ANS Nuclear Cafe

Illustration of NS SAVANNAH from Launch Ceremony Brochure in Will Davis' collection.

Observers were startled to learn in March that the Omnibus Spending Bill had included, in the budget for the U.S. Maritime Administration, the complete estimated amount required to perform the nuclear decommissioning of America's only commercial nuclear powered vessel, the NS SAVANNAH.  While there had been some funding toward beginning the process in a previous year's budget, the provision of the full amount - not specifically requested by MARAD - was a surprise.

Podcast at RadioNuclear is today's Matinee.

Last week, I brought you the sordid tale of the Shoreham nuclear plant - a plant which was completed and started up, but which for a host of reasons was destined to never put power on the grid.  The plant sits today as a shell - disabled in a nuclear sense (as the key components were removed) but visible as a reminder of the terrible political, managerial, historic, activist and regulatory confluence that killed it.

From June 17-21, the American Nuclear Society will be hosting its Annual Meeting. This year's event will be held in Philadelphia, Pa., where leaders from across the nuclear industry, government, and academia will share their expertise in hot-topic technical sessions and panel discussions.

https://vimeo.com/269002443

The story of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, New York was once well known in the industry and in utility circles; the plant, which took a very long time to construct and which faced considerable cost overrun, was heavily opposed by locals and in fact was never placed in operation.  The specific details of the plant's long but non-operational history are, though, considerably more interesting and, in many ways both more revealing and more depressing than such a brief description implies.

Watch Bill Magwood's presentation

The North Carolina State University Department of Nuclear Engineering recently shared with us a video of ANS member William D. Magwood, IV. Director-General, OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) as he presented Nuclear Energy: Where Are We, Where Are We Going.  Enjoy!

Watch ANS Social Media Team member Douglas E. Hardtmayer talk about his hopes for the future of nuclear.

ANS member and Social Media Team member Douglas E. Hardtmayer is a nuclear engineer and host of the RadioNuclear podcast. Watch his TEDx talk as he discusses his hopes to change some of the most common misconceptions about nuclear energy and technology, and makes the case for it being a vital key in sustaining the future prosperity of mankind. Currently, Hardtmayer is a grad student studying nuclear engineering at The Ohio State University.

When was the marriage between radiation and medicine?

The Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam may last for eight hours, but factoring in the time it takes to study, prepare, and apply for the exam, the level of effort grows substantially. Given that, why did I choose to take the nuclear PE exam?

Click to watch the video from Generation Atomic 

Click to watch the video from Generation Atomic 

The U.N. and many other governments believe that water scarcity will be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. We live in a world with an increasingly unpredictable climate with both droughts and floods becoming the norm. In much of the developed world we've built dams and tapped aquifers to quench our thirst. Many of the people lacking access to freshwater live in the Middle East and Africa, regions facing continued population growth that can only exacerbate the issue.  We must look for new ways to bring water to both the developed and developing world.

Figure 1.) Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant with the abandoned town of Pripyat in the foreground. The large arch structure is the New Safe Confinement structure under construction. Via Chernobylguide.com

Chernobyl was by far the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. The explosion and subsequent release of radioactivity forced the long-term evacuation of nearly 135,000 people from a 30-kilometer exclusion zone surrounding the plant [1]. When I was younger and wanted to learn more about nuclear power, I was fascinated with the Chernobyl disaster. This was partly because it was one of the only two books in my elementary school library on the topic, but also because it's constantly used as a cudgel to beat proponents of nuclear power into submission. However, when you look at the "facts" that opponents of nuclear power cite about the accident, they are often dead wrong.

I truly think people more or less value the environment; they just choose to show it in different ways. Someone in the city might be willing to pay to maintain the Alaskan Arctic, and have no interest in ever going on a hike, let alone visiting the Arctic. Someone else may be dead set against environmental regulation but spend much of their time in beautiful undeveloped places; hiking, fishing, or hunting. No matter what people's personal feelings are towards the environment, we all are dependent on it and need to find ways to agree on how to use the natural resources available.

Note from the editor: Our Friday Nuclear Matinee is a day early this week. Please enjoy a short video from Generation Atomic.

The Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station completed and in operational service. Press photo in Will Davis collection.

The initial startup of the Fort St. Vrain station finally happened on January 31, 1974, which was roughly one month after the station had received an operating license from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).  As was the habit in those days with plants that were more experimental in nature than the light water plants, Public Service of Colorado had applied for and been granted by the AEC an operating license under Section 104(b) of the Atomic Energy Act.  This provision, ostensibly for medical or for research and developmental reactors, allowed a great deal more operational flexibility to the operators and additionally required far less discussion with and approval by the AEC itself on various matters concerning plant design, operation, administration and developmental testing.

This week's video is a five-minute-plus "tour de force" on the actual steps of fabrication required to manufacture the integral reactors used in the latest Russian nuclear powered icebreakers.  The impressive shop operations required to fabricate such a system are usually not seen widely, but in this case, Atomenergomash shows the entire process in both computer graphics and in actual film shot during fabrication.  Atomenergomash is the design division of Russian nuclear state enterprise Rosatom; one of the subsidiaries of Atomenergomash is the storied "Joint Stock Company Afrikantov," which is the section responsible for design and fabrication of sea-going nuclear power plants.

By Aristidis (Aries) Loumis

According to the Roman historian Quintus Rufus, Midas's Gordian Knot was actually several knots so tightly entangled it was impossible to see how they were fastened.  The Gordian Knot of Grid Resilience is similarly constructed.  There's the Fuel Security Knot (how is "fuel security" defined?)  There are a series of knots related to the definition of and engineering approach to achieving generation system resilience, transmission system resilience, distribution system resilience, and integrated Grid system resilience. There's the Regulatory Knot - a real killer due to electricity market deregulation, entangled federal/state/local regulatory jurisdictions, and the demise of the vertically-integrated electricity provider. There's the Ownership Knot (most Critical Infrastructure in the U.S. is actually owned by the private sector).  There's a Tragedy Of The Commons Knot (when everyone is a stakeholder, but no one takes ownership of a problem).  I could go on.

Offsetting the shock of this week's announcement that FirstEnergy intends to shut down its entire fleet of nuclear plants (Davis-Besse, Perry and Beaver Valley) early - the first whole fleet early shutdown declaration in this increasingly dreary nuclear season - we have some good news of the progress underway at Plant Vogtle in Georgia.

FirstEnergy's recent announcement of its intent to shutter four commercial power reactors at its Perry, Davis-Besse, and Beaver Valley sites is just the latest development in an escalating dialogue about electric Grid resilience and nuclear power's role in enabling and maintaining modern resilient societies and the resilient electricity supply systems upon which they depend. (Within this post, my definition of "Grid" is "the integrated system of U.S. generation, transmission, and distribution assets required to produce and deliver electricity to the end consumer".)