Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
bbc.com
bbc.com
- jobs
- energy supply
why is it that when a safety limit has been established and later on reached, that (seemingly) uninformed people start walling by screaming 'but the jobs' and 'but the power'. None of those should be more important than a reactor problem you'd think.
On the other hand, if there is inside information describing the impact of such cracks as irrelevant to safety and operation, then it would be fine (but then you wouldn't have to cry for jobs and energy).
Jobs should not be a reason to not take into account safety or evolution. As soon as you do that, everything stagnates.
"In October 2014 a new kind of crack in the graphite moderator bricks was found at the Hunterston B reactor. This keyway root crack has been previously theorized but not observed. The existence of this type of crack does not immediately affect the safety of a reactor – however if the number of cracks exceed a threshold the reactor would be decommissioned, as the cracks cannot be repaired."
Hunterston B has also been fitted with "super-articulated" control rods that are designed to be insertable even if the graphite channels are destabilised/distorted.
This is the issue currently. The cracking in reactor 3 has progressed more rapidly than modelled, and has exceeded the threshold of 350 cracks. EDF are arguing that the reactor can be safely operated with more cracks, and want the threshold increased to 700.
If, in real life, it turns out that it takes a year for a crack to grow from 1mm to 2mm, the model used can be improved. Result _could_ be that the “take out of commission now” point gets moved to 3mm.
They also may remove some stuff with 2mm cracks and test it for strength, and learn more about how the stuff behaves after being irradiated for decades. That, too, can change (in either direction) the life expectancy of the reactor.
So at this point in time I would be skeptical of new experiments and model updates performed by the operator and approved by the regulator. IMHO: Don't approve the model change, do some lab experiments / examine more empirical evidence over time and then possibly change the model for a _future_ reactor.
Also, would you be in favor of _not_ changing the model for current reactors if updated models predict a shorter life time? If you think the model should be updated in those cases, that introduces bias. It also could mean reactor owners would stop making measurements, and that, in turn, would mean we would learn less about making safer reactors.
Particularly bizarre in a country like the United Kingdom which is operating at record levels of employment.
The statistics are based on a Labour Force Survey which counts anyone who works for one hour a week - or more - as employed. And also anyone who labels themselves as self-employed, irrespective of hours worked.
This is explicitly official policy, and not exaggeration or hyperbole.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
So, in the UK, if you're on unemployment benefit (UB) you're permitted to work up to 15 hours a week. But that wage is deducted from your UB. That work counts towards "employment" as far as the current UK stats are concerned. It's a lie and the UK government should own up to this....but statistics, damn statistics make them look good depending on how you cut things.
These definitions aren't just made up to make the UK look good, they're international definitions of employment.
Depends on your classification of "employment". For the last 30 years the UK government DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) has being classifying all sorts of things as "employment" including folks who work on zero hour contracts, which aren't full employment. Governments get to classify all sorts of things as "record levels" of employment, meanwhile these "employed families" are still having to rely on foodbanks to feed themselves.
Take this specific case; stay the reactor's systems fail (all of them including the quadruple redundancies), those jobs and energy generators are kind-of irrelevant if you are dead...
You do see what the point is, right?
This is ranging on hyperbole. Even in the case of a meltdown the result wouldn't be another Chernobyl. The latter was an unshielded reactor. Literally the soviets didn't bother putting a concrete condom on their reactors, because that would be too expensive. We've already experienced meltdowns in properly built reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
> Thus, there seems to be a barrier less in AGR compared with LWR reactors. In AGR's the pressure vessel and containment is one unit, but the vessel contains the total primary circuit.The main reason for this difference is the single phase CO2 coolant used in AGR compared with the H2O coolant in LWR. CO2 cannot undergo suddenly phase change as a result of an unexpected rise in temperature or pressure, i. c. it cannot flash as water. It means that there can be no sudden discontinuity of cooling under fault conditions, and changes in flows, temperatures and pressures progress rather slow.
On the third day following the accident, a hydrogen bubble was discovered in the dome of the pressure vessel, and became the focus of concern. A hydrogen explosion might not only breach the pressure vessel, but, depending on its magnitude, might compromise the integrity of the containment vessel leading to large-scale release of radioactive material.
Why is it considered luck? For it to be luck wouldn't we have to show that there was some way in which the explosion breaching the containment was possible and should've occurred, but due to chance didn't. (Seems like it could've been modeled but I couldn't find anything on that.)
> From 30 March through 1 April operators removed this hydrogen gas "bubble" by periodically opening the vent valve on the reactor cooling system pressuriser. For a time, regulatory (NRC) officials believed the hydrogen bubble could explode, though such an explosion was never possible since there was not enough oxygen in the system. [1]
> Our main conclusions were the following: (1) Most of the initial hydrogen in the bubble was produced by the reaction of the Zircalloy cladding with the super-heated water. (2) During the first 16 hr after shutdown, when boiling of the primary coolant water took place, in the worst case stoichiometric amounts of hydrogen and oxygen could have been produced by radiolysis, leading to a maximum amount of oxygen in the bubble, of 0.7% of the hydrogen, which is well below the explosion limit. (3) After this 16 hr period, when boiling had totally ceased, no further oxygen could have been produced by radiolysis of the primary cooling water. On the contrary, oxygen was recombined with hydrogen due to radiolysis at such a rate that the oxygen in the water was completely removed in less than five minutes. The subsequent rate of removal of oxygen from the bubble by dissolution and radiolysis depended essentially on the rate of dissolution. [2]
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0146572483...
The fact that the engineers were afraid it was going to blow up shows that the entire scenario had not been forseen. Hence, luck.
And research papers dispute the risk posed by said bubble: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0146572483...
The timing sometimes is just so perfect
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43988385
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/06/cracks-n...
More like 300 years (10 Cs137 and Sr99 half lives) but otherwise you're right.
I'm guessing Pu-239 was intended as 1) an extra "0" digit is the more likely typo, and 2) Pu-239 is (AFAIU) the principal Plutonium byproduct of typical Uranium fission reactors.
Most likely between 900 and 1200 years.
It's not like modern nuclear reactors can only fail catastrophically, much less a predictable failure case that engineers are actively monitoring to ensure the safe operation of said reactor.
What's terrifying are the failure cases that the engineers aren't aware of -- the unknown unknowns -- which are probably significantly fewer than the cases they are aware of and are monitoring.
This is my biggest problem with the nuclear industry. To begin with much of the design and operations of nuclear power stations were classed as state secrets, today they're classed as commercial secrets. Until the full operational characteristics of these generating stations are properly revealed we just can't trust nuclear power.
And if it depended on those people the reactor would keep running until it exploded. It's almost as if democracy was stupid and ineffective.
Edit: I understand the feeling of helplessness, but saying that democracy doesn't work is dangerous as this feeling of apathy spreads and people stop participating in the system and we lose many of the more reasonable voters and then less savory candidates get elected and make things even worse and more apathy spreads and so forth. It becomes a vicious cycle and self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm very guilty myself, but have vowed to start participating more in elections and local politics.
Yeah, next time you exceed the speed limit, just ask the police officer for permission to double the fun...
No seriously, what the article is missing, is why there was a limit of 350. Was it just made up at some point to correlate with the expected lifetime? What real, increased risk is involved when operating up to 700 cracks?
Just telling they would have to get the power elsewhere and jobs would be at risk, is obvious and just one side of the medal. If there is no additional risk involved, there is no reason to condemn asking to raise the limit.
This is a rather weak analogy - I don't know where you live, but where I live driving the speed limit is not the norm and ironically driving against the common speed of traffic is more dangerous. i.e. You are safer exceeding the speed limit if that is with the flow of traffic than you are driving the speed limit when the flow is faster.
> No seriously, what the article is missing, is why there was a limit of 350. Was it just made up at some point to correlate with the expected lifetime? What real, increased risk is involved when operating up to 700 cracks?
To keep with the same analogy - what you are missing is that speed limits tend to be set assuming the _worst case_ driver, someone that really should not be on the road in the first place. i.e. the limit is not designed for the average driver/car but for the worst. i.e. they are _extremely_ conservative.
> Just telling they would have to get the power elsewhere and jobs would be at risk, is obvious and just one side of the medal. If there is no additional risk involved, there is no reason to condemn asking to raise the limit.
I think the challenge here is to quantify the 'risk' in full, which has to include where the power would come from as an alternative. The present situation is that the capacity is mostly replaced with natural gas, a net CO2 emission loss.
This is usually not the case in Europe. If someone doesn't belong on the road, they normally don't pass the exam, but:
* some countries have problems with bribes, I've heard of some egregious cases.
* some countries have a reckless driving culture, for instance traffic in Italy is quite crazy, they don't seem to care at all about the rules.
Sometimes the road does allow one to go faster, but speed limits are enforced through fines and I think in most EU countries you lose your license if you go 30 kmph over the speed limit.
> I think in most EU countries you lose your license if you go 30 kmph over the speed limit
It's also a significant penalty in the US, this has no impact on the reality of the speeds that exist in reality, nor the safety.
But yes, in my experience if you happen to be driving at the speed limit(or god forbid - below!) You will have people driving 50cm behind you and overtaking dangerously while beeping.
Are you? I've lived in Texas and Oregon, spent a lot of time in Florida and Arizona.
My gut feel is that the places where people drive aggressively and past the speed limit are less safe and the data seems to back that.
https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/local_rural/rural_fatal.cfm
I've never felt unsafe by driving the speed limit where others want to go faster in my life, except perhaps by narcissists losing their mind about having to wait a moment to pass.
Designed with slide rules and drafting tables.
An unbelievable accomplishment!
But this reactor uses tons of CO2 as coolant! /s
This is an incredibly disingenuous comparison. Nuclear waste is not even remotely as much of a problem as CO2 emissions. Nuclear waste can be encased in concrete and buried in remote areas. There are also several areas already irradiated by nuclear bomb testing, so putting the waste there is moot (This applies to the Yucca Mountain facility). The hypothetical situations in which nuclear waste could result in human contamination are borderline absurd. Sure, if society collapses and all records of these waste locations are lost, and if some future civilization decides to dig a mile deep in a remote area with no natural resources, and if they decide to crack open these concrete caskets because all knowledge of 21st Century languages are lost so they can't read the warnings, and if they manage to do all this without knowledge of radiation then humans might get contaminated.
By comparison, CO2 emissions get pumped straight into the atmosphere
> It is indeed a significant accomplishment. Let's keep it that way by ceasing operation on time and not risk tarring the accomplishment with a reactor failure.
Yeah, and then turn around and build more coal and gas plants because the other alternatives cannot provide consistent power at the same price point. This is what happened in Germany and Japan. Anti-nuclear runs contrary to the principles of clean energy. In fact some estimates indicate that the coal plants built in Japan following the reactor closures after the Fukishima Daichi plant failure will actually end up emitting more radiation than the incident itself.
[Its] impact is 34 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period
https://unfccc.int/news/new-methane-signs-underline-urgency-...
2. Nuclear waste is not as trivial as you make it sound, especially if you consider the length of time it has to be managed.
However, even present-day renewable technology can apparently provide 80% of project US energy demand of 2050: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/can-the-world-ru... ; and expected to provide 70% of Denmark's demand by next year already (same article) - despite the non-uniform output of Solar and of Wind. And technology marches on.
3. If countries link up their grids, there would be some mitigation of the non-uniformity of Solar and Wind output.
4. Energy storage technology.
5. CO_2 is a big issue. But non-renewable energy sources which run the risk of causing nuclear holocausts - while not entirely out of the question should be considered only to the extent renewable sources cannot be exploited instead.
6. IIANM One can also significantly decrease the amount of CO_2 emissions from fossil-fuel-fired plants through different process technology. It's not clear to me that between that and construction of nuclear plants, the latter wins out (although I don't have a strong opinion on the matter).
And the gasoline used to run the mining vehicles and transport vehicles are already counted in other carbon emission categories - namely transportation. So if you included them in the power generation emissions estimate you're likely double counting them.
As you say, vegan vs carnivore (and red vs other meats) would be a factor just as whether the electric power comes from renewable or fossil power.
And to get super complicated you could then weigh the cost of healthcare if the rider is using less physical exertion.
For nuclear, CO2 emitted by the concrete should obviously be counted. But uranium mining?
By contrast, how do you reduce the CO2 output of coal? Do the same thing and replace the electricity the plant generates with nuclear and solar?
How do atomic energy organizations succeed in doing this?
From my knowledge: they mostly don't. For example, in France, we have the Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (Nuclear Safety Authority, ASN) which is supposed to be an independent and transparent authority on nuclear safety and information.
However: it has been criticized many times since its inception in 2006 regarding conflicts of interest[1][2], and lacks in terms of safety issues reporting[3].
I'm glad my country invested so much into nuclear energies, I still believe it's our best chance at tackling the upcoming crisis, but we should not let nuclear in the hands of private interests. Governments _have_ to apply a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to safety, regulation, and transparency, regardless of how expensive and inconvenient it is.
We're not doing enough, in France[4], when it comes to safety, from within or without. On top of that: it's giving fuel to anti-nuclear militantism.
[1] http://www.observatoire-du-nucleaire.org/spip.php?article281 [2] https://www.cairn.info/revue-revue-juridique-de-l-environnem... [3] http://mai68.org/spip2/spip.php?article1347 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STjGOGkMz4k
Only in combination with some kind of carbon tax, otherwise you make nuclear too expensive compared to coal or natural gas whose costs are externalized and harder to quantify than nuclear regulatory compliance.
- in 2016, 72% of the energy generation in France was nuclear, Germany never came close to that percentage[2], therefore making it easier to transition away from it.
- France invested a lot into nuclear energy and no government since then would dare to throw such a huge industry (2500 companies, 222 000 jobs) into the trash. I don't think it was the case with other European countries.
There's a lot of pride surrounding our history of nuclear research (since Pierre and Marie Curie), and politicians are often accused by militants of falling for the sunken-cost fallacy or to have a misplaced pride into the industry ("En France on n'a pas de pétrole mais on a des idées" - "In France, we don't have oil, but we sure have ideas").
Ultimately: the percentage of nuclear-based energy in France should go down to 50% by 2025, I just hope we'll manage to reduce our carbon monoxide emissions as well, Germany gave up on nuclear and they're failing at that so far.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Franc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#/medi...
Germany all but killed off an industry of 80000 jobs (at the time) in the blink of an eye: photovoltaics.
One other main difference is that having your own nuclear industry is also important for countries aiming for (or having) nuclear deterrence power, like France (and unlike Germany which merely hosts US nukes).
Solar panel production in Germany mostly died because it couldn't be price competitive with those from China.
Installations went down due to reduced subsidies, apparently as an reaction to more than expected solar being installed [0]. I have a hard time calling that "killing of an industry".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
"So we kickstarted an industry that created 80000 jobs by subsidizing it, and now we noticed that subsidies actually cost money, so let's turn off the faucet" is what I call a killing.
One of the issues in German politics is that politicians are easily scared of their own courage, instead of doubling down on it (and, in this case, help drive costs down for Germany-made PV through more industrialized and scaled-up production, thereby solving the subsidy problem while propping up an industry instead of leaving it for dead).
It's especially annoying to me because one of the "arguments" in favor of keeping coal alive is that there are 20000 jobs to protect in that industry (and for much more money than it would cost to give those 20000 folks their wage + social security/insurance, no questions asked, until their retirement age, which makes me think that's all just a ruse).
The Green movement does not seem strong in France, but I'm not sure why.
I have a theory. The French people like the American people put a great deal of value on liberty. Most of the purposed changes made by green activists involve ratcheting up state control the citizen's daily life and as a result are unpopular.
Hence the immense importance there of Massive Things Backed By Long-Term Plans, natural fruit of any jacobinist gov.
IMHO this lead to massive failures, as those Massive Things are less and less adequate in a fast-paced world.
Sorry for impinging in your "personal liberty" to place me at risk of a nuclear holocaust. Must be my authoritarian statist tendencies.
For more background
The French are also pragmatic and have seen the failure of the German green energy model, why on earth would they want to do that?
This situation has been developing slowly for last decade though, and the reactor just got re-licensed.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/concre...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770562
'normalization of deviance'.
That was one of the best posts in a long time.
Why can't they be fixed or replaced?
Though for this case, factoring in the lighting, I'd not panic, but equally mindful that cracks are part and parcel in the world of reinforced concrete, I'm not so sure about the material in use here. It's not what you want to be seeing in such use. Equally to combat cracks in any material, you drill small holes either end of the crack to stop it growing.
So for me, why is that not being done? After all, hairline crack today, receding hairline tomorrow possibilities.
After all, would they let an aircraft take off with a known hairline crack? That's one way to put some perspective upon this.
It doesn't seem to me that that many prospective nuclear safety concerns involve a radiation leak ahead of time. Your heuristic seems better calibrated to detecting leaks that exist now, rather than flaws or limitations in systems that are meant to prevent future leaks.
Thing is about cracks, they tend to grow, hence questioning how they are handled as currently it seems a case of make a note, move along, nothing to see here approach strikes again.
Regarding the bit at the end about the alternative being gas or coal, they could just build more wind, it's cheaper than any of the other options if building new and competitive with the cost of fuel alone for existing fossil plants.
[Slightly edited.]
If we have a crack in our solar panels, it ain't going to make the BBC news site.
> If we have a crack in our solar panels, it ain't going to make the BBC news site.
Actually cracking solar panels could be a rather large problem. e.g. Cadmium Telluride cells are gaining in popularity, if a tornado, large hail storm, or similar natural event hits a power plant built with such cells it could result in non-trivial release into the environment.
The difference is that micro services don't all stop working at the same time when the sun goes down and the air is calm.
Solar is great for running air conditioners. It generates when the demand is highest. But you still need something reliable to generate baseload. They're complementary, not replacements for each other.
> If we have a crack in our solar panels, it ain't going to make the BBC news site.
It won't, but maybe it should. Solar panels are full of toxic substances. As long as they're covered in glass and isolated from the environment that's no big deal, but break the glass and ignore it and you're leeching heavy metals and toxic chemicals into the environment.
Things done competently are good, things done incompetently are bad. Nuclear is not different, solar is not different.
About cracks in solar panels - those are:
1. Mostly localized (i.e. not a dust storm and such)
2. Doesn't produce a chain reaction - if a few panels are beginning to crack, you would isolate them and inspect the rest. Even if they've completely cracked it's not that bad.
"Excess solar energy" isn't really a thing. Due to the economics, there is no reason to even look at widespread storage until we already have enough solar capacity to satisfy the differential between daytime and nighttime demand. But just doing that is going to consume 100% of the available panel manufacturing capacity for at least a decade.
To cover baseload as well isn't just a question of storage. First you would need to more than triple that amount of solar generating capacity. You'd need enough to satisfy not just the differential between the baseload and peak but the entire peak demand -- while charging the energy storage for nighttime use on top of that, including the conversion losses in both directions.
Only then do you add the cost of storage, which currently isn't economical. It may become so in the future, or it may not, but that's ten or twenty years in any event before we can even start constructing it, much less finish. And there is a non-trivial chance that economical storage technology never materializes.
> About cracks in solar panels - those are:
> 1. Mostly localized (i.e. not a dust storm and such)
Not really. In many cases it is a dust storm, or hail, or a tornado or hurricane or some other weather event.
In other cases it's just time. You have a million panels and every year some percentage of them get cracked by wildlife or tree branches or weather or rogue humans. The damage accumulates.
This is actually a significant issue for solar farms when they reach end of life. What happens then? Just abandoning them in situ would be a serious environmental problem, but the incentive to file for bankruptcy and do exactly that would exist once enough of them are damaged that the cleanup cost exceeds the value of the remaining panels.
> 2. Doesn't produce a chain reaction - if a few panels are beginning to crack, you would isolate them and inspect the rest. Even if they've completely cracked it's not that bad.
It's potentially worse than that, because solar installations tend to be more distributed and have less oversight, so instead of one big problem you have a million cumulative little problems. Which is actually harder to solve because a million little leaks are harder to plug than one big one, and you're adding coordination and distribution problems on top of the engineering problems.
Solar is like microkernels: nice on paper but lacks the power for anything serious.