The UK's Energy Gap: very scary

Starvid · Last edited by Starvid on Mon Nov 14, 2005 6:23 am; edited 1 time in total

No one has managed to provide an answer to why the reactors can't have their lifes extended.

sjn

There was an artitcal in the Institute of Physics "Physics World" magazine about cracks in the reactors. I can't rembember with specifity though; I'll try to find it.

untothislast

[quote="Starvid" 60 new reactors would be cool.[/quote]

Of course, getting them all to stay 'cool' would be the problem.

Doly · Expert Joined: Dec 03, 2004 Posts: 4034

Starvid

untothislast

Headline from the Australian news:

'Australia terror suspects 'were stopped near nuclear plant'

Staff and agencies
Monday November 14, 2005

Three of the 18 terror suspects arrested in Sydney and Melbourne last week were stopped and questioned by police near Australia's only nuclear power station, it was claimed today.

A document released to the court where the eight people arrested in Sydney had their first hearing alleged that three of the suspects had been stopped in their car near the city's nuclear facility in December 2004.

The men also had an off-road motorbike and claimed they were there to ride, the document said. It added that all three had given different versions of the day's events to police.

Police inquiries revealed the lock of a gate to a reactor reservoir had recently been cut. The three - Mazen Touma, Mohammed Elomar and Abdul Rakib Hasan - along with five other Sydney men, have been charged with conspiring to manufacture explosives in preparation for a terrorist act.'

Let's just bear in mind our own vulnerability to this sort of thing, before we go ahead with the sort of exponential growth in commissioning nuclear reactors, being called for in this thread.

Blow up a conventional power station - the lights go off for a few days, or weeks.

Blow up a nuclear facility - we're talking permanent evacuation of hundreds of square miles. Basically, the UK - little island that it is - would be finished.

untothislast

. . . And from the UK's 'Guardian' newspaper (4 years ago - but perhaps even more relevant now).

'Sellafield attack 'could be worse than Chernobyl'

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Tuesday October 23, 2001
The Guardian

An EU report says an accident at Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant could cause greater damage than the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine in 1986.
The report, leaked on the same day that MEPs in Strasbourg discussed safety at nuclear sites following the September 11 attacks, paints a harrowing picture of the disaster which could follow an accident in the high level waste tanks at the Cumbrian reprocessing plant.

Fears that the waste problem was worsening have led to the nuclear installations inspectorate temporarily closing the reprocessing works last month.

The inspectorate has frequently warned British Nuclear Fuels, which operates the plants, it could not allow the situation to continue with 1,550 cubic metres of high level liquid waste remaining untreated.
The report, compiled for the EU by environmental group Wise Paris before September 11, said events that could trigger an atmospheric release of high level radioactive waste at the plant included explosions and air crashes.

"The long term consequences of a release from the Sellafield high level waste tanks could be much greater than the consequences of the Chernobyl accident due to the large amounts of caesium-137 and other radioisotopes in the tanks," it said.

The Chernobyl nuclear accident exposed 5m Europeans to increased levels of radiation. Hundreds of children in Russia and the Ukraine have cancer as a result.

The report said some emissions from Sellafield had contained radiation in excess of levels recommended both by the EU and under the Ospar convention for the protection of the marine environment in the northeast Atlantic.

Britain's decision this month to expand Sellafield with the commissioning of a mixed oxide (MOX) plant provoked protest in Ireland, which has long campaigned for the closure of facilities there.

The Irish government has launched legal proceedings under EU law, and is considering a claim under the United Nations convention on law of the sea. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have also launched a case against the government but in the UK high court.

A spokeswoman for the Irish government department with responsibility for nuclear matters said it had not yet obtained a copy of the report.

"However, if media reports prove to have substance then it further justifies the Irish government's legal action against the British authorities," she said.

The report, Possible toxic effects from the nuclear reprocessing plants at Sell afield (UK) and Cap de la Hague (France), compiled for the EU's scientific and technological assessment committee, has not been published.

The committee is expected to meet in Strasbourg today to hear independent views before making a decision on whether to release it.

Irish Green party MEP Nuala Ahern said the closed nature of the meeting was highly irregular. "I'm going to stand up in the [European] parliament and say I have a copy, I believe it should be released to members and anyone who wants it I'm prepared to give it to them," she said.

In the parliament in Strasbourg yesterday, Green MEP Caroline Lucas called for anti-aircraft measures, no-fly and offshore exclusion zones to be established at nuclear power stations and reprocessing facilities in the EU, particularly at Sellafield and La Hague.

Dr Lucas said: "After September 11, all nuclear facilities must be shut down as rapidly as possible. Operations like reprocessing at Sellafield were never constructed with a terrorist attack in mind...

"If a plane crashed into ... Sellafield, it has been calculated that it would release 44 times as much radioactivity as the Chernobyl disaster, and could cause more than 2m cancers," she said.

Starvid

First of all, Australia has no nuclear power stations. The news outlet should check its sources better. The Australians do have a small research reactor.

untothislast

Starvid, you're obviously a devotee of nuclear energy - and I won't hold that against you. Facing the oncoming crisis, we obviously need to reassess all our technological capabilities, to make sure we're not overlooking anything which might help us bridge the gap after the effects of oil depletion have impacted heavily.

I've never been persuaded of the case for nuclear power. It's largely inefficient for its specified purpose; is never economically rational - given the vast government subsidies and underwritings usually involved;

(From the UK 'Guardian' newspaper: July 18 2005: A letter marked "restricted: commercial and market sensitive", obtained by the Guardian, shows the government paid £184,812,087 to British Energy on March 1 for "spent fuel liabilities". These liabilities are long standing reprocessing contracts with the state-owned British Nuclear Fuels, at Sellafield in Cumbria'.)

is inherently lethal - and increasingly subject to terrorist interest; and no one has yet found a statisfactory way of dealing with the waste products.
The cost of dealing with the waste products and general decommissioning in the UK alone, has recently been estimated as being up to £56 billion.

(Thanks to my local reprocessing plant (Sellafield), I live next to one of the most radioactive stretches of sea in the world - responsible for the trace amounts of plutonium every British child is currently carrying around in their teeth).

I'm actually less concerned with any terrorist threat, than by the fact that these facilities seem to be built without much regard to operational safety - which has only been made worse in the UK since the industry was transferred to the private sector. For example:

'Sellafield staff ignored 100 warnings about leak'

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Saturday July 16, 2005
The Guardian

Shift workers and managers at the Sellafied nuclear reprocessing works suffered from "new plant culture", believing it was impossible for the £1.8bn factory to go wrong, and so ignored more than 100 warnings over six months that it had sprung a catastrophic leak, it emerged yesterday.
Although the plant is manned 24 hours a day and deals with highly radioactive and corrosive materials, the flagship of the Sellafield nuclear works in Cumbria continued in operation even though 83 cubic metres of dangerous liquid was gradually leaking into the base of the works.

In April, the plant was closed after the discovery of a fractured pipe and a board of inquiry was established.
The inquiry discloses that the over-confidence of workers was completely unjustified. Some supports for tanks holding the dangerous liquid which were designed to prevent vibration and guard against earthquakes had never been fitted.

The result was that "the pipework had exceeded its theoretical life expectancy given the level of vibration". It was this vibration that caused the pipe carrying the dangerous spent nuclear fuel dissolved in nitric acid to spring a leak.

The company inquiry says the "new plant culture" persisted at the thermal oxide reprocessing plant (Thorp), despite the fact that leaks had occurred twice before in its 10-year history. In one case warnings had been ignored for years, despite alarms being activated.

Workers at the Thorp plant are now being retrained to change their outlook by the company which runs it, the state owned British Nuclear Group, a successor to British Nuclear Fuels. The report says: "It seems likely there will remain a significant chance of further plant failures occurring in the future even with comprehensive implementation of recommendations of this report."

Further embarrassment for the company comes with the disclosure that because of the six months that the leak continued, 83 cubic metres of dissolved fuel from three countries, Holland, Switzerland and Germany, has been mixed together on the plant floor.

Under reprocessing contracts, plutonium and uranium from spent fuel must be returned to the country of origin. But it may prove impossible to do this since the mixture in the leaked fuel is impossible to calculate because it is not known how much escaped and at what time .

The company has since recovered the leaked fuel and stored it in buffer tanks but remains unsure how to proceed.

It emerged yesterday that British Nuclear Group was in talks with the safety watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, over how to restart the plant.

It will be months before the works can be brought back into operation. It is losing more than £1m a day of revenue which would have been put towards nuclear clean-up.

Martin Forwood, from Cumbrians Opposed to Radioactive Environment, who obtained some papers from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority under the Freedom of Information Act, said he believed the report meant Thorp should never be reopened.

The previous two accidents took place in 1998 and this February. It was the 1998 accident, in which coarse particles of metal wore away a pipe and it leaked, that was undetected for years, the report said. '

I can't understand why you're citing Chernobyl as some sort of success story either. There are Welsh livestock farms here in the UK, which are still subject to radiation monitoring, following the fallout from Chernobyl nearly 20 years ago. The suggestion that any British citizen would willingly move back into a radioactive hotspot, even 30 years after a major incident (which is nothing, in terms of the lethal timescale of such materials, is fanciful at best). If anything comparable happened in the North West of England (and let's not forget that we've already had a shot across the bows with the hushed-up-for-decades Windscale fire of 1957) the effects of the ensuing general exodus on the national housing market, the insurance sector and the health service would, alone, be enough to crash the economy, and cause national ruin. And where are all those millions supposed to go for 30 years?

If some scientific wunderkind should ever come up with an answer to the innate energy production problems of radioactivity and leakage, I'll drop all the arguments. Until then, the technology just doesn't come up to scratch - figuratively speaking, it would be like grasping a viper to our collective bosom.

Whatever technologies we may develop over time, the best thing we can do in the short term is to reduce our energy consumption needs - for which, I've yet to see any serious government policies.

Starvid

stu

There was a report on Channel 4 news about the energy gap. It was placed right near the end so this gives you a sense of how much of a crisis they deem this to be.

Anyway here's what I learnt. The first nuclear power stations won't come on line until 2021 due to the planning and legal wrangling etc.

So how are we going to solve the problem? Conservation.

The report talked about how two thirds of electricity are wasted and how there is a lot of potential to save energy. This gives the impression that there is not really anything to worry about and that people can carry on as usual.

Personally I'm not an expert on conservation but I would love to hear peoples opinions on this because the sheeple are going to be pinning there hopes on energy conservation.
_________________
"The age of excess is over. The age of entropy has begun"

julianj

Jake