False sense of safety with nuclear power plants

[Divide by Zero]

Hi,
I was listening to the alternative news station WBAI on Tuesday and they had 2 guests from the group Riverkeeper that deals with the Hudson River in NY.

They brought up a really scary issue with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) testing of fuel rods. The fuel rods they test with are made out of stainless steel or inconel which both can handle higher temperatures. However, no plant uses these materials. Instead they use Ziconium alloy which suffers an oxidation reaction. This same reaction caused hydrogen to be produced in Japan, causing an explosion. The NRC has been ponerized by pandering to the corporations that seek to profit from this heavily government subsidized and protected industry.

http://www.riverkeeper.org/news-events/news/stop-polluters/power-plant-cases/rvk-files-enforcement-petition-against-indian-point/

I can't seem to find more detail about the NRC testing versus real life. I do know that inconel is a very strong high temperature metal as it is used in high performance engine valves.

 

[Woodsman]

That's just so weird!

What is wrong with stainless steel? How can some exotic material like zirconium alloy (well, exotic from my perspective of having never heard of the stuff until ten minutes ago when I read the article you linked to), be preferable to steel, which I should think is likely to be cheaper and more readily available, especially if it has superior safety characteristics?

Maybe steel and nickel do something to complicate the nuclear fission process. . ?

But if that's the case, then testing with steel when the industry is going to use zirconium definitely sounds criminally misleading!

What an interesting find!

Still. . . need more data.

 

[Woodsman]

Well. . . It appears that the popularity of zirconium alloys in the nuclear industry stems from the material's ability to resist corrosion to such a high degree, which is important in high-temperature, high-pressure conditions where water is present. (Describing the interiors of many, if not all, reactors.)

The problem is that when heated past a certain point, the stuff catastrophically fails. Turns into hydrogen and blows up!

Sheesh.

No wonder the industry felt the need to not mention this little problem in a. . . proactive(?) manner. ie, running safety tests on a completely different material!

Okay. I understand this better now. And, what an unholy mess! It's amazing more reactors haven't blown up. They sound like bombs waiting to happen should cooling systems fail. Fukushima almost seems like it was an inevitability given its location.

 

[thevenusian]

And, what an unholy mess! It's amazing more reactors haven't blown up. They sound like bombs waiting to happen should cooling systems fail. Fukushima almost seems like it was an inevitability given its location.

Absolutely. Its as though we've already had a nuclear war but the bombs haven't gone off yet.

It seems clear that the well-being of humans was never at the forefront in developing such an insane technology for producing energy. It is inevitable that eventually there will be more widespread problems, as many plants are located near oceans and on fault lines, and many are now aging beyond their expected lifespans. There also is the matter of waste 'disposal'. There really is no way to safely dispose of nuclear waste, so most of it is just piling up in 'storage' at the sites of the plants themselves. Some plants have 40 years worth of spent fuel on-site. And as we've seen with Fukushima, the cooling systems are absolutely required to run in order to prevent meltdown. It is difficult to imagine there won't be some time during the next 24,000 years when the power grid might be down for a time.

I think the building of these plants ranks near the top of unbelievably short-sighted stupidity thus far accomplished by humans on Earth.

 

[WhiteBear]

What is wrong with stainless steel? How can some exotic material like zirconium alloy (well, exotic from my perspective of having never heard of the stuff until ten minutes ago when I read the article you linked to), be preferable to steel, which I should think is likely to be cheaper and more readily available, especially if it has superior safety characteristics?

Zirconium is more transparent to the neutrons needed to sustain fission...the neutrons are less likely to interact with it than other alloys which might be better from a safety standpoint, but when has safety been job #1 in the energy industry? ;) It's too bad that the Japanese reactors weren't built with a design closer to what's used in the US Navy. The reactors used in "boomers" (ICBM-fitted submarines) use convection to circulate the primary current. This allows the reactor operators to run the reactor without any coolant pumps at all, to cut down noise (bad for subs). That would have really come in handy when they lost power to their pumps in Japan.

 

[go2]

Arnold Gunderson of Fairewinds Associates, Inc., a forensic nuclear engineer gives video updates on the Fukashima nuclear plant disaster for the layman. I find his work the best on the internet.