Nuclear plants performed well during Sandy – as expected by professionals
One of the best things about nuclear energy is that the fuel is cheap and densely concentrated. That characteristic enables facilities to be hardened against external events, and has the potential to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear energy facilities to infrastructure damage that happens outside of the facility.
The low cost fuel also enables a larger portion of the resources provided by selling a valuable product like electricity to be used for investments in people; highly-trained, well-motivated staffs are a powerful asset at nuclear power stations that enable safe response to rare events. I will refrain from calling the events unexpected; there are few groups of people in the world who are more imaginative in building scenarios of what might go wrong than those who are involved in accident analysis or disaster preparedness at nuclear power plants.
As someone who has a pretty good understanding of the inside story of nuclear energy facilities in the United States, I published the following tweet just before 6:00 am on October 28, 2012
Rod Adams @Atomicrod
WHEN #nuclear plants on US east coast weather yet another large storm, will more people realize they are an asset rather than a threat?
The Nuclear Energy Institute has published a summary of the performance of the 34 nuclear facilities that are located in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. The score is pretty impressive – of the 34 plants in the path, 24 kept providing power, 7 were already shutdown for scheduled maintenance and 3 experienced automatic protective actions due to storm related disturbances in the grid or in supporting systems. The crews at the plants took appropriate actions and there was never any risk to the public.
Of course, some of the usual suspects who have either never liked nuclear energy or who hold a personal grudge against the established nuclear industry were able to find receptive audiences for their usual servings of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Democracy Now asked their favorite “former nuclear industry senior vice president”, Arnie Gundersen to explain why people who have plenty of more important concerns should be distracted by worry about what might happen at distant nuclear plants. Russia Today provided Professor Chris Busby with another venue for reaching potential customers for the anti-radiation pills left over from his Fukushima related sales effort. Kevin Kamps, from Beyond Nuclear, and Peter Bradford, a former NRC commissioner who has served on the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists for many years, made appearances and provided their reliable quotes about why storms like Sandy show that nuclear energy facilities are especially vulnerable – in their opinion.
Though they did not get the same kind of national news coverage, there was much more useful and fact-based commentary by people like Will Davis (Spent Fuel Pool at Oyster Creek and a series of storm sitreps on Atomic Power Review), Dr. Jim Conca (Don’t Politicize Sandy – Hurricane Normal Problem for Nukes and Bob Apthorpe (@arclight) explaining how nuclear professionals take storms seriously so that the public can focus on more important and immediate concerns.
I do want to go back to something I said in the first paragraph – the basic characteristics of nuclear fuel, including its incredible energy density, make it possible to design nuclear facilities that are not vulnerable to infrastructure damage outside of the plant. Designers of our current fleet of commercial power plants, however, did not do a great job of taking advantage of that characteristic. For a variety of reasons, they often have to shutdown if there is an issue with off-site power or cooling water intakes.
I have it on good authority that at least some of the systems being conceived today include design choices that make them more resilient, with the ability to keep powering on through events that would trip our older reactors. As a former submarine officer, I never did figure out why people chose to design grid dependent nuclear systems. There were no transmission lines connected to the facilities I learned to operate; I am pretty sure that my aircraft carrier trained colleagues would make the same statement.
The BEST thing about nuclear energy is that the fuel is cheap and densely concentrated.
When the reactors that comprise the current fleet of nuclear plants in the US were being designed, it was assumed that they would be operated like the coal plants of the day: run a little while and shut down; clean whatever needs to be cleaned, fix whatever needs to be fixed; then start up again. This is how the plants were operated several decades ago, which is why the early capacity factors of the older plants are dismal by today’s standards.
Why would anyone put the effort into designing the plant to operate during a hurricane if the plant was going to be shut down every now and then anyway? That would be just another outage.
Experience has taught us better.
@Brian:
Some CANDU plants can lower power quicklly to “self sustaining” values.
Here’s how that helps.
When the grid becomes unstable, which can be from a wide area external event such as a hurricane, or something as transient as a solar storm – many plants suffer load rejection trips / scrams. That removes the plant as a generator for the grid AND it removes its own Aux Transformers as a source of power for the plant itself. This can quickly become a Loss of Offsite Power – only a few Emergency Diesel start failures away from a Station Blackout.
By now, no explanation of the safety significance of Station Blackouts should be needed.
Plants that can quickly follow load can reduce their power to provide their own internal loads – thus avoiding the first domino in the sequence of a rather risky transient.
Everyone’s favorite Navy reactors can provide self sustaining “hotel loads” with a good deal of stability – it’s a good idea for the big plants too.
Nice post Rod.
By the way: you don’t need to call Busby “professor” any more. Univ. of Ulster seems to have excised him.
I am just shocked that a person of such integrity as Busby would be let go!!!
(If that didn’t set off your sarcasm meter, you better go get it re-calibrated.)
It would be interesting to read how coal and natural gas plants fared. Were any windmills in the hurricane’s path?
There were definitely windmills in the path of Sandy.
http://www.eia.gov/special/disruptions/hurricane/sandy/index.cfm
What you won’t hear is AWEA coming out and telling what happened to their preferred generation source. The NEI however has been providing regular updates on the status of nuclear power plants in the path of Sandy.
It appears the EIA is also not talking or at least not recording what is happening to wind, solar, natural gas or coal. But they do have nuclear as page 2 of their updated situation report.
http://www.oe.netl.doe.gov/named_event.aspx?ID=67
But then the EIA does not cover wind or solar as part of their Energy Assurance Daily reports as I learned today:
http://www.oe.netl.doe.gov/ead.aspx
So it that because the EIA does not consider wind and solar critical parts of the eletrical generation and distribution system? Or is that because wind and solar are at the whim of the weather patterns and the EIA is not in the weather forecasting business so there is no way the EIA can provide “assurance” reports and therefore the reports are silent?
@Rob
I note that the wiki page on “Load following power plants” points out that the French PWRs use something called “grey” control rods to adjust their power output. Is there some licensing restriction that prevents US plants using the same technology or is there some technical reason why older plants like Oyster Creek can’t be upgraded?
I find it a curious engineering mindset that these plants weren’t originally designed to follow there own electrical load if and when it became necessary.
Why did the designers want to be so dependent upon the grid? It seems to me to be a design flaw and It is simply more fodder to feed critics like Busby.
Rod, On SSBN 631 we had a “battleshort” switch in the alley(like you did), I pulled 9 DPM on a fast scram recovey in 1972. 1,000MWe plants don’t have battleshort, they pull rods at 0.25 DPM, they are on a different mission and the plants are built with cost involved, not like Navy. Navy plant always has a load T/Gs or shaft, A sub plant could load follow and their fuel would not fail. Quad Cites and I think Dresden tried the load following in early 70’s, not good, fuel failures. (talk to old GE nuke about “PCIOMR”) If you lose grid, where does the 1,000MWe go? nowhere, so trip your plant. I wanted to keep the boat power going to save boat/crew, if civilian plant goes down, no one dies.
On a small NJ wind farm with a circular layout (?-dont ask) it appears 2 out of 5 were damaged to some extent perhaps more. The whole thing didn’t go back online till Friday and needed backup power to prevent damage ( http://m.windpowermonthly.com/article/1158013/wind-farm-withstood-Hurricane-Sandy )
A freebie PSA seed for Ben Heard to try:
Scene; a lovely meadow in the Outback where cute frilly little girls are plucking flowers. After a long pause, voice-over; “In this fresh natural meadow, these girls are being exposed to (X) times more radiation than exists in the towns around the freak rare zero-causality incident at Fukushima, but there are many who don’t want you to hear that…” As scene fades the camera pulls back to a soot-belching coal/oil plant on the horizon.
Sweet and simple and non-techie and heart-tugger to boot.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Several natural gas pipelines failed, putting everybody around at risk of explosion but of course there’s simply no news about that :
See http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/01/newjersey-gas-sandy-idUSL1E8M1DJ120121101
And there’s still the 111 burnt houses at Breeezy Point almost certainly because the power company was unable to send someone to stop the gas at each home as was unfortunately required.
Actually the French PWR today mostly use bore injection for load following.
The bore guarantees a better, more even regulation of power inside the vessel.
The EPR will make more use of grey control rods, as it’s being conceived from start to solve the difficulties it can involves.