Is anything nuclear ever really super safe small and simple?
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The gaping maw of Chernobyl.
Absent some terrible news from Japan this will be my second and last column about the nuclear accidents unfolding there. It turned out I was right last time about the sodium polyboride or boric acid or whatever neutron absorber the Japanese authorities dumped in first one and now two reactors along with a lot of sea water in an attempt to quench the reaction heat. I think it is pretty clear, too, that most of these reactors will not be coming back online… ever. This column looks at what that can mean for the nuclear industry in Japan and I also want to look at how these accidents are or aren’t like Chernobyl — a comparison I am seeing far too often in news reports.
To come up with a good comparison I turned to my friend Robert Bishop, one of the only Americans actually at Chernobyl back in 1986, helping fight that reactor.
These Japanese reactors are old and fairly well understood while Chernobyl was brand new. These Japanese reactors had already been in service for 16 years when Chernobyl melted down. In comparative terms there is no comparison — Chernobyl was vastly worse.
As just one example, when it came to poisoning the nuclear reaction in Japan they inserted the control rods, dumped-in the boric acid, then allowed sea water to enter the containment. In the course of all this the roof of the reactor building exploded revealing the containment vessel, inside of which lay the reactor core. But at Chernobyl it was all so much simpler — no reactor building, no containment vessel, just the out-of-control reactor, standing in the rain, emitting radiation.
Poisoning Chernobyl, according to Robert, came down eventually to dumping tons of powdered bismuth directly into the gaping maw of the reactor core from above. “It was almost instantaneous, ” he recalled. “Bismuth is a good neutron absorber, but more importantly it went through two complete phase changes from solid to liquid to gas, absorbing huge amounts of heat from the core, which was cooled by hundreds of degrees in just seconds. ”
It was a clever gambit, poisoning Chernobyl, but remember that somewhere between 30 and 60 workers died in the process leaving a further legacy of birth defects in the region.
These Japanese nuclear accidents come down to the simple fact that nobody back in the 1960s designed nuclear plants to run for 40 years then go through an 8.9 earthquake. Nor are today’s nuclear plants probably designed to that standard, which means Japan is facing what will by necessity be a significantly different nuclear future.
We’ll see rolling blackouts for months, maybe years, in Japan and the new nuclear plants that replace those old nuclear plants will be vastly different, too. If I were to predict a clear winner in Japan’s new nuclear future it would be Toshiba with its innovative 4S (Super Safe Small and Simple) reactors.
Japan needs increased generating capacity fast. They would like to replace nuclear with nuclear. But the new plants also have to show they can survive an 8.9 earthquake and reduce the number of critical failure points. Toshiba’s 4S reactors, which have been around for several years now, though not yet commercially successful, do all that quite easily.
4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S’s each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S’s are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium.
The biggest problem facing the 4S has been regulatory approvals, which would normally take in aggregate 100 times as long (and cost 100 times as much) if done the same way as a larger nuclear plant. That’s where this earthquake will probably change everything, at least in Japan, where the process will be streamlined almost to nothing with a 4S soon stashed under every power substation giving Japan a smart grid in the process.
The western press is mostly misinterpreting the statements out of Japan. They apply cultural expectations against a culture that is vastly different.
One report, from an Australian, makes it sounds like armageddon, but not from anything the individual saw before he left the country; rather by the speculation he applied because he wasn’t being told enough.
Japan has been quite forthcoming with data; they haven’t been forthcoming with western worlds hypothetical scenarios and worse case disaster tails. The Western world likes to hear the worse case scenario and then is thankful when it doesn’t come to pass. The Japanese will present what the current situation is, without hyperbole and conjecture attached.
Excellent piece, Bob; your comments and replies to comments are likewise fresh, insightful, and full of good info and good perspective I’m not getting elsewhere. Keep up the good work.
PS Bob worked as a reporter on the Three-Mile Island disaster; his bona fides on the topic go back decades longer than most of us….
Nicely and thoughtfully said. And a courtesy to the Japanese. Thanks
Yet again, some measured, thoughtful and above all knowledgeable commentary from the Cringester. The real meltdown’s coming from me every morning when I read the hysterical British press headlines – “Armageddon outta here!”, “Meltdown nightmare”, “Invisible terror”, etc, etc. The result of all this will be another twenty years of government paralysis on nuclear power, squintillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money spent on windmills and other nonsense and power rationing when old nuclear becomes obsolete.
Do you have any insight into using Stirling engines to harvest the “wasted fuel”? Another idea is to improve coal/fuel based plant efficiency by adding heat to places that the carbon fuel energy is wasted on keeping the system hot. An article on alternate nuclear technologies would be much appreciated.
Was suppose to be a main reply.
Good to see real expertise on display. Your cnoitrbuiton is most welcome.
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the Japanese government is being jobbed by TEPCO. which has 4 reactors in disaster, with the other two shutdown reactors at the Daiichi site heating up. time does fly in these things. at present, #1 is said by Kyoto, now that TEPCO has decided to start talking again, to have a 70% fuel melt, #3 a 33% melt in the core, #2 a 3 percent melt with a possible small breach, and fire has broken out again on the fourth floor spent-fuel storage area at #4. radiation at the site has hit 400 mSv and 100 mSv, which for old cranks who remember rems is 40 and 10 rems. oh, and reactor #3 is said to have had a mixed-oxide core in it, which contains plutonium.
we haven’t heard a thing about Fukushima Diiwa for days now, although on Friday and Saturday they were concerned about cooling the three similar reactors at that slightly further southern site.
US utility practice is that the spent fuel pools have 3 to 4 core loads of hot, nasty, too dangerous to put in a concrete outhouse, used fuel. so we have upwards of 5 core loads of melted uranium BWR fuel free-ranging there, potentially 1 or 2 core loads burned off already. that’s, what, 90 to 180 tons of mixed nucleides on the ground and in the air?
ain’t looking good when Godzilla looks to the land and cries.
Japan will rebuild.
but the (now rated at) 9.0 earthquake and tsunami are looking like the good news.
There is no way you can compare the devastation from the earthquake and tsunami to the problems at the reactors. Thousands of people have died and toxics have been spread around by floods. How is this nuclear crisis possibly looking like worse news? As for safe energy, note that a refinery has been burning spreading toxic fumes over populated areas and a dam has burst causing many deaths (don’t know if it was hydroelectric though).
Yes, this is a major disaster. Some workers have died, there will be some low level radiation leakage, the financial cost will be enormous. But that pales compared to the disasters elsewhere in Japan.
Lets say #3 has a hydrogen explosion too and together with earthquake damage cracks the storage pool emptying it in minutes. At this point none of this is exactly low probability. If it has been running on MOX long enough to have spent mixed oxide fuel in it’s pool and that stuff caught on fire good it could make Chernobyl look small.
The potential for a huge disaster is there. We’ve had roofs blown off AND fire in storage pools … yes they got to it before it could get out of control, we got lucky.
Lets hope we stay lucky.
The NY Times reported this morning that the containment on the #3 (the one with the plutonium) has been breached.
This is officially worse than Chernobyl. And yes worse than the earthquake/tsunami — that devastation could be rebuilt in a couple of years — Fukushima’s radiation will last our lifetimes.
[8:33 a.m. ET Wednesday, 9:33 p.m. in Tokyo] Severe damage to the containment vessel of the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is unlikely, Japan Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Wednesday, according to a Kyodo News service report.
The nuclear situation in Japan is nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. There’s been no significant release of radiation, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any.
Here’s a picture of the reactor building design: http://imgur.com/UrTkr
The 3rd floor was the cooling pool with up to 20 years of spent fuel. That 3rd floor was blown up on 2 of the buildings. Yikes!
Perhaps roll out LFTRs? I’d assume that Japan’s got as much weapons-grade material as they care to stockpile at this point. Then again, the Toshiba design is already approved, but longer-term the LFTR should be even safer in larger scales..
Has anyone built an LFTR yet or are they still in the theoretical stage?
This is bad news for Hyperion. They are Toshiba’s competition for the mini-nuke reactor. They face the same regulatory hurdles but they are not a Japanese based company so probably won’t get the big contract.
What about the prospects for molten-salt thorium reactors, like the ones China seems to be betting its future on?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/china-thorium-power/
1 hr google talk on thorium MSRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So
100+ power point on thorium MSRs
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/ppt/GreenEnergyForum_20080725.ppt
Cooter
I have a question that I’ve not seen asked anywhere. Filling the coolant system with seawater must be like using seawater in your steam iron. Yeah, it’s going to corrode things to the point of never-be-used-again, but it seems to me that there’s a shorter term problem. As all the water is boiled away and/or split into free atoms, you’re going to have lots of salt left over accumulating in the reactor, and eventually preventing the free flow of water. You saidin the previous column that it should take a week for the reactor to cool down, so maybe it’ll be ok, but I’m still wondering.
saltwater is all they have at hand. the civic infrastructure is totally smashed. on day 6, somebody’s news report mentioned on the side that authorities are considering opening up a road to the Daiichi site so they can perhaps run another fire truck up there.
a bunch of really clever, dedicated, likely walking dead people at the site are pounding themselves into the mud because they’ve got sticks, stones, and spit to try and stop 6 fulminating nuclear reactors from taking out all of east Asia. they have wavering directors behind the effort and frankly, it’s out of control.
every nuclear reactor license I’ve ever heard of has to have a long, contingency-based, complete and overreaching response plan to a number of scenarios, including disaster. none of what has been happening would be written in that set of documents.
they’re winging it. they had to have site support from the whole nation in the first few hours, half a day at best, to prevent the problems we see. which are not the end of the road. water cannon on the spent fuel pools? — that’ll wash the fuel assemblies right out of the pond onto the concrete.
One aspect which hasn’t been make very clear is what level of infrastructure damage occurred and is continuing. I’ve seen one reference to “not even having telephone service” operating, and reporting by the NYTimes of the remaining 50 persons going around with flashlights, which suggests that electrical power is scarce or non-existent. Personally, my speciality is out-of-the-box thinking. It occurs to me that the problems at these reactors is made vastly more difficult by the lack of power – While the objective is to bring these reactors to cold shutdown – would it have been possible to restart any of these reactors at any time in order to generate power locally? Restarting any of the six reactors to provide a small amount of local power would make this situation possible to bring under control.
I wouldn’t dare do anything like that without first making a very, very thorough inspection of each and every wall, pipe, and seal in the site.
Yours is an obvious solution, but you should listen to that little voice saying “maybe this isn’t such a good idea”.
(Though they still have those diesel generators. Those are probably in better shape, if the water didn’t damage them too much.)
Aside from possible equipment and containment damage due to the quake and tsunami, just-shut-down reactor generally can’t be restarted for a while due to short-lived radioisotopes that poison the fission reaction…look up “iodine pit”. Duration of the outage depends on the output power of the reactor before shutdown and the time it had been running.
To answer my own question, I have found that nuclear plants do not have what is called “Black start” capability, and therefore cannot be started without access to base load power from a grid. So, once grid power was lost, a restart would not have been possible from the power of the on-site diesel generators at any time. There are now reports that TEPCO is attempting to provide a power line to the plant and expects to do so “soon,” which at least clearly suggests that the grid connection to the plant was destroyed by either the earthquake or the tsunami.
And thanks for the other responses. Clearly, the local system has to be functional for a low-power restart – but there was no report of immediate damage, it’s been a slowly deteriorating problem as the LOPA lead to a LOCA, hydrogen explosion, etc. What we are seeing is that recovery from a LOPA is a nasty, risky procedure – it sure wasn’t apparent before this that a LOPA + diesel generator failure could lead to catastrophe.
As as to the safety of a 4S plant, go check out this report: http://www.yritwc.org/Portals/0/PDFs/nuclearreactorletterucs.pdf
[...] reading Robert X. Cringely’s “Is anything nuclear ever really super safe small and simple?“, I have a question that I’ve not seen asked anywhere. Filling the coolant system with [...]
[...] back in the 1960s designed nuclear plants to run for 40 years, then go through an 8.9 earthquake, says blogger Robert Cringely.Japan now needs increased generating capacity fast. Toshiba’s 4S (Super [...]
What i want is a small (small enough to be hidden in the back yard) system so i can disconnect from the ripoff con artist filled grid hows about half garden shed sized thorium reactors that would be real nice
I am not convinced that spreading 100′s of such 10MW nuclear reactors in the country, even if buried 30m below surface, is making the solution safe enough. If I can imagine many scenarios of misusing or sabotaging these, other can do as well.
On the contrary I cannot imagine soft energy solutions like solar panels, or even solution based on chemical reactions (oil, gas, coal), offering options to be misused to the extent of nuclear energy options. The weak part in every option is and will remain the human factor.
The fundamental problem is concentrating energy production to such an extent. Doing this is indeed economically more profitable, but at the same time makes society fragile.
Thats because you arent very imaginitive
This is a sad situation. Especially for a country that minds its own business and has a bunch of hardworking people whose only purpose in life is progress. The worst part is that it had already faced a terrible nuclear disaster decades back. I don’t think they deserve to suffer more.
Nuclear Disaster? That wasn’t a nuclear disaster, that was a war which they started and thankfully lost due to our nuclear technology and its war time application.
Yes, the recent tragedy is horrible and it is a shame to have such a loss of life and impact on their society. But the Japanese people are a very focused and resilient, and there isn’t another culture in the world better equipped to handle such a disaster based upon their national experience in dealing with the impact of nuclear radiation.
Nothing justifies dropping nuclear bombs on top of cities.
Look up the history. Around 10 to 20 years ago, Japan had a reactor that was run like the one on the Simpsons. It failed. Reactor techs were dumping coolant in with buckets. Two of the operators died. There were several levels of safety that were not functional. There was a big flap over it. Someone even went to prison. The parent poster is talking about that incident, not the bombing that ended WWII.
[...] this column by Robert Cringley, which also talks about how the current disaster is much less bad than Chernobyl [...]
Sodium is highly combustable when it contacts water or air. What happens if the Toshiba mini nuke ruptures, which is not unlikely in a huge earthquake? Won’t it just burn and spew radiation? The chances of a plant rupturing would be a lot higher because there would be 1200 of them.
how do they stop the 4s from getting ripped off and used as a weapon? or how do they stop someone from putting a bomb (or driving an airplane) into the 4s and creating mass contamination in a highly populated area? how do they stop someone tunneling underground and jacking one?
what is the security process for the installation, transportation, and disposal phases of a 4s unit life? where do you put all the used ones? do they take up more space than spent fuel rods?
im sure there are solutions, i would just like to hear them.
D’oh!!! It just dawned on me. Where are the cooling towers, as at TMI?? None of the pictures I’ve seen show any. How can that be? Simple. They used river/sea water as secondary coolant, just as they do here. So, siting on the coast was very much on purpose; doesn’t look so wise right now. Not having the cooling towers is aesthetically superior; however, I recall controversy over the use of such estuary water to cool power plants. It seems that fish kills occur in the immediate area of discharge, even though the temperature rise is just a few degrees.
http://www.martenlaw.com/newsletter/20100211-state-thermal-effluent-standards
[...] 15.04 kl 09: og reaktor 4 har hatt en brann). Disse systemene liker ikke saltvann, så det er en ganske dramatisk ting å gjøre. Kanskje går det samme vei med reaktor 3. Tre ytterligere reaktorer ved dette enorme kraftverket [...]
I just want to make two simple points. Sodium is a highly reactive metal . Earthquakes could break open a Toshiba Gen 4s reactor and spawn a horrific sodium fire. Great solution.
Soviet Alfa class submarines used a lead-bismuth coolant. Which offers two great properties . Lead and bismuth are nonreactive compared to sodium or potassium . If and when a reactor fails the coolant is lead, when it cools the reactor is encased in lead not salts or a reactive metal.
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectioncode=132&storyCode=2054804
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor
What needs to happen…
The majority of buildings that are built from this point forward, especially houses, need to be self sufficient in terms of electricity. This means a combination of geo thermal, solar and wind power to provide electricity, and a battery to store any unused power.
We have to look at a different model for power, the current model is not sustainable and is so very primitive that we’ll look back in 100 years and laugh at how stupid we were.
I agree with John. Energy supply must be decentralized as much as possible. The source of the energy dito. This solves a great, great deal of problems but also presents us currently with many challenges.
The problems it solved are: No more dependency on limited resources and all the political involvement associated with that, no risk of entire areas going black in case of infrastructural failure, no easy huge targets for terrorism.
The challenges are mostly in being able to get enough energy from a local environment to power the local area. It will likely have to be a combination of factors, e.g. solar, waste processing. But also, to some extent, fuel brought in from less decentralized sources. And then there is a need for sufficiently efficient storage with high enough capacity with limited risks to act as a buffer.
Tried to make an energy sufficient house in 1999. Would have cost about $80k for the additional roof space and panels – a bit rich for a $200k house.
The real issues were there was no utility ‘net metering’ in TX at the time so the utility didn’t have to buy back power – you either ran on solar or the grid. The most perplexing/exasperating issue was the HOA, which absolutely forbade any solar *anything* on rooftops. No passive solar water heaters, no PV panels, nada. They even told me I couldn’t go with high-reflectance roofing.
Attitudes have changed/improved quite a bit since then, but you still don’t see many TX houses with solar installed.
A possible major drawback of using many small nuclear power plants is that they all have to be running 24/7 and cannot be throttled. With a few big power plants covering a large area this is less of a problem, as local industry will be able to use up the power during idle periods. With these microplants, this is much less likely to be possible. To fix that, the energy produced during non-peak hours should be stored in a buffer, and proper solutions for that are not readily available at this time.
When the full power of your home’s reactor isn’t needed, the locally generated power could be fed back into the grid. It’s already done, at least in the US. If everyone was doing this you’d probably want to turn the grid into something more like a mesh, for greater efficiency, but that’s just an infrastructure upgrade.
And if you still wanted a local buffer you could use batteries, which could be swapped out and charged in succession. Or something like pressurized water or air with a turbine, or even a large flywheel.
“Or something like pressurized water or air with a turbine, or even a large flywheel.”
You can’t pressurize water. Well, you can but it’s volume doesn’t change. Next?
wondering what the fuss is about, 1923 earthquake death total 120,000, war total for ww2 exceeds how many?
THe human condition seems to devalue life ,perhaps as a defence tactic, some die early to allow the rest to live.
Sorry but can’t think if this happened in the U.S. ,or Canada would Japan or China rush to aid. I Don’t think so.
The underground installment is a great idea as with most infrastucture, why didn’t anyone insist on this before, funding ,cost benefit analysis , an old bugabear.
When Katrina happened Cuba, who is geared and apparently regularly moves huge numbers (with there pigs) without loss of life, did offer help discreetly, but was rebuffed….
Well it’s a matter of pride really. When America suffers a disaster, america doesn’t want help from other countries. And when they do accept help, the politicians will keep it quiet. (as has happened in previous disasters in the US)
For the same reason politicians in the US would never admit that a certain system (healthcare, education etc) works better in some other country, because that would be admitting that the US is not the best in everything everywhere. Which would be political suicide.
Hats off to you Bob for improving the signal to noise ratio of the discussion. Between the hopeless optimists and the nuclear armageddon crowds you are a breath of fresh air.
Keep up the good work.
You’ve got to be joking about the rolling blackouts in Japan lasting for YEARS.
The main reason these are happening right now, is due to most of the 55 reactors nationwide automatically powering down – and I suspect they will need to be integrity checked before they are allowed to power back up, especially the older reactor designs, what with the events at Fukushima.
Japan shouldn’t build reactors on islands. Japan should agree with the continental states about building the atomic power stations in their territory.
[...] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Is anything nuclear ever really super safe small and simple… – Is anything nuclear ever really super safe small and simple?: The gaping maw of Chernobyl.Absent some terrible n… [...]
I would have to go a bit further than the title suggests. Is anything realy totally safe. A follow on question is how much safety is enough. Absolute safety has an infinite cost.
And i would have to question just why we are so tied up with everything must be safe this constant clamour for safety is stiffeling us and our ability develop we are going nowhere unless we get rid of this safety safety safety ,, let me put it like this why are we not on the moon now simple because some silly little ouik alloweed the health and safety brigade to win brave up people we do actually need to get off this lump of rock we call earth sooner rather than later
Seems that here, like in many cases, the real problems here are political/cultural, not technical. see:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/japan-s-nuclear-disaster-caps-decades-of-faked-safety-reports-accidents.html
I have to wonder if other “face-saving” high-context cultures have similar skeletons in their closets. At least us western cultures expose our skeletons earlier..
Bob, not to quibble but the reactor in Chernobyl was ON FIRE. It wasn’t just free radiation billowing out of there. Pieces of graphite and everything else were BURNING.
It wasn’t dumping one or two things. It was dumping tons and tons of many different things. They even tried dumping water (not just the firefighters, but from helicopters) at first in what was later considered a rogue operation by local authorities.
It was more than 2 tonnes of sand and clay, more than 2 tons of lead, and boron (which was mixed in with the sand initially) in much smaller amounts.
I didn’t know there were Americans on site in Chernobyl in 1986, aside from Hans Blix and his IAEA team that came in. Where can I read about this?
How can anything as ginormous as our energy consumption be simple or completely safe?
[...] vol plantejar-se l’ús d’altres tipus de tecnologia com els Toshiba 4S que proposa Bob Cringely que són tan xicotets que caben en un tràiler, operen soterrats a 30 metres, estan tancats [...]
Bob, can you tell me how the Japanese 4S differs from the Canadian Slowpoke? They both sound pretty similar.
“Absent some terrible news from Japan”
Does this qualify?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369216/Fukushima-Fifty-First-pictures-emerge-inside-Japans-stricken-nuclear-power-plant.html
makes me glad I am 350 miles from the nearest one here in CA. Would not want to be near NJ.
It was more than 2 tonnes of sand and clay, more than 2 tons of lead, and boron (which was mixed in with the sand initially) in much smaller amounts.
Japan needs to take all the contaminated land and grow soybeans for making biodiesel. Industrial Green Power Inc sells an APGU(Advanced Power Generation Unit) that runs the MYT(massive yet tiny) engine from Angel Labs LLC invented by Raphial RG Morgado. Raphial’s engine runs on biodiesel and doesn’t use engine oil. The unit is expected to be rolled out the beginning of 2012. IGPI’s 2MW units will do the job safely and meet all the GHG regulations and Japan will have the cleanest and most economical power generation on earth.
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