Skip to main content

Great Picture of Fort Calhoun and the Missouri River

By

From St. Louis today:

image

The NRC sent out a notice (pdf) last week saying a fire had occurred in a switchgear room and was extinguished in less than an hour. No incidents have been reported since. Here’s what Omaha Public Power District said yesterday:

Jeff Hanson says, "We're protected far above where this is projected to go."

It helps that the facility was built to withstand a 500-year flood event and Hanson says there are feet of protection between the Missouri and the important structures on site.

That was before the aqua dams were put in place. Hanson says the plant has plans and procedures in place and practice flood defense. The aqua dams add another layer of protection from flooding.

Jeff Hanson says, "Protecting the vital assets, we have sandbagged and placed earthen berms around the substations which guarantees the power can get into the plant to keep the plant powered."

The facility was taken offline to refuel earlier this year so the containment building has been flooded by OPPD in order to cool the fuel rods.

Hanson adds they have a number of backup systems in place to continue to pump clean water through the spent fuel pool and into the reactor containment building so he says there is nothing to fear.

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
At Idaho Samizdat there is an excellent blog post spiking some of the conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet about the flood and the plant.
June 16, 2011 at 12:32 PM
Anonymous said…
"The facility was taken offline to refuel earlier this year so the containment building has been flooded by OPPD in order to cool the fuel rods."

The implication is that they deliberately flooded the containment building to cool the fuel rods. Come on, be serious. Do you really believe that?

Obviously when the containment building floods, and these guys say they did that deliberately to keep the rods cool, there is a problem. I've never heard such rubbish. No one floods their building to cool rods in a reactor. Basically these guys are just laughing at the public.
June 17, 2011 at 7:59 AM
Brian Mays said…
"The implication is that they deliberately flooded the containment building to cool the fuel rods."

I suspect that this is simply a case of misunderstanding by the reporter. It probably means that the fuel rods sitting in the reactor vessel are covered by water, which is the normal situation during a refueling outage.
June 17, 2011 at 8:20 AM
Anonymous said…
What they mean by "flooding the contianment" is that the refueling cavity has been flooded. This is exceedingly normal for an outage. The reactor vessel sits at the bottom of a giant concrete cavity (pool) which is normally empty. They flood it up to the refueling floor (approx. 40 ft. above the reactor vessel head) to offload the fuel in the core. The 40 ft. of water is what provides shielding from the radiation when the core is exposed, and keeps the core cool during this time.
June 19, 2011 at 12:15 AM
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