ANS 2012 - Preliminaries

Today, I got on an airplane (which I have not done in over twenty years) and flew to Chicago for the American Nuclear Society's 2012 Annual Meeting. Here are some notes on today's experiences.

The Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago is a fantastic venue for the convention. The cavernous recesses under the West tower (the Hyatt has two towers, separated at ground level by a street but connected by sky bridge as well as street entrances) are seemingly more than large enough to hold the meetings; I only toured a small part of them with my ANS-issued Media credential in force.

Almost immediately upon arrival I met Margaret Harding and her husband; Margaret needs no introduction to regular readers of pro-nuclear sites, blogs and Facebook pages. We later met up at the 151 Bistro in the East tower and had a great time getting to know each other a little. We agreed on just about everything and laughed a lot.

Later on, after completing the check-in for the ANS Annual Meeting, I put my badge back on and went down under the West tower again to try to find Laura Scheele. As you may or may not know, I moderate the ANS Social Media List, and as moderator my direct supervisor is Laura, whose official title with ANS is Communications & Policy Manager. Being busy, she didn't have much time, but showed me to the Media Center where I also met Paul Bowersox. Paul conducts the day to day operations over at the fine ANS Nuclear Cafe website. We were just about to talk when in walks ANS President Eric Loewen, to whom I was introduced.

Discussion was only brief at this point, because Mr. Loewen had to film a "welcome aboard" message, so I moved off to investigate more places that were open. I purchased a paper copy of the ANS Transactions for the meeting at the open registration desk. Operations at the check-in for the ANS meeting seem well organized and very efficient, as do operations at the walk-in attendee desk where onsite registration can be speeded by attendee use of provided laptops.

The media package provided by ANS is first rate. (One must remember that I wear two hats here - while I am an ANS member, and moderate the ANS Social Media List I am also attending on a media credential from ANS and am reporting on the meeting; this is why I have the media package.) There are a number of informative brochures, including "The Greening of the Nuclear Age" which is very forward looking. However, I have to say that the most impressive thing ANS has done with the media kit is to include a stack of ANS Position Statements. These papers are simply brief explanations of the official ANS opinion, or Position, on various important and timely issues facing the nuclear industry and nuclear plant owner-operators today. These would be quite valuable to any reporter or any layman who really took the time to read them; they are each small masterpieces of brevity and clarity (even though some are multiple pages.) This addition to the media kit makes the entire kit worthwhile; let's hope that any of the wider media sources that get this package will really, honestly read these papers and get the most out of them.

That's about it for today. Tomorrow promises many more chances to meet and get to know people, as well as a chance to see many (or all) of the displays that will be presented by many interested parties for this meeting. Much more tomorrow! Keep up with Atomic Power Review on Facebook, and on Twitter. APR tweets as @atomicnews and the official hash tag for the ANS Annual Meeting is #ans12.

8:50 PM Central 6/23/2012
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

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110th Carnival of Nuclear Bloggers

Atomic Power Review is proud to present the 110th edition of the Carnival of Nuclear Bloggers. This week's event comes immediately before a large number of us will be jetting off to Chicago for the American Nuclear Society's Annual Meeting (I will be there) and sort of kicks off what promises to be an active week of posting here on Atomic Power Review (as well as on the APR Facebook page, and the APR Twitter feed) since I will have a media credential (press pass) in Chicago for the event and will be reporting on it through these media.

Since many folks who sincerely try to guess my "What is this?" feature pictures are pretty busy right now, I'm going to go easy on you all this week. This illustration should be guessed by more than a few. So... "What is this?"



The answer to this question follows the 110th Carnival - which begins now!

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Dan Yurman - Idaho Samizdat


An IPO for China’s nuclear energy triple play

The Chinese government reinvigorated its civilian nuclear energy program last week with three major actions.

First, it announced the release of a long awaited safety plan that will result in the lifting of a moratorium on new nuclear reactor projects.

Second, it announced approval of an IPO by China National Nuclear Power (CNNP), the country’s largest reactor developer, to raise the equivalent of US $27.3 billion.

Third, the central government announced a list of seven strategic industry initiatives to counter a sharp down turn in economic growth. One of them is building new nuclear power plants.

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Gail Marcus - Nuke Power Talk

Russia Joins NEA

At Nuke Power Talk, Gail Marcus discusses Russia's accession to the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. This is the culmination of a process that began several years ago when she was at the Agency and is an important step in assuring that the NEA's initiatives maintain a global perspective.

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Meredith Angwin - Yes Vermont Yankee

Superfuel - a Book I Wanted to Love

Meredith Angwin reviews the book "Superfuel" at Yes Vermont Yankee. Superfuel, by Richard Martin, describes the history and promise of the liquid thorium reactor (LFTR). Angwin likes the LFTR and has even given a poster session on it. However, Superfuel is a difficult book to praise because of scientific errors and overly strong attacks on the the people ("nuclearati") who operated the current fleet of reactors.

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Brian Wang - Next Big Future

Ukraine, India, UK about to invest

The Ukraine, India and the UK are on the verge of new nuclear energy investments.Ukraine could invest up to $25 billion by 2030 in the construction of new nuclear power facilities. India and France are close to signing a deal regarding to establishing India's largest Nuclear Power plant that will generate 9,900 Mega Watt (MW) of electricity. The prospect of new nuclear power stations being built in the UK for the first time in 20 years has moved a significant step forward after EDF Energy awarded a £2bn contract to build a plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Rolls-Royce confirmed it had won a Ministry of Defence contract worth more than £1bn (US$1.56 billion) to make reactor cores for Britain's nuclear submarine fleet.

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Rod Adams - Atomic Insights

There are three Superfuels - uranium, thorium and plutonium

Though I have only made it through the introduction and part of the first chapter, I can tell that Superfuel will be providing fodder for several posts in the coming days. I can already tell that my effort is going to be focused at refocusing various factions within the fission family to look outward rather than to squabble internally. Though Martin has published a book that purportedly is pronuclear, I believe it is actually a well conceived effort to encourage fratricide that will support the hydrocarbon establishment.

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NEI Nuclear Notes has several submissions this week.

The Price Point in Japan

NEI's Mark Flanagan takes a look at Japan's decision to restart the reactors at Ohi.


The U.S. Energy Department Should Consider Washington State for Small Reactors, Lawmakers Say

NEI Victoria Barq looks at how states across the nation want to compete for federal dollars for SMR development.

Also, two further;

Local, State and International Leaders Turn Their Attention to New Reactors, Both Big and Small

Germany and the Cost of Moving Fast

NEI's Mark Flanagan checks in on Germany's nuclear phase-out, and finds it isn't going well.

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"Cool Hand Nuke" makes an appearance in the Carnival this week with a post by Dan Yurman!

Governors vie for DOE SMR Funds.

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ANS Nuclear Cafe

“The NRC chair and Yucca Mountain”

Jim Hopf at the ANS Nuclear Cafe examines the political dimensions of
the nominations of Allison Macfarlane & Kristine Svinicki to the US
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the possible ramifications of several
recent US court decisions (and the Macfarlane nomination) on US policy
regarding nuclear waste, spent nuclear fuel, and the Yucca Mountain site.

“Smoke but no fire in nuclear news from India”

Between now and 2022, India plans to build 39 new nuclear power
reactors for a total of 45 Gwe. Dan Yurman at the ANS Nuclear Cafe
reports on the latest developments in India’s nuclear market and what
they might mean - or not -- for US and other interested firms.

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Following is a late entry made from the site of the 2012 ANS Annual Meeting...

Charles Barton - Nuclear Green

Uri Gat and the Ultimately Safe Reactor

A number of years ago, Uri Gat. an ORNL researcher, wrote a paper which argued that design features of the Molten Salt reactor made it the ultimately safe reactor. I reproduce and discuss Gat/s paper in Nuclear Green, in a post titled, Uri Gat, and the Ultimately Safe Reactor.

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That does it for this week's Carnival submissions. Since I'm going to have to get busy packing my suitcases for Chicago, I'll be very brief about the answer to the "What is this?" photo.

That illustration is a preliminary artists' conception of the layout of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station. Of course, the finished plant was not laid out this way and looked quite different - but the concept of the underground siting of the primary plant components was retained. This illustration is from the Westinghouse brochure titled "They Harnessed the Atom," published by Westinghouse Electric Corporation's Information Services Department in September, 1954 - which is very shortly after the project was launched. Of course, the project wasn't entirely new; the Shippingport plant was a development of the cancelled Navy CVR plant. What was new was the approach to containment, with reactor, steam generators and pressurizer (and a good deal of other equipment) contained below grade.

Next time I post on APR it will be from Chicago!

9:20 PM Eastern 6/22/2012
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

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Augmented Inspection Team Meeting at San Onofre (Press Release)

Southern California Edison has provided the following press release, direct to Atomic Power Review, concerning this evening's public NRC meeting at 6 PM Pacific.

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Southern California Edison to Participate in Nuclear Regulatory Commission Public Meeting


ROSEMEAD, Calif., June 18, 2012 — Southern California Edison (SCE) will be participating in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) public meeting today, Monday, June 18, in San Juan Capistrano. The NRC will present findings from its Augmented Inspection Team (AIT) that visited the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) earlier this year. SCE has not received the NRC’s report from the AIT and cannot comment on its content at this time.

The utility will be presenting information to the NRC and the public on the ongoing steam generator tube wear analysis and responding to questions from the NRC at the public meeting.

“We know that the outage and the tube wear issue have generated concern in our community,” said SCE president Ron Litzinger. “This meeting is a further opportunity to talk with the NRC and the public about the rigorous process of inspection, testing and analysis that we continue to do at the plant and our ongoing commitment to safety.”

SCE’s number one priority is, and has been, the health and safety of the public and its employees. SCE will not restart the SONGS units until the utility and the NRC are satisfied that it is safe to do so.

SCE will not be discussing restart at the June 18 meeting as that is not within the scope of the AIT report. Currently, SCE estimates that SONGS Unit 2 likely will remain off line through August. A plan for Unit 3 is expected to take longer to develop.

Unit 2 was taken out of service Jan. 9 for a planned outage. Unit 3 was safely taken off line Jan. 31 after station operators detected a leak in a steam generator tube.

More information is available at www.edison.com/songsupdate.


About Southern California Edison
An Edison International (NYSE:EIX) company, Southern California Edison is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, serving a population of nearly 14 million via 4.9 million customer accounts in a 50,000-square-mile service area within Central, Coastal and Southern California.


-###-


Jennifer Manfrè
Senior Manager, Media Relations
Southern California Edison
626-302-7964

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Southern California Edison has also provided us with a copy of a special fact sheet which has been distributed to interested parties; this fact sheet gives some quick background on steam generator replacement. Click here to access this fact sheet on the SONGS update page.

Jennifer Manfre has also provided a copy of the relevant pages of the Federal Register in which are covered the NRC findings on the San Onofre steam generator replacement. It is clear that the NRC staff found "no significant hazards."

Given the history of steam generator replacements prior to those performed at San Onofre, data this author has read on Inconel 690, the SoCal Ed referenced material and professional opinions, there is no specific or pointed reason known or given at this time to think that anyone - SoCal Ed, Mitsubishi, the NRC or anyone else - should have suspected problems due to vibration in these steam generators such that tube damage would occur. Reports today in the general press are indeed focusing on design issues with the steam generators, apparently in an advance release of NRC investigation findings. Much more work remains to determine the root cause of this problem.

It is unknown to this author why NRC AIT findings would be released and / or discussed in an Associated Press wire story prior to the findings being supplied to Southern California Edison.

SoCal Ed will be taping the meeting and may post some of the video; if this happens, I'll note that on this site.

6:25 PM Eastern 6/18/2012
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

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UPDATE 11:00 AM Eastern 6/19/2012

The news on the wires this morning is that the NRC feels that computer modeling performed by Mitsubishi in determining flow and heat transfer characteristics internal to the generators was flawed. This seems to drop the problem squarely in Mitsubishi's lap, but there is by no means a certain outcome for this yet - in fact, whether or not Mitsubishi is finally found at fault, Southern California Edison could well still be fined. The situation is still highly unclear, although we're a step along in determining the real cause. As Meredith Angwin pointed out in her very popular guest post on steam generators, it would appear (in my opinion as well) that operation at reduced power should be possible with greatly reduced likelihood of damage. This will probably shake out as the operational testing period plan.

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Carnival 109 at ANS Nuclear Cafe now

The 109th Carnival of Nuclear Bloggers is up right now over at the ANS Nuclear Cafe.

Click here to access Carnival 109.

Every week, rain or shine, this rotating feature brings you right up to speed with the top pro-nuclear blog posts of that week. Further, the feature's rotating nature lets you discover the best and most popular of the pro-nuclear blogs; all you need do is keep watching any one, and weekly the Carnival announcements will appear (you can consult blogs, Facebook pages linked to them, and Twitter feeds to see these announcements.)

Make sure to check this one out!

5:56 AM Eastern 6/17/2012
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Ohi reactor restart in Japan fully approved.

At roughly 11:37 AM Tokyo time, which was 10:37 PM here EDT, news broke in Japan that full governmental approval to restart two reactor plants at the Ohi nuclear station in Fukui Prefecture has been obtained. The Fukui governor, the Prime Minister and all advisorts have approved the restart.

According to Daily Yomiuri, Ohi 3 will restart first in early July, followed by Ohi 4 and then Ohi 2 in late July. All of the plants at this site are pressurized water reactors.

Thanks to Tom Killian, who first reported this story on GEPR's Facebook page and on the "Nukes" Facebook page, at a point when it was not yet available in English. (As of the last ten minutes, the NHK World home page has added an English language 'breaking news' headline on the matter.)

11:22 PM Eastern 6/15/2012
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Water Hammer - guest post by A. David Rossin

Background: A number of us have been discussing, for some months now, the chance that some of the water leakage at the Fukushima Daiichi plants which experienced the meltdowns might be completely external to the reactor vessels, and might be due to the deleterious effects of water hammer (sometimes in the old days known as 'steam hammer' under variable conditions.) This happens when a dead end of pipe, or piping with a restriction or perhaps a check valve is suddenly pressurized; water, being for all practical purposes totally incompressible, can cause serious damage when it is propelled suddenly with high velocity to the end of a piping run which effectively is dead headed. It has been postulated that this kind of effect, perhaps in conjunction with thermal shock (the operators did have to resort to the use of any water volume available, including sea water) could have resulted in leakage that detracted from flow that should have been cooling reactor fuel at any or all of the three plants that experienced core melting. While this is merely conjecture, I will add that is is sensible and informed conjecture - but also conjecture that can't be proven until TEPCO can get far deeper into the plants than it is now.

What follows is a very interesting reflection on this phenomenon by A. David Rossin. "Dave" Rossin has become one of my e-mail acquaintances (who I cannot wait to meet in person) through the American Nuclear Society; Dave is in fact a past ANS President. His experience is incredible and quite varied, and a proper bio would be a half hour or hour long TV documentary. I'm proud to present his piece below in entirety and unedited.

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Water Hammer – Steam Hammer

A. David Rossin 6-10-12

A couple of years after I started work at Argonne in 1955 I was assigned to the ALPR project. This was the small 3 Mw thermal BWR which was designed to be for a remote Alaskan DEW Line outpost. It was later renamed SL-1. Remember?

I was “Assistant Reactor Physicist.” After we had run it for a couple of months, we scheduled a set of tests to verify its safety and to test the performance of some safety systems. The ALPR had a spray ring inside the vessel above the top of the core. Its purpose was to provide emergency cooling water to cool the core if it was necessary to quench the steam, depressurize the vessel and flood the core. In some ways it was the forerunner of the HPCI, the high-pressure injection system of the first BWR’s.

I was in the control room, which was separated from the reactor building by a gap, some steel and12 feet of rock and sand shielding.

The plan was for the operator was to SCRAM the reactor, slow down and then cut off the recirc pump, let boiling subside, and then activate the emergency spray cooling system.

Several seconds after the pump was turned on the banging started. The noise level was terrible! The control room shook violently, and we figured that the reactor and its structure did too. The emergency pump was cut off ASAP. The heaviest banging soon stopped but a lower level of noises kept up for a while.

I recall that an “older” engineer (he must have been 53 or 54) announced that it must have been “steam hammer.” He told some of his boiler stories, and we all recalled visits to our parents or grandparents’ apartments in the winter when the radiators had gone on and there were couple of minutes of steam hammer before things settled down and they got hot. Heavy cast-iron radiators seemed to sit just below windowsills.

“Steam Hammer”, “Water Hammer” - the two names were both used.

What was obvious was that when water was injected by the emergency pump into the spray ring, the ring pipe was plenty hot, and before high-pressure water flow could be established into the ring and out the many holes, water would flash to steam at many places and the banging was the result. Much later, when the ring itself was examined, damage was found on the supports that held the ring onto the inside wall of the pressure vessel. But as I faintly recall, the ring itself, though kind of discolored, was pretty much as it had been dimensionally. No new cracks or bends.

We decided that the emergency cooling function had to be re-evaluated. Meanwhile the reactor would only be operated at very low power for physics measurements and training purposes.

I went back to Chicago and was assigned to work with Bernie Spinrad as his Reactor Physics Division Assistant Director, Monthly Report Editor and Errand Boy, etc.

It was a couple of years later, serving on the Argonne Reactor Safety Review Committee that the water hammer issue came up again somewhere else. By then, ALPR had been transferred to Combustion Engineering to operate for the Government and named SL-1. To the best of my knowledge, no operator had tried to operate the emergency core cooling system. I believe it had been locked out. It had nothing to do with the later tragedy that killed three men and ended the life of SL-1.

When I was at Commonwealth Edison after 1972 I visited Dresden and Quad Cities. I talked at length with the plant managers. One of them set up a meeting for me with guys from GE. They explained how they had engineered their HPSI and LPSI systems to avoid steam/water hammer, and provided papers on a couple of test programs. Although the issue was looked at again at NSAC while the Peach Bottom PRA was being done, the guys there found it satisfactory and it did not run high in any of their risks analyses.

Every couple of years I get a dream about water hammer. I think about conditions at the time it is needed being outside the envelope of temperature, pressure and flow conditions for which its operation was designed and tested. I just hope I never wake up to find myself reading about it in the paper the next morning.

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Thanks to Dave Rossin for this story - which gives our readers here a first person introduction to this phenomenon; we may need this for background as the Fukushima Daiichi investigations continue. Below, from "Boiling Water Reactors" published for the AEC in 1958 (by Andrew W. Kramer), we see the ALPR (later, SL-1) site.



The largest cylindrical structure in the illustration is the reactor building, which housed not only the reactor but the turbine generator as well. The control room was located in the adjacent support building.

6:20 PM Eastern 6/15/2012
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

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Review: "Super-Fuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future"

When I first received my copy of Richard Martin's book "Super-Fuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future," I was thinking to myself "Well, this is going to be just fabulous. Here we go with another loony story about alternative reactor designs - we all know that LWR plants (Light Water Reactor) are the only ones that made it, and everything else went by the wayside .. so why bother any more?"

I also thought about some reading I'd done when I was researching the article I did on this website about Elk River. That reactor, a unique indirect-cycle BWR plant, initially had thorium in its fuel (as did Indian Point 1, and a couple of other plants, too) but the program was abandoned almost as quickly as it started. Another volume in my library called "Minerals for Atomic Energy" which I consulted during the project relates the extreme difficulty in extracting thorium from monazite deposits - making it fairly uneconomical. Thorium never again figured in LWR plant operation, or any serious mainstream economic considerations about the nuclear fuel cycle, past the 60's. So, I thought, as I began to read the book, that I was about to be really unimpressed by a wild narrative of impossible designs and people all too willing to believe the unbelievable.

I was wrong by quite a long shot.

Immediately upon starting the book I was presented with a brief narrative of a hike to the site where the Clinch River Breeder Reactor construction began but which never got too far. This project in some ways represents one of a number of killed-off "should have beens" of the history of nuclear energy as it was envisioned when it became mature. We were supposed to have breeder reactors making more fuel than they produced; we were supposed to have a complete nuclear fuel cycle that included reprocessing, and a fully operational national high-level waste repository. We were supposed to have gas cooled reactors that could develop, without external (fossil fired) superheat, 1000F steam. We were supposed to have a wide array of nuclear plant designs and outputs, placed all over the nation in outputs from just a few megawatts to 1500 and more.. and we were supposed to have combined power generating and water desalination plants to solve irrigation and drought problems out West (and in Mexico.) Most of this never came to pass, thanks largely to environmentalism and to economics.

But the Clinch River project does represent one of those great "should have beens".. and that is why an illustration of it leads Atomic Power Review. At that point, Richard Martin had my attention. All too often, we see the end of a project as the end of a concept. The people working today on LFTR technology do not.

The book does of course go on to describe, in very thorough and satisfying detail, the operative cycle of LFTR plants and how they differ from LWR plants. It does go on to describe the developmental history of this kind of plant, as well as the background of some of the major players in the nuclear energy industry (both of yesterday and today) who have backed, and are backing this project. For just this, the book is useful and is commendable.

However, perhaps more startlingly (and pleasantly surprising) the author chooses to include what amounts to a capsulized history of nuclear energy in the U.S. and does so in a very interesting and very humanistic way. I especially enjoyed this unexpected inclusion .. and for just this, the book is very worth purchasing.

I do have some nitpicks with the book. The author's bias toward the LFTR concept is clear, and LWR plants are of course denigrated to an effect supportive of the author's concepts. There are a few assertions with which I might take exception, but perhaps these are errors (if they are indeed errors) borne of enthusiasm. As such, I do suppose they're tolerable.

If one wishes to get a grip (but not a super quick read, for this book is not that) on where the LFTR concept is right now, and some of the background behind its present push for commercial construction, this book should be added. For those keeping complete libraries on presently published works, it must be added, as it must for those interested in that myriad of alternative fuel and coolant technologies long since gone by the wayside in nuclear energy. There are some especially good insights on Hyman Rickover in the book; the chapter about Rickover and Alvin Weinberg (co-author of my all-time favorite book "The Second Nuclear Era") is a truly fascinating and riveting story of these men and early nuclear energy history. Although not specifically focused on LFTR concepts per se, this chapter is that which I enjoyed the most.

I really appreciate having been provided a copy of the book, and believe it makes a worthy addition to my library. In fact, I believe it to be a decent tool (if only it had a complete index!) for reference when I encounter, as increasingly I will, questions or issues about this technology on my site. Good show, Mr. Martin!

6/15/2012
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

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