The NRC released a draft copy of their State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses for comment this week. The report models the results of a severe nuclear accident at Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania, and Surry here in Virginia.
Since Surry is only around 200 miles from W&L, I was pretty interested in whether we would face a certain death or not. Apparently not. The report concludes that “the calculated risks of public health consequences from severe accidents modeled in SOARCA are very small.” There is also an appendix to the report contrasting Fukushima to the study based on the available information from Japan.
Overall, the report seems very interesting (I have not read all 133 pages), and appears to be an excellent update on nuclear safety in the US. If you have some free time I recommend flipping through it.
Links
State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses (SOARCA) Draft Report
Nuclear accidents pose little risk to health: NRC (Reuters)
NRC Releases Draft Report on Simulated Accident at Surry Plant in Virginia and Peach Bottom Plant in Pennsylvania (Union of Concerned Scientists)
Ben Koopferstock
Sam Petsonk
Jeff Wieand
Anthony Raucci
The SOARCA report shows that in the worst case (unmitigated, station blackout) scenario, the reactor vessel is not breached until 8 hours after the event. Normally, the diesel generators would start-up in that situation, providing core cooling. Fukushima showed that it is possible to lose the diesel generators to flooding. Plants typically have several diesels on-site, but to provide even more redundancy, it would be wise to create a mobile generator distribution system that could get a generator to any site in the U.S. within 8 hours and the time it would take to install.
What happens if, for long term or nation wide issue – as from an EMP, the diesel generators are not able to be fueled? Is there ANY type of plan in effect, or being developed, that would provide a method of long term SAFE storage. If Yucca mountain was still available for sending at least the waste to from each plant that would eliminate a lot of the issue. Now that it isnt, if the generators run out of diesel, for whatever reason, we will have wide spread contamination throughout the country.
You are addressing two issues: long-term cooling and spent fuel storage.
Aside on the danger of EMP: Safety-related equipment (that essential for plant shutdown and cooling) is qualified to operate at extremely high electromagnetic radiation doses. Also, plants already incorporate surge protection for lightning strikes. Thus, I would suspect that equipment damage would not be an issue for nuclear plants initially in the event of an EMP.
If an accident scenario were to involve the unavailability of diesel fuel on a large scale, such a shortfall should be accounted for in the mitigation strategy. Assuming the required equipment is intact, a talented (somewhat desperate) operator could use the electricity from the generators to “black start” the plant into producing its own electricity for cooling the reactor and spent fuel pool. This assumes that no offsite power is available and that the generators can generate the required level of power. If the generators on site are not capable of black-starting, then perhaps this is something that needs to be addressed.
The spent fuel storage issue can be dealt with in several ways. The travelling wave reactor concept addresses certain reprocessing concerns (no need to chemically separate fissile/fertile fuel, burnup of actinides) while potentially providing power for over 60 years with its initial supply of uranium. Dry cask, air-cooled storage has proved to be practicable. Furthermore, for fuel that cannot be reused, we should look to the success of the salt domes at the WIPP facility in New Mexico in evaluating a long-term safe storage option.