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Zombie Nuke Plants
Oyster Creek Generating Station, in suburban Lacey Township, New Jersey, opened the same month Richard Nixon took office vowing to bring "an honorable peace" to Vietnam. This nuke plant, the oldest in the country, was slated to close in 2009 when its original forty-year license was ending. It had seen four decades of service, using radioactively produced heat to boil water into high-pressure steam that ran continuously through hundreds of miles of increasingly brittle and stressed piping.
If constructed today, Oyster Creek would not be licensed, because it does not meet current safety standards. Yet on April 8 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)--the government agency overseeing the industry--relicensed Oyster Creek, extending its life span twenty years beyond what was originally intended.Seven days later workers at the plant found an ongoing radioactive leak of tritium-polluted water. Tritium is a form of hydrogen. In August workers found another tritium leak coming from a pipe buried in a concrete wall. Radiation makes metal brittle, so old pipes must be routinely switched out for new ones. The second leak was spilling about 7,200 gallons a day and contained 500 times the acceptable level of radiation for drinking water.
That leaking pipe had erroneously--or perhaps fraudulently--been listed in paperwork as replaced. How this error occurred remains unclear. What seems likely is that the plant's previous owner, GPU Nuclear, was deliberately skimping on maintenance as it approached the end of the plant's license. Then Oyster Creek was sold to Exelon and won relicensing. How many other mislabeled, brittle, old components remain in the plant's guts is impossible to determine without a massive audit and investigation. Unfortunately, stories like this are all too common: crumbling, leaky, accident-prone old nuclear plants, shrouded in secrecy and subject to lax maintenance, are getting relicensed all over the country.
In the face of climate change, many people who are desperate for alternatives to fossil fuels are considering the potential of nuclear power. The government has put up $18.5 billion in subsidies to build atomic plants. As a candidate for president, John McCain called for forty-five new nuke plants.
Environmentalists have rightly pointed out the dangers this would entail. But new nukes are not the issue. As laid out in these pages last year [see Parenti, "What Nuclear Renaissance?" May 12, 2008], new atomic plants are prohibitively expensive. If enough public subsidies are thrown at the industry, one or two gold-plated, state-of-the-art, extremely expensive nuclear power stations may eventually be built, at most.
The real issue is what happens to old nukes. The atomic power industry has a plan: it wants to make as much money as possible from the existing fleet of 104 old, often decrepit, reactors by getting the government to extend their licenses. The oldest plants, most of which opened in the early 1970s and were designed to operate for only forty years, should be dead by now. Yet, zombielike, they march on, thanks to the indulgence of the NRC.
More than half of America's nuclear plants have received new twenty-year operating licenses. In fact, the NRC has not rejected a single license-renewal application. Many of these plants have also received "power up-rates" that allow them to run at up to 120 percent of their originally intended capacity. That means their systems are subjected to unprecedented amounts of heat, pressure, corrosion, stress and embrittling radiation.
These undead nukes are highly dangerous. But constant, careful (and expensive) inspection and maintenance would mitigate the risks. Unfortunately, the NRC does not require anything like that. And the industry often operates in a cavalier profit-before-safety style.
At the heart of the matter is the culture of the NRC. During his campaign Obama called the NRC "a moribund agency...captive of the industry that it regulates." Unfortunately, since then Obama's position has softened considerably.
The NRC is run by a five-member commission. When Obama came to office he inherited one open seat; another opened soon after. Filling those seats with safety-conscious experts not in thrall to the industry would have done much to change the culture of the NRC.
The president's first move was a good one: he made commissioner Gregory Jaczko chair of the commission. Jaczko has openly questioned the safety culture of both the NRC and the industry and is respected among environmentalists as a serious and safety-oriented regulator.
But in October Obama nominated two people for the open seats. In classic fashion, he cut it down the middle. The relatively decent appointment, in the view of environmentalists, is George Apostolakis, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. He sits on a safety oversight board within the NRC. His academic specialty is probabilistic risk assessment of complex technological systems, risk management and decision analysis.
"He is safety-minded," says Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But I worry that his approach might be a little too theoretical, too academic. He might not be ready to really regulate the industry."
The other nominee, William Magwood, is described by environmentalists as a disaster. Magwood worked at the Department of Energy as the director of its nuclear energy program. In that capacity, he acted as a booster for the industry. He's made numerous public speeches promoting atomic energy. And most recently he worked as a consultant for the nuclear industry.
Because the NRC is an independent regulatory agency, the president's nominees must be confirmed by the Senate. A key player there--notorious climate-science denier Senator James Inhofe, ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee--greeted the appointments with a backhanded compliment to the president: "At the very least, the selection of these individuals indicates President Obama understands the importance of the NRC in rebuilding our nation's nuclear capabilities." Given the source, this was damning praise indeed.
Lax safety culture at the NRC is at least in part a result of the revolving door between the atomic power business and the commission, including both middle- and upper-level staff. The most prominent example of this involved commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield, who championed accelerated licensing and other major policy initiatives that directly benefited the Shaw Group, the self-described "largest provider of commercial nuclear power plant maintenance and modifications services in the United States." Twelve days after Merrifield left the NRC, in 2007, he became a top executive at--yes--the Shaw Group. Then, in late October of this year, after pressure from public interest groups, the NRC's Office of the Inspector General found that Merrifield had violated government ethics rules by courting industry while still at the NRC.
This corrupt symbiosis between the industry and NRC is even found at the level of language. Critics say the staff habitually defers to the industry, rarely double-checking corporate assertions about safety. During relicensing, the NRC has used industry language verbatim in its reports. A recent random sampling of NRC relicensing reports conducted by its Office of the Inspector General found that almost half the language in the documents had been lifted verbatim or nearly so from industry applications. In other words, not only is the NRC failing to conduct its own research; it can't even rewrite the nuke industry's boilerplate self-justifications when issuing new licenses.
"Politically, the nuclear industry is very effective," says Richard Webster, legal director of the Eastern Environmental Law Center, which represents five citizens' groups fighting Oyster Creek. "If only they ran nuclear plants as well as they lobby."
This cozy relationship is helped by the fact that the nuclear power industry's drive for profit coincides with the NRC's bureaucratic will to survive. If all the old plants were mothballed, the raison d'être of the NRC (and maybe much of the bureaucracy itself) would disappear.
Environmentalists describe the relicensing and up-rate process as highly opaque, rigged in the industry's favor, designed to exclude public participation and marginalize opposition. They say safety is closely linked to transparency--which is in short supply.
Over the past two decades the NRC has also promulgated rules that effectively exclude from consideration many of the grounds on which the public could intervene to oppose relicensing. For example, the public cannot raise the issue of terrorism. Nor can it question maintenance plans, or waste storage plans, or even evacuation procedures.
The NRC's Office of the Inspector General found that its own agency had "established an unreasonably high burden of requiring absolute proof of a safety problem, versus lack of reasonable assurance of maintaining public health and safety, before it will act to shut down a power plant."
The parameters for relicensing are sometimes shockingly permissive. For example, Oyster Creek, only fifty miles from Philadelphia, lacks a reactor containment shell strong enough to withstand a jet crash. And the geography around the plant isn't possible to evacuate: originally built in a rural area, the plant is now surrounded by sprawl. But the NRC takes none of that into account.
Even more amazing, Oyster Creek's relicensing process did not require testing metals in the plant's core for embrittlement. The containment shell, such as it is, was found to have been corroded down to half its intended thickness. Citizens' groups had to file a lawsuit just to get the NRC to hold a public hearing that would yield a ruling. And that was the first one the NRC had held during more than forty-five relicensing processes.
Indian Point, forty miles north of Times Square, is also applying for a new license. It too leaks radioactive water like a sieve: tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive, tritium- and strontium 90-laced water from one of its spent fuel pools have polluted groundwater and the Hudson River. The first of several leaks was discovered in 2005, but the plant's owner, Entergy, failed to report the problem for almost a month.
Vermont Yankee, also owned by Entergy, has one of the worst operating records in the country, runs at 120 percent capacity because of a 2006 power up-rate, and is well on its way to being relicensed. As detailed in these pages last year, Vermont Yankee has recently suffered a number of almost comical problems: a fire set off emergency mobilizations in three states; a cooling tower collapsed; a crane dropped a cask of atomic waste; parts of a fuel rod even went missing. To save money Entergy has been caught skipping routine maintenance and not hiring needed staff. This year the plant has been battling what seem to be unending leaks: in February the water cleanup system leaked, in May a condenser tube leak was identified but not repaired, in June there was a leak in a service water pipe. Then a recirculation pump unexpectedly reduced power and locked up, preventing the operators from changing its speed. And in August Entergy announced that it was not doing all of the required monthly radiological monitoring of its spent fuel.
FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio also wants a new twenty-year license. In 2002 that plant came very close to calamity. Largely by chance, staff discovered a six-inch-deep hole in the reactor vessel head; only three-eighths of an inch of metal remained. This barrier protects against a reactor breach and a possible chain of events that could have led to a reactor meltdown. The hole could have been found and fixed earlier, but the plant's owner, FirstEnergy, requested that the NRC allow it to delay a mandated inspection. In October 2008 Davis-Besse workers also discovered a tritium leak.
This fleet of poorly regulated zombie plants is the real story of nuclear power. Building hundreds of new nukes to save us from climate change is a pipe dream--the time and expense necessary for that would be impossible to overcome in the decade or two remaining. And so the debate about the future of atomic power in the age of climate change functions mostly as a smoke screen behind which these old, leaky, crumbling plants are being pushed to the limit of their endurance. Half the fleet has already been relicensed and many up-rated to run at more than 100 percent of their designed capacity. To avoid dangerous accidents over the next two decades, the industry must be subject to real oversight. For that to happen, the NRC must be reformed.
There will likely be one more opening on the commission. If the risk of a real nuclear disaster is to be diminished, Obama must nominate a robust safety- and transparency-minded commissioner who will stand up to the powerful companies that own the zombie nuke fleet.
32 Comments so far
Show AllSioux Rose
Well, if there really are foreign terrorists interested in doing harm to this nation they need but just sit back wait, watch, and listen. The for-profit motive being set free to regulate itself in so many precarious industries is decimating safety for Americans at every turn. From these zombie nuclear power plants ready to ignite (or melt down) due to poor maintenance, to the numbers of persons dying early due to lack of meaningful health care, to the public's increasing exposure to a bevy of toxic chemicals in their food, air, and water, to the newly forming viruses that are in many ways the product of "industrial" farming mechanisms, the lack of safety protocols or any viable counterbalance to the interests of big business turns our nation into a petri-dish of wrong-doing. Given the scope of a wide array of technological menaces, a terrorist could just sit back and watch the big show. Given the current odds and lack of genuine concern for the public's well-being, a number of ticking time bombs are set to go off without any help from those "who hate our freedoms" from afar. What will profit mean to those with the Midas touch when all things once wonderful are imbued with a radioactive glow?
In the meantime; from the current CD headline article:
"The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia......".
Live and refuse to learn. Don't worry though we're sure to get smacked again. The next accident will hold our attention about as long as the balloon boy did.
Nuclear power is one of the worst options out there and I do not understand how anyone in their right minds can promote more of it.
In Washington State the CLEANUP costs of the Hanford site has exceeded 100 BILLION dollars. This number is exponentially greater then the costs to build the plants.
The GAO has in fact suggested that the cleanup be halted as it too expensive and that it would be cheaper just to bear the extra health care costs associated with exposure.
This is just ONE site.
The Costs to decommission Nuclear Plants that are NOT part of the Weapons Industry (If there is such a thing) are also excessive.
As example the Costs to Brenillis in France, a plant which ran only twelve years was some 480 million EUROS and it still not completed.
The UK estimates that some 70 billion pounds are needed to decommission the plants in the UK that are being shut down. These PRELIMINARY estimates. Brenillis went 20 times OVER first estimates . One plant in the UK will take 75 years to clean up.
Decommissioning costs do not include the storage costs for contaminated fuel and materials . The costs to store the spent fuel rods from existing Canadian Plants as example is some 24 billion dollars.
When one includes ALL the costs of Nuclear power, from the mining of the ore, to the construction of the plants and from the costs of Cleanups and decommission of Plants to long term storage costs adding this to the EXISTING health care costs the use of Nuclear is prohibitively expensive and the Corporations that build such plants piggyback costs onto the taxpayers and the enviroment.
I gave the EXAMPLE of Chalk River costing 300 million to decommission and I gave the example of 24 BILLIOB to store spent fuel rods in CANADA.
Canada does not make Nuclear weapons yet the Nuclear industry ADDS THESE costs to the treasury and the enviroment.
Meaning with even "Peaceful uses" the COST of Nuclear energy is prohibitive.
Calculations on the back of Envelopes showed Ford Motor Compnay that by leaving a 2 dollar part out of the Construction of a vehicle, they could save hundreds and millions over and above the costs that would result from law suits when fuel tanks on the same vehicles exploded.
Bottom line calculations are what sends Factories to China to dump waste into rivers and what threatens our food supply with "Cost effective foods" from GM crops.
The cheapest and safest and cleanest method of generating power is NOT having to use it in the first place. This can be done with CONSERVATION methods. The US and Canada alone consume over twice the energy per Capita as does Germany.
The problem with NOT using the power in the first place is that because Companies can not charge people for power not used.
The major problem with such calculations is that they include nowhere near the costs involved.
Just because a plant is decommissioned and its operation terminated is no indication that the expenses of its operation have stopped. It just means that it has quite producing electricity.
Particularly glaring in publicized industry statistics are the omissions of costs only incurred after the plant is closed: medical costs to those sub-sub-contracted for the work within the plants that involves radiation exposure, the omission of medical costs to communities with raised radiation levels, and the expenses of waste storage, including all the attendant legal fees for lawsuits between power companies and the Federal Government, paid for by ratepayers and taxpayers from beginning to end
without
a solution
in sight.
In the United States, however, both run hand in hand.
Whatever the possibility of "extricating" one from the other in the United States, they remain un-extricated: thoroughly wed.
It's a complex topic to launch here, but I would suggest that their considerable unity within the US is inevitable given the nature of the plants themselves on the one hand and the nature of US institutions, on the other.
The NRC and Westinghouse and Bechtel and the power companies all hire from each other, particularly when they're hiring execs and higher-level experts. These companies and related companies are all major lobbyists in Washington, major arms suppliers, and major suppliers of nuclear weapons.
Besides the danger of the plants themselves and the nuclear process themselves, authorizing further nuclear plants increases the centralization of money and power in the society as a whole, and concentrates it in the hands of those who produce nuclear weapons and who have encouraged nuclear proliferation.
Assuming, as I do, that these people are actually not devils incarnate, the other explanations all seem to have to do with systemic problems. Concentrating power production and the economic power that goes with it in for-profit institutions combines two systemic circumstances in which the motivation of the decision-makers little resembles that of the stakeholders.
It's bad enough that nuclear power exists in Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland and Mexico, where it comprises a massive systemic error with problems like to those discussed in the article above. So much worse that nuclear power should exist in the United States, a country that has shown itself so irresponsible in terms of armament and so little able to curb the rapacious nature of its corporations.
The weapons program and the power program are not only not discrete from each other, but vastly overlapped.
Hanford was extensively involved in both.
This article puts the lie to all those trolls who come on liberal/progressive sites extolling the virtues of nuclear---usually as against dirty coal. Nuclear is cleaner than coal is their usual mantra, conveniently using the classic either/or argument. Sometimes, they offer up false data "proving" that wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy cannot possibly provide enough power to fuel America's insatiable appetite for gluttony.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission obviously is REcommissioning plants to put off the financial apocalypse of DEcommissioning these "zombie" plants. What's a little tritium in our water supply compared to the many billions it will cost to DEcommission each of these plants. Tritium: invisible, tasteless. You could drink it all day long and never know it, until the pancreatic cancer hits and you're dead six months later, if you're lucky.
If the electrical utilities that own these plants had to include a realistic DEcommissioning fund in their rate structures then customer utility bills would more than double overnight. We don't want that of course!
"Noone died from Three Mile Island," say the propagandists for nuclear power. Those of us who have paid attention (like Harvey Wasserman) since the early 1970s know about these lies. Unfortunately, the average American is too busy worrying about house and car payments (forget college for the kids, as tuition costs are over the top) to pay attention to such ephemera as matters of life and death.
DEcommissioning is inevitable for these brittle plants. Increasing maintenance costs make it inevitable. REcommissioning is putting off the day of reckoning of yet another taxpayer bailout of for-profit corporations that will file for bankruptcy even if you can't, because you are a human being. Corporate "personhood," don't you know.
America, a toxic waste dump. Our greedy chickens are coming home to roost, and to shit in our own wells. Serious people have been warning of this outcome for at least four decades. The trajectory of an asteroid slamming into the earth CAN be calculated.
Considering our history of genocide, rapine, and imperialism, in this case justice approaches the divine.
I really am getting weary of living among a population whose willful ignorance threatens me at every turn. (For you SUV survivalists out there, you can't hide from a second Chernobyl, this time in the good old US of A.)
Finally, from the article:
"As a candidate for president, John McCain called for forty-five new nuke plants."
John McCain is insane. He forgot to take his freebie Big Pharma meds. And to think that he was one "premature" financial crisis from becoming President... Naw, the GOP wanted to lose this election as a setup for 2012.
-30-
OleManRiver,
I put this comment by you in my "Quotable Quotes" file, as it COMPLETELY sums up how I feel, 10 years after B*sh's coupe of 2000:
"I really am getting weary of living among a population whose willful ignorance threatens me at every turn."
Thank you for letting me know I am not alone.
And I agree with this article, and most of the comments under it. Nuclear power is SO DANGEROUS no insurance carrier will underwrite it. So the Fed. Gov't "self insures" the industry.
What does THAT tell you?
Price-Anderson Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
Sincerely,
True Patriot
I know an engineer who has been in the nuke business a long time. When a plant in his purview was caught leaking tritium, he tried to downplay the risk. Tritium, while not a "hot" radioactive element, is an alpha emitter, just like plutonium. These particles smack into DNA like freight trains, and the damage may not show up for years.The entire spectrum of nuclear power production is expensive and dangerous. Mining leaves millions of tons of low-level tailings(mine waste); processing and transport are virtually unregulated, and once the magic fuel rods are spent, they remain deadly for thousands of years. It doesn't help that the US hasn't been emphasizing science education for the last 30 years...few people understand nuclear hazards, and even fewer are curious.
This article points up the urgent need to reduce the use of electrical power until green sources become available. We could reduce waste in street lighting, reduce the amount of illuminated signage, increase insulation in buildings to save heating and air conditioning load, replace old refrigerators with efficient new ones, run an advertising campaign on saving power, etc.
To smipypr---
To my understanding you are right on target on the general situation. If I have any disagreement with you it would be on your observation that "processing and transport are virtually unregulated,..." You are probably correct here, despite the fact that there exist quite stringent regulations ON THE BOOKS, while as you suggest, nobody is paying attention.
Since the days of Madame Curie and her isolation of radioactive radium, and the Roentgen experiments with X-rays, Science has known of vast threats growing out of human attempts to develop radiation as a source of energy production whether for destructive or constructive purposes. The Yucca Mountain issue sort of demonstrates that we actually lack a language to comprehend the damage we have already done to ourselves by thinking we could harness this folly. Given the half-life of 100,000 years or so for waste plutonium---roughly the present age of Homo Sapiens---we are overwhelmed by our own hubris. But, as always, all work attempting to mitigate our destruction of our environment contributes to the GDP...good for the economy, don't you know.
So let's get to work solving the nuclear radiation pollution problem...if only we could. All over the country we have "spent fuel rods" immersed in deep pools of water to keep them cooled down. Tons of "depleted uranium" just waiting to be turned into ammunition against innocents.
To close, you are correct about the DNA alpha particle bombs once inside the human body. This has been known for decades. Decades ago there was an atmospheric researcher by name of Martell at the Boulder labs who published works showing that if you got lung cancer from smoking, it wasn't the tobacco as such that "caused" the cancer, but rather it was the radioactive fallout from 1950s atmospheric nuclear testing that fell on the "sticky leaves" of the tobacco. Alpha emitters adhered to the tobacco cause the lung cancer. Martell demonstrated the epidemiology.
People better start re-learning about nuclear power and nuclear energy. When was the last time you could buy a Geiger counter at Wal*Mart? (Not that a Geiger counter measures alpha particles...!) Noto Bene...
Our country has a huge inventory of all kinds of radioactive waste it has no idea how to "dispense with." This is, as much as anything, a hugely ethical issue. Ask Chris Hedges, who ought to be addressing this issue but has so far avoided it...
We are all PTSD!
-30-
Nuclear power reactors are a system which requires 100 percent perfect safety all the time. Of course, enter in error-prone humans and profit-motive CEO's and this becomes an impossible achievement. Take just the Chernobyl accident alone. Fallout covered much of eastern Europe, the United Kingdom and all the way over to the Eastern United States. The ground immediately downwind of the meltdown explosion is now uninhabitable for 600 years.
Civilian Nuclear power accidents as listed by wiki:
December 12, 1952 — INES Level 5 - Chalk River, Ontario, Canada - Reactor core damaged
A reactor shutoff rod failure, combined with several operator errors, led to a major power excursion of more than double the reactor's rated output at AECL's NRX reactor. The operators purged the reactor's heavy water moderator, and the reaction stopped in under 30 seconds. A cover gas system failure led to hydrogen explosions, which severely damaged the reactor core. The fission products from approximately 30 kg of uranium were released through the reactor stack. Irradiated light-water coolant leaked from the damaged coolant circuit into the reactor building; some 4,000 cubic meters were pumped via pipeline to a disposal area to avoid contamination of the Ottawa River. Subsequent monitoring of surrounding water sources revealed no contamination. No immediate fatalities or injuries resulted from the incident; a 1982 followup study of exposed workers showed no long-term health effects. Future U.S. President Jimmy Carter, then a nuclear engineer in the US Navy, was among the cleanup crew.[1][2]
May 24, 1958 — INES Level needed - Chalk River, Ontario, Canada - Fuel damaged
Due to inadequate cooling a damaged uranium fuel rod caught fire and was torn in two as it was being removed from the core at the NRU reactor. The fire was extinguished, but not before radioactive combustion products contaminated the interior of the reactor building and to a lesser degree, an area surrounding the laboratory site. Over 600 people were employed in the clean-up.[3][4]
October 25, 1958 - INES Level needed - Vin?a, Yugoslavia - Criticality excursion, irradiation of personnel
During a subcritical counting experiment a power buildup went undetected at the Boris Kidrich Institute's zero-power natural uranium heavy water moderated research reactor [5]. Saturation of radiation detection chambers gave the researchers false readings and the level of moderator in the reactor tank was raised triggering a criticality excursion which a researcher detected from the smell of ozone [6]. Six scientists received radiation doses between 200 to 400 rems [7] (p.96). An experimental bone marrow transplant treatment was performed on all of them in France and five survived, despite the ultimate rejection of the marrow in all cases. A single woman among them later had a child without apparent complications. This was one of the first nuclear incidents investigated by then newly-formed IAEA. [8]
July 26, 1959 — INES Level needed - Santa Susana Field Laboratory, California, United States - Partial meltdown
A partial core meltdown took place when the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) experienced a power excursion that caused severe overheating of the reactor core, resulting in the melting of one-third of the nuclear fuel and significant releases of radioactive gases. [9]
[edit]1960s
October 5, 1966 — INES Level needed - Monroe, Michigan, United States - Partial meltdown
A sodium cooling system malfunction caused a partial meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration nuclear breeder reactor (Enrico Fermi-1 fast breeder reactor). The accident was attributed to a zirconium fragment that obstructed a flow-guide in the sodium cooling system. Two of the 105 fuel assemblies melted during the incident, but no contamination was recorded outside the containment vessel. [10]
Winter 1966-1967 (date unknown) – INES Level needed – location unknown – loss of coolant accident
The Soviet icebreaker Lenin, the USSR’s first nuclear-powered surface ship, suffered a major accident (possibly a meltdown — exactly what happened remains a matter of controversy in the West) in one of its three reactors. To find the leak the crew broke through the concrete and steel radiation shield with sledgehammers, causing irreparable damage. It was rumored that around 30 of the crew were killed. The ship was abandoned for a year to allow radiation levels to drop before the three reactors were removed, to be dumped into the Tsivolko Fjord on the Kara Sea, along with 60% of the fuel elements packed in a separate container. The reactors were replaced with two new ones, and the ship re-entered service in 1970, serving until 1989.
May 1967 — INES Level needed - Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, United Kingdom - Partial meltdown
Graphite debris partially blocked a fuel channel causing a fuel element to melt and catch fire at the Chapelcross nuclear power station. Contamination was confined to the reactor core. The core was repaired and restarted in 1969, operating until the plant's shutdown in 2004.[11] [12].
January 21, 1969 — INES Level needed - Lucens, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland - Explosion
A total loss of coolant led to a power excursion and explosion of an experimental nuclear reactor in a large cave at Lucens. The underground location of this reactor acted like a containment building and prevented any outside contamination. The cavern was heavily contaminated and was sealed. No injuries or fatalities resulted. [13][14]
[edit]1970s
February 22, 1977 — INES Level 4 - Jaslovské Bohunice, Czechoslovakia - Fuel damaged
Operators neglected to remove moisture absorbing materials from a fuel rod assembly before loading it into the KS 150 reactor at power plant A-1. The accident resulted in damaged fuel integrity, extensive corrosion damage of fuel cladding and release of radioactivity into the plant area. The plant was decommissioned following this accident. [15]
continued next post
Continued Civilian Nuclear Power Plant Accidents
March 28, 1979 — INES Level 5 - Middletown, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, United States - Partial meltdown
Equipment failures and worker mistakes contributed to a loss of coolant and a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station 15 km (9 miles) southeast of Harrisburg. While the reactor was extensively damaged on-site radiation exposure was under 100 millirems (less than annual exposure due to natural sources), with exposure of 1 millirem (10 µSv) to approximately 2 million people. There were no fatalities. Follow up radiological studies predict at most one long-term cancer fatality. [16][17][18]
See also: Three Mile Island accident
[edit]1980s
March 13, 1980 - INES Level 4 - Orléans, France - Nuclear materials leak
A brief power excursion in Reactor A2 led to a rupture of fuel bundles and a minor release (8 x 1010 Bq) of nuclear materials at the Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Plant. The reactor was repaired and continued operation until its decommissioning in 1992. [19]
March, 1981 — INES Level 2 - Tsuruga, Japan - Overexposure of workers
More than 100 workers were exposed to doses of up to 155 millirem per day radiation during repairs of a nuclear power plant, violating the company's limit of 100 millirems (1 mSv) per day. [20]
September 23, 1983 — INES Level 4 - Buenos Aires, Argentina - Accidental criticality
An operator error during a fuel plate reconfiguration in an experimental test reactor led to an excursion of 3?1017 fissions at the RA-2 facility. The operator absorbed 2000 rad (20 Gy) of gamma and 1700 rad (17 Gy) of neutron radiation which killed him two days later. Another 17 people outside of the reactor room absorbed doses ranging from 35 rad (0.35 Gy) to less than 1 rad (0.01 Gy).[21] pg103[22]
April 26, 1986 — INES Level 7 - Prypiat, Ukraine (then USSR) - Power excursion, explosion, complete meltdown
A mishandled reactor safety test led to an uncontrolled power excursion, causing a severe steam explosion, meltdown and release of radioactive material at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located approximately 100 kilometers north-northwest of Kiev. Approximately fifty fatalities resulted from the accident and the immediate aftermath most of these being cleanup personnel. An additional nine fatal cases of thyroid cancer in children in the Chernobyl area have been attributed to the accident. The explosion and combustion of the graphite reactor core spread radioactive material over much of Europe. 100,000 people were evacuated from the areas immediately surrounding Chernobyl in addition to 300,000 from the areas of heavy fallout in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. An "Exclusion Zone" was created surrounding the site encompassing approximately 1,000 mi? (3,000 km?) and deemed off-limits for human habitation for an indefinite period. Several studies by governments, UN agencies and environmental groups have estimated the consequences and eventual number of casualties. Their findings are subject to controversy.
See also: Chernobyl disaster
May 4, 1986 – INES Level needed - Hamm-Uentrop, Germany (then West Germany) - Fuel damaged
A spherical fuel pebble became lodged in the pipe used to deliver fuel elements to the reactor at an experimental 300-megawatt THTR-300 HTGR. Attempts by an operator to dislodge the fuel pebble damaged its cladding, releasing radiation detectable up to two kilometers from the reactor. [23]
November 24, 1989 — INES Level needed - Greifswald, Germany (then East Germany) - Fuel damaged
Operators disabled three of six cooling pumps to test emergency shutoffs. Instead of the expected automatic shutdown a fourth pump failed causing excessive heating which damaged ten fuel rods. The accident was attributed to sticky relay contacts and generally poor construction in the Soviet-built reactor. [24]
[edit]1990s
April 6, 1993 — INES Level 4 - Tomsk, Russia - Explosion
A pressure buildup led to an explosive mechanical failure in a 34 cubic meter stainless steel reaction vessel buried in a concrete bunker under building 201 of the radiochemical works at the Tomsk-7 Siberian Chemical Enterprise plutonium reprocessing facility. The vessel contained a mixture of concentrated nitric acid, uranium (8757 kg), plutonium (449 g) along with a mixture of radioactive and organic waste from a prior extraction cycle. The explosion dislodged the concrete lid of the bunker and blew a large hole in the roof of the building, releasing approximately 6 GBq of Pu 239 and 30 TBq of various other radionuclides into the environment. The contamination plume extended 28 km NE of building 201, 20 km beyond the facility property. The small village of Georgievka (pop. 200) was at the end of the fallout plume, but no fatalities, illnesses or injuries were reported. The accident exposed 160 on-site workers and almost two thousand cleanup workers to total doses of up to 50 mSv (the threshold limit for radiation workers is 100 mSv per 5 years)[25]. [26] [27]
June, 1999 — INES Level needed - Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan - Control rod malfunction
Operators attempting to insert one control rod during an inspection neglected procedure and instead withdrew three causing a 15 minute uncontrolled sustained reaction at the number 1 reactor of Shika Nuclear Power Plant. The Hokuriku Electric Company who owned the reactor did not report this incident and falsified records, covering it up until March, 2007. [28]
September 30, 1999 — INES Level 4 - Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan - Accidental criticality
Workers put uranyl nitrate solution containing about 16.6 kg of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass, into a precipitation tank at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura northeast of Tokyo, Japan. The tank was not designed to dissolve this type of solution and was not configured to prevent eventual criticality. Three workers were exposed to (neutron) radiation doses in excess of allowable limits. Two of these workers died. 116 other workers received lesser doses of 1 mSv or greater though not in excess of the allowable limit. [29] [30][31] [32]
See also: Tokaimura nuclear accident and 5 yen c
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Page 3 of Civilian Nuclear Power Accidents on wiki:
April 10, 2003 — INES Level 3 - Paks, Hungary - Fuel damaged
Partially spent fuel rods undergoing cleaning in a tank of heavy water ruptured and spilled fuel pellets at Paks Nuclear Power Plant. It is suspected that inadequate cooling of the rods during the cleaning process combined with a sudden influx of cold water thermally shocked fuel rods causing them to split. Boric acid was added to the tank to prevent the loose fuel pellets from achieving criticality. Ammonia and hydrazine were also added to absorb iodine-131. [33], [34]
April 19, 2005 — INES Level 3 - Sellafield, England, United Kingdom - Nuclear material leak
Twenty metric tons of uranium and 160 kilograms of plutonium dissolved in 83,000 litres of nitric acid leaked over several months from a cracked pipe into a stainless steel sump chamber at the Thorp nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The partially processed spent fuel was drained into holding tanks outside the plant. [35].
November 2005 — INES Level needed - Braidwood, Illinois, United States - Nuclear material leak
Tritium contamination of groundwater was discovered at Exelon's Braidwood station. Groundwater off site remains within safe drinking standards though the NRC is requiring the plant to correct any problems related to the release.
March 6, 2006 — INES Level needed - Erwin, Tennessee, United States - Nuclear material leak
Thirty-five liters of a highly enriched uranium solution leaked during transfer into a lab at Nuclear Fuel Services Erwin Plant. The incident caused a seven-month shutdown and a required public hearing on the licensing of the plant.[36] [37]
^ [1
end quote
Also: It appears Little Known Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant almost melted down in 1979: Seen on Wiki on Nov 10, 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco
Steam generator dry-out
On 20 March 1978 a failure of power supply for the plant's non-nuclear instrumentation system led to steam generator dryout. (ref NRC LER 312/78-001). In an on-going study (ref NRC Commission Document SECY-05-0192 Attachment 2 [1]) of "precursors" that could lead to a nuclear disaster if additional failures were to have occurred, the NRC concluded (as of 24-Oct-2005) that this event at Rancho Seco was the third highest ranked occurrence (second highest if one omits the event at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station).
When the reactor was at power, a failure of the NNI power supply resulted in a loss of main feedwater, which caused a reactor trip. Because instrumentation drift falsely indicated that the steam generator contained enough water, control room operators did not take prompt action to open the EFW flow control valves to establish secondary heat removal. This resulted in steam generator dryout.
This is a list of civilian nuclear incidents which are notable, but do not fit the criteria for inclusion in List of civilian nuclear accidents.
November 1965
An operator error caused overheating and melting of some fuel in the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 facility at the National Reacor Testing Station in Idaho. There was no raditaion release or exposure.[1]
[edit]1970s
22 March 1975 — Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, AL, United States
A fire caused by careless technicians cut off many control circuits for two nuclear power reactors of the Tennessee Valley Authority at Browns Ferry Station in Alabama. The fire burned uncontrolled for 7.5 hours and the two operating GE nuclear reactors were at full power when the fire began. One of them went "dangerously out of control" for several hours and was not stabilized until a few hours after the fire was put out.[2] There was some concern about a meltdown, but this did not occur and there was no radioactive contamination.[3]
March 1977 — Toledo, OH, United States
An electromatic relief valve stuck open following a reactor scram at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant near Toldedo, OH. The valve was noticed by operators, and the reactor, manufactured by Babcock & Wilcox, was only slightly damaged.[4]
[edit]2000s
See also: List of civilian nuclear accidents#2000s
9 February, 2002 —
Two workers were exposed to a small amount of radiation and suffered minor burns when a fire broke out at the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. The fire occurred in the basement of reactor #3 during a routine inspection when a spray can was punctured accidentally, igniting a sheet of plastic.[5]
July, 2002 —
UK Authorities blamed an incident at a Scottish nuclear plant on "procedural and hardware deficiencies". Fuel rods falling to the floor were deemed responsible for the incident.[6]
9 August 2004 — Mihama Nuclear Power Plant, Japan
An incident occurred in a building housing turbines for the Mihama 3 reactor. Hot water and steam leaking from a broken pipe killed five workers and resulted in six others being injured. Officials insist that there was no radiation leak, and there is no danger to the surrounding area.[7]
September and October, 2005 — Dounreay, UK
In September, the site's cementation plant was closed when 266 litres of radioactive reprocessing residues were spilled inside containment.[8] In October, another of the site's reprocessing laboratories was closed down after nose-blow tests of eight workers tested positive for trace radioactivity.[9]
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Last page of Civilian Nuclear Power Incidents
25 July, 2006 —
An electrical fault prompted shut down of the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, Sweden. Although there was no damage to the reactor, no radioactive release and no adverse health consequences, the incident highlighted potentially hazardous flaws in the site's reactor shutdown procedures, as well as two out of four German-built Siemens emergency coolant pumps failing.[10][11]
July, 2007 —
Hunterston B nuclear power station in the UK had to be shut down due to "problems with controls that keep the delicate process at exactly the right temperature".[12]
16 July, 2007 — Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, Japan
A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. A small fire in a transformer was extinguished a few hours later. Several reactors were automatically closed down and as of April 2009 they have not been restarted. The quake was stronger than the reactors had been designed to withstand.[13]
November 28, 2007 — INES Level 2 - Tarragona, Spain - Nuclear material leak
Ascó Nuclear Power Plant told the Spanish Nuclear Board that about 200 thousand Bq were leaked to the atmosphere, due to a configuration failure in the ventilation systems. The incident was declared at INES level 1. However, the Spanish Nuclear Board realized there were leaked more than 80 millions Bq, and the incident was notified in April 2008. So the incident was updated to INES Level 2, the Nuclear Power Plant was fined with 15 millions euros and it manager removed.
4 June, 2008 — Krško Nuclear Power Plant, Slovenia - Loss of coolant
Emergency response system ECURIE (European Community Urgent Radiological Information Exchange) received an alert message following a loss of coolant accident at the Krsko Nuclear Power Plant.[14]
8 July, 2008, France — Nuclear material leak
A 6.25 m³ material leak is discovered on the Tricastin Nuclear Power Center, with 12g of uranium per litre (around 75kg in total). The Préfecture forbid the use of water, bath, nautical activities, fishing and irrigation in the Bollène area.[15]
23 July, 2008, France — Nuclear material leak
During a maintenance on the 4th reactor of the Tricastin Nuclear Power Center, a pipe was opened and low level radiation contaminated around 100 employees.[16] UNQUOTE
Nuclear Power is not safe nor profitable when you factor in the costs and dangers of accident or proliferation. None of these containment vessels can withstand the impact of a B-747 (over 1800 built) or a A380, or a C-5 aircraft because the standards for containment vessel specification pre-dated the 1969 Jumbo. You're absolutely playing Russian Roulette with one of these sitting anywhere on the continent where you live.
The above, as all my posts are, are just my opinion only.
TJ
Thanks!
(Let no one think that because the above list is admirably thorough it is by any means complete).
Sioux Rose
TJ: I also made a copy of all this data, and thank you for posting it. It's proof positive against anything those in favor of nuclear power could begin to say as per justifying their stance in the "safety record" of this dark power from Hades.
Thanks TJ for that listing of accidents, which I actually read through.
Need I point out that in every case the governments and corporations involved had a vested interest in downplaying the environmental damage from these incidents, while any investigator outside their systems would find it almost impossible to gain access?
True, in theory nuclear power offers promise, while the presence of humans with all our foibles inevitably mucks it up.
A case in point, not reported above because the plant was never nuclear-commissioned, is the Zimmer plant just outside Cincinnati, that was converted to coal after an investigator by name of Tom Applegate revealed construction defects known by the contractors but covered up. This case, well-publicized mostly by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer at the time, seems to have gone down the memory hole of 1984.
From early childhood it is a tendency of human beings who realize they have committed a boo-boo to hide the evidence. In the case of nuclear power this tendency is made most insidious.
-30-
You're welcome guys. Those were just Civilian power plant accidents. More nuclear accidents by the military are at the bottom of a web page I just started here:
http://planetliberty.wikidot.com/nuclear-power-incidents.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Oyster Creek is not the oldest, although it may be the oldest currently operating. Yankee (1960) and Humboldt Bay (63) come to mind and there must be others.
sierra7
This is the price we pay as a society that has embraced the, "extractive raw materials" kind of economics.
Until we can come up with a more humane kind of existence, along with the frailties of our environment we will slowly continue to kill ourselves.
Perhaps a point of language, but an important one:
If "new nuclear plants are not the issue," then they are surely AN issue.
Emissions start from before Day 1 of operation. The entire chain of mining and processing rises to the fresh demand, and a fresh cycle of compromising life and health to boil water (to create steam to turn the turbine to generate the electricity to . . . ) begins anew.
Every new plant created will become an old plant -- unless it blows up beforehand.
Generally, new plants will continue to run as old plants as long as owners imagine that will be profitable.
How long is that?
How old is the Oyster Creek plant now? For how long have its owners been licensed to continue operating it?
Power companies researching lawsuits against Westinghouse and Bechtel targeted the Oyster Creek plant as a fertile ground to examine degenerative problems in light water reactors way back in the 1980's.
Oh, tick . . . tick . . . tick . . .
Power companies play a game of chicken: the longer they stay on course without crashing, the higher the prize.
Of course,
---------- assuming that the owners live far from the plant (like their engineers, BTW!) the person with the steering wheel of this game of chicken is not the person seated in the car.