Under Revised Quake Estimates, Dozens of Nuclear Reactors Face Problems 152
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Owners of at least two dozen nuclear reactors across the United States, including the operator of Indian Point 2, in Buchanan, N.Y., have told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they cannot show that their reactors would withstand the most severe earthquake that revised estimates say they might face, according to industry experts. As a result, the reactors' owners will be required to undertake extensive analyses of their structures and components. Those are generally sturdier than assumed in licensing documents, but owners of some plants may be forced to make physical changes, and are likely to spend about $5 million each just for the analysis."
Re:A unified design? (Score:4, Informative)
Wouldn't help. The surveys cover things like the deterioration of materials (which depends on age, weather conditions, seismic activity etc.) and the local geology. Of course maintenance has to be checked as well, to make sure it is being done properly.
Even if they were all identical they would still need all these checks.
Re:Must question the "revised" estimates (Score:5, Informative)
Wow. I really wish people would stop conflating "counts per minute" measurements of radiation exposure, with alpha and beta nucleide contamination. There's a lot of Cs137 and Sr90 contamination in the soil all over the place near Pripyat (and Fukushima), and just because you can walk through the area and get a few sieverts of decays on your skin, and no net harm, doesn't mean anyone can safely live there. Those contaminants get into dust, and you inhale it, or ingest it in your food, and they remain active inside your body for decades. It's not the same as either an x-ray, or eating a banana.
Re:Must question the "revised" estimates (Score:4, Informative)
Problems are storage, handling of existing radioactive stockpile, Spent Fuel Pools. Many hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste already piled up, in SFPs in the Nukes.
And we have reactor designs that can safely burn this waste down. Right now, in many places, you have sequestration vessels standing in open air in what is essentially a parking lot out back of their reactors.
But the people who simply equate nuclear and "bomb" have prevented, via political chicanery, the implementation of known-safe designs that could render all this long-lived spent fuel down into short-lived spent fuel. Through similar chicanery, they've also basically poisoned the government regulatory system in such a way as to artificially skyrocket the costs of implementing and compliance for nuclear. They've also basically nixed intelligent reprocessing of the fuel to extend the useful lifetime without the need to actually obtain more.