French Companies Admit Problems at Nuclear Plant in China (nytimes.com) 176
Unusual activity at a nuclear power reactor in China has drawn international attention, as two French companies involved in the plant acknowledged problems on Monday but said they could be handled safely. From a report: The companies were responding to a report by CNN on Monday that Framatome, one of the companies, had sought help from the United States, citing an "imminent radiological threat" at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong Province. EDF, France's main power utility and part owner of the power plant, said in a statement that certain gases had accumulated in the water and steam surrounding the uranium fuel rods at the heart of the reactor. But it said that the reactor had procedures for dealing with such a buildup of gases, which it described as a "known phenomenon." Framatome, an EDF affiliate and the builder of the reactors, said that there had been a "performance issue" but that the plant was operating within its safety parameters. In China, the power plant said in a statement on Sunday night that no leak into the environment had been detected.
Heard this before... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometime in late April 1986...
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The difference is this time the plant has achieved consciousness and has begun communicating with people, that makes it far more dangerous.
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You can't compare this to that. You've got an international operation here, and at least one of the countries is communicating and the client isn't stopping them. China is not great for transparency, but the USSR was locked down way harder. They didn't even tell people in the immediate vicinity until serious damage was done. IIRC, nobody knew internationally until radiation increases were detected in Europe. Then they were forced to fess up.
I don't think the French are lying. We're finding out about a
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If the reactor was blown apart like Chernobyl was in 1986, we'd know.
(a) kind of hard to hide from spy satellites
(b) every university rad lab has a scintillation counter that can run a gamma spectrum of fallout in a few hours and determine what's present in it
(c) the Internet ... people talk. China isn't as isolated as former USSR was in 1986.
Re:Heard this before... (Score:4, Insightful)
I still haven't worked out why the elite haven't sold up all their coastal real estate and adjusted the insurance premiums appropriately. It's almost like they don't believe that the oceans will rise any time soon. They need to get behind the science with the rest of us.
They like their beachfront properties (Score:2)
It's also like asking why the elite haven't dumped Bitcoin yet. Because the best time hasn't arrived yet
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Sell it to who? [youtube.com]
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If all the doom predictions of climate change are correct
They're not.
Listen carefully. Climate change is real. The greenhouse effect is based on well-understood physics. It is happening. It will have harmful effects. It will not cause the end of the world.
then surely the odd nuclear meltdown is a tiny price to pay to avoid the total annihilation of humanity?
It should be possible to make next-generation nuclear plants that are safer. Seriously. We know a lot more now than we did back when the current crop of plants were designed.
I still haven't worked out why the elite haven't sold up all their coastal real estate and adjusted the insurance premiums appropriately.
Because the sea level rise is happening, but it is slow. Real estate prices don't reflect what happens fifty years in the future. They jus
Re: Heard this before... (Score:2)
We know a lot more about PWR, a big build out of sodium cooled reactors like nuclear engineers are prone to desire will be a learning and burning experience.
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Too many people ignore the actual science.
Too many people ignore the trade-offs that have to be made when building nuclear reactors. Neutron bombardment that limits the service life of the reactor vessel. The amount of CO2 created in making the concrete that the reactor is built from. The amount of CO2 generated when mining uranium OR the amount of radioactive sulfuric acid from acid leech mining uranium. The amount of CO2 created when enriching uranium. The amount of CO2 created when dismantling a reactor.
People forget that a nuclear reacto
advocates and opponents [Re:Heard this before...] (Score:2)
Yes: the problem with discussions of nuclear power is that the advocates won't admit that there are any problems, while the opponents won't admit that there are any solutions.
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The amount of CO2 created in making the concrete that the reactor is built from. The amount of CO2 generated when mining uranium OR the amount of radioactive sulfuric acid from acid leech mining uranium. The amount of CO2 created when enriching uranium. The amount of CO2 created when dismantling a reactor.
The amount of CO2 generated when mining uranium goes to zero the more nuclear power plants are in operation. Uranium is diffuse enough even in its ore bodies that it's mined using bucket wheel excavators, which are electrically powered. They trail a big fat cable behind them.
Uranium is enriched purely using electrical power. No one runs an enrichment centrifuge off of a big fat diesel engine in the room. The vibrations would destroy the centrifuge.
The concrete the reactor containment is built from absor
UF6 [Re:Heard this before...] (Score:3)
I have to say, this comment thread has been very informative. Kudos to the people commenting with real facts and information, and not just opinions.
commenting on just one minor point in the long post:
...Ultracentrifuge has plenty of issues of it's own with radionuclide externalities. Uranium hexafloride used in production of nuclear fuels produces radioactive chlorinated flurocarbons, which are tens of thousands of times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2
The problem with chlorofluorocarbons is their long lifetimes in the atmosphere, because CFCs are extraordinarily non-reactive. This is not true of UF6; it is very reactive. Most notably, it reacts with water, so its atmospheric lifetime will be very short. Maybe nuclear power has got 99 problems, but the gre
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Same thing can happen at any solar panel, wind turbine or battery plant.
Hell, even a gas or coal powered plant can have these exact issues.
Why... I remember this one time when a coal plant exploded and brought down a major global power due to the human and economic costs of the immediate handling of the explosion alone.
Same thing happens to solar and wind plants practically daily.
Clearly, we should build more nuclear power plants. It's the only way to be sure.
Re:Heard this before... (Score:5, Interesting)
The sarcasm might make sense if that had ever happened due to a nuclear accident. But we're talking about a malfunction in China that reportedly hasn't killed anyone.
After Fukushima happened, one enterprising journalist thought maybe he'd check what fossil-fuel-related disasters had happened in the same year. He found 25 disasters that killed 647 people [theatlantic.com]. I don't have numbers for other years, but is there any reason to think 2011 was an unusual year for fossil fuels? This comparison matters because nuclear power is as low-carbon as wind energy [energyforhumanity.org], and it's firm generation that, unlike batteries, won't run out if the wind doesn't blow for an extended period of time.
So why is it that we all remember Three Mile Island, which killed no one and happened before many of us were born, while fossil fuel disasters get a free pass year after year?
Now, I heard somewhere that if people hadn't been relocated after Fukushima, 160 (or was it 200?) would have died from cancer at some point. I'm having trouble finding the reference for that again (though here is a study that finds the relocation was not justified [sciencedirect.com]), but let's compare Fukushima with how many people could realistically (or unrealistically) be killed from nuclear power in the worst case. [reddit.com]
Re:Heard this before... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oops, meant to say "let's compare coal with how many people could realistically (or unrealistically) be killed by nuclear power in the worst case"
Oh, and before you say "doesn't matter, nuclear costs way too much", I would point out that most of the nuclear plants currently in use today were built in the 1970s and did not cost too much at that time [pitt.edu], which is why they were built instead of fossil fuel plants (businessmen in the 1970s were not trying to stop global warming). And while building nuclear plants has become much more expensive due to regulations, green-yet-accidentally-pro-coal activism, and the loss of expertise that comes from not building nuclear plants for 40 years, and maybe even other mysterious cost diseases [slatestarcodex.com], there are technologies that could make nuclear affordable again, such as the plans by Terrestrial Energy, Thorcon, Moltex [youtube.com] and other companies.
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Oh, and before you say "doesn't matter, nuclear costs way too much", I would point out that most of the nuclear plants currently in use today were built in the 1970s and did not cost too much at that time [pitt.edu]
Pointing to the past doesn't solve the very real problems of the present. The past is an indication that nuclear power *can* cost less if we fix the very real problems currently facing the industry. Nothing is more of an example of this than the company listed in TFS.
Who is EDF? An energy utility that bought the rotting corpse of bankrupt AREVA, one of the world's most premier nuclear companies who helped propel France to world leadership in the industry and who have built reactors all over the world, who n
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Well, it would be dead simple to restore the conditions
No it won't. A significant portion of the conditions are societal and industrial not just political. If the problem were as easy to solve as just a bunch of politicians applying common sense rules then some countries would have done it by now (not the USA obviously, the political system there is fucked, but the problems being experienced exist in the USA, in France, in China, and in India, four countries with four completely different rules, regulations, and politics).
Speaking of regulation, nothing points
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... He found 25 disasters that killed 647 people [theatlantic.com].
Sure. And each one cost US$187 billion to clean up, just like Fukushima...
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So why is it that we all remember Three Mile Island, which killed no one and happened before many of us were born, while fossil fuel disasters get a free pass year after year?
Define "we all". I certainly remember a lot more nuclear incidents/accidents, most of which the same "we all" don't remember, or don't even know existed.
The 1957 Mayak accident was the worst after Chernobyl, shortly followed by the Mailuu Suu dam failure and radioactive waste spill. Then there's the Andreev Bay incident of 1982, and I could go on.
Guess where they all happened, and how (or whether, even) were they reported correctly.
That's what triggers my gut feelings which say "there might be more to this
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If you want to play a numbers game then nuclear is worse for deaths per unit of energy generated than wind and solar.
https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
It's also worse than both for the amount of wildlife killed, including birds. Worse for CO2 emissions over its lifetime.
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One of two reactors went offline during the Texas freeze earlier this year when safety monitoring instruments froze up in the unanticipated cold and ice conditions. The operating licence for the nuclear plant meant they couldn't continue to run the reactor without safety monitoring and deliver its gigawatt or so of generating capacity into the undersupplied grid so it was shut down. The other reactor on the same site kept running fine.
"gas explosion at a furniture store" (Score:2)
After Fukushima happened, one enterprising journalist thought maybe he'd check what fossil-fuel-related disasters had happened in the same year. He found 25 disasters that killed 647 people.
Have you ever heard of confirmation bias and cherry picking? Cause you just did a shitload of it.
The "list" you provided contained ZERO (0, NULL, zip, nada...) actual powerplant disasters.
It also didn't have a single coal power plant on the list. In any capacity.
What it did have is a bunch of events, from all around THE ENTIRE FUCKIN PLANET - loosely related to the entire fossil fuel industry and, from mining to transportation and end-user exploitation.
And still "the journalist" had to resort to padding it
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Um... what? I was comparing an event in 2011 with other events in 2011. If you've got other deadly incidents related to nuclear energy (e.g. uranium mining) that happened in 2011, let's hear them. If you want to include all incidents related to nuclear po
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You haven't said why you think this. Estimates are that fossil fuels have historically caused 40 to 467 times more deaths than nuclear power [ourworldindata.org].
Perhaps you think nuclear reactors can potentially explode like a nuclear weapon? No, that's phsically impossible since nuclear weapons require weapon
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[citation needed]
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Did some googling because I was curious. There have been studies for decades, but no strong evidence either way. The entire state (not just the local area or areas that would be downwind) has higher than normal levels of thyroid cancer. Apparently due to high natural levels of radon. Apparently that mucks with being able to find definitive evidence eith
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How's your third eye? :)
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It helps with his psychic powers.
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In retrospect, I should have detailed my post... it's easy to be misunderstood, especially when the entry is too brief and prone to misinterpretation. Totally my fault here.
I am not anti-nuclear power, quite the contrary. However, nuclear incidents reported in countries with a long, LONG history of secrecy, totalitarian governments and a certain population mindset which is more inclined to lie than tell the truth are worrying me and trigger a response which is based on distrust towards said governments and
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The USA is a toddler compared to Russia or China, in this regard.
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You're confusing government-controlled misinformation and stupidity.
Stupidity is when you are being told shit, and choose to believe it, regardless of widely available data.
Government-controlled misinformation is when you are being told shit, and there's no available data to debunk that shit, because the government actively suppresses it.
Keeping things up. (Score:2)
Wow. Don't you hate when a reactor has a "performance issue"?
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Yeah, I thought they had a pill for that now. Or several.
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They have a pill and a vaccine!
"Nothing to see here, move on!" (Score:3)
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Nothing escapes containment in China, be it a virus or radiation. It wouldn't have the audacity to.
Re:"Nothing to see here, move on!" (Score:4, Interesting)
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I am fairly sure nuclear evangelists are somewhat dubious on building nuclear reactors in non-democratic countries with known issues in building quality and culture of hiding problems to save face.
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Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
It has a fairly short half-life of just around 100 minutes, so it's harmless for anyone outside of the nuclear plant.
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
Xe-135 is a neutron absorbing fission product that's known to cause issues in reactors especially during startups or major power level changes but there are well-known ways to burn though any accumulation of Xe-135 that might affect power production levels. Xe-135 has a half-life of 9 hours so it doesn't stay around too long anyways.
The reports are very coy about what sort of gas is said to be the problem -- one mention, I presume translated by Google from French into English says "fission gases" so it's probably not tritium or any of the neutron-capture transmuted forms of nitrogen, carbon or oxygen which might happen if the water feeds weren't properly de-oxygenated as they should be.
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
Xe-135 "poisoning" also played a part in the Chernobyl incident - the morons in the control room didn't know what was happening after half a day of running at minimum power and building up Xenon without the neutron flux to burn it off, and they stalled the reactor. Then they tried to pull all the control rods trying to get power back up so they could still do their rundown test, even though anyone with their head on straight should have known that they are outside of test parameters and should not. So they cranked it up in order to try to get power back to the level necessary for the test. Well, it went up all right - right through the roof once the Xenon burned off and the reactor went into runaway due to the coolant flashing to steam and creating voids (because they had also shut down two of the feedwater pumps in order to purposefully increase reactivity due to having a positive void coefficient.)
Basically any way of controlling the reaction was purposefully removed or ignored, and then when they tried to shut the thing down when it started to run away on them, something nobody was told about happened - neutron absorbing water started getting replaced with neutron-moderating graphite control rod tips, which increased reactivity and blew the top off the thing. The last reading recorded had reactor-4 at 30,000MWt, or 10x the rated output of the reactor. Oops.
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
Less likely to be a CCP officer, more likely to be a plant director afraid of giving bad news of lessened production till they deal with the problem to his regional superiors. Problems getting swept under the rug is a norm in Chinese culture, because to tell about problems you're having to your superiors is to lose face. And face is paramount in China.
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:4, Interesting)
Problems getting swept under the rug is a norm in Chinese culture
This is not even remotely unique to Chinese culture. Oh, the "face saving" part, sure. But please don't tell me you've never heard a boss in the US say something akin to, "Don't bring me problems; bring me solutions!", accompanied by a bit of table-pounding.
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
Not even remotely similar. In China, it's completely normal to spend more energy covering up problems so you don't have to bring them to your boss to save face. For example there have been recent reports of a sinkhole opening in the street in a tier three city in China, where crews arrived to begin filling up the hole while people were still in it to cover it opening in the first place. Can't have city bosses lose face because there's a documented major failure of infrastructure.
Evidence is a handful of photos and complaints from citizenry who were severely distraught by the fact that workers that arrived at the scene were literally burying their loved ones alive to save face of the local leadership before WeChat memory holed the event, which is a common occurrence in China for such events.
And this sort of thing is not uncommon in China.
It's in fact one of the reasons why most of more demanding development with low tolerances for failure doesn't really function all that well in China. For example, manufacturing fighter jet engines. You need constant communication between each layer of leadership to minimize problems as they are found to ensure that end product has a useful life span, as even the tiniest failures that are barely noticeable result in severe reduction in end product's lifespan. In China, this is effectively impossible to achieve due to the way culture of face functions, so their fighter jet engines rarely last more than 1/10th of Russian counterparts that they're copied from in spite of massive amount of resources that has been thrown at this problem for at least two decades at this point. It's a strategic problem that top CCP leadership is involved in solving, and even then, it's been a process of beating their collective heads against the wall that is this culture for a better part of two decades.
The "bring me solutions" culture you're talking about is in fact a great thing, because it means that boss is both informed of the problem and expects his subordinates to know that they also need to work independently and to the best of their ability to solve it. Both aspects are utterly absent in China, where not only are workers expected to try to hide any problems from their boss, but they're also utterly incapable (and culturally not allowed) to make their own judgement calls on potential solutions. It's a standard communist model of top down low trust leadership structure where even the medium tier bosses will have little to no ability to order any meaningful changes to procedure without getting permission from higher ups. And any attempt to act of one's own volition, no matter how productive is persecuted harshly.
And bosses in question cannot be informed about potential problems that require such changes in the first place. It's a very unique cultural problem. One of the solutions often used is the heavy workplace drinking culture, where everyone is expected to go out with the rest of their corporate group and get utterly smashed routinely. During those events, inhibitions are often lowered enough for some details of potential failures to creep up the food chain without immediate loss of face.
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In China, it's completely normal to spend more energy covering up problems so you don't have to bring them to your boss to save face.
That's exactly how it is here too. To give you an example one installation engineer I know managed to blow up a load of lead acid backup power batteries, so went out and bought a load of new ones with his own money. He then blew those up as well, but third time was the charm. Never told his boss, even bought a load of cleaning products and paint to remove the black marks on the brand new building he nearly set on fire. Oh, and he replaced the fire extinguisher he used, again out of his own pocket.
For example there have been recent reports of a sinkhole opening in the street in a tier three city in China, where crews arrived to begin filling up the hole while people were still in it to cover it opening in the first place.
I couldn't
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Do you really think that the average Chinese person is a hardcore communist?
If you had ever been to China you would have noticed that it's full of capitalists, and they have fully embraced consumerism. Why do you think so many Western brands are desperate to be selling there?
As for leaving people to die in the road, well I have contrary video evidence:
https://youtu.be/QwQzomisaf4 [youtu.be]
https://youtu.be/upjLEJFPvaE [youtu.be]
https://youtu.be/4nMO0sLBGyc [youtu.be]
There are plenty more videos of things like environmental schemes where th
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China memory holing is a thing. Overwhelming majority of Western sites are not accessible in China without VPN, using which can result in terrorist charges in China for locals without permission do to so. Not to even mention the language barrier. So most people in China do not use any Western video sharing sites at all. Those are worse services than they already have in China that is hard to access compared to WeChat.
Which is why videos you'll look for are on WeChat, not "Western media". And WeChat is contr
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"Chinese authorities memory holed it, just like they memory hole most such things".
Do you think that a single slashdot user is more powerful than Chinese domestic propaganda and censorship apparatus? Were you born yesterday?
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This is not even remotely unique to Chinese culture. Oh, the "face saving" part, sure. But please don't tell me you've never heard a boss in the US say something akin to, "Don't bring me problems; bring me solutions!", accompanied by a bit of table-pounding.
In China you never hear that said because workers do not tell their boss anything. Not the problem, not the solution. They just pretend like everything is working as intended even when it's not. There's a very VERY big difference.
I have had a boss in the USA say to me "If he screws up, help him fix the problem. Whatever you do don't report it." But that was during a cultural training class right before my trip to the Chinese plant.
And the problem was very real too. There are some cultural sub context which
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]
"EDF said the build-up of noble gases krypton and xenon, which it said had affected the primary circuit of reactor No.1 of the Taishan plant, was a "known phenomenon, studied and provided for in the reactor operating procedures".
A group spokesman said this could be because of an issue with fuel rods and seals. Measurements of inert gases were below maximum levels authorised in China, the spokesman said, adding that it was too early to say whether the reactor would have to be shut down.
Krypton and xenon do not tend to react with other substances but they do have radioactive qualities and are therefore subject to constant monitoring."
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, that's useful information. Xe-135 is a known problem as a fission product, it's one of the strongest absorbers of neutrons around causing issues with sustaining a chain reaction. It's usually only an issue during startup or making power level changes in a reactor and there are operational procedures to deal with its effects.
What this event sounds like is that Xe-135 gas and maybe other common fission-product gases are escaping from the theoretically gas-tight fuel pins into the pressurised water inside the reactor vessel and being detected there. That would point to faulty fuel structures rather than anything particularly intrinsic to the EPR design. I can't recall if the Taishan EPRs are using Framatome-manufactured fuel for the initial operation of these French-designed reactors or whether the Chinese are manufacturing and using their own home-rolled fuel elements under licence.
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Agreed. A fuel element failure is the first thing that came to mind. The cladding popped a seam due to thermal stress/bad fabrication.
It's a nuisance, not a disaster. The symptoms of one were part of the training in ELT school in the Navy.
Al Mas Pintado. SSN 672.
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:4, Informative)
I can totally see Chinese power plant operators cutting corners around it. It shouldn't be dangerous, but PR is going to be terrible.
Re:Guessing: argon contamination (Score:5, Informative)
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My first thought was they're leaking tritium. Trace levels of tritium leak from all water moderated fission reactors and it's very hard to contain because it's hydrogen with extra neutrons and hydrogen famously leak through all but the best seals.
This doesn't surprise me because this is a western design that assumes material and construction quality that one can only attempt to ensure in a reactor built and regulated in a Western nation, and operation by people that at least attempt to approach Western s
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Tritium is a noticeable problem with boiling-water reactors (BWRs) since the reactor-generated steam is used to directly drive turbines before going through condensers and cooling towers and being turned back into feedwater for the next trip round. There's a lot more piping and valve gear outside the containment for leaks of irradiated water to occur.
The Taishan EPR in question, one of two operating there is a pressurised-water reactor (PWR). The water heated in the reactor doesn't flash to steam, the heat
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Tritium is a noticeable problem with boiling-water reactors (BWRs) since the reactor-generated steam is used to directly drive turbines before going through condensers and cooling towers and being turned back into feedwater for the next trip round
Water from a BWR core _never_ goes into cooling towers. It's condensed in heat exchangers by the water that does go through cooling towers or ponds. In general, you have to heavily treat anything before it can go into the core, otherwise you'll get a radioactive mess on your hands.
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Yes, I know, but a BWR's moderator-coolant still leaves the reactor containment and passes through a lot of piping, the turbine which has non-gastight bearings etc. and the condensers which are sometimes cold-sinked in cooling towers. The reactor coolant is recirculated, it's not deliberately lost in an open-loop evaporator.
The extra plumbing outside the containment means a very small but detectable amount of tritium can be found in various places outside a BWR reactor complex even when it's running withi
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The other concern is excessive hydrogen generation from the breakdown of zirconium due to uncovered fuel rods, like what blew the tops off the Fukushima reactors.
"certain gases had accumulated" worries me. They obviously know which gasses, and they're not saying which one it is. Normally I try to leave the aluminum headcover on the shelf, but this is a pretty obvious withholding of information. If they're avoiding saying which gasses, I think it's safe to assume it's one of the worse options.
If it were o
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Former radiochemist here. Although I never worked with plant chemistry, I've got a little bit of knowledge of the kinds of issues you can get in these reactors.
My semi-informed suspicion is that they're seeing krypton and xenon due to fuel failures, a problem that has been very nearly eliminated in reactors run in the west but does occasionally happen and used to be pretty common a few decades ago. We learned to control it by managing plant chemistry very precisely and with very strict foreign material ex
Manipulation (Score:4, Interesting)
This news was probably leaked by large funds wanting to buy into uranium stocks more cheaply than they currently are priced.
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This news was probably leaked by large funds wanting to buy into uranium stocks more cheaply than they currently are priced.
LEU [yahoo.com] dropped by a little more than 1% today. That's the company that makes most of the civilian nuclear fuel for US use. Most major indices were down today so its all beta (its a movement of price in unison with the rest of the market). So it appears that your theory isn't correct.
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So it appears that your theory isn't correct.
The theory could still be correct.
Just because an attempt to manipulate the market failed doesn't prove that there was no attempt.
Re:Manipulation (Score:4, Interesting)
Proving negatives isn't just for electrons.
Lots were down more (Score:2)
LEU dropped by a little more than 1% today
The stocks I follow (like URNM, NXE or CCJ) were all down 5-9%...
URNM is a basket of companies in the space (ETF) so it would be the most desirable target for hedge funds to acquire (as they have been slowly over the past several months).
Look out! (Score:3)
In China, the power plant said in a statement on Sunday night that no leak into the environment had been detected.
THE PLANT HAS GAINED SENTIENCE! Of course it's going to say nothing is wrong!
Not great, not terrible (Score:3)
French company in China, and USA? (Score:3)
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Same thing happened with Fukushima. The Japanese were trying to deal with it and the US government kept demanding information from them. When they didn't get it we started seeing these conspiratorial articles in the US media about what were the Japanese covering up... Of course they weren't, they just had more important shit to deal with than some random foreign government agency.
There is probably some regulatory requirement for them to report now, if they have any operations in the US.
Fukushima and the USS Ronald Reagan (Score:3, Interesting)
The Japanese were trying to deal with it and the US government kept demanding information from them.
I think if Japan had asked for help at the beginning of the disaster from the USS Ronald Reagan [wikipedia.org] that was diverted from exercises, instead of being so concerned with their pride and sovereignty, then the disaster could have been controlled.
Especially considering that US budget had already been allocated for doing that stuff. Japan had access to the expertise of the reactor personnel on board, which would have gone a long way to reducing the severity of the Fukushima disaster. Instead reactor personnel w
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While it would have been a good idea to get extra batteries on-site for cooling, in the end it wouldn't have actually helped. Most of the water that was pumped in to cool the reactors never reached them.
There was a valve that was diverting water to a storage tank. The system for monitoring the valve was damaged and it was inaccessible for manual checking.
Pride perhaps isn't quite the right word though. Denial maybe. Much like at Chernobyl, there was an unwillingness to accept the catastrophic reality of the
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Not counting the deaths of US sailors, deaths from nuclear power have overtaken renewables per terawatt hour produced.
Nuclear 0.07
Wind 0.04
Solar 0.02
https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
Thank you for the updated information.
While it would have been a good idea to get extra batteries on-site for cooling, in the end it wouldn't have actually helped. Most of the water that was pumped in to cool the reactors never reached them.
There was a valve that was diverting water to a storage tank. The system for monitoring the valve was damaged and it was inaccessible for manual checking.
The Ronald Reagan was perfectly place to get expertise on site at Fukushima before things got out of control, if they were authorized.
Pride perhaps isn't quite the right word though. Denial maybe. Much like at Chernobyl, there was an unwillingness to accept the catastrophic reality of the situation.
No, pride is the right word. Arrogance got them into the situation due to their belief that nuclear power was an infallible technological solution. Pride was what they used to conceal that arrogance because, as you rightfully say, there was an unwillingness to accept the catastrophic reality of the situation.
The Australian press happen
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There are some documentaries by NHK on YouTube somewhere, but basically the valve was physically inaccessible due to tsunami damage and high levels of radiation. Accessing it would have needed heavy equipment to remove some debris, not an easy task when some of that debris is contaminated and setting off personal alarms. Unfortunately I don't think anyone could have helped unless they were willing to die to do it.
Having said that it might have helped to have engineers on site to give advice, but perhaps you
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Incorrect. Both the French and Japanese consult the US because we have the experts.
Is it possible that they bought US experts in because no one in the US would believe them *unless* they bought in US experts?
Is it possible it's a courtesy to the American population to avoid getting pilloried in the US press and so a US expert is available to answer questions?
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The French contracting in China doesn't "make USA involved". One nuclear expert working for a nuclear site they partially own has asked another for assistance. That is par for the course. The nuclear industry despite the insane politics surrounding proliferation is actually insanely collaborative.
an reverse China Syndrome is called? (Score:3)
an reverse China Syndrome is called?
Re:an reverse China Syndrome is called? (Score:5, Funny)
an reverse China Syndrome is called?
Look at a globe to see the antipode of China.
It is called "Argentina Syndrome".
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Alright. That's clever. +1 Funny
So, how bad is it? (Score:2)
On a scale from zero to "Oh my god!" where does these problems lie? With green being all is fine, and C being the moon is launched from it's orbit out to deep space.
It appears to me that Slashdot will only cover good news about fusion power, which tells us that yet again fusion is only 20 years away, or good news about solar power, which is a technology that will also always be 20 years away. That's if it's not a story about how we are all going to die from global warming in 20 years. Thankfully we will
Let us know (Score:2)
It appears to me that Slashdot will only cover good news about fusion power, which tells us that yet again fusion is only 20 years away, or good news about solar power, which is a technology that will also always be 20 years away.
Let us know when the next solar power plant meltdown occurs.
I'll submit it to Slashdot myself.
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Let us know when the next solar power plant meltdown occurs.
The Tonopah solar concentrator tower melted its tower once when the computer-controlled mirrors focussed the sunlight on the wrong part of the structure for a time.
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On your scale, about 0.2 if the Space 1999 case is a 10.
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Sounds like safe nuclear power is still 20 years away if plants keep running into unexpected phenomena. The sun is exporting vast quantities of energy daily on our planet. Why not passively take advantage of that?
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Sounds like safe nuclear power is still 20 years away if plants keep running into unexpected phenomena
That may be true in China.
The sun is exporting vast quantities of energy daily on our planet. Why not passively take advantage of that?
Because sunshine is intermittent, requiring vast storage systems or some reliable power source to back it up. If we have a reliable power source to back up solar then what do we need solar power for? We don't use solar power much because it is dilute, it requires large facilities to collect this energy, a far more material and labor than any other energy source, and because of this demand for land, material, and labor it is damaging to the environment. Solar power is far from "g
For a non-hysterical view (Score:2)
Your New York Times link is paywalled, so we have no idea what they have to say on this story. The link in the clear is CNN's usual nudge-wink-apocalypse spin on anything related to climate and energy.
This is what BBC had to say: https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
Move the goal posts - so there's no 'leak' (Score:5, Informative)
' It also warned that the Chinese safety authority was raising the acceptable limits for radiation detection outside the plant to prevent it from being shut down.'
From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/wor... [bbc.co.uk]
OK granted that the safety margins in determining the safe level of radiation are massive (why can't there ever be a nuclear power station in Cornwall? Because the background radiation there would ensure EVERYONE exceeded their 'safe' dose'). But this still stinks.
If the USA actually gets a public call for aid (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
A bunch of people here are acting like the moon just exploded. This "incident" is more of an annoyance than anything. It comes at a bad time since there are power shortages already, but this is far from the end of the world.
Ideally, they would shut down, let the xenon decay, then remove the offending fuel rod. Less ideally, they'll keep running until there is less shortage of electricity.
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Why the need to report this to the media and increase the allowable emissions then?