Halloween comes early for the AP1000
Westinghouse engineers are burning the midnight oil in Pittsburgh this week, and it’s not because they are filling trick-of-treat goodie bags. The reason is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) threw a scare into the company and with it set teeth on edge at five U.S. power utilities and two provinces in China.
What happened is that the NRC appears to have lost its patience with the company after holding discussions with firm for the past 12 months on design changes to its AP1000 reactor. According to an NRC press release, the agency feels the shield building, which provides the primary containment safety barrier for the reactor, isn’t going to do everything expected of it.
The decision has the potential to delay construction of 14 new U.S. reactors worth collectively over $80 billion. Public utility commissions in states that allow cost recovery for reactors while they are being built are nervous about the possibility of these delays. The NRC’s action has already hammered the stock of a key contractor building the plants.
Full details in my exclusive report at the Energy Collective.
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1 comment:
Dan, I was interested in this story too and took the time to have a look at a little of the Westinghouse design document, most of which is available here. (It took me a little while to reassure myself that conversions between metres and feet were correct but that reference level is tagged with a value of 100 for both units.)
So I just want to mention that the shield building is not the "primary containment safety barrier". It is the primary defence against external threats (weather and impacts), but containment is handled by the next layer in, the steel containment vessel - see chapter 3 section 8.
No doubt you will have seen Rod Adams take on the dangers of tweaking an already-approved design. I wonder if this kind of back-and-forth would trigger putative government payments on legislation-induced delays?
Does anyone else see the Westinghouse logo as an ironically mutated face?
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