unlurk said:
I believe if we pause to look at what has been learned here in the last two months we will see that we have uncovered a major flaw in the way nuclear power plants are run in Japan and the US.
We have badly underestimated the potential hazards emanating from spent fuel ponds.
[...]
This is a so far unheard wake up call for the US (and everyone else.)
We need to empty our SFPs now, not at some time in the future.
SFPs are our nation's Achilles tendon. They are a major source of danger by themselves - not to mention combined with reactor event(s).
[...]
But in my view, the cat is already out of the bag, we need to see our SFP crisis for what it is _ and deal with it. There should be no more sweeping it under the rug.
I fully agree that the spent fuel pools in that kind of reactor design are a major concern. (Don't necessarily agree on the conclusion that there would have been only minor problems in this particular case if not for the SFPs.) I was and still am amazed at how nuclear industry people and their followers always talk about containment and that nothing can happen, and that the reactors will even survive airplane crashes - and at the same time they literally keep the stuff that is so heavily "contained" in the reactor in a pool on the attic. I have been wondering all the time why they don't put concrete shield plugs also onto the top of the SFP? Apparently such shield plugs do exist (see post not too far above), but they are much lighter even than the dryer-separator shield plugs, i.e. probably not very effective at protecting the SFP, e.g. in the case of an airplane crash.
According to these guys -
http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/aircraftcrashbreach/ - the whole reactor buildings even including BWR SFPs are more or less safe in case of a plane crash. IMHO that just cannot be true. Interestingly enough for the BWR SFP they just considered an impact from the side. Of course, on the side of the SFP concrete wall is rather thick and they also mention the steel liner. So, I may trust them that in that particular impact scenario, it might go well. But come on, they don't even mention vertical impact onto the SFP, which IMHO would be catastrophic judging from the building structures we see in Fukushima. Seriously, they must know about that, so they just say ok we just consider impact from the side, then there is no problem, let's not even think about other scenarios. This is almost like the story with the unround RPV in Japan. If they would have scrapped that RPV which took 2 years or so to build, the company would have gone bankrupt. Here, if they admitted that SFPs in those BWR designs are flawed from a safety point of view, they would have to shut down all those plants, in the worst case (which would not even solve the problem...). Anyway, it's a money thing, as always.
Oh, and please no one say the above scenario is impossible or unimaginable or unforeseen.
Sorry, for the ranting, but it had to get out.
As an aside: What is actually with the common fuel pool in Fukushima, in principle they should have had the same issues with cooling and hydrogen buildup there. It might be interesting to compare to the reactor SFPs. Probably this was discussed already?
