SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
City A.M. (non-Cloudflare link) is reporting that Royal Dutch Shell has submitted to the British government its plans to dismantle its "four platforms, 154 wells and 28 pipelines" in the North Sea's Brent field, some of which have already ceased production. The company's Charlie platform continues to extract oil.
The Anglo-Dutch oil giant submitted its programme to the department for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS), which has invited public responses to the proposals over the next 60 days. It will then analyse the feedback and decide whether to approve the plan.
"Any decommissioning plan will be carefully considered by the government, taking into account environmental, safety and cost implications, the impact on other users of the sea and a public consultation," Reuters reported a spokesman for the BEIS said.
Additional coverage:
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday February 10 2017, @09:43AM
Remove all the oil bits.
Seal the well.
Put a nuclear reactor on top, and a long cable back to land (power cables already criss-cross the Med and the Channel, so it's not infeasible.
Energy problem solved.
Safety problem solved.
Infrastructure for getting people over there is already in place.
If the thing goes nuclear, you cut the legs and drop it into the ocean.
Because even waste nuclear material is stored in water and you can SWIM in the tanks just meters away (for limited times, agreed, but it's how maintenance takes place) because of the radiation-blocking properties of that much water.
Why we haven't been doing this since the start, I can't fathom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @03:54PM
> Why we haven't been doing this since the start, I can't fathom.
I see what you did there...
Maybe it's something to do with the 3-eyed sharks that will result from swimming around the reactor?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @05:14PM
Current designs for nuke reactors already come submerged in tons of water (more than needed for cooling completely) or with their own water towers (gravity fed cooling to last several days).
They have seen how plants fail, and iterated on the design to increase safety. Sadly, no one can build them because "nukes have been proven unsafe". As the existing plants continue to age, the "proof" will only get larger.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday February 10 2017, @11:02PM
ledow:
If the thing goes nuclear, you cut the legs and drop it into the ocean.
I'll assume that the intended meaning of "if the thing goes nuclear" is "if something goes drastically wrong, such as serious damage to the reactor."
Anonymous Coward:
Current designs for nuke reactors already come submerged in tons of water [...]
Yes, water is used in many designs. One thing it can do is to cool the reactor; another thing it can do is to slow neutrons; the slowing makes them more likely to be absorbed by the fuel, leading to fission. In other words, water can help to sustain the chain reaction. If a reactor is designed to be filled with ordinary water during normal operation, dropping it into ordinary water won't quench the reaction. If, however, it's designed to run with heavy water, and it becomes damaged, with the heavy water leaking out, and is then dropped into ordinary water, the reaction might indeed slow down, because ordinary water is less effective at slowing neutrons than is heavy water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient [wikipedia.org]
How would the reactor be dropped into the water? If it were done with explosives, that seems likely to cause further damage to the reactor; assuming the explosives would be always in place and ready, it also strikes me as a security risk. If instead the reactor were lowered with hydraulics, there would be less damage. Such a structure might be costly to construct. Seawater, furthermore, is corrosive. Submerging the reactor in the sea might still render it unusable, unless the materials throughout were designed for the procedure. If a reactor were scuttled in this manner, and were seriously damaged, radionuclides could leak into the sea. We don't want that because, as enormous as the ocean is, it is part of the biosphere. Disposing of radioactive waste in the ocean is forbidden (except, scandalously, in Somalia) by several international treaties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste [wikipedia.org]
How would a containment structure figure into the proposal? Such structures tend to be heavy; an artificial structure that could support a containment building would have to be robust. At Fukushima, didn't we see that a small containment building can be especially vulnerable to overpressure? A thin, lightweight containment might be less strong than is usual. It might be vulnerable to damage if aircraft, or huge ships, were to impinge upon it.
At Fukushima, seawater was initially used, of necessity, for emergency cooling. If I'm not mistaken, fresh water is now being used to keep the damaged reactors cool. However, the operator is now taking some care to keep the water from escaping into the environment. We've had some stories about TEPCO's efforts to contain that water.
Conventional designs sometimes call for supplies of borated water; when an emergency shut-down is necessary, the water can be introduced into the reactor, where the boron absorbs neutrons, slowing the reaction. Although that can also be corrosive, it strikes me as more workable than this proposal.
http://pmmd.pnl.gov/nuregcr6923/appendixb-18.pdf [pnl.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Heavy_Water_Reactor#Design [wikipedia.org]