Safety upgrades required will cost U.S. nuclear plant operators $billions

U.S. plants covered under the directive are older, boiling-water reactors mainly similar in design to the Fukushima facility…..

Plant operators may have to spend nearly $3.6 billion over the next three to five years on modifications to the nation’s 102 nuclear facilities in response to the Fukushima accident, according to a Platts survey released on Thursday.

U.S. orders new safety upgrades at nuclear plants By CNN Staff June 7, 2013 –– Washington — U.S. regulators are directing 31 nuclear reactors similar in design to the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, where an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown two years ago, to take additional steps to help contain radiation and other damage from any accident that is not quickly halted.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission directive on Thursday requires enhancements to systems for venting accumulated pressure from containment structures during an emergency. Vents must also be able to safely handle rising temperatures, hydrogen concentrations and radiation levels.

The changes also aim to ensure that plant personnel can continue to operate vents safely if a reactor core melts down, the agency said.

Plants in the United States were ordered last year by the NRC to take other steps to upgrade their “hardened” venting systems after the 2011 disaster in Japan that crippled three reactors and released radiation into the atmosphere……

U.S. plants covered under the directive are older, boiling-water reactors mainly similar in design to the Fukushima facility…..

The goal for completing venting improvements in the United States is 2014, depending on refueling schedules. Additional steps would take longer, if deemed necessary…..

The directive covers scenarios for structures meant to condense steam generated during an accident and control pressure and for the larger structures that surround the reactor.

The NRC also plans to develop a rule to improve the filtering of radioactive material from any vented gases and to improve procedures for preserving the integrity of containment systems…….

“Venting to protect containment integrity and to mitigate the impact of a serious event is among the long-established training responses that are part of these facilities’ severe accident mitigation guidelines,” according to a statement from the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group for the industry.

The organization said the timetable is achievable but it did not provide a cost estimate.

This includes costs for government mandates to handle threats from flooding and earthquakes as well as related engineering studies, Platts, an energy industry information service, said.http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/06/us/nuclear-reactors-upgrades/

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Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

nuclear-news

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