Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
The recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which shut down several reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex in northeastern Japan, followed by a failure of the backup cooling systems that resulted in hydrogen gas explosions and fires, has me re-evaluating my support for nuclear power. Non-nuclear technology, such as clean coal, is looking even better than when I wrote about it here on WUWT (see this and this).
Don’t get me wrong, I still favor nuclear power as part of what Sen. John McCain called an “all of the above” energy policy. We need all the energy we can get to power a vibrant, growing world economy. Our energy future should include nuclear along with clean coal, gas, oil, and renewables, as well as improved energy efficiency and usage. I welcomed the recent resurgence in interest in building more nuclear power plants in the US, a policy supported by both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Obama re-iterated that support today.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF NUCLEAR AND CLEAN COAL POWER
The graphic lists the major pros and cons for nuclear and clean coal electrical power technology.
Nuclear is Clean & “Green”, with no production of “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). The waste products, while radioactive, are relatively small in quantity and can be stored safely when proper procedures are followed. US and other well designed nuclear plants, with substantial containment vessels, have been relatively safe. There has been no loss of life (though Fukushima may change that fact). Finally, nuclear fuel is reasonable in cost, and represents only a small portion of the cost of generation of electricity.
On the negative side, the media over-hypes nuclear accidents, emphasizing the worst that could happen. Radioactive waste disposal is a difficult issue mainly due to political opposition and over-played fears of the unknown.
Clean Coal technology is ready for prime time in the US, where the fuel is plentiful. Coal may be gasified or liquefied at the mine site, for more convenient transport and use. As I pointed out on WUWT, CO2 Is Plant Food which should be used to improve agricultural yields in elevated CO2 greenhouses, rather than what seems to me to be a foolish idea of sequestering CO2 in abandoned oilwells.
On the negative side, coal trains have been dubbed “death trains” by Global Warming Alarmists, such as James Hansen, the head of NASA GISS. The supposed possibility of human-caused, catastrophic “runaway warming” (CAGW) has been way, way over-hyped and is more political than science-based. On the other hand, coal and other fossil fuel technology is responsible for some air pollution and disposal of the waste products can be troublesome.
SUPPORT FOR NUCLEAR POWER
In Fukushima, there has been a partial meltdown of some of the cores, release of some radioactive gases into the atmosphere, and there remains a real risk of further radioactive material spewing over the surrounding countryside. The news is bad for the nuclear industry worldwide. As happened with Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, the media are over-hyping the dangers. Even if the crisis doesn’t worsen, it may be a long time before the nuclear industry regains its footing.
While bicycling in France a few years ago, I was impressed by the nuclear powerplants that seemed to be everywhere. See here for an account of how we were almost arrested for trespassing at one plant. Decades ago, the French made a major commitment to nuclear from which they now get some 80% of their electrical power.
In contrast, the US gets only about 20%. Less than a year ago, I kayaked fairly close to the nuclear plant at Crystal River, Florida, that happily co-exists with dolphins and paddlers. When the US cautioned Americans living within 50 miles of the Fukushima nuclear plant to evacuate or stay indoors, I was relieved that I live a full 52 miles from Crystal River, but concerned abut the fact that plant is 34 years old.
The 1979 movie The China Syndrome dramatized a hypothetical, catastrophic core meltdown, where the molten material burns through the bottom of the containment vessel and melts partway through the crust of the earth. Of course, the molten material could not actually penetrate all the way to China, but the coincidence of this movie coming out only a short time before Three Mile Island essentially shut down the US nuclear industry for three decades.
In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Russia had the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, sending radioactive materials over parts of Russia and other areas in Europe. That plant had no containment vessel so there is no basis of comparison to either Three Mile Island or Fukushima.
The Japanese earthquake, and -especially- the resultant tsunami flooding, has most likely resulted in the deaths of 10,000 or more people who were living in low-lying fishing villages along the coastline. Yet, no one is calling for an end to fishing villages.
Though the Three Mile Island accident resulted in no deaths at all, and the Fukushima accident will most likely have only a limited number of casualties, there is a hue and cry to close existing nuclear plants and reverse the recent resurgence in interest in expansion of “green” nuclear power. I think that reaction, while all too human and understandable from an emotional standpoint, is unwise.
SYSTEM ENGINEERING FAILURE
Although my bachelors is in Electrical Engineering, I do not claim to be any kind of expert on electrical power plants. However, based on my long career conceptualizing and designing highly reliable, robust and redundant military avionic systems, and my advanced degrees in System Science, I do know something about complex systems. In my opinion, both Three Mile Island and Fukushima were system engineering failures. Yes, there were hardware failures in both cases, but the major fault was in how the system was designed and how the operators misunderstood what was actually occuring and how best to reverse or limit the damage.
According to Wikipedia:
The [Three Mile Island] accident began … with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve (PORV) in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape. The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant accident due to inadequate training and human factors, such as human-computer interaction design oversights relating to ambiguous control room indicators in the power plant’s user interface.
In Fukushima, the backup systems proved to be inadequate. It appears that the earthquake or, more likely, the flooding due to the tsunami, disabled the backup generators which were supposed to power the pumps and keep the cooling water flowing over the cores. There was also a battery backup that failed. It is not clear if the automatic shut-down system worked properly. With the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, it is clear that the backup generators should have been sited above above the maximum flooding level or otherwise protected from water damage. The connection between Fukushima and the national electrical grid was severed by the tsunami. A new power line is currently being run to that plant and, when connected, it may power the pumps if they are still operational.
The system and design engineers most likely thought that power for the pumps would be available from other nuclear generators in the complex, or, in a reasonably short time period, from the national electrical grid. They seem to have ignored the possibility that a single incident would shut down all the generators as well as the backups and access to the grid. Of course, at 8.9 or 9.1, this was over 100 times more powerful an earthquake than the 7.0 for which the system was apparenty designed. However, backup systems must be designed to withstand whatever might cause the primary systems to fail. This they failed to do.
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Why “clean” coal? “Dirty” coal does not mean sooty. In the eco-leftist newspeak that spawned it, “clean coal” means that the CO2 is not exhausted into the atmosphere. Sure, where there is a greenhouse that can use it, capturing the CO2 might be cost effective for this purpose, but very likely it will often not be. Cost effectiveness is not what clean coal is about. It is about the fraudulent pretense that CO2 imposes significant negative externalities.
found it…
http://www.theage.com.au/world/elderly-left-to-die-in-hospital-20110318-1c0nd.html
Very sad, very much the media’s fault, imo. Japanese media may not be over-hyping it as the world media is, but as far as I can see they’re not doing any better job presenting worthwhile facts to the public.
Ira wrote:
“The system and design engineers most likely thought that power for the pumps would be available from other nuclear generators in the complex, or, in a reasonably short time period, from the national electrical grid. They seem to have ignored the possibility that a single incident would shut down all the generators as well as the backups and access to the grid. ”
As an engineer, I am frequently confronted by the general practice of limiting hazard analysis to single fault scenarios. This approach is codified in most safety regulation documents. Occasionally a safety agency will implement dual fault failure analysis; particularly where things can explode or catch fire. The dual fault approach is uncommon and I don’t know if it is used in the nuclear industry.
As the Ira hinted the probability that all four plants, all four backup generators and the national grid would go down at the same time produces a failure scenario with an extremely low almost non existent probability. These failures would have been seen as independent failures not as cascading failures from a single hazard event; a tsunami. When the failure is viewed as a single failure resulting from tsunami the hazard analysis will produce equal to the probability of a tsunami occurring. If the probability is low enough, it will not be addressed.
It would be interesting to see the geological engineering assessment of a tsunami risk. My guess is that the risk wasn’t evaluated or if it was, it was ranked as extremely unlikely.
After all, prior to the Christmas day tsunami a few years back, who would have remembered when another tsunami occurred ? The 1964 Alaska earthquake produced a tsunami which caused damage throughout the Pacific basin. This would have given us a likelihood of one in 40 years. Add to that the probability the event would originate just off shore and we have an extremely unlikely probability of a catastrophic failure.
Comparing what the geologists and engineers knew 30-40 years ago to what we know now, it is easy to criticize the design decisions made back then. In reality, the engineers of the time probably did a thorough accurate analysis given the information they had. Unfortunately, that information was incomplete and luck turned against them.
If anything, this should be a warning to modern engineers. When designing dangerous systems, always assume the worst then consider that optimistic.
Alec Rawls says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:06 am
In the eco-leftist newspeak that spawned it, “clean coal” means that the CO2 is not exhausted into the atmosphere.
Clean coal is a term coined by the coal industry to describe coal fired plants that have few emissions other the CO2 and reduced CO2 emissions per MWh due to higher efficiencies.
Mr. Glickstein,
You need to understand much more about inherently safe modern nuclear designs.
Read up: Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR)
Tom T
“Maybe power plants can be made to withstand a 10 earthquake and 50 ft tsunami, but no matter what something bigger, unforeseen could come along.”
How do you ever bring youself to drive across a bridge?
Some perspective.
We have just passed 1 week since the Japanese Earthquake. This was a magnitude 8.9 with 30 or so magnitude 6/7 aftershocks and more than 500 magnitude 4/5 aftershocks. This puts it firmly in the top 5 world wide this century.
The initial quake was just 110 miles from the coastal Fukushima Daiichi power station. Several of the aftershocks were right under it. Yet the nuclear reactors shut down properly and their containment chambers held.
The tsunami that followed averaged 33ft in height and in places reached 76ft. When it hit it moved the coastline of Japan by 8ft. On landfall in Japan it covered an area of 400 square miles. It caused damage as far away as Hawaii and California.
Honestly I am pretty thick skinned but I was close to tears as I watched footage of cars racing away from the wave-front that I just knew where not going to make it.
There are now officially more than 17,000 dead or missing. Husbands & wives. Fathers and mothers. Sons and daughters. Friends.
More will die from the cold and from hunger.
390,000 homeless.
The tsunami shut down the power supply to the cooling pumps that bring the fuel temperature safely down over a period of weeks. Much work has been done to rectify this – some of it frankly heroic. It is tempting to say lessons will be learned but this is a design from decades ago that will never again be built. The lessons were long since learned.
The story is far from over but thus far the injured relating to the nuclear plant number 11 – none from radiation. The death toll is zero. May it remain so.
This is neither the time nor the basis for decisions about nuclear energy policy. When that time comes we might consider that between 1952 and 2011, nuclear power caused 63 deaths against 73 for wind power over the same period. Each one a tragic event.
Well, I’ll say this. Irrational fear has certainly improved the bottom line of those selling anti-rad suits, counters, gas masks, and iodide on the Left Coast of the USA. Even the drug dealers are getting into the business and selling iodide? on the street. Probably took a page from the days of LSD and are doping sugar cubes with iodine.
Well as someone else pointed out, more humans died at Chappaquiddick, than did at Three Mile Island.
And everything I have seen, read, or heard about Fukushima, is that it is a TMI like event; and NOT a Chernobyl event.
And the San Jose Mercury News; has exhausted their entire inventory of three inch high headline font, as well as their vocabulary of overhyped paranoic scare words; as well as stamping their editorial staff, as totally nuclear ignorant.
Other than that Ira, I can’t for the life of me see how you rate clean coal as being safer than nuclear. It is but a short while since New Zealand lost a number of coal miners, in a coal accident, and China has lost many times that in coal power related accidents.
I understand that there have been fatalitie(s) at Fukushima; unrelated in any way to the fact that it is a nuclear site.
With our President having made his picks for the “toss the ball through the ring” silliness, and now off to party in RIO, I am sure that both Libya, and Japan, will resolve their problems without any concern on the part of the USA, and its totally inept leadership. We even have our Secretary of State, and former Presidential candiate, acting as President in absentia (of the elected one).
@Phil’s Dad It was my understanding that they had a non-nuclear fatality in one of the explosions, but with the quality and quantity of news, I could be wrong. They certainly had deaths earlier that were related to nuclear when the idiots sent guys to mix fuel by hand, and then covered it up.
Burning coal in a pure oxygen environment is a simple way to reduce the real pollutants in it and release a stream of almost pure CO2. Problem is most people have been brainwashed into thinking that CO2 is a major pollutant.
For a quick comparison
1 ton of thorium, 200 tons of uranium or 3,500,000 tons of coal can produce the same amount of energy. If you consider the danger to those mining it there is no contest in which is the safest to mine. Nuclear is very safe until something (usually based on a human decision) goes wrong. Then things have potential to go very bad, very quickly over very large areas.
The problems with the nuclear power that we’ve done so far is that humans make bad decisions.
1) Situated some plants near fault lines, on coastal areas known to be hit by large waves and think we can design around anything that mother nature can throw at us. We can’t.
2) We leave waste that will need to be stored for 10,000 years
3) Human action/inaction has caused 3MI and Chernobyl.
To compete without subsidies (like insurance) you need to compete with $3-$4 gigajoule natural gas for either coal or nuclear. The biggest cost of nuclear is the containment (uranium not thorium).
Matt Schilling says: March 18, 2011 at 8:08 am
“…nuclear-powered cars cruising down our highways. and nuclear-powered jets darting across our skies.”
Try as I might, I can’t see how you power a jet engine with a nuclear reactor.
A side issue but related – the UK government is slashing the ‘feed in’ tariff for large scale solar farms by 70% – and naturally the investors who were, let’s face it, only in ‘solar’ for the ‘feed in’ tariff – are fuming.
The rest of us just feel that economic chickens are coming home to roost – and maybe – just maybe – some sense and reason will start to become a feature of the ‘renewables’ lunacy…
After the hysteria about Japan has died down, I think the incident will actually be good for nuclear’s reputation. One of the worst conceivable accidents will have happened, but (probably) only a handful of people will have died, a few more will have got radiation related illnesses, but there will have been no great disaster.
“Jeremy says:
March 18, 2011 at 8:34 am
FWIW: Discussing the merits of equipment based on its ability to safely withstand an event with a probability of around 1 in 1000 years is pretty much teh definition of insanity. If you did this then you probably would never get in a car, bus, train, boat or plane…”
Jeremy – I have never designes a nuclear power plant, but I have designed many large dams. All are designed to resist the Probable Maximum Flood (PMF) and the Maximum Credible Earthquake (MCE), both established on deterministic bases and have requrrence intervals of much greater that 1 in 10,000 years as established probabilistically.
I would like to think that nuclear plant design criteria are at least as conservative.
Ira –
(1) Correction required, I suspect. You say “Of course, at 8.9 or 9.1, this was over 100 times more powerful an earthquake than the 7.0 for which the system was apparently designed.” However, each order of magnitude for quakes represents an increase of 32. A magnitude 8.0 is 32 times a 7.0, and a magnitude 9.0 is 32 times an 8.0. Therefore a 9.0 is 1,000 times a 7.0 (or more precisely 1,024 times), not 100 times.
(2) Tsunami risk is generally underestimated in the world, probably because of the long time between major tsunamis. For example, the great Lisbon quake in 1755 was somewhere offshore (similar to the recent Japan quake) and produced a tsunami which was perhaps 10m high in Portugal and possibly as high as 20m in North Africa. How many countries affected by that tsunami now take any form of precaution?
@Snotrocket says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:50 am
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft
I found out “clean coal” does not mean reduced mercury and sulphur but lower carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is what feeds us.
Fossil fuels, and only fossil fuels, make more life on Earth.
If true then even more reason to go to clean coal & other similar:
http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast
Those promoting either nuclear power or clean coal are doing it with the thought that this will reduce the carbon dioxide “pollution” of our atmosphere which is sure to lead to climate catastrophe. That is asinine because carbon dioxide is not causing any warming and has not been responsible for any at anytime for the last century. If you look at the temperature history of the last 100 years you will see this: from 1910 to 1940 there was a steady temperature increase that came to an end with World War II. Bjorn Lomborg of all people, a believer in anthropogenic global warming, demonstrated that it can be attributed to sunspot cycle influence which is part of coming out of the Little Ice Age (see his figure 146 in the Skeptical Environmentalist). This is just one reason why the warmists hate him. The other reason is that he advocates a moderate, common-sense approach to global warming that is anathema to the alarmist crowd. But this early twentieth century warming was followed by very slight cooling that is recorded from the forties to the seventies. This, too, follows from his graph of sunspot cycle influences. Where his graph and current temperature part company is in the eighties and nineties where the temperature shoots up but his graph is still horizontal. But it turns out that this sudden upsurge of warming in the eighties and nineties is faked and the graph’s predictions are right. Satellites that have been recording global temperature for the last thirty one years simply cannot see this so-called “late twentieth century warming.“ What they do see in this time slot is a temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree for almost twenty years while the mean temperature remains unchanged. And these temperature oscillations correlate with real events – the alternation of warm El Nino and cool La Nina periods in the Pacific that have a global climate influence. Comparing these satellite temperatures with temperatures reported by NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office shows that all three have been falsified to show a non-existent warming. If you look at the entire thirty one year record of satellite measurements you realize that this lack of warming is not an exception but the rule. It turns out that the only global warming during this entire period was a short stretch that started with the 1998 super El Nino, raised global temperature by a third of a degree, and then came to a stop in 2002. The cause of this step change was oceanic, a super El Nino and its aftermath, and not anthropogenic. What followed was a six year warm period I call the twenty-first century high that ended with the 2008 La Nina cooling. A third of a degree does not sound like much but it is fully half of what has been attributed to the entire twentieth century. This, and not some greenhouse effect is the cause of the very warm first decade of our century. The oscillatory temperatures that were interrupted by the 1998 super El Nino returned with the 2008 La Nina and will be our climate future. The 2008 La Nina has already been followed by the 2010 El Nino and we are now half way through the next La Nina that came after that. The El Nino phenomenon has been with us since the Panamanian Seaway closed and is likely to outlast the human race. Before closing I also want to mention Arctic warming. First, it is real. Second, it is not global. Third, it is not a greenhouse warming but is caused by warm Atlantic currents that have been entering the Arctic for more than a hundred years. The absence of any carbon dioxide warming in this entire climate sequence we reviewed is what one would expect from the work of Ferenc Miskolczi. Using the NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he determined that the global annual infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere has remained unchanged for 61 years, with a value of 1.87. This means that the transparency of the atmosphere to heat radiation that carbon dioxide absorbs has not changed despite constant addition of carbon dioxide through all these years. To put it in other words: the greenhouse absorption signature of the added carbon dioxide is simply missing. This is a simple empirical observation that tells us how the real world is and and overrides any calculations from theory. It is in full accord with the absence of any greenhouse warming in the satellite record. No absorption, no greenhouse effect, case closed. To learn the full story read “What Warming?” available on Amazon.com.
Actually wouldn’t it make, for the short term, shale gas as a more viable options, since it’s already a real life process in reality and not just one of them fabled fantastical ACME “beep beep” blue prints. :p
If it can be made economical with a bigger return then what is invested then it becomes viable and will become optional.
According to wikipedia there might be one of them fabled thorium rectors ready for 2025, which means any other optional energy source would need to be economically sound to be able to compete with those reactors, and, of course, gen4 reactors which probably will be much cheaper by 2025 ‘an today.
Maybe “clean” coal is a viable option, but then it has to become economical in 15 years. Although I’m thinking it’ll take longer to convince people that coal is clean even if only “clean” and doesn’t create all them great heaps of poisonous acid waste slags, not to mention coal dust that’s such a great addition to diminished lung capacity.
So to me shale gas looks more as a viable option, for the short term at least. 🙂
If this Bloomberg article is correct, then Japan largely has only itself to blame for the current nuclear plant crisis. Very interesting reading:
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aFWC3RYALjeI&pos=12
Finally. I completely agree with Ira.
Great post
“Hager says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:18 am
As the Ira hinted the probability that all four plants, all four backup generators and the national grid would go down at the same time produces a failure scenario with an extremely low almost non existent probability.”
Don’t forget they had battery backups that ran for 8 hrs. It took 3 strikes.
1)The earthquake triggered and automatic shutdown and knocked out off-site power.
2)The tsunami was higher than the 6 m wall protecting the diesel generators that had been working, so they were knocked out when it hit. Switch to battery backup…
3)Infrastructure damage and general chaos prevented the timely restoration of off-site power or the repair/replacement of on-site power within the 8 hrs the battery backups were running.
They had a 3-layered “defense”, but all three lines were broken.
locating backup generators miles inland to protect against typhoons … harden the cabling to survive earthquakes to 11 (redundant paths of course) and you would not have had this problem in this case … maybe another problem would pop up but this problem was forseeable (i.e. earthquake followed by tsunami)
It would of course cost more but compared to the total costs of a nuke plant it would be a blip …