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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etudiant says:
March 18, 2011 at 6:31 pm
“……………Much worse may yet be in store from this disaster.”
===================
Or, heroic efforts calm fears.
From this NHK report, it looks like the fuel for the diesel generators was in tanks at the waterfront. The tanks were displaced some 300 metres inland by the tsunami.
A similar fate may have been suffered by the hydrogen burner. This (according to several reports that I’ve read) was gas-fired (CNG or LPG). A flame is used to ignite hydrogen to burn it continuously. The alternative is to use e.g. a spark plug to ignite hydrogen gas collecting in a holding tube (aka “cannon”), but that results in noisy, energetic explosions on a frequent basis. And the mutant turtles in the cooling ponds wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. 😉
Diesel engines can operate submerged. They only need to be able to breathe air, get fuel and to exhaust combustion products. Fresh air can be supplied by a tall “snorkel” and the exhaust vented through a stack.
Having provisions for an off-site generator to be shipped in as needed, relies on the necessary infrastructure still being intact. The tsunami left no roads or rail intact. Bringing one in by ship would be very risky because a tsunami from an after-shock, especially once it’s docked.
A stationary off-site generator requires substantial infrastructure and the transmission line is the most-volnerable. Towers are vulnerable to both earthquake and tsunami. Buried lines are directly susceptible to the geophysical dislocation that is usual in an earthquake.
IAEA, NISA, TEPCO and every other serious party are concerned with improving the resilience of existing and future plant under such extreme events. But right now, the focus is on management of the crisis to make it controllable. That, in a background of surrounding infrastructure having been utterly devatated by the tsunami, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, leaving them with little shelter, clean water, food or warmth.
I have enough patience to wait until those people at real risk from the environment are suitably accommodated and employed while they clean up the big mess of the tsunami and to rebuild the region; before actions are taken at other nuclear plants to make them more resilient, should there be a plausible risk. But to determine those actions, the situation must first be controllable so that investigators can collect data and determine what actually failed and why it failed.
Suggestions that the reactors shouldn’t be built in an earthquake-prone zone don’t take into account that the energy-hungry nation of Japan is entirely in such a zone; or perhaps they do take it into account, wishing for the Japanese to go back to living in paper houses and lighting their lives with lanterns; whilst whittling away on pieces of wood to make trinkets to sell to passing traders.
The reality is that Japan is a small country, with a large population whose life depends on consuming energy of high quality; i.e. density, availability and security.
Those suggesting that the plants be constructed inland need to look at the practicalities and the consequences if a tsunami struck. The nature of the pipeline to supply and to return water from the heat exchangers requires large amounts of complex machinery and operational energy that increases sharply with the distance and the altitude.
Regarding the evacuation of US citizens: I was gobsmacked when I saw the report on TV … evacuation from Japan to … Taiwan. To what end? To avoid the inconvenience of rolling blackouts until enough generating capacity can be brought back online?
The CANDU reactor will burn Thorium. – no real new technology needed, and a demonstration unit is to be tested in China – (quoting from the page) “Additionally, an expert panel appointed by the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) recently concluded that CANDU technology “is the ideal nuclear reactor design to further China’s nuclear power program using thorium as an alternative nuclear fuel source.” ”
CANDU reactors are heavy water moderated as opposed to light water plus graphite or other moderator.
John R;
For those who don’t know the significance of the heavy water moderation comment:
“moderation” slows emitted neutrons enough to allow capture and thus cause further fission of the fuel. If the containment breaks and the H.W. drains out, the reaction stops because the fast neutrons go right past the fuel, and the system is “shut down”.
That said, all liquid-cooled and moderated reactors have plumbing issues. The temptation to run them past their “due date” should be resisted vigorously, as degraded pipes are no joke.
Ira,
The real answer is that we need them both. Plus Hydro dams. Plus natural gas. Plus anything else that makes economic sense. Why should it be one or the other?
But the comparisons and comments are misleading. Are nuclear accidents bad? Of course. Just like when an airplane crashes, they make headlines. More people die on car accidents, but they happen every day so they’re not “front page” material. More people die in coal mine accidents in a few years (in China anyway) than all the nuclear accidents in history combined. Chernobyl was not only a bad design which resulted in the fuel rods sliding inward toward each other (instead of outward and away) when the failure occurred, the failure only happend because scientists were trying to run an experiment that exceeded the plants safety systems which kept kicking in and shutting the plant down, so they came up with the obvious solution which was to shut down the safety systems. Apparently you can get a PhD in physics without haveing to understand what safety systems are for! Three Mile Island was as you commented, staff not understanding what was going on. A harsher interpretation is that they saw readings so high, and so out of proportion to normal that they decided the instruments must be faulty and over rode…the safety systems. Same school as the Chernobyl scientists maybe? Nuclear gets a bad rap because of a very small number of accidents that are hyped out of proportion and the deaths/Gigawatt hour produced of other industries ignored.
But the saddest criticism is all the complaints about spent fuel storage. I find that amusing. What do you suppose “dirty” coal has that “clean” coal doesn’t? Coal is filthy with radioactive elements. There’s so much thorium in some coal deposits that places like South Africa are tinkering with extracting it economically from the fly ash from coal fired power plants. Coal deposits are frequently associated with radon gas, but no worries, strip mining gets rid of it by releasing it into the atmosphere. Point being that coal may be “clean” in terms of what gets released into the atmosphere, but only because some very nasty elements are scrubbed out of the either the exhaust or preprocessing. Which ever, the point is that there’s large amounts of radioactive waste and it needs to be handled safely just like the waste from the nuclear plants.
But at day’s end, what’s most economical for any given area? Answer is use THAT, and learn from everything that ever went wrong ever before and make the new plants better. Just no more super subsidized drag on the economy for the good of no one except the companies who make them wind farms and solar cells. And for the sake of the starving masses….stop the corn/ethanol insanity. You can’t help the hungry by burning the food, and with the money you save…hey! you could buy them food!
Oak Ridge National Laboratories has an analysis of coal burning. U and Th are significant constitutents of coal. The estimate that each coal-fired plant burns 5 tons of U and 13 tons of Th each year. We have spread the equivalent of several reactor loads of radioactive isotopes all over the world simply by burning coal.
Five percent of ash goes right out the stack as fly-ash. This glassy material is quite radioactive. It is in the 6 to 10 µm range, exactly the right size to be breathed deeply into the lungs and stay there. That is the preferred size of pharmaceutical aerosol droplets. Ordinarily there is little risk from alpha radiation since the skin is sufficient protection. When the ash particles sit directly on the epithelium, this sensitive tissue is diretly irradiated with short range, but powerful radiation.
About 50% of ash is collected and used in paint, wallboard and metal fabrication. These radionuclides and their decay products are potentially a significant source of domestic irradiation, since radon is a product of the decay series, and a significant cause of lung cancer. The recent discovery of radioactive chinese wallboard illustrates the severity of the problem.
The remaining ash goes into landfills and can contaminate groundwater. Coal is known to be a source of sulfur, that when burnt, becomes SO2 which transforms under the action of sunlight, ozone and water to produce H2SO4. It falls as acid rain. Coal also is the source of about 40% of mercury contamination.
Clean coal? I don’t think so. I’ll take nuclear power any day.
Phil says:
March 18, 2011 at 12:26 pm
@Snotrocket says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:50 am
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft
Phil, Wiki tells me that program was cancelled in 1958 (yes, ’58!).
As it happens, I had already seen and dismissed that item. From reading it one can see that all the ‘plane did was carry a reactor: it was not connected to or used to drive the engines.
Well, Hoser, into each life a little radioactivity must fall.
It turns out that evolution and natural selection seem to have taken natural radiation into account, because low doses seem to have a beneficial effect, stimulating a protective reaction in biological cells, preventing some types of DNA damage, and actually supressing some cancers. Who knew?
I first heard about this from Ann Coulter, who was on the O’Reilly Factor a couple days ago. Her current column says:
Here is a 2004 Blog item with more details about the good effects of low dose radiation.
Ira, heard of that thing called a free market? If there is money to be made in expanding sources of electricity, let’s remove the impediments that stand in the way of that. Clean coal? I think not.
FYI: The clean coal plant SoCo is building in Ms has green groups suing to stop it. It’s not about the environment. It’s about socialists seizing a mantra to try and enslave the world.
@Ira Glickstein, PhD says:
I first heard about it (hormesis) in talks by Theodore Rockwell that he was giving well into his 80’s. One of the interesting things this interesting man did was march with a group of soldiers to ground zero after one of the early nuclear weapons tests. They actually had the dust cloud (the entire stalk of the mushroom cloud) collapse on them as they marched in, with no respiratory protection. He was as healthy as any 80+ year-old man I’ve ever met.
He spoke of asking his colleagues in the radiation protection and emergency planning end of the nuclear business why they didn’t factor hormesis into their calculations. Their reply was basically, “if we do that, then there’s no need for our services…”
Interestingly, this is a topic the anti-hormesis establishment seems to have hijacked on Wikipedia, like the climate change topic.