Sentences with phrase «fuel pool cooling»

«FLEX would provide multiple means of obtaining power and water needed to fulfill the key safety functions of core cooling, containment integrity and spent - fuel pool cooling that would preclude damage to nuclear fuel,» explains Adrian Heymer, executive director of Fukushima regulatory response at NEI.

Not exact matches

A fire in an electrical switch room on Tuesday briefly knocked out cooling for a pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Neb., plant officials said.

The real solution, according to Lochbaum and other experts, is to require spent fuel to be moved from pools to more permanent storage in massive concrete and steel casks after five years of cooling down.

The explosions tore open reactor buildings, damaging the 12 - meter - deep pools where used nuclear fuel is kept cool, potentially setting off another meltdown in the fuel there as the surrounding water drained away or boiled off.

As NRC staff noted during the Fukushima emergency, when there was concern that the spent - fuel pool at Unit 4 may have lost its cooling water as well as been damaged by the reactor building explosion, adding cold water to already hot fuel can create a problem in its own right.

If the pool leaks or the cooling system breaks, as happened in Japan, the nuclear fuel rods could become exposed and release radioactive gas.

At the time of the accident, some feared that cooling water had drained out of the pool and exposed the fuel to air, which might have led to overheating and melting.

The evaluations must ensure that backup cooling systems for reactors and spent fuel pools can operate for a long time in «blackout» conditions, where on - site and off - site power is cut off.

After all, the spent fuel pools that may have been exposed by the power plant explosions contain more than 200 metric tons of used uranium fuel rods that have been cooling for weeks, months or even years — and smoke or steam continues to billow from the exposed spent fuel pool of reactor No. 3.

In the interim, more spent fuel should be moved from cooling pools to dry casks, which offer better protection against hazards.

One was a measure prohibiting plant owners from densely packing spent - fuel pools, requiring them to expedite transfer of all spent fuel that has cooled in pools for at least five years to dry storage casks, which are inherently safer.

The problem of spent fuel storage Nuclear reactor operators must store spent fuel removed from reactor cores for several years at least, in large pools at reactor sites until the remaining heat from the uranium fuel cools sufficiently.

When auxiliary batteries were exhausted, the plant was without power to continue cooling reactor cores and spent fuel pools.

Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said his staff in Tokyo had been told by Japanese utility officials that cooling water that normally covers spent fuel was nearly or totally gone from an uncovered concrete pool above reactor Unit 4.

The pools — water - filled basins that store and cool used radioactive fuel rods — are so densely packed with nuclear waste that a fire could release enough radioactive material to contaminate an area twice the size of New Jersey.

It notes that a storage facility that could hold spent fuel for several decades while it cools could free up space in reactors» pools, lowering the risk of overheating, loss of coolant, and fires.

And whether or not the 50 tons of water dumped on reactor No. 3 was enough to temporarily cool the spent fuel pool, the efforts will need to continue to avoid a significant release of radiation.

The most damaged Daiichi reactor, number 3, contains about 90 tons of fuel, and the storage pool above reactor 4, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) Gregory Jaczko reported yesterday had lost its cooling water, contains 135 tons of spent fuel.

TEPCO may have made the problem worse, according to some experts, by storing more spent fuel in some of the pools than they could safely cool.

But those reactors» spent fuel pools are benefiting from a diesel generator that is still working to keep cooling water in place, according to World Nuclear News, though temperatures are beginning to rise in these pools as well.

Many nuclear plants, like Fukushima, store the fuel onsite at the bottom of deep pools for at least 5 years while it slowly cools.

The nuclear spent fuel produced during 14 years of operation at Rancho Seco was kept cool in a water pool on site and is now in protective dry storage.

Spent fuel assemblies that have been removed relatively recently from reactors are kept in deep pools of water to cool them and shield the radiation they emit.

Although cooling pools provide a relatively small and, hence, difficult target for terrorists, a pinpoint attack could drain a pool's water, causing the fuel to overheat and melt.

After removal from the reactor core, spent fuel assemblies are placed in dedicated spent fuel storage racks in the below ground spent fuel pool, which contains four times more water volume for cooling per fuel assembly than current designs.

The pool water volume provides a minimum of 30 days of passive cooling of the spent fuel assemblies following a loss of all electrical power without the need for additional water.

In the SMR - 160 power plant, the inventory of fuel in both the pool and the reactor is a fraction of that in large reactors, and that entire fuel inventory is kept cool without any reliance on pumps and motors.

Response: The Fukushima accident happened when flooding of power plant safety systems caused by the tsunami prevented operation of pumps needed to cool the nuclear fuel within the reactor and the fuel storage pools, causing that irradiated fuel to overheat.

Japan's Self - Defense Forces worked to cool a fuel rod storage pool at Reactor No. 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Friday.

The active reactors, Indian Point 2 and 3, were humming away on Thursday, and a new feature is an open - air pad where spent fuel taken from crowding cooling pools is increasingly being stored in «dry casks» — super rugged containers that no engineer has yet figured out how to breach.

Almost immediately, the site's personnel became alarmed over the storage pools and shifted the remaining cooling capacity to prevent the overheating of spent fuel at reactor No. 2.

It took years for the robots to be designed and built for the specific task of swimming through the underwater tunnels of the now - defunct cooling pools of the Reactor 3 building to remove hundreds of melted fuel rods.