Skip to main content

Thinking About Safety in India and Nigeria

By

lagos_nigeria Like the United States, India wants to take a look at the relative safety of its nuclear plants.

The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has set up a 10-member committee to examine if our 20 nuclear plants can withstand earthquakes and other external events such as tsunamis, cyclones, floods, etc. That includes checking if the arrangements are adequate to ensure safety in case of such events, both within and beyond the design.

The panel is chaired by AERB’s former chairman, S K Sharma. Its first meeting is on the coming Thursday.

Naturally, the focus will be on earthquakes and tsunamis:

He [an unidentified board member] said during the 2004 tsunami, nuclear plants in south India were able to withstand the effects. “Our plants are almost 2,000 km away from the tectonic boundary of Sumatra. The earthquake following the tsunami in Japan was quite unprecedented and, therefore, the committee will revisit the safety applications installed in our plants.”

This is a worthwhile effort. It sounds as though the board members are well informed and serious about their jobs – it helps that they come from a range of disciplines.

Committee members include representatives of AERB, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Nuclear Power Corporation, IIT-Madras, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and Central Water & Power Research Station, Pune.

It’ll be interesting to see what they turn up – the article doesn’t say, but I assume they will make a report to the AERB.

---

And Nigeria, which is thinking of buidling of nuclear energy plant, is concerned about safety too. The Daily Independent offers an opinion.

We cannot but narrow the scenario to Nigeria, which has for some time now tinkered with the idea of nuclear power to generate electricity. According to the National Space Research and Development Agency (NARSDA), Nigeria should be prepared for the earthquake experience. Having experienced earth tremors in 1933,1939,1984,1990,1994,1997,2000 and 2006 with the surface wave magnitude of between 3.7 and 3.9, the probability cannot be ruled out. 

After noting the haphazard efforts of the National Emergency Management Agency in other recent emergency, the editorial makes a few suggestions:

While urging government to take pro-active measures against natural disasters, NEMA’s facilities and training of personnel should be upgraded. Ecological funds should be judiciously utilized by state governments for the purpose meant.  

The writer also notes all the international help offered to Japan and guesses that Nigeria would receive the same (which seems a safe assumption. I also assume Nigeria will have a regulator.

Not a bad overview of concerns, though I think the paper underestimates how much of an safety infrastructure will be put in place should Nigeria pursue nuclear energy.

A fish-eyed view of Lagos, Nigeria.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...
6 comments
Read more