Astonishing Tower Collapse Screams “No New Nukes!!”
A cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant has collapsed.
A broken 54″ pipe there has spewed 350,000 gallons per minute of contaminated, overheated water into the Earth. “The river water piping and the series of screens and supports failed,” said a company spokesman. They “fell to the ground.”
The public and media were barred from viewing the wreckage for three days. But when a Congressional Energy Bill conference committee takes up Senate-approved loan guarantees for building new nukes this fall, what will reactor backers say about this latest pile of radioactive rubble?
This kind of event can make even hardened nuke opponents pinch themselves and read the descriptions twice. Who could make this up?
Vermont Yankee has been in operation—more or less—since the early 1970s. Its owner is Entergy, a multi-reactor “McNuke” operator that last year got approval to up VY’s output by 20%.
Required inspections revealed worrisome cracks and other structural problems. Entergy dismissed all that, but was forced to issue a “ratepayer protection policy” against incidents caused by the power increase. The guarantee expired earlier this month, not long before the collapse.
The tower came down amidst angry negotiations between Entergy and plant workers. A strike was barely averted, but VY’s labor troubles are by no means over.
The reactor’s output has now been slashed 50%. A public battle is raging over whether it can dump water even hotter than usual into the Connecticut River. Reactors in Alabama, France and elsewhere have been forced shut because the rivers that cool them have exceeded 90 degrees.
Yankee’s cooling system, vintage 1972, centers on 22 (now 21) wood, fiberglass and metal towers that stretch for 300 feet, and are 50 feet high and 40 feet wide. The company calls this giant rig a “rain forest.”
Operators admit to hearing “strange sounds” coming from its fans last week, but say Tuesday’s collapse was unexpected.
Nuclear opponents who warned about such an event have been scorned by Entergy and its supporters. That something as apparently absurd as the spontaneous collapse of an entire cooling tower could actually occur underlines America’s Keystone Kops reality of atomic operation and regulation. “We need to understand what happened,” explains the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Diane Screnci.
So does Congress. A definitive Conference Committee battle will be fought after Labor Day over an Energy Bill that includes taxpayer guarantees for $50 billion and more to build new nukes.
Meanwhile Vermonters will pay for this latest pile of radioactive reactor rubble. Maybe a “fall foliage” field trip to the Green Mountain State would do the Congress some good.
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.
Chernobyl in the US of A?? Might be a lot closer and sooner than we think.
Wow. I’m against more nuclear reactors. But overblown hype like this article doesn’t help any. Instead it just makes nuclear reactor opponents look stupid.
Its a cooling tower that collapsed, not the reactor itself. A cooling tower is a tower that cools water by pumping it up to the top of a tower then letting it fall down to the ground in a series of cascades. Its actually an environmental device. If the reactor operators could pump hot water back into the river, they wouldn’t have a cooling tower. But since people insist, quite properly, that the water from the reactor not create an overheated and dead-to-most-life zone in the river, they have cooling towers to cool the water.
Since a little quick research revealed Vermont Yankee is a ‘boiling water reactor’, that does mean the water in that tower has been through the reactor core. So he’s probably technically correct in calling it contaminated water. But by the end of the piece where he’s ranting about ‘this latest pile of radioactive reactor rubble’, he’s just so far off into complete hype and bullshit as to have become ridiculous. Even more so when you read the article closely and realize the reactor probably really just lost about 5% (1 in 20) of its water cooling device.
I’m against more nuclear power plants, and I think we should be working to close the ones we’ve got as soon as we can. But sometimes I’ve just got to shake my head at the stupid things I see come out of opponents of nuclear energy sometime.
Yeah, COMarc is right. Enough has been published about this and enough light has been shown on the situation that it’s completely overblown.
uhhhh… I wish.
Back to reality time. I saw NO coverage of this by the corporate media. NONE. NADA. ZILCH. The plant was inspected and flaws were found, but the plant dismissed them and went on business as usual.
A little HYPE is better THAN NOTHING AT ALL. Right, Marc?
Peace to you and yours.
“But sometimes I’ve just got to shake my head at the stupid things I see come out of opponents of nuclear energy sometime.”
Cool… or should i say HOT? If the writer of the above nonsense is that enthralled with nukes, then i move that some of the thousands of tons of radioactive waste be buried in their yard.
After all, a little “NUKIE” never hurt anyone, now has it?
There are 438 nuclear plants worldwide. Reports indicate at least 93,000 deaths from the Chernobyl disaster, and 270,000 related incidences of cancer. This amounts to an average of 212 deaths per nuclear power plant, and only from one incident. WHO CAN CLAIM NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION IS SAFE?
In a press release issued by RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute) in June, 2005, their study shows that even two years ago renewables were generating more power than ALL the world’s nuclear plants (and this didn’t even include large hydro electric dams). Why go nuclear, when it is messy, dangerous, and costly? When the nuclear industry claims it is the least expensive power generation source they don’t include the cost of building the plant, or the cost of storing deadly radioactive waste products perhaps for centuries even. Isn’t this a bit disingenuous?
Perhaps this article is a bit of fear-mongering, but after all of us have been continuously & repeatedly propagandized by the MSM, Bush administration, and nuclear power industry about the benefits & safety of nuclear power, while down playing the liabilities & deadly consequences, is it any wonder us ‘little guys’ (ie citizens) must shout out to be heard?
While I might not quite agree with all of your comments on this article, COMarc, I do appreciate the fact that you (twice) mention the need to de-commission existing nuclear plants in the near future. I agree completely.
I also believe the proposed $50 billion on the table now, to be given to the nuclear power industry in the next two years, would be better spent on renewable sustainable ‘green’ energy sources. This does NOT include liquid coal for autos, ethanol from corn, oil from shale extraction, or drilling for oil off the coast, which present their own set of fiscal & environmental drawbacks.
What this demonstrates is why we need to be building new reactors using the new generation of technology as fast as we can, thus allowing us to shut aging reactors down.
nwfisher
I can only assume that you are being humorous since the article clearly states that renewables are now far cheaper and your writing assumes the ability to read. However as sometimes happens I just don’t “get” the joke.
The “new” tech you refer to is the “inherently safe” particle bed reactor I suppose? No large scale version of this is in operation is it? If that is true we can only guess its cost effectiveness.
I’m sure you(nwfisher) agree that nuclear should be able to stand on its own without govt subsidies(or perhaps the pittance given to wind say at most) so I’m sure you favor the removal of the Price-Anderson Act’s indemnification of the industry at taxpayer expense.
Funny you left that out of your comment. Surely you don’t beleive those naysayers that say nuclear power couldn’t produce even one more KW without Price-Anderson do you?
BTW can we store all the waste at your house?
Steve Mickler
Solar Thermal/Electric rocket Propulsion enthusiast
First STEP
“What this demonstrates is why we need to be building new reactors using the new generation of technology as fast as we can, thus allowing us to shut aging reactors down.”
Perhaps such a statement might be true if we were to conclusively eliminate: human error, acts of terrorism, natural disasters, and the sticky wicket of saddling our planet with poisonous wastes for millions of years.
Lacking those preconditions, let us, instead, allow common sense in our problem solving.
“In a press release issued by RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute) in June, 2005, their study shows that even two years ago renewables were generating more power than ALL the world’s nuclear plants (and this didn’t even include large hydro electric dams).”
Uhhh, looking at the charts, RMI included natural
gas (a non-renewable energy) in their calculations,
so that statement is not accurate. At least by my
interpretation of the graphs and their descriptions.
Now why they didn’t include hydro
instead, I have no idea. I didn’t read the report
in detail to see if there was an answer for that.
http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E05-08_NukePwrEcon.pdf
I’m glad to see the pro-nuke swiftboaters are out to trash any who dares draw attention to reasons to re-think nuclear power.
I wonder who pays them and how much to trash sincere critics?
“There are 438 nuclear plants worldwide. Reports indicate at least 93,000 deaths from the Chernobyl disaster, and 270,000 related incidences of cancer”
Nice fabricated statistics about the worst accident ever that happened in a society on the verge of total collapse under a system renowned for covering up these types of problems.
Why didn’t the mainstream media cover this?
One point at least should be uppermost on the minds of any who favor nuclear power. That point is,(anythng man made, will eventually fail). Water pipes that carry nuclear waste are internally corroded by radiation and pipes fail that just transfer anything. An outright disaster could occur at any of our aging nuclear plants, a disaster that could FOREVER steralize an area of land larger than the size of Texas,___ or NY, NJ, Pa and Delaware combined.
“Oh no, say the nuker guys, that would NEVER happen”. The collapse of a cooling tower could never happen either,___ but it did. It was man made and that’s the point. This is not the first accident at a nuclear plant, nor will it be the last. AS EZEFLYER noted, why didn’t the press cover this? The same reason they didn’t report several other even worse accidents, for one thing the plant owners cover as much as possible, then we must remember who owns the nations press and news media.
Build new plants and replace the aging ones?
Bull, scroll up and read Paul M. Smith’s intelligent comments. Build new clean energy plants and shut down every nuker and coal fired plant is the ‘honest’ and ’sensible’ answer. Stop mining uranium and and stop storing additional nuclear waste. It is ludricious to believe, any country can ‘SAFELY’ store deadly nuclear waste for the next thousand, ten thousand, ten million or ten billion years.
It has been well proven, it is impossible to safely store any type of nuclear waste for 60 years. I hate to even mention the use of DU for weapons of war, instead of safely storing it, as we were ‘promised’ it would be, before the first nuclear power plant was built. There have been so many major leaks of radio-active waste in the world, if published, the words would fill a book the size of a college edition dictionary.
Someday here in the United States, there WILL be a disasterous nuclear power plant accident, that’s just the mathamatical odds. Three appropriate words will be immediately spoken by millions. __”Oh–My–God”! And God will reply, with three appropriate words.___ “Told–you–so.
RE: nwfisher August 27th, 2007 3:50 pm
Do your research and you will find these are NOT fabricated statistics.
“…a society on the verge of total collapse under a system renowned for covering up these types of problems.”
hmmm…are you talking about their system or ours?
RE: peoplefirst August 27th, 2007 1:42 pm
Actually, the press release I mention specifically states, “…low- or no- carbon sources…”, and specifically sites, “…(wind, biomass power, geothermal, small hydro, and solar, but excluding big hydro dams—any over 10 megawatts)…”. My reference is the cover story in RMI’s summer 2005 newsletter, published 6/22/2005. The link you site is different from mine, and although a bit difficult to decipher I couldn’t see where they include gas as a renewable. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, though, and will look over it again.
The thrust of my article however is easily understood, and I quote, “So the big question about nuclear ‘revival’ isn’t who’d pay for such a turkey, but also…why bother?”
There are five ‘bread baskets’ in the world.
Those are land areas where it is possible to grow all of the food crops necessay for the entire world populations.
They are, Vietnam/Cambodia. New Jersey, California, Japan, and the lands near the Ruhr Valley. The Chernobyl disaster wasted massive land areas, some near the land of the Ruhr Valley.____ FOREVER!
The MSM is full of gross deception these days, but I will forgive them for not covering a story about a bunch of hot water that fell from a 54″ pipe. The water was only used for cooling and is typically radioactive for a few seconds.
I would have much more respect for and faith in the anti-nuclear individuals if they would not resort to hyperbole. Mr. Wasserman’s account above is reminiscent of the Bush admisistration’s fear mongering. Furthermore, Chernobyl should not come up in any discussion of today’s American nuclear power plants. Chernobyl had a myriad of mismanagement problems, it was knowingly operated beyond it’s design limits, and most importantly, unlike American reactors, it did not have a containment dome.
I am not getting paid anything by the nuclear power industry. I know there are many concerns with nuclear power, but please consider that when a lump of coal is burned to produce electricity, everything the coal contains-arsenic, mercury, uranium, etc. is spewed into the air with no regulation. I would guess that a coal fired power plant would release more radioactive matter into the air in five minutes of “normal” operation that was released by this “accident”. Go after coal with the same vengeance and we wouldn’t be faced with immediate climate crisis, soaring asthma rates and thirty thousand premature deaths each year.
JSTEVENS. Why forget Chernobyl? The other two reactors there were still operating the last I heard. The point of mentioning Chernobyl is: No matter how well designed and built, all nuclear power plants now in operation, and any constructed and opened in the future, will be man made. Any nuclear power plant accident in the United States, could be another Chernobyl like accident or worse, as far as the forever lasting damage done is concerned.
I totally agree with you on the coal fired plants, in fact if we established a program to build clean energy plants, I would prefer the coal powered plants be phased out first, the nukes next. Even if we build the most modern, hi-tech nuclear plants, which are safer than the ones now in operation, there will always be the real danger of a disasterous accident and the storage of some nuclear waste to consider. Why bother thinking nuclear? Clean energy will cost less in the long run and there is no disasterous dangers to even consider.
PaulMagillSmith
The newsletter does not include natural gas as a
renewable.
The second page of the 6/22/2005 newsletter (if it
is this):
http://www.rmi.org/images/other/Media/PR_NucPwr_05vi22.pdf
states:
…Fossil-fueled cogeneration’s emissions depend on its fuel (~60-70% worldwide uses low-carbon natural gas)…
Looking at the chart (Figure 1) shows the output of
low- or no-carbon worldwide electrical output. It
shows where the output (including cogeneration
natural gas) does excede nuclear in 2005. Without
the “Non-Biomass Decentralized Cogeneration”, the
remaining renewables, biomass, and small hydro will
make up about 1/3 of the output of nuclear plants
in 2010.
The key is probably the first paragraph of the
newsletter where it refers to BOTH cogeneration
and renewables, not just renewable.
I think you are mistaken, JStevens, if you think ALL of them the coal, oil, and nuclear industries aren’t equally in the crosshairs now. They have served their purpose, been useful to humanity for a span, but it’s time for them all to be retired as better technologies have come up. Unfortunately, because they have gotten used to a plush flush life they will not go quietly into the night.
We now know the damage that has come along with the benefits, and in the cost/benefit analysis our old ways of powering our lives points toward other methods. Wise people don’t replace useful systems without other systems to replace them, but to continue down a path that has proven harmful is just sheer insanity.
I agree with Kem that coal must go first, and eventually nuclear also close on its heels. Unfortunately, powerful moneyed interests stand in the way of what is best for the most of us. This is why we, who object to the potential eradication of our species, must rant, rage, raise hell, and shout out as loud, long, and to as many people we can reach, until an ill-informed public, long propagandized by those same moneyed interests, get the message. It’s an uphill fight, but one we can’t afford to lose.
You know one fact that has been seriously missing from reports about the benefits of nuclear power is studies by leading scientists in the know indicate we would need 2,000 plants to meet the world’s energy needs, even now, and the fuel is a finite resource just like oil. In other words just like oil it will run out eventually, and there isn’t even enough NOW to fuel the 2,000 plants needed. Why devote trillions toward a temporary energy solution when scarce resources could be better spent building a sustainable power system? The oil industry fooled the public about ‘peak’ oil for years, but ‘peak’ uranium is just as threatening to us.
Dan, tritium is radioactive for 25 years, thank God it wasn’t plutonium that got out. Tritium is only dangerous for animall life if inhaled or injested, but if 350,000 gallons a minute pumped out onto the gound, that’s very troubling.
Of course, we will likely never know how many minutes it pumped out or exactly how many gallons was lost, or if any other radiation hazard exists. Anyway, good point Dan and of course this is not really that unusual. We seldom hear about ‘leaks’ of radioactive waste and there have been many that are documented. Documented and reported are seperate issues of course. I know people who live downwind from any of the nuclear plants have a much higher incident rate of cancers and other medical malady’s than other land areas in the States.
ANd New Jersey might as well be wiped out by nuclear waste…..it’s been POPULATED, from river to sea and river to bay! Paris still has it’s farms outside the city! Viva la France!
Oh yes and BTW I lost my thyroid to 3 mile iland!
I had a goiter, That day, I swallowed a dose of radioactive iodine for my scheduled radiological test and stepped out of my apt. into a vey weird fog hanging low to the ground in NJ, about 100 miles due east from 3 mile island. In less than 2 years a biopsy showed the cells were turning cancerous and it had to come out!
SO what was that saying reagan had about the government? Itwas at that timesuring his presidency that the govt. decreed I had to renew my prescription every year. Prior to that I could walk into the drugstore in my old neighborhood and get 1 pill ( I was snowed in at a friend’s & that worked! Without it I function like a zombie and the utimate outcome is coma & death!
If civilizatin breaks down I will have to raise my own pigs. ( I wonder how many pills you get out of one pig thyroid?)
If I were mechanicalI could build my own generator down back inthe tidal stream there.
Would sure be a lot cheaper than a nuclear reactor. I could probably supply my whole town!
ANd I thought the Ruhr Valley was industrial?
Well RUCOGNIZANT, if your argument is NJ is no longer The Garden State, I’ll agree. NJ is now heavily populated. But if you fly over the entire state and look down at the ground, you will note that over 70% is mostly un-used farm land, about 6% is the Pine Barrens, NJ still has the most fertile land for area in the Unied States and the weather conditions required to grow from three to four annual crops. Geo-poitically, NJ is very important.
The Rhur Valley is and has been for many years, industrialized all along the river. The vast land areas ‘NEAR’ the Ruhr Valley, as I clearly stated, are very fertile and valued for numerous crops. My point is, a nuclear accident can FOREVER ruin one of those five areas on our only planet available to live on in a flash/BOOOOOM! Or, ruin many other areas of perhaps less crop growing value, but still of great importance. Of course flooding due to possible global warming will wipe them out also. Hope that clarifies it for you, because I don’t intend to argue the point any more.
You can forget hydro-electric dams as a source of clean renewable power. The water that backs up behind them releases as much methane and CO2 as fossil fuel plants do. They have to go too.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7046
The CO2 relesed from water is natural, do you think we should bomb every natural dam in the world and kill all of the beavers too? The emissions from Coal fired plants are also full of other poisons.
Speaking of beavers, last week I saw a bumper sticker on a car that read, (SAVE A TREE-EAT A BEAVER). I’m one of those who believes we should not be cutting down trees in our forests and especially the trees in the rain forests. I plant five to seven trees every year and have done that for the past forty years.
However, I also believe we should protect our wildlife. The beavers are a vital element in our ecology and there is no need to be killing them, especiallly for food. Deer and Rabbits when over populated are another matter, but rabbits and beavers are not listed among the clean animals, they either don’t chew their cud or have cloven hoofs. Anyway, there are many ways of saving our trees without eating a beaver.
Those posters who believe this is a little over the top have got it right. The water that was spilled was secondary water, not primary water. It had not been through the reactor but was used to cool the primary water in a heat exchanger. It is not radioactive. This piece is classic Wasserman.
Paul:
According to www.eia.doe.gov the world wide generation for electricity for 2004 (their latest year), all in billions of kilowatts was:
Fossil fuels: 10899
Hydro electric: 2747
Nuclear: 2619
Renewables except hydro: 334
Lovin/RMI is very good at creative and deceptive statistics. Natural gas is a fossil fuel and is not a renewable.
Kem:
None of the reactors at Chernobyl are in operation. I believe the last one was shut down in 2000. Unfortunately, there are still some of the same style reactors in service in Russia and one in Lithuania.
Chernobyl and well designed should not be mentioned in the same sentence. This is an inherently unsafe reactor design which should never have been built.
The water that was spilled at Vermont Yankee was not radioactive but tritiated water can actually be quite hazardous in high concentrations (above that normally experienced in a power light water reactor). Skin exposure can lead to absorption just like ordinary water. It is not just an inhalation/ingestion hazard.
Tritium is also a beta emitter which is a greater external hazard than an alpha emitter such as uranium.
Hi Billy, I read a report about Tritium years ago, that is exactly the opposite of what you wrote. Tritium will not penetrate the skin, but is only dangerous if inahled or injested by eating or drinking. Google tritium, I just double checked it five minutes ago on Wikipedia.
I don’t know what was spilled at Vermont Yankee, if it WAS tritiated, it’s hazardous.
Again, all nuclear power plants are potential disasters and the biggest concern is SAFELY storing the waste. Uhhhhh, BTW, you didn’t comment about eatin beavers.
.
EEEXCELENT!
Count me as a skeptic when it comes to nuclear power, which would never have reached current levels of usage without massive subsidies. I consider it a technology that has demonstrably failed in the marketplace.
That said, COMarc and the other folks who have stated that Wasserman’s comment about “radioactive rubble” is over the top are correct. I live not far from the Vermont Yankee plant, and have followed developments at the plant closely for years. This is most likely a case of poor maintenance and oversight policies, which certainly does not inspire confidence in this company or in the industry as a whole. But unless a really tight cover-up is going on, there is no evidence of any radioactive release of any sort. Hot water, and only hot water…
So take this as a warning shot across our bow. Next time we may not be so lucky. I’m normally in agreement with most of what Wasserman has to say, but his “pile of radioactive rubble” comments are not accurate.
Ok, Billy, what information do you have to show RMI ‘pads’ their stats?
Nuclear power is currently one of the most expensive forms of electricity: Source of energy Cost per kilowatt-hour
Energy Efficiency
0-5 cents
Hydroelectric
2-8 cents
Coal
5-6 cents
Wind
5-8 cents
Oil
6-8 cents
Solar Thermal
9 cents
Nuclear
10-12 cents
Solar Photovoltaic
15-20 cents
Extreme Expense
The nuclear industry claim in the 1950s of “power too cheap to meter” has proved to be anything but accurate. According to the Congressional Research Service, from 1948 to 1994, the nuclear utilities received, on average, 60 percent of all federal energy research and development dollars. Yet customers of nuclear utilities still pay far higher prices than their conventionally-supplied counterparts. A 1993 Energy Information Agency (EIA) study found the average bill from a nuclear utility was more than two dollars per kilowatt hour higher and nearly $17 per month than from a conventional utility.
http://www.net.org/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=18534
I know this study is a bit dated, but the trend is not. You might want to check this link out, too Kem.
Is this story “over-hyped”, as some allege here? This is the first I’ve heard of it, and it happened last week. Moreover, all of the stories I found on it when I looked for follow-up stuff were bloggers chatting with each other. For hype, it certainly is low-key. The level of indifference to the event says lots. Even if it were a collapse that poses no danger, as many are asserting, how can they be certain that similar structural failures aren’t in the offing?
An interesting book on the “natural history” of our need for energy is “Children of the Sun” by Alfred W Crosby. I paraphrase an idea that stood out ; Nuclear energy could be the answer to our future energy needs, or it could fry us in our tracks.
Gives me pause for using nuclear energy…
We are in need of forward, long-term, responsible thinking about our energy consumption and sources and effects. Sadly, we live in a culture of me!, here!, and now!
Large-scale social change is usually preceded by upheaval; which is on its way, I think. Unfortunately the power machine works against change because it has the most to lose.
Be active, do your part, stay informed and educate others.
Justice & Peace!
How can this be over-hyped? First time I’ve heard it is today.
I suppose it’s only news if the reactor explodes? We are repeatedly warned about the threat of terrorism, because the powers that be want us afraid. However, they DO NOT want us afraid of nuclear power.
The whold nuclear business is a scam.
According to the European Nuclear Society, the world’s entire reserve of economically extractable Uranium is about 2 million tons. Which is equivilent to about 48 billion tons of coal using the safest technology we have. The extractable USA coal reserve in 1997 was 275 billion tons - the worlds reserves are estimated at 1000 billion tons. So all those nuc-heads who act like Nuclear energy will save us… It won’t. It’s going to run out just like every other non-renewable source of energy. The only thing we’re not going to run out of is solar power.
I wonder how much radioactive waste is produced from 2 million tons of uranium?
KEM PATRICK & PAUL MAGILL SMITH: Thank you for generously adding so much to this important discussion. (KEM–your humor is really getting itself toned from “the workout” on this site lately! I noticed.)
The collapse of an aging Nuclear Power Plant cooling tower is another nudge by the god of physics to get the lazy fat-assed human race into shape.
We have corroding steam pipes in Manhattan, falling brides along the Mississippi, an entire city written off by most Americans as not worth the effort to replace. What’s a couple of collapsing power plants to worry about?
Our trains run on wooden tracks installed by a bunch of illegal aliens 150 years ago, and there is a derailment because of equipment failure somewhere daily. Planes fall and then blow up because of sloppy maintenance procedures. Walking on almost any city sidewalk is a trip waiting to happen.
When we do have the disaster, it gets one day of publicity [unless it happens Friday night, when it gets none]. The victims of these preventable disasters are carted off to 100 year old hospitals and quite possibly left, forgotten. on a gurney in the hallway waiting to see the doctor.
We even invented a fancy French term for this neglect “Triage” as in “Well, we have to be efficient, and some people would die anyway…”
This is the society we get for spending the past forty years avoiding taxes and community responsibilities and believing that ‘greed is the greatest motivator’. Anyone who believes that, hasn’t lost a child to a preventable event. I think Cindy Sheehan may be a good example of what happens with that kind of motivation.
We have produced a couple of generations of lazy, selfish, brats who don’t know the meaning of hard work.
When I look at how my mom worked to keep the fire burning in the wood stove to heat the water to do the dishes after putting in a 10 hour day working at Boeing in Seattle in the ’40s, I don’t know how she kept going. Of course, she did have that big garden, and the chickens, along with the 2 kids and the job.
But when she looked back, I am certain she thought she had it easy compared to her folks trying to homestead in Montana and Wyoming.
Now we are faced with a raided, bankrupted, treasury and a hundred year old infrastructure [remember that term from the ’70’s]. If that’s not enough, millions of people are out of shape, in poor health, and even if they work-out daily don’t know what a blister is.
It’s time to quit playing around and start doing what we can with what we’ve got. Put solar on your own roof, even if it won’t get you off the grid. Cut back where you can and recycle where possible. Harass your local officials about the local infrastructure till they cringe when you enter the room,
Waiting for salvation from the feds just ain’t gonna do it!
And then there is this story that just appeared in Monday’s papers. An NRC investigator had to spend two minutes trying to wake up the armed guard guarding the entrance to a nuclear power plant in NY. Spokesmen assured us that there was plenty of security redundancy. That certainly assures me.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6879530,00.html
xntrk,
I am horrified to hear of the “fallen brides” on the banks of the Mississippi! There is a good (or maybe fairly good) folk song in there somewhere.
Paul,
Lovins maintains through his convoluted argumentation that burning natural gas produces less global warming gases than a nuclear power plant. If that isn’t cooking statistics I’ll eat my hat.
You can argue that nuclear power is unsafe or that the fuel disposal problems are insurmountable but it is preposterous to say that it contributes more to global warming than natural gas.
For a more complete review of Lovins ‘logic’ see the following from a very pronuclear viewpoint http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/search?q=amory+lovins
Kem,
You are correct that tritium must get inside the body to cause injury. If your skin comes into contact with tritiated water, it can absorb that radioactive water and thus get inside the body.
eshu,
This story is generally not being ‘over hyped’. Generally, it is only being carried by local Vermont newspapers. My comments were on the attempt to sensationalize on a very minor incident by Greenpeace/Wasserman. My greatest concern is the inaccuracies of his editorial.
This incident has not even been picked up by the oversight agency, the NRC, as a reportable event but Wasserman wants to shut down all the nukes.
Yeah, I caught the brides [pun intended] but decided it was too good to correct
Thanks, btw, every diatribe can use some cogent typos.
Radiation from tritium will not penetrate the skin. Inhaled and eating will get it in the body Billy.
Just remember a couple of things about nuclear plants. They are built by the lowest bidder and the cheapest labor they can get away with. (true of most big construction jobs in the United States) This means the chance of a bad weld or a cheap valve failing is always there.
The second thing is that most materials exposed to hard radiation for long periods of time tend to transmute. Hence they could become weakened and fail. The old plants are continually showing incipient failures, corrosion, etc., in the coolant pumps piping and systems. I believe that is one of the reasons they want to phase out and replace the old plants. At some point, it becomes too expensive to maintain, and deferred maintenance can be deadly.
Of course, we all know how incorruptible and unbiased and non-political our various governmental watchdog agencies are these days, so we know they would shut a plant down in a minute if they found something wrong, regardless of cost to the plant owners. Wouldn’t they? Sure they would! Honest!
I followed the link you offered, Billy, and it is understandable the NEI would be putting different statistics out there. They are an arm of the nuclear industry. One thing I couldn’t find, although I used their search engine with quite a number of requests, is who funds them. Just as Woodward & Bernstien said, “Follow the money”, I’ve found it a good yardstick for determining the credibility of sources of information.
Just about the time of the latest nuclear plant ‘accident’ in Japan there was another spill in either Tennessee or Kentucky, little reported of course. Of course it was also downplayed as ‘minor’, as was the one in Japan. Later, we find the Japanese Nuclear industry has a history of not telling the truth about this subject. Should we expect the same from the American industry…YES. If nuclear is so safe then why the need for such secrecy?
I’ve posted this before, after some research, but here we go again. Reliable statistics, as much as can be obtained by independent organizations facing government secrecy, have determined Chernobyl responsible for 93,000 deaths, and 270,000 incidences of directly related new cancer. With 438 nuclear power plants in the world (notice I didn’t say ‘operating’ because many are often down because of very expensive repairs or safety violations…many lasting up to two years even) this comes out to 212 deaths per plant on average. And they call this safe???
Is this safe?…HELL NO!!! Numerous square miles surrounding Chernobyl poisoned for up to hundreds of years safe?…HELL NO!!! Does the renewable industry generation of power cause this many deaths?…HELL NO!!! Does the renewable industry generation of power get equal funding as the temporary power need fix of nuclear?…HELL NO!!!
For those who make the claim of nuclear providing more power than renewables this is disputed by other sources. What I say is if you throw hundreds of billions of dollars at renewables, as nuclear has gotten for the past 50 odd years, the race won’t even be close. Renewables will beat nuclear by miles and will be safer & cleaner (and more reliable, too)…and even more important…permanent instead of a temporary solution.
Paul,
I am suprised you could not find NEI’s funding. They are very up front about being an industry based organization. They are funded by the membership which is essentially all of the domestic nuclear industry.
They lobby and do PR but they also participate as an independent expert organization (independent in the sense that they don’t support GE over Westinghouse or vice versa.) I was reading the transcript of a meeting on new reactors at the NRC and NEI was a major participant.
The spill in Tennessee was minor only in the sense that no one got hurt. It was a very serious safety violation. Almost all of the nuclear criticality accidents have been with solutions of uranium. This was a uranium solution in an unapproved configuration. It was not much publicized because everything but the toilet paper at NFS is FOUO (for official use only). NFS has a liscense for high enriched uranium (i.e. weapons grade) and it has been reported that they supply fuel to the Navy. The work they were doing at the time of the spill was not for the Navy however; it was demilitarizing excess weapons grade uranium.
The World Health Organization, a UN agency, reports in 2005 55 deaths from Chernobyl and in excess of 4000 cancers but that more should be expected. Most of the cancers are thyroid cancer which is normally not fatal if properly treated (2 of the deaths are, however, from thyroid cancer).
Is it appropriate to include Chernobyl in your average death per plant when that reactor would not have been able to obtain an operating liscense anywhere in the western world?
It is unfortunate that reactors of this type are still in operation. All but one of them are in Russia. Lithuania has promised to shut down theirs as soon as they have replacement power (it supplies 80% of their electricity).
Renewables do indeed generate worldwide more electricity than nuclear. This is quite clear. More than 70% of that renewable generation is hydroelectric.
I’ve seen where you are getting your figures, Billy, and according to other sources they seem suspect. Here’s another side of the coin:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2006/04/18/1618601.htm
Based on research by the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the report says that of the 2 billion people affected by the Chernobyl fallout, 270,000 will develop cancers as a result, of which 93,000 will prove fatal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates 4,000 people died as a result of the explosion in reactor number four at the power plant in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.
The explosion sent a plume of radioactive dust across northern and western Europe and as far as the eastern United States.
“It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the most serious nuclear accident in human history,” Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner Ivan Blokov said.
The IAEA was not immediately available for comment.
The Greenpeace report further extrapolates that in total some 200,000 people in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus could have already died as a result of medical conditions, such as cardiovascular diseases, attributable to the disaster.
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While I agree there could be quite a bit of disagreement in figures due to poor baseline medical records from the Ukraine, and bias by different organizations doing the studies, but the only 55 death figure you quote as reference, when even IAEA says 4,000 seems mighty suspicious.
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Here is some more information:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/mar/25/energy.ukraine
UN accused of ignoring 500,000 Chernobyl deaths
· Atomic agency says toll will not exceed 4,000
· Doctors ‘overwhelmed’ by cancers and mutations
John Vidal, environment editor The Guardian Saturday March 25 2006
United Nations nuclear and health watchdogs have ignored evidence of deaths, cancers, mutations and other conditions after the Chernobyl accident, leading scientists and doctors have claimed in the run-up to the nuclear disaster’s 20th anniversary next month.
In a series of reports about to be published, they will suggest that at least 30,000 people are expected to die of cancers linked directly to severe radiation exposure in 1986 and up to 500,000 people may have already died as a result of the world’s worst environmental catastrophe.
The new estimates have been collated by researchers commissioned by European parliamentary groups, Greenpeace International and medical foundations in Britain, Germany, Ukraine, Scandinavia and elsewhere. They take into account more than 50 published scientific studies.
“At least 500,000 people - perhaps more - have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine,” said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine. “[Studies show] that 34,499 people who took part in the clean-up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The deaths of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population.
“We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident. All this information has been ignored by the IAEA and WHO. We sent it to them in March last year and again in June. They’ve not said why they haven’t accepted it.”
Evgenia Stepanova, of the Ukrainian government’s Scientific Centre for Radiation Medicine, said: “We’re overwhelmed by thyroid cancers, leukaemias and genetic mutations that are not recorded in the WHO data and which were practically unknown 20 years ago.”
In the Rivne region of Ukraine, 310 miles west of Chernobyl, doctors say they are coming across an unusual rate of cancers and mutations. “In the 30 hospitals of our region we find that up to 30% of people who were in highly radiated areas have physical disorders, including heart and blood diseases, cancers and respiratory diseases. Nearly one in three of all the newborn babies have deformities, mostly internal,” said Alexander Vewremchuk, of the Special Hospital for the Radiological Protection of the Population in Vilne.
Figures on the health effects of Chernobyl have always been disputed. Soviet authorities covered up many of the details at the time. The largest radiation doses were received by the 600,000 people involved in the clean-up, many drawn from army conscripts all over the Soviet Union.
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Billy, when we witness cover-ups such as implicated in Japan & Chernobyl doesn’t it seem there is a pattern developing here by the nuclear industry? Even as a poor person I would rather pay a little extra for safe green power than less expensive nuclear power, and be sorry because I (my family, friends, home, and even future generations) became irradiated.