nuclear power safety


There are Faster, Cheaper, Safer and More Reliable Alternatives to the Energy Department’s Proposed Multibillion Dollar Test Reactor

, Acting Director, Nuclear Safety Project; Senior Scientist, Global Security Program

April 5, 2019 4:07 PM EDT

Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry recently announced the launch of the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) project, flagging it as one of the department’s top priorities. The project, which would be the first new DOE test reactor in decades, would differ from the DOE’s operating test reactors because it would be cooled by liquid sodium instead of water, enabling it to produce large numbers of “fast” neutrons. The DOE says that such a facility is needed to develop new reactors that use fast neutrons to generate electricity. US nuclear plants today are light-water reactors, which use slow (“thermal”) neutrons.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) questions the need for a dedicated fast neutron test reactor and, more generally, has serious concerns about fast reactor safety and security, detailed in a critique it released last year. Fast reactors pose nuclear proliferation and terrorism risks in part because they commonly use fuels containing plutonium, a nuclear weapon-usable material. Most fast reactor concepts also involve reprocessing of their spent fuel, which separates plutonium in a form that is vulnerable to theft. Read more >

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Nuclear Reactor Fuel Safety: The Waiting Gain

, former director, Nuclear Safety Project

September 27, 2018 9:21 AM EDT

Nuclear power reactors spilt atoms to release energy used to generate electricity. Many of the byproducts formed when atoms split are unstable (radioactive) and release particles or gamma rays in search of stability. These radioactive emissions produce energy. Whether in the core of an operating reactor, in the core of a shutdown reactor, in the spent fuel pool after discharge from a reactor core, or in dry storage after offloading from a spent fuel pool, the energy released from nuclear reactor fuel must be removed before it damages the fuel from overheating. This commentary describes the energy levels associated with nuclear fuel in various locations at various times to illustrate the factors that affect the associated hazard levels. Read more >

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Fatal Accident at Arkansas Nuclear One

, former director, Nuclear Safety Project

September 13, 2018 6:00 AM EDT

 Role of Regulation in Nuclear Plant Safety #11

The Fatal Accident

As described in Fission Stories #139 and illustrated in Fission Stories #181, a temporary crane removing a component weighing 525 tons on March 31, 2013, in the turbine building of the Unit 1 reactor at Arkansas Nuclear One near Russellville, AR collapsed. The dropped load struck the turbine building floor with considerable force, then rolled and fell through an opening to cause further damage on a lower floor. One worker was killed and eight others injured by the accident. Read more >

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Clinton Power Station: Even More Power Problems

, former director, Nuclear Safety Project

September 10, 2018 6:00 AM EDT

The Clinton Power Station is located 23 miles southeast of Bloomington, Illinois and has one General Electric boiling water reactor with a Mark III containment that began operating in 1987.

In December 2017, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) dispatched a Special Inspection Team to the plant to investigate a transformer failure that prompted the operators to manually scram the reactor. That event nearly duplicated a transformer failure/manual scram event that happened at Clinton in December 2013.

The ink had scarcely dried on the NRC’s special inspection report when Clinton experienced yet another electrical power problem. Some progress has been made—this time it did not involve a transformer failure causing the reactor to be shut down. This time, the reactor was already shut down when the power problem began. This time, the failures involved several workers over several days failing to follow several procedures to disable an emergency power supply. This time as in the past, the NRC dispatched a special inspection team to figure out what when wrong. Read more >

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Vogtle and Hatch: Have Cost Over-Runs Undermined Safety Performance?

, former director, Nuclear Safety Project

September 6, 2018 6:00 AM EDT

In August 2018, Georgia Power announced raised its estimate of the construction costs for its 45.7% share of the two new reactors being constructed at the Vogtle nuclear plant by $1.1 billion from $7.3 billion to $8.4 billion. Assuming the company lacked warehouses stuffed with money, the cost over-run raised an important question: has the hemorrhaging budget for constructing Vogtle Units 3 and 4 taken funding or distracted management attention away from the company’s operating reactors—Vogtle Units 1 and 2 and Hatch Units 1 and 2—and undermined their nuclear safety performance? Read more >

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