Windscale Disaster

Isn't it usual for an engineer to "... push the limits past the comfort level..."?

This is, after all, how many discoveries have been made. Man on the moon comes to mind.

The Windscale Event had several indicators of trouble that were disregarded, as well as advice that went unheeded - this may be the (management level?) push you mention.

Yes it is, but in a controlled environment, not at the risk of destroying the surrounding city....

Can you say Maralinga?

I don't see the relevance...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga

Have you been tested for Covid SE? Confusion and halucinations are common symptoms.

Not sure how you missed it.

British

Nuclear irresponsibility

Denial

Coverups

Deaths.

Seems pretty straightforward.

There was also the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

As well as Discovery

Just look to today, when prudent health professionals are being jacked around by political nonsense.

Should the cure be worst than the disease?

I was taught in school that political decisions always take precedent over engineering decisions. Over the years this has proven correct. As I have stated before, the catastrophe results of failure of nuclear power plants out weigh the benefits. There are alternates. And, the spent rods must be cared for my humans for 10000 years is absurd! And, there are alternates to nuclear and fossil fueled power. The alternates would cost more, but they would be a lot safer.

But we need nuclear to reduce CO₂...and all the problems you mention can be mitigated by improved designs....You are judging nuclear energy based on failed prototypes...there are no viable alternatives...

I disagree. The risk isn't worth the reward. All those spent rods exploding in that mountain would be the end of the world as we know it. Even when spent rods are recycled, there's still some that must me isolated for 10000 years. Until the spent rods can be neutralized to have a reasonable half-life, like 30 years, stay away from nuclear energy. We can produce power without any CO2 emissions. It will cost more. But, it's worth it.

Early on, Insurance-wise, it was deemed an acceptable risk if one in 600 earth-filled dams failed, by (insuance companies), which had no (persons-of-importance) living downstream of an earth-filled dam...

It came down to who it was risky to...

What about risk to a sizable portion of the world's population? Risk is inherent in just about anything we do. Drug companies set aside funds for lawsuits in case their drug goes astray. Chemical companies do the same. Even Dept. of Transportation does the same. If an intersection or anywhere else in the system has a high number of accidents, an analysis is made to see if it's economical feasible to fix the problem. There's a monetary value assigned to death accidents, accidents that cause injury and accidents that cause no injuries. All this is added up for the preceding period. If fixing the problem will cost less than leaving the problem as is, then, it's fixed or at least they try to fix it.

For nuclear energy, add the monetary value of 100 million lives and see which is the cheapest. 100 million is a low number.

..."Explosions. While a nuclear reactor can never explode like an atomic bomb, an explosion can still occur. All power plants are a potential site for an explosion, because the fuel used, whether it is coal, uranium, or natural gas, needs to be energy dense. ... The destruction at Chernobyl was caused by a steam explosion."..Sep 11, 2014

..."At coal plants, sparks can set coal dust on fire causing an explosion. Gas leaks can cause explosions at natural gas plants. Typically at a nuclear reactor, the type of explosion seen would be a steam explosion. A steam explosion could only occur if the reactor suffered a meltdown."...

https://science.fusion4freedom.com/why-a-nuclear-reactor-cannot-explode-like-an-atom-bomb/#:~:text=Explosions,needs%20to%20be%20energy%20dense.&text=The%20destruction%20at%20Chernobyl%20was%20caused%20by%20a%20steam%20explosion.

MIT Develops Meltdown-Proof, Nuclear Waste-Eating Reactor

By Brian Westenhaus - Mar 16, 2013,

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/MIT-Develops-Meltdown-Proof-Nuclear-Waste-Eating-Reactor.html

https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/nuclear-technology-abandoned-decades-ago-might-give-us-safer-smaller-reactors

Top 10 myths about nuclear energy....

..."# 1: Americans get most of their yearly radiation dose from nuclear power plants.

Truth: We are surrounded by naturally occurring radiation. Only 0.005% of the average American’s yearly radiation dose comes from nuclear power; 100 times less than we get from coal ^[1], 200 times less than a cross-country flight, and about the same as eating 1 banana per year ^[2].

# 2: A nuclear reactor can explode like a nuclear bomb.

Truth: It is impossible for a reactor to explode like a nuclear weapon; these weapons contain very special materials in very particular configurations, neither of which are present in a nuclear reactor.

#3: Nuclear energy is bad for the environment.

Truth: Nuclear reactors emit no greenhouse gases during operation. Over their full lifetimes, they result in comparable emissions to renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar ^[3]. Nuclear energy requires less land use than most other forms of energy.

# 4: Nuclear energy is not safe.

Truth: Nuclear energy is as safe or safer than any other form of energy available. No member of the public has ever been injured or killed in the entire 50-year history of commercial nuclear power in the U.S. In fact, recent studies have shown that it is safer to work in a nuclear power plant than an office ^[4].

# 5: There is no solution for huge amounts of nuclear waste being generated.

Truth: All of the used nuclear fuel generated in every nuclear plant in the past 50 years would fill a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards, and 96 % of this “waste” can be recycled ^[5]. Used fuel is currently being safely stored. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the equivalent scientific advisory panels in every major country support geological disposal of such wastes as the preferred safe method for their ultimate disposal^[6].

# 6: Most Americans don’t support nuclear power.

Truth: In a survey conducted in September 2016, it was found that 75% of Americans feel nuclear energy will be important in meeting the country’s future electricity needs, and 45 % believe this importance will increase with time. In addition, 80% of respondents favor renewing operating licenses for nuclear power plants that continue to meet federal safety standards. Also, 68% believe that nuclear power plants operating in the United States are safe and secure.

# 7: An American “Chernobyl” would kill thousands of people.

Truth: A Chernobyl-type accident could not have happened outside of the Soviet Union because this type of reactor was never built or operated here. The known fatalities during the Chernobyl accident were mostly emergency first responders ^[8]. Of the people known to have received a high radiation dose, the increase in cancer incidence is too small to measure due to other causes of cancer such as air pollution and tobacco use.

# 8: Nuclear waste cannot be safely transported.

Truth: Used fuel is being safely shipped by truck, rail, and cargo ship today. To date, thousands of shipments have been transported with no leaks or cracks of the specially-designed casks ^[9].

# 9: Used nuclear fuel is deadly for 10,000 years.

Truth: Used nuclear fuel can be recycled to make new fuel and byproducts ^[10]. Most of the waste from this process will require a storage time of less than 300 years. Finally, less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. This portion is not much more radioactive than some things found in nature, and can be easily shielded to protect humans and wildlife.

# 10: Nuclear energy can’t reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Truth: Nuclear-generated electricity powers electric trains and subway cars as well as autos today. It has also been used in propelling ships for more than 50 years. That use can be increased since it has been restricted by unofficial policy to military vessels and ice breakers. In the near-term, nuclear power can provide electricity for expanded mass-transit and plug-in hybrid cars. Small modular reactors can provide power to islands like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Nantucket and Guam that currently run their electrical grids on imported oil. In the longer-term, nuclear power can directly reduce our dependence on foreign oil by producing hydrogen for use in fuel cells and synthetic liquid fuels.

1. National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.
2. Brodsky, A. 1978. CRC Handbook of Radiation Measurement and Protection. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, Inc.
3. Meier,P.J., 2002. Life-Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Systems and Applications for Climate Change Policy Analysis.
4. Nuclear Energy Institute (http://www.nei.org/)
5. Krane, K.S., 1988. Introductory Nuclear Physics. John Wiley and Sons
6. Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD report, 1999. Progress Towards Geologic Disposal of Radioactive Waste: Where do We Stand?
7. Questionnaire for September 2013: National Public Opinion Tracking Survey, Bisconti Research, Inc.,
8. Chernobyl Forum reports 20-year findings, offers recommendations, Nuclear News, Oct-05
9. NRC: Transportation of Spent Nuclear Fuel, 2012
10. K.S. Krane, Introductory Nuclear Physics, John Wiley and Sons, 1988"...

http://nuclearconnect.org/know-nuclear/talking-nuclear/top-10-myths-about-nuclear-energy

I agree that nuclear power is our future but today's nuclear power technology (including disposal) is inadequate, further R&D is needed. Hopefully, instead of wishful prototypes being massed produced in the future a more thoughtful approach will follow.

Nuclear would benefit greatly if it were not a for profit endeavor. As the Navy would argue, their reactors are not overbuilt. They are also not profit centers so their operational and maintenance criteria tend to be quite different. Since we already pay for these.....

What do they do with their spent rods? How long must they be stored to be safe?

For obvious reasons, what the military does with anything is classified.

I like the concept that everything should be reused instead of just piled as garbage. If somebody can find a use for these rods so very many things will be better.

France recycles them, but there's still some left with a long half life that must be stored for thousands of years like we do ours here in the US.

Which is probably more robust than the civilian alternatives.

Nuclear waste is not dangerous as some here seem to think....it is not explosive and is not radioactive once stored...

• ..."Once removed from a reactor, used fuel assemblies initially cool down in a storage pool. The concrete and steel pool and the water shield workers from radioactivity.
• When cool enough that it no longer needs to be stored underwater—typically for 2 to 5 years after removal from the reactor—used fuel is transferred and stored in dry casks, which are large steel-reinforced concrete containers. These casks are designed for long term storage until a site is available for permanent disposal. They’re safe enough to walk up to and touch.
• The U.S. nuclear energy industry has safely transported used fuel without any harmful release of radioactivity, injuries or environmental damage. In fact, after 7,000 shipments total of used fuel by the worldwide nuclear industry since 1970, there have been no leaks of radioactive material or personal injuries."...

https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste

Are you afraid of bananas as well?

I only ask because they are radioactive....

Avocados give off 0.16 μGy/hr of gamma radiation
Bananas emit 0.17 μGy/hr
Bricks average about 0.15 μGy/hr
Smoke detectors (even with their americium components) give off 0.16 μGy/hr
For what it’s worth, natural uranium ore measures 1.57 μGy/hr.
"If you're surprised that your fruit is emitting gamma radiation, don't panic," Hayes says. "The regulatory level for workers - which is safe - is exposure to 50,000 μGy per year. The levels we're talking about in your household are incredibly low."

https://www.electronicproducts.com/Biotech/Research/Nuclear_engineers_explain_why_you_shouldn_t_panic_about_the_radioactive_banana_in_your_kitchen.aspx#

The problem with costs associated with nuclear energy is the ever increasing regulatory burden that has been imposed by those against nuclear energy for reasons that don't necessarily increase safety, but do increase government revenues while attacking profit margins...Nothing like the business friendly incentives afforded most major industries...

..."Annual ongoing regulatory costs range from $7.4 million to $15.5 million per plant, mostly related to paperwork compliance. Combined with regulatory capital expenditures and fees paid to the federal government, the average nuclear plant must bear a regulatory burden of $60 million annually."...Jul 12, 2017

https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-political-economy-of-nuclear-energy-in-the-united-states/

..."Twenty years ago, the cost of building a nuclear power station in the United States averaged almost $3 billion (in 2002 dollars). Years of technological refinements and potential cost-saving measures since then have not succeeded in significantly lowering that price tag. The persistence of this enormous overhead, which accounts for two-thirds of the cost of nuclear-generated electricity, is what puts it at a marked disadvantage against power from combined-cycle gas turbines or coal-burning plants.

Why capital costs are so prohibitive is a question much debated. We know that cost overruns have to do with delays in the construction process. Before 1979, it took an average of seven years for plants to go on line. By 1990, the average lag from groundbreaking to operation had reached twelve years. The delays, in turn, have been widely attributed to a ratcheting up of regulatory requirements for health, safety, and environmental reasons following episodes such as the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident in 1979. One estimate imputed to the post-TMI standards as much as 60 percent of capital costs for plants completed after 1979."...

https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-political-economy-of-nuclear-energy-in-the-united-states/

Hopefully, these regulations will make nuclear power plants cost prohibitive. Something must be done to stop putting millions of people in danger. The risk of nuclear power is too great for it to continue. Deactivate the spent rods and then nuclear power can be considered. Don't leave a bunch of dangerous spent rods for future generations to watch over. There are non CO2 emissions alternates to nuclear power. So, what justification is there to use the dangerous nuclear power? Me, and a lot of other people don't accept the risk.

The greater risk here is clearly not developing increased nuclear energy....there is no viable alternative. and there is no safer form of energy production...Solar and wind have proven not to be viable as base load energy sources...they are also not environmentally friendly...they are land intensive, environmentally destructive, intermittent, ruin the landscape with unsightly and dangerous infrastructure...Maintenance personnel fall to their deaths, birds and bats are chopped to pieces...

..."How many people die a year from wind turbines?

Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the w... The Wind Energy industry asserts that the deaths associated with wind farms should be measured in deaths per MwH."... https://www.quora.com/On-average-how-many-people-do-wind-turbines-kill-a-year

My personal hopes in future energy production is ITER but I fully admit that this is a massive experimental research prototype. Nobody knows yet if this is the shape of things to come or if the yet to be discovered complications of controlled fusion power doom this to the "nice try" scrap heap.

There is one big advantage to fission power production that many who appropriately fear nuclear explosions fail to grasp. The nuclear core material already made during our nuclear arms race madness can only be rendered permanently useless (without detonating a nuclear bomb) is to "burn" this fuel up in a fission reactor. Wishing this material away doesn't work, the fissile isotope PU 239 has a half life of 24,000 years.

Short on substance, long on outrage. Realize that this is the same era when we nailed a reactor operator at SL-1 to the ceiling of a tin building with an ejected reactor control rod and sent in the fire crews with radiation monitors with inadequate power supplies.

Unsurprisingly for the period, the plant was crude with little in the way of emergency planning and community coordination, but that stuff was about 20 years in the future. What was surprising was the lack of a smoke or CO2 detector in the exhaust stack.

Dude that was like 60 years ago....we were driving around in new cars that looked like this....

...and that was an experimental reactor run by the military....I don't see the relevance...

Boy, he explained the danger of the spent rods, didn't he? He didn't even mention the old justification that technology will eventual have a way of safely disposing the spent rods. Technology hasn't done it yet and probably never will. The only real way to have green energy without a lot of batteries is what I have proposed many times before. And, that is a world wide grid. No batteries required. There's always sunshine somewhere.

Well first of all you'll never convince one country to become dependent on another country for something as vital as it's energy...what happens when one country decides to cut the energy to another? = war...

Second, you would lose a lot of the power in conversion and transmission line losses....

Three, the cost would all be born by the richest countries....so you think we are going to finance the construction of solar and wind infrastructure in unfriendly countries like North Korea, Russia, Iran, Syria, Africa....and what about Australia, do you think you can run power lines 9,000 miles under water?

Not only is this idea implausible and improbable, it's undesirable...

..."The disadvantages of HVDC are in conversion, switching, control, availability, and maintenance.

HVDC is less reliable and has lower availability than alternating current (AC) systems, mainly due to the extra conversion equipment. Single-pole systems have availability of about 98.5%, with about a third of the downtime unscheduled due to faults. Fault-tolerant bipole systems provide high availability for 50% of the link capacity, but availability of the full capacity is about 97% to 98%.^[30]

The required converter stations are expensive and have limited overload capacity. At smaller transmission distances, the losses in the converter stations may be bigger than in an AC transmission line for the same distance.^[31] The cost of the converters may not be offset by reductions in line construction cost and lower line loss.

Operating an HVDC scheme requires many spare parts to be kept, often exclusively for one system, as HVDC systems are less standardized than AC systems and technology changes faster.

In contrast to AC systems, realizing multi-terminal systems is complex (especially with line commutated converters), as is expanding existing schemes to multi-terminal systems. Controlling power flow in a multi-terminal DC system requires good communication between all the terminals; power flow must be actively regulated by the converter control system instead of relying on the inherent impedance and phase angle properties of an AC transmission line.^[32]

Multi-terminal systems are rare. As of 2012 only two are in service: the Hydro Québec – New England transmission between Radisson, Sandy Pond, and Nicolet^[33] and the Sardinia–mainland Italy link which was modified in 1989 to also provide power to the island of Corsica.^{[34] "}....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#:~:text=Depending%20on%20voltage%20level%20and,at%20the%20same%20voltage%20levels.

The worldwide grid is feasible. The end result would be worth the effort. Instead of leading to wars, it would prevent wars. With everyone connected, if some country was to cut power, everyone else would cut power to them and the citizens would force the government to negotiate. This has happened in Europe with the natural gas importation from Russia. Australia could be on the grid by island hopping the transformer stations. The grid could start by going from North America to Asia (Russia). Siemens will probably be the ones to get it started. They've already laid some undersea DC lines.

The worldwide grid would eliminate the need for storage. When more power is needed, get it from the grid just like we are doing now with our current system.

A feasibility study needs to be done for the worldwide grid. I believe it will come to pass and eliminate the possibility of spent rods being blown up and killing many people with radioactive fallout like in a nuclear war.

Your irrational cynicism is showing again. Energy is shipped across international borders all the time. Russia provides natural gas to Europe. The USA exports energy to China. Hydro-power from Niagara feeds the grid on both sides of the river. There are a myriad of other examples but I believe I've made my point.

HVDC power distribution does baffle some but it is becoming the standard for power sharing across different AC power grids. Photovoltaic panels do directly produce DC power but converters to AC is as easy as the circuitry found in any AC UPS.

A transoceanic electric power grid, while technically possible, is likely so impractical to implement it will never happen. Nonetheless the perspective to view power needs globally instead of regionally should not be shunned.

Maybe you should join a cult...?

Some people want to work well with others. Some people don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_America

Gee, ya think?

Thank you so much for that post! It gives more credence for not having highly radioactive spent rods stored for 10000 years.

How so?

I can't give you an in depth explanation of what I mean because CR4 would probably censor it. So, I'll let you research it and form your own conclusion. The words are "SHARIA LAW".

So you think some jihadist is going to penetrate a heavily guarded and secure facility and set off a nuclear bomb to spread nuclear waste all over the area...First of all that's not possible...even if someone could get a nuclear device into the facility, it's buried deep underground, in a remote area....and if they have a nuclear device, why would they bury it deep underground in the middle of nowhere? Ridiculous....make up your mind, are these people partners in energy, or enemies of the people? Do you fear them or trust them, you can't have it both ways....

I don't trust them and I fear them. They don't mind destroying the world for their cause and martyrdom.

Then how do you think this power sharing idea is in any way feasible?

https://cr4.globalspec.com/comment/1296859/Re-Windscale-disaster

Because it's working already.

We don't have a global electrical grid....so how could it be working at all...What we have is some neighbors selling across borders, that's a far cry from what you are proposing...not even close

...". According to recent trends, over 60% of Sub-Saharan Africans will still lack access to electricity by 2020."...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Africa

India..."almost 32 million homes in the dark"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(India)#:~:text=Individual%20State%20grids%20were%20interconnected,between%20States%20in%20each%20region.

We can't even supply electricity to the people we have now...and you want to impose an even greater financial burden, a burden that surpasses 10's of trillions of dollars...absolutely absurd