solar storms to turn every nuke plant into a fukushima?

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http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194166/ ... -event.htm

Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for atleast eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours.


Nuclear plants depend on standby batteries and backup diesel generators. Most standby power systems would continue to function after a severe solar storm, but supplying the standby power systems with adequate fuel, when the main power grids are offline for years, could become a very critical problem.

If the spent fuel rod pools at the country's 104 nuclear power plants lose their connection to the power grid, the current regulations are not sufficient to guarantee those pools won't boil over, exposing the hot, zirconium-clad rods and sparking fires that would release deadly radiation.

A report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity enables a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss, a risk that significantly outweighs that of major earthquakes and tsunamis.

Personally I think they are exagerating, and an old style diesel generator would not be affected by a solar storm in any way whatsoever in the first place.

It's not likely enough to worry about.

even if so, what happens when the infrastructure needed to fuel that generator is destroyed? cars and trucks would all be disabled permanently until repaired. but how do you get the part to repair them if all of them have been fried as well? how do you make new parts if the plants that make those parts have gone offline?

The worst that could happen is that a few transformers will blow. The reactor itself will be unaffected.

Evidence?

Commercial nuclear reactors have been in operation since the 1950s, and not one has had a meltdown due to solar activity.

Some folks should watch something other than the SyFy Channel.

Solar-flare activity significant enough to cause widespread (>30% of the United States) power outages, and disable diesel generators, would also be sufficiently energetic to eliminate most life on the surface of the planet. It would require our Sun to be far more variable than it has thus far been shown to be (about 4% variation in output).

Further, the situation at the Daiichi Fukushima plant resulted from a plant shutdown due to the earthquake, followed by disabling the diesel generators with a tsunami, and finally there being no good way to get backup generators to the plant because the earthquake had destroyed the roads. Even should we grant a solar storm the power to somehow knock out long-range power transmission, that would not cause the plant itself to shut down, meaning it would still be generating more than enough power to keep its cooling systems running; even should it somehow destroy the existing backup generators, it would not affect the existence of roads, and it would be possible to move new generators into place.

In short, the failure mode at Daiichi Fukushima was unique, and is unlikely to be duplicated anywhere else, particularly in the United States. Further, it is physically impossible to duplicate this failure mode through solar activity. (You might have recalled reading at some point about the Van Allen belts; they made the news again recently with the discovery of a pocket of antiprotons, created by cosmic-ray decay, trapped between the belts high above Earth. They are the clearest representation of the protection offered by our planet's magnetic fields against extraplanetary radiation sources.)

then why are oak ridge and noaa saying otherwise?

There are reactor designs with passive cooling. I.E. they do not require power to stay cool enough not to melt down.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

ruven

It doesn't look like they are. This is really a crappy piece of journalism. There's no reference to any of the titles of these reports, let alone links. There's not a single quote by a single scientist. The information presented is skewed and completely outdated. There's nothing even news-worthy here and I'm not sure why this article has even been written.

The closest thing I can find to a primary source is a NOAA news article written back in 2009. Here's the link: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... rediction/

It basically says the peak is coming up in May 2013, but it will be relatively weak. The end of the article sums it up nicely,

Meanwhile, the sun pays little heed to human committees. There could be more surprises, panelists acknowledge, and more revisions to the forecast.

"Go ahead and mark your calendar for May 2013," says Pesnell. "But use a pencil."

I can't find anything relevant on ORNL, except a link back to article published in IB Times.

They aren't. What you perceive is the application of bad journalism - only this, and nothing more.

i wonder why there aren't all designed that way.

The reactor design at Chernobyl was one of the worst designs used. Graphite was packed around the core to contain radiation. Graphite exposed to radiation breaks down into charcoal, and has be replaced periodically. Well, they didn't replace the graphite regularly, it decayed to charcoal, and caught fire! That was an excursively Soviet design, but the USSR built many such plants although the old union.

Much circuitry at nuclear plants is radiation hardened anyway, so they would probably do better in a massive solar eruption.

The reactor design at Chernobyl was one of the worst designs used. Graphite was packed around the core to contain radiation. Graphite exposed to radiation breaks down into charcoal, and has be replaced periodically. Well, they didn't replace the graphite regularly, it decayed to charcoal, and caught fire! That was an exclusively Soviet design, but the USSR built many such plants all throughout the old union.

Much circuitry at nuclear plants is radiation hardened anyway, so they would probably do better in a massive solar eruption.

Not only that, the Chernobyl reactor did not have a containment structure around it. Typical Soviet Sh*t.

ruveyn

Eh, not really, A solar flare on the order of what happened in 1859 would take out quite a bit of infrastructure, though it would not leave 30% of the grid dead.

The biggest problem is a lack of dc current sensors hooked up between the neutral and the ground at the major distribution transformer stations. Keep in mind that its not the solar flare that burns up the transformer but the ac grid power, the solar flare just saturates the transformer. Compounding the problem is the thermal time constant on these transformers due to the very high efficiency is on the order of hours not minutes, and as per design they are %99.5+ efficient. The slightest amount of dc current will cause the core to overheat on a long term scale. In fact just due to background dc currents present on a few lines in Canada, there have been early transformer failures, though the cause is disputed. Dc currents on the order of more than 10% of the normal ac line current will render these things a dead short to ac as well, and then you get the copper heating up and the transformer oil literally boiling over and lighting on fire.

What is comes down to is if you want infrastructure that's solar flare proof, all you have to do is disconnect the neutral from the ground, and let it float through a resistor and a spark gap to handle lightning strikes
The utilities are waiting on the feds to pay them to do this.

as far as the journalism in question, it is essentially fear mongering.


We also haven't had any significant solar activity, nor any long term blackouts.

If we lose more than a handful of the fractional gigawatt six digit voltage class transformers, there's no one to make any replacements, much less any spares on hand, and that would be a real problem. but the chance of that happening is really, really low
The utilities are operating on the assumption that transformer failures are 100% predictable (they are), and they last more than 70 years. they even have real time oil temperature monitoring in some areas to prolong their life (every 10-15C increase in temperature cuts the life in half.)
I think their plan is to just shut the power off in the event that we actually start losing satellites to radiation.

If one could have looked into the future and see the damage oil and coal would cause, I'll bet most people would have chosen nuclear. I would rather have a storage mountain that was off limits than an entire planet affected by burning fossil fuels.