Yesterday we lost one of the cooling towers at Browns Ferry Nuke Plant. I am just hearing about it. It will be in the news soon. No injuries reported. No radiation danger either. The tower looks like it collapsed partially into the river.

So I repeat, no Injuries and no fallout concerns. It was one of the backup cooling towers as I understand.

[This message has been edited by 8Ball (edited 07-30-2012).]

Wow!

http://www.waff.com/story/1...ooling-tower-damaged

quote Originally posted by 8Ball: So I repeat, no I juries and no fallout concerns. It was one of the backup cooling towers as I understand.

But Doctor, why am I glowing at night, and my dogs puppies have two tails?

Fortunately, the cooling towers do not deal with radioactive material.. They simply cool the river water back down before it is put back into the river. Bascially they are giant radiators.
It looks like age is the culprit here. The tower was a little over 30 years old and made of Wood and Steel.

quote Originally posted by htexans1: But Doctor, why am I glowing at night, and my dogs puppies have two tails?

Side effect of man-made global warming, of course. Better buy some more carbon credits.

Holy crap... I just got word (about 15 minutes ago) that I wasn't going out there today.

I've been gearing up for that run since I got in this morning.

Yea, I don;t think they will be wanting anyone not mandatory on site.

Speaking of which.... Gotta go folks!

*edit* PHEW!!! Looks like my boss likes me after all! Got a call, I am NOT going onsite

[This message has been edited by 8Ball (edited 07-30-2012).]

No news coverage is probably a good thing. People already are anti nuclear energy and all the media will do it blow it out of proportion and create more people agins t this power source.

quote Originally posted by 87antuzzi: No news coverage is probably a good thing. People already are anti nuclear energy and all the media will do it blow it out of proportion and create more people agins t this power source.

As well they should! We still have no idea what to do with the waste let alone how to deal with accidents.

Oh I FULLY Expect protesters to be around the building this week. Good thing my car is fully insured!

quote Originally posted by dratts: As well they should! We still have no idea what to do with the waste let alone how to deal with accidents.

Stick it in yucca moutain and call it a day.

Build the space elevator already, transport it all to a barge ship in orbit and send it to the frozen expanse of Intergalactic space.

quote Originally posted by 8Ball: send it to the frozen expanse

Can we just send it to Wisconsin? Close enough.

Wooden cooling tower?

Looks like the cooling tower affected is NOT associated with the Nuclear side of the plant.

Quote from TVA

quote Cooling tower 3 is one of seven cooling towers used at Browns Ferry. Browns Ferry uses river water to condense steam after it is used to turn a turbine-generator to make electricity. The cooling towers are in the non-nuclear portion of the plant and help cool the water before it is released back to the river.

So looks like the powers that be have assessed the situation and this is not part of the Nuclear side of the plant.

quote Originally posted by dratts: As well they should! We still have no idea what to do with the waste let alone how to deal with accidents.

This is not so. In order to explain why, though, I've got to go over how nuclear plants are fueled.

The typical light water commercial power reactor is fueled with uranium oxide pellets, each in its own zircon canister. Each pellet is perhaps about the diameter of a AA battery and about 1/3 the length. These pellets are stacked into hollow tubes to form fuel rods, and it takes about 20 tons of fuel to run a typical reactor.

The fuel is enriched to about 3-5% U-235. (If you smelt uranium ore right out of the ground, it's about 0.7% U-235, and that's too low a concentration for a practical reactor.) There are a bunch of complicated technical reasons why this is done, which are beyond what I want to get into here. But suffice it to say that the reactor core is designed for a fuel load that's about 5% U-235 with the rest being U-238. U-235 absorbs neutrons and fissions more readily than U-238 does, and the higher concentration of U-235 in the enriched fuel makes it more efficient for a sustained and controlled nuclear reaction.

Using this fuel in a reactor leads to fission byproducts, of course. These byproducts are reaction "poisons"--they absorb neutrons more readily than U-235 or U-238, and the reactor gradually loses power. Eventually these poisons accumulate to the point that the fuel is no longer really efficient at making heat (to boil water, to turn turbines) so it must be swapped out.

Now: prior to the Carter administration, what would happen next would be that the fuel would be removed from the reactor and set aside in a spent fuel pool, to cool down. The reaction poisons I mentioned above have very short half-lives; they're intensely radioactive but the radioactivity dies out pretty quickly. And once that happened, the fuel was RECYCLED.

The fuel was chemically processed to remove the neutron poisons, recast into pellets, assembled into rods, and put right back into the nuclear reactor. After reprocessing the spent fuel, typically you ended up with a few hundred pounds of actual radioactive waste, stuff that could not be used for anything, and that was stored on-site in the spent fuel pool.

But Carter signed an executive order making it illegal to reprocess spent fuel. This was an "anti proliferation" move, something done in the name of nuclear disarmament. Plutonium was one of the reaction poisons removed from the spent fuel; even though most of it was NOT Pu-239 (the most desirable isotope of plutonium for making nuclear bombs) the theory went that if we weren't separating it from our nuclear fuel the USSR wouldn't, either. (This was wrong but again that discussion is beyond the scope of this.) Congress later passed a law doing the same thing.

Because we stopped recycling our spent fuel, naturally it began to pile up. That's why the feds wanted to build the Yucca Mountain storage facility, but it's almost totally unnecessary if we simply recycle our spent fuel. And it doesn't take any new technology to do that, either; industry frequently works with highly poisonous and/or corrosive materials. Radioactivity is simply another form of material hazard, one that can be detected and protected against the same way we protect against other hazards.

Which brings me to the other point: "dealing with accidents". The three major nuclear accidents in commercial power generation are Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

TMI remains the worst nuclear power accident on US soil, but the thing no one seems to remember about it is that all the safety systems worked perfectly. The total release of radioactivity amounted to around 1,500 millirem. (For comparison, in that decade, if you went in for an angiogram, you were exposed to 25,000 millirem of radiation. It's less now, but it's still well over 1,500 millirem.) And it was radioactive hydrogen released from the top of the containment vessel; to receive that dose of 1,500 millirem you would have had to camp out atop the containment vessel for the duration of the event. Even though the core did partially melt down, the containment vessel prevented any involuntary release of radioactivity.

Chernobyl is the worst nuclear power accident in world history. According to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission and the IAEA, to date 57 people have died due to radiation exposure from the event, including cases of thyroid cancer related to the event.

The Chernobyl reactor was housed in a sheetmetal building--there was no containment structure!--and the reactor itself was of a design specifically prohibited long before 1986 by the United States' Nuclear Regulatory Commission because such an event was possible. The Soviet Union used this design for two reasons: it was cheaper and easier to build than a light water reactor, and because it was easier to move fuel elements through the reactor in order to harvest plutonium from it during reprocessing. And furthermore the reactor was deliberately misoperated as part of a test which had been delayed by bureaucrats, and which was then performed by some of the least-experienced operators at the plant.

Fukushima is recent enough that I probably don't need to recount all the details, but I will say that the plant was not designed to withstand an 8.0 earthquake and a tsunami...and despite that the only reason there was a problem at all came from the lack of a backup system for the backup system. The diesel generators on site were meant to keep the water flowing to the reactor cores, and they only failed because of the tsunami; having a redundand system is usually enough and the odds of both the main and backup system failing are remote. (Not "impossible", but "remote". Sometimes the dice roll snake-eyes.) Regardless, no one has died as a result of the Fukushima event--which is arguably the most catastrophic nuclear event in history, with multiple core problems and the spent fuel pool issues--and the release of radioactivity has been minimal, particularly compared with that of Chernobyl.

Life is risky, and there are hazards with all types of power generation systems. If you take the time to learn and understand the risks and rewards of each system you can then make an informed, educated decision about which you prefer. But all of the problems have solutions, and no power generation system will ever be perfectly safe.

Ed

quote Originally posted by htexans1: But Doctor, why am I glowing at night, and my dogs puppies have two tails?

quote Originally posted by 87antuzzi: Stick it in yucca moutain and call it a day.

Yucca mountain turns out to have ground water problems and Nevadans don't want it. It's not going anywhere. My cousin, the rocket scientist, has the idea that a subduction zone is the answer. I looked it up and although I like the idea in principle it seems to have problems too. There is a guy promoting his technology and he refers to his equipment for getting it into a subduction zone as a submarine in order to get around legal transport restrictions. Although I believe that our present nuclear facilities were rushed into use and not entirely safe, I haven't entirely counted nuclear safety out. If they can make it safe and get rid of the waste safely I could come on board with it, but the people who are doing it are interested in maximum profit and safety sometimes gets in the way of profits.

quote Originally posted by 87antuzzi: Can we just send it to Wisconsin? Close enough.

Hey now Wisconsin has no need to be radioactive!!!

That place has been having some problems lately:

Browns Ferry nuclear plant had a control room fire in January, regulators took months to notify public

Published: Friday, July 13, 2012, 8:12 PM Updated: Friday, July 13, 2012, 8:17 PM
Brian Lawson, The Huntsville Times By Brian Lawson, The Huntsville Times


HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- TVA's Browns Ferry nuclear plant near Athens had a fire in one its control rooms in January, but public notice of the event was not issued until this week.

The roughly 10-minute fire in the Unit 3 control room was caused by an electrical component determined to be about 34 years old, some four times older than its recommended shelf life, according to a TVA incident report.

TVA's report on the Jan. 26 fire was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on March 26. An NRC spokesman said Friday he had no explanation why the report was not made public by the NRC until July 9.

The fire was reportedly caused by a failed power supply in a panel. It burned out some plant alarms and warning lights. TVA determined the fire did not affect safety systems and did not last long enough to warrant immediate reporting to the NRC.

An NRC inspector at the plant responded to the control room shortly after the fire but there were conflicting versions of what occurred, NRC spokesman Joey Ledford said Friday.

"He was told there was no fire, no damage to any adjacent equipment," Ledford said. "He asked all the typical questions and determined it had been a minor problem."

Then TVA issued the report in March, Ledford said, which was the first time the NRC "heard there was an actual fire."

Ledford said the NRC is still reviewing the incident, but a "disposition" is expected by late August. He said there has been no inspection finding issued.

Ray Golden, a TVA spokesman said control room operators smelled burning insulation and acted quickly on the day of the fire. Golden said no plant operation were affected by the fire, as "redundant" systems provided the same function as the burned out panel.

The fire has caused the utility to develop a maintenance program for the capacitors, which do not deal directly with safety systems.

The TVA report indicates there were three previous incidents involving power supply problems and "annunciator modules" that occurred in 2008 and 2009.

Those problems should have alerted TVA, said David Lochbaum, a former Browns Ferry engineer and director of the nuclear safety program for the Washington, D.C.-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Those events were opportunities to look into the preventative maintenance program for the components to learn what TVA learned after this one -- that eight to 10 years is the recommended replacement frequency," Lochbaum said. "TVA plans a preventative maintenance task to replace the Unit 2 and 3 power supplies every 10 years. A company focused on ensuring safety and preventing failures would replace them every eight years or even more often."

TVA reported the Unit 3 capacitors all dated back to the original construction of the unit, 34 years ago.

Browns Ferry was the site of the worst nuclear plant fire in U.S. history in 1975. A plant employee using a candle to look for air hose leaks accidentally ignited some sealing material, the fire resulted in operators having no control over the plant for about an hour. Browns Ferry officials didn't notify Limestone County Emergency Management officials about the fire until the following day.

Many of the current nuclear plant fire regulations followed the 1975 incident.

TVA takes fire safety very seriously, Golden said.

"We have made some physical improvements and are doing a lot of engineering and analytical work to enhance fire protection, but we still have some ways to go," Golden said. "We are absolutely committed to having state of the art fire protection programs at all of our plants, especially at Browns Ferry."


Browns Ferry nuclear plant had a control room fire in January, regulators took months to notify public
Published: Friday, July 13, 2012, 8:12 PM Updated: Friday, July 13, 2012, 8:17 PM
Brian Lawson, The Huntsville Times By Brian Lawson, The Huntsville Times
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Share Email Print
Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant Media tour 3.25.11Matthew Rasmussen, Operations Superintendent at Browns Ferry explains the remote shut-down panel of Unit 1. (The Huntsville Times/Michael Mercier)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- TVA's Browns Ferry nuclear plant near Athens had a fire in one its control rooms in January, but public notice of the event was not issued until this week.

The roughly 10-minute fire in the Unit 3 control room was caused by an electrical component determined to be about 34 years old, some four times older than its recommended shelf life, according to a TVA incident report.

TVA's report on the Jan. 26 fire was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on March 26. An NRC spokesman said Friday he had no explanation why the report was not made public by the NRC until July 9.

The fire was reportedly caused by a failed power supply in a panel. It burned out some plant alarms and warning lights. TVA determined the fire did not affect safety systems and did not last long enough to warrant immediate reporting to the NRC.

An NRC inspector at the plant responded to the control room shortly after the fire but there were conflicting versions of what occurred, NRC spokesman Joey Ledford said Friday.

"He was told there was no fire, no damage to any adjacent equipment," Ledford said. "He asked all the typical questions and determined it had been a minor problem."

Then TVA issued the report in March, Ledford said, which was the first time the NRC "heard there was an actual fire."

Ledford said the NRC is still reviewing the incident, but a "disposition" is expected by late August. He said there has been no inspection finding issued.

Ray Golden, a TVA spokesman said control room operators smelled burning insulation and acted quickly on the day of the fire. Golden said no plant operation were affected by the fire, as "redundant" systems provided the same function as the burned out panel.

The fire has caused the utility to develop a maintenance program for the capacitors, which do not deal directly with safety systems.

The TVA report indicates there were three previous incidents involving power supply problems and "annunciator modules" that occurred in 2008 and 2009.

Those problems should have alerted TVA, said David Lochbaum, a former Browns Ferry engineer and director of the nuclear safety program for the Washington, D.C.-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Those events were opportunities to look into the preventative maintenance program for the components to learn what TVA learned after this one -- that eight to 10 years is the recommended replacement frequency," Lochbaum said. "TVA plans a preventative maintenance task to replace the Unit 2 and 3 power supplies every 10 years. A company focused on ensuring safety and preventing failures would replace them every eight years or even more often."

TVA reported the Unit 3 capacitors all dated back to the original construction of the unit, 34 years ago.

Browns Ferry was the site of the worst nuclear plant fire in U.S. history in 1975. A plant employee using a candle to look for air hose leaks accidentally ignited some sealing material, the fire resulted in operators having no control over the plant for about an hour. Browns Ferry officials didn't notify Limestone County Emergency Management officials about the fire until the following day.

Many of the current nuclear plant fire regulations followed the 1975 incident.

TVA takes fire safety very seriously, Golden said.

"We have made some physical improvements and are doing a lot of engineering and analytical work to enhance fire protection, but we still have some ways to go," Golden said. "We are absolutely committed to having state of the art fire protection programs at all of our plants, especially at Browns Ferry."

Browns Ferry nuclear plant had a control room fire in January, regulators took months to notify public
Published: Friday, July 13, 2012, 8:12 PM Updated: Friday, July 13, 2012, 8:17 PM
Brian Lawson, The Huntsville Times By Brian Lawson, The Huntsville Times
Follow
Share Email Print
Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant Media tour 3.25.11Matthew Rasmussen, Operations Superintendent at Browns Ferry explains the remote shut-down panel of Unit 1. (The Huntsville Times/Michael Mercier)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- TVA's Browns Ferry nuclear plant near Athens had a fire in one its control rooms in January, but public notice of the event was not issued until this week.

The roughly 10-minute fire in the Unit 3 control room was caused by an electrical component determined to be about 34 years old, some four times older than its recommended shelf life, according to a TVA incident report.

TVA's report on the Jan. 26 fire was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on March 26. An NRC spokesman said Friday he had no explanation why the report was not made public by the NRC until July 9.

The fire was reportedly caused by a failed power supply in a panel. It burned out some plant alarms and warning lights. TVA determined the fire did not affect safety systems and did not last long enough to warrant immediate reporting to the NRC.

An NRC inspector at the plant responded to the control room shortly after the fire but there were conflicting versions of what occurred, NRC spokesman Joey Ledford said Friday.

"He was told there was no fire, no damage to any adjacent equipment," Ledford said. "He asked all the typical questions and determined it had been a minor problem."

Then TVA issued the report in March, Ledford said, which was the first time the NRC "heard there was an actual fire."

Ledford said the NRC is still reviewing the incident, but a "disposition" is expected by late August. He said there has been no inspection finding issued.

Ray Golden, a TVA spokesman said control room operators smelled burning insulation and acted quickly on the day of the fire. Golden said no plant operation were affected by the fire, as "redundant" systems provided the same function as the burned out panel.

The fire has caused the utility to develop a maintenance program for the capacitors, which do not deal directly with safety systems.

The TVA report indicates there were three previous incidents involving power supply problems and "annunciator modules" that occurred in 2008 and 2009.

Those problems should have alerted TVA, said David Lochbaum, a former Browns Ferry engineer and director of the nuclear safety program for the Washington, D.C.-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Those events were opportunities to look into the preventative maintenance program for the components to learn what TVA learned after this one -- that eight to 10 years is the recommended replacement frequency," Lochbaum said. "TVA plans a preventative maintenance task to replace the Unit 2 and 3 power supplies every 10 years. A company focused on ensuring safety and preventing failures would replace them every eight years or even more often."

TVA reported the Unit 3 capacitors all dated back to the original construction of the unit, 34 years ago.

Browns Ferry was the site of the worst nuclear plant fire in U.S. history in 1975. A plant employee using a candle to look for air hose leaks accidentally ignited some sealing material, the fire resulted in operators having no control over the plant for about an hour. Browns Ferry officials didn't notify Limestone County Emergency Management officials about the fire until the following day.

Many of the current nuclear plant fire regulations followed the 1975 incident.

TVA takes fire safety very seriously, Golden said.

"We have made some physical improvements and are doing a lot of engineering and analytical work to enhance fire protection, but we still have some ways to go," Golden said. "We are absolutely committed to having state of the art fire protection programs at all of our plants, especially at Browns Ferry."

http://blog.al.com/breaking...clear_plant_had.html

[This message has been edited by carnut122 (edited 07-30-2012).]