Nuclear

[jerry1423]

If I was younger and contemplating what career direction to take I would consider nuclear engineering.
After the windmills are built and the solar panels are installed we are going to need to build something to supply us with constant energy.
Since very few people of this generation entered this field there will be a high demand for them in the coming years. It may be 10 years in the future, but it will come.

 

[jmw]

Just listened to a lady engineer from the nuclear industry on the radio today arguing for the need for nuclear power.
Arraigned against her were two greens.

Predictably, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were mentioned.
Then they claimed that Nuclear was too expensive. They said we shouldn't have to subsidise it. They didn't mention that wind turbines carry a big subsidy and she was too savvy to use that argument, she remarked instead that France has the cheapest electricity in Europe.

She was sharp, knew all the answers, even pandered to the Green lobby by allowing that wind turbines were a good idea but as part of the package.

Then they said building nuclear power stations was to expensive for private companies and why should the government have to pay.

She pointed out that in Finland private nuclear power was going ahead and that EDF wanted to build nuclear power stations in the UK.

Terrorists could crash planes onto them... she pointed out that they were and always had been designed as proof against Jumbo jets being crashed onto them.

There would be a proliferation of material suitable for bomb making that could fall into the hands of terrorists.... different technology, she said.

Toward the end of the program she was still calm and collected and shooting down every bit of nonsense they trotted out and they were reduced to shouting.

She had all the answers lined up and I guess she must have been drawing on all her years of experience dealing with nitwits. But oh how futile it all must have seemed to her since even as she answered their objections you knew they weren't listening. AT any minute I expected them to claim she was in the pay of the evil oil consortia.





JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[gwolf2]

Coming back to the original post about whether its a good industry to go into, and my comment:

> On the other hand I think they are having trouble filling certain jobs. It will be interesting to see how it pans out now that most of the old boys have retired.

I was hired by a 'nuclear company' a couple of months ago despite a predominantly aerospace background.

It looks like some nuclear companies are willing to go outside to get engineers. I have to stress that 3/4 of similar companies turned me down, so maybe my recent experience is a fluke.

gwolf

 

[davefitz]

zdas04:
2 of your 3 claims re: TMI are not technically accurate.

Also, the planned new nuke plants will likely experience a lot of design+ construction delays. For example the TVO Olkiluoto ( Finland)plant is 3 yrs behind schedule, in a situation with no backlog on the suppliers. Just imagine 30 new units in the pipeline ; the resulting delays will run into the decades. customers with $10-20 billion dollar loans had better figure on a very late unit startup and the impact on their ability to payback the loan.

 

[zdas04]

OK, which statements were not accurate, and what are you basing your opinion on?

 

[HamishMcTavish]

zdas04 - you said no radioactivity was released...

43000 Curies of Krypton was/were released from the plant’s auxiliary building to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core

NRC factsheet:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html

Regards, HM

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary - William of Occam

 

[davefitz]

zdas04:

The NRC may have some credibility in this area. The following link is a short summary of the publically available information:

<

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html>

The are more fascinating, unofficial summaries based on interviews with plant personnel to be found on the web, and also discussions with engineers associated with the plant and its suppliers that were involved inthe aftermath .

But overall, the excellent record of the industry after the accident owes some credit to the recognition of the failures of operators, the safety equipment, and the engineering design faults that cause the TMI accident. It does not help prevent future accidents if we forget what actually happened at TMI- as that generation retires and the new generation moves away from reading paper records and moves toward the fictional web displays of what we want to believe, some of those learned lessons are bound to be lost.

 

[HamishMcTavish]

There's a book called "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow which makes pretty interesting reading. His thesis is that if we design complex systems which are tightly coupled then accidents are inevitable. I don't agree with everything he says but as i said it's an interesting approach from a non-engineer.

Regards, HM

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary - William of Occam

 

[zdas04]

Don't think that there really was 43,000 Curries of Krypton released. There was some amount of radiation released to the atmosphere, but Krypton is a pretty rare fission product and to get to that level of radiation from Krypton alone would require the whole eastern seaboard to be glowing over all of the dead bodies. The NRC report said

Detailed studies of the radiological consequences of the accident have been conducted by the NRC, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services), the Department of Energy, and the State of Pennsylvania. Several independent studies have also been conducted. Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a full set of chest x-rays is about 6 millirem. Compared to the natural radioactive background dose of about 100-125 millirem per year for the area, the collective dose to the community from the accident was very small. The maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem.

In the months following the accident, although questions were raised about possible adverse effects from radiation on human, animal, and plant life in the TMI area, none could be directly correlated to the accident. Thousands of environmental samples of air, water, milk, vegetation, soil, and foodstuffs were collected by various groups monitoring the area. Very low levels of radionuclides could be attributed to releases from the accident. However, comprehensive investigations and assessments by several well-respected organizations have concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, most of the radiation was contained and that the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.

So I guess I should have said that the "released radiation was less than background" which sounds very much like "none" or "a fraction of what a Denver resident gets every day" to me but then I've been out of the industry for a long time.

David

 

[SomptingGuy]

I grew up in Cornwall. Granite buildings, radon.

- Steve

 

[HamishMcTavish]

Wikipedia says "It is estimated that a maximum of 13 million curies (480 petabecquerels) of radioactive noble gases were released by the event"

Argonne National Laboratory Factsheet gives 50000 Curies of Krypton...

Probably somewhere between the two!

Fission yield of Kr85 is 0.3% - 3.1E10 fissions per second to produce 1 Watt, TMI was 800MW so you get 0.003 multiplied by 2.4E18 fissions per second gives 7.2E15 (roughly)atoms of Kr85 per second. 3.15E6 seconds per year gives 1.067kg per year held within the cladding. Specific activity is 400 Ci/g so 4E5 Ci per year produced.

About a third of the fuel melted so the figures of 50000 sounds reasonable.

zdas04 you said "that level of radiation from Krypton alone would require the whole eastern seaboard to be glowing over all of the dead bodies" - don't confuse inventory with the dose. Kr85 is predominantly a beta emitter and they spread the dose calculation over a population of 30000

Regards, HM



No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary - William of Occam

 

[IceNine]

I like Amory Lovins' take:

http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf

 

[jmw]

Second paragraph in opens with:

There’s a catch, though: the private capital market isn’t investing in new nuclear plants, and
without financing, capitalist utilities aren’t buying.

which, for a December 2008 publication date is hardly accurate or is at least misleading.
EDF, the French power Utility is investing and we have previously noted that there are others also privately funded.
An auspicious start for the document.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[cranky108]

capitalist utilities ?????

Bad utility, Bad utility. Shame on you.

 

[jmw]

"Capitalist" Oh I missed that tell-tale as to the motivation of this document. Shame on me!
My Bad.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

This is a great read.
I liked:

And the long-pronuclear British government, abruptly reversing its well-reasoned 2002 policy, has decided to replace its old nuclear plants with new ones, although, it claims, without public subsidy3

which is the first I'd heard that Labour were pro-nuclear, having amongst its membership some of the most well known anti-nuclear politicians of the age. What they really mean is that Phony Tony made this choice all by himself. But he has also committed the UK to a huge CO2 reduction and a huge Wind Power Program.... which will cost a small fortune and which is heavily subsidised.
Incidentally, it is nice how they gloss over the problems of wind farms saying:

The investments needed to manage central-thermal-plant intermittence (nuclear
or fossil-fueled) have already been made and paid for. It is therefore hard to understand
why the occasional and predictable becalming of wind farms or clouding of solar cells over a
much smaller time and space, offset by higher output from statistically complementary renewable
resources of other kinds or in other locations, is a problem.

and:

Yet there is no technical difference between variations in demand and in supply; they
are entirely fungible, and indeed onsite generation can be usefully considered a negative load.
Calm winds or cloudy skies last up to a few days in decent sites, but can be offset by complementary
renewables at the same sites or by any renewables at more distant sites. (The distance
needed for very uncorrelated output depends on regional geography and weather patterns, but is
typically many hundreds of km.) Yet whether a given solar roof, wind turbine, or wind farm is
working at a given moment is about as irrelevant to the system operator as whether a particular
big office building’s chillers are on or off.

Hmm, I await clarification from the experts.
In the preprinted doc "Capitalist" is much used.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[IceNine]

While I am by no means an expert, spending our efforts improving end-use efficiency appears to be the way to go. Too bad there's no lobby for it...

 

[KENAT]

IceNine, there is, at least kind of. I see commercials on TV etc. about reducing use all the time & encouraging energy efficient appliances, maybe it's a California thing. Many environmental groups lobby for improved standards etc., just look at all the fuss over CAFF.

Now if they'd be better spending more of their money on that and less on promoting 'renewable' energy is another matter.

KENAT,

Have you reminded yourself of faq731-376 recently, or taken a look at posting policies:

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[moltenmetal]

There's plenty of talk and precious little money spent on actually reducing consumption- because that would involve changing people's behaviours, attitudes and sense of entitlement to all the cheap energy they can squander. Building neat new machines for billions of dollars is much sexier to a politician, much less to a utility! Yeah, they both put in a nice PR effort, but their hearts aren't in it whatsoever.

I seem to remember Energy Probe or the like, years ago, calculating that it'd be cheaper by a fair bit to buy back every beer fridge and replace every residential refrigerator in Ontario with a brand new high efficiency unit than it would be to build a new nuker unit. The supply/demand reductions were of similar magnitude.

Yeah, you'd have to do the same again 20 years later, but the nukers are only given a 40 year life. There'd be no "decomissioning" cost to worry about, and no nuclear waste either.

Still way better than burning coal, though. People forget just how much radioactive carbon 13, potassium, radon etc. is released when you burn coal, along with all the mercury, microparticulates and CO2- even if the acid gases are dealt with properly.

 

[cranky108]

Well they are trying something simular here, except not with beer fridges. They are giving away swurly light bulbs, that when broken spread mercury, and other unknown chemicals everywhere (And cost 10 times as much to buy).

So if you don't like nukers, or coal, and solar and wind are unreliable, I guess that leaves us gas, oil, and hydroelectric. But hydroelectric hurts the fish. And oil and natural gas produce CO2.
How about we go back to wood to heat our boilers?

 

[Hotown]

cranky108 - "How about we go back to wood to heat our boilers?"

Ontario coal-fired plant plans switch to biomass (wood pellets)

http://pepei.pennnet.com/display_ar...rio-coal-fired-plant-plans-switch-to-biomass/

Talk about a step backward.