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Chernobyl at 40 years: Looking back at Nuclear News
Sunday, April 26, at 1:23 a.m. local time will mark 40 years since the most severe nuclear accident in history: the meltdown of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
In the ensuing four decades, countless books, documentaries, articles, and conference sessions have examined Chernobyl’s history and impact from various angles. There is a similar abundance of outlooks in the archives of Nuclear News, where hundreds of scientists, advocates, critics, and politicians have shared their thoughts on Chernobyl over the years. Today, we will take a look at some highlights from the pages of NN to see how the story of Chernobyl evolved over the decades.
Vaibhav Yadav Jason K. Hansen, Shawn St. Germain (INL), Robby Christian (RPI)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 24-38
Economic or financial causes have led to closure or pending early retirement of several US nuclear reactors in the last five years. The published report “Economic and Market Challenges Facing the US Nuclear Commercial Fleet – Cost and Revenue Study” by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) identified 63 of the 79 studied nuclear power plants (NPP) lost money in the year 2016. The revenue-gap analysis (Figure 1) performed in the study also concluded that additional revenue is required to return most of these nuclear power units to profitable operations [1]. This can be achieved by reducing the operation and maintenance (O&M) costs that account for about 70% of the total operating expenditures for an NPP (Figure 2). There are many ways of reducing O&M costs; this work presents an innovative framework of reducing O&M costs by utilizing the onsite FLEX equipment at NPPs.