OL3 postpones full energy production again
Full-scale electricity production at the Olkiluoto 3 reactor has been delayed yet again by over a week, tabloid Iltalehti reports.
Nuclear power utility Teollisuuden Voima (TVO) said that regular electricity production at the plant should start on 15 April.
This is the sixth time TVO has announced a delay on the schedule this year, with the previous estimate of 4 April announced just last Thursday.
The unit, located about 50 km south of Pori, was originally to have begun producing electricity in 2009.
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But surely, worth the wait. Given that the electricity it is going to produce, eventually, will be too cheap to meter.
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Odd. Stripes doesn’t have more either.
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well, there is this
The firings come as the Air Force is expanding a review of whether nine instances of blood cancer found in officers over decades are linked to nuclear silo work. The broadened review includes all personnel who worked on, guarded, supported or operated ground-based warheads, Global Strike Command announced last week.
Seems like a nonsequitur, but maybe they’re connected.
A little googling and voila…
The Air Force review will extend beyond Malmstrom to include F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.
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That’s arguably the last thing commanding officers (or any other rank, really) would be fired for, given the armed forces’ track record.
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The whole burn pit fiasco might cost $400 billion, so maybe it’s a case of shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted
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Not anytime soon, it seems.
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Nuke adjacent, I guess?
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TIL that support beams were installed backwards on the 2nd reactor at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant because the single set of blueprints for the two reactors was not physically flipped when installing the beams in the 2nd reactor.
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OL3 soon fully online?
A new round of trials will test Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor’s at full-scale power output this evening, newspaper Ilkka-Pohjalainen reported.
Finland’s newest nuclear reactor, OL3 has become notorious due to the length and number of delays, as the reactor was originally slated for completion in 2009.
Plant operator, Teollisuuden Voima (TVO), announced that the facility was brought back online on Wednesday morning, following months of repair and maintenance work and more delays.
Regular electricity production at the plant is now estimated to begin 17 April, according to TVO, the paper reported.
The 1.6-gigawatt European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR), was granted a construction permit in 2005 and was originally scheduled to be fully operational by 2009.
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Not an expert, but some napkin-calcs anyway…
12 kilos of U235 [1].
Edit:
A couple kiloton-scale bombs worth. About a quarter-bomb’s worth [2].
Of course, refining that stuff is hard: yellowcake to pure uranium to weapons grade uranium involves chemistry and centrifuges and machining that is … really hard. Not something you’d expect from a non-state actor.
So which state would be interested in 10 drums of yellowcake on the black market? North Korea jumps to mind, but I’m not really clear on where they get any of their fissile material. Any others?
[1] the math:
If “natural uranium” means yellowcake, that’s around 80% uranium oxide (U3O8).
2.5 T * 80% = 2.0T U3O8
Uranium percentage by weight in U3O8 is
3 * 238.03 / (3 * 238.03 + 8 * 16.00) = 84.8%
84.5% of 2 T = 1.70 T U
U235 (the isotope you need for reactors and weapons) is around 0.72% of naturally occurring uranium, so that’s
1.7T * 0.72% = 0.0122 T
[2] The critical mass of pure U235 is around 47 kg. I mis-remembered it as around 10 kg. For U239, it’s around 10 kg, but that only exists briefly (a few hours) as a fission by-product. source.
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Eletronuclear, the Brazilian company responsible for managing national nuclear power plants, omitted a leak of radioactive water at the Angra 1 unit. The company estimated that 90 liters had flown into the sea in a region visited by a lot of tourists.
These accidents must be immediately reported to CNEN (National Nuclear Energy Commission) and Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), but the Company hide the leak for 21 days and was fined.
Government and Eletronuclear say that the volume of contaminated water released was small, had a low level of radioactivity and promises to appeal in court.
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Monticello MN. On the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
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