased risk of cancer just from being poor, or living down wind of a coal fired power plant, or being an airline pilot. Those are risks we all accept each day. This level of increased risk is laughable. You could probably more than offset this level of risk of death and injury by taking the bus instead of driving in a car for a month. Yes, the article mentions that there might be a lifetime risk of death of 2 to 12 onsite workers, which is immediately followed by a caution that the methodology used in calculating those numbers as a sum of risks for serial low level exposures is unproven and possibly suspect. It's also important to remember that the astronomical radiation levels reported during the event were from short lived isotopes of oxygen (oxygen-15 has a half-life of 122.24 seconds) and nitrogen (nitrogen-13 has a half-life of 9.965 minutes). Tritium with a half-life of 12.32 years was probably the most problematic, but given that it is hydrogen, it would have almost certainly diffused to negligible levels rapidly. Yes there was a release of some cesium-137 with a half-life of 30.17 years and strontium-90 with a half-life of 28.8 years, but we have a lot of experience with mitigating and dealing with the effect of these, to the point where the added risk is practically negligible compared to the other risks we face daily. I would expect the health effects of the panic, relocation, and losing one's home far outweighed any and all radiation risk. Or perhaps that was your point?

        • So far all death and heavy injuries were related to mechanical incidents, not radiations. Even your wiki article shows it to be so. There is a projected increase of cancer, but it is relatively low compared to other environmental effect (like living near a coal plant).

          As for the evacuation it was a *precaution*. The fact is, the measured radiation were actually lower than in some part of the world where people live on regular basis, like people living in granitic area (for example france : macif ce

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 )

        The proposal was to make containment of radioactive material and avoiding off-site contamination in an accident a legally binding agreement
        http://www-ns.iaea.org/downloa... [iaea.org] (bottom of page 15)

        The actual wording includes the term 'shall', which in a regulatory sense is a pretty absolute statement, it ends with the statement, "these objectives also shall be applied at existing plants"

        So, any nuclear operator in the planet would be out of legal compliance if they have any existing nuclear plant that 'may' pres

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Cyberax ( 705495 )
          40 trillion Becquerels sounds like it's a lot - but remember, 1 Bq simply means one disintegration per second. My tritium keychain contains 74 gigabecquerels of radioactive material (2Ci)! So the total amount of the escaped radioactive material in Fukushima is equal to about 500 of those keychains: http://www.amazon.com/Titanium... [amazon.com]

          That's an absolutely utterly stupidly trivial amount.
          • I'm sorry, your keychain does not contain more radioactivity that approx 30% of three nuclear core loads. I invite you to go and stand in the water coming out of the basement of unit 2 for an hour while you redo the math.
            • The amount of escaped radioactivity is nowhere fucking near even a kilo of plutonium, all the core material is still there. And yes, I'd stand in the water near the reactor without any worries. I would even drink it (after regular purification) and eat seafood captured nearby.

              For your information, I actually worked for several months at the former Chernobyl power plant (we were installing ultrasonic monitoring devices to prepare for eventual construction of the new sarcophagus).

              • workers who stepped in the water at Fukushima sustained significant radiation burns.
                http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com]

                There are safer ways to work around these exposed cores but in some ways Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. The workers who tunnelled under Chernobyl and laid concrete to stop further core intrusion into ground water avoided the more severe problem that now occurs at Fukushima.

                The total exposed core material and the use of MOX also make the total expelled radiation greater at Fukushima, just

                • You might not be familiar, but there's such a thing called "dilution". This contaminants have been diluted to levels that are not even detectable. Also, radiation burns after 170mSv? I smell a bullshit.
      • Yeah, the truth is hard to swallow, so mod it down instead. There are readily available sources to help in perspective. Here just a start....

        http://news.discovery.com/eart... [discovery.com]
      • So not being able to go home because the area is too polluted by radioactivity is not a negative consequence of the meltdowns?
        • In a small area, that is true, but many more people will never be able to 'go home' because they can't rebuild in the tsunami zone, that includes areas in the Fukushima precinct. The number of people that will not be able to return to un-damaged homes has yet to be determined, but it appears to be a pretty small number. And even if they can't return, they can keep practically all of their belongings after routine scans for contamination.

          It is a very small impact scale compared to the greater tragedy of t

      • > and by doing so giving a big middle finder to those victims

        Like you're giving a big middle finger to the 160,000 people forced out of their perfectly good homes by Fukushima.

        I'm not sure I would be so quick to ignore their suffering just to make a point.

        > Do you trust those that are more driven by their agenda than human compassion?

        You should definitely be asking yourself that very question.

    • The first thing should be you properly study the subject before opining. There is way to much improperly informed people talking like they know what they are talking about. Site selection is about building new nuclear reactors. Both AP1000, ESBWR and a few other nuclear designs are able to safely survive total loss of power (no generators, no electricity supply from the grid, reactor shutdown) without any risk of meltdown.
      Most anti nuclear people have been brainwashed with incorrect information about nuclea

  • Regulation, more regulation, only lawyers win (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 01, 2015 @03:12PM (#48953329)

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't fukushima's nuclear plant already breaking Japan's law? Why would then more regulation even help the problem? Enforcing current regulations on older plants should take priority over more red tape and bureaucracy.

    • They need to find a way to keep stupid people from running the plants. Fukushima's problems were severe, but the meltdowns were all preventable. That's the dirty little secret that Japan doesn't talk about. Any competent nuclear plant operator could have shut down Fukushima safely.

      • Re:Regulation, more regulation, only lawyers win (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 01, 2015 @03:34PM (#48953453)

        A big part of the Fukushima's problems were cultural. A Japanese tendency towards social order and not questioning superiors let bad decisions worsen the situation.

        Only reason it didn't go Chernobyl was the plant manager, Masao Yoshida, chose to disobey direct orders and continued to pump in sea water (his superiors told them to stop and pull out which would have led to a complete meltdown)

        • And he died of cancer not too long after. "Unrelated," they (The power plant owners) say, but it hadn't been diagnosed before the incident.

          • Re:Regulation, more regulation, only lawyers win (Score:5, Informative)

            by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @03:46PM (#48953527) Homepage Journal

            You do realize that it takes a while for cancer to be fatal, right? Generally years.

            From the time my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer until her death was less than a month. She had had it for far longer, of course.

            Most high level officials/employees in Japan are incredibly old.

            • You can contract, be diagnosed and die from cancer in less than 3 months in a normal situation - it entirely depends on how aggressive the cancer is.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by nietsch ( 112711 )

                Yes, but the aggressive cancers are usually also the easiest to treat.
                Besides, claiming somebody died of cancer is akin to claiming somebody died of 'sickness'. There are many types of cancer, some can be traced back to exposure of bad habits (asbestos, smoking) while others appear to be completely random. Since Paradide Pete did not mention which kind of cancer, we still don't know anything. Remember though that about 30% of all people die of some sort of cancer, most of them of unknown cause.
                Now if you ca

        • Tell me how Donald Trump (for example) behaves when an underling questions him and then get back to me about how "cultural" this is.

        • Only reason it didn't go Chernobyl was

          No, it didn't go Chernobyl because it couldn't, regardless of what anyone did or failed to do. The Fukushima Daini plant reactors are all BWRs, utilizing a negative void coefficient. The original RBMK-1000 reactor design used at Chernobyl used a void coefficient of 4.7ß. The physics of the reactor designs are entirely different and while the situation at Fukushima Daini was terrible and nearly every possible human error in both planning and operation was committed, it was also about as bad as it can ge

      • Re:Regulation, more regulation, only lawyers win (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) * on Sunday February 01, 2015 @05:34PM (#48954109) Homepage Journal

        What really worries people in Japan is that previously undiscovered problems keep coming to light at existing plants, now that proper checks are being done. Any trust that existed has proven to have been misplaced.

        To be fair, some of the issues could not have been discovered when the plants were built. Equipment to find fault lines like the ones discovered recently did not exist in the 1980s. That just makes it worse though, because it demonstrates how even now we are discovering new issues and improving our understanding of the environment.

        When the consequences of an accident are so severe being 99% sure it's okay isn't enough to gamble on. Of around 450 commercial electricity producing reactors 6 have melted down catastrophically. That's a 1.33% failure rate, and doesn't include all the other serious problems at nuclear plants. It's no wonder nuclear plants can't get commercial insurance.

        • Re:Regulation, more regulation, only lawyers win (Score:5, Interesting)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @08:02PM (#48954737)

          If you went to build anything these days with 1970s era thinking, 1970s era technology and 1970s era safety standards you would be denied commercial insurance.

          The problem is not that the numbers look bad, its that the numbers are horrendously skewed compared with knowledge of nuclear power generation. It's like saying cars are incredible death traps and thus refusing to build new cars with crumple zones, seat belts, and air bags.

          The process / power industry has evolved, the designs have evolved, but nothing has been built. So any statistics you use about x number of meltdowns out of x reactors basically need to be adjusted for 1970s era thinking. And we did a lot of mistakes back then across all industries.

          I reject the notion that if you built a nuclear reactor now that is has a 1.33% of catastrophic meltdown over 40 years.

          • There's no way it can be compared to perfect on paper designs because the earlier stuff was also perfect on paper before reality got in the way. A lot of the domain knowledge in fabrication has gone so it's likely that the next generation of reactors is going to have far more problems than the previous, not less. Nuclear needs a continued committed effort to be viable - to use a software analogy the Win2k and XP people had left the building when it was time to do Vista.
            The US nuclear lobby gave up on doin

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

            Insurance doesn't work like that. It's not just the risk of a failure, it's the cost. Even if you could get the risk down to 0.1% or less the cost of a meltdown could still be in the hundreds of billions of Euros/dollars range. In fact the potential cost is something of an unknown, because no-one can say yet what the long term consequences at Fukushima will be and therefore what the long term costs will be.

            No commercial insurer is going to write a blank cheque, and even a cheque for hundreds of billions is

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by notunexpected ( 4000645 )
        Mistakes were made, but the operators did what they could with what they had. Those in the nuclear industry don’t fault their actions. They were heroic. The Fukushima reactors *were* shut down safely. It's an automatic event during a loss of offsite power, and for some plants, a seismic event. All the rods inserted into the all the cores. There's nothing an operator can do to stop it. But, there is still a massive amount of decay heat that must be removed long term, on the order of 100s of MWs initia

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      So what you are saying is they should create new regulations that would apply current laws for new reactors to already existing nuclear reactors and where those reactors can not be upgraded they be safely shut down ;D.

  • Who has a financial interest in this one then? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Angeret ( 1134311 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @03:25PM (#48953399)

    I can't think of a reason ANYONE would want the nuclear power generation industry to be less safe than it possibly could be, except where it meant that designs with potential flaws & faults would be blocked from sale to countries requiring lowest possible cost nuclear power. Blocking increased safety simply sounds like someone wants their income protected.

    If current regulatory practices means that there are ways of getting round safety, then they MUST be rewritten and/or extended. Anything less I consider a dereliction of duty to the people who would live near nuclear plants.

    • Re:Who has a financial interest in this one then? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @03:33PM (#48953439)

      I can't think of a reason ANYONE would want the nuclear power generation industry to be less safe than it possibly could be

      I can think of a reason: Perfect safety costs infinity dollars.
      Real life involves tradeoffs. There are no perfect solutions.

    • Re:Who has a financial interest in this one then? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @03:54PM (#48953587) Homepage Journal

      I can't think of a reason ANYONE would want the nuclear power generation industry to be less safe than it possibly could be,

      How about this one: where the increased 'safety' would mostly be theater and cost so much that it would raise the expense of the already known to be far safer nuclear power plants to the point that people burn more coal, which is known to kill hundreds of thousands a year from mining accidents and pollution. That's before you get into global warming.

      Germany's building coal power plants to replace their nuclear and satisfy additional demand(presumably at night).

    • two more reasons. It kills people, and it kills pe (Score:4, Interesting)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @04:46PM (#48953871) Journal

      Others have already pointed out two reasons. One, making it a billion times safer than carrots also makes it cost a million times as much as it already does, and two, if it's more costly than coal, people will just burn coal instead. I'd like to point out two more reasons.

      Suppose you make $60,000. You can only spend that $60,000 once. If you pay $100 more on your electric bill to make your power even more safe, that's $100 you don't have to spend on having your car a bit safer - two more airbags, perhaps. Spending your safety budget on the wrong things gets people killed, because any money from your pay check that ends up paying for safer energy is money that can't be used for traffic safety, food safety, etc. So the way to have the safest LIFE is to spend your safety budget where it does the most good, which probably isn't energy related.

      Secondly, have you ever worked at a place that makes you change your password monthly? Pretty much everyone there increments their password, so all passwords end with two digits. Ever seen a highway with a speed limit posted that's clearly much too low? Everyone ends up speeding, but by vastly varying amounts since there's no reasonable guidance on how fast you should be going. Excessive rules are counterproductive because they just get people in the habit of ignoring the rules. If you wnt people to follow the rules, you need a) rules that are reasonable and b) people who understand why the rules they are handed are reasonable.

      So the proper set of safety rules, the most effective are:
      Carefully selected for maximum effect per cost, keeping the safety budget in mind.
      Reasonable to follow.
      Well explained, so people understand WHY they are reasonable rules that should be followed.

    • This is a pretty facile assessment. The safest possible approach would be to ban the plants entirely. Once you dismiss that, then it's a trade-off.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      The problem is that no insurer will insure a nuclear plant, so governments have to take the liability on themselves. Essentially nuclear operators get subsidised free insurance, so where are normally a commercial insurer would require high standards the government has to and the government is vulnerable to lobbying (bribes) and other shenanigans.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NoKaOi ( 1415755 )

      It's probably not a simple "increase safety" vs. "don't increase safety." The specifics matter. Were the safety measures actually going to be helpful? Or would it just create more bureaucracy to wade through and just make it harder to build more power plants?

    • To answer your question directly. There are more that 20 GE Mk-1 reactors running in the US. They all suffer from the flaws that led to melt throughs and loss of containment at Fukushima. These factors include embrittlement of the primary containment by neutron bombardment. This embrittlement means that cooling has to occur slowly, something that is tricky in an emergency. They also have steam suppression systems that are too small (torus) and valve systems that need to be manually actuated in emergency

  • Shrug, yawn. Have you read it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheRealHocusLocus ( 2319802 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @04:09PM (#48953653)

    The Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS) [iaea.org] is a treaty-ish pile of broad and anti-specific foofy diplo-language. Its purpose is not to share or agree on a single iota of practical knowledge, though over time a tiny bit might creep into it. It exists to permit and encourage the ratification of itself by as many parties as possible, and in this, it is like those "bad luck if you do not forward me" chain letters.

    The Swiss proposal said in effect, stop all the music and implement every feature ever conceived to make new plant designs safer, to every existing plant. Somehow. Even if it is redundant and absurd. The whole kitchen sink. They cannot be bothered with specifics, that is not the game being played. Signing on to every broad recommendation would be a direct insult to our own NRC, which does not dabble in such diplomatic newspeak, preferring to assess actual risk, look at each site, mandate practical and specific engineering guidelines, evaluate what has been done.

    See INFCIRC/449 [iaea.org] and Add.2 [iaea.org] and Add.3 [iaea.org] and Add.4 [iaea.org] and Swiss Amendment [iaea.org].

    This stuff was written by people from another planet. It was probably leaked from Planet X which is orbiting with the Earth directly behind the Sun. Planet X is just like ours only its United Nations truly runs everything. That is why they send UFOs to abduct an engineer every now and then, to keep their shit from falling apart. Then we send one of our own (out of Hangar 19) to bring 'em back. Maybe we got the wrong one back, one of their 'senior diplomats' instead.

    In it you will find some vague things that sound like good ideas. You're supposed to imagine that this is a world where people do not apply common sense unless they are acting directly on the recommendations of a multi-national NGO.

    The compromise statement now says basically, "New nuclear power plants should be designed and constructed with the objective of preventing accidents, and minimizing off-site contamination in case of accidents. Reasonably achievable safety improvements identified at existing plants during... safety assessments should be oriented to these objectives and be implemented in a timely manner."

    Engineers should not be afraid to stand up and express their anger when they are insulted. This is an insult. We lose an essential part of our human self-respect and tenacity when insults like this go unanswered. Governance of the world should not be bestowed upon folks who cannot be bothered to delve into detail. Regardless, some people will be comforted by the mere presence of the CNS, they're the people who distrust corporations and their own government, to find solace in the flowery language of international diplomacy even though there is little substance in it.

    Basically, this organization-thing was spawned in 1994 and went to sleep. Fukushima woke it up, and they've been running in little circles ever since to come up with a timely response. The response has finally arrived and is on the table in early 2015. This is the kind of time frame you can expect if you pursue world governance.

    Meanwhile, the United States Nuclear Power industry and its associated regulatory body NRC hit the ground running in 2011, assessing the disaster and lessons learned from Fukushima. If you are expecting me to elaborate on them and think there is something to be learned from every earthly experience you wil

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Not sure what exactly it was that got you riled up like that. Of course it is held in broad strokes, and of course it's the job of the national nuclear safety institutions to come up with, implement and oversee the guidelines and rules. It's the lowest common denominator everyone can (or should be able to) agree upon. That's how these things work.

      The amendment states:
      "Nuclear power plants shall be designed and constructed with the objectives of preventing accidents and, should an accident occur, mitigating

    • Signing on to every broad recommendation would be a direct insult to our own NRC, which does not dabble in such diplomatic newspeak, preferring to assess actual risk, look at each site, mandate practical and specific engineering guidelines, evaluate what has been done.

      I wonder if you know something I don't.

      You should dig up a 2011 Associated Press article about tritium leaks at nuclear plants across the country.
      Or maybe read about the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant which was so plagued by problems that it was finally shut down.

      Heck, a quick google search for 'NRC regulatory capture' will kick back plenty of examples that you can use to reevaluate your position.

      The way we have operated nuclear plants in the US is sound. The safety record shows it,

      Well, now I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about.
      The safety record is public, go look at it.
      The

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bidule ( 173941 )

        You should dig up a 2011 Associated Press article about tritium leaks at nuclear plants across the country.

        Since tritium has to be ingested and its half-life is short, I thought this wasn't a risk for humans.

        Hell, there have been 2 nuclear plants that SCRAMed recently.
        One on Christmas and the other last week, during the big north east blizzard.

        Wasn't it shutdown because the powerline were gone and they could not "export" electricity out of the plant? That's how I read it anyway.

    • Actually we learned quite a bit more. When mark 1 reactors lose coolant flow to ultimate heat sink they have at least 3 failure modes that were not previously considered. Loss of ultimate heat sink can happen many ways so this lesson is important for currently operating mark 1 reactors. A flood, drought or any obstruction to intake pumps would have the same effect as loss of pump power. The real lesson was that these reactors do not handle these situations gracefully. Number 1 most likely melted through

      • Pressed for time this morning... but may I suggest a commentary and analysis of the failure modes of Fukushima reactors and fuel pool#4?

        Fukushima âoeMelt Throughsâ: Fact or Fiction? [hiroshimasyndrome.com]
        Fukushima Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool [hiroshimasyndrome.com]
        Fukushima Fear Uncertainty and Doubt [hiroshimasyndrome.com]

        The torus is a known weak point in any boiling reactor design. Triple-redundancy is our best approach right now. High pressure operation, what can you do?

        Truth is, I never set out to 'defend' light water reactors at all. I got into this to push for a r

        • Wouldn't the continued high radioactivity of water coming out of the basement support there having been a melt-through?
        • Regarding molten salt, I assume you refer to the liquid fluorine molten salt proposals. I looked into this too but it does create a lot more complexity in separation of neutron poisons from the molten stream. I agree that in an accident the design looks better and the fact that it has self regulating qualities is good. However, the molten salt reactors don't get around the largest issue with fission power, expensive to handle waste products. Reprocessing doesn't reduce the volume of waste much (only hel

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nietsch ( 112711 )

            Yes the chemistry is hard, otherwise all reprocessing facilities would dissolve their stuff in molten salt at the entrance. But you don't need to reprocess just to get rid of neutron poisons. Just let it sit and wait for about a month and the poisons will have decayed into non poisonous products.
            And solar can not provide all the energy we need, unless you redefine 'need' and 'we' and leave the rest of humanity to die of starvation. Add to that some nasty phenomenons called weather and seasons.

            The reason we

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      I read the proposal and it seems sensible. What they are saying is that best practice should be done everywhere, and that all plants should be brought up to a high baseline spec so that in the event of problems people are not looking for schematics and trying to figure out what the best course of action for reactor type A with hack B and upgrade C at location D.

      We learned NOTHING from Fukushima.
      Because there was nothing to learn.

      We learned that hubris is the biggest danger. Same with Chernobyl. People thought they knew what they were doing. They thought that safety rules wer

  • Use France as a prototype? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jtara ( 133429 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @04:36PM (#48953809)
    It's been a log time since I worked in the industry (I did programming in Health Physics at San Onofre many years ago) but I know that at the time, France was considered to have the safest reactors, operating rules, and procedures. Their Health Physics rules were particularly admired. Of course, this makes sense, because historically, isn't France the country with the widest deployment of and most reliance on nuclear reactors? But, now France has decided on a long-term goal of phasing-out nuclear power. Perhaps the best way to win this game - is to not play at all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The US has its own unique nuclear issues. Some locations where selected on older planning ideas and more is now understood about the deep geology.
      Just thinking about reports on earthquakes and flooding is expensive as the press and locals do read the reports and ask more difficult questions.
      The need for pressure-venting flaps and what role they could have or how they would work when needed?
      The costs of parts, the ability to fit, look after and even buy quality parts is the main issue in the US.
      The site
  • This [al.com] didn't make national news like it should have. Capitalism and dangerous things don't seem to mix too well.

    • It's funny this sort of thing can happen when the nuke shills keep telling you that there's so many safety nets and inspections and regulations that nothing could ever possibly go wrong.

      I personally think that it is probably possible to build a safe reactor, but there's no accounting for the human factor. That, and the unsolved waste problem. We here in Germany are also slowly realizing that nuclear power isn't quite as cheap as we've been told, now that waste disposal as well as decommissioning costs of pl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nietsch ( 112711 )

        Yes, previous designs had drawbacks, but if you paint everyone pro nuclear energy as 'shill', I don't think it is any use to argue with you. You will not convince me, nor will my arguments convince you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ssam ( 2723487 )

      Nothing bad actually happened. No one was killed or injured.

      So much safer than your gas and steel industies
      http://www.al.com/news/birming... [al.com]
      http://blog.al.com/spotnews/20... [al.com]
      http://www.bizjournals.com/pit... [bizjournals.com]
      http://blog.al.com/live/2013/0... [al.com]

  • Nuclear is currently the safest energy source (measure in deaths per KWh http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... [forbes.com] ). Even in the worst combination of things going wrong, the harm to people is small, while there are hundreds of fatal accidents in the fossil fuel industry each year (search for something like 'gas explosion' on google news).

    Imagine if cars were held to the same standards as nuclear power plants. You'd need to get crash rates below 1 in 100 million user years. Make sure that even in the worst crash im

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