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Explosion at Nuclear power plant in France
There has been an explosion at a nuclear power plant in France. The explosion happened this morning [9 Feb] in the plant's engine room, officials are saying there is no risk of nuclear contamination. One of two reactors was shut down as a result of the incident.
The plant is situated in Flamanville, near Cherbourg on the Contentin peninsula in north-west France.
Explosion at Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant Near Cherbourg, France
Power Engineering International reports
The incident has been reported by local media, Ouest-France newspaper and M6 Radio station. These sources claim five people have suffered minor injuries as a result of the explosion.
A government official says there is no nuclear risk, and at midday EDF spokesperson Laurence Ollier confirmed, "At 9.40[1] this morning, a fire resulting in a minor explosion broke out in the turbine hall on the non-nuclear part of unit 1 at the Flamanville nuclear power plant."
"The fire was immediately brought under control by the plant's response team. As per normal procedure, the fire brigade went to the affected location and confirmed that the fire had been extinguished."
[...] "It is a significant technical event but it is not a nuclear accident" because the explosion occurred "outside the nuclear zone", said Olivier Marmion, director of the state prefect's office.
The area of the incident has variously been called a turbine hall, an engine room, and a mechanical room. It has further been described as a long structure, separated from the nuclear portion of the facility.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Aiwendil on Saturday February 11 2017, @12:08PM
2017 Jan - Ohio/USA six injured at explosion at coal plant [cincinnati.com]
2017 Jan - Russia one dead at explosion at CHP plant [rt.com]
2016 Nov - China 21 dead at explosion at coal plant [powerengineeringint.com]
Just for some perspective
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 11 2017, @12:42PM
But those plants also were indirect nuclear power plants: They acted on stored power originally released in nuclear reactions in the sun. So this is only more proof that nuclear power is dangerous! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Saturday February 11 2017, @01:12PM
Don't forget, coal plants release more dose than nuclear
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ [scientificamerican.com]
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-plants-release-more-radiation-than-nuclear-power-plants [stackexchange.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @07:53PM
...and solar installations, wind turbines, and electricity generators driven by geothermal or tidal energy all produce ZERO emissions.
...and, of new energy installations built in recent years, renewables have been the vast majority.
The jobs in renewables now represent multiples of what the jobs that polluting energy sources do.
Mentioning coal these days is A RED HERRING.
It demonstrates that you know you've lost the argument and are trying to distract attention away from the most expensive way ever devised to boil water, which also has the potential for its own special brand of danger.
...as well as having had incidents which actually demonstrated that danger.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @03:58PM
Let's not forget the fire at the Samsung SDI plant in Tianjin. Even battery power can be dangerous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @08:12PM
Yes, coal-fired plants are crap and should be eliminated and replaced with RENEWABLES.
Update:
[1] EPR™ == European Pressurized Reactor, a third generation pressurized water reactor.
The Flamanville units were built in 1986 and 1987.
To review:
France has a bunch of junk that was built/maintained wrong (and, I say that their adoption was always a dumb idea).
They've had and continue to have events which have the watchdogs concerned about safety.
Some of those events have required shutdowns/restarts which further stress those expensive, fragile Cold War relics.
It's time to admit that nukes were a bad idea from the start and that better, safer, zero-waste solutions are now readily available and should be put into service to replace them.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday February 11 2017, @09:10PM
With the exceptions of geothernal, hydro and tidal there are really no viable terrestrial renewable that works well enough at scale (closest are biomass - but those has another set of problems).
The issues with EPR is that it is a first-of-a-kind built with inexperienced (on this kind of project) workers. (in china they have completed most of the testing of a finnished EPR and are expected to start it up in a fee months (this side of summer))
A nuclear power plant is defined as anything within its fence, so a grassfire on premises is technically "a fire in the plant" - yet again lots more information is neded.
(I could only find one fire in Cattenom and it was in a temporary administrative building (i.e: portable office) - when was the other one?)
In nuclear terms an incident is for all intents a non-event off-site. And without knowing more of the incidents just listing how many are useless (incident (ines:2) includes stuff like leaving fuel canisters in the wrong room, or using a yellow instead of an orange sticker, or finding you only have N+2 instead of N+4 backup generators working).
It is not without reason a joke in the industry goes "if you drop a donut and come back 15 minutes later you'll find six guys in white coats with clipboards trying to figure out why it was dropped"
It is annoying to see issues in the conventional (or even non-industrial parts) pointed out as unique to nuclear.
And I disagree with your summary as well - the french plants actually performs very well (the french run their plants in the most taxing way possible), and why would you event want to see them replaced while they still burn fossil fuel in france and need to operate the nukes in loadfollowing mode?
Also - wind turbines catches fire [telegraph.co.uk], and there are quite a few hydropower dams that have or are on their way to burst.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @11:13PM
no viable terrestrial renewable that works well enough at scale
Your let's-not-move-forward pessimism aside, there's e.g. Rock Port, Missouri, a 100 percent wind-powered community since 2008. [google.com]
Clearly, there are places where energy can be harvested continually.
...and I know that the US military has setups with giant flywheels so that an interruption/degradation in electric power delivery won't be noticed for hours.
...and a great thing about solar is that supply and demand coincide very nicely.
Costs for rechargeable batteries are 20 percent of what they were 7 years ago and that's still going down.
New battery technologies are repeatedly being developed.
Storing energy has never been easier to achieve.
...and pumping water uphill as a way to store energy while solar/wind -is- available has been known for eons.
.
wind [turbine] catches fire
How many people's safety would that have impacted if the ABSOLUTE WORST had happened there.
How many people would that have poisoned?
There is no comparison to be made WRT the safety of nukes and wind energy where nukes don't come in last.
Among France's nukes, "non-critical" events are still taking the plants offline.
...and, as mentioned, shutdowns/restarts stress these old, fragile nukes, making them an even greater safety risk / source of reliability problems with each "non-critical" event.
Compare this to the typical *clustered* nature of wind turbines which makes backup/compensation from another of those an obvious thing.
With a gigawatt nuke going down? Not so much.
hydropower dams
I'm against those too.
Dams screw up ecosystems and their construction often displaces people (usually poor people).
When they aren't built/maintained properly, they pose a threat to life.
Some (wise) places have already decommissioned/removed their dams.
Sol delivers something like 15 petawatts to Earth continuously.
All we need to do is collect a small bit of that and all our energy needs can be met--without doing anything expensive, dangerous, and stupid like nukes.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:39AM
Faulty assumption - I belive we should fix issues first and then optimize, so as long as we still have fossil I belive we should build more nukes and biomass plants. After the fossil is gone we should try to optimize away the biomass (better to use that to produce bio-oils fir plastic). After that deploy fusion and/or SPS.
1) Didn't see anything about how they do their load balancing
2) They only use 13GWh/year, that isn't at scale - that is a roundingerror (or about 11h worth of production for an EPR). This probably is the thing most people in favor of wind and solar misses - just how much power is needed.
For reference - most big grids has about 15min worth of inertia if they just can power down select consumers as needed.
A few hours mean squat at gridlevel - you need to hit at least two weeks before wind becomes reliable, and with sun between 3h and 7months depending on where you are.
...if you are close to the equator. Here (sweden) we use about twice as much power during the winter than in the summer, and during winter power-usage peaks at night and the sun is up only about 3-6h/day and most of that is just above the horizon.
Still expensive, resource-intensive and with a laugable short lifespan - but for smaller grids (sub 10TWh/year) they make sense.
Just for fun - try to cost about 7.5TWh worth of batteries (roughly what nuclear produces per day globally), and see which chemistries you can't use due to exceeding global production. And then cost it for 80 years (reasonable expected lifespan for a nuclear reactor), remember the raw material usages.
Pumped hydro is great for peaking and grid-stabilization, but please, do the math for area and water needed to backup - say - germany for two weeks with it. (In general pumped hydro tend to be designed for less than 6h at full power)
At "ABSOLUTE WORST" it would have set off a fusion reaction that would have caused all the hydrogen on the planet to fusion.
But within reason worst would have been a - for its landmass - major fire.
Considering that one is far away - quite few, but in general oil and plastic are very nasty when it burns. (From a fire standpoint a nuclear reactor building are better when it comes to fire - since it contains the soot and ashes, and can withstand external fires)
Unless you count stuff like injuries during maintance, MTBF, injuries in material extraction for build, injuries in construction, dealing with fire when sited close to cities, withstanding storms, ice-castoffs (issue for reindeer herders)...
Other than your rhetoric I actually agree on this point - but what can we do when the greens and anti-nuke people rather wants us to keep the old plants online instead of replacing them with newer plants?
(Heck, take a look at france - tell me how you would create a stable (less than 3s blackout every fifth year) and low carbon (less than 100g CO2/kWh) grid there without nuclear, and without pushing electricity above 25cent/kWh)
Except for that wind tend to be insanely variable over large swathes (roughly half of mainland beurope) of lands, while with dispatchable power-generators you simply have an overprovisioning of LargestBlock*1.10 (so, if you biggest plant is 6GWe younhave a 6.6GWe overprovisioning)
Goes down how?
A (200MWe-900MWe) CANDU6 can lose individual fuel channels (about 2MWe each) and keep running.
A few VVER are two reactors that share housing (yup, you can take them offline individually).
Also - power-reactors operate best in groups of 2, 4, 6 or 8 (which is why we build reactors in clusters we call plants, also keeps the cost of the grid down).
Oh, and the normal way to power down a reactor when an issue arise is not to scram (well, excepting CANDU - but they deal with that just fine) but rather to just disconnect the faulty part and run at reduced capacity and slowly shut down as replacement comes online.
But if you mean "transformer substation goes offline" it also takes out entire windfarms.
But you are not against building even bigger stretches of dams to build pumped hydro? (Or do you prefer to kill lakes en masse?)
I'm all in favour of building a launch-loop and sending up huge numbers of solar power satellites - but terrestrial solar is just silly if you are not very close tomthe equator.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @08:20PM
terrestrial solar is just silly if you are not very close [to the] equator
Germany has had numerous days[1] where the majority of their power came from renewables.
That would be Germany, the country whose lowest latitude is roughly the same as Quebec.
[1] Granted that those have been on weekends, but the number of days it happens is increasing and one day it will apply on a workday.
Before too long, it will become the norm.
The future is renewable and distributed.
Burning things/creating waste to produce energy is less appealing with each passing day.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 12 2017, @09:37PM
Please provide data, the longest I've seen is about 4h stretches.
Maybe I should mention that in my field grid stability is everything - so unless we can get stabke power at a nice 50H'+-0.5Hz out of it then it is an issue.
Also germany is south of all of the nordic countries, ireland, and the baltic states.
For me germany is that very hot place two countries south ;)
In the outback - yes, at big grids - no.
Iromically emough one thing you will end up with having centralized is power storage.
Which is why we have RepU, ReMIX, DUPIC and the Proryv - and that is before we get to ADS.