[hga]

"Areva's EPR-proto has proved that western nuclear industry contractors had forgot (comparable to UK's Trident missile -case) how to actually build nuclear power plants."

I really wonder about this: surely the cited concrete problems can't be due to requirements that are entirely unique to building nuclear power plants? (In some case, though, I can well believe it, e.g. the foundation for the reactor, although it ought to be at least a bit like building serious bomb-proof fortifications.)

Have people forgotten how to forge metal? Very possibly, depending on the type and scale needed (I know there are general US issues with our defense industrial base here, then again we just aren't building military artifacts in the old ways anymore (e.g. modular Chobham tank armor vs. cast armor, construction of the B2 ws very different than the B1)), but we need more info than is provided in the source article: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Olkiluoto_pipe_welding_...

Which you'll notice the main topic of was a gross failure to properly direct and supervise pipe welding. When you all these three things up, it smells to me like serious supervisory incompetence on the part of the general contractor rather than anything likely to be unique to nuclear engineering.

Of course that could be due to the general contractor getting out of practice, but the concrete and pipe welding it relatively basic stuff (e.g. high quality pipe welding is critical to refinery and chemical plant construction). This sounds more like "out of practice at being serious about their job", which is a sort of institutional rot that can set in when an organization has no real work to do for too long. See e.g. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail40...

[lispm]

The safety requirements are much higher than in the past.

There are lots of problems. For example the control systems are now all digital. Now find THREE INDEPENDTLY designed and programmed control systems, so that these are available redundant and don't fail at the same errors. How many companies are there that can get their stuff certified at the required levels?

[hga]

Plenty I'm sure, after all aren't there firms doing this work right now (in that the world never stopped building nuclear power plants? I've read that this approach is used by Airbus for dual redundancy.

Given my very limited understanding of the requirements, isn't nuclear reactor control a lot easier than fly-by-wire avionics? And somewhat safer, in that good designs (e.g. not the RMBK) are designed to safely passively fail as Three Mile Island Babcock & Wilcox design quite nicely did in a near worst case accident (about half the core melted with 20 tons of uranium flowing to the bottom).

[lispm]

For Finland there was ONE company capable of doing that, IIRC. They had a hard time finding other companies willing to invest in that area.

Airbus sells many airplanes. Boeing, too. It took a long time to go to fully digital control systems on airplanes.

I don't think any one wants a reactor to passively fail. That's a worst case scenario. If your reactor control system has to fall back to that, then it has no chance. The control system has a) to keep a reactor at all times in safe operation conditions and b) it has to work under failure conditions. If the core melts, then this is an economic loss of billions. The reactor in Finland will cost upwards of 6 billion Euros (last estimates I read were at 5.7 billion Euro). No one would want to have a core melting at such an expensive machine.

Read more here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8138869.stm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/27/nuclear-po...

This sounds even worse:

http://www.electricenergyonline.com/?page=show_news&id=1...

[hga]

Agreed that no one wants a passive fail in these type designs; Three Mile Island Unit 2 was in operation for only three months before the accident took it off-line for all time.

Hmmm, reading those links and the most relevant of the items linked by the last, it sounds like:

The French may have done an inadequate job in the control system design; at the very least multiple other country's regulatory bodies are concerned about the same and very basic thing (module independence) and that sounds bad to me.

The other conclusion is that it was insane to start building 3? of these EPRs without getting all the way through the design process (!!!) let alone getting the first up and running. That's just appalling bad project management, which I think the U.K. regulator implied in its complaint (the "experts" knew of the control system architecture problems but management wasn't listening to them).

France has been technically quite successful in their nuclear power program (ignoring the experimental Superphénix) and was finishing construction of their last operating plant as late as the last month of 1999. I wonder what happened (well, we can guess well enough).

[neutronicus]

"Have people forgotten how to forge metal?"

Not entirely related, but there are only three (foundries? forges? - not sure of the noun) capable of creating a one-piece reactor pressure vessel in the entire world, one in Germany, one in Japan, and one in France (I think - there might be two in France and none in Germany).

[hga]

I can't imagine forging something that big and casting at a foundry wouldn't I think produce what you'd need (maybe, and it would be a cast iron b----, so to speak to do :-). A bit of work with Google came up with this NRC Fact Sheet: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pr... which says they "are made of thick steel plates that are welded together" which is what you'd expect. If this was good enough for later 20th century warship armor (which most certainly got put to the ultimate test!) (ADDED:) and submarines (which get put to the test every time they dive) it's good enough for this purpose.

Given that, it wouldn't take too much effort to cobble together what you would need to do it (stuff to hold the work in progress, like the two submarine shipyards we keep alive for the obvious reasons), but it's specialized and low volume enough I'm not be surprised there are only a handful operational in the world right now, and of course post-TMI the US wouldn't have one of them.

[pjscott]

Another fun fact: China and Korea are making large reactors without going through Japan Steel. Waiting in line for the heaviest of heavy forgings isn't necessary to create PWR nuclear reactors, even large ones.