On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Gregg Eshelman <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Pointless, petty, regulatory BS like that, which has zero bearing on the safe > operation of the facility is why the control rooms of nuclear power plants > still look like they're 30 to 40 years old - because they are 30 to 40 years > old. > > Modernization and upgrading not allowed, thanks mostly to the "green" people. I don't know how you arrived at that conclusion; it's simply not true. You are correct that this stuff is highly regulated, though---once a plant is licensed for something like 20 years, it's fairly difficult, albeit not impossible, to make changes because it requires proving that the modifications are safe. If it was economically favorable, people would go through the process, otherwise they leave it alone. > What contributed a lot to the problems at Three Mile Island was the light > indicating the core vessel pressure valve was open was across the room from > where the operators were gathered, looking at the gauges and trying to figure > out WTF the temperature kept going up and the pressure kept dropping despite > all the water they were pouring into the core. Someone finally noticed the > light and hit the manual close button. Problem ended - except for the > politics that have kept the reactor from being cleaned up and rebuilt these > past 34 years. Problem ended, except for the small problem of melting the fuel elements. There was no radiation release thanks to the containment vessel holding up, but inside it was a mess. What do you mean that the reactor not cleaned up? The damaged unit TM2 was declared un-salvageable after few billion dollars of cleanup, but the sister unit TM1 is in operation. Come on, this isn't hard, let me Google it for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident > It's not just nuclear plants afflicted with this regulatory stupidity. Old > coal, oil and gas burning ones are too. George Bush the 2nd tried for eight > years to get changes passed that would allow old power plants to be updated > with whatever pollution reduction was *practical*. The "greens" blocked it > every time, demanding that the only way any upgrades would be allowed would > be bringing them up to current regulations - which would mean tearing them > down then spending 20+ years trying to get past their blockade to build new > ones. This is highly debatable. There's an alternative view, to which I subscribe, namely that GB2's administration was dominated by old-energy lobby and spent 8 years trying to gut the regulations that I personally credit for the nice state of our environment. When they succeeded, like in the deregulation of oil and chemical industry, the results were predictable (explosions at the Horizon platform, and fertilizer plant in Waco). > I wouldn't mind having a nuclear power plant, built with the latest > technology, close to me. The problem is in the USA they're having to start > with a baseline that's 34 years old then trying to get the bureaucrats to > approve modern designs. Nuclear power CAN be inexpensive and super safe (it > actually *is* safe, the number of death causing reactor incidents can be > counted on the fingers of one hand that's missing 2 or 3 fingers*) but only > if it's not constantly beset by people determined to make it expensive just > so they can claim it's expensive and thus shouldn't be used. We're in agreement here, but the large part of the reason why nukes aren't being built is not the regulation of the plants, but the abject failure to solve the waste storage problem, and the fact that natural gas is just too cheap an alternative. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
