Yes, but the idea here was to construct a nuclear power plant, not to build a large pot for boiling soup in. You can't take a critical component like that, spec it and then suddenly pretend the spec never mattered in the first place, then you have to admit that you're just winging it. Changing the spec of the reactor vessel essentially translates into a complete redesign of the reactor itself unless you are willing to compromise on other aspects, such as safety, longevity and so on.
We're not talking about a bracket here. Or an O-ring. When was the last time something as stupid as an O-ring decided the fate of... oh, never mind.
It's a requirements change. Those happen all the time in everything. Why would that be completely forbidden or impossible here? Like you said, it might really suck. But the NRC does not allow trading off safety the way you suggest.
Requirements changes are not driven by one-off material defects in critical pieces of hardware.
That's simply a bending of the rules for economic reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and that at the root of every one of those disaster and near disasters there was someone who thought they could get away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with this kind of responsibility, especially across a timeframe measures in decades.
At the same time I would love to see us solve the climate change problem, and I recognize that we will likely have a nuclear component in there. But it will have to be done by the book or we'll end up regretting it - again.
If we're going to start out with the normalization of deviance on the #1 critical component of a reactor then I think we are on the wrong path:
I see your concerns, and I think you're probably just unaware that they're addressed better than you know, but in a different way than you'd expect.
When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped.
Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example.
With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country. It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now.
Nobody is normalizing or bending anything. Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis. There is no deviance from the safety requirements. Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
I'm sorry, I don't believe in magic or appeals to authority, I believe in physics and once you start bending the rules for one part who is to tell where it will stop. Having one leg too short won't be fixed by making the other one a little longer. The materials science requirements on nuclear reactor vessels are such that if the safety margins are so narrow that the specs are going to be even possible to be violated by a manufacturing defect that you have a problem anyway, either in the selection of your manufacturing partners, your design process, your risk assessment, your QA or all of the above. For me that breaks trust at a level that I'm not going to buy the 'we'll fix it by using better parts somewhere else' argument.
The stated defect has effects that can only be properly ascertained by destructive testing and since the whole point was that there was only one of these that leaves a large part of the end result in the realm of 'hope' and 'belief', neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan. And because 'safety' is the only one that doesn't show up in the books that's where my worry would be.
'special teams' don't amount to much, we've had special teams all along and a long series of fuck ups. This is exactly the problem.
> neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan.
At one point I learned there were standard tombs describing (presumably often unexpected) Nuclear Plant Phenomenology.
Ok, you obviously have zero interest in an actual discussion, lest it confront your completely fabricated "facts". So for anyone else who's genuinely interested in more than just pontificating their own bs, the "special teams" this person mocked, rather than asked about, can be learned about here:
No, that's not how it works. See the FAA and many other institutions where commerce, one upmanship and all kinds of other considerations besides the actual work ended up trumping what should have been done in the first place. I don't think the nuclear power industry is immune to that sort of thing.
This kind of thinking is what brought down the spaceshuttle. Three Mile Island (US), Windscale (UK), Chernobyl (Then USSR, now Ukraine) and Fukushima (Japan) all had the very best teams assigned to their design, construction and operations and yet each of those had a major accident.
There isn't anything fabricated about these facts so you can extend your appeal to authority but I'm just not buying it: people will always be people and the day that you start bending the rules on the design requirements is the day that I bow out. Obviously that isn't going to move the needle but it is exactly why I don't trust the nuclear industry: way too much did not go according to plan even if it always was with the best of intentions. And that's before we get into non-proliferation, waste and other considerations.
Trust has to be earned.
Also, you should probably lay off the personal attacks.
You said that engineers don't engineer things, you called the techniques I mentioned an appeal to authority because I also said who's practicing those techniques, and you keep repeating yourself about everything instead of interacting with what I've written. And now you're whining about a personal attack I didn't make. You took it personally because you're presenting your own opinions as facts.
All I see is a whole pile of unsupported assertions, let's take them one by one:
> When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts.
'They' presumably being the engineers, and because they are engineers it is automatically assumed that the less expensive parts can always be redesigned. But in the case of a reactor vessel it isn't clear at all how and if that is even possible without compromising on something that apparently originally wasn't to be compromised on. And because the nuclear industry isn't exactly known for their transparency when it comes to such defects it is hard to have visibility on whether what is now no longer the original design really is as safe as what went before.
I think we can agree on at least this simple fact: if the original spec was presumed to be optimal and the new change is still a costly one that there is some pressure to allow a solution to pass that maximizes the economic equation, in this case to redesign the rest of the parts that closely interact with the part that is out of spec. But because the interaction with the reactor vessel is one that is closely based on the operating parameters of the complex as a whole and funds are limited there will be pressure on to compromise. In your world such a compromise would never happen. In mine there is ample evidence that it is and I highly doubt that the nuclear industry is exempt from such pressure to compromise.
The very fact that they did not simply demand a vessel made to spec spells out exactly such a compromise.
> The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped.
That is exactly where the pressure comes from any further compromise will limit that efficiency and hence the profitability (including subsidies) of the plant. So there is pressure to minimize the costs of such a redesign to ensure that the economic damage is limited. The question whether or not that is possible within the original safety margins is an open one, and for at least one reactor I'm aware that safety margins were exceeded on more than one occasion and yet the plant remained open, simply because of a continuous redefinition of what was deemed to still be acceptable. Something that in your world, again, likely is an impossibility:
Just one example, there are many more (sorry, this one is in Dutch, it is about the plants that I know most about). So there is clear evidence (at least, clear enough to me) of this 'normalization of deviation' that you claim does not exist in this context.
> Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example.
Indeed. And bridges never collapse and roads never have problems... In terms of our knowledge about bridges we are still learning new things. Not that long ago that a completely safe and well designed bridge ended up with a whole slew of patches to deal with various resonances in the steel cabling that held up the bridge when the wind was strumming those cables causing massive deflection of the bridge deck, far in excess of what the design originally allowed.
Engineering complex, one-off installations is hard. Reliability and reproduction go hand in hand, only by iteration over a design across many cycles and learning from various defects and errors does engineering progress. It's not just a matter of plugging numbers into formulas, there is a significant amount of feedback from the field about how the assumptions hold up that drives engineering forward and in the case of a one off design that loop doesn't exist. If there is only one reactor vessel and it does not end up being to spec the real effects of that change won't be known until the reactor is decommissioned. Until then we're on ice that we hope is thick enough but that we can not be 100% sure of, see that article linked above. There too engineers ended up being quite surprised at their findings when analyzing the reactor after it had been in service for a while.
> With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country.
> It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now.
This is again a claim that essentially creates an elevated class of engineers who are above making mistakes and who lead the way in ways that I can only assume is through magic. Because in my world engineers do make mistakes, they miss elements in their risk assessment and they make mistakes in their assumptions and sometimes even in the design itself.
But for a one off reactor vessel with a material defect there is no 'plan B', the job could not be called off, so instead of scrapping this vessel and getting one that was built to spec we now work on a cascade of changes. And your claim essentially is that because all these people are so good at what they are doing that they can make this all work without further consequence other than some financial adjustments. My claim is that this isn't a bolt or some other simple part of the reactor and that the safety implications of such a change will not be known until either one of two things happen: the reactor serves out its lifespan, is decommissioned and after analysis of the vessel it is proven that there was no material difference between this one and the one that they originally wanted to have. Or we do find such a difference and in that case we conclude that we were lucky. The third alternative we'll leave unspoken.
> Nobody is normalizing or bending anything.
I don't think you realize that you've essentially made the case for doing just that far more eloquently than I ever could: you are normalizing the deviation by making the claim that it can always be done safely. But how do you know this? In the long, long chain from the QA inspector that faulted the vessel, to the recommendations, to the engineers that redesigned the other parts to the management surely there is pressure from above to solve this, just like there was pressure on NASA administrators to launch and that pressure worked its way downward. And I fail to see the difference between rocket scientists and nuclear power plant engineers. Both are very capable people with very extensive backgrounds in the fields that they are operating in. And if it was just the scientists I'm pretty sure they would have ordered a new vessel and left it at that.
But because there is a political element to this (and politics driven by financial considerations at that) you end up with the exact environment that can lead to this thing called 'normalization of deviation' and that way accidents can and do happen. There is a mountain of evidence for this and I'm not going to close my eyes to that on your say-so. And what goes for the USA may not hold for other countries with less capital and possibly even higher pressures on the management to deliver.
> Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis.
I'm sure it is. Just like in aviation, right? And of course the regulators are not in bed with the likes of GE.
> There is no deviance from the safety requirements.
Blanket unsourced statement. How can you make this claim with such certainty?
My claim is that safety requirements are violated routinely, by people who believe that they are in control of the situation and who have the best of intentions. They're people, after all. And I do have some evidence for my claim:
> Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
That is not a reason to be super happy about nuclear, but it is a source of worry for all these other fields. And this is probably one of the few things where we agree: that risk management is a field that is still very much under appreciated. And I see that reflected in my practice almost every week.
I appreciate you engaging in a two way discussion.
As a general comment, you still jump to many exaggerated conclusions apparently without seeking to understand. For example, your conclusion about an elevated class of engineers that use magic, which you explicitly said is an assumption.
Having worked with these processes and techniques myself for many years in other industries, I know from daily firsthand experience that this is not at all a fair characterization. What they do is one piece of one layer of defense. One aspect of their job is to say no until they cannot say no anymore. The new techniques are for finding more things to say no about.
However, you erroneously concluded that they must be concocting new ways to justify increasingly risky behavior. If you still feel this to be true, the burden of proof has firmly shifted back to you, for the purpose of this discussion. To be clear, I don't expect you to trust me for the purpose of changing your own opinion.
I don't have time to address everything you've written. Maybe the next thing to reflect on is what out-of-spec truly means and implies. On one hand, you're afraid of cost pressure. But on the other hand, you want to create larger cost pressure through a rigid system of rules that you alone adhere to. Something to consider revisiting yourself.
As for general concerns about nuclear, I think the public messaging needs to improve before a real discussion can happen about accepting new developments. Old technologies and risks still dominate the psyche, and new technologies are varied with different concerns from each other.
I think my main point is that engineers operate in a field that is always going to be subject to pressure, both commercial, political, prestige and so on and that even though the engineering profession in general can be relied upon to do their level best to produce high quality and reliable solutions the various pressures have the ability to push that which is commercially still viable into the realm of danger. The shuttle debacle is an excellent example of how even though everybody worked with the best of intentions this can eventually lead to a disastrous outcome and it is exactly the use of out-of-spec parts for critical applications that you find as the root cause. Once you start doing that the pressure is on to keep doing it right up to the moment that mother nature gives you the kind of wake up call that you really don't want to have. The big trick is simply not to make that first move down the slope.
Nuclear engineers, while possible made of different stuff than your average bridge-and-road engineers are not exempt from such pressures, and examples that prove this abound.
We're not talking about a bracket here. Or an O-ring. When was the last time something as stupid as an O-ring decided the fate of... oh, never mind.