Here's some context for what was happening in 1985, from the eia:
>"As a consequence of the identification of a large number of deficiencies shortly before the WBN Unit 1 license was expected to be issued, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent a letter to TVA [...]. In response to this letter, TVA developed a Nuclear Performance Plan (NPP) to address corporate and site-specific issues, establishing programs to address a wide variety of material, design, and programmatic deficiencies. WBN Unit 2 construction was suspended at about that time, with major structures in place and equipment such as reactor coolant system piping installed."
And while most of the documentation was very terse and spoke more about specific regulatory requirements that I don't understand, this is pretty interesting:
(From the nrc.gov)
>"The NRC staff reviewed TVA’s refurbishment program and found the following: (1) TVA was refurbishing or replacing most active components and instruments; (2) TVA had determined the potential degradation mechanism for each category of components, along with any contributing environmental factors; (3) the acceptance criteria were developed from the licensing basis, design specifications, and vendor specifications; (4) the proposed inspections and testing included in the program could be expected to identify degradation; and (5) refurbishment activities would be in accordance with applicable vendor and design specifications or requirements."
That sounds like a massive, massive amount of work. It explains why it took longer even if the reactor was apparently 60% completed.
(From the eia) :
>"That time, a study found Unit 2 to be effectively 60% complete with $1.7 billion invested. The study said the plant could be finished in five years at an additional cost of $2.5 billion"
One of the bullets on the box is that the AP1000 uses a fairly standardized design, unlike many prior designs which were mostly a patchwork of one-off designs. The AP1000 still being "in production" means parts are available.
I was wondering how that was powered.
https://www.quora.com/Is-the-TVA-in-Loki-somehow-related-to-...
I have no idea, but I would assume most parts are custom machined to spec. If that's true, you'd just need to find machine shops capable of making the parts.
You call up your local nuclear reactor spare parts vendor and place an order. Then they figure out how to either source the part or manufacture it or substitute it.
No, really. Most places that sell nuclear fuel have a spare parts business too.
That seems to be common with nuclear power plants. The latest one near where I live (Angra 3) has been under construction since 1984, and it should be complete in a few more years if it doesn't pause again; construction of the previous one (Angra 2), according to Wikipedia, started in 1976 and came online in 2001.
Like a car crash where the seat belts and airbags lead to no injuries.
And then all driving was banned.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident_hea...
Statistically it's inconclusive whether slight increases in some zones from a bit below average to a bit above average cancer rates is linked to TMI or to stress and|or increased screening.
What is certain, beyond a doubt, is that within the last week an explosion at a nickel plant in Indonesia left at least 13 dead and 46 injured.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/24/explosion-at-a...
That's an example of the generally unreported and ongoing human cost of battery technology.
Note Well: I'm not pro nuclear OR anti battery - I am pragmatic about the real consequences of resource mining and extraction having been part of exploration geophysics and global resource mapping for several decades.
I'm stating that to date all mining and processing of resources involves deaths, multilations, long term disease, etc.
I'm asserting that to date the cumulative deaths from the nuclear power industry do not yet equal the deaths from a single Bhopal disaster (pesticide processing, half a million people exposed, many dead).
I'm putting forward as a simple fact that as wind, solar, batteries, etc continue to scale up from the small sliver of total global energy they currently are to ideally matching the current percentage of coal there will need to be a substantial increase in the tonnages of nickel, copper, lithium, and more that are mined, concentrated, processed and extracted and that comes with substantial increases in the wastes associated with these industries and the known risks to human life.
I would suggest that anybody making a human risk argument on any single portion of the energy industry look broadly at the risks across the board.
It's perfectly fine to chest beat about safety, I'm for it.
It's callously indifferent to only give a damn about a few deaths in a sector not approved while ignoring those in sectors liked.
this regulatory inconsistency is mostly irrational, because it's clear through other policies that society values safety much less in other policies (eg. driving, all the emissions from other sources, gun safety, etc)
of course regulations are not perfect mirrors of society's preferences, but it's close enough. (and of course society doesn't "has to be" consistent, but I would say a pretty vocal minority, perhaps even the majority wishes it to be so)
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that said, yes, if the world would order 1000+ nuclear power plants, all standardized, then we could have it cheaper, because then it would make sense to invest in automation, and maybe modular small reactors can already get enough traction. but since we are not ordering that many and even AP1000 is just a brand not really a standard, there's practically no economies of scale
Someone would have to pay for those 1000 NPPs, and in the current market conditions no one is willing to, because the ROI isn't there. Even you said so, there is no NPP standard in place to begin with, so before those 1000 plants are ordered, this standard design has to defined, agreed upon and developed first. And that takes how long in your opinion?
The ROI is not there because other forms of electricity generation didn't have to pay for most of their externalities[1], and people don't give a damn about actual safety profile, or mid-long term overall costs, it's simply the usual sentimentalism-theater.
> Oh think of the nuclear waste, oh think of the poor little spent fuel rods leaking into our puppies' drinking water, oh think of all the horrible unspeakable tragedies we will get when every Monday Chernobyl repeats but worse, Fridays are for Fukushimas, and the rest of the weekdays are for all the usual GreenPeace-made-up dangers. But of course instead currently, of course, we enjoy the peaceful and prosperous energy abundance granted to us by ... checks notes ... the same geniuses who delivered the just one-more-lane will solve the traffic jams for sure hit comedy series, the single-family house exclusive rated 10/10 absolute heavens on Earth[2], healthcare as an investment [3], but muh guns [4], and so on.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Largo,+FL,+USA/@27.9213946... whatever the hell is going on here :o
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773426 private equity takeover is amazing for hospitals(' profitabilty)
[4] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/special-report/u... muh guns and muh freedum to leave guns in not-even-locked cars to get stolen
Uninsurable at what price? If NPPs work without insurance, maybe it's irrelevant anyway. (Especially since private parties hardly can just run their own NPPs, and states already run them or allow them to be run without insurance.)
That said I don't know whether residents near NPPs have a higher preimum because of the plant. Or even whether they can get policies from insurers. But if they can, then insurance already does underwrite some of the costs of potential accidents.
No they absolutely cannot. Many incidents happened due to yet unimagined failures. For example, KLM Flight 867, which lost all four engines due to a common mode failure (flying through ash clouds). The plane landed safely and safety standards were updated to provide guidance on avoiding, detecting, and reacting to ash ingestion.
TMI was a similar situation. At that point, nobody had really considered human factors engineering for nuclear plants. Nobody considered the risk of having a lamp that indicated that a valve had been asked to close instead of that it actually was closed.
One major challenge that aviation has handled better than nuclear and much better than chemical production is ensuring that issues get reported promptly and treated seriously. Aviation calls it "just culture", where mistakes and accidents are treated with retraining and lenience, but covering up issues is treated very harshly. This is absolutely necessary, otherwise you end up with major communications issues like we saw with MetEd during TMI or Tepco during Fukishima.
Chernobyl was a very poor design, with a positive void coefficient of reactivity (i.e. temperature goes up, steam goes up, reactivity goes up, leading to runaway feedback) and no containment building. It was operated in a very poor manner as well, which was the principle cause of the failure. Some sources[1] claim that this poor design and unsafe operating conditions were well known to plant management and Soviet leadership, and were covered up in the name of Progress and production pressures. There was even a very similar accident that occurred during a very similar test in Leningrad in 1975, albeit with less extreme consequences, which was fully covered up, even from plant operators at other RBMK reactors.[2]
Fukushima was a pretty well designed and operated reactor, but the design basis did not consider the risk of a large tsunami, rather instead focusing on typhoons. Ironically, they actually removed a larger "natural sea wall" (i.e. a cliff) that would have protected the plant.[3] The big lesson learned here is to have prepositioned stocks of generators, batteries, replacement parts, etc close enough to the plant to be supplied promptly as needed, but far enough away to hopefully be excluded from any local disasters, aka the FLEX program.[4]
On the other hand, TMI was an accident in which the operators made the wrong call, primarily because they had been trained to be concerned about one specific danger ("going solid" and bursting the pressurizer, requiring less water injection), but really they were facing a totally different one (small break loss of cooling, requiring more high pressure water injection).[5] Interestingly, a very similar accident happened at Davis Besse in Ohio only a few years before, but without any major consequences, as the operations team recognized the mistake and resolved it, but these lessons learned were not well communicated to operators of other plants. This failure and others like it led to the establishment of WANO (international) and INPO (USA) which are organizations intended to help operators share experiences with each other in a timely and safe manner.[6][7]
1: https://www.reuters.com/world/unsealed-soviet-archives-revea...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Nuclear_Power_Plant
3: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem...
4: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1524/ML15244B006.pdf
5: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1556/tmi-operators-did-what...
After the Leningrad incident, the RBMK Chief Engineering organisation announced changes to the operating procedures taken this incident into account to all RMBK plants. Those procedures where never written, and none of the operators asked about them neither. That was pure negligence, and no cover up (the cover up was invented by the HBO series, no idea why). What is true so, is that the whole bureaucracy and organisation in the USSR let Chenobyl 4 get away with well known safety and regulation violations before the accident, and those regulation were extremely lax by modern standards to begin with.
An interesting bit about Fukushima is not the reactor design, there is apparently nothing inherently wrong with that, but rather the site. As you said, the seawall was too low, mainly because during the site development earthquakes of the magnitude that caused the tsunami where not considered despite geological proof to the contrary. That was negligence number one. Number two occured after simulations years before the tsunami predicted pretty exactly the magnitude of the earthquake and the height of the following tsunami. Despite being fully aware of that simulation, and the effects on the site, no measures where taken, e.g. updated procedures or a heigher sea wall or moving batteries and generators to higher ground.
The IAEA reports on both, Chernobyl (the IAEA report in English includes translations of the two Soviet ones, and man are those two damning even before you consider who wrote them) and Fukushima are very good reads, highly recommended if you didn't read them already.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
so yes, nuclear is (almost?) the safest, but the direction of causality is the opposite.
it's safe because we made it safe, because the inherent nature basically necessitates is (because it's a form of energy generation that is a lot more efficient in big plants, and because fissile material requires a very careful handling compared to - for example - coal, and therefore the cost-benefit trade-offs of making NPPs very safe is basically a no-brainer up to a point)
the problem is that it's hard to find this inflection point where "more safety against acute problems" actually leads to more harm from "chronic problems", basically where we are reducing the meltdown events so low that we end up suffocating in fly ash from coal power plants. (not to mention the secondary effects of "killing" the nuclear industry.)
Everyone talks about Fukushima and the half a dozen cancer cases. Nobody talks about the ten thousand that died from other effects from the earthquake, nobody talks about the thousands that died that year to produce the same amount of output from coal
Same with airline security. I get my toothpaste check Kes out because of the “potential” of some deaths, yet nobody stopped me driving to the airport that morning, and driving actually kills thousands in the US alone every month.
Same goes for your airline security example. Car related accidents/attacks are unrelated to airplane accidents/attacks.
""" Ironically, some of the decisions that have been made in the name of improving safety margins for low probability events, may have reduced the safety margins for high probability events. The UE&C piping study uncovered numerous areas where the tolerances requested in the piping design documents might be appropriate for a machine shop oriented manufacturing operation, but are totally unrealistic for field construction. """
via https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-12-15
The whole quote is worth reading/skimming.
More importantly this zero risk approach has to be considered relative to all the other risks arising from building other types of power plants.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
(and of course a bit more on the problems with the process at the NRC https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/waiting-on-the-nuclear-regu... )
Also, skimming the list of USA incidents, there are a great deal of bullshit "incidents" in recent times. Most related to natural machanical breakdowns in non radioactive systems due to everything being operated decades past its expiration date. Wouldn't be happening if new NPPs had been built to replace these ancient designs.
> Wouldn't be happening if new NPPs had been built to replace these ancient designs.
That's possible but the economics have to make sense as well. You would do well to try and extend the lifetime of a NPP and run it as an LTO NPP, this maximises profits if it is possible to run the plant past the lifetime it was originally designed for. Incremental upgrades are the way to go in such a case.
This is how a good culture of safety looks like. Treat small stuff seriously to prevent the big bad things. Similarly with aviation, and with medicine, etc.
Sometimes, when your employer wants to fire you but doesn’t want you to be able to file for unemployment or accuse them of firing you for some legally impermissible reason, they just make it so miserable to keep working there that you end up quitting. There is a legal term for this: “constructive dismissal”. I hope the implied analogy is obvious.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Omit internet tropes"
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken"
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
"Pursuant to B.M.C. Section 12.90.070, the City of Berkeley shall grant no contract to any person or business, which knowingly engages in work for nuclear weapons."
After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.
As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant’s parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation.
Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nuclear-accident...
Two decades isn't very long for an infrastructure project, which is unfortunate since long-term planning benefits greatly from political stability, and many areas are seeing large shifts for the worse in that regard.
No, what you meant to say was “and only 47 people died constructing it!”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268466718_Statistic...
That was in 1937 - the new main railway station does not exist yet (though it looks like it might actually be built this time) and post even moved out of the historic building last year. :P
an abandoned nuclear station in Cuba
was under construction from 1970. I believe it's had 3 generations working on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Barbara%27s_Church,_Kutn%C...
People are calling for small, modular and repeatable nuclear reactors that could theoretically get cheaper with scale.
You know what is is actually small, modular and repeatable and getting cheaper with scale? Solar panels and wind turbines.
But it is very nice that RosAtom seems to be one of the most competently run Russian Gov agencies.
India is famous for talking about nuclear. Building it, not as much. India gets 2x as much energy from PV as it does from nuclear, and the PV is growing rapidly.
More on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant#Unit_2