Fukushima Five Years Later: The FLEX Strategy

David Heacock

This week is the fifth anniversary of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. To mark the event, we'll be sharing observations from leaders around the nuclear energy industry all week long on how the U.S. has absorbed lessons learned from the accident to make safe nuclear plants even safer. Today's contribution comes on the industry's FLEX strategy from David Heacock, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dominion Nuclear.

The U.S. nuclear industry is well on its way toward implementing a flexible mitigation approach for responding to any event that may exceed the robust design of the nation’s nuclear power plants. This FLEX strategy, the outcome of the U.S. industry’s response to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan, provides yet another layer of safety. This is in addition to the multiple back-up safety systems already available to protect the public and environment.

In effect, this strategy was demonstrated to successfully prevent damage to the reactor core at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant, only a short distance from its sister plant, Daiichi.

FLEX strategies provide the greatest safety benefit of all the options that could be implemented in a short period of time to further ensure public safety from extreme natural events. Each site is equipped with portable equipment capable of providing electricity and pumping water to keep the nuclear core cool and stable. This equipment can be moved easily from protective storage buildings on the site to key locations in the plant to maintain reactor cooling until a longer-term solution is put in place. Two national response centers—in Memphis, Tennessee and Phoenix—provide additional FLEX equipment and resources that can be dispatched to any U.S. nuclear station within 24 hours.

More than half of the nation’s nuclear operators have implemented the FLEX strategy and the rest are making progress towards complying with this requirement in a timely manner.

Comments

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

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...

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

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...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

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...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog