Russia set to shut down plutonium production reactor Sunday, US officials say

[bananas]

http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2008/severskPU_shutdown

Russia set to shut down plutonium production reactor Sunday, US officials say

In a surprise announcement by US nonproliferation officials, Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom is expected to switch off one of Russia’s last three remaining plutonium producing reactors on Sunday in the closed Siberian nuclear city in of Seversk, which has been producing weapons-grade plutonium for four decades.

Charles Digges, 20/04-2008

In the heyday of the Cold War, Russia operated 14 plutonium production reactors, all but three of which have been shut down. These three – two in Seversk and one in Zheleznogorsk, near Krasnoyarsk – remained in operation, but recent movements within the Russian government have fast tracked the long stalled shut down projects – at least for Seversk.

<snip>

For the 17 years following the collapse for the Soviet Union and the fragmentation of its mammoth nuclear weapons machine, the reactors produced plutonium that the Kremlin neither needed nor wanted.

<snip>

But the reactors could not be closed, and plutonium was still produced, because the reactors have been the primary source of heat and power to the bitterly cold regions along the Tomsk River in Central Siberia, where no equivalent utility sources had been built.

<snip>

More worrisome still is that places to put the plutonium are scarce. In 2005, then Minister of Atomic Energy Alexander Rumyantsev announced that the Mayak Fissile Materials Storage Facility – CTR’s longest running project, which was developed to store 50 tonnes 0f weapons-grade plutonium and 200 tonnes of weapons grade uranium – would be scaling back on its intended capacity.

Rumyantsev announced that the facility, that had been under construction with US funds since 1993, would be housing no uranium and only 25 tons of plutonium that were to come from disassembled warheads.

[Dead_Parrot]

1. Hmmm

Well, they've evidently got enough plutonium to fry everyone for a few decades to come, so that's nice, but some of the bits you snipped don't exactly fill we with warm fuzzies:

The Zhelznogorsk reactor – the ADE-2 - is still scheduled to be pulled from the grid in 2010, when refurbishment of a coal fired plant there is expected to be completed.
...
Under a cooperative programme between the Russians and the US Department of Energy, the United States has provided $285 million to underwrite the refurbishment of a coal plant to provide an alternate utility service to the region, Tobey said.

Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand have also donated money, about $30 million, to replace Russia’s remaining plutonium-producing reactors with fossil-fuel plants, Tobey said.
...
The coal-fired plant near Seversk has been sufficiently refurbished to switch off the first reactor this week, Russian officials told their American counterparts on Friday. The coal plant is expected to be completed and in full service by June, allowing the second reactor, ADE-5, to be turned off as well. Both reactors had been expected to shut down much later this year.

Yah! New fossil fuels, and Faster Than Expected™! Double-plus good!

[bananas]

2. Nope, no warm fuzzies.

I didn't include the part about how lax the security is.
The reactors are 40 years old, probably at the end of their life-cycle anyway.

[Systematic Chaos]

3. The security and age of the reactors are NOT the issue here.

The issue is that rather than building a bunch of latest-generation reactors to replace these, we instead have another few brazillion tons of fucking CO2 to contend with.

And, as much as I hate to sit here sounding like "poor ol' Marvin", some of you here couldn't care less!

You know, this forum is one of those places where having a relatively high IQ and a well-developed sense of reality can be a serious threat to one's health.

:grr::banghead::grr:

[bananas]

8. Maybe they didn't want to freeze to death

waiting ten years for new reactors to be built.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Do closed atomic cities normally take 10 years to build a reactor?

Link?!?

[bananas]

11. Don't know about "closed cities", but the most recent Russian reactors took twenty years.

edit: Oops! They took twenty years, not ten!

Here's the IAEA database of reactors http://www.iaea.org/programmes/a2/
Here's the list of Russian reactors: http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=RU&sort=&sortlong=Alphabetic

The two most recent to come online took twenty years from "construction started" to "commercial operation":

KALININ-3 PWR Operational Tver Oblast 950 1000 2004/12/16

http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.prdeta.htm?country=RU&site=KALININ&units=&refno=36&link=HOT&sort=&sortlong=Alphabetic

Construction Started 1985/10/01
Connected to Electricity Grid 2004/12/16
Commercial Operation 2005/11/08

VOLGODONSK-1 PWR Operational 950 1000 2001/03/30

http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.prdeta.htm?country=RU&site=VOLGODONSK&units=&refno=59&link=HOT&sort=&sortlong=Alphabetic

Construction Started 1981/09/01
Connected to Electricity Grid 2001/03/30
Commercial Operation 2001/12/25

The next one scheduled to come online will have taken at least twenty-three years:

BALAKOVO-5 PWR Under Construction SARATOV 950 1000 2010/12/31

http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.prdeta.htm?country=RU&site=BALAKOVO&units=&refno=114&link=HOT&sort=&sortlong=Alphabetic

Construction Started 1987/04/01
Status Under Construction Connected to Electricity Grid 2010/12/31
Commercial Operation N/A

[Dead_Parrot]

12. Whereas Smolensk-3 took 6 years

If one was open-minded, one might think that that a country (USSR) that had just collapsed and formed a new one (CIS) and then another one (RF) might take a while to pick up the pieces of half-completed construction projects: Alternatively, one might conclude that the technology is wrong.

Still, there's an easy way to tell - just look at all the wind farms and PV arrays they've completed in the same 20 years. At least 4GW, right?

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Yeah, I saw that.

Although I can't help wondering how it stops being an issue when the plants are shut-down. Maybe the stuff evaporates by magic?

Edit: Actually, I've just noticed Zheleznogorsk and Seversk are closed cities - you can't get in or out of them with going though checkpoints, and I'm reasonably sure they'd notice someone walking through with a very heavy radioactive back-pack. It's probably why the internal security has got so lax - nothing to do all day.

I'm sure the reactors must be pretty ancient, so I'd agree, no great loss as far as the ADEs are concerned: Pity they decided that coal somehow made more sense that a new reactor or two, though.

Hey ho. Another step into the abyss.

[GliderGuider]

5. Your selective editing

Is one of the most egregious examples of agenda-driven posting I've seen around here recently. The Russians going to replace these reactors with coal fired plants, and you didn't even see fit to mention that fact. On an environment board.

For shame.

[bananas]

7. Nope.

I originally was going to include the paragraphs about the coal plants and the extreme weather,
but we're only allowed to quote a few paragraphs. The article covers a number of issues,
if I included the coal, everyone would jump on that and ignore the other issues; so I included
the parts which I thought would stimulate enough interest that people would read the whole article.

As far as my agenda, I'm somewhere between Dead_Parrot and jpak, so I'm not sure what you think my agenda is.
My position is similar to Al Gore, Joe Romm, James Hansen, etc etc:
"Neither carbon sequestration nor nuclear power can help in the near-term,
and they both have serious issues even over the longer term."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x141286

So excuuuse me for agreeing with these respected and outspoken voices.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[NNadir]

6. In some sense this is a victory for enormous ignorance...but that said...

these were reactors that were designed to produce weapons, not power.

Only dumb ass fundies think that there is "no place to put the plutonium." In fact, all of this plutonium, which is relatively isotopically pure Pu-239, needs to get into nuclear power reactors. It is essential for environmental reasons to use this plutonium, and only in fundie land is it considered that the best approach is to keep this grade of plutonium around and whine stupidly about it.

Belgium, Japan and several other countries are preventing the creation of dangerous fossil fuel waste on a millions of tons scale using plutonium.

Several billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste have been avoided through the use of plutonium, about which the paranoid anti-nuke cults know nothing, understand nothing, because basically, they're not too bright and because they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Russia is, of course, dedicated to an advanced nuclear power program, and they are in fact, world leaders in this technology.