My dad who passed away some years ago on my 50th birthday, worked on the design for the AGR for many, many years. Fond memories of him picking me up from school and excitedly telling me the interesting problems he had to solve that day on the walk home. A lovely way to start my day - thank you for sharing.
I bet the Fukushima backup power system would have fit this explanation perfectly:
> in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working.
Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns?
The most likely (and I think underestimated) risk for Nuclear plants is a systemic change due to a large (climate?) crisis and/or war. Think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that definitely increased risk and reduced maintenance budget for a few Nuclear plants. Any significant sea level rise, drought or flood could very well trigger such events (even if the reactor is not affected directly, the society around it will be). That is why I think nuclear is a risky option to reach net-zero; every plant you build is a bet on the future stability of society for at least 75 years (time until the plant will be safely decommissioned by future generations). I would feel much safer in a world covered in solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines (and highly variable spot pricing) than in one with nuclear plants that require constant care by experts and that even in the best case incur a huge cost on society to safely decommission.
> In 2016 the European Commission assessed that European Union's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded by about 118 billion euros, with only 150 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 268 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs covering both dismantling of nuclear plants and storage of radioactive parts and waste. France had the largest shortfall with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74 billion euros of expected costs [1]
Interestingly hunterston - a nuclear power station on the west coast of Scotland - had a failure of its backup diesel generators. Wikipedia describes it as:
> In December 1998, an INES Level 2 incident occurred after severe winds and sea spray disabled all four power lines to the site during the Boxing Day Storm of 1998. After multiple grid failures in a short period of time, emergency diesel generators failed to start. Normally, in the absence of power for the reactor cooling pumps, the reactor would be passively cooled. However, the emergency control system which would have initiated passive cooling failed to act, as it had not been reset. Reactor cooling was reinstated after four hours.
It seems the safety margin was twenty hours of no reactor cooling.
I agree with your risk assessment, but I have to say that given the choice between a climate apocalypse and a nuclear power buildout, I would choose the latter.
While these are real risks, it's worth pointing out two things:
- This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away.
- The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).
French power grid agency RTE made a report[0] forecasting 2050 France energy mix, and because of loss of knowledge and increased security measures, even with strong political will, France won't be able to maintain its 70% nuclear power electricity share.
Most nuclear-intensive scenario in this report is max 50% nuclear energy.
Even if you didn't have loss of knowledge or increased security measures, unless future French nuclear power can lower its costs, it will inevitably have a lower share in the French energy mix.
In unrelated news, lowering nuclear to 50% of electricity is set as a political goal.
In other unrelated news, safely maintaining the current nuclear electric power would have required a massive buildup starting 10 years ago (to replace the reactors that are currently arriving at the end of their life).
That's 28 years away. People not yet born will be trained nuclear engineers by then. On what basis does RTE regard the loss of knowledge as already locked-in?
I went on a tour round Torness a couple of years ago and it's a fantastic engineering marvel to mosey around.
A few things stand out, like the old-tech ring binders and Windows 95 screensavers on CRTs. The safety focus was clear. Nothing was done without a risk assessment, and the young apprentice who was helping with our tour was given a telling off by the tour staff as he wasn't holding the handrails - as had clearly been drummed into them.
What really struck me was how many people were involved in running the plant. I don't know how it compares to similarly sized gas plants, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people employed - mostly in project management/safety roles. I wonder how it compares to how many folk are employed in renewables, we have a lot of wind power here now.
It's a shame that cracks have started to form in the reactors so the plants will be shutdown earlier than planned. It looks like tours are suspended for Covid, but go round if they open up again before shutdown!
The central cylindrical space in what was the Scottish Nuclear headquarters was designed to be the same size as an AGR reactor (each AGR plant having two reactors) - which I thought was rather cool.
Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong.
Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal clear imo. Energy goes into steam, steam does work, lowering the steam temperature and pressure, heating and cooling at different point can increase efficiency. It’s a topic I wish I’d have learned about sooner!
My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables.
I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building (that Unit 2), staring at the humongous, partially-disassembled turbine (they may have replaced it that year), spotlighting deer at the end of the island. I also remember a very strange feeling while listening to radiation monitors go crazy when the spent fuel was being removed... if you walked a few dozen feet past the warning tape you were probably dead.
I was very disappointed when I finally learned how a nuclear power plant worked because I assumed there was some really cool way to turn nuclear energy into electricity (apparently this is still challenging to do at power plant scale).
Accelerando is my all-time-favorite Sci Fi book. I read it twice now and will again in the near future. I'm 36 year old. I hope more people read this book.
I read "The Fountainhead" at age 18 and was marvelled by it. I even quoted bits of Howard Roark's speeches on second-handers. I re-read it at age 25 and, uh, it's a really bad novel built around a couple of awesome "yas queen" kind of put-down rants.
I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time because I can't get through Annette Benning, and I remember the flock of birds stuff at the end.
The linked text is pretty good, but Stross thinks too highly of himself re: his knowledge of science, and he presents his politics in a way that mildly annoys people who don't agree with his politics. Also, Accelerando ages as badly as Ayn Rand.
ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as green tech by the EU, maybe the political will is finally here ;)
ITER will generate no power. No liquid-metal neutron-absorber "blanket", no steam piping, no turbines.
DEMO / PROTO will, if not cancelled, be absolutely monstrous, but generate no more power than a wee fission plant. Until they destroy themselves with their own neutron flux. (They should build them underground, so they will already be buried when it is time to abandon them.)
It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all. Cost would radically exceed the same-capacity fission plant, and fission plants are already not competitive. All the while before ground is even broken to start building any, power generation cost is in free fall, with no bottom in sight.
The fact fission is classified as green /might/ impact fusion's future classification, but who knows. I was listening to a podcast and a disillusioned engineer said "environmentalists favorite nuclear power plant is always one that doesn't exist, as soon as it's ready to be built it's ready to be protested".
Probably an instance of many groups under one label acting disparately, but I get the sentiment :/
The Ferranti mainframes mentioned in the article are probably Argus 700 machines developed in 1968/9 [1] Amazing that such tech was still running important infrastructure only a decade ago.
On safety - one of the places I had the opportunity to visit had a car park where you were only allowed to reverse in. I'm not sure if it was a holdover from a previous establishment, but I think they kept something on site that was volatile enough (like a lot of gas) that if a swift evacuation was required, they didn't want people futzing around getting out of spaces.
I spent some time at an active petroleum refinery a few years ago and one of the safety things that surprised me a little was that every vehicle inside the complex must have the keys in the ignition at all times. Not turned on, but in the event of an evacuation they didn't want anyone to have to futz around looking for keys.
My wife visited Torness (the plant in the article) for a meeting with one of the managers. She went through reception, got her badge, and was on her way up the stairs to the meeting room when the receptionist shouted at her. "Maam! MAAAM!... please hold the handrail".
They're nuts about safety - and a good thing too, speaking as someone who lives relatively close-by.
This excellent article reminds me of the time in the early 80's when I got to visit the Dounreay nuclear reactor complex[0]. Now we didn't quite get to see all the guts of the power station as Charlie did, but nonetheless even as a young teenager I was impressed by the scale and complexity of the engineering. The thing that really made the hairs on the back of my neck activate was standing right above the reactor itself. We also got a tour of the labs where radioactive components and other "hot" things were manipulated by remote control arms and grippers behind very thick glass. We even got to have a go, though obviously not with anything too dangerous :)
One thing I've always wondered is, who cleans this things? Is normal, run of the mill cleaning personnel expected to be careful enough to not accidentally toss something out alignment, or is there some kind of Nuclear Plant Grade Cleaning industry I never heard about?
There are dedicated staff for cleaning, and they do an amazing job, not a speck of dust or grime anywhere people routinely go (for good reason). Where I worked they even had special titles: NPSA, nuclear plant service attendant.
The only real difference is that there's also a decommissioning aspect. Typically any consumables that get used in a nuclear environment get collected, put in a barrel and then sent off to a warehouse for later disposal (generally unspecified...). A lot of "nuclear waste" is lightly contaminated PPE.
Just to point out that Stross's blog is running off an elderly PC in his office, so no surprise that when it makes the front page on HN (twice in two days now) it gets slashdotted.
> ...although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. "Energy too cheap to meter" it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat.
"some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past"
echoes of the Raspberry Pi camera flash reboot story, 13 years apart :)
Being apparently able to erase old style glass top EPROMs with a camera flash is perhaps a bit less surprising than random power components messing up. UV light exposure is how you erase them normally, although you normally use lower light levels for longer, not a short bright camera flash.
I do think they need to buy higher grade sticky labels to cover the window with though. :-)
Seeing a massive 500 megawatt turbine in the generator hall of a nuclear powerplant is an incredible experience, dwarfed only by the knowledge that there are 3 more at the facility.
The last paragraph was truncated for me. I had to look at the page source to read it! Reproduced here for those on mobile browsers:
"It's a weird experience, crawling over the guts of one of the marvels of the atomic age, smelling
the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers), all the while knowing that although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. 'Energy too cheap to meter' it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat."
One can hope that the complexity, size, potential hazards, and expense of getting power from nuclear reactions can be greatly reduced in the future. Like Charles Babbage's difference engines [1] that were replaced by a whole new way of doing calculations with electronics, I don't think there is any first principle reason small and safe nuclear powers sources couldn't exist. The big problem in discovering/inventing them is the regulations and public fear around radioactive materials. Radioactivity is dangerous but so are a lot of technologies when they first were discovered. Steam power, chemical explosives, oil refining, etc. No one can really tinker around nuclear materials, try new things, and iterate quickly. The US could really help jump start new nuclear tech if they would designate an isolated location where the rules and regulations around handling radioactive material was greatly relaxed. The former test site in Nevada might be a good place.
Fully informed consent for the people working there with each lab spaced out to confine any unexpected high exposures to the people working on their own experiments. A certain portion of the population desires doing dangerous and risky things. Look at all the extreme sports these days. It would be great to create a way to allow them to take dangerous risks that are deeply meaningful, intellectually challenging, potentially financially lucrative, and productive for society at large.
This plant is exceptional. It is a vintage Ferrari among power plants. If hundreds of these were built, and then operated by the typical management competency of a large natural monopoly, would you bet they would all be as safe as this plant?
That's the context of nuclear safety. Big, bureaucratic, lowest-bidder contractors, bosses that are most competent at career management, lax oversight, privatized profit cushioned by socialized risk, ineffective whistleblower protection.
[+] [-] callumprentice|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tda|4 years ago|reply
> in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working.
Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns?
The most likely (and I think underestimated) risk for Nuclear plants is a systemic change due to a large (climate?) crisis and/or war. Think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that definitely increased risk and reduced maintenance budget for a few Nuclear plants. Any significant sea level rise, drought or flood could very well trigger such events (even if the reactor is not affected directly, the society around it will be). That is why I think nuclear is a risky option to reach net-zero; every plant you build is a bet on the future stability of society for at least 75 years (time until the plant will be safely decommissioned by future generations). I would feel much safer in a world covered in solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines (and highly variable spot pricing) than in one with nuclear plants that require constant care by experts and that even in the best case incur a huge cost on society to safely decommission.
> In 2016 the European Commission assessed that European Union's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded by about 118 billion euros, with only 150 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 268 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs covering both dismantling of nuclear plants and storage of radioactive parts and waste. France had the largest shortfall with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74 billion euros of expected costs [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
[+] [-] JetSetWilly|4 years ago|reply
> In December 1998, an INES Level 2 incident occurred after severe winds and sea spray disabled all four power lines to the site during the Boxing Day Storm of 1998. After multiple grid failures in a short period of time, emergency diesel generators failed to start. Normally, in the absence of power for the reactor cooling pumps, the reactor would be passively cooled. However, the emergency control system which would have initiated passive cooling failed to act, as it had not been reset. Reactor cooling was reinstated after four hours.
It seems the safety margin was twenty hours of no reactor cooling.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_sta...
[+] [-] konschubert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfindley|4 years ago|reply
- This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away.
- The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).
[+] [-] bocytron|4 years ago|reply
[0]https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-12/Futurs-Ene... in french
[+] [-] Spooky23|4 years ago|reply
Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!
[+] [-] jhgb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|4 years ago|reply
In other unrelated news, safely maintaining the current nuclear electric power would have required a massive buildup starting 10 years ago (to replace the reactors that are currently arriving at the end of their life).
[+] [-] topynate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eggfriedrice|4 years ago|reply
A few things stand out, like the old-tech ring binders and Windows 95 screensavers on CRTs. The safety focus was clear. Nothing was done without a risk assessment, and the young apprentice who was helping with our tour was given a telling off by the tour staff as he wasn't holding the handrails - as had clearly been drummed into them.
What really struck me was how many people were involved in running the plant. I don't know how it compares to similarly sized gas plants, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people employed - mostly in project management/safety roles. I wonder how it compares to how many folk are employed in renewables, we have a lot of wind power here now.
It's a shame that cracks have started to form in the reactors so the plants will be shutdown earlier than planned. It looks like tours are suspended for Covid, but go round if they open up again before shutdown!
[+] [-] arethuza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caoilte|4 years ago|reply
So one and a tiny bit people. Plus occasional inspections i suppose.
[+] [-] le-mark|4 years ago|reply
Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal clear imo. Energy goes into steam, steam does work, lowering the steam temperature and pressure, heating and cooling at different point can increase efficiency. It’s a topic I wish I’d have learned about sooner!
[+] [-] dls2016|4 years ago|reply
I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building (that Unit 2), staring at the humongous, partially-disassembled turbine (they may have replaced it that year), spotlighting deer at the end of the island. I also remember a very strange feeling while listening to radiation monitors go crazy when the spent fuel was being removed... if you walked a few dozen feet past the warning tape you were probably dead.
[+] [-] dekhn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yboris|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prionassembly|4 years ago|reply
I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time because I can't get through Annette Benning, and I remember the flock of birds stuff at the end.
The linked text is pretty good, but Stross thinks too highly of himself re: his knowledge of science, and he presents his politics in a way that mildly annoys people who don't agree with his politics. Also, Accelerando ages as badly as Ayn Rand.
[+] [-] ArtWomb|4 years ago|reply
ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as green tech by the EU, maybe the political will is finally here ;)
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220109-europe-nuclea...
[+] [-] ncmncm|4 years ago|reply
DEMO / PROTO will, if not cancelled, be absolutely monstrous, but generate no more power than a wee fission plant. Until they destroy themselves with their own neutron flux. (They should build them underground, so they will already be buried when it is time to abandon them.)
It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all. Cost would radically exceed the same-capacity fission plant, and fission plants are already not competitive. All the while before ground is even broken to start building any, power generation cost is in free fall, with no bottom in sight.
ITER is an end even more dead than the AGR.
[+] [-] bocytron|4 years ago|reply
I'm not saying we should not keep investing in fusion research, but at the current state of things, it is still somewhat science fiction.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
[+] [-] wolfram74|4 years ago|reply
Probably an instance of many groups under one label acting disparately, but I get the sentiment :/
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6LLvveMx2koXfwn|4 years ago|reply
1. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16225/Ferranti-Argus-...
[+] [-] joshvm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyarkles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sloucher|4 years ago|reply
They're nuts about safety - and a good thing too, speaking as someone who lives relatively close-by.
[+] [-] teh_klev|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dounreay
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otrahuevada|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retzkek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshvm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulAJ|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickcw|4 years ago|reply
Fantastic article. Well worth a read.
[+] [-] jareklupinski|4 years ago|reply
echoes of the Raspberry Pi camera flash reboot story, 13 years apart :)
https://hackaday.com/2015/02/08/photonic-reset-of-the-raspbe...
[+] [-] fredoralive|4 years ago|reply
I do think they need to buy higher grade sticky labels to cover the window with though. :-)
[+] [-] tim333|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|4 years ago|reply
Olkiluoto 3 is a 1600 MW reactor, so on paper it's a much bigger unit than the 600 MW reactor described here.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beckingz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonathanBuchh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camtarn|4 years ago|reply
"It's a weird experience, crawling over the guts of one of the marvels of the atomic age, smelling the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers), all the while knowing that although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. 'Energy too cheap to meter' it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat."
[+] [-] soneca|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dayofthedaleks|4 years ago|reply
The new Laundryverse book, _Quantum of Nightmares_, was released today.
[+] [-] dayofthedaleks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njarboe|4 years ago|reply
Fully informed consent for the people working there with each lab spaced out to confine any unexpected high exposures to the people working on their own experiments. A certain portion of the population desires doing dangerous and risky things. Look at all the extreme sports these days. It would be great to create a way to allow them to take dangerous risks that are deeply meaningful, intellectually challenging, potentially financially lucrative, and productive for society at large.
[+] [-] Zigurd|4 years ago|reply
That's the context of nuclear safety. Big, bureaucratic, lowest-bidder contractors, bosses that are most competent at career management, lax oversight, privatized profit cushioned by socialized risk, ineffective whistleblower protection.