Nuclear Meltdowns and Question Marks

The recent events in Japan have got me thinking about the future of nuclear power and energy, in general. By now, you all know about the tsunami related accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the still lurking danger of a meltdown. With the Bank of Japan declaring it will provide a $220 billion liquidity boost to domestic lending institutions, this event may bring the anemic global recovery to a halt.

It seems that every time nuclear energy begins to climb back towards the spotlight as a venerable energy source a catastrophe happens. It has been over thirty years since Three Mile Island, here in the U.S. The words of a man who lived through it and is now in Japan,bring a harsh reality to the hot button issue. As valuable as nuclear power is, the potential downsides may be getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros.

This morning while filling up at the pump I was reminded, yet again, how much of a benefit we would all have from greater energy flexibility. Not that anyone would jump behind the wheel of a nuclear powered car anytime soon, but nuclear power is already here and does have the ability to become a bigger player in the industry. Unfortunately, the guiding light of the nuclear industry still remains the notion that engineers can build enough redundancy into safety systems to overcome any threat. This has not proven to be the case in practice over time.

I am beginning to question the validity of nuclear power going forward. Not so much because of the once-a-decade on average cataclysm. More so due to the fact that lingering fears around the containment of nuclear power seem to be an eternal brake pedal on its potential proliferation path. I have to admit that Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are so far in my rearview that the events of the past few days have snapped me back into reality and perhaps even...into a bit of panic.

I have never been a clean energy bible thumper. I have accepted the necessary dominance of coal and oil over our daily energetic requirements. Still as time goes by, even my neanderthal attitude is shifting towards a desire to see cleaner and more abundant energy sources in everyday use.

This brings up the (perhaps paradoxical) notion that we should abandon nuclear energy proliferation as a whole. After all, you can be certain that the coal and oil lobbies will take advantage of this situation to push their own agendas. With natural gas facing some difficulties from regulators nationwide, as well...I fear that a time of rising energy prices is not the best time to retrench. That is...for those of us not directly associated with big coal and big oil.

I am cognizant that much of what I am writing here and pondering recently is an emotional reaction. I will cool out in a few days when the next media typhoon grabs my attention and carries it off to distant lands. But for now, I'd like to have an open discussion on the future of energy and especially nuclear power.

How have the events in Japan redefined your views of the energy world? Obviously, from the finance perspective energy falls under the cloud of commodities. With a rapidly growing and developing world, however, it is more than rational to argue that energy will be the key to the 21st century. Should nuclear energy be omitted from that future? If not, how can make sure it is reliable in times of crisis? If you can see a better, smarter energy path than the one we are currently on...

Please share.

 

yeah I also read that blog and it seems to make a lot of sense. however nobody can know the excact situation in reactors 1, 2 and 3 right now. and those core catchers are not in place so the material might actually melt through into the ground at some, hopefully unlikely, point.

over here they all start the nuclear energy debate all over again which seems a political move. however a lot of nuclear powerplants have old security standards and could impose a great amount of danger to their environments. it might sense to proof systems and alter security standards.

do i know enough about nuclear power and how a powerplant works to make an informed statement about their current state of operations? most likely not.

"too good to be true" See my WSO Blog
 
Best Response

The situation is definitely as bad as or worse than Three Mile Island. We've lost the ability to cool the reactor, it appears. In industry, this is called a loss of coolant accident (LOCA).

In some ways, the silver lining in this is that for the past 30 years, enviros have claimed that TMI would have wiped out the entire Northeast had we not gotten it under control. We now get to see if those fears are overblown.

I figure there's a 90% chance people will live within three miles of the reactor in ten years. The fuel rods will probably stay within the containment, and even then, if they fall through the floor of the containment, they will stay in one (albeit molten) place deep underground rather than getting vaporized like Chernobyl.

That said, the short funds will be coming on CNBC tonight trying to scare folks out of their positions. They will be speaking about water-soluble fission products seeping into the ocean and irradiating surfers in Australia. They will be talking about the death of beach tourism for the next 60 years with the Cesium-137 floating around in the water. They will be talking about holding miners and engineering firms financially accountable for the severe global environmental damage that's coming and giving millions of people cancer.

It's all BS. Perhaps moreso than with the gulf oil spill. There's less radioactive Cesium in the reactor than was created with Tsar Bomba, a Russian nuclear test back in the '60s. But it will make the shorts a lot of money as frantic investors pull out of East Asian/Oceanian tourism and the nuclear industry. I suggest everyone turn off CNBC for the next week and stay in touch with a couple nuclear engineering profs at Penn State or Va. Tech. And I think what the shorts are going to try and pull here is, yet again, terribly unethical.

 

Nuclear Reactors are safe.

On the other hand, building a dozen of nuclear reactors right on the intersection of 4 tectonic plates, including 2 of the largest and most active ones, is batshit insane.

Geologists have been expecting what's happening right now in Japan for decades. We all are dead in the long-run, but Japan will be the first to go due to its geographical location relative to tectonic plates.

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At the end of the day, the US still needs to find a viable alternative energy source in this country aside from crude oil.

Nuclear power (minus California) is still the best option available due to its low carbon emissions and safety (despite what our media may lead you to believe otherwise)

Solar energy is still not viable on a wide scale and neither is wind power.

Aside from the whole issue of energy production, I imagine we're going to enter into a period where we see more nuclear proliferation which will have an effect on uranium prices worldwide. (Just look at countries like North Korea and Iran and see how much leverage they gain over the rest of the international community versus other countries who play nice and abide by all the nuclear non proliferation treaties)

 

Received this from our Nuclear Chief, formatting sucks because of PDF. Will attach full file if people want.

American Nuclear Society Backgrounder: Japanese Earthquake/Tsunami; Problems with Nuclear Reactors 3/12/2011 5:22 PM EST To begin, a sense of perspective is needed… right now, the Japanese earthquake/tsunami is clearly a catastrophe; the situation at impacted nuclear reactors is, in the words of IAEA, an "Accident with Local Consequences." The Japanese earthquake and tsunami are natural catastrophes of historic proportions. The death toll is likely to be in the thousands. While the information is still not complete at this time, the tragic loss of life and destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami will likely dwarf the damage caused by the problems associated with the impacted Japanese nuclear plants. What happened? Recognizing that information is still not complete due to the destruction of the communication infrastructure, producing reports that are conflicting, here is our best understanding of the sequence of events at the Fukushima I‐1 power station.  The plant was immediately shut down (scrammed) when the earthquake first hit. The automatic power system worked.  All external power to the station was lost when the sea water swept away the power lines.  Diesel generators started to provide backup electrical power to the plant’s backup cooling system. The backup worked.  The diesel generators ceased functioning after approximately one hour due to tsunami induced damage, reportedly to their fuel supply.  An Isolation condenser was used to remove the decay heat from the shutdown reactor.  Apparently the plant then experienced a small loss of coolant from the reactor.  Reactor Core Isolation Cooling (RCIC) pumps, which operate on steam from the reactor, were used to replace reactor core water inventory, however, the battery‐supplied control valves lost DC power after the prolonged use.  DC power from batteries was consumed after approximately 8 hours.  At that point, the plant experienced a complete blackout (no electric power at all).  Hours passed as primary water inventory was lost and core degradation occurred (through some combination of zirconium oxidation and clad failure).  Portable diesel generators were delivered to the plant site.  AC power was restored allowing for a different backup pumping system to replace inventory in reactor pressure vessel (RPV).  Pressure in the containment drywell rose as wetwell became hotter.  The Drywell containment was vented to outside reactor building which surrounds the containment.  Hydrogen produced from zirconium oxidation was vented from the containment into the reactor building.  Hydrogen in reactor building exploded causing it to collapse around the containment.  The containment around the reactor and RPV were reported to be intact.  The decision was made to inject seawater into the RPV to continue to the cooling process, another backup system that was designed into the plant from inception.  Radioactivity releases from operator initiated venting appear to be decreasing. Can it happen here in the US?  While there are risks associated with operating nuclear plants and other industrial facilities, the chances of an adverse event similar to what happened in Japan occurring in the US is small.  Since September 11, 2001, additional safeguards and training have been put in place at US nuclear reactors which allow plant operators to cool the reactor core during an extended power outage and/or failure of backup generators – “blackout conditions.” Is a nuclear reactor "meltdown" a catastrophic event?  Not necessarily. Nuclear reactors are built with redundant safety systems. Even if the fuel in the reactor melts, the reactor's containment systems are designed to prevent the spread of radioactivity into the environment. Should an event like this occur, containing the radioactive materials could actually be considered a "success" given the scale of this natural disaster that had not been considered in the original design. The nuclear power industry will learn from this event, and redesign our facilities as needed to make them safer in the future. What is the ANS doing? ANS has reached out to The Atomic Energy Society of Japan (AESJ) to offer technical assistance. ANS has established an incident communications response team. This team has compiling relevant news reports and other publicly available information on the ANS blog, which can be found at ansnuclearcafe.org. The team is also fielding media inquiries and providing reporters with background information and technical perspective as the events unfold. Finally, the ANS is collecting information from publicly available sources, our sources in government agencies, and our sources on the ground in Japan, to better understand the extent and impact of the incident.

 

Bottom line, though, is that this boiling water reactor is the same overall design used in 40% of US nuclear reactors.

Hell yes, if the US gets an unprecedented 9.0 magnitude earthquake, anything is possible. But that will be the least of our concerns.

Japan is demonstrating the worst-case situation for one of our nuclear reactors- a once in 1000 years in the continental US earthquake. And so far it has been proving that the design can stand up to even that. America needs to give up its OCD over radiation. We get 300 millirems a year naturally.

 
Akusokuzan:
Illini,

And the other is PWR, the only difference can lie in whether it is a passive design or not.

True, but we don't have any Gen III reactors with passive design in the US. The last reactor to come online here was South Texas in 1989, I believe. It was still a Gen II that was designed back in the 1970s but took forever to get approved and built.

Bottom line is that there are significant design flaws in the Gen II plants. One of the big ones that we saw in TMI that most people forgot was the potential for a hydrogen explosion in the secondary containment. Engineers don't like to talk about design weaknesses very much, but they do exist in LWRs. The good news is that with a combined coolant-moderator, you at least eliminate some of the doomsday scenarios- there's no possibility of a huge steam explosion between the fuel rods like we saw at Chernobyl.

Some other problems that I could see here is that they seem to be having some significant challenges pumping in seawater with the boron. We're protected from the U-235/Pu-239 reachieving criticality by Xenon poisoning for a ~48-72 hour period after the reaction shuts down, but if you have a whole bunch of fuel rods melted and sitting at the bottom of the containment and there's uncertainty about the boron concentrations in the reactor, that's cause for some concern. Good news, again, is that you can't have a nuclear reaction with slow neutrons without a water moderator, and presumably, that water is also carrying boron wherever it is.

Additionally, we are going to have to keep cooling the reactor significantly for months as the fission products stop generating heat. As just a plain old regular engineer who took an intro nuclear engineering course, I don't know all of the details on the decay heat profile for MOX fuel, but there's a possibility where we get a BP oil spill like situation that drags on for months where every few days they need to vent more radioactive steam with more water-soluble fission products bubbling out with it.

Not as bad as Chernobyl, but perhaps an order of magnitude or two worse than Windscale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire#The_aftermath

In any case, this accident should hopefully resolve the debate about the worst-case situation for western Light Water Reactors. Not sure we can imagine a worse situation than a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, 21-foot Tsunami, and destruction of the nation's infrastructure all in the same hour.

 
IlliniProgrammer:
Akusokuzan:
Illini,

And the other is PWR, the only difference can lie in whether it is a passive design or not.

True, but we don't have any Gen III reactors with passive design in the US. The last reactor to come online here was South Texas in 1989, I believe. It was still a Gen II that was designed back in the 1970s but took forever to get approved and built.

Bottom line is that there are significant design flaws in the Gen II plants. One of the big ones that we saw in TMI that most people forgot was the potential for a hydrogen explosion in the secondary containment. Engineers don't like to talk about design weaknesses very much, but they do exist in LWRs. The good news is that with a combined coolant-moderator, you at least eliminate some of the doomsday scenarios- there's no possibility of a huge steam explosion between the fuel rods like we saw at Chernobyl.

Some other problems that I could see here is that they seem to be having some significant challenges pumping in seawater with the boron. We're protected from the U-235/Pu-239 reachieving criticality by Xenon poisoning for a ~48-72 hour period after the reaction shuts down, but if you have a whole bunch of fuel rods melted and sitting at the bottom of the containment and there's uncertainty about the boron concentrations in the reactor, that's cause for some concern. Good news, again, is that you can't have a nuclear reaction with slow neutrons without a water moderator, and presumably, that water is also carrying boron wherever it is.

Additionally, we are going to have to keep cooling the reactor significantly for months as the fission products stop generating heat. As just a plain old regular engineer who took an intro nuclear engineering course, I don't know all of the details on the decay heat profile for MOX fuel, but there's a possibility where we get a BP oil spill like situation that drags on for months where every few days they need to vent more radioactive steam with more water-soluble fission products bubbling out with it.

Not as bad as Chernobyl, but perhaps an order of magnitude or two worse than Windscale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire#The_aftermath

In any case, this accident should hopefully resolve the debate about the worst-case situation for western Light Water Reactors. Not sure we can imagine a worse situation than a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, 21-foot Tsunami, and destruction of the nation's infrastructure all in the same hour.

I agree, but in the case of Japan, there was a significant problem with their diesel back up caused by the tsunami. Their redundant system, can only last for 8 hours, failed as designed and were left for multiple hours without power and ways to cool the reactor. It took them significant time to provide a back up diesel generator, which in my opinion would not be the case here in the US because of our infrastructure and our topography being a larger landmass.

I would also like to see their contingency plan in terms of black out conditions, and what mitigation techniques were placed in the past decade. Majority of the nuclear plants here in the US, installed additional mechanism to cool the reactor core during an extending power outage, like what was seen in Japan.

In fact, I believe like TMI this is another "success" showing the ingenuity and design abilities to withstand a natural disaster like this, far and above the original design.

 

Nuclear power in the USA is the same sort of boon-doggle for the Right that solar/wind are for the Left.

It is HEAVILY subsidized- directly and indirectly.

********************************* “The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.” - Oscar Wilde
 

fears are way overblown, it will not be able to melt through the reactor.

nuclear energy is safe, building nuclear power plants in one of the most earthquake prone regions of the world is the issue, not nuclear energy

 
leveredarb:
fears are way overblown, it will not be able to melt through the reactor.

nuclear energy is safe, building nuclear power plants in one of the most earthquake prone regions of the world is the issue, not nuclear energy

I'm not ruling it out at this point. I think the odds of a below-ground breach of containment are at least 10-20%.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are two containments. They may very well say that the fuel has melted through the bottom of the steel reactor vessel, but the real barrier is the secondary concrete containment.

 

I don't think Nuclear should be put off the table because of what happened in Japan. It was a earthquake, a damn 8.9 earthquake. It is not simple stuff. Anything could have happened.

As someone said earlier, Japan needs to rethink its energy alternatives because a nuclear plant where earthquakes are too frequent, is not safe.

The US situation is more an acceptance that the government or the private industry cannot regulate something so sensitive as nuclear. If there is an error, a lot of lives would lost unnecessarily. Nuclear is not something you can have one mistake and have a second chance like BP has right now.

 

It seems to me that, baring human error, a natural disaster such as an earth quake / tornado are the biggest threats to nuclear reactors. Running with this very basic assumption, it would seem that a nuke would be the best alternative to a coal plant to provide base-load energy to regions that are off the edges of tectonic plates or regions that are prone to tornadoes. If I am understanding our energy situation right, the fundamental problem is that none of the Clean Energy solutions currently on the table (i.e. solar, wind, etc...), barring nuclear energy, are capable of providing our base-load energy needs.

Am I on point here or am I missing the mark?

I'm on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen.
 

Just a thought... but why has the nuclear plant been getting so much attention from the press? xhundred or xthousand people have died from the earthquake/tsunami itself so why has the press concentrated its coverage on what appears to be a relatively minor effect of the earthquake itself?

 

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