A Canadian Chernobyl "what if?"

NDog090

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Aug 27, 2014
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After many friends advised me to check out HBOs Chernobyl, I took the plunge this evening and watched all 5 episodes. Wow is all I can say.

Also just learned that MB has an abandoned nuclear power plant called Whiteshell Laboratories by Winnipeg and I have to ask:

If an act of nature was to damage one of our CANDU reactors by flooding or a hurricane at the Eastern sites, just how safe are our reactors compared to Chernobyl/Fukushima?
 

masterpoonhunter

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Good questions and good of you to have an interest in NPP's.

The Whiteshell Research facility outside of Pinawa (not a power plant) was not abandoned, rather it was decommissioned starting in 1998, and is still completing. WR-1 was a historical reactor that goes back to the facility's origin in 1963. It has been decommissioned and as no radioactive material was left it is being left in place. The other reactor, a SLOWPOKE is a small scale inherently safe research reactor that had its core removed many years ago and has been dismantled. Very little is left to be done at this time but there is a small staff of scientists still working there.

The other reactors and at one time there were quite a few SLOWPOKE's have been decommissioned (I believe McMaster University's is still operational. The Nuclear Power Plants though, in Ontario and New Brunswick are active. Quebec is decommissioning theirs.

The Canadian NPP's use the CANDU design which is very expensive but is also a fail safe design in that the likelihood of it going critical is exceeding low (same as per the SLOWPOKE's). If there is a coolant failure, there are secondary and tertiary coolant system and the rods retract such that the system shuts off. Completely different from the designs of many around the world (all less costly).

So to answer your question Canadian reactors will shut down in event of catastrophic failure and it would take a direct missile hit with a heavy ordinance payload to really cause damage. But a core meltdown chance is very very low. Hope that all helps.

Cheers,
MPH
your resident scientist pooner
 

westwoody

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MPH- The fuel rods don’t move but the moderator rods do. The moderator rods are held in a vertical position by electromagnets. There are emergency handles to pull and the moderator rods go down.
Have you ever seen the charging machine used to swap out fuel bundles? It’s slow.
My dad took me to Chalk River many times, walked around on top of NRX and NRU, even stuck my hand in the heavy water of the pool reactor. Played with glove box. Held a blob of U in my hand and felt the heat. No cancer yet! Not the normal visitor tours LOL
 
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masterpoonhunter

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MPH- The fuel rods don’t move but the moderator rods do. The moderator rods are held in a vertical position by electromagnets. There are emergency handles to pull and the moderator rods go down.
Have you ever seen the charging machine used to swap out fuel bundles? It’s slow.
My dad took me to Chalk River many times, walked around on top of NRX and NRU, even stuck my hand in the heavy water of the pool reactor. Played with glove box. Held a blob of U in my hand and felt the heat. No cancer yet! Not the normal visitor tours LOL
Thank you Westwoody for the correction, yes moderators move in the Canadian designs. Late night posts should also be moderated :)
Handling uranium pretty much in all its forms is an exciting endeavour. First off it is so heavy you can't believe it, second of course is the fact that "woah this shit can kill me". Which it can if you get stupid about it. It is a low energy gamma emitter such that for the most part any material will stop the gamma-rays from penetrating. However it is also an alpha emitter and that is the bad part. Alpha particles travel about a cm in air and cannot get through a barrier so handling uranium is safe. As long as you do not lick the surface, your hands after handling or if its dusty breath in the dust. Alpha's in your body will convert your hydrogen into tritium which is also radioactive and voila you have major cancer starting. This is what kills populations after a nuclear blast, meltdown etc, the timed effects of ingesting the various emitters that come out of it.
Cheers all.
 

LLLurkJ2

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The new designs they're working on are supposed to be 'walk away safe' in that if thw power goes out or the coolant pumps fail a plug below the reacting mass melts and the reactants drain into a large chamber thats too spread out for critical mass to occur. In theory.
 

SeekSteadyRegSP

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Feb 9, 2005
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A Canadian Chernobyl "what if?"

Well, for starters, it would surely adversely impact vast numbers of foreigners on their land even more than Canadians, so likely it would be near to one of the borders with the U.S..

Just hope it's the Yukon... for the sake of the population bases on both sides.
 

licks2nite

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Chernobyl gave nuclear a bad reputation. A totally different technology than anything in western Europe or North America. Navy ships' successful nuclear propulsion decades could eliminate half the world's carbon emission in commercial shipping industry and easily go on to power neighbourhoods. You be sure, when fossil fuel depletion bites too hard into living standards, nuclear can pick up the slack.
 

westwoody

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The problem with nuclear is almost always cost cutting.
US Navy operates with highly trained crewmen and strict discipline. Constant scheduled preventative maintenance. Anyone fucks up gets the boot.
Private operators start off like that. At first they have real engineers 24/7. Then it’s only on day shift. The engineer is replaced with a community college guy for less money. Then it’s a grade 12 guy who takes a week long company course.
Throw in union protection for guys who fuck up. Staff gets less competent and less disciplined as time goes by. A billion dollar facility trying to save a dollar an hour on an employee and saving by cutting maintenance.
 
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Uncled

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The problem with nuclear is almost always cost cutting.
US Navy operates with highly trained crewmen and strict discipline. Constant scheduled preventative maintenance. Anyone fucks up gets the boot.
Private operators start off like that. At first they have real engineers 24/7. Then it’s only on day shift. The engineer is replaced with a community college guy for less money. Then it’s a grade 12 guy who takes a week long company course.
Throw in union protection for guys who fuck up. Staff gets less competent and less disciplined as time goes by. A billion dollar facility trying to save a dollar an hour on an employee and saving by cutting maintenance.
IMG_0452.JPG
 

Amerix

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May 7, 2004
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After many friends advised me to check out HBOs Chernobyl, I took the plunge this evening and watched all 5 episodes. Wow is all I can say.

Also just learned that MB has an abandoned nuclear power plant called Whiteshell Laboratories by Winnipeg and I have to ask:

If an act of nature was to damage one of our CANDU reactors by flooding or a hurricane at the Eastern sites, just how safe are our reactors compared to Chernobyl/Fukushima?
Our reactors have containment domes and don't use graphites cores, so pretty damn safe.
 

rlock

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May 20, 2015
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The problem with nuclear is almost always cost cutting.
US Navy operates with highly trained crewmen and strict discipline. Constant scheduled preventative maintenance. Anyone fucks up gets the boot.
Private operators start off like that. At first they have real engineers 24/7. Then it’s only on day shift. The engineer is replaced with a community college guy for less money. Then it’s a grade 12 guy who takes a week long company course.
Throw in union protection for guys who fuck up. Staff gets less competent and less disciplined as time goes by. A billion dollar facility trying to save a dollar an hour on an employee and saving by cutting maintenance.

As you say, the problem is the difference between what they ought to do and what they actually do. Safety culture has to be built in from the design phase, through operation, right down to final disposal, and that runs up against all sorts of human factors which will try to water it down.

Chernobyl demonstrated that in oppressive places like the USSR, where people were given objectives that were impossible to meet safely and punished for any perception of failure, that the problems went unresolved and even multiplies - there was simply too much pressure to not admit to problems instead of dealing with them.

But where their society's problem was fear (and official secrecy), ours is greed and complacency (and official secrecy).

Navies have had nuclear accidents too - and they use weapons-grade stuff for their reactors, AFAIK. Discipline has sometimes failed, incompetence reared its ugly head as US Navy ships have crashed into each other or subs have surfaced underneath fishing boats etc.

In the civilian world, you have examples like the Mt. Polley mine disaster here in BC - the company was told dozens of times by safety authorities not to overfill their tailings dam or it would collapse, but they did so anyways to save money; instead of forcing them to smarten up, the pols told the safety authority to back off and stop imposing "red tape". result: Collapse, disaster, and millions of tons of pollution flooding downstream. The company still gets to operate, when really their executives should have been hung on a meat hook. Greed wins every time. Same goes for the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico. Lack of safety flowed from greed, then after the disaster, lack of punishment for those responsible. NASA's Challenger disaster - yes, more "cost savings" pressures to blame, but what is amazing is how an organization that has such a culture of being the "best and brightest" with intense safety engineering and risk management still managed to fuck it up.

Fukushima's the obvious stunning failure in the capitalist world - how did the most earthquake-prepared country on earth, with a strong & innovative engineering culture, never realize that a tsunami could wash its critical backup power connections away? It's like the bosses at TEPCO simply declared that such a disaster couldn't happen and that was that. They had decades to fix this problem, but there too, they just let it go on until disaster struck, and even afterwards were in total denial that the nuclear disaster was taking place. It's as if they would rather die than admit failure.

Sometimes too, there is simply the aspect of corporate & government culture that blinds itself by only wanting to put forward a positive image, refuses to take safety concerns as anything other than naysaying, and fears scandal or embarrassment to the degree that they will ignore problems that are clearly pointed out just to hang onto the [unrealistic] image of being problem free. They will fight tooth and nail to make sure the dangers and dirty secrets never get public scrutiny.

It is no accident that environmentalists have fought against the nuclear industry for so long. Aside from its strong ties to nuclear warfare, it doesn't have a great record when it comes to honesty, have been caught cutting corners many times, has always treated environmental considerations as unimportant, downplayed risks (short term from operations and long term from waste), and repeatedly hides behind the excuse of national security when it comes to public oversight. Indeed, environmentalist experts on the subject are often way more knowledgeable than the average politician who supports it.

It is a tough issue for environmental groups, too - opposing nuclear power means taking off the table a very promising source of energy at a time when energy is needed that doesn't create carbon-emissions. Within their ranks, there is quite a heated debate on this, but it still comes down to two things: risk and trust.

Yes, in theory nuclear power should be well-managed and minimize risk; in practice, it is still subject to the same human & systemic failings as other industries - only while handling something so deadly serious that there is really no room for the usual fuck ups.

Honestly, I worry more about the proposed new "small modular reactors" that are being touted as an lower cost & more decentralized alternative to big nuclear power plants.
At least with the big reactor complexes in Canada, they require a strong base of professionalism, and are an already- known factor in terms of operational culture.

With the small reactors, the boosterism I see makes me think that the sales pitch for it will overwhelm the safety concerns, and we'll end up with dozens of small reactors out in the boonies that are being operated in some half-assed unsafe manner, by people who (as you said) are cheapskates & barely trained at all.
 

masterpoonhunter

"Marriage should be a renewable contract"
Sep 15, 2019
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Excellent post rlock - thanks for taking the time to write that. You hit on a lot of points, all valid. We are in a politics and profit culture where the right thing is not as important as votes and money.

Back to nuclear in Canada, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is one of the toughest inspection/certification groups in the world. No reactor on Canadian soil can be built without their blessing and oversight every step along the way. Including SMR's. Not that we don't have anything to worry about as far as nuclear goes, but in general the Canadian solutions are as safe if not safer than any in the world.

The Mt Polly and BP disasters stick in my craw as examples of the worst failures of so called safety enforcement. Whey the fucking executives in those outfits are not in jail for crimes against the environment is way beyond my pay grade, but man, if I had a rocket launcher ...
 
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