OT:long chat an NE

Karl Townsend · 2011-03-31T01:57:35+00:00

I had a four hour car ride today with a fellow engineer. His specialtywas running nuclear power plants and has years experience with theexact design run in Japan.Way too much for me to repeat here, but a few keys points reallyenlightened me.First, today's plants are using a hotter uranium core than the plantswere originally built for. This is for producing more power. A lot ofupgrades have occurred to handle this. Not all upgrades have beeninstalled in every plant.Second, the original design called for 6 months down time for auranium core change. A lot of this time was to cool the core comingout. Today the core change is being done in one month. that's to getthe plant back up and running and not lose the millions per day indown time. This means the core come out of containment and goes to thespent pool far hotter.Again a number of design improvements were made to handle the hottermaterial. And at least some improvements certainly haven't been donein Japan. he knew exactly what was missing with the first explosionand had installed design improvements for a spent core overheat in theplants he ran. He also knew the biggest danger is in a spent coreoverheat.He was also involved in an emergency cooling system improvement. Thiswould allow the fire department to pull up to a tap on the outside ofthe plant and hook up high pressure water. The water pressure wouldtrip all the necessary valves and cool the whole plant with no onegoing inside. In other words the fire department could shut it down.It sounds like this was real expensive and hasn't been done in mostplants, certainly not in Japan.Lot more, but I learned more about power plants today than I thoughtpossible.Karl

OT:long chat an NE

Mar 31, 2011 23 Replies

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John R. Carroll 15 years ago

Oh.

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dcaster 15 years ago

My point was that they could have had a show about the problems with the safety of the reactors in Japan before there was an earthquake. Anyone can point out the problems after they are obvious to the most casual observer. If they had had a show about the problems before the earthquake, perhaps something would have been done to avoid the meltdown.

Dan

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jim 15 years ago

OK that says those changes to Medicare Advantage will kick-in in 2012. Still looks to me that if you were cut in the recent past it was due to the cuts made to the program in 2008 which also didn't take effect immediately, but were phased in over a couple years.

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dcaster 15 years ago

You could be right. The plan I was on, was canceled as of Jan 1 of this year. Was it because the payments were frozen at 2010 levels? Or was it because of cuts approved in 2008? My doctor said lots of Medicare Advantage plans were terminated.

Dan

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