Harry,
There is hardly anything in you reply with which I would
disagree. Nevertheless, you miss the point. The bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, together with the (admittedly rare) accidents at Windscale,
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, together with the clam-like secrecy
of the nuclear industry (yes, it's always a governmental or
quasi-governmental affair) means that the general public are fearful of
nuclear power and it's never likely to leave the collective memory while
nuclear power stations operate. (Yes, the coal industry spreads much more
radioactivity around the world than nuclear power stations but it nowhere
remotely reaches, nor could ever reach, safety limits. DNA has evolved
special mechanisms over hundreds of millions of years which are repairing
thousands of times more mutational accidents than that produced by natural
background radiation which is still higher than coal-produced stuff.) (Also
we'd already have had a rash of cancer from the use of the mobile phone.)
As to insurance and the fact that no insurance company will insure against
floods in vulnerable places, then this is another instance of where
governments (central and local) are not doing their job. If bureaucrats
were carrying out their duty of care, then house-building in these areas
should be outlawed (unless on stilts!)
Keith
At 14:13 20/03/2011 -0700, you wrote:
Keith,
Before the tsunami, most sources refer to three major nuclear accidents.
Chernobyl, Windscale, and Three Mile Island. Three Mile was insignificant.
Chernobyl sent out 7 million curies, Windscale emitted 20,000 curies,
though I understand that has been reduced, Three Mile loosed 15 curies
less than background radiation.
Both Chernobyl and Windscale were military installations, producing
plutonium. Windscale was a reprocessing plant. Im not sure we have that
particular use under control. I havent spent much time on nuclear stuff in
recent years, but some time ago when there was a chance we would build
some new inherently safeplants I spent a lot of time on it. My memory is
that reprocessing plants were risky propositions. Maybe ineptitude was a
factor, too.
Chernobyl produced plutonium. It had no containment vessel, was an ancient
graphite type of plant that was not considered a safe choice. I understand
that Europe has offered to build modern replacements for some East
European countries if they would close their old graphite reactors.
I understand that now improved graphite reactors are in the works, but we
would probably have to ask Pete about that.
The point is that the two major catastrophes before the present were
military producers of plutonium rather than civilian power reactors.
As far as I can gather the Japanese reactors survived the earthquake, but
the one, two punch of the tsunami was too much. The tsunami may have
caused some 15,000 deaths (including the 10,000 or so who are missing).
Would you prefer to be on the north-east shore, or near the reactors when
the tsunami hit?
With regard to quality of personnel, youll recall that in the UK Dyson was
unable to find 200 scientific people for his research labs. Dont know how
he eventually came out, but it indicated a certain failure of UK education
I rather think that knowledgeable people from academe or think-tanksare
not good choices to offer opinions on a practical engineering problem.
But, I suppose the initiating factor for the BBC was its innate academic
snobbery. It would have been better to get some hands-on nuclear reactor
engineers to contribute. Ive forgotten the twists and turns of nuclear
reactor ownership in the UK. Are your remaining reactors owned privately,
or by quasi-governmental entities? I once knew this but as I said I havent
much been involved in nuclear discussion in recent years. Now, that may change.
Mistakes at nuclear reactors may have enormous consequencesbut we havent
seen much of these enormous consequences. Prior to the 9.0 earthquake and
tsunami, the only civilian disaster was at Three Mile Island. There,
everything worked as it was supposed to and, as I said, the radiation
released was less than background radiation.
I would, however, submit that people died and were injured because of the
accident. This was because they shut down the second reactor at Three
Mile. Presumably, while it was shut down, more electricity was produced
from coal a known killer. The deaths came because they kept the second
reactor out of commission, but there you are.
It would probably be an ongoing disaster to put those knowledgeable
academics in charge of a nuclear plant. As I say, the plants need
practical engineers and sensible workers even if they didnt get a first
with honors at a university.
The storage of spent fuel rods in tanks is a temporary measure while the
government decides what to do with them. It has been temporaryfor decades
while governments fail to come to a decision. I assume thats the case in
Japan. As I told Natalia, I recall that one US plant got fed up with
governmental inertia and built an off plant storage facility. As I recall
(its been a long time since I interested myself in this) it looked like a
row of brick garages and was built somewhere in the in the north central
part of the US. Ill guess Wisconsin, but cant remember. They were offering
storage space to other plants, as I recall. I also vaguely remember the
spent rods were not immersed in water, but were separated in safe amounts.
The spent rods in water tanks is a government folly not to be attributed
to the plants.
You say which is the way anti-nuclear power people treat the matter:
We don't yet know whether or not large quantities of caesium-137 with a
30-year radioactive half-lifetime are yet to be spewn over 30 million
people in the Tokyo region of Japan only 100 miles away -- or even to
reach the coast of America. (If that were to happen I think you would soon
change your mind about nuclear power!)
We also dont know whether radiation leakage will be minor and relatively
unimportant.
But that thought isnt to be revealed. In the US, we have a saying about TV
News the bleeds lead. In other words, they show the shootings, highway
accidents, and other bleeds, before they get to the meat of the news.
Blood grabs the audience. So, all the hypotheticals like Rays 40 million
deaths get top billing. Sensible worries about a situation are downplayed.
Your point about insurance is true. Now, would your insurance company like
to sell flood insurance to the survivors of Japans north-east? Insurance
of such large possibilities is not particularly welcome to companies even
though they would have done well with nuclear insurance in the US. Nuclear
plants contribute to an insurance pool that is now over $11 billion. Of
this some $151 million has been paid out along with a Department of Energy
(also covered ) payment of $65 million. Insuring the nukes would have been
pretty profitable. (I think the nuclear companies are trying to get some
of that money back but without much luck.)
A tiny amount as I recall only a fraction of a penny per watt is added to
the price of US nuclear produced electricity to pay for decommissioning.
Many years ago, I recall that the decommissioning fund was enough to pay
the costs if all the plants closed down next day. I surmise that there is
much more in the fund now. Decommissioning is handled here. Dont know the
situation in the UK.
Getting a plant into operation is not an engineering problem but a legal
problem as perhaps a $2 billion plant can sit unused while protests from
anti-nukes drift through the courts. Terrible waste of money. Its a wonder
any plants were built. But, once they are, these now ancient plants
produce a sizable chunk of our electricity over decades of use.
No fallacies involved from my end, but I fear a few from Devon!
Harry
******************************
Henry George School of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
(818) 352-4141
******************************
From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2011 2:41 AM
To: [email protected]; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,
EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question:
Harry,
I am afraid that your complacency is quite wrong. Accidents to nuclear
reactors may be rare -- but when they occur they are disastrous.
I've tried to persuade you before that the standard of scientific and
engineering personnel employed by the nuclear industry is way below what
it should be. This is exemplified by the Fukushima disaster now going on
in Japan. The Japanese have had to call in experts from America and
elsewhere to help them. I've been watching BBC 24-hour News pretty closely
during the past week. Altogether, the BBC called in about 40 or 50 experts
to explain matter more clearly to the lay viewers. Not a single one of
these has come from the industry itself -- UK or US or anywhere else.
They've all been highly-knowledgeable people from academe or think-tanks.
In the UK nuclear industry, the engineering and scientific personnel are
drawn almost completely from one third-rate university with very low
A-level (school) entry requirements. The UK Government Nuclear
Inspectorate hasn't ever been able to recruit enough suitably qualified
engineers and scientists, nor can it do so today despite offering high
salaries.
The long and the short of it is that, quite unlike any other industry --
repeat, any other industry -- relatively few engineers or scientists of
sufficient intelligence and qualifications would dream of risking their
careers to the day-to-day working of nuclear reactors. There are plenty of
other career opportunities for people of such calibre. No matter how
carefully nuclear reactors are designed, nor how well their equipment is
made, some mistakes -- no matter how infrequent -- can have the most
enormous consequences.
The main unforeseen mistake in the current case is that once spent fuel
rods are dunked in a tank of water and kept fairly separate then they are
assumed to be of no possible danger afterwards despite their residual
radioactivity. What was overlooked is that such spent fuel tanks oughts to
have had double -- and eve triple -- fail-safe sources of water. We don't
yet know whether they'll succeed in cooling down those fuel rods at
Fukushima. We don't yet know whether or not large quantities of
caesium-137 with a 30-year radioactive half-lifetime are yet to be spewn
over 30 million people in the Tokyo region of Japan only 100 miles away --
or even to reach the coast of America. (If that were to happen I think you
would soon change your mind about nuclear power!)
The second fallacy in your line of thinking -- correlated with poor
quality of personnel -- is revealed by the fact that no insurance company
in the world would dream of insuring a working nuclear reactor, nor would
any nuclear construction company in the world dream of running reactors
all through their lifetimes and of having to decommission them afterwards.
Keith
At 23:35 18/03/2011 -0700, you wrote:
Thanks, Pete, I had forgotten about the CanDu reactors.
It's a long time since I spent time on nuclear reactors. I suppose I
considered the whole thing a done deal with little chance of much progress
in the US. There is apparently one under construction, but I don't know
where.
Important is the use of fuel that in due course won't be plentiful. Do the
CanDus use much of the fuel or only about a quarter? One day that will be
important. (I bet Canada is loaded!) You seem to indicate they use most of
the fuel, which is good. Also, your thorium point is something to watch for
= very interesting.
Do you know where the 'private' storage of spent fuel took place? I seem to
remember it was in Wisconsin or one of those other central northern states.
I also recollect they were offering storage space to other nuclear plants.
Certainly something should be done about the storage of spent fuel rods, but
the prospects aren't good considering how long the US government has been
dragging its feet.
Seem to remember that reprocessing plants don't have a good history. I think
that Jimmy Carter stopped a US plant. Windscale - the second disaster after
Chernobyl - was a reprocessing plant.
Harry
******************************
Henry George School of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
(818) 352-4141
******************************
-----Original Message-----
From: pete [<mailto:[email protected]>mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2011 2:21 PM
To: [email protected]; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,
EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Harry Pollard wrote:
> Ray,
>
> If Japan loses 40,000 people from this incident, it will be the worst.
>
> But the chance of that is small.
>
> Instead, spare a tear for the thousands of Japanese already lost from
> the natural events.
>
> The workers in the plants are suffering and will suffer, but the
> chance of further serious contamination of the civilian population is not
great.
> Anything might still happen, but the probability is that things will
> be soon under control and the main damage will be economic. I don't
> like the stories of spent fuel rods in temporary water tanks losing
> their water, but that's a continuing problem caused by various
> governments, including the US, fiddling around unable to provide them
> a permanent home. At least one nuclear plant got fed up with waiting
> and built above ground places (like a row of brick
> garages) for spent fuel rods. But, everywhere, in the absence of a
> safe place to get rid of them they sit in tanks of water. I would
> prefer them to be processed (against the law) and then suitably
> covered in concrete be dropped into the Pacific Trench
>
You don't want to either reprocess or dispose of spent fuel rods from
pressurized light water reactors (the only kind in the US). These "spent"
rods of enriched uranium contain 0.9% U235. Canadian "CanDU"
heavy water reactors normally use natural, unenriched uranium, which is 0.7%
U235. They can run happily with the "spent" light water rods, unreprocessed,
in fact with a slightly greater power output than normal.
And when rods are spent after running in a CanDU, they are really spent, but
they can still be processed further by running in a thorium reactor (except,
as a newly conceived technology, there are no commercial thorium reactors
yet in existence), which will lower the radioactivity content even further.
Upon final extraction from a thorium reactor, the rods can be potted in
glass and nested in gravel beds in tunnels dug deep in the geologically
inert canadian shield, at depths below the water table, and sealed in. These
will essentially be returned to the rock from which they were mined.
The existing CanDU reactors, by the way, are very close to the current
benchmark of "inherently safe", even though the design is
40 years old. The low activity level of the fuel means it can only achieve
criticality in a bath of heavy water, and while it does acquire residual
heat from daughter product decays continuing after shutdown stops the
fission chain, the larger size of the chamber reduces the heat density.
Further more, the individual rods are accessible outside the heavy water
envelope, and can be extracted one at a time to further dampen reaction. The
spent rods are thus not in a fixed geometry matrix (unlike the rod packs in
the GE design used in Japan), and thus are initially placed for cooling
storage in a lower density array, further reducing the heat load generated
during their cooldown period.
The Old GE design in Japan is referred to as "engineered safe", which is
PR-speak for "safe as long as all the engineered safety systems are working
properly". These devices should have been retired years ago.
-Pete
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/03/
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