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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Ira, The Register has the right take on foolishness like your post:
Things to remember:
1) The plants survived the earthquake (an earthquake bigger and badder than any they were supposed to) it was the massive tsunami which followed that broke their backs.
– I’m pretty sure we can tell which if any current or future nuclear plants may be affected by a massive earthquake/tsunami combo 🙂
2)We’ve already spent billions on the solution to the nuclear waste problem with the giant underground facility deep in the mountains of (wyoming maybe?)that now that we’ve spent all the money and used every possible contingency and built in the middle of absolutely nowhere, now they won’t let us place anything in there.
-These look pretty safe to me
The pros and cons should include the process of extraction for each. There are the theoretical health risks, and then there’s what occurs in practice. Every mine can be constructed to pose a theoretically minimal level of health risks, but how often does that actually happen?
I think this would tip the evaluation towards a preference for coal in the modern era. With more development and education nuclear would eventually win out, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
The damage to the Dai-ichi reactors was caused as a result of both the earthquake and the tsunami, but the primary cause of their reactor problems was they ran out of power to maintain the cooling pumps in the spent fuel pools once the battery stacks ran down.
Now you have no roads, no rails, no port to get supplies into the area, and 90+% of your reliable staff just got wiped away. I think they’re handling it as well as anyone could, for all the blathering and moaning of the screaming faces in the Maggot Slime Media.
JMHO.
Stories of ‘remote control’ of electricity consumption on a need-to-use basis might prove useful if they used it to switch OFF the electricity supply of anyone that actively objected to methods of production.
OT – What will Al Gorge say? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8390792/Russia-lifts-ban-on-polar-bear-hunting.html Fuzzy, yes, dangerous, even more so.
Is there any real problem with dropping solid radioactive waste (appropriately encased) into a deep Pacific trench? This would leave it far out of the food chain and well shielded from the surface, and eventually subduction currents would actually draw it into the earth’s interior.
(Even if perfectly safe, the Japan trench might be too politically sensitive, but why not the Marianas Trench, for example?)
In Japan and China, they call this the America Syndrome! 😉
A few weeks ago, Mike Smith called for thorium reactors as being safer than conventional ones. I’d like to see a post on them some day.
harrywr2 says : “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.”
AFAIK harrywr2 is correct. But as Alec Rawls pointed out, the warmist camp has redefined the term : “In the eco-leftist newspeak that spawned it, “clean coal” means that the CO2 is not exhausted into the atmosphere.“. Just one more in the long list of politically-inspired manipulations of the language – “Global Warming” -> “Climate Change”, “Carbon Dioxide” -> “Carbon Pollution”, etc.
The above comment by Lady Life Grows – “I found out “clean coal” does not mean reduced mercury and sulphur but lower carbon dioxide.” – shows that the redefinition is working. Ask the person in the street what “clean coal” means, and they will say it is about “Emissions”. And that’s another redefinition : “Emissions” does not any more mean emissions of stuff such as particles, mercury, sulphur and noxious gases, it now only means “Emissions of CO2”. And note that “CO2” has been visually redefined to be black smoke, just so there can’t be any confusion.
Ira Glickstein – My reading of your article is that by “clean coal” you are using harrywr2’s definition. But others may simply see the term and use the new definition, in which case your article pretty well ceases to make sense. IMHO you and anyone else using terms like “Clean Coal”, “Pollution”, etc, need to be very careful to define what you mean by them.
To answer my own question above, trench disposal has been proposed and apparently makes sense, but is currently prohibited by international agreements:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep
Perhaps the current crisis might prompt re-evaluation of these agreements.
Sure, clean coal looks better than a 1960’s design power plant. But a modern plant will beat clean coal six ways to Sunday. Also note that the plant on the other side of town (Fukushima Dai-ni) had all reactors in normal cold shutdown. They have a more modern design (1970’s) that doesn’t require outside power to circulate water (has steam turbine pumps that can use the decay heat to pump water).
It withstood the same quake and same tsunami as the other plant only a couple of miles away.
What we need to do is get these old plants decommissioned and replaced with new ones. It is like looking at head on collision with a Corvair and saying we need to stop producing cars. Maybe you just need to get the unsafe ones out of operation.
The real problem with waste is our idiotic disposal policy. We should recycle the waste. We should also take other waste contaminated with long half-life contamination and expose it to fast neutron bombardment and transmute it to materials that have a much shorter half-life.
This article should be required reading for every American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste&print=true
1. Energy drives the economy.
2. Fossil fuels are cheapest source of energy.
3. CO2 is an unproven danger.
4. Nuclear energy is complicated with known risks.
5. The world economy is in a severe recession and needs cheap energy to recover.
The problem is simple. All we need are politicians who can do simple problems.
I care not what party they subscribe to. I care not what they “believe in”. Until they understand, I will reserve my support and my vote at election time.
With all the gnashing of teeth over nuclear reactors… specifically the Fukushima reactors that had an energy release of around 31,622 megatons just a few miles away (quake) then were swept with the subsequent tsunami which damaged the generators since they did not have any protection from a wave that large… you have to wonder how this problem was caused by nuclear power. Even the damage that the reactors have was allegedly caused by a HYDROGEN GAS explosion… the panacea that a lot of greenies want us to run our cars off of. Speaking of which, I have yet to see any hydrogen proponent voice how they are going to deal with the high cost of material that is less susceptible to hydrogen fatigue. A brittleness that sets in to metal that has has a long exposure time to it.
Okay.. I went off tracks and missed my point.
With all the gnashing of teeth about the nuclear incident… how come no one seems to care that Chernobyl’s sarcophagus will likely collapse in about 10 years and is in poor repair? When it goes, that’s a LOT of radioactive dust that is going be lifted back into the air. A lot more radioactive material than Fukushima has released to date is going to become airborne…
Yee haw.
The only thing we’ve learned from the Japanese reactor problems is that you should not build below the water line, and you should not under-estimate where that water line will be over the life of the installation.
Simple questions, simple answers:
1) What can create a cooling failure
* If you lose power to the pumps the reactors and spent fuel pools will melt.
2) What can cause loss of power to the pumps?
* A tsunami.
3) Is a tsunami a realistic threat?
* Trick question? No sh*t, Sherlock, this isn’t Kansas!
4) The fuel rods in the spent fuel pools are placed with great care to maximize storage and to minimize nuclear reaction. Is it possible in a large earthquake for these rods to be displaced in such a way that increased reaction is likely? The water in the pool is purified. Is it possible for contaminated water – sea water, specifically, to increase reactive activity?
* What’s that siren? Whoa – gotta go, bud!
Surely a failure of systems or technology is a subsequent outcome … fundamentally, it was the decision to site the facility on a beach, immediately adjacent to the most earthquake-prone, plate collision zone on Earth … incredibly ignorant, short-sighted stupidity ! …
Precautionary principle logic fail number… 192094810381. Or so.
What utter tosh. The incidents over recent weeks should stand as a testement to the safety of the nuclear industry.
An older reactor design, hit by an earhquake 5 times more powerful than had been designed for, followed by a tsunami of unimaginable destructive power. Despite their world turning brown and sticky the operators of the plants never lost control, they never ran out of options and there was no substantiative public health risk.
Predictably apocalyptic pronouncements from anti-nuclear campaigners – such as the BBC – notwithstanding, the reality is that the outcome – that these plants survived the very worst nature could throw at them – was a triumph for nuclear safety, and should provide confidence in the construction of newer designs of reactor (that will of course take the experience of Fukushima into account in their design), especially in parts of the world not succeptible to such weather extremes.
*edit – “weather extremes” should read “tectonic extremes”.
Did anyone pick up on the obvious failure point at Fukushima Dai-ichi complex? No? How about the emergency generators were located at ground level. In an area that has 30 foot tsunami walls protecting it … the walls were topped, the generators washed away.
My guess is they never thought the walls would be topped, as was the design criteria for a smaller earthquake. The reactors survived, because of their design safety margins(likely) but the emergency power generators were washed away or rendered unusable.
It’s the biggest oops of the whole debacle. Bottom line, they should have known and made provisions for better emergency backup electricity for the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. The clue was the flood walls. Plan for failure in depth.
If CO2 is responsible for global warming and if that warming imposes net costs on society, then imposing a Pigovian tax at a rate per ton that is equal to the harm per ton is the economically efficient solution to the problem.
If it is eventually proven that CO2 is not causing significant warming, or if the warming it causes generates a net benefit to society the same rules of logic apply. This leaves only the positive component of the CO2 emmisions.
If, at the margin, CO2 emissions contribute positively to agricultural productivity then the economically efficient solution would be Pigovian tax calculated exactly the same way as it would be in the case where CO2 emissions were assumed to be harmful. This, of course yields a negative tax, or subsidy. We may be saying goodbye to all the chatter about “Cap and Trade”, and fighting over the design of a new “Burn and Earn” program. The Chinese would be selling turnkey coal fired plants like hotcakes. I wonder if they still make coal furnaces for home use.
Look at LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) thermal reactors, developed, proven, and run at Oak Ridge 1965-1969. Start it up on Monday shut it down on Friday, go home for the weekend. Start it up again on Monday. Abandoned because it didn’t feed the weapons program with fissionable waste products. Who would possibly want small scale, non-pressurized, self regulating reactors that automatically shut themselves down if they overheat, and produce no plutonium waste.
Naw, let’s let the Chinese recapture this technology and leave us in the dustbin of history:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/china_thorium_bet/
A little history:
I have 2 main concerns about nuclear reactors/sites:
1.) The regulatory agencies seem to bend over backwards over repeated safety violations. There, there…no need to worry…we’ll just be back in 6 months and everything will be fine & dandy.
2.) Spent fuel rods lying about the globe in pools of water. Accidents looking for a place to happen.
Clean up the act, and nuclear could be the golden boy of energy. Keep shoving the problem down the road and there will be more accidents and uninhabitable lands.
The elephant in the room here is not the fuel in the reactor containments, but rather the presence of massive amounts of spent fuel, now exposed to the open air because of the blast damage to the reactor buildings.
That fuel is in 7 pools, some of which may have been breached by the explosions. Some fuel is clearly already exposed to air. There could not have been hydrogen explosions in the reactor 4 building if the pool were intact and the fuel submerged.
There is a serious study by the DOE done in the 80s which analyzed the risks posed by this spent fuel. It concluded that a reactor load of this material left uncooled and exposed would heat enough to boil off its long lived radioactive volatiles such as cesium 137, a fission product with a 30 year half life. It concluded that the projected amount of contaminants could render hundreds of square miles uninhabitable for centuries.
That is reality and thus far, Japan has been spared only because the winds have blown the plume directly out to sea.
The decision by the US Navy to stand much further offshore, 100+ miles rather than 30, indicates that the plume is a real threat within less than that distance. The recommendation by the US government for Americans to stay at least 50 miles away also supports that view.
Much worse may yet be in store from this disaster.
My two cents: nuclear power is too expensive, too dangerous, and creates a toxic spent fuel legacy for future generations to deal with. They will not thank us for this. We knew better, as a civilization, and we did not do better.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/reconsider-nuclear-power-is-it-ever.html
No earthquake has EVER caused a fossil fuel power plant to emit dangerous radioactivity. Floods put their fires out. Tsunamis do also.
Natural gas power plants beat all others, hands down, every time. The power produced for the dollar spent to build is far better, and the power produced per unit of fuel consumed is far, far better (59 percent for natural gas, vs 33 percent for nukes).
Nukes also use far more cooling water (that’s a river, mostly), even when located on the coast (like South Texas Nuclear Power Plant in Texas) which uses Colorado River water (and people upstream CANNOT take it) even though it is right on the coast.
For every unit of power produced, a nuke requires at least two units of cooling. So, for 1000 MW of electricity, 2000 MW of heat goes into the river. Or into a cooling tower. But, for a natural gas fired plant of 1000 MW, only about 800 MW of heat goes into the river or cooling tower. That’s about 2.5-to-1 ratio. Saves river water for more productive uses, like drinking or farming.