Nuclear Power and Policy

nothing is 100% safe, but other power plants won’t leave lasting effects like Chernobyl or Fukushima. Technically there was meltdown going on in Fukushima, and authorities are powerless to prevent contaminated waters from entering the ocean.

[quote=“Taiwanguy”]Just starting a new thread so discussion doesn’t get absurdly off-topic in the other thread:

  1. There are two reactors at the Lungmen Plant. It is my understanding that reactor No. 1 has been completely greenlighted and sealed. It was originally supposed to go into operation near the end of this year or early 2015. No. 2 is approximately 90% completed, and construction has been halted. [/quote]

According to Taipower themselves, generator 1 isn’t done with construction (hence 90%) but they are ordered to only conduct safety evaluations and then seal it. Generator 2 is to halt construction without doing further work.
taipower.com.tw/content/new_ … ?LinkID=19

source? and what were the items?

[quote=“Taiwanguy”]
4. That was 2010. The reactor was still 4 years out from being deemed fit for operational. It now is ready and passes all international standards.[/quote]

the flaws were in the foundation and the support structures. They only fixed what they could still see.

[quote=“Taiwanguy”]
The following statement concerns Taiwan nuclear safety in general:

[quote]In January 2012 the AEC said that its post-Fukushima inspections found “no safety concerns” with the six operating nuclear units. It also required Taipower itself to review the nuclear plants’ safety margins by following the European Union’s reactor stress test requirements.
A review conducted by the European Commission and the European Nuclear Safety Regulators’ Group (ENSREG) in 2013 confirmed that the safety standards used by Taiwan’s nuclear power plants are generally high and comply with international state-of-the-art practices. [/quote]
The same company and oversight committee that runs those plants will be running the Lungmen plant. There is no reason to assume safety standards would be lower there than at the older plants, and in fact, the reactor design used at Lungmen is a much safer design than the other plants.[/quote]

I’ve cited the ENSREG inspection in my original post. The ENSREG’s report pointed out the design of Nuclear Plant 4’s quake-resistance, tsunami-resistance, and emergency planning are all flawed.

Actual ENSREG report
aec.gov.tw/webpage/npp-check … 3-1_01.pdf

[quote]The seismic resistance of such reservoirs should undergo further analysis and improvement.

For seismic, the criterion to evaluate the failure of safety functions is limited to a medium fragility analysis of SSCs that neither covers SFP safety functions nor outage states. The approach leads to some cliff edge values listed in the NR that seem unreasonably high compared to the technical literature.

However, the EC recommended that the island should use more modern techniques in identifying earthquake-related hazards for its plants. It suggested that Taiwanese assessments regarding earthquake hazards do not meet current international requirements and do not take into consideration new geological and geophysical data regarding "capable faults in the site vicinity of the Chinshan, Kuosheng and Maanshan plants.

Further analyses needed to improve SAM include further consideration of extreme natural hazards (seismic, tsunami/flooding hazards re-evaluations or volcanic Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA)) and simultaneous events at multi-unit sites (to estimate the duration of an independent response capability). Additional requirements have also been issued by AEC, such as installing an alternate Ultimate Heat Sink (UHS) consistent with recommendations of the ENSREG action plan. [/quote]

gcaa.org.tw/post.php?aid=385

EU’s independent nuclear safety inspector, Oda Becker, in her analysis pointed out there were many problems with Taipower’s emergency plans, and mentioned 3 major ones.

  1. After an emergency happened, Taipower’s URG requires cooling to be restored within 96 minutes. That time frame is too short for disasters like a major earthquake.

  2. The URG calls for 400 tons per hour of water to contain the reactors before cooling is recovered. Taipower states they have built a water storage tank on the hill to provide that massive amount of water. However, the tank itself is not earthquake resistant.

  3. In Taipower’s URG, it clearly states when an emergency happened, the first thing they would do is to release fumes within the generator to alleviate pressure buildup. That means exposing the entire northern Taiwan to radioactive gas.

Oda added, the design of Nuclear Plant 4 uses ABWR, which requires manual active actions of operators to trigger the emergency systems. In Europe, they require passive activation of emergency systems.

By the way, such inspection is supposed to provide information to the public, but when ENSREG team arrived, the media and NGOs were forced out by SWAT teams. The so called inspection is then conducted in secret, which only the EU independent inspectors could provide some insight into. It’s as if ACE is paying the ENSREG team to give everything a thumbs up.

[quote=“Taiwanguy”]
5.-7. If true, it’s pretty much true about any location around Taiwan. Standards have been beefed up for this reactor because of its location…in Taiwan. I just don’t share the extreme fear of nuclear incidents. The way I look at it is that Fukushima was a near perfect storm…everything that could have gone wrong, did. Record-breaking earthquake, record-breaking tsunami, old, outdated reactor with outdated backup systems, etc. And still…not a SINGLE radiation-related death and scientist don’t think there will be a statistically observable rise in cancers either.[/quote]

if it can happen, it will, Murphy’s law. You sound like if something happens rarely we should just ignore it.

Any of you pro-nuclear folks should have a read of 零地點 by 伊格言. Even though it’s a fiction, most of the stuff about the Lungmen plant is true, and Yi goes into detail about how messy the situation is. The start-stopping has been ongoing for decades, the original team that had any idea what was getting done is long since gone, almost all of the equipment since the OEM stopped working on it was outsourced with the outsourcing companies responsible for their own quality control, many of them have also long since gone out of business, merged, disbanded, or are otherwise not contactable.

Someone above said there’s about a 0.25% chance of meltdown given how many reactors there are in the world. While I’m sure the odds go up due to a lack of competence here, is that really a chance you want to take? 0.25% chance that the northern 1/3 of the island from Hualien diagonally up across to Taoyuan becomes completely unusable and unlivable?

That’s a 1 in 400 chance. That’s a pretty damn big risk.

[quote=“finley”][quote=“PeregrineFalcon”]Around 290,000,000,000 NT has been spent on Nuke 4, right?

It would be an epic waste to leave it incomplete and unused.[/quote]

Epic waste is what gubmints do best :notworthy:

One possibility would be to start up #4 and shut down one of the older ones (which, when you think of the general state of Taiwan in the 1970s, must surely be running on borrowed time). However, it all depends: exactly what state is #4 in? If the news is to be believed, the delays have been mostly due to engineering incompetence and corner-cutting, which doesn’t inspire confidence.[/quote]

The other 3 are already expected to be shut down within the next 5 years so it’s not much of a trade.

I worked in a nuclear power plant as an engineering intern so I’m not completely anti-nuclear but imo the plants designed and built in the 60’s and 70’s are ready to be closed (a decade long phase out throughout the US and world). A modern design of a nuclear plant would be much more interesting since it would have much better fail safe mechanisms and rely less on operators and emergency power during critical times. I would be more in favor of this vs more gas/coal plants. Obviously alternatives are the best answer but I’m not optimistic that they can be implemented fast enough or cost effectively enough in the next 30-40 years.

[quote=“greves”]
Someone above said there’s about a 0.25% chance of meltdown given how many reactors there are in the world. While I’m sure the odds go up due to a lack of competence here, is that really a chance you want to take? 0.25% chance that the northern 1/3 of the island from Hualian diagonally up across to Taoyuan becomes completely unusable and unlivable?[/quote]

We ran such risks with Nukes 1 through 3.

Higher risks than the new design in fact.
Meanwhile we suck in air pollution everyday which kills thousands a year and not a peep from the media.

There are in fact lots of loud “peeps” from the media–but they seem focused on the spectacle of air pollution in China, or from China…

More to the point, I don’t think any serious anti-nuclear position would claim that we need to simply ramp up burning coal to make up the difference. We need an integrated approach that would involve reducing usage, real commitment to alternative energy sources, and new industrial policy to stop subsidizing the energy hogs in the name of “development.” There’s lots of work to be done. Are the people setting policy goals in Taiwan up to the task?

Guy

No.

The basic problem is that most people, unless they have a hard-science degree or at least paid a little attention in high school, don’t really have a gut feel for how much energy is required to do a given task. Or how much might be necessary, at minimum. You plug stuff in and it works, right? You put fuel in your car and it goes along. If it took 3 gallons to get from there to here, then 3 gallons is what it always takes to get from there to here. I occasionally end up in conversations with (usually very intelligent people) about climate change and the like, and they’ll talk quite confidently about “energy needs”, but not one of them so far has had the foggiest idea what a joule is. That’s like sounding off about Shakespeare before you’ve even read a single play.

Physics is counterintuitive but not really complicated. If you asked most people: “theoretically, what’s the minimum amount of energy required to move this car from this side of this hill to the other?”, virtually nobody would give the correct answer (zero) or would be able to explain why it’s non-zero in reality (and therefore how you might minimize losses to get closer to zero). Some people, but not many, would be able to accurately compare real-life costs of a refrigerator and an aircon. Politicians, mostly, are just ordinary folk in this regard. If neither the populace nor TPTB know how much energy they’re burning and where it’s going, talking about reduction is futile. We need to start raising a whole new batch of kids who are a lot more science-savvy before this sort of thing gets fixed.

Got it right Finley, people don’t have the tools to analyse the problem in the first place. We come out of school with a basic education, I was fortunate to get an okay grounding in science but almost none at all in political or social of financial systems. Everything regarding finance or alternative social or political systems I picked up outside school.

And here a more integrated approach in education would seem to be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition: to see that knowledge of science and engineering is in fact tied to and not somehow separate from our complex and shifting social lives: the air we breath, the food we eat, the houses we live in, and so on. Education reform is always on the agenda in Taiwan but this seems to me to be a compelling argument in favour of some kind of change: to help train socially aware scientists and engineers that have the tools to understand not only their chosen fields but also to imagine and understand the impact these fields have on actual people. Otherwise I am afraid we are screwed.

Guy

[quote=“afterspivak”]There are in fact lots of loud “peeps” from the media–but they seem focused on the spectacle of air pollution in China, or from China…

More to the point, I don’t think any serious anti-nuclear position would claim that we need to simply ramp up burning coal to make up the difference. We need an integrated approach that would involve reducing usage, real commitment to alternative energy sources, and new industrial policy to stop subsidizing the energy hogs in the name of “development.” There’s lots of work to be done. Are the people setting policy goals in Taiwan up to the task?

Guy[/quote]

This is ideal if people actually understood this solution.

Hear is the problem. They are getting fired up about No Nukes but they still are oblivious that the alternative is actually changing their lifestyle to use less, replace that energy production with oil/coal or pay more for electricity (solar/wind). Completely oblivious to the big picture.

Abacus, Guy, HH2: exactly, lack of joined-up thinking. So what can be done about that? Are we all doomed (again)?

I think this is true of education worldwide. Kids can see no practical relevance in what they’re taught. My gut feeling is that this is deliberate. It’s blatantly obvious to any teacher that 50,60,70% of the kids going through their classes are not academically inclined and will leave school with no meaningful qualifications - so why bother continue with a method that fails so badly? Can it really be that hard to devise a curriculum that demonstrates practical, engaging applications along with (much more basic) academic knowledge, so that kids know WHY they’re learning about Newton’s First Law or the periodic table?

Former NASA climatologist James Hansen (you’ve heard of him, right?), has this to say about nuclear power:

People who entreat the government to solve global warming but offer support only for renewable energies will be rewarded with the certainty that the U.S. and most of the world will be fracked-over, the dirtiest fossil fuels will be mined, mountaintop removal and mechanized long-wall coal mining will continue, the Arctic, Amazon and other pristine public lands will be violated, and the deepest oceans will be ploughed for fossil fuels. Politicians are not going to let the lights go out or stop economic growth. Don’t blame Obama or other politicians. If we give them no viable option, we will be fracked and mined to death, and have no one to blame but ourselves

James Hansen in Der Spiegel interview

Try to get a handle on what generation IV reactors really are. From one of the best experts on this technology (warning, 2-hour video, but maybe the most important you ever watched):

Thorium Remix 2011

But in the spirit of reconciliation, good luck to the DPP when they take power in the next election cycle and try to run the Taipei MRT and high-speed railway off of solar panels.

i’ve been a long time advocate for thorium based nuclear power. I am not against safe nuclear power, but the fission ABWR generator used in plant 4 isn’t one of those inherently safe options. It is inherently unsafe, and requires levels after levels of safe guards to manage its potential for disaster. The system, location and incompetent implementation calls for alarm, and I am pretty sure this isn’t what James Hansen had in mind when talking about viable options.

I don’t have any inside knowledge of what’s going on with Taiwan’s 4th nuclear power plant, but I too would be against starting it if indeed it is not up to standards. That, however, is not a call I would trust the organized anti-nuke movement to make. That will do/say anything to stop a nuclear power plant from operating. I’d like to see some real experts called in to inspect it.

The greatest tragedy of all is that no young people (at least in Taiwan) are studying nuclear technology. Every year, a bunch (not sure how many, but not a few) new electrical engineering graduates enter the job market in Taiwan. Their training is almost entirely in thermal (ie coal, natural gas) power generation. They know nothing about nuclear, and never will. And who can blame them? Would you enter the field of nuclear engineering knowing that Taiwan plans to shut down its nuclear industry?

The really knowledgeable nuclear experts are getting old, retiring and dying. The young generation will lose their expertise. The only experts left will be in Russia and China, and the world will have to go to them and beg for help in building generation IV nuclear power plants. And the ones to blame for this mess will be our current crop of anti-nuclear organizations and politicians, who are feeding us a line of crap about how we can have our cake and eat it too thanks to solar and wind.

What a load of hooey. So what if we need to consult Chinese scientists? Exchanges happen every day and it would not be difficult in the slightest to get Chinese experts to emigrate to the US (if they would be needed at all).

And get the blame right too would you: if nuclear power seems scary and unstable that is not the fault of activists but of power companies. Taipower and Taiwan in general has a bad reputation for safety standards. Why should we trust unaccountable, error-prone, ass-covering systems with extremely dangerous technology? Answer that and I might be persuaded to watch your little movie. :sunglasses:

You posted about how we as a species should pursue Thorium powered nuclear energy, and yet you say things like only China and Russia has nuclear knowhow? India is about to have the first commercial thorium AHWR go into active service:
sciencedirect.com/science/ar … 9306000690

Yes, Taiwan probably won’t be allowed to pull off an AHWR since the US and China would shit their pants if Taiwan started making loads of heavy water, but, there are other thorium alternatives that doesn’t require heavy water and with the kind of money Taiwan has spent on Nuclear Power Plant 4, they could have put all those NCHU nuclear engineering grad-students to work and build a functioning thorium reactor.

Interesting link, Hansioux. But actually, I don’t really like the AHWR design, as it uses both solid thorium fuel and water as a coolant. Not that I’m a nuclear engineer, mind you - reading up on this technology is just a hobby for me.

Much more interesting than the AHWR is the LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor), which uses the fuel as a coolant. It was featured in the Youtube link above about thorium reactors.

The LFTR is a pretty advanced design, and we’ll probably first be seeing MSR (molten salt reactors).

This link gives a quick rundown of the differences between the AHWR you mentioned and MSR:

liquidfluoridethoriumreactor.gle … r-reactor/

As for India being a leader in nuclear technology, I truly hope that they can pull it off, but I’m not that confident. You’re probably aware of the recently opened Kudankulam nuclear reactor in the far south of the country. It appears to be only about 10 meters above sea level. They started building it right after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - you would have thought that particular disaster would have given them pause, but apparently not. Obviously it should have been built on higher ground, so let’s just hope that the building is at least tsunami-proof.

MM - I don’t want you to watch “my little movie.” I think you should watch this this one - it was made for “people like you.”

More hooey. Give me a good argument and I will read and consider it.

I should point out that at one time in the past (post Three Mile Island) I was very anti-nuke, and indeed was an activist. We in the USA-based anti-nuke movement brought nuclear power expansion to a standstill in 1989 with the lawsuit against the Shoreham Nuclear Powerplant:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_N … ower_Plant

By the time of that lawsuit, I was already disillusioned with the movement and had dropped out. But the “good work” that I was involved in continued, and culminated in Senator John Kerry persuading US President Bill Clinton to kill (in 1994) America’s experimental Generation-IV nuclear powerplant, the IFR:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

Way back in the early 1970s (prior to my involvement), the anti-nuke movement touted energy conservation and renewables as the answer. So how has that worked out? True, the conservation/renewables solution hasn’t been fully implemented (for good reasons, I might add), but the efforts have been ongoing. You younger folks who think that you’ve discovered something new and exciting in energy policy have simply dug up an old failed idea from the boneyard. Excellent article today on the Brave New Climate website which goes into detail of just how dismal the results have been, and why. Anyone who is interested in energy should read it.

Exerpt:

Full article here