The North Anna nuclear plant, ten miles from the epicenter of last week’s earthquake, was designed to withstand a 5.9-6.1 magnitude earthquake, and may have exceeded its design limits. It’s a good thing everything worked:
The spent fuel pools at North Anna contain 4-5 times more than their original designs intended. As in Japan, all U.S. power nuclear power plant spent fuel pools do not have steel lined, concrete barriers that cover reactor vessels to prevent the escape of radioactivity. They are not required to have back-up generators to keep used fuel rods cool, if offsite power is lost. Even though they contain these very large amount of radioactivity, spent reactor fuel pools in the U.S. are mostly contained in ordinary industrial structures designed to protect them against the elements.
North Anna lost power and its generators worked (one failed but another spare was put on-line to replace it). As with other US plants, the spent fuel needs to be moved to dry cask storage, where no electrically-powered cooling is needed.
cathyx
Can anything be done now to make it more earthquake proof?
c u n d gulag
Here’s a fun fact for you from an old anti-nuke protester:
Almost all of the US nuclear reactors are built either dead smack on, or adjacent to, major fault lines.
I hope that allows everyone to sleep easier.
Knowing that, I haven’t slept well for over 30 years.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I was in the Navy nuclear program, and because of that, I will never be in the civilian nuclear program. The Navy has a fear that a reactor will fail, or something will leak, causing every nuclear ship in the fleet to be grounded. Because of this they are very, very conservative when it comes to design and handling of their reactors. The civilian world, not so much.
JPL
We Dodged A Bullet…this time.
JGabriel
The name of the company that owns the North Anna nuclear plant is Dominion.
You know, it’s really not reassuring when a nuclear plant is owned by people who think it’s cool to give their company the kind of name comic-book villains or Christian extremists would come up with.
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Skepticat
As in Japan, all U.S. power nuclear power plant spent fuel pools do not have steel lined, concrete barriers that cover reactor vessels to prevent the escape of radioactivity.
Is this supposed to read “not all US power …” or is someone’s syntax scrambled?
El Cid
A round of tax cuts and deregulation will help, as long as taxpayers are ready to bail out the owners if there is an incident.
PurpleGirl
@Skepticat: scrambled syntax — note the placement of the negative “pools do not have” later in the sentence. Also note the “power nuclear power plants” — I’d say they wrote and rewrote the sentence and didn’t reread it very well.
A better statement would have been “not all U.S. nuclear power plants … have steel lined,….”
JGabriel
@Skepticat:
tHIS IS WHY WE NEED cONSERVATIVE EDUCACATION! dAMN libtardz AM NOT GRAMMAR CORRECT GETTING!
!
PurpleGirl
@JGabriel: LOL.
MikeJ
I distinctly remember after the Japanese disaster people saying, well of course that’s bad things happen in a earthquake zone, but most of the US reactors are on the geographically safe east coast and nothing could ever possibly go wrong there.
@JGabriel:
The nickname of Virginia is “Old Dominion”. Nothing to do with christian wackaloons.
cathyx
Well, do any US nuclear power plants have steel-lined, concrete barriers? That’s the question.
magurakurin
Nuclear power. It’s safe, until it isn’t. There is no way anything can be 100% foolproof. So, if we as humans use nuclear fission for energy generation there will be accidents and there will be leaks of radiation. It is only a matter of time until every country that has nukes has its own Fukushima. I suppose that might be okay if we, as democratic nations, had decided that such a risk was acceptable. But instead, most people have drunk the “nuclear power is safe” koolaid and haven’t made a risk/reward calculation as to whether or not we should be doing it.
but yeah, a little more deregulation and a tax cut should do wonders. Cesium 137 is no match for the magic of the free market.
MikeJ
BTW, here’s a map I posted here after the Japanese quake. US earthquakes from 1973-2002. Anybody still want ignore the right side of the map?
cleek
@cathyx:
Shearon Harris (just south of Apex, NC. about 5mi from my house) does. it has four concrete and steel pools: one for each of the four reactors they had planned to build there. but after 3mi Island, they cancelled plans for three of them, and built just the one. now, those other three pools are used to store spent rods from other plants. that gives Shearon Harris one of the largest concentrations of spent fuel in the country. 3800 tons.
href.
JGabriel
@MikeJ:
Joke-Killer.
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Bill H.
Unlike Japan, though, the spent fuel pool at Dominion is at ground level, not 30′ or so in the air, which makes a rather dramatic difference in an earthquake. Nothing in either article comes within proverbial hand grenade distance of actually suggesting that spent fuel was at risk in this earthquake event.
Also, the Japanese raectors which failed are of the boiling water design, while Dominion is a pressurized water reactor which is several orders of magnitude safer. Again, there is no suggestion in either article that the reactor was ever within any reasonable distance of being at risk of overheating, let alone melting.
The article which says it “may have exceeded its design limits” offers no explanation for that given that it was designed for 5.9-6.1 and experienced a 5.8. The Richter sacle is logarithmic, so the 5.8 actual quake is quite a lot smaller than the 5.9 lower limit of the maximum for which the reactor was designed, not the tiny margin that is implied in most writing on this topic. The article even says that no damage has been found other than some insulation shaken off of pipes, so the statement about “exceeding design criteria” sounds ludicrous.
The 5.8 was the largest on that side of the continent on some sixty years, so the design criteria sounds like it was reasonable, and no damage other than lost insulation sounds like the criteria was adequate as well, so the “we dodged a bullet” headline sounds a bit silly to me.
Cacti
@Bill H.:
50 years from now, a pair of easterners will have the following conversation…
#1: “You remember the great quake of 2011?”
#2: “You mean the one where no one died and there was minimal property damage?”
#1: “It was terrible wasn’t it?”
#2: “Just awful.”
Frankensteinbeck
@Bill H.:
Let ME add that comparing the Cesium in spent fuel pools to Chernobyl is insane and not apples to oranges, more like apples to boots. You worry that spent fuel rods will melt and the pool itself will become terribly radioactive. In a really extreme circumstance you worry about some ground water pollution, but that’s a pretty extreme circumstance. This is not the crap in the reactor that has any chance of being jetted into the air and going everywhere – not that that stuff has any real chance, either.
Any comparison (as opposed to contrast, since we’re full of pedants) of any Western reactor to Chernobyl is disingenuous, period, and a pretty good sign that the speaker is either wildly ignorant or fervently alarmist.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
I watched Under Siege 2: Dark Territory last night and learned that there’s a nuclear reactor located beneath the Pentagon. Steven Seagal saved D.C. from a terrorist attack that would have caused an earthquake resulting in a nuclear catastrophe.
Who is more important to the safety of the United States, Casey Ryback or Jack Bauer?
Robert Sneddon
The US government is responsible for taking, processing and storing spent fuel rods from US nuclear power reactors. It collects a levy for every MWHr of electricity generated by the nuclear power plants to pay for this.
The US government has not collected any of the fuel rods they are contractually obligated to deal with for the past fourteen years ever since the Yucca Mountain project got bogged down. This is why there are so many spent fuel rods clogging up the primary storage ponds in nuclear power plants. The government has continued to collect the fuel rod levy for those fourteen years though.
ant
so what’s the hold up on the dry storage?
Don’t they have to wait a while, and let the the stuff cool down on its own for a while first?
As for cost, seems like a no brainer to me. Raise the rates, and pay for it.
I also recall that there are big piles of coal ash laying around as well. Why can’t they dry that shit out?
ant
@Robert Sneddon:
Was Yucca going to be all dry?
Do they need to ship the stuff to Nevada while still under water?
Pengie
@Cacti:
#1: “No, the one in Japan.”
#2: “Oh, yeah. That one was bad.”
seabe
We? Well I know I certainly did; I live 10 miles from the plant.
Robert Sneddon
@ant: Yep, all dry in buried flasks. The wet storage on-site should only be for fresh spent fuel which is thermally hot from decay products in the fuel pellets. As I recall each rod puts out about 300-400kW of self-heat at shutdown which drops off rapidly in the first couple of days to about 100kW. This cooling period happens while the rods are still in the reactor after fission stops. Each rod is then pulled from the core and quickly (in a few minutes) put into a wet cooling pond. That’s why, for example, the Japanese reactors and other BWRs of the same design had the spent fuel pools at the top of the building next to the reactor lid to minimise the time a hot fuel rod spent in air as it was being transferred.
After a year or two a rod’s self-heat will be down below 50kW and it can be transferred from the reactor pool to an on-site collective storage pool, assuming there is space in that facility for it. Unfortunately since the USG isn’t taking the rods which are ready for transport the cooling pond “pipeline” is getting clogged up. A couple more years in the collective pond and the rod’s low residual self-heat would allow it to be stored dry in a sealed container with a simple unpowered gas circulation system. These containers are being built but they’re not cheap and they’re vulnerable to terrorist attacks, earthquakes, landslips, flooding, aircraft crashes, wildfires, Godzilla… OK, I’m maybe exaggerating a bit there but the Yucca Mountain project meant the argument for processing fuel rods didn’t get made as there was going to be a final disposal solution on hand Real Soon Now and filling up the “pipeline” was only temporary.
Steeplejack
Never mind. Late again.
Roger Moore
@JGabriel:
Yeah, and that name must have to do with them being comic book supervillains. It couldn’t have anything to do with the nickname of the state in which the reactor is located.
Roger Moore
@El Cid:
I think you left out tort reform, the third leg of the crony capitalist platform.
ant
@Robert Sneddon:
Yeah, i went and read the Yucca mountain wiki…. learned a few things.
Thanks for your reply.
I still feel rather ignorant to express much of an opinion on the matter of spent fuel.
It does bother me though.
thanks again
Bill H.
@Robert Sneddon:
Nicely described. Nice to know there are people who are more interested in facts than in axe grinding.
Spent fuel is still a big problem that needs to be resolved.
trollhattan
But, but, Fukushima was so last spring. Also, too.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@JGabriel: It’s not that bad, really. Dominion Power was originally Virginia Power. Virginia is nicknamed the “Old Dominion”. Pretty simple.
Unless… (twiddles thumbs, thinks of more conspiracies)
ETA: I see I’m way behind the curve here. Never mind.
Left Coast Tom
@Bill H.: Not clear what it means to design for quakes based upon Richter scale, which relates to total energy release. MMI (ground shaking intensity) would seem like something worth designing for. One might assume a certain R-scale, model a likely MMI based upon local soil conditions, etc., and design for that. But then, quakes here in the west have led to enough surprises in that area that one would need to revise those calculations over time – for example, Loma Prieta showed amplified shaking around SF and Oakland due to the bedrock. Were the local conditions re-surveyed and the calculations re-done after Loma Prieta in order to determine whether retrofit was required, or did everyone just ignore the ‘right side of the map’ as MikeJ asked?