Nuclear Power? Still not great.
Feb. 21st, 2009 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unusualmusic_lj_archiveBad Reactors:Rethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again.
Seven years ago, Finland was faced with a daunting energy dilemma. To keep its domestic industries up and running, it needed to double its electricity supply by 2025. At the same time, it had to cut carbon emissions by fourteen million tons a year to comply with its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. The question was how to fill the gap without stifling its flourishing economy or increasing dependence on costly imports.
As it hunted for solutions, the Finnish government decided to consider a controversial option: building another nuclear power plant. It was not a new idea; in fact, the Finns had weighed and rejected it nine years earlier. But since then, officials reasoned, the situation had changed. Besides a new imperative to reduce carbon emissions, a new generation of nuclear reactors had recently come onto the market. None had been built, but the industry claimed that their simple, standardized designs and modular components would make them far easier and less expensive to assemble than their predecessors.
...
But the building site is far less serene. When I visited in November, it was teeming with lumbering backhoes, churning cranes, and workers doubled under sacks of concrete. Hundreds of metal shipping containers and canvas tents were scattered around a fifteen-acre hole blasted into the granite bedrock. Rising from one end of the pit was the containment building, a ninety-foot-tall tower with its top wrapped in scaffolding, which houses the reactor. From afar it looked like a solid pillar of concrete, but as I picked my way through stacks of rusty I beams and giant spools of cable, I noticed Bondo-colored patches scattered across its face. Eventually, I looped around back and crossed a rickety plywood bridge that led inside. The interior of the containment building was lined with a solid layer of steel that was crisscrossed with ropy welds. On this surface someone had scrawled the word "Titanic."
These marks are the last remaining hints of the problems that have plagued this thick outer shell, the last line of defense in case of a meltdown. The steel liner was hand forged using outdated plans by a Polish subcontractor, which had no prior nuclear experience. As a result, the holes for piping were cut in the wrong spots, and the gaps along the weld joints were too wide. Entire sections had to be ripped apart and rebuilt. And the containment liner is not unique. Virtually every stage of the construction process has been dogged by similar woes, from the nine-foot-thick foundation slab (the concrete was mixed with too much water, making it weaker than had been called for in the plans) to the stainless steel pipes that feed water through the reactor core (they had to be recast because the metal was the wrong consistency). To date, more than 2,200 "quality deficiencies" have been detected, according to the Finnish nuclear authority, STUK. Largely as a result, the project, which was supposed to be completed in 2009, is three years behind schedule and is expected to cost $6.2 billion, 50 percent more than the original estimate. And the numbers could keep climbing. "There are still some very challenging phases ahead," says Petteri Tiippana, STUK’s assistant director for projects and operational safety. "Things will have to go extremely well if those responsible for building the project are to hit the new targets."
These complications have already erased the cost savings nuclear power was supposed to deliver compared to other energy sources, such as natural gas. What’s more, the reactor won’t be completed before 2012, when the Kyoto treaty expires. To meet its targets, between now and then Finland will have to buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of credits through the European Union’s emissions trading scheme. In the meantime, because the country expected the reactor to deliver a bounty of energy and didn’t pursue other options, it’s facing a severe electricity shortage and will have to import even more from abroad, which will drive up power bills. Elfi, a consortium of Finnish heavy industries, has calculated that the project delays will create $4 billion in indirect costs for electricity users. The implications of Finland’s ordeal reach far beyond its borders
As it hunted for solutions, the Finnish government decided to consider a controversial option: building another nuclear power plant. It was not a new idea; in fact, the Finns had weighed and rejected it nine years earlier. But since then, officials reasoned, the situation had changed. Besides a new imperative to reduce carbon emissions, a new generation of nuclear reactors had recently come onto the market. None had been built, but the industry claimed that their simple, standardized designs and modular components would make them far easier and less expensive to assemble than their predecessors.
...
But the building site is far less serene. When I visited in November, it was teeming with lumbering backhoes, churning cranes, and workers doubled under sacks of concrete. Hundreds of metal shipping containers and canvas tents were scattered around a fifteen-acre hole blasted into the granite bedrock. Rising from one end of the pit was the containment building, a ninety-foot-tall tower with its top wrapped in scaffolding, which houses the reactor. From afar it looked like a solid pillar of concrete, but as I picked my way through stacks of rusty I beams and giant spools of cable, I noticed Bondo-colored patches scattered across its face. Eventually, I looped around back and crossed a rickety plywood bridge that led inside. The interior of the containment building was lined with a solid layer of steel that was crisscrossed with ropy welds. On this surface someone had scrawled the word "Titanic."
These marks are the last remaining hints of the problems that have plagued this thick outer shell, the last line of defense in case of a meltdown. The steel liner was hand forged using outdated plans by a Polish subcontractor, which had no prior nuclear experience. As a result, the holes for piping were cut in the wrong spots, and the gaps along the weld joints were too wide. Entire sections had to be ripped apart and rebuilt. And the containment liner is not unique. Virtually every stage of the construction process has been dogged by similar woes, from the nine-foot-thick foundation slab (the concrete was mixed with too much water, making it weaker than had been called for in the plans) to the stainless steel pipes that feed water through the reactor core (they had to be recast because the metal was the wrong consistency). To date, more than 2,200 "quality deficiencies" have been detected, according to the Finnish nuclear authority, STUK. Largely as a result, the project, which was supposed to be completed in 2009, is three years behind schedule and is expected to cost $6.2 billion, 50 percent more than the original estimate. And the numbers could keep climbing. "There are still some very challenging phases ahead," says Petteri Tiippana, STUK’s assistant director for projects and operational safety. "Things will have to go extremely well if those responsible for building the project are to hit the new targets."
These complications have already erased the cost savings nuclear power was supposed to deliver compared to other energy sources, such as natural gas. What’s more, the reactor won’t be completed before 2012, when the Kyoto treaty expires. To meet its targets, between now and then Finland will have to buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of credits through the European Union’s emissions trading scheme. In the meantime, because the country expected the reactor to deliver a bounty of energy and didn’t pursue other options, it’s facing a severe electricity shortage and will have to import even more from abroad, which will drive up power bills. Elfi, a consortium of Finnish heavy industries, has calculated that the project delays will create $4 billion in indirect costs for electricity users. The implications of Finland’s ordeal reach far beyond its borders
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Date: 2009-02-22 04:34 am (UTC)