"Energy to cheap to meter". It pains me. I'm so glad to see a good writer give some strength to how massive and impressive these reactors are. But it pains me as he describes system after thoroughly redundant system adding to the costs of these reactors.
I'm much more familiar with PWRs (Pressurized Water Reactors) which yes, are a bit smaller and less efficient, but the plans and schematics are like a first time run through of a problem. Nothing re-factored, nothing elegant, just plain and simple brute force design to make it work.
There's no reason for four diesel generators when two would do. There's no reason for multiple chemical volume and control systems. There's no reason for 6 foot thick, steel re-barred concrete containment in a negative void coefficient reactor!
My take-away from working in the industry is regulation severely impedes innovation. I fear that our greatest discovery since fire is languishing. Nuclear energy will be used to great extent in the future, but I can't stand the current delays. Energy is conceivably too cheap to meter in it's current form. You could conceivably pay, not by your kilowatt-hour, but a fixed monthly subscription to unlimited energy. Just think about what you could do with that!
Edit: -- Misread the article. PWR's are less efficient than AGRs
My take-away from working in the industry is regulation severely impedes innovation.
Regulation is a lousy form of idiot proofing in terms of efficiency. But it's somewhat reliable.
What do you with a technology that's profoundly useful and perfectly safe in the hands of a sane, reasonably intelligent person but grotesquely dangerous when in the hands of a greedy idiot?? Don't tell me there aren't lots of greedy idiots around...
The inability of biological science to freely perform experiments on humans really does hold back a lot of potential innovation also. That sounds snide but it's also literally true.
Science and society have an uneasy risk-reward relationship.
This is true. Given that there is no shortage of examples of harmful mishaps in the nuclear industry caused by corner-cutting and mismanagement, the mind truly boggles at what might happen if regulation was any looser.
"There's no reason for four diesel generators when two would do"
I remember one senior Scottish Nuclear bloke telling me about one, rather important, bit of equipment at Hunterston B plant (another AGR site on the west coast of Scotland) - the Reactor Shutdown Safety Sequencing Equipment (RSSSE) (not my recall of the details of this acronym are probably a bit off). This shuts down the plant in a safe way if something were to go badly wrong.
Apparently when the AGRs were being designed in the 60s/70s they, understandably, to use tried and tested technology for this module. However, what tried and tested meant to these engineers was that stuff should have had multiple decades of production use before they would consider it - so the technology in the RSSSE was essentially from the 1940s - worm gears, relays etc. At the time I was working on research projects that involved Scottish Nuclear (the early 1990s) they were rather proud of the fact that there was no safety critical software in any AGR plant (there were plenty safety related systems).
So I think it's safe to say that the designs of these plants were, when it came to safety, quite conservative - even if the overall design goals of the plants were actually quite ambitious. As Charlie says, the abiding impression I got of the design of the AGRs (and I am no nuclear engineers) is that they had a design decision that would impact safety they always played safe - massive redundancy in systems, a vast amount of instrumentation (my estimate of the number of signals fed into the control room was off by a comical factor) etc.
We have in Scotland an excellent example of what could be called "conspicuous over engineering" - the Forth Rail Bridge - which was designed in the aftermath of a rail disaster where a bridge over the Firth of Tay collapsed with a train on it, causing great loss of life. With the Forth Rail Bridge not only is it a fantastic bit of engineering the whole spirit of the thing asserts "this is safe".
To me, my experience with the people of Scottish Nuclear and the design of the AGRs themselves gave me a huge amount of confidence that not only were the designs probably as safe as they could be but they were operated in a way that was quite amazingly safety conscious. Given that the UK is rather small and very crowded - with the Central Belt of Scotland being particularly densely populated and neatly bracketed by AGR plants at Hunterston in the west and Torness in the East I'm actually rather pleased that these systems were also conspicuously over engineered.
Actually, I did wonder whether there might have been a backlash against the crazy under-engineered Windscale air cooled reactors and the near disaster of the reactor fire there:
So Windscale might have been the Tay Bridge to the Forth Bridge of the AGRs.
[Edit: The description of the fire in that Wikipedia page is pretty alarming - fancy sticking a scaffolding pole into an on-fire nuclear reactor and bringing it out dripping in liquid irradiated uranium!]
Coolant leak and steam explosion are in conflict with one a other. What you're referring to is Chernobyl, which had a graphite moderator which allowed for a dramatic increase in power and pressure with no release. Light water plants use water as a moderator and a coolant leak would relieve pressure making a steam explosion unlikely. For example Three mile Island was never in danger of a steam explosion.
>Light water plants use water as a moderator and a coolant leak would relieve pressure making a steam explosion unlikely.
I mean, the pressure in the containment building. Isn't that the purpose of the containment walls, to withstand steam pressure from a coolant leak? Or am I misunderstanding things.
>Coolant leak and steam explosion are in conflict with one a other.
My argument is that there is no purpose for the containment walls. They are theoretically yet another barrier to leak of radiation on top of the fuel rods and the piping itself but I would argue this as unnecessary.
Chernobyl should have had a containment vessel. This would have averted that disaster. Three Mile Island had a catastrophic systems failure with a partial meltdown yet only 1 inch of the 7 inch thick reactor vessel was affected. Some xenon gas and other radioactive elements were released to the atmosphere but of minimal quantities.
Here in Canada they shut down the worlds major reactor for producing medical isotopes - because the secondary backup diesel generator failed an inspection.
It didn't matter how many cancer patients died because of the lack of treatments - you can't be too careful.
It's lack grounding all the fire engines in a city because one of them had a siren a 1/4 tone flat.
Actually, Chalk River went down for awhile due to a crack in the reactor vessel. It's actually rather amazing that they were able to repair it. They actually had to use "robots" to repair the welds because it was too hot for humans. The imaging techniques (effectively sonar and eddy currents) that they used to determine where the fractures were was also impressive.
So, sometimes if something shuts down, it's not a conspiracy, but really is an issue of safety (cracked reactor vessel===bad)
Have we actually built one that gets this kind of efficiency? I've heard people saying that pebble beds could combine high core temperatures with gas turbines to get around 50% efficiency, but the only commercial-scale pebble beds I know of are the Chinese HTR-PM, which uses steam turbines to get around 40% efficiency. Still damn impressive, of course.
I'm much more familiar with PWRs (Pressurized Water Reactors) which yes, are a bit smaller and less efficient, but the plans and schematics are like a first time run through of a problem. Nothing re-factored, nothing elegant, just plain and simple brute force design to make it work.
There's no reason for four diesel generators when two would do. There's no reason for multiple chemical volume and control systems. There's no reason for 6 foot thick, steel re-barred concrete containment in a negative void coefficient reactor!
My take-away from working in the industry is regulation severely impedes innovation. I fear that our greatest discovery since fire is languishing. Nuclear energy will be used to great extent in the future, but I can't stand the current delays. Energy is conceivably too cheap to meter in it's current form. You could conceivably pay, not by your kilowatt-hour, but a fixed monthly subscription to unlimited energy. Just think about what you could do with that!
Edit: -- Misread the article. PWR's are less efficient than AGRs