US Nuclear Power Plants Contain Dangerous Counterfeit Parts, Report Finds (theverge.com) 129
At least some nuclear power plants in the US contain counterfeit parts that could pose significant risks, an investigation by the inspector general's office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found. Those parts "present nuclear safety and security concerns that could have serious consequences," says the resulting report (PDF) published on February 9th. The Verge reports: The investigation was conducted after unnamed individuals alleged that "most, if not all," nuclear plants in the US have fake or faulty parts. The inspector general's office uncovered problems with counterfeit parts at a few different plants as part of its investigation. The report also says that the DOE had separately flagged 100 "incidents" involving counterfeit parts just last year. It's a problem that the US will have to crack down on if it moves forward with plans to include nuclear power in its transition to clean energy. Without greater oversight at the NRC, the report warns, the risk of counterfeit parts going unnoticed in the nation's nuclear power plants could rise.
As part of its inquiry, the inspector general's office looked for parts that are illegally altered to look like legitimate products, parts that are "intentionally misrepresented to deceive," and parts that don't meet product specifications. It sampled four power plants across the US and found evidence of counterfeit parts at one of those plants in the midwest. It also points to nuclear power plants in the Northeast, separate from those it sampled, where a "well-placed NRC principal" found that counterfeit parts were involved in two separate component failures.
The NRC might be underestimating the prevalence of counterfeit parts, the report warns, because the regulatory agency doesn't have a robust system in place for tracking problematic parts. It only requires plants to report counterfeits in extraordinary circumstances, like if they lead to an emergency shutdown of a reactor. The report also notes that the NRC hasn't thoroughly investigated all counterfeit allegations. There were 55 nuclear power plants operating in the US as of September 2021, and the inspector general's office sampled just four for its report. NRC Public Affairs Officer Scott Burnell told The Verge in an email that "nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern. The NRC's office of the Executive Director for Operations is thoroughly reviewing the report and will direct the agency's program offices to take appropriate action."
As part of its inquiry, the inspector general's office looked for parts that are illegally altered to look like legitimate products, parts that are "intentionally misrepresented to deceive," and parts that don't meet product specifications. It sampled four power plants across the US and found evidence of counterfeit parts at one of those plants in the midwest. It also points to nuclear power plants in the Northeast, separate from those it sampled, where a "well-placed NRC principal" found that counterfeit parts were involved in two separate component failures.
The NRC might be underestimating the prevalence of counterfeit parts, the report warns, because the regulatory agency doesn't have a robust system in place for tracking problematic parts. It only requires plants to report counterfeits in extraordinary circumstances, like if they lead to an emergency shutdown of a reactor. The report also notes that the NRC hasn't thoroughly investigated all counterfeit allegations. There were 55 nuclear power plants operating in the US as of September 2021, and the inspector general's office sampled just four for its report. NRC Public Affairs Officer Scott Burnell told The Verge in an email that "nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern. The NRC's office of the Executive Director for Operations is thoroughly reviewing the report and will direct the agency's program offices to take appropriate action."
When Amazon doesn't have it... (Score:5, Funny)
mr burns is to cheap for that and that guy in 7g (Score:2)
mr burns is to cheap for that and that guy in 7g is to dumb to know it's an fake
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China has nuclear power plants, are they using Amazon for parts?
the bad parts: (Score:5, Interesting)
The first failure identified by the NRC principal was a water pump shaft used for emergency service that snapped soon after being installed. At a separate plant in the Northeast, temperature monitors in “safety-related areas” that are used to identify steam line breaks suddenly failed “at a significantly increased rate.” Prior to that failure, some of the instruments had been repaired using defective parts.
Other groups, including the Electric Power Research Institute and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), have also identified counterfeit valves, bearings, circuit breakers, pipe fittings, and structural steel in nuclear power plants in the US and abroad in recent years.
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Which adds some perspective to
>nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern
which would have been bogus anyway because in a safety-critical system it is always a safety concern if parts are not qualified.
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Right?
In my line of work the functionality of emergency water pumps, temperature monitors, STRUCTURAL STEEL and circuit breakers are considered to be pretty safety concerning.
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More recently (2004) my company bought 10 computers from a well-known brand (*cough*Dell*cough*) that failed when the capacitors failed after a few years.
This was a wide-spread problem [wikipedia.org] from 99-07, caused by faulty electrolyte composition; investigation uncovered industrial espionage.
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You hope.
Safety analysts have gone towards more of a "swiss cheese" approach - if the holes line up then there's a potential safety issue. The problem is that even with layers of security, you can't tell how well covered the holes are or if there are slight gaps.
Even worse, the holes may move - t
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This is why we need to build even more nucular power plants! Nucular power is the one & only solution to all our global warming woes & we can wait 30+ years while they get build instead of investing in renewables that'll come online almost immediately. Also, Bill Gates & some other billionaires are going to make experimental nucular power plants & you can rest assured that they'll only be using the best, genuine parts available & they won't try to cut corners or reduce costs & put al
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And AI/Deep Learning.
The sky is not falling (Score:2)
NRC Public Affairs Officer Scott Burnell told The Verge in an email that “nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern."
Don't worry though ... (Score:5, Funny)
They found all the fake uranium pretty quickly, then all the fake graphite dampers very shortly after that ... :-)
So what are they going to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the price of criminal behavior is less than the profit of the crime, the "law" is nothing but a cost of doing business.
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Our system is imperfect, and must be designed to be resilient and fail gracefully. It is more difficult to do this with nuclear power than other energy delivery systems.
Re:So what are they going to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
The plant operators should be suing them for the cost of replacing the parts. If they aren't then their relationship is too cosy and represents a regulatory problem.
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Well, it may end up as a civil action, by the nuke plant against the supplier.
That may run up to a huge amount, considering how mission critical this could have been.
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Where are all the agencies to prevent this from happening? Where is UL? Where is CSA? The counterfeit parts all bare their markings and not a peep from any of them, but they're eager to make me, the end user, report it to them for free after I payed for it of course.
Where is US Customs and Borders who are supposed to prevent all this? Where are the inspectors that are so qualified to determine what's real or not? They always complain they're understaffed, but somehow the EU can handle this with a quarter of
This is why I'm opposed to nuclear. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why I'm mostly opposed to nuclear.
In theory its an excellent clean energy source with manageable waste disposal needs. Especially MSRs, whose waste mostly only remains radioactive for several hundred years, rather than 10's of thousands like current plants.
In practice though they're inevitably managed by cost-cutting bureaucrats who are eager to cut corners wherever possible, and continue operating plants decades beyond their design life. Sometimes going so far as to actively suppress information about dangerous equipment failures, containment cracks, etc.
In that environment, a "safer" reactor just means they can get away with more cost-cutting to line their own pockets. Until we figure out a way to eliminate that, I'm not at all confident that even the most theoretically "idiot proof" reactor would actually be substantially safer in practice than the reactors we have today.
Re:This is why I'm opposed to nuclear. (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1984 Bhopal disaster killed more people in a single day than the entire nuclear industry has done in its existence. But for some reason chemical plants don't get a fraction of the scrutiny that nuclear plants do, despite thousands of them operating all across the world and the potential for a similar disaster happening again. And no one, not even the green lobby, would advocate shutting them all down.
Nuclear, at least in Western nations, is very heavily regulated. 100% Safe? No, but nothing is, and the risk is acceptable. The problem of counterfeit parts is not unique to it either; it's a huge problem in the automotive, medical and even aviation sectors.
Re:This is why I'm opposed to nuclear. (Score:4, Informative)
"The 1984 Bhopal disaster killed more people in a single day than the entire nuclear industry has done in its existence. But for some reason chemical plants don't get a fraction of the scrutiny that nuclear plants do"
For "some" reason, you say, as if it wasn't obvious?
Bhopal was certainly catastrophic and an example of what predatory capitalism does -which is significant because that's immediately transposable to any other industry, nuclear included.
But, as terrible as it was, for the very nature of the business its impact was contained to a short reach (part of the deadly toll became from the industry being in the middle of heavily populated land, which most possible wouldn't be allowed in more advanced countries, which is why it was in India instead of USA because of predatory capitalism).
On the other hand, Chernobyl reach was the full of Europe, or Fukushima the full of Japan and Asian seashore. Bhopal was the worst possible incident for a factory of its class while Chernobyl and Fukushima were not the worst they could be and we know the same forces that made Bhopal possible are at work in the nuclear business too, so it's just a matter of time a full Bhopal incident, only on a nuclear facilty, to happen.
And no: that is *not* an acceptable risk.
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Nuclear has had far more than a few hundred deaths over the years.
The WHO estimates 4000 deaths from Chernobyl alone.
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Nuclear has had far more than a few hundred deaths over the years.
The WHO estimates 4000 deaths from Chernobyl alone.
The nuclear fanatics always lie about the cancer deaths. They only want to count the acute radiation poisoning ones, which is dishonest in the extreme. Pretty much like all their claims.
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Did someone from your family die there?
Are we supposed to only care about people we know personally now?
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This is a ridiculous analogy.
Absolutely it is. That's intentional.
The probability of getting a bullet is 1/6.
Right again.
What's the probability of a human death with a TWh of nuclear energy?
No idea, and don't care.
The point is, the consequences are dire.
Even if the cylinder of your revolver had 1000 slots, with 1 bullet, the consequences of failure, even if 1/1000, are death.
You are attempting to use our success in not getting the bullet to argue that someone is unable to accept any risk.
The problem isn't the risk. The problem is the consequences of rolling the snake eyes.
I.e., it is perfectly reasonable to say that some consequences aren
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And that's the discussion that needs to happen.
The failure consequences of nuclear have the potential to be truly fucking dire.
Granted, our safety record is damn good, and we've done a lot of work to make sure failures aren't worst-case.
The pretense that the risk is non-existent just because we have managed to avoid it is wrong and muddies the discussion.
To me, it's a no-brainer. Nuclear has a much lower body count than burning hydrocarbons.
However, I'm not going to
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But, as terrible as it was, for the very nature of the business its impact was contained to a short reach (part of the deadly toll became from the industry being in the middle of heavily populated land, which most possible wouldn't be allowed in more advanced countries, which is why it was in India instead of USA because of predatory capitalism).
Watch some USCSB videos some time. There have been accidents at chemical plants in the middle of residential areas, and Bhopal-style failures that happened to be lucky enough not to involve methyl isocyanate, in the US.
Also frequently because of predatory capitalism.
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The disasters in socialist companies get a lot less press exposure and are more easily hushed up. Fuzhan province had a major chemical spill in 2018. But you won't see it leading Twitter channels or Facebook feeds, the locals don't discuss it in social media.
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Right, because global warming - the direct result of non-nuclear power - is totally something local.
And even your examples make no sense. Chernobyl was unsafe by design. And Fukushima is basically as bad as it could possibly get for a modern reactor - multiple containment buildings exploding. And, last I checked, Japan is still populated and the tsunami part of that disaster wiped out entire cities, making the nuclear part a footnote. So by your standards there should be no coastal cities in Japan, the
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Global warming is the consequence of short-circuiting the Earth's carbon cycle, not non-nuclear power.
There are many solutions to the power problem that don't involve nuclear power.
Is nuclear power the easiest? Absolutely. Could one argue that we've painted ourselves into a corner where it's the only realistic way out in time? Sure.
But trying to pin global warming on "not using nuclear power" is like me blaming you for me breaking the windows of your house, because you didn't
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On the other hand, Chernobyl reach was the full of Europe, or Fukushima the full of Japan and Asian seashore.
You're talking about scaring people, not actually affecting them in a physical way. No Chernobyl's reach was not the full of Europe, and Fukushima affected only the immediate precinct, nothing more.
"OMG we registered rising radiation in the water!" They say as they eat a banana with a higher natural source of radiation than what they are bitching about.
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Can you tell me what you consider an acceptable risk? Granted, Chernobyl and Fukushima could have been worse, but how things panned out effectively, would you consider that an acceptable risk? I'm just trying to establish if there possibly is a baseline to discuss nuclear power or not.
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The way that the US Navy operates nuclear reactors.
It's not been accident free, but has been much safer. Because it's not operated on a for-profit basis.
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You need to dig deeper. The Navy reactors have a safer history for several reasons including a strict culture and U.S. military procurement rules. Commercial operations do not have the same culture, and procurement can be done by whoever has the job that day. Chernobyl was not a for-profit operation, but the culture of its operators was not strict in the respects needed for safe plant operation; the quality of the parts there is something we'll never know.
Commercial nuclear plant companies can have the righ
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines
This does not include K129, which was nuclear-armed but not nuclear powered.
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yeah, but the risk is borne by innocent bystanders.
Not shareholders.
Not board-members.
Not idiot operators who don't vet the authenticity of replacement parts (or otherwise cut corners to save their costs).
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>The problem of counterfeit parts is not unique to it either; it's a huge problem in the automotive, medical and even aviation sectors.
Those problems aren't really comparable, despite having the same root cause. When medical equipment fails you might kill one person. When a plane fails, you might kill dozens or hundreds. If a reactor fails you may easily take decades off many thousands of people's lives, as well as contaminating a huge area - the Chernobyl exclusion zone for example covers a thousand
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> But for some reason chemical plants don't get a fraction of the scrutiny that nuclear plants do
Yes, they do, as even a brief perusal of historical news reports will demonstrate.
Bhopal was the lead item on the news for weeks. About the same amount of time as Chernobyl, and longer than Fuki. Love Canal was still unfolding when I was still a kid, but I remember it leading to huge political fallout and the Superfund system. There 40,000 sites on the Superfund list in the US, and similar lists around the wo
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It is absolutely not absurd.
There where about 600,000 liquidators, the clean up crew. Far over 450,000 are dead now.
The numbers I gave in previous post, probably up to 2,000,000 dead come from Russian scientists. As the food produced in the fallout zones was mixed into clean food and distributed all over Russia/USSR at that time.
I suggest to check https://arte.fr/ [arte.fr] - search on it for Chernobyl, and hope your German or French is good enough, or with luck you find an english version of the many Chernobyl repor
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Coal has killed more people this hour than non soviet nuclear ever has.
Yes, we have been exceptionally lucky so far. That is unlikely to continue.
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Well hopefully you mean we will stop using coal all together and coal deaths drop to zero.
As for nuclear-it is incredibly safe. There is historical data on that. That trend will continue.
In practice, safer than any other power (Score:2, Insightful)
In practice though
In practice, the many nuclear reactors across the US have operated for decades without harmful failures to anyone around them or even to workers.
Three mile island, the last incident of any note, was around 40 years ago and things have gone fine since.
At even at TMI, not a single worker was hurt.
So basically 40 years says your concerns are totally unfounded, and newer reactors have even more safety features than reactors that have been running all that time without issue.
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40 years says to nuclear plant operators that they can skimp on safety gear and buy form the lowest bidder because nothing bad is going to happen. It's not like accidents don't regularly happen either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The real issue though is to get to even this level of safety is expensive. Too expensive. Also too slow, it takes so long to build new nuclear and we have left dealing with climate change so late that we can't really wait 20-30 years for new plants to come online.
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It's not like accidents don't regularly happen either.
Your own link shows the only people who have died were working with electricity, not the nuclear aspects.
Did you link to the record for traditional electric plant deaths? No? I wonder why... actually I don't wonder at all, it's because they are far worse in all regards, because safety is treated more seriously at nuclear plant.
The real issue though is to get to even this level of safety is expensive.
Oh I'm sorry, I thought we were trying to save a pla
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So basically 40 years says your concerns are totally unfounded, and newer reactors have even more safety features than reactors that have been running all that time without issue.
No, it doesn't say that at all.
If you put 1 bullet in a revolver, spin the cylinder, and pull the trigger, survive, and do this again 30 more times, and continue to live, it does not mean my concern for your life is unfounded.
Shame on any of the morons that moderated you up.
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If you take *94* bullets (the number of nuclear reactors in the US), put them all in the gun, then try to fire and reload it for forty years then either gun the gun is not real, or the bullets are not real.
That's incorrect. It's a patently false assertion. Why the fuck did you make it?
Basically in fact you are not afraid of a real thing that can happen.
This is also patently false. Are you stupid?
The problem is your analogy assumes harm, when no harm has even occurred - as started not even workers were hurt at three mile island, it was just an expensive cleanup job.
Incorrect.
The problem is that you are making the logic failure that since we have successfully avoided harm, that harm does not exist.
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We have actual data showing that the overall safety record of nuclear energy has been excellent and on balance it's saved a tremendous number of lives--
But rather than the actual data, you prefer hypotheticals based on a vague sense that nuclear systems have to be absolutely perfect...
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But rather than the actual data, you prefer hypotheticals
The data is about the past. The hypotheticals are about the future.
Nuclear safety is good if you look at the direct body count.
But it is not so clear if you look at the hundreds of billions spent to clean up Chernobyl and the trillion-dollar cost of the Fukushima meltdown. How many lives could have been saved if that money was available for better nutrition, healthcare, or cancer research?
If nuclear was a cost-effective solution to climate change, perhaps we could live with the safety and waste concerns.
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Nuclear has double the number of deaths per TWh of electrical energy generated than wind does. That's directly attributable deaths, and as you say the deaths due to nuclear being a money pit are not included.
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Renewables have saved even more lives, according to the data.
It's a false dichotomy to suggest that the choice is between nuclear and fossil fuels.
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Actually, the data is quite clear: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
And contradict what you said. Nuclear energy is the one which kills the less. Even less than wind. Hydroelectric death toll varies whether you take or not into account the Banqiao dam disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The problem with those statistics is they ignore the deaths from uranium mining. Coal is amazingly safe if we ignore the health affects from mining and emissions. When was the last time you heard of a coal power plant killing anyone?
Hydro and nuclear are similar in how fuck ups such as using sub-standard materials during manufacture can lead to loss of life and I'm pretty sure if we had as many nuclear plants as hydro plants, there'd be more nuclear disasters, whether caused by errors in manufacture, or pol
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And the problem with this factoid is that you're just making shit up, and you either don't know what you're talking about, or are convinced that bullshitting the world is to the greater good in the holy war you insist on fighting.
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Perhaps, as an example, you don't believe the Navajo are people. For example, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Nava... [duckduckgo.com] not that they were the only victims of the uranium mining industry, but perhaps you don't consider Australians to be people either, https://lead.org.au/lanv7n1/L7... [lead.org.au] I could go on but obviously you would say I'm full of shit instead of admitting your source is shit even if the basic idea is correct.
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The point here is not that no one has ever been injured by uranium mining, the problem is you're argument rests on two points:
(1) the commonly sited stats for impact of power sources on human life neglect mining fatalities.
(2) the mining fatalities for uranium are large enough they they make a change in the overall stat.
Neither of these pass the smell test.
You simply don't need to mine all that much uranium for nuclear power (because the energy density is so high). You do, on the other hand nee
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I agree with your points, I just don't like your source and also don't have much trust that nuclear plants won't at some point be built on the cheap. Some time back I looked into some of the hydro failures, and in general they were from cheeping out or politics (older ones lack of knowledge). There's always an urge from contractors to add more sand or less rebar or as this article shows, counterfeit parts to increase profits and then there are politicians who know shit about engineering pushing bad decision
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By the way, do you have any idea how long I've been hearing that line? It started back in the late-70s, and consequently we had another half century of heavy coal use compared to some place like France, which actually reacted sanely to the "energy crisis".
Oh, and by the way: any place that tries to shut down it's nukes has it's CO2 emissions get worse.
But yup False Dichotomy. We're going to get to renewables heave
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By the way, do you have any idea how long I've been hearing that line? It started back in the late-70s, and consequently we had another half century of heavy coal use compared to some place like France, which actually reacted sanely to the "energy crisis".
France did it largely by ignoring the cost and running it as a socialist project. This was not likely to gain much favour in many localities. It also did it because of reliance on burning oil for power, not even coal, partly because most of its coal deposits are in a place that is traditionally a battleground.
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We have actual data showing that the overall safety record of nuclear energy has been excellent and on balance it's saved a tremendous number of lives--
And at the same time, nobody insures nuclear because the insurances (you know, the people that actually understand risk and probabilities) would ask a premium that would make nuclear power extremely expensive. When you can have massive accidents, the "track record" is meaningless.
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This might be surprising to some, but all the radioactive material came from the ground. It's not new, even less after use.
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Actually not. That's a common misconception.
Nuclear fuel is fissile(*), but negligibly radioactive. The most common fuel, U-235 has a half-life of ~704 million years - basically it just doesn't decay fast enough to produce much radiation.
Which makes sense if you think about it - everything that went into forming the planet has been there for ~4.5 billion years - everything significantly radioactive completely decayed billions of years ago. The only significantly radioactive material still around is bypro
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Correction - in the second paragraph I say only 1.2% of uranium still exists - I should have said 1.2% of U-235. 99.3% of all uranium (today) is the more stable U-238, which has a half-life of ~4.5 billion years, and thus half of the original amount of that is still around.
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>n that environment, a "safer" reactor just means they can get away with more cost-cutting to line their own pockets. Until we figure out a way to eliminate that, I'm not at all confident that even the most theoretically "idiot proof" reactor would actually be substantially safer in practice than the reactors we have today.
It's really THIS.
And we already have a way to eliminate that. Just not in the Civilian world. As soon as you try to run a nuclear reactor as a for-profit business where the costs are
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> In practice though they're inevitably managed by cost-cutting bureaucrats who are eager to cut corners wherever possible
This is true of almost every company in almost every industry.
The moon shots required NASA to keep three people alive in space for days, with zero chance of rescue and very little failsafe. Who built it? The lowest bidders.
> Until we figure out a way to eliminate that
We will not. This is why solar panels, for all their faults (get it?) are a far better place to put our future.
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Yep, pretty much exactly my position.
Moreover, nuclear is at least 2-3x more expensive than coal or solar per MWh, even with government indemnification eliminating the expected cost of accidents from the price. Which means that you can add days worth of batteries to your solar and still come in cheaper than nuclear.
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Free hydrogen is a nightmare, and at present electrolysis is far more expensive than steam reformation of fossil fuels - at which point we may as well just burn the fuel. Ammonia looks promising as a hydrogen-storage medium - and there are some interesting options in both generating and using it that sidestep free hydrogen altogether. Plus it has the advantage that there is already a *huge* industrial demand for ammonia, so further developments in carbon-free ammonia production will help greatly reduce ca
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Free hydrogen is a nightmare, and at present electrolysis is far more expensive than steam reformation of fossil fuels - at which point we may as well just burn the fuel.
If you have excess power from a windfarm and have a process that can be scaled up and down sufficiently then hydrogen is a reasonable option. You don't have to follow every Watt, but if you know you are going to have 48 hours of at least 100MW spare, constantly, you can work with that. But being able to scale up in blocks of that sort of size for industrial scale processes is probably what you would need.
Ammonia looks promising as a hydrogen-storage medium
I could agree with that. And yes, if you could avoid free hydrogen, that would be good. You might hit mo
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I suppose for used-on-site applications hydrogen is far less of a problem than for cars and such.
Really, then it becomes just another kind of "battery" alongside Li-ion, iron-oxide, pumped hydro, etc.
Unfortunately if you burn it in a power plant, that means throwing away about 1/2 to 2/3 of the energy you stored, which gets expensive quickly if you're using it on a regular basis.
And if you're not using it on a regular basis, the capital costs can't be distributed enough to make it viable.
Really, we need a p
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I suppose for used-on-site applications hydrogen is far less of a problem than for cars and such.
Personally, I don't think it is really viable for cars or wide distribution to consumers.
Really, then it becomes just another kind of "battery" alongside Li-ion, iron-oxide, pumped hydro, etc.
Yes.
Unfortunately if you burn it in a power plant, that means throwing away about 1/2 to 2/3 of the energy you stored, which gets expensive quickly if you're using it on a regular basis.
I don't think that's too much of an issue if you are looking at TCO. E.g., batteries might be more efficient, but what if that's ten times the cost?
Really, we need a power storage system that can pay for itself doing the routine hours-to-days buffering that conventional batteries are just too expensive for, while also being able to scale cheaply to handle longer-term "emergency" storage.
We can hope for that, but we'll have to build infrastructure before that may be fully available.
Hydrogen... I don't know - the conceptual simplicity makes me want to like it, but I haven't heard a whole lot of compelling arguments that it's actually a cost-effective part of the solution.
I am only just warming up to the idea of hydrogen in the way I mentioned as a general concept on the potential storage side, but I haven't looked into the economics of the ove
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> E.g., batteries might be more efficient, but what if that's ten times the cost?
Then it *might* be worth it.
However - throwing away 2/3 of the energy when converting it back to electricity means that you need to store 3x as much energy as you want to get out. Which in turn means that you need 3x as large a charging system (a.k.a. fuel generator) and need 3x as many solar panels to charge them.
And you have to add the cost of all that extra capacity to the total cost of using fuel instead of batteries wh
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> E.g., batteries might be more efficient, but what if that's ten times the cost?
Then it *might* be worth it.
However - throwing away 2/3 of the energy when converting it back to electricity means that you need to store 3x as much energy as you want to get out. Which in turn means that you need 3x as large a charging system (a.k.a. fuel generator) and need 3x as many solar panels to charge them.
All very true, although it applies to wind farms more than solar, I'd say, as that is where you are more likely to have a mismatch of excess energy overnight after sizing wind farms to cope with typical daytime requirements. However, it's about what system is most cost-effective in the end, not how much you waste as overnight it's more-or-less free energy.
And then of course there's the inefficiency of generating fuel. A quick Google says that electrolysis of hydrogen is about 55% energy efficient - so you're losing almost half the energy you store before you even pump it into a tank. You're going to have a very hard time being competitive with an 18% round-trip efficiency.
Yes, round trip is not efficient. But as noted, if the alternatives are expensive, then it's still worth it.
Of course if you're *only* planning to use the hydrogen as an emergency backup, rather than for routine longer-term storage, that might not matter so much- but then the power company has to consider the entire cost of the hydrogen power plants as extremely expensive insurance, and are far more likely to just tell people to expect blackouts.
Again, it would come down to cost, although al
Re: (Score:2)
If you're wasting significant generating potential, you're doing it wrong.
All that excess energy during peak production is what gets stored to power you through the hours of low production over the next day. If you're not producing enough excess to last you through the lulls, then you need to build more generating capacity.
I'm not suggesting delay - we absolutely need to start getting serious... a generation or two ago, really. Rather I think that we're in such a crunch now that wasting resources on ineff
Re: (Score:2)
If you're wasting significant generating potential, you're doing it wrong.
Only if there's a better way of doing it that is cost-effective. If not, it's the only option you have.
All that excess energy during peak production is what gets stored to power you through the hours of low production over the next day. If you're not producing enough excess to last you through the lulls, then you need to build more generating capacity.
If that is cost-effective compared to storage and shifting, yes. If the lulls are rare, then you might build a bit more wind and have massive excess most of the time, in which case the inefficiencies of turning it into something you can store aren't an issue. In fact it's making best use of the investment in the main generating capacity, although with having to invest in the electrolysis, storage, etc., on
Inspections (Score:2)
Re:Inspections (Score:5, Informative)
After the part is installed it's hard to inspect it. Furthermore many parts can only be inspected by destructive testing. So you test a random sample of the parts. If the sample isn't quite so random an unethical vendor can sneak through quite a lot.
I had trouble with this sort of thing at a chemical plant I worked at. It was a hassle to say the least. I even got to see the old same x-ray submitted for multiple welds trick. To answer your question no one goes to jail, but there was a settlement.
The last case before I retired was a batch of brass valves from a normally reputable vendor. Externally they looked fine. Then they started to break. It turned out they were gun metal, not the grade of brass they should have been, and they had the coarsest grain structure I ever seen in a copper alloy. The composition being off was detectable by PMI if we had thought to look (reputable vendor, remember) but the grain structure was invisible until it was broken open. The combination of wrong alloy and huge grains made it exceptionally sensitive to stress cracking.
I was also in the Navy and if you want to read up on the loss of the Thesher and the Subsafe program go ahead. It's not a new problem. If memory serves Archimedes has a problem with an out of spec crown way way back when.
Once again this is why nimbys exist (Score:2)
I don't want the people who wouldn't even bother to winterize a power grid in Texas after multiple large-scale failures to be the only thing between me and a meltdown that leaves me evacuating a city for 10 years. Never mind that none of the people who caused Fukushima were
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It doesn't help that voters are often happy to privatize things that really should not be privatized.
In Europe it is the opposite.
I doubt that there ever was a case when a voter wanted anything to be privatized. Everything that was costed for decades significantly more than when it was a state thing. And then: suddenly it got regulated, now it is only twice as expensive than it was when it was state owned.
Re: (Score:3)
Germany runs the same reactors as the US.
And we have 50 years of data that contradicts your ridiculous statement: We've got a half century of data showing our nuclear power plants have indeed been safe-
The operators even have the audacity not to report incidents which need to be reported by law. Whistle blowers probably only reported the tip of the ice berg.
Usually roughly 2000 mandatory to report incidents per year did not get reported. We are all happy that we got rid of those time bombs.
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And you know about them, because mumble.
Seriously, it's astounding everyone hasn't tossed you guys in the trash with the anti-vaxxers. You've got the same level of absolute certainty combined with complete irrationality.
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And you know about them, because mumble.
Because of whistle blowers, dumbass.
Probably due to investigations, too.
The guys running the plants are so stupid to re_c_ord every incident in their books, but do not follow the guidelines to re_p_ort them.
How should I know how it was found out? I only read headlines regarding such topics, I'm not really interested in nuclear scandals in Germany. We simply have (had) to many of them.
You've got the same level of absolute certainty combined with complete irrationality.
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The real point of failure is the NRC beaurocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
An example from the report:
The NRC principal then told us that he inquired about this situation with NRC subject matter experts, but was told that a recent series of NRC Office of the General Counsel regulatory interpretations had allowed utilities to use license event reports for reporting the failure of parts in service. Furthermore, if an inservice failure was evaluated for potential reporting under 10 C.F.R. 50.73, it did not need to be reported under Part 21 even if it was determined the failure was not reportable under 10 C.F.R. 50.73.
The principal said the criteria and purpose of reporting under Part 21 are very different from reporting failures under 10 C.F.R. 50.73, and under the latter, the threshold for reporting is much higher as it requires safety system failures. In the case of an emergency service water pump, for example, both pumps would have to have failed to meet reporting requirements under 10 C.F.R. 50.73. Part 21 staff members told the principal that though they agreed with his concerns, they could not do anything about them, and he should no longer consider the violation. The principal said:
“They told me that they had already initiated rulemaking to restore the original intent behind Part 21. This rulemaking was subsequently terminated as part of a cost reduction effort."
TLDR: they're having difficulty properly cataloging and addressing the issue of counterfeit parts because the regulation on reporting them (Part 21) is too open to interpretation. It's taken to mean that the counterfeit must be reported only if discovered prior to use. When it's in service, it seems to fall under a different regulation (10 C.F.R. 50.73), but this regulation only requires reporting if a safety system actually fails. Lastly, the NRC was going to have a little chat about fixing the regulation, but they decided that talking about fixing it would be too expensive. Way to go, NRC!
Check the box (Score:2)
Make sure that "uranium" isn't spelled "urnaium"
um (Score:2)
It's like the voice of millions of auto mechanics cried out and were silenced.
No surprise (Score:2)
It's a common issue across many supply chains.
Asbestos free that isn't.
Stainless steel that isn't.
Guess what the common demoninator is in a lot of this ? Hints: It's China
You buy something relatively mundane from a large company like a pump etc. and you assume that their quality control processes are up to snuff. Only on paper unfortunately - that pump shaft is made from poor butter steel in China but was delivered certified to spec to the manufacturer who didn't recheck or else only tested the "samples". O