NRC researching nuke plant licenses past 60 years

[FBaggins]

Bill Dean, a regional administrator for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Wednesday the agency "is currently looking at research that might be needed to determine whether there could be extensions even beyond" the current 60-year limit for licenses. He added, however, that there is no procedure in place yet for such an extension. "That's ongoing research and my guess is it will be several years before we come to some determination," Dean said.

...snip...

Several plants have already won new licenses. Their performance during the 20-year extension would be carefully considered in any applications for yet another license, Dean said. "For these plants that have now gone beyond 40 years ... obviously we're looking at those plants closely, as is the industry, in terms of assessing the ongoing performance of those plants as they get older," he said.

Dean said the plants' passive components, including the containment building, the reactor vessel and buried piping, would be the most important to monitor. Active components, he said, "get refurbished and changed out frequently" and so are less subject to aging.

He said the continual bombardment of the reactor vessel by neutrons creates "a certain amount of embrittlement." That has to be analyzed during every outage to see if it goes beyond predicted levels, he said.


http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57435651/nrc-researching-nuke-plant-licenses-past-60-years/

Oh... they're going to love this one. Cue a dozen variations on "if they were planned to last 40 years, then they fail after 40 years! Bathtub! Bathtub!"

[enough]

1. How convenient.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/science/earth/as-nuclear-reactors-age-funds-to-close-them-lag.html