The Saudis are now also demanding that they should get a generous cut of the cap and trade money. Coming up next, after Obamacare is rammed through. 
Posted on 10/15/2009 8:05:28 PM PDT by Willie Green
WASHINGTON — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Thursday that it had rejected a design by Westinghouse for a new reactor because a key component might not withstand events like earthquakes and tornadoes.
The rejection raises the possibility of delays in building 14 planned reactors in the United States, including two twin-reactor projects in Georgia and South Carolina that are leading the pack.
~~~SNIP~~~
In a conference call on Thursday with reporters, David Matthews, director of the division of new reactor licensing in the commission’s Office of New Reactors, said staff members were not convinced that a crucial part of the design, a structure called a shield building, would protect the reactor from “external” events like earthquakes, tornadoes and high winds.
The shield consists of 35 inches of concrete sandwiched between two sheets of steel, each of which is half an inch thick. Existing Westinghouse reactors, designed in the 1960s and ’70s, do not have shield buildings.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why bother, you know they are just going to keep moving the carrot.
Yeah, I can see high winds causing a lot of trouble for that. /s
Yeah, I'm sure the first high wind that comes along will blow that sucker away like a kite, right?
Pretty obvious what’s going on here...
How about a meteor impact? Could it survive a 1m meteor impact? How about a 10m one? 100m?
How about the sun exploding? Could it survive that? If it can’t, the EPA won’t approve the design. /hyperbole, but barely
The Saudis are now also demanding that they should get a generous cut of the cap and trade money. Coming up next, after Obamacare is rammed through.
Why bother, you know they are just going to keep moving the carrot.
Because I've been p-oed about this since 1974 and windmills aren't the right answer.
Whoa Dude! You’re back!
Will be engaging....
Well surely they can redesign this part to make it more earthquake proof.
“.....said staff members were not convinced that a crucial part of the design, a structure called a shield building, would protect the reactor from “external” events like earthquakes, tornadoes and high winds.”
Westinghouse Corporation speaks many different languages including Japanese. Earthquakes, Monsoons, Godzilla haven’t been able to knock out their nuclear power facilities.
My bet is the allegedly unconvinced “staff members” are of Leftist bent, thus are Hell bent to sabotage any restart of American nuclear power facilities.
Reminds me of a HAZOP exercise with a bunch of pinheads once. I sat in a corner reciting very quietly, “Lions and tigers and bears, OH MY!” and then after they got all hot and bothered about how to reach a grease zerk on a crane I suggested an asteroid may impact the facility ....and they bought it!!!
Right, like a tornado is going to do damage to steel and 35 inches of reinforced concrete! Who in their right mind thinks this is even a remote possibility?
The whole safety and risk management culture is out of hand. The product of risk and ultimate consequence, no matter how small the risk, is always unacceptable in these assessments. Illogical people who fear they may be pinned with responsibility for a failure can illogically conclude they should do nothing.
Yup, all of the Nuclear Power Plant construction will be on hold until Sarah gets in. . . then, watch out, Plants galore, offshore and Alaska drilling, Wahoo!
FU BO
Who are these staff members, what are their names, and we need to see their photographs.
Who appointed them, and what is their ideological bent. No building that man can construct will survive the force of an earthquake over 7.0, or a force 5 + hurricane.
The power companies will try a few times and then will give up, while America lapses into a state of brown outs , on a path that resembles "Zimbabwe." The problem is that these ideologues have a far too romantic notion about the nature they seek to preserve and return to.Which is where all this is going.When the wilds invade their lives, they will find that nature has teeth, and they will not be prepared to cope with that which they have brought about! LOL.
Conservative folks who rely on self help, and have leaned the skills of their forefathers will thrive, while the petty ideologues will run into collectives of government fed troglodyte subservients.
Keep these little fascist troglodytes away from me, that is all I ask.
Excuse me? Since when is the NRC going to license a reactor anywhere withing 100 miles of an active fault line? As for wind, it’s laughable if they thing 35 inches of re-inforce concrete sandwiched between inch thick steel plates (probably arranged like an igloo) is going to go anywhere.
It just a way to stop approving the plant design. Remember this shield is probably in addition to the containment. They are just moving the goal post. Typical of these clowns, the NRC use to be a tough but good watch dog. Now they are turning into a political tool of the left.
Westinghouse design competes with GE?
Do back ground check on the clowns at the NRC and you will find they are connected to the left green sh-it heads.
Westinghouse design competes with GE?
Yep, they've been competeing ever since Nikolai Tesla proved to the World that Thomas Edison was WRONG about Alternating Current. (See "War of the Currents")
This is the historic battle where Edison resorted to a massive publicity campaign of disinformation to freighten an unsophisticated public into choosing his inferior Direct Current proposal for our national electric grid.
Some things never change.
And now, well over a century after Edison was proven wrong, GE is still trying to foist inferior technology on a gullible public with the help of Boogyman Propaganda.
We need nuclear power plants, not windmills.
Note: Significant earthquakes can last several minutes, not just seconds. The 1964 Alaska earthquake lasted about 4 minutes without stopping.
The requirements should be clearly stated up front. Changing requirements are what keep driving up the cost and delaying the projects.
Who are these staff members, what are their names, and we need to see their photographs.
Who appointed them, and what is their ideological bent.
Well Jaczko was made "Chairman" by BO back in May.
But Jorge Arbusto actually put him on the Commission back in '05.
Before that, he had been appropriations director for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and also served as the Senator's science policy advisor.
Gee, Thank-You Dubya!!!
That ranks right in there with your failure to drill ANWR and Poppy's appointment of David Souter to the Supreme Court.
Cripes Almighty, how STUPID can you get???
You can check out the others if you want.
Some of them might be "moderates", but the Oil Lobby didn't appoint anybody with enough spine to challenge the idiocy.
Oh, they may have some impressive looking "nuclear engineering" credentials... but they're mostly academic or regulatory bureaucratic types. They seem content with publishing mountains of paper and shuffing paper from one pile to another. But I don't see anybody with "fire in the belly" to actually put the technology to good use.
No building that man can construct will survive the force of an earthquake over 7.0, or a force 5 + hurricane.
Well the earthquake might be difficult, depending on how close you are to the epicenter on the fault line.
But the hurricane isn't that bad if you don't mind a little surface damage. Afterall, the pyramids are still standing, and they've been blasted by many sandstorms over the millenia. It all depends on how much $$$ you want to spend.
And that's the real objective to junk science obstructionism, to keep raising the cost no matter what design you come up with to address their "concerns". They just keep on claiming it isn't sufficient "proof".
Alaska gets a 7 nearly every year and an 8 about every 14 years. They have some building that have survived a 9.2.
Forgot to include the link.
Earthquake facts
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/facts.php
See number 29
My last house in Alaska was built before the 9.2 earthquake they had in 1964.
Dr. Klein is my old faculty advisor from when I went to UT. He’s a very knowledgeable man and has extensive industry experience from his days ay General Atomic. He’s no ‘crat and probably has cleaned up a lot of the leftists at the NRC from his days as Chief Commissioner.
The NRC certified our original AP1000 containment design back in 2005. The new shield building was a new requirement put in after 9/11 and now we will see how this goes. I know the engineering is sound and am confident we will put thos particular staffers in their place.
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