Sunday, March 13, 2011

Failure to Maintain Cooling at Nuclear Power Sites Resulted Because Plugs Did Not Fit the Emergency Generators

Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, has written an important article on the nuclear power events in Japan. He explains the problems that occurred and the protections still in place to prevent a major catastrophe. It begins:
I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.

There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.

By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.

I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single (!) report that was accurate and free of errors (and part of that problem is also a weakness in the Japanese crisis communication). By “not free of errors” I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism – that is quite normal these days. By “not free of errors” I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.

We will have to cover some fundamentals, before we get into what is going on.

Construction of the Fukushima nuclear power plants

The plants at Fukushima are so called Boiling Water Reactors, or BWR for short. Boiling Water Reactors are similar to a pressure cooker. The nuclear fuel heats water, the water boils and creates steam, the steam then drives turbines that create the electricity, and the steam is then cooled and condensed back to water, and the water send back to be heated by the nuclear fuel. The pressure cooker operates at about 250 °C.

The nuclear fuel is uranium oxide. Uranium oxide is a ceramic with a very high melting point of about 3000 °C. The fuel is manufactured in pellets (think little cylinders the size of Lego bricks). Those pieces are then put into a long tube made of Zircaloy with a melting point of 2200 °C, and sealed tight. The assembly is called a fuel rod. These fuel rods are then put together to form larger packages, and a number of these packages are then put into the reactor. All these packages together are referred to as “the core”.

The Zircaloy casing is the first containment. It separates the radioactive fuel from the rest of the world.

The core is then placed in the “pressure vessels”. That is the pressure cooker we talked about before. The pressure vessels is the second containment. This is one sturdy piece of a pot, designed to safely contain the core for temperatures several hundred °C. That covers the scenarios where cooling can be restored at some point.

The entire “hardware” of the nuclear reactor – the pressure vessel and all pipes, pumps, coolant (water) reserves, are then encased in the third containment. The third containment is a hermetically (air tight) sealed, very thick bubble of the strongest steel and concrete. The third containment is designed, built and tested for one single purpose: To contain, indefinitely, a complete core meltdown. For that purpose, a large and thick concrete basin is cast under the pressure vessel (the second containment), all inside the third containment. This is the so-called “core catcher”. If the core melts and the pressure vessel bursts (and eventually melts), it will catch the molten fuel and everything else. It is typically built in such a way that the nuclear fuel will be spread out, so it can cool down.

This third containment is then surrounded by the reactor building. The reactor building is an outer shell that is supposed to keep the weather out, but nothing in. (this is the part that was damaged in the explosion, but more to that later).

Fundamentals of nuclear reactions

The uranium fuel generates heat by nuclear fission. Big uranium atoms are split into smaller atoms. That generates heat plus neutrons (one of the particles that forms an atom). When the neutron hits another uranium atom, that splits, generating more neutrons and so on. That is called the nuclear chain reaction.

Now, just packing a lot of fuel rods next to each other would quickly lead to overheating and after about 45 minutes to a melting of the fuel rods. It is worth mentioning at this point that the nuclear fuel in a reactor can *never* cause a nuclear explosion the type of a nuclear bomb. Building a nuclear bomb is actually quite difficult (ask Iran). In Chernobyl, the explosion was caused by excessive pressure buildup, hydrogen explosion and rupture of all containments, propelling molten core material into the environment (a “dirty bomb”). Why that did not and will not happen in Japan, further below.

In order to control the nuclear chain reaction, the reactor operators use so-called “control rods”. The control rods absorb the neutrons and kill the chain reaction instantaneously. A nuclear reactor is built in such a way, that when operating normally, you take out all the control rods. The coolant water then takes away the heat (and converts it into steam and electricity) at the same rate as the core produces it. And you have a lot of leeway around the standard operating point of 250°C.

The challenge is that after inserting the rods and stopping the chain reaction, the core still keeps producing heat. The uranium “stopped” the chain reaction. But a number of intermediate radioactive elements are created by the uranium during its fission process, most notably Cesium and Iodine isotopes, i.e. radioactive versions of these elements that will eventually split up into smaller atoms and not be radioactive anymore. Those elements keep decaying and producing heat. Because they are not regenerated any longer from the uranium (the uranium stopped decaying after the control rods were put in), they get less and less, and so the core cools down over a matter of days, until those intermediate radioactive elements are used up.

This residual heat is causing the headaches right now.
Read the rest here (Note scroll passed all the italicised copy to get to the continuation of Dr. Oehmen's anlysis)

(Thanks2MattD)

5 comments:

  1. Thank you, Robert. For the record, the article might be perfectly fine ... then again it might not be. I thought it was useful in its technical details, but is every thing as okay as suggested?

    I don't think things are that clear. It's nice to have a perspective though that probably mirrors what the company wants to project because its useful to weigh that against what other media outlets are saying.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dr Josef Oehmen is currently employed as a Research Scientist at MIT. His major research interest lies in risk management along the engineering value chain and the application of lean principles to the product design process.

    This article is the closest the nuclear industry gets to marketing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Would you like to point out any errors in his argument or are you going to stick with an ad hominem attack?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I liked that article. I learned a few things there. It sounds like worse case there will not be release of the fuel into the environment. I wonder though, if the pressure vessel containing the fuel is for some reason plugged up (for example valves in and out are all closed for some reason) could it develop enough pressure to explode and blow a hole in the concrete containment building?

    Sounds like nukes need to have a backup generator/cooling pumps located a few miles away, on a hill, or in a hill, that can be used if something bad happens to the cooling system at the site. The reactor pressure vessel should have taps to connect hoses for emergency cooling for use with this backup system.

    On-site systems are too vulnerable by themselves. A portable backup system in addition to the standard on-site backups is required. Store the backup system in a hardened shelter not subject to damage from wind, earth movement, tidal waves, volcano eruption, etc. It shoud have large wheels to allow moving over the debris of any disaster.

    This should be a requirement for all nuke plants. One per reactor pressure vessel.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am not a nuclear expert and cannot point out any “factual” errors in Oehmen's argument. But his opinion (which has been edited out since the article moved to MIT's site) that:

    "There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity. By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation."

    plays down the possible consequences of this accident, which is just as dangerous as inciting panic.

    The websites the author recommends are those of nuclear power lobbyists. The author not only recommends reading those but advises not to use independent sources. Really bad advice from an engineer/scientist.

    I stand by my earlier post: it's nuclear industry marketing.

    ReplyDelete