Bruce said:

I’m sure it does, since that requires lots of costs for the nuclear industry – actually cleaning up their mess and returning the area to greenfield status. Much nicer to keep everything as is instead of demolishing it. Just in case one day you might want to start running the plant again, right? You never know!

I don’t really understand your point. Why should we turn a perfectly good power plant into a green field and for that matter, even an obsolete power plant into a green field?

I’m sure you understand that power needs to come from somewhere. If a power plant shuts down, one of there things needs to happen: either a new power plant is built, a different power plant is upgraded or an existing power plant that was mostly standby or peaking moves to more baseload generation to make up for the loss.

You can’t take away a power plant and not replace the power it generates somewhere else. In fact, even if you don’t decommission power plants, we still need to build more to make up for the loss. There’s a need to construct more, so my question is why do you think they should be somewhere else?

You’re arguing to turn power plants into green fields while somewhere else they’re turning green fields into power plants. Doesn’t make much sense now does it? Somewhere someone is jackhammering the parking lot at an old power plant and somewhere else someone is pouring a parking lot at a new power plant. How is this a good idea?

If you build a new plant on the same site, not only do you avoid having to turn it back to complete greenfield status (which is more than any other industry is required to do), but you can reuse a piece of property that is already in your possession, already zoned for the purpose and already surveyed. Why not? The alternative is acquire a new piece of property to put the new plants on?

Infrastructure is another issue. It can cost many millions per mile to set up new high tension feeders. They try to build new power plants near major grid junctions or lines to begin with, but it’s still expensive. Even if the old lines need upgrading, it still avoids the nasty issue of acquiring right of way and dealing with buying property at market cost.

How much of an old plant can be reused depends on any number of factors, like the age and whether you’re going to have much higher output reactors for a new one. Usually turbines can be reused, even if they need to have more added. Switch gear can almost always be reused.

Well, it was a sensational article with a lot of factual errors.

This is an invented issue. The fuel is perfectly safe on site or at Yucca Mountain. The reason this issue was invented is to create a self-perpetuating kind of claim against nuclear energy.

“They have no place to put it. It’s stored on site. They have no plans for it. There’s no solution.” Well of course there’s no final site to store it at, because any site chosen will not be good enough. If Yucca Mountain and the effort that went into safe containment is not good enough, nothing but nothing is going to be acceptable. The political interests love that. It’s their catch-22. They can use any site as an example of an unsafe location, even if it’s not and then cry that a safe location was not found.

I’m sure it does, since that requires lots of costs for the nuclear industry – actually cleaning up their mess and returning the area to greenfield status. Much nicer to keep everything as is instead of demolishing it. Just in case one day you might want to start running the plant again, right? You never know! On the other hand, at least it provides a means to avoid transporting nuclear waste around, which by itself is not 100% safe: http://reid.senate.gov/issues/yucca.cfm

        gman said:

The owners of nuclear plants are pretty much free to improve their turbines, feedwater heaters, moisture-separater-reheaters, and so on to improve the heat rate (that is, to get more electrical energy delivered from the same core power) – because from the NRC point of view, the important thing is the magnitude of the core power and the decay heat power once the reactor is subcritical.

That may be the case, but the big reason for the increase in nuclear energy production comes from improved effeciency, such as in Sweden, where they lost one nuclear plant in the past few years, but had a net increase in total nuclear output primarily due to turbine and steam dryer upgrades.

Also, the NRC is concerned with everything to do with a plant and all modifications must be submitted and could theoretically be denied. You can look at the NRC plant reports and you’ll find incident reports for transformer fires and citations of upgrades of steam generators or replacement of other non-nuclear systems.

From what I have been told, if two nuclear plant employees get into an automobile accident in the plant parking lot, and one is injured enough to need stitches at a local hospital, this would be reported to the NRC as a “non nuclear event” but still reported.

The point is, the NRC has reviewed the submitted amendment request and has determined that it is safe to operate the reactor at this new power level. If you don’t think they do a thorough job considering these power uprate amendments, you probably have never really looked at the process. If you have looked into it and feel there is a specific issue not adequately addressed by the NRC review, you should have told them so. You could also tell the ACRS during their deliberations. These things are matters of public interest and the public is invited to participate. You can send them letters or just show up at the meetings.

Also usually the accepted dose per year is 2000mrem for a rad worker.

I found this while looking for someone else who found that news item as insulting as I did, I did not see it on the Slashdot site, but it seems actually like they did a good job as most of the comments there refuted it and did not support it. It got rained on as it should.

The Scientist above made some good points and I want to add to that. Yes, a nuclear plant can turn a tidey profit, because although they are a big operation to run, they run at near full capacity when they run and the fuel cost is actually very low.

Cutting corners in that kind of industry will gain you money in the short term but will lose money very fast. The reactor is like a goose that lays golden eggs, so it is foolish not to keep it happy and laying more eggs. The NRC is a very strict agency, and in my opinion stricter than it needs to be, but that is another topic. The current standards that apply will force a shutdown of a reactor that exceeds release limits or does not have full compliance with cooling, safety systems and other things.

For this reason, it is important to make sure that nothing goes wrong that would force an extended shutdown. If a problem is detected early you can deal with it, occasionally without a shutdown. If not, you try to find any sign of a problem BEFORE it happens and that will allow it to be fixed as soon as possible. If something is nearly worn out, a replacement is set aside and prepped for installation on the next scheduled shutdown. When the reactor shuts down, that is when you fix everything that you have observed as being possibly ready to prevented ahead of time. That will always result in better buisiness, as shotty work or monitoring will last so long before coming back to bite you.

Older reactors are sometimes more difficult to keep up, because they don’t have the same kind of features to allow for easier repairs and on occasion you run into situations where there is a need to upgrade something to keep it standard. It is not beyond the capabilities of anyone running a plant, though, because you have to realize that the average plant worker has been there for a good ten years. Turnover is fairly low, and that means you usually end up working with people who know what they are doing very well and have done it dozens or hundreds of times. It becomes very well organized.

I think many have an inaccurate view of the inside of a nuclear plant. It is a non-dramatic but very safety conscious place to work. It is a very good industry to work for.

Notice something, when it comes to safety, the ones complaining are always politicians and reporters and activists. It is rarely the people who work with the hardware on a daily basis. Of course, there were the so-called “whistle blowers” in the 1980’s or 1990’s who made good money with their stories of how someone didn’t do something right, but in general, you won’t find too many in a nuclear plant who feel apprehensive about their own safety or would not want their family to live near the plant.

No amount of money or loyalty to an employer would be enough to put my children in danger and yet I would never think twice about them living next to the nuclear power plant and I do not think anyone else would. There is simply nothing to fear.

http://nostradamus-america.atspace.com/

PZ, I thought the Morris Police Department was going to save you from the wrath of God…