DTE's Fermi 2 nuclear power plant shut down after leak detected

[marmar]

(Detroit Metro Times) DTE Energy shut down its Fermi 2 nuclear plant in Monroe County on Sunday after a leak was detected in the drywell area that surrounds the reactor about 30 miles south of Detroit.

The public is not in danger, and the plant is in “safe, stable condition,” DTE spokesman Stephen R. Tait tells Metro Times.

The plant will remain shut down until repairs are complete.

At 4 p.m. Saturday, a sensor detected the leakage of reactor coolant, according to a notice filed by DTE Energy with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The utility notified NRC at 6:30 p.m. ..............(more)

https://www.metrotimes.com/news/dtes-fermi-2-nuclear-power-plant-shut-down-after-leak-detected-33943675

[RandySF]

1. I'm still open to nuclear to get us off of coal.

There’s no free lunch.

[yourout]

2. Agree with a few caveats...

Absolutely no high pressure primary cooling that can go airborne which means either molten salt reactors or some other low pressure non-erosolizable media.

[IbogaProject]

3. Big issue is the waste

And finding solutions to store it safely for tens of thousands of years. Steel doesn't last for millennia. It is a great baseline power source but the choice of Uranium instead of what the actual designers of the A-Bomb recommended which was Thorium. Only those involved with weapons production liked the Uranium reactor concept.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

4. There are reactors that will eat old waste, though

But technological breakthroughs can transform a sluggish sector into a futuristic game-changer. Case in point: GE Hitachi’s Advanced Recycling Center, (ARC). The ARC technology is basically the anti-nuke: it actually burns nuclear waste (even weapons-grade plutonium), and emits exactly zero CO2.

Here’s the secret: The system uses a liquid metal — sodium — to control the nuclear reaction, instead of high-pressure water. The sodium-cooling allows the reactor to “burn” the leftover energy in its used fuel — nuclear waste that, in traditional water-cooled reactors, would be taken and stored for thousands of years. In fact, when used fuel is removed from a traditional water-cooled reactor, 95 percent of its potential energy is still untapped.

Here’s a breakdown of ARC’s benefits:

Burns more of its own raw radioactive fuel
Burns other reactors’ spent fuel
Shuts down automatically if there’s a problem
Is built in small modules than can be expanded
The waste it does generate needs to be stored for just a few hundred years.

https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/27032/GE-nuclear-reactor-waste