Safety of nuclear reactor

http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/earthquake.html details the Peldon earthquake of 1884, the strongest recorded in Britain. The shock wave bounced off a geological fault underneath the river Colne near Colchester, and the reflected wave was felt in Belgium. Reputedly, it is overdue for another one. Bradwell Nuclear Power Plant, undergoing decommissioning is on a straight line between the epicentre and Belgium, so this item is of interest. There are a number of nuclear plants along the French coast.

I'm not so sure about Peldon. It does sound like a big one (by UK standards), but I wonder how accurate measurements at that time were. It could have been an over/under estimate. Somewhere in CR4 there is related chat on Earthquakes, which interested me because I live very near to Folkestone. It did feel pretty amazing (though I'm sure other parts of the world would have thought it no big deal) and people are still repairing their houses. Dugeness nuclear is just along the road...

I think it is a very good point to bring out to public notice that earth quake and Tsunami can play havoc with nuclear power plants. In India, Kalpakkam power plant run into danger due to unexpected Tsunami wave reaching east cost of south India. Water entered houses and perhaps the reactors were still safe. People in the zone were killed as they were drowned in water of Tsunami. Now, people sure will have greater preparation to face such unexpected disaster.

Our nuclear power plants in India have a regular emergency handling mock drills, and not only the nuclear reactor staff is involved, the local villagers are also given training and over 30km zone can be evacuated just putting an emergency siren on. Coordination among Reactor Safety group and the public administration is highly planned and 1000s of transport vehicles come into action within few minutes. Mock emergency drills are conducted without prior notice and will full details and this has been a practice for more than two decades now even though for first time they faced this Tsunami water, which was not at all in their plans. Fortunately, government had built two sets of housing for people, one near sea coast and another 10km away from sea coast in relatively safer zone. I lived for 22 years near sea cost housing within 100m from sea and never felt that there exists such a danger within few meters when I was watching sea waves each evening on sands of the beach. I always felt that the sea had limits. Now that we know the problem and expect trouble any time, people are getting ready for it with defense plans.

In one reactor, the roof of the reactor collapsed while the reactor was under construction and perhaps may be either design fault or contractors problem. Perhaps the quality engineers inspect only after the work is completed and they did not get the chance to inspect as the roof was already on the floor.

We did not face any serious accidents in India and our nuclear reactors are actually very small one and may look like a toy reactors compared to the reactors in the world. Nuclear power is not very significant in India and is hardly a small fraction of total power generated.

I think it is a very good point raised here and it is better to know ahead of time than after the disaster takes place. Civil engineering and quality mechanical engineering have to play a much greater role here. I can not say much about it as I am a physicist.

"...make sure this kind of event doesn't happen?"

Well, if you develop a way to prevent earthquakes, I want a piece of the action.

Some points to consider:

* If you must be inside of a building when a big quake hits, be sure that the building is a nuclear power plant. Nuclear plants are better engineered, reviewed and built to higher seismic standards than any other structures.

* What happened in Japan that you want to prevent? To date, the most serious allegation from the moron press corps is that 1200 liters (312 gallons) of makeup water leaked. The radiation levels in this cleaned up water is too low to cause any health problem if it were directly consumed.

* The natural radiation levels of seawater are at about the same level as this discharged water. I suggest that people operating at a high level of ignorance stay away from beaches and never go swimming. There are 4.5 BILLION tons of uranium (from natural sources) in the oceans of the world. Evacuate all cities and resort areas from this contaminated stuff. I suggest a setback of at least 2 miles from the oceans for safe human habitation. Some of that salt spray will have uranium and other nasty stuff in seawater.

* 9 people dead, 10,000 displaced, many buildings destroyed, and the moron press corps wants to spend their time obsessing over nuclear reactors that went through the whole episode with the least damage of any type of structure?

* How about the following headline: "Nuclear facilities experienced only minor damage while most everything else collapsed. Why aren't our buildings put up with the same level of intelligent engineering as nuclear power plants???"

* The air borne debris from the collapsing buildings and breathed in by the Japanese is millions, perhaps billions, of times more significant as a health issue than the release of the slightly radioactive water.

* I do NOT recommend the practice, but there are many people who drink and bathe in naturally radioactive water with higher levels of activity than the water released from the Japanese reactor, and have done so their entire lives with no adverse health effects. Water that is naturally radioactive is not controlled by the NRC. It is nonsense to obsess about small quantities of slightly radioactive water produced by man when nature has vast quantities of it flowing into water supplies and into the oceans.

In the USA, an example is the radioactive spring in Saratoga Springs, New York. Here is an example from the Greek island of Iraria going back 2400 years:

"IKARIA's abundant therapeutic radioenergized spring sources have been identified as amongst the best in the world in terms of healing qualities, radioenergy and water supply. Since the fourth century B.C. Therma, IKARIA has been a known center for hydrotherapy as evidenced by numerous references in historical texts and by the presence of archeological remains of ancient baths. The city of Therma is the principal region on IKARIA for organized hydrotherapy, and its reputation and history date from the Classical Period. Along Ikaria's coastline there are many areas where radioenergic hot mineral springs flow into the sea from the shoreline where it is possible for one to bath/swim. The essential elements in IKARIA's therapeutic radioenergic hot mineral springs are saline radium and radonium."

Finally, some rationality.

There is such a standard press script that amounts to hand wringing, and finding anyone to ask how frightened they are.

A design basis earthquake is typically chosen to be rarely expected, say a one in 10 thousand year frequency. In addition there is significant margin in the design practice such there is substantial margin above the design.

The major intent of this design is safe shutdown of the reactor and containment of its radioactivity therein. There can be seismic failures in other areas where consequence are minimal. If the earthquake is severe enough, that is to be expected.

I'm sure that there will be some important lessons to be learned from this event, and the systematic review of the performance of both seismically designed equipment .and non-seismic equipment for that matter, will be valuable. Also, the review of the actual seismic event and forces in relation to the selected design basis.

It's just going to be a while before press info will be worth the paper it's printed on.

That is a good point with respect to increase safety by design. Reactor core can be dumped in deep to avoid nuclear explosion effect on ground.

Something to note. during the Loma Prieta earthquake, Diablo Canyon which is south of the epicenter, did not suffer any damage (Cal Poly, the state university nearby did). about 75% of the distance between diablo Canyon and Loma Prieta, north of Loma Prieta, the entire Bay Bridge collapsed pancaking the commuters. Maybe we need the same level of safety in bridge design we get in Nuclear facilities design, especially in Cities that have a established history of poor performance in seismic events.

Shyam: I'm not sure I understaood your post correctly, about dumping the reactor core "in deep" to avoid nuclear explosion effect... How do you propose to move the damaged, leaking nuclear core to (I assume) the deep ocean, hundreds of miles from the continental shelf. How do you think there could be a nuclear detonation from a nuclear power plant core? The explosion at Chernobyl was due to ignorance of the fire fighters, pouring water onto glowing carbon blocks, and thus generating explosive gas pockets which then ingited, detonated and blew much of the core open. Remember the photos of the firefighter on the roof, kicking glowing pieces of nuclear fuel off the roof? How many nuclear submarine cores did the Russians dump into the ocean near Russia and the Nordic countries? What environmental disaster will they eventually cause? I enjoy your posts, but you lost me on this one.

Core is hinged and hanging over a deep well of depth 200m and if something goes wrong, then simply drop the reactor core down the depth and bury it there. Even if explosion takes place after melting the core, it will still remain confined like the one at Pokharan under ground explosion.

Portions of the roof of the containment building of Kaiga-1 fell in a bizarre accident

Read the last para on this link

http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2403/pn240304.htm

Not a good idea at all. The contamination of the water table would be unacceptable.

Nuclear plants are designed to completely contain the core under accident conditions, which is the correct approach.

In reply to #s 4 and 5, I have to say that it would be eye-opening to have the roof of a nuclear reactor building collapse at any time! Where was gov't oversight, supervisors, inspections, concrete testing? I note that much of the building that the U.S. has paid for in Iraq has been of very shoddy construction, and some of the buildings are already failing to one degree or another. Supposedly, the sale of Iraqi oil was to pay for all reconstruction in Iraq, but the last I heard, they hadn't contributed a dime. How many $ Billionairs were made in the oil-for-food program in Iraq? In some of the Iraqi palaces, there were stacks upon stacks of still-wrapped packs of US $100 bills. Re construction, the Seabrook NH nuclear plant containment building was constructed such that the largest SAC bomber (from nearby SAC base Pease AF Base) could not penetrate the containment building in a direct hit. There are two separate concrete walls. I don't have the data at my fingertips (I used to take my university classes thru the nuclear plant until they were ready to start fueling and closed the facility), but as I recall, the outer concrete wall was 6 feet thick and used 3-inch thick rebars. The rebars could not be welded due to the conduction of heat away from the weld spot, so each of many thousands of rebar intersections was enclosed in a ceramin "pot" and the joints were thermite welded. One would hope that the construction company who poured the concrete ceiling/roof of the nuclear plant in India is not involved in vehicle or aircraft construction!! As an aside, speaking of low level nuclear waste, don't forget that potassium is a mandatory element in the human body, and all natural potassium and its salts contain 0.0118 % K-40 isotope, which is spontaneously decaying all the time, via beta (-), beta (+) and electron capture modes. One subject of study and speculation is how much genetic change is due to the K-40, and other naturally radioactive elements in the body. Your posts were interesting! Thanks.

There are strict seizmic ratings. The equipment installed must past destructive tests. They are very safe in the U.S.

Generally, the test is not destructive. If you destroy the equipment it fails.

There are two types of Seismic tests

OBE-operating baseline earthquake

SSE-Safe shutdown earthquake.

You test the equipment first to make sure it works, you perform 5 OBE test, generally 50 % of SSE.

You retest the equipment to make sure it still works, compare to baseline.

Then perform 2 SSE. These must envelope the Plants Required Response Spectra.

Retest the equipment. The equipment is considered qualified Seismically if it works before, during and after the event.

Seismic plots are frequency and acceleration, most earthquakes are low frequency, so your curve peaks around 10 Hz

The is considered Safety Related CLASS 1E Equipment.

The standards are IEEE 323 IEEE 344 IEEE 627

All forms of energy has its hazards. put your finger in a candles flame and see. Oil wells catch fire, refineries blow up, atomic plants fail, radioactive wastes are released, the land, sea and air is polluted, the list of risks go on and on. When a accident or deliberate act of terrorism occurs, the public outcry is deafening. But no where is there the cry to stop producing the energy. In fact, the demand is for more and more energy. Thus, it is the engineer's impossible task to design all sources of energy to be fail safe and fool proof. It is our job to do our best and suffer the blame for any failure.

Atomic energy has its hazards, fossil fuels have their hazards, even running water is a hazard. So, what is the engineer to do? We can and have stopped building atomic power plants in the USA. We are moving from the oil economy to the hydrogen economy. We do very strict hazard analysis, knowing that if it can happen, it will happen, looking for what can go wrong. But still, the blame is ours when it does go wrong. And still, the public demands, "damn the torpedoes, give us more energy!" Ladies and Gentlemen, I am an old dinosaur, retired; I leave it to you to make our make the fool-proof energy sources to satisfy the demands of the fool.

There is no one standard for seismic design of a nuclear power plant. Generally the design spec is agreed to by the utility and the regulating authority when the plant site is agreed upon.

Something to keep in mind is that an earthquake is only a 6.8 at the epicentor, it usually weakens as you move out from the epicenter. While there are geoligic features that can focus the earthquake, many of these are known and many possible sites are ruled out for these reasons.

As a former nuclear engineer, the reporting on this has been really bad. It sounds to me like a couple of gallons of water from systems that never see high amounts of radiation.

It is my understanding that the leak occurred from drums of water stored on the site. The plant's plumbing was secure. Having lived through several earthquakes in Japan in the mid 90's (including Kobe), I can state without a doubt that things fall over, and water wil splash out of a vessel during the course of a significant earthquake. Even things like concrete and rebar fail when the loads are greater than the design limit.

Natural radioactivity is much more abundant than most people think:

think about granite mountains (yosemites el capitan or chinas holy mountains or everywhere else) and beautiful houses and pavements and other artifacts made from it,

- all contain significant amounts of uranium and its decay products.

Mean concentration is 150g per cubic meter and very near a level where extraction may be economically feasible.

(Some sedimentary rocks contain much more!)

So get out of reach of any dust, soil, hill, valley or mountain.

What should really be done is to prevent dry grinding or other dust production from granite without brathing air being filtered!

Think also about the naturally radioactive potassium in our body this contributes a significant amount to the total radiation we will get.

In this moment some political significant people from Germany go mad because a big transformer burnt in a nuclear power plant. All political parties are involved there is a big rumor - driven not only by the rainbow press - that reactors are not safe.

Have a look at the canadian CANDU reactor that was discussed here some time ago.

This and its newer version is inherently safe (some others too) and will not fail catastrophically by a sudden loss of coolant (earthquake or ordinary reason, terrorists or simple overpressure failure or corrosion or stress corrosion bursts ).

So if we argue towards these better reactors for future systems may be we are successful to implement a better reactor type for the future.

RHABE

All current reactor designs proposed for construction in the US, Japan and Europe are extremely safe. The probability of an accident impacting the health of the general public is so small right now that you need a microscope to measure it. While nice to make anything even safer, there is no pressing concern in the safety arena.

Nuclear power has issues, but safety is not one of them. The number one issue is economics. How do you get one built in a timely manner with every wild-eyed wacko filing law suits to stop it or substantially delay it?

No large manufacturing/construction/energy industry has a better safety record than nuclear power, and that is with the old designs of nuclear plants.

The biggest nuclear blunder to date was Chernobyl, which occurred more than 20 years ago. This was a poorly designed Russian reactor of very large size, greater than 1000 MW. It was a design basis accident with operators intentionally driving it into its unstable state.

To date, approximately 60 people (the last official number was 56) have died from the accident, most of whom were first responders to the accident. Expert estimates range to perhaps a total of 4,000 people will have their lives shortened over the 100 years following the accident, although this is speculation and only time will tell. Most of the impact is and will be to the people involved in the cleanup, not the general public. (It is interesting that if you ask the average person on the street about the death toll to date from Chernobyl the typical response is a number between 10,000 and 500,000 such is the reach of the moron press corps and their disinformation propaganda).

While horrible and heart rending for the people impacted, think of the more horrendous accidents in other industries. World-wide, many more than 1,000 people die every year from extracting coal, and this does not count the more than 100,000 people whose lives shortened every year due to ingesting or breathing the discharges from coal fired plants. The EPA estimates the number to be 30,000 for the USA alone.

The Bhopal chemical accident in India killed about 18,000 people immediately after the accident.

A very interesting fact is that nuclear workers have longer life expectancies than most other professions. Lawyers and bankers live substantially shorter lives than nuclear workers, for example. Consequently, a person obsessed with human health should be working to eliminate lawyers as a way of improving health statistics and not nuclear power.

If it can be developed, it seems that the P⁺ + He³ fusion linear rocket would be even safer, it seems. There is no residual radiation to contend with. The last I heard is that NASA is still working on it but I am not sure this is continuing. I can't seem to find any information any more than 2000 on this project. Closely akin to this is the Plasma rocket being used and tested with our unmanned space probes. The magnetic mirror linear plasma rocket is the forerunner of the fusion rocket, too. I believe Russia is building one test unit as well. Anyway, any fusion reactor that does NOT produce fast (or slow) neutrons would be relatively free of residual radiation and thus benefit from reductions in heavy shielding. It is a shame that much of this ongoing research is still somewhat hidden and hard to find.

But, of course, if one were to study the NASA site, one would find that at least some thought is being given to advanced propulsion such as warp drive. I doubt that this would happen, but who knows, stranger things have come about. Who would have ever thought 30 years ago that Nanotechnology would promise the advances we are seeing in medicine, physics, chemistry, and computers. All hail to research, Christ said that all would be revealed. Who ever thought He meant while man was still living on earth?

The saving grace of Jesus Christ is in the here and now. It will be a long time, if ever, for fusion power to be as reliable.

A prediction: If fusion power is ever commercially viable, the wacko left will not like them much better than current fission reactors. People born with the ignorance gene and the lawyer gene will find or invent plenty of reasons to dislike them.

The fusion reactions that are economical for power production, i.e., it takes less energy for the entire fuel cycle compared to what you get out from the generator, produce lots of fast neutrons and consequently the materials surrounding the reaction chambers become activated and are high level gamma radiation sources when the plants are shut down. The huge neutron flux from a fusion reactor is a serious materials science issue for any fusion reactor.

Tritium needs to be bred and stored. Whenever Tritium leaks out, the wackos will be out in force. Tritium is very difficult to contain, so a certain "normal" leakage rate will probably have to be accepted.

Fusion reactors do not have a heavy metal radioactive core to melt and cause havoc. When the fusion reactions stop, the production of radiation stops, except for shine from the previously activated materials.

Some big breakthrough is needed to get net energy at affordable prices if it is ever going to be viable. The "mimic the sun" and implosion approaches to date have been big and expensive failures after many decades of trying with a low probability of future success. The overall economics and the cost of power are major issues even if they work. Many who have analyzed the economics contend that even if net energy production is achieved that it will not be possible to produce electricity that is competitive with fission power or coal.

Copius amounts of power can be generated by fission reactors at reasonable cost. Using uranium and thorium fed breeder strategies, we can produce electricity indefinitely. After a thousand years of fission power, perhaps by then we will have a viable fusion reactor design.

It is instructive to observe how old and tested and mature are fission power technologies. For example, the big French fuel reprocessing plant uses the PUREX process that was developed by the USA in the 1940s. The borosilicate glass encapsulation process for the small amounts of high level nuclear waste products is again a very old and reliable technology.

Again, current fission reactors are very very safe, so it it not necessary to wait for the development of any new technologies to reap huge environmental rewards from a combined nuclear and so-called "green" strategies working in concert.

Hi edykes,

do you have an estimate about the necessary purity of a material for the plasma tube not to be activated by the neutron flux?

The JET did burn with a plasma that caused fusion in a rate that produced more total energy than was put into the heating of the plasma.

But after 1 to 10 seconds this had to be stopped and now the tube is so highly radioactive that nobody will ever be allowed to come near.

The propagating people claim that the next generation will have a blanket of lithium inside , to generate some fuel (tritium) and to prevent activation.

This seems good but I fear that they will need ultrapure material? What are the worst elements? Co, Ni, Fe?

Same question for the reaction chamber for the spheres in the NIF experiments.

I agree with you that fusion reactors may never work economically. But why not funding research until the situation will be clear.

RHABE

The solid materials are going to be activated with such an extremely high intensity and high energy neutron flux, you cannot prevent it. Some materials are more easily activated than others. There is some talk about attempting to use composites, which would have less of a problem.

All common metals that would be economical become highly activated.

The Lithium does not prevent activation, it will simply lessen it some due to the shielding provided. The Lithium is nasty stuff.

Lithium burns and explodes when exposed to air or water. Fires are difficult to put out, you need special chemicals in order to smother a Lithium fire.

Actually, the situation is already clear. No one is even remotely close to making it work for normal power production. Even the biggest optimists say that it will take hundreds of billions of dollars and more than 20 years just to prove feasibility.

It engineering studies showed that fusion could provide big economic benefits, such as cheaper power, there would at least be a reason for heavy investment.

Investing in fusion research should be done at a lower level. It is not at all obvious that throwing large amounts of government money at it will do much good.

Fusion is one of those "the grass looks greener on the other side of the hill" things. People always get excited about things that do not exist in the energy field, and then when they do exist, they protest them.

Clearly, here is the appropriate course of action:

* Use current and future generations of FISSION reactors. Economically and environmentally, their penetration in the USA energy mix should be about 40%. The French get 75% of their power from nuclear power, and they are the largest exporters of electricity in the world.

* Fission power can easily provide electrical power in substantial amounts at economical cost for the next 1,000 years, at least.

* The next generation high temperature fission gas (Helium) reactors offer the opportunity to use direct cycle gas turbines and have good fuel breeding ratios with extremely high thermal efficiencies. These have far more promise than fusion reactors.

* The only reason with some validity for expediting fusion reactors is safety concerns. However, fission reactors are already incredibly safe and operating with an AVERAGE capacity factor of over 90% all 103 reactor plants in the USA each year delivered at a price that is as low as burning coal in the older coal-fired plants that have no expensive emissions controls. This is incredible performance, especially when at least 5% of the loss of capacity factor is due to refueling outages. That any complex industrial technology can accomplish something is truely amazing. Man, this is a technology that delivers. It is absolutely the premier way to make base loaded power in this age of global warming conern.

* Invest in fusion power at a low level realizing that it will be a long time (such as 100 years or more) before we see a return, if ever. Unless, of course, some smart guy has a big genius idea in the meantime that changes things overnight. It is interesting to note that most brilliant ideas that change the game come about almost independently of the money spent.

* There is no need for fusion reactors, and there are no good reason to try and expedite the technology. Spending money on something too quickly only wastes a lot of money. There are alternative good uses for this money, such as education, housing, etc., instead of welfare for nuclear scientists.

Serious difference between fission and fusion is the amount of fuel used and the amount of energy generated and these two things are very significant. You can not suggest to back off as that will push things backward. After 500 years, we will not have this fission fuel worth using and lots of problems of stored waste material from reactors. This problem will be so massive and grave that it will scare to death both scientists and governments in just another 100 years and not to talk of another 400 years after that. World will find out ways to safer fusion energy and they are going slow as there are many people like you putting pressure on others who can produce results otherwise. Sure fusion needs different material and energy handling systems, so these will be discovered in time. Fusion will come much earlier than 100 years and perhaps in a decade or two. On arrival of fusion, the use of fission will become almost criminal and small countries will still try using fission. Fusion era will be another tough economic regime that will change the policies of the world in much worst way. It will almost bring back slavery of the olden era and government heads will become the slave provider. If they are not now then they will become soon to that level. These slaves will put on good cloths so not to worry if they will look all that bad and they will also get good food. It is going to be mind game of who rules whom.

While we talked about equality and better exchange of information link between nations and fear for worst future never died down or ever was buried. 160 nations in the world and only few names to count on top and many of us do not figure out names of the countries that exist and they are yet to communicate with us. Just look at who are talking here and what are those people in remaining 150 countries are doing now? I always have greater hope for better future, but can easily figure out the lurking danger. We all need to be watchful.

After recycling fuel, the remnant of high level waste that cannot be reused is about the size of two telephone booths, completely packaged for safe storage, for one year of operation of a 1,000 MW fission reactor at 100% power.

This is many many times less volume than the waste products from most everything else of comparable scale and easily managed.

High level waste storage is a political football and point of debate for propaganda artists, it is not a technical problem.

Looked at another way, if the processed and encapsulated high level wastes were simply dumped into the deep ocean trenches in the Pacific, no one would ever suffer a health problem. There is no way that man can compete with the 4.5 billion tons of radioactive Uranium already in the oceans from natural sources.

Statistically, even if the RAW high level wastes were simply sent to the bottom of these trenches in steel drums that will leak in just a few years, no discernable health effect could ever be observed due to the huge dilution factor of the deep trench and the gigantic volume of the oceans.

After about 300 years the activity levels of the high level waste products declines to a level below the level of the original ore.

The very long half life stuff, Uranium and Plutonium, are reprocessed into new nuclear fuel and burned up in reactors.

There is no lack of fission fuel with breeding and reprocessing. In fact, with fast breeder reactors, just the U-238 already mined could power the world for 100 years without digging up another ton of uranium ore.

There are 4.5 billion tons of Uranium in just seawater alone, and there is twice as much Thorium as there is Uranium. Producing power for 1,000 years is easy to achieve.

Those scared of nuclear waste products should never ride in an airplane, get an x-ray or have a medical isotope fed into their bodies. These are all substantially larger sources of radiation for you than what you would ever see from nuclear waste.

Interestingly, the largest radiological hazard today is coal. The uranium, radium and Thorium in the ash remaining after combusting coal is not controlled. There have been hundreds of thousands of tons of these nuclear species spewed out for the past 200 years from coal-fired power plants.

If India USA nuclear treaty is bottle necked for just waste fuel storage and waste fuel reprocessing then this problem is not all that small. For the last 20 years there was technology ban on India just for that small fuel reprocessing and use and the same problem we talk about Korea and Iran and WMD in Iraq. Did you compute properly the total fuel waste in 100 years in entire world with each developed and developing country having 100 nuclear reactors of 1000MW each. Are you only thinking of few countries and dumping waste in Australia or in the sea near other countries to experiments with them or dumping them in Antarctica or in the no-mans space above.

Let us place the figures that are realistic for 100 years and making it 70% nuclear fission as other forms of fuel will not last that much time and 30% power can be from other sources like hydro-electric, wind, solar, hydrogen, chemical, bio fuel etc.

I will leave it up to you to determine the number of reactors needed world wide.

Let's take a look at 1000 reactors running at 100% capacity for one year. The volume of reprocessed and encapsulated high level waste for one of these plants for one year is less than 25 m^3 (25 cubic meters). Thus, for one year of operation we have 25,000 m^3 and over 100 years the total is 25x10^6 m^3.

Now, one cubic kilometer is 1x10^9 meters. Thus it takes 4,000 years for 1000 fission reactors to create reprocessed, encapsulated and packaged high level waste volume of one cubic kilometer. As an exercise, the reader may calculate the volume of the earth in cubic kilometers (hint: the number is unbelievably huge).

For full disclosure, there is also a stream of low level wastes that is not represented in the numbers above. This consists of things like wipes to clean up minor spills inside of the plant, contaminated workers garments, filters, etc. However, to the best of my knowledge, even the big opponents of nuclear energy do not claim that this low level waste stream represents any significant health hazard.

The great advantage of nuclear power is that the waste streams are small and it is economically feasible to contain it all, which is not the case for other technologies.

It is amazing that the wacko left propaganda artists with their political science degrees have polluted the minds of an entire generation. Here we have a huge advantage for nuclear power, and amazingly people choose to believe the wacko left instead of scientists.

Looked at another way, Al Gore and all of Europe are running around saying that you have to believe in global warming because there is scientific consensus among the experts in climate. OK, following the same logic, you have to believe in fission power because there is consensus among energy experts.

India is not a very good example when talking about nuclear energy. The government cannot get out of its own way. No program has ever been anywhere near its schedule. India has been working with nuclear since the 1950s and developed the bomb. It is a lame excuse for a nation of a billion people with a highly educated elite to claim that in all of this time they could not get it into gear because of a technology ban by the USA. For every political problem there is a negotiated solution. That India chose to screw around playing political games for decades is no one's fault but India. It was only recently that India decided that it might be a better idea to work with the Democratic West instead of the previous policy, which was to suck up to the communists. And we know the quality of reactors built by communists.

You need only look at the French nuclear program to see what can be achieved by any nation. They have the blueprint, just follow it.

India is developing the Thorium fuel cycle, which is to be commennded. If that is accomplished, it will make India a world leader in nuclear technology.

You have not computed the reactor itself as waste after 25 years. No one will assure your stock pile for 4000 years, and not even for 10 years and there has been a lot of problems of the stored fuel. There could be serious accident in stored fuel itself and them hell lot of problem in handling that. Even for simple tiny gamma sources in hospitals there were lots of problems. I think you are talking of limiting the nuclear to less than 10 countries in the world or are you talking the same thing for all or say even 25% countries of the world. Most of the developed countries reprocess the fuel or transport it elsewhere. It is not just few fuel pins that is radioactive reactor waste. radioactivity spreads to many things and they also become waste. If handled properly then perhaps waste can be reduced but may still run into waste storage related problems.

Now that India and USA are signing a treaty, its political fallout is yet to be seen in just few years. People who put pressure on others never relish to live without such practice and it does not matter what they say. Actually arm twisting mechanisms are planned, convinced as friendly and then used for the purpose they were planned.

India does not have any compulsory military training and the simple National cadet Course Rifles, which part of education program was made to drop the word Rifles and now it is called NCC. Now we are told not to reprocess the spent fuel. I am not sure if we will or we will not. We sure dislike some one else telling all that to us. India can very well accept the terms as it really has no need to reprocess spent imported fuel at all and then this treaty will run into rough weather as usual then India can reprocess all of it. Funny. I think India will develop many fast breeder reactors and use Thorium as blanket material and then there is no need to reprocess spent fuel. India is so dense populated that storage of waste is highly risky any where it may be. Event km is filled by thousands of people.

Edykes, you did not specify the thermal rating of the 1,000 reactors, such that one could get a reasonable guess as to the amount of "used" fuel generated. Speaking of the Indian gov't and regulations, inspections, etc, don't forget the roof in the nuclear reactor building that collapsed, fell down!!! What confidence level do we assign to the operating and emergency shut down controls????

The thermal rating for the nominal reactor example:

* Light Water Reactor, either BWR or PWR

* Thermal efficiency 33%

For more advanced reactors with higher thermal efficiencies, the amount of high level waste generated is proportionally smaller. For example, a high temperature gas reactor operating at 40% (easy to achieve), then the waste generated would be 33% divided by 40% or 82.5% as much.

Concerning the roof collapsing in India, that is neither here nor there. If it had not been during construction but during operation, you might have a point. It also depends upon the design of the plant. For example, in a BWR, the roof of the reactor building is NOT the containment. The containment structure is inside of the reactor building

Anyhow, the roof can fall down a hundred times during construction, but if they finally get it correctly done, verified and tested, that is what counts. Construction accidents do not necessarily have any relation to operational safety when the plant is finally up and running.

There are typically numerous construction accidents when building any large structure. If we run to the chicken coop every time there is a construction problem yelling "the sky is falling", NOTHING of significance would ever get built. My grandfather helped build the Panama Canal, and more than 10,000 people died and there was one construction mishap after the other. Should we declare it unsafe and shut it down because of what happened between 1906 and 1914?

That said, I advise that you do not hire the Indian construction company involved in that.

I don't think that there is going to be any correlation between civil engineering and construction and the operating and emergency shut down controls. Can you see a logical connection?

In nuclear plants, the problem is not shutting them down, it is keeeping them up and running. Lose control power, they shut down. A worker bangs on a pressure transducer, they shut down. During the monthly testing of all the control circuits, you make one slip they shut down. There are so many things that will shut down a nuclear plant, it makes your head swim. The circuits are fail-safe, which means that the way you shut them down is by removing power. The insertion of the control rods is by gravity in PWRs and heavy water plants.

Hi to all,

if you include the reactors that are moderated with heavy water and cooled with ordinary water then the situation changes to much less waste as the efficiency is raised significantly.

This is boosted further if thorium is included in the fuel rods. (So India can be happy about pressure from US as this will bring a big step in the positive direction.)

The raised efficiency is resulting in a longer time between refueling and a higher rate of the fuel that is used and a higher rate of conversion of U238 to U235 and a higher rate of thorium fission. And there is more time when the highly radioactive "waste" in the fuel rods are used as fissionable material and consumed to a considerable amount.

This is not possible in light water moderated reactors as these have not enough excess reactivity (neutrons generated by neutrons consumed).

The higher cost for the initial heavy water supply is counterbalanced by the lower uranium enrichment cost (1.5 versus 3.5% U235 in the fuel).

So the only (?) argument not to proceed with this approach is the NIH syndrome in the conventional reactor builders. (NIH = not invented here).

RHABE

Would anyone like to review their post to this thread in light of the new 2011 japanese data input?