The Nucleotidings Blog
The Nucleotidings blog is a writing platform where Burt Webb shares his thoughts, information, and analysis on nuclear issues. The blog is dedicated to covering news and ideas related to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and radiation protection. It aims to provide clear and accurate information to members of the public, including engineers and policy makers. Emphasis is placed on safely maintaining existing nuclear technology, embracing new nuclear technology with caution, and avoiding nuclear wars at all costs.
Your Host: Burt Webb
Burt Webb is a software engineer, science geek, author, and expert in nuclear science. Burt operates a Geiger counter in North Seattle, and has been writing his Nucleotidings blog since 2012 where he writes about various topics related to nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, and radiation protection.
Burt Webb has published several technical books and novels. He works as a software consultant.
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Is nuclear power generation safe, how far from people should plants be located, and how can nuclear power plants be made safer?
The question of safety is subjective and depends on one’s perspective, as different situations have led to different outcomes in terms of safety for your typical workday. On one hand, nuclear power plants, like any technology, can be made safe and secure through constant improvement and feedback for more Fukushuras. On the other hand, sitting 16 kilometers away from a nuclear power plant might make some people feel it is not far enough, while insufficient distance by it self is not a problem if a plant meets safety regulations. Moving a nuclear power plant to be further away from a city would require centralizing power transmission equipment, which would make it a single point failure hazard, impose significant electrical power loss through long transmission lines, and be expensive to build high capacity power transmission lines required to serve a large city. Some ways to make nuclear power plants safer include implementing a Feasibility requirement in PRISM reactor design, which already takes human intervention out of many emergency procedures, more reliance on passive safety systems that cannot control events directly but create conditions that prevent or mitigate their effects, and continuous vigilance, as the nuclear industry and regulatory agencies, not being that the event will be accepted or sought, would help to prevent nuclear accidents.
What do you mean by “Fukushuras”?
“Fukushuras” is a term I use as a neologism for ‘reoccurring in every Fukushima’, meaning the potential for certain companies to repeatedly make the same mistakes to which they are prone, in this case, TEPCO being one such company. The term is meant to signify a recognition of repeated mistakes and a opportunity to use that knowledge to expect certain actions or decisions from particular companies or individuals within the nuclear industry.
Part One of Two Parts
I have often mentioned in my blogs that nuclear power plant projects have serious problems meeting budget estimates and construction schedules. The U.S. has been building nuclear power reactors for sixty years and not one of the projects ever met their original budget and schedule. For thirty years no new nuclear power plants were constructed in the U.S. Then, about ten years ago, work began on projects to build new power reactors in Georgia and South Carolina.
After five years of effort, Southern Company and Georgia Power utilities contracted in 2012 with Westinghouse Electric Company LLC for two new AP1000 power reactors to be installed at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. The two new reactors were supposed to start producing power in 2016 and 2017.
It was obvious that restarting nuclear power reactor construction after a thirty year hiatus was not going to be easy. Southern Company, Georgia Power and Westinghouse and were confident that they had sufficient expertise to deal with all the challenges they would face. But not only were they restarting a long dormant industry they were also working with a new reactor design. The plan was for Westinghouse and the Stone & Webster unit of the Shaw Group to build small, prefabricated components at a factory. The components would then be shipped to and assembled at the Vogtle site. The Southern Company’s nuclear unit and Georgia Power would oversee and manage the contractors. The then executive vice president of Southern Company testified in a hearing before the Georgia utility regulators in 2008, “We’ll use very, very experienced people who actually have done the work before. And they’ll know that schedule and the budget issues coming up.”
At the very beginning of the project, design changes delayed the issuance of the construction license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by four months. Westinghouse and Georgia Power were confident that they would be able to make up the lost four months during the project but it never happened.
Problems plagued the project from the start. Southern Company’s nuclear unit and Geogia Power added more and more supervisors to oversee the complex work on the reactors. Westinghouse was over optimistic about the design schedule and there was a shortage of managers with experience. There were substandard components from suppliers and critical documents went missing. Vendors had to be educated on the very strict nuclear quality standards and oversight processes. There were not enough qualified welders and not enough instructors to train more.
Contractors complained that Southern Company’s nuclear unit and Geogia Power micromanaged the project and interfered with their work. Commercial disputes piled up. Consultant Charles Hudson said in his report on the project, “This type of internal consortium commercial dispute on critical path module completion had potentially catastrophic consequences for Vogtle Units 3 and 4.”
An independent construction monitor at Vogtle reviewed some of the problems at a routine hearing in 2012. One of the things that he reported was that there a lot of missing documents and missing signatures on documents which resulted in a lot of delays. This was not an infrequent issue. The main vendors on the projects simply did not follow the rules for documentation and other quality assurance requirements.
In 2013, Chicago Bridge & Iron Company bought the Shaw Group and became a contractor for the Vogtle project.
Please read Part Two
Part Two of Two Parts (Please read Part One first)
India has a tariff system that provides a lower ROI for nuclear power than for other sources of power. If not for this system, nuclear power would be even more expensive than it is. The Indian government says that the ten nuclear power plants will result in more than thirty three thousand new jobs. However, the real issue with respect to jobs created by infrastructure projects is the ratio of investment per job and, by that measure, these nuclear projects are an expensive way to create jobs. Jobs generated by the solar industry are six times more labor intensive than jobs created by the nuclear industry. Investment in solar jobs is much more cost effective than investment in nuclear jobs.
Supporters of nuclear energy tout the low carbon emissions from nuclear power plants as a way to mitigate climate change. However, the manufacture and fueling of nuclear power plants generates a lot of carbon before a single watt of electricity is produced. It has been estimated that it may take as much as fifteen years of steady operation before a nuclear power plant repays the carbon debt from construction. Considering the lengthy time required to license and construct a nuclear power plant, nuclear power is no solution to climate change.
In addition, there are threats to human health and the environment from nuclear power plants in case of an accident. A single accident such as Chernobyl or Fukushima can contaminate hundreds of square miles of land and force the evacuation of millions of people. Costs for such accidents could run into the trillions of dollars.
Nuclear power plants also make great targets for terrorists and that is a serious issue for India considering recent terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan. They would also be targets for an enemy’s bombs and missiles in case a war broke out.
Every nuclear power plant produces radioactive waste products that are dangerous to human health and the environment. Some of these waste products have half lives of hundreds of thousands of years. The human race has been using nuclear energy for power production for over sixty years and yet there is still no safe, economical and widely accepted method for the disposal of dangerous radioactive waste from nuclear power reactors.
While the federal government of India is dedicated to expanding nuclear power, local communities are not so enthusiastic. Since the 1980s, every time the federal government has announced the site of a new nuclear plant in India, there have been public protests by the people who live near the new site. In some cases, these protests have caused the government to abandon sites for planned reactors. In other cases, the government has been able to use the promise of badly needed public funds to quash protests and proceed with reactor construction. The risks and costs of nuclear power plant construction fall heavily on poor rural communities who only use a small fraction of the electricity generated by nearby power plants.
The Modi administration in India strongly supports nuclear power but that may be an unwise policy decision. Globally, the trend seems to be away from nuclear power. Recently, India cancelled the construction of ten new coal-fired power plants because it was cheaper to build solar power plants. Perhaps this will soon be the fate of the planned nuclear power plants.
Kundankulam nuclear power plant:
Part One of Two Parts
India is one of the most populous nations on Earth. They are woefully short on the energy needed to run their nation and provide the growth they desire. The current energy mix in India consists of about fifty eight percent coal, about twenty seven percent oil, about six and a half percent natural gas, about four percent hydroelectric, a little over two percent renewables and a little over one percent nuclear.
This has been a difficult year for the nuclear industry. At the beginning of the year, Areva, the French nuclear company went bankrupt in the midst of a scandal over substandard nuclear components. The French government had to step in and support the purchase of Areva by EDF which has its own financial problems. In March, Westinghouse, the nuclear subsidiary owned by Japan’s Toshiba, declared bankruptcy, throwing the completion of nuclear reactor projects in the U.S. into doubt. In May, the U.S. Energy Information Agency estimated that the percent of nuclear power in the U.S. energy mix would be cut in half in the next thirty years. The new Presidents of both Korea and France have pledged to cut the percent of nuclear power in their nations. Switzerland just voted to phase out nuclear power entirely.
Last June, Indian Prime Minister Modi and U.S. President Obama announced that Westinghouse would build six new nuclear power reactors at Kovvada. Areva had made an agreement with India to build the biggest nuclear complex at Jaitapur. Critics of these arrangements had claimed that the deals were fiscally irresponsible and now they may been cancelled. Considering the recent financial problems of both of these companies, it is likely that if the projects had gone forward, they never would have been completed and the Indian taxpayers would wind up paying inflated prices for electricity. The critics say that the whole idea of nuclear power for India needs to be reevaluated.
Critics of nuclear power in India demand that the Indian government’s recent approval of the construction of ten seven hundred megawatt Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) be carefully reviewed and reconsidered. The projects to build the ten reactors have been in development for some time. In 2012, the United Progressive Alliance government provided a list of sites for the ten new reactors. Even so, construction delays for the first reactor projects, the problems in the global nuclear industry, the low cost of natural gas and the dropping cost of renewable energy sources have all combined to prompt calls for India to abandon all ten of the planned reactor projects.
The domestically manufacture of seven hundred megawatt PHWR reactors would certainly be cheaper than importing foreign reactors. However, it is likely that the energy they generate will be expensive compared to other sources. These seven hundred megawatt PHWR reactors have never been actually built and tested before in India. The biggest domestic reactors that have been built in India are five hundred forty megawatt PHWR. The construction of the first two seven hundred megawatt PHWRs has been delayed by more than two years and the government has been reluctant to share information about the related cost increases. Estimates of the cost of electricity during the first year of operation of the first two seven hundred megawatt PHWR reactors show that it will likely be greater than the cost of all the coal, natural gas and hydroelectric power currently being generated. Even the cost of renewable power has been dropping below the cost of nuclear power.
Please read Part Two
