Japan Quake Damage Mounts; Reactor Watched

[Marcus Aurelius]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jap...ake-fault-line


(July 18, 2007), 7:18 a.m. EDT 6.7 quake



Reactor may lie directly on quake fault line

Japanese reports cite data on aftershocks

''After looking at aftershock location data, we have come to realize a fault lies right below the nuclear power plant,''
Kyodo reported a Tokyo Electric Power spokesman as saying.


So 4 years ago or so they knew the biggest plant was right on a fault line.
Don't know if you can do much after one's built but I would think so.

[charlestudor2005]

If one of the screening factors for building a nuclear plant is to keep it off a fault line or out of areas with tendencies to natural disasters (tornado, hurricane), how do you equally provide nuclear power to those places that are screened out from having a nuclear plant?

Do you build the plant in a "safe" area, but provide nuclear power to "unsafe" areas with no extra charge? With an upcharge for the added transmission costs?

And how do you prevent nations from building them wherever they want without regard to the location?

[pjorourke]

Originally Posted by discreetgent

I don't think that includes the potential injuries and fatalities that radiation leaks or a meltdown would cost.

In theory, that would all be in the $5B fuck up cost.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Just ask Dow Chem how much Bhopal cost them.

[Rakhir]

Isn't anyone else concerned about what happened the last time there was a massive quake in Japan coupled with a dose of radioactivity?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7gFlSGXt_k

[Guest083011]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/ja...eforeafter.htm

[Guest083011]

another PoV:
http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/20...lear-reactors/

[discreetgent]

Now at 4 reactors in trouble.

[Rakhir]

SR Only those are cool links!

[Mazomaniac]

Originally Posted by pjorourke

I agree its going to be an expensive mess Mazo. I was referring to your calculus of risk. Say for the sake of argument that a fuck up costs $5B and that there is a .1% annual chance of it occurring -- that's an expected annual cleanup cost of $5 million. If it would cost $50 million to engineer out that .1% chance, thats 10x the expected cost. Multiply that by enough reactors and you have a pretty compelling case to not make the fix.

Now there's some libertarian math for ya. Take an annualized risk and compare it to a one-time expenditure.

The expected service life of of most reactors is between 40 and 75 years - let's call it 50 on the conservative side.

Using your figure of $5M per year annualized clean-up costs that makes it $250M per plant justifiable in additional safety measures, not $50M. That's about 1/5 the cost of a next generation reactor.

Using your numbers (which I don't agree with, btw) nuclear energy is economically unviable just based on the risk/benefit analysis.

Q.E.D.

Like I said, though, the problem I have with commercial nuclear power isn't the engineering. We're smart enough to engineer very safe reactors that have excellent safety systems and a very low risk of failure. My problem is that we put those reactors into the hands of people who repeatedly fuck up those safety systems in the name of profit. You just can't engineer greed out of the system. Somebody somewhere is going to screw it up. Until we figure out a system to avoid that Mazo don't want to live next to a nuke.

Cheers,
Mazo.

[pjorourke]

Originally Posted by SR Only

another PoV:
http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/20...lear-reactors/

Thats pretty interesting.

[pjorourke]

Originally Posted by Mazomaniac

Now there's some libertarian math for ya. Take an annualized risk and compare it to a one-time expenditure.

The expected service life of of most reactors is between 40 and 75 years - let's call it 50 on the conservative side.

Using your figure of $5M per year annualized clean-up costs that makes it $250M per plant justifiable in additional safety measures, not $50M. That's about 1/5 the cost of a next generation reactor.

Using your numbers (which I don't agree with, btw) nuclear energy is economically unviable just based on the risk/benefit analysis.

Q.E.D.

Like I said, though, the problem I have with commercial nuclear power isn't the engineering. We're smart enough to engineer very safe reactors that have excellent safety systems and a very low risk of failure. My problem is that we put those reactors into the hands of people who repeatedly fuck up those safety systems in the name of profit. You just can't engineer greed out of the system. Somebody somewhere is going to screw it up. Until we figure out a system to avoid that Mazo don't want to live next to a nuke.

Cheers,
Mazo.

You are right on the math, I was just illustrating the concept.

I made the numbers up for illustration. Yes I agree, you would look at a capitalized cost of the risk vs. the additional expense.

My original point, that got lost in all this, is that we shouldn't over-react and insist on some insanely unreasonable level of safety such as we did post TMI. This effectively killed nukes for the next 30 years. Despite all the solar and wind pipe dreams, nukes are the only "alternative" energy source that scales -- i.e., will ever, baring a dramatic breakthrough in science, be more than a rounding error in our energy mix. If we insist on such stringent cost/safety magins that the stuff is uneconomical, then we may as well get used to sun bathing in the Arctic (making the absurd assumption that Al Bore is anywhere near right with his global warming smoke and mirrors.) So pick your poison -- life is a series of trade-off. Hopefully they are made intelligently based on real facts.

[Mazomaniac]

Originally Posted by pjorourke

My original point, that got lost in all this, is that we shouldn't over-react and insist on some insanely unreasonable level of safety such as we did post TMI.

Ah, gentle PJ. Now you have fallen into my trap.

We actually can build reactors that are nearly fool-proof and we can do so for reasonable additional cost. The problem is that the definition of "reasonable" varies greatly. To the utility industry "reasonable" means "none".

The Swedes have a design called PIUS that is, quite literally, immune to meltdown. The core is regulated by natural physical forces rather than through control rods and artificially circulated water. You can literally just walk away from the thing and it will shut itself down and cool itself without any help. PIUS designs, however, would add about $100M to the cost of every new plant so the system was scrapped as being too costly. If a PIUS design had been in place at TMI or Japan we wouldn't even be talking about those incidents here.

There's also a German design called a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) that has actually been built and demonstrated. This kind of reactor could have a meltdown, but the design is such that it would take days for a meltdown scenario to develop rather than the minutes or even seconds that it takes a light water reactor to ruin your day. That gives the operators more than enough opportunity to address the problem and prevent serious accidents. Again, though, the design adds costs so we don't build them.

So my point is that we already can build reactors that are much, much safer than current commercial designs. We don't do so simply because it's easier to build cheap and roll the dice on who pays for a massive cleanup than it is to add the cost of inherently safe plants up front. Either way we're paying the cost of safety. It's a social decision as to which of those two roads it's better to take. I think you can guess which side I"m on.

Cheers,
Mazo.

[Fast Gunn]

I just saw some of the horrendous damage on the evening news and had to turn it off because the devastation was just too painful to watch.

The prime minister of Japan said this disaster is the worst that country has suffered since World War II and I fear it is going to take decades for that country to dig itself out of the hell hole it has fallen into.

. . . It is sobering to think what a precarious world we all live in.

[pjorourke]

Originally Posted by Mazomaniac

So my point is that we already can build reactors that are much, much safer than current commercial designs. We don't do so simply because it's easier to build cheap and roll the dice on who pays for a massive cleanup than it is to add the cost of inherently safe plants up front. Either way we're paying the cost of safety. It's a social decision as to which of those two roads it's better to take. I think you can guess which side I"m on.

I actually did some work with a big nuclear utility, so I understand a bit of the economic issues. The problem is that they didn't build cheap. The existing nukes in this country were horrendously expensive to build -- largely because of endless regulatory reviews and delays. In many cases the regulators forced more complex Rube Goldberg designs instead of looking at simpler ideas such as are now becoming available as you suggest from Sweden.

This was more than 10 years ago and the sunk cost in those puppies was well north of a couple bill each -- so something like $100M wouldn't break the bank. Besides, if those designs became standardized, the cost would drop. Also, the other big cost in a nuke is the periodic take down and maintenance work when the thing is down for 2-4 months. A design like what you are talking about would cut the hell out of those times.

No, I think this is a classic bureaucratic case of making perfect the enemy of good.