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US Eyes Nuclear Rebirth After Three Mile Island
WASHINGTON - Thirty years after the accident at Three Mile Island shattered Americans' trust in nuclear power, lawmakers are touting a nuclear rebirth as a safe, green way to wean the United States off foreign oil.
The cooling towers of Three Mile Island's Unit 1 Nuclear Power Plant are seen reflected in a parking lot puddle in Middletown, Pa., Tuesday, March 17, 2009. Three Mile Island's Unit 2 nuclear power plant was the scene of the nations worst commercial nuclear accident on March 28, 1979. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) "We have the enormously powerful opportunity for a nuclear renaissance in our country. We need to pursue that aggressively and effectively to meet all of our energy and environmental goals," Senator David Vitter told a hearing of the Senate subcommittee on clean air and nuclear safety this week.
No new reactors have been opened in the United States since the accident at Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania, which began to unfold in the early hours of March 28, 1979 when cooling water started seeping through an open valve in a reactor.
The technical glitch was compounded by human error, eventually leading to a partial meltdown of the reactor's core, making Three Mile Island the worst accident in US nuclear power industry.
No one died in the accident and official reports commissioned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and US government agencies concluded that the escaping radiation had little impact on public health -- arguments that are still put forward today as calls crescendo for a nuclear renaissance.
"We cannot run this machine called America without a nuclear component," said Senator James Inhofe, echoing a call made by Energy Secretary Steven Chu for nuclear power to be part of the US energy mix, along with clean technologies, to break the US addiction to foreign oil and fight climate change.
According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, for nuclear power to even maintain its current 20-percent share of US power generation, three reactors would have to be built every two years starting in 2016.
Seventeen industry groups have applied for licenses for more than 30 nuclear power plants, NEI said.
Federal government loans are crucial to building those plants, which cost around six to eight billion dollars (4.4 to six billion euros) each.
But the administration of President Barack Obama stripped 50 billion dollars of loan guarantees for the nuclear industry from the stimulus package in February, leaving just 18.5 billion dollars available.
"It's a pretty shaky renaissance if no one is willing to pay for it," said Peter Bradford, a commissioner for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of Three Mile Island and now a university professor and board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Bradford drew historical parallels between the burgeoning nuclear industry of the 1970s and the proposed renaissance of the 2000s to highlight why he questions lawmakers' gung-ho drive for a nuclear revival.
Just prior to Three Mile Island, the price of oil reached 40 dollars a barrel, which would be the equivalent of 115 dollars a barrel in today's money, he said.
At the time, the cost of building a nuclear power plant was rising steadily and eventually surpassed the cost of other energy sources, he said.
"Congress felt that we had to build more nuclear plants anyway because that was the only way to reduce our oil dependence," Bradford said.
"We didn't build a lot more nuclear plants and we did get dependence down," largely thanks to larger than expected reserves of natural gas and improved energy efficiency, he said.
"I'm very skeptical of the wisdom of designating nuclear power as a key part of the response to climate change and then lavishing millions of dollars on the industry ... especially given the other demands on the federal budget."
Steve Wing, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill school of public health, said it would be irresponsible to increase nuclear power capacity without addressing the issue of how to dispose of nuclear waste.
Obama's budget ruled out a proposed national repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but, Wing argued, the United States would have faced "a tremendous problem with the transportation of waste across thousands of miles of public roads and railroads if it had opened."
Wing also questioned the official line that the accident at Three Mile Island had a negligible impact on the health of nearby residents.
A study led by Wing, which hypothesized that radioactive plumes from the accident would have been carried by the wind to nearby communities, found that the rates of lung cancer and leukemia in downwind areas were up to 30 times higher than in upwind areas.
"I have problems with a nuclear renaissance," Wing said.
"There are better alternatives."
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28 Comments so far
Show All"We cannot run this machine called America without a nuclear component," said Senator James Inhofe".......This pretty much sums it up....We the People are but a machine to the elite to produce goods and fatten their coffers. AND THE WASTE?...what to do with the waste?.........feed it back into the machine. And as parts of the machine die as a result of consuming its own waste, just replace those parts with another machine/slave. Aah..............ya gotta love it...the cycle of life/less/ness!
No to nuclear, There are too many safer alternatives.
As the sister of a nuclear physicist who had worked in the industry designing power plants, after working for the military, and who predicted the Three Mile Island accident, which happened 4 months after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I strongly believe that we can surely continue the commitment to other forms of energy. My brother died in June after the Three Mile incident, and he was on a voluntary sabbatical in Calfornia to work on alterntive energy. Would that he had lived to continue that work 30 years ago!
Another problem, besides the waste disposal, is that not only do the nuclear plants builders have to be subsidized by the government, they insist on a waiver for any damage caused by an accident. Additionally, there is the totally convincing argument that the depleted uranium provided to the military to make weapons leaves radiation everywhere it is used.
Please, figure how many windmills and solar panels can be built for the cost of one nuclear plant. My brother also suffered from radiation illnesses before being diagnosed with the cancer that killed him. I miss him every day.......
Your brother and you are right.
Some day they might find a safe way with no waste hazard but they haven't built one yet.
Nukes are a bad solution with a "gift" that keeps on giving: radioactive waste with a half-life of approximately 300,000,000 years (in that space of time, human evolution went from neanderthal to homo homo sapien). There is also the need to seal off decommissioned nuclear plants for the same amount of time for the same reason: radioactive waste. Considering the sturdiest and longest standing human construction, the Pyramids of Giza, are slightly less than 5,000 years (and the builders of nuke plants are nowhere nears as good as the ancient Egyptians), the expectation that human society will remain organized long enough to maintain the no-longer-used nuke plants is utterly ridiculous. Same problem applies with the waste, as well as where to dispose of it safely.
Nuclear power generation, or the boiling of water with thermal nuclear RADIATION has never been and will not be an environmentally sound way to create electrical energy.
Secretary Chu should first tell us how he plans to clean up Hanford, Oak ridge (Y2 site) and all the rest of the great disaster's created by the nuclear industry.
After that he should try explaining what is happening to the indigenous people's who mine and process the uranium used.
Next explain that even if you get one of these machines from hell going that the pollution to create it is far worse than the useful life time benefit of operating the machine.
Then tell us what he plans to do with the waste, plutonium, strontium and the various other hazardous chemicals and materials.
We do know that the empire has ways to distribute depleted uranium so everyone can benefit.
Nuclear power generation is only viable to the criminally insane.
"Steve Wing, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill school of public health, said it would be irresponsible to increase nuclear power capacity without addressing the issue of how to dispose of nuclear waste."
This seems to say it all....
I'm sure David Vitter knows what to do with the waste.
As a nuclear veteran, (Operation Redwing, Bikini Atoll, 1956) I know at first hand the horror of the Nuclear Dragon. We do not need nuclear plants, we cannot deal with the nuclear waste piling up from the ones that are in service. DU is spreading world wide, being picked up in atmospheric filters all over the world.
Three Mile Island was bad enough, but consider Chernobyl. Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was just a very hot, stubborn fire in nuclear fuel. Chernobyl and a huge surrounding area is uninhabitable for an estimated three to six hundred years. The fallout from Chernobyl contaminated food and livestock around Europe and Scandinavia for a long time, and the radiation is still traceable in the earth and some living things.
We have adequate alternatives, if we just concentrate on developing them. As the late "Atomic Ed" Grothus used to say, "There is only one safe nuclear reactor. It delivers plenty of power for our needs and at a distance of ninety-three million miles, it is far enough away from us."
When an author writes on a scientific idea such as nuclear power and cites Senator Inhofe (the climate change denier) you know they have little or no scientific knowledge on the topic.
For example, the author writes, “No one died in the accident!” This is unknowable!
We are all exposed to a certain level of background radiation, which is caused by naturally occur radioactive substances. We evolved to deal with this level, but background radiation does contribute of the cancers and birth defects we experience.
Using nuclear power requires mining, processing, using, disposal, and possibly recycling. These processes not only mean that radiation will be, must be, spilled into the environment, but the use of nuclear power also creates more lethal radioactive isotopes. In the end, nuclear power will slowly and inevitably increase the background radiation, and, given the half-lives of some of these substances, it increases the background radiation virtually forever.
All of this means more cancers and birth defect not just today and tomorrow, but for the enter life of the human race. So much for the stupid line, “No one died in the accident!”
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Some would argue the French and others are using nuclear. Adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere was done by the industrialized world and they reaped the benefits. We now know the many in the third world, specifically pacific islanders, are paying the price.
In the case of nuclear power, clearing the users of the electricity will reap the benefits. However, part of the price of using nuclear will be paid by every human who lives on this planet for the next several hundred thousand years. That is, if such a short sighted species can manage to not destroy itself in the near future.
Its ironic to me that Imhofe is promoting nuclear power, a source of energy that while dense, requires socialistic levels of planning and finance, and would actually help reduce GHG emissions and replace his beloved coal.
Maybe that's the plan. Obama is letting the Repubs push nuclear for him.
Get used to the idea of campaigning for nuclear safety, not bans.
Proponents of nuclear power have no answer to the problem of what to do with the waste. And in case of an accident, it is WE who will be stuck with the bill, because no private insurer will cover one of these bombs-in-waiting.
30 years ago Sunday I was in a theater packed beyond SRO 90 miles from TMI and watched China Syndrome with hundreds of others as nervous and riveted as I was. Although the movie was about a reactor in California the line
"It would render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable"
kinda stood out for us.
The movie was fantasy; the many conflicting pronouncements every day by private and government flacks about how safe it was but we should stay indoors and pregnant women and children should get outa town were even more fantastical. Everything they said then was a lie, even the (rare) true stuff, because even that was said with the intent to deceive. They're still lying. To let them get away with
"No one died in the accident and ...the escaping radiation had little impact on public health"
is to surrender to more reactors, and more lies, to giving them more money which they will use to get people to lie to us, so they can build more reactors to get more money to get more people to lie to us, so they can build more reactors to get more money to get more people to lie to us, so...
How can anyone believe this will end well?
...
Conservation, solar, wind. Smarter, faster, cheaper. More economical, more ecological, more democratical. Better in every way that matters.
I can name four types of nuclear disasters.
First, a terrorist can cause a loss of coolant accident, as happened at Three Mile Island. I guess that some kind of explosive device or RPGs would be used. The local area would be devoid of human life forever, like the area around Chernobyl.
Second, an experienced and educated terrorist or group can take over a nuclear power plant's control room and set the nuclear pile to chain react upwards until the whole thing vaporized. This would be a nuclear poof, not a nuclear bang, and it would be Chernobyl-like if not quite as big.
Third, a country could take the plutonium out of a nuclear power plant and build a bomb or three. This is why no other country wants North Korea to have nuclear energy.
Fourth, and most dangerous in this economy, both the government and the plant's owners are financially encouraged to cut corners and to submit fraudulent safety checks. There is no known countermeasure to massive fraud in our economy when billions of dollars are at stake. This, I believe, was the actual cause of the Three Mile Island meltdown, the subsequent coverup when people should have been evacuated, and a surprisingly effective clampdown on the casualty count. I've heard one statistical estimate of 50,000 casualties. Like smoking, it's impossible to tell whether any one lung cancer was caused by any one cause, but the statistics tell the truth.
to say that nobody got hurt is to echo assertions with no known and no possible proof. we don't know and never will know how many people were hurt, and killed, and were born with gross or small defects. 50,000 sounds much too high to me, but, as i said, we don't know. and to say no one got hurt and there is a lung cancer cluster downwind of tmi is so inconsistent and closemindedly pigheadedly stupid i'd be surprised if you didn't start bleeding out of your ears when you typed it.
even before tmi the list of nuclear mishaps, lies and corruption was huge. my favorites are the fake weld x-rays taken from real life and used in the movie, the browns ferry rollercoaster of nincompootence, and the karen silkwood 'mystery', but there are many many more.
but you both leave out the best terrorist plot: a bunch of guys hijack, oh, say, 3 or 4 fuel-filled commercial airliners and crash them into buildings! only instead of going for symbolism or the highest visibility with the lowest body count possible, they actually go for damage. I'd be dead if tmi were like that in 1979, in fact i wouldn't even be a memory, since virtually everyone who knew me would be dead too, along with millions or 10s of millions of others (tmi is actually a poor choice--too far from population, and a properly-spaced string of 3 or 4 such reactor crashes could make half of the eastern seaboard a permanent wilderness park (with mile-high fences and anti-bird gun emplacements to keep the mutants from spreading their modified genetics.)
the fact that cheney persisted in pushing his mad-scientist (mad anti-scientist, more like) scheme of a thousand new nuclear reactors, the fact that anyone not living on super-powerful psychotropic drugs can even CONSIDER the possibility of building a new reactor in an age of such acts is perfect testimony to the perfect insanity of our collective mind.
nuclear rebirth? what a monstrous, obscene phrase.
If one loaded a Cessna with as much concrete as it would take off with, anyone can rent one, anyone can buy concrete, and they flew it to 10,000 feet, then flew it straight down vertically into a reactor, would that cause any problems?
Probably not, but the ease w/ which this could be done is notable. Teenagers can fly these things, they have their Columbine moments, get mad at Mom & Dad.
Of course a stunt like this would probably mean Anger Management classes for sure.
Draining the water from a holding pond full of hot reactor rods is easier to do.
Draining too much water from TMI caused a problem...
No nuclear! No coal! No oil tankers! No LNG terminals or pipelines! No wind turbines (they hurt birds, create low frequency noise, ruin view)! No more dams, remove the present ones (they stop fish migration, flood natural canyons)! No anything! Well...I guess that does leave one thing, solar. Got to come up with some environmental reasons for being against solar. Let's see...
Errr, batteries........
there should be a museum 3 mile island so the tourist can visit it like the pyramids for another thousand years / by the way, what did actually happen there last century?
edweg
why weren't the ecologists paid to stop the coal last century? / ah, the hidden economic wars, nuclear lost
edweg
I lived within a 25 mile radius of TMI, and used to waterski on the river there. They told us it was safe and hid the fact that they were dumping into the river while we were enjoying some sun in the fun. I do not have cancer, but have gone through a litany of illnesses of undiagnosed origin ever since. I am constantly asked whether I've been exposed to toxic chemicals, and the answer is yes. It's easy for them to say that no one was effected, but I often have wondered what truly happened to the friends and colleagues that went through the experience at the time. We were outraged at the way it was handled. Nuclear energy is definitely not safe, especially when placed in the hands of those whose only concern is the payback on their investment, not the wellbeing of humanity.