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America's Eggshell Nukes
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made it clear that America's 104 licensed atomic power reactors are not accidents waiting to happen.
They are accidents in progress.
And proposals to build a "new generation" of reactors are not mere scams. They comprise a predictable plan for permanent national bankruptcy.
On November 10, the USNRC delivered a stunning reprimand
to Japanese-owned Westinghouse, which proposes building new atomic
reactors here and around the world. The Commission warned that the
containment design for the new AP1000 did not include a "realistic"
analysis of its ability to withstand a jet crash.
An NRC rule introduced in 2009 requires that the integrity or cooling of
used fuel, the containment and the cooling of the reactor core on new
reactors must be able to withstand the impact of a large passenger jet.
The failure of Westinghouse to explain its case amounts to a violation
of that requirement.
New AP1000 reactors are proposed for numerous sites in the US, including
Georgia's Vogtle, which has received $8.33 billion in loan guarantees
from the Obama Administration. Site work has begun at Vogtle, which
already houses two licensed reactors. But the new designs still lack
final approval. At least one AP1000 plant is already under
construction in China. Similar concerns about the AP1000 design (as
well as France's EPR) have been raised by regulators in the UK.
The hotly debated ability of proposed new commercial reactors to
withstand a jet crash underscores a stunning reality: not one of the
104 old ones now operating in the US has the proven ability to do so.
The reactor industry successfully fought off such requirements,
complaining they would make the plants too expensive to build. More
than two dozen US General Electric Mark I containments are rated as
weaker than the structure that blew off Chernobyl Unit Four during its
1986 catastrophe.
Owner-operators now want license extensions that would keep those same
reactors going for 20 or more additional years. Under intense
multi-decade stress from heat and radiation, all suffer dangerously from
embrittlement of critical metals and degradation of structural
concrete.
Because spent fuel pool are overflowing, thousands of tons of highly
radioactive fuel rods now sit in "dry casks"---concrete boxes with vent
holes. Neither the pools nor the casks can withstand a jet crash, or
even a low level terror attack.
"In 2003, my colleagues and I reported that the drainage of a spent fuel
pool by a jet crash could lead to a catastrophic spent fuel radiation
fire that could render a 27,000 sq mile area uninhabitable. This is
larger than the combined states of Maryland, Massachusetts and New
Jersey," says reactor expert Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the
Institute for Policy Studies and former Senior Policy Advisor to the US
Secretary of Energy, 1993-7.
"A year later the National Academy panel, convened to address our study,
warned that reactor ponds were vulnerable to terrorist attack and
catastrophic radiological fire," Alvarez continues. "In particular,
there are 35 Boiling Water Reactors in the U.S. that have elevated spent
fuel pools several stories above ground. The pools are not protected by
thick concrete containment as are the reactors. They currently hold
about four times the amount of highly radioactive spent fuel than their
original designs."
At Vermont Yankee, New York's Indian Point and other aging reactors,
underground pipes are known to be leaking significant quantities of
tritium, cesium and other deadly isotopes. Health researcher Joe Mangano has linked such emissions to serious human health problems at nuke sites throughout the US.
Meanwhile, new reactor pushers want Obama to cave on minimal financial
requirements for federal loan guarantees. According to Alvarez, the
General Accounting Office and Congressional Budget Office have both
estimated that at least half the loans given for new nuke construction
will fail.
But even marginal fee requirements for a proposed project at Calvert
Cliffs, Maryland, has prompted Constellation Energy to back out.
Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service,
among others, has speculated that Constellation wanted out of a plant it
knew to be a loser, and used the loan fee as an excuse.
If Obama slashes builder-owner loan liability, the virtually certain
failure of new reactor projects will dump billions of dollars of
liabilities onto taxpayer and ratepayers.
The plants are also primarily insured against accidents and terror
attacks by the public. The industry's liability---which could be in the
trillions---is limited to $11 billion.
So continued operations at old reactors, or construction of new ones,
could plunge the United States into permanent bankruptcy.
Reactor owners are now constantly pushing for license extensions. And
Obama is soon expected to try to ease the loan guarantees for new ones.
Our economic future and physical health depend on stopping them both.
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40 Comments so far
Show AllAmericans have now been brainwashed to believe the following lies:
1) the lights will go out if US nuclear power expansion is constrained, and
2) nuclear is just like wind, solar and other renewables in the push to curb greenhouse gas, and
3) new nuclear plants will be much safer than existing plants.
I agree with you on the first 2 points, but your suggestion that the third is a "lie" is patently incorrect. Modern designs are *considerably* safer than the earlier designs, and with the current US fleet at least 10 years past their "use by" date, the comparison is ridiculous.
Just to clear the air, I am against fission-designs of all flavors, and have been a long-time proponent of energy from managed fusion. Having said that, there is a lot of misinformation being posted by those on either side of the nuclear energy debate.
Umm, managed fusion nuclear plants? I'm personally a fan of flying cars and think that we should have peace with the Martians.
Fission plants, which is to say ALL plants, are economically and environmentally moronic. They're only around because Republicans want to support their buddies.
I believe that managed fusion is achievable, and within our lifetimes. All it will take is a national sense of urgency, and funding levels that are militaristic in their size. The only downside is that such energy production remains centralized though this is well suited to powering publicly-owned utilities and corporations. Energy for personal use should come from renewable and democratized energy sources.
FWIW, "flying cars" do exist though they are hardly tenable. And we have determined that Martians, if they exist in micro-cellular form, are peaceable as long as we do not disturb them.
The purpose of nuclear power is for the utilities to maintain their utility monopolies. It's really that simple. This can be deduced by the "fleece" market because the nuclear advocates cannot get private financing for their projects, free market, but have to be assured of USG guarantee's, the "fleece" market.
Why not an array of nuclear batteries, sufficient to equal the output of a conventional nuclear generating facility?
Much less expensive and a hell of a lot more safe.
Joe Stack aimed his plane at the wrong target...
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
Irrespective of the health and safety concerns, nuclear power is a relatively expensive means of producing power and has not succeeded anywhere in the world without significant public subsidies.
or at least a removal of subsidies for fossil fuel...
But...my senator, Lamebrain Alexander, assures us that nuclear energy is green energy! Where is truth, justice, and apple pie? Will not the center hold?
Spinning out of control--MD
Just want to clarify something: Containment vessels in US nukes have been designed to withstand the crash of an *armed* airplane, as well as sustained shelling by 150mm artillery. Yes, designers thought of this stuff in the 60s.
Why would modern systems be any less secure?
Cooling towers were not defined as containment vessels on the last nuclear plant I worked on.
Cooling towers are not radioactive, and hence, are not dangerous (unless you are predisposed to Legionnaires Disease or consider gravity a health-hazard).
Thank you WTF! There's a reason why the 9/11 terrorists did NOT crash into the Indian Point Reactors that they flew right over. It wouldn't have done anything. To put it quite bluntly, Wasserman is just lying again. Tests and analyses HAVE been done - http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2002/02-2-159_report.pdf & http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/aircraftcrashbreach are easy enough to find.
In spite of Wasserman and his ilks idiocy, we are going to see a nuclear renaissance.
The ONLY reason that the costs are a bit too high at the moment is that the crazies can shut down and delay construction for an indefinite time with endless lawsuits. That problem WILL be solved fairly soon and we will rejoin the rest of the world. China is building dozens of this exact type of plant. Germany is not going to shut theirs down and will build more.
Here's what could happen: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q4/view595.html#nuclear
Here's an idea of how http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q3/view640.html#option .
Access To Energy is a human right!
The reason the 9/11 terorists did not target a nuclear plant was that their targets were obviously intended to be 1) symbolic...New York and DC control centers of global corporate power, and 2) well known sites that would be readily identified by as many people as possible.
Your comments indicate that you probably reside under a bridge somewhere but are not homeless. Having been a construction worker I knew plenty of guys that worked on reactors and such. Just like the BP well corners are cut for profit and the finished product is not the plans to build it.
"Access To Energy is a human right!" Oh bullshit. Never was never will be until capitalism is dead and long gone. But you just dream on Pal.
The difference between Haliburton's concrete work in the Gulf and concrete around a nuke's containment vessel is that the nuke's concrete is x-rayed and ultra-sounded, and must meet NRC standards. The x-rays and ultrasound recordings are public data, and can be examined by anyone. No similar standards exist for concreting oil wells.
This is not to say that fantasy such as depicted in the movie "The China Syndrome" does not exist. I am sure many corners are cut (such is the nature of greed, laziness and capitalism), they would certainly not be representative of the work completed.
One good thing about nuclear power is that it has created lots of jobs that can't be exported. I worked for an engineering firm in the 1990s that had a standing offer for me to go work at Hanford WA nuclear cleanup...they guaranteed 42,000 years of job security.
Even in the current depressed job market, Hanford WA has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.
harvey wasserman
and one of the highest cancer rates.....
There will be a monstrous accident eventually. That should put the last nail in the nuclear energy coffin. Besides that, nuclear energy is not renewable in spite of what anyone might claim. Uranium is a finite resource, just like oil or coal, and, yes, I know about breeder reactors. Just what we need. Tons of plutonium upon the face of the earth. Good for making bombs, though. Oh yeah.
Sigh, the old plutonium myth. You simply CANNOT make bombs from commercial reactor waste. The reasons aren't all that complicated.
To make a bomb you have to "assemble" the sub-critical masses into one critical mass. Once you've got critical mass the thing still won't explode unless a neutron happens along to start things going. Now if you get a neutron too soon - before assembly is complete - you get a fizzle that is a LONG way from a bomb.
Since you assemble the thing with a chemical explosion its obvious that you don't have much time at critical mass - only a few milliseconds actually. Thus a very active neutron source is placed in the middle of the device, shielded by a thin lead foil. Said foil is ripped as the assembly occurs and a neutron occurs just when you need it.
There are only two materials that have half-lives that are exactly right - U235 and Plutonium 239. Short enough to be active enough to make a bomb and long enough so that they won't themselves cause a fizzle. With U235 you actually have a few hundred milliseconds - long enough for a simple gun-type weapon (thin-boy) to be built.
PU239 on the other hand has a much shorter half-life - on the order of 250,000 years. This means its active enough for the critical mass to be emitting a neutron every few milliseconds. Thus you have about 10 milliseconds to assemble the device - which means you must use a complex implosion assembly system to even have a chance. It was this bomb that was tested at Trinity Site (which I've visited and only 50 years later is pretty much cold). The Los Alamos people were so un-sure that Fat-Man was going to work that they had to test it.
Ok, why can't commercial reactor waste be used? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239:
In practice, however, reactor-bred plutonium produced will invariably contain a certain amount of Pu-240 due to the tendency of Pu-239 to absorb an additional neutron during production. Pu-240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission events (415,000 fission/s-kg), making it an undesirable contaminant. As a result, plutonium containing a significant fraction of Pu-240 is not well-suited to use in nuclear weapons; it emits neutron radiation, making handling more difficult, and its presence can lead to a "fizzle" in which a small explosion occurs, destroying the weapon but not causing fission of a significant fraction of the fuel.
Ah, but strapping 20-30 lbs of radioactive material (spent fuels rods, contaminated concrete, contaminated clothing, whatever) around a core of 10-15 lbs of RDX, Semtex or good old commonly available TNT (from mining and demolition sites for the cost of a pair of bolt cutters) can mean *party time!* in Times Square in good old NYC.
That should ratchet up the old DHS panic meter a few shades of paranoia. (Are you getting all this, you eavesdropping fascist goons?)
Share the (radioactive) love!
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
harvey wasserman
unfortunately, you got that right. won't take much to make a "dirty bomb"....
"You simply CANNOT make bombs from commercial reactor waste."
You are correct. I never said that bombs could be made from commercial reactor waste.
"PU239 on the other hand has a much shorter half-life - on the order of 250,000 years."
Thank you for making my point. Who said anything about bombs, other than you?
harvey wasserman---
one fear is that there will be an accident---which is inevitable---and the media will bury it, like they tried with TMI.
they still claim "no one was killed" at TMI, which is a monstrous lie. right up there with holocaust denial.
SInce almost all the claims of deaths at Three Mile Island seem to go back to Harvey Wasserman - there are NO credible claims - its obvious that pretty much nothing happened there.
If there were even a dozen fatalities, they could not have been covered up, that large a conspiracy is simply impossible.
As for the wild claims about low-level radiation, see "Radiation Hormesis". http://www.springer.com/medicine/radiology/book/978-3-642-03719-1 ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis - "the 2005 French Academy of Sciences-National Academy of Medicine's report concerning the effects of low-level radiation rejects LNT as a scientific model of carcinogenic risk associated for doses less than 100 mSv. They consider there to be several dose-effect relationships rather than only one, and that these relationships have many variables such as target tissue, radiation dose, dose rate and individual sensitivity factors. They propose that more study is done on low doses (less than 100 mSv) and very low doses (less than 10 mSv) as well as the impact of tissue type and age. The Academy considers the LNT model useful for regulatory purposes as it simplifies the administrative task. However, they also point out that approximately 40% of laboratory studies on cell cultures and animals report some sort of radiobiological hormesis.[8] They state:
"...its existence in the laboratory is beyond question and its mechanism of action appears well understood."
harvey wasserman
This is nonsense. Much of the evidence of the deaths at Three Mile Island come back through me because I believe i'm the only one to go into central Pennsylvania the year after the accident. I interviewed numerous residents and found a horrifying array of death and disease. There were, however, other sources, including Dr. STephen Wing and numerous others....
Deep breath, people. Bigger picture!!
You know how a nuclear plant works? It generates steam. Yeah. And the steam is used to generate electricity. There are lots of ways to generate steam (the object being to spin a magnet in a coil) and lots of ways besides steam to spin that magnet.
You know what they are doing in Israel? A salt pond. I kid you not. They just fill it with salt water and let it sit out in the sun. The bottom of the pond natually settles to very high salt content, which means the water can hold lots more heat and that hot water is used to generate steam.
Honestly. We can even use solar to melt salt, and the melted salt to generate steam. How bright do we have to be to skip over the cheap, reasonably safe ways to generate steam and go directly to nuclear waste? The question is not why nuclear, but why even bother with it when there are better methods?
Also, mcsandberg1: check out the problem of embrittlement at nuclear power plants. Itsa thrilling prospect.
mcsandberg1 writes:
"Wasserman is just lying again."
Going deeper into your vast insight it becomes obvious that you are grossly ignorant of the nature of the history of nuclear power. Back in the early 50s advertised as "too cheap to meter."
Have you figured out how to "dispose" of the Nuclear "waste" yet? The late Edward Teller had a really elegant solution: enclose it in glass beads and fire it out into Outer Space. Really elegant, and very efficient!
Face it: Nuclear power is no way "green." Some of us have actually researched and studied this issue. Obviously, you have not.
Meanwhile, I have known Harvey W for more than 20 years, and find him incapable of "lying." I do not always agree with him, but he remains among the great critics of the disaster that is nuclear "power."
It is innately Entropic. Here is a challenge. There was a book published in 1957, with a Forward by Bertrand Russell, entitled "Fall out..." Extremely important. Not in your local library.
Another book: "Radiation," by Schubert & Lapp, Viking, 1957. Scientists have known for a century that radiation is dangerous. When concentrated, it kills. "Depleted Uranium," a misnomer, is now used as a weapon, and it leaves an Environmental Trail almost impossible to clean up.
Our Secretary of Defense is possibly an Honorable man. An academic with a history in Texas. Probably unrelated to Microsoft's creator Gates.
Read "Solartopia" and then come back.
Ignorance of the Laws of Evolution is no defense. Harvey is as usual right on target. In theory, nuclear energy could work. In practice, humans corrupt it.
Ask the French!
(Any questions, see Tom Applegate's series on the Zimmer nuclear power plant just outside Cincinnati in The Cincinnati Enquirer (hardly "leftist") and followed up by The Toledo Blade. He reported shoddy work and it became a coal-fired plant. The contractor shortcuts...)
Applegate had shit and piss dumped on his head for reporting truth.(Meanwhile, it remains amazing to me that The Enquirer published his reports.)
The wrong people seem often to be rewarded for wrong actions.
Obama Peace Prize? Scandinavia, give us a break.
As usual, Harvey is right.
Regarding nuclear power, we now pretty much know the theory. But when push comes to shove, in the corporate world, we end up getting poisoned. Shortcuts. People.
This has got to stop.
-30-
I'll let Petr Beckman of "Access to Energy" do the debunking of the "Too cheap to meter myth". From The Bulletin board system of Access to Energy, called Fort Freedom:
http://www.fortfreedom.org/p06.htm
Where, then, did the phrase "too cheap to meter" originate?
It was used by Lewis L. Strauss in an address to the Ntl. Assn.
of Science Writers in New York on 16 Sept. 1954. The fact that he was
Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and not a member of the nu-
clear industry is a technicality, which would not in itself make the
statement a lie.
What makes it a lie is that he used it in connection with the
eradication of disease and other scientific marvels that he expected
to occur at some time in the faraway future. He first reviewed some of
the breakthroughs that had taken place in the 15 years before his
speech in 1954, including unlimited power and the ability to investi-
gate the working of living cells by tracer atoms. Then he came to the
sentence that contains the phrase and whose remainder is invariably
censored:
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in
their homes electricity too cheap to meter, -- will know of great
periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, --
will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the
air with a minimum of danger at great speeds, -- and will experience a
lifespan far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to
understand what causes him to age."
That sentence, in its entirety, should be eaten by every brain-
washer who uses the "too cheap to meter" lie; it is EXACTLY the same
as accusing the medical profession of having claimed in 1954 that we
"will experience a far longer lifespan as we understand what causes us
to age."
The nuclear industry never made that claim. The Fort Freedom archives are a very valuable source of hard data on a vast range of topics. Petr Beckmann, as you can see from the above, was extremely meticulous and thorough. I highly recommend his work.
The burning of fossil fuels is destroying the planet.
If the true cost of burning fossil fuels was imposed upon the industries that profit from them, there would not be a single coal plant.
The fossil fuels industry is heavily subsidized and never responsible for the pollution generated.
What is the true cost of the BP oil spill?
How much is a large section of the ocean really worth.
How many cancers will be caused by the dispersants?
What is the cost of global warming?
Why, why does Harvey relentlessly bash nuclear energy with every bit of hyperbole, with every scare tactic and every far-fetched Armageddon scenario he can imagine while he barely mentions fossil fuels?
You can't separate the two.
You can't bash nuclear without supporting coal.
The very unfortunate timing of a Jane Fonda movie closely followed by TMI all but killed nuclear energy.
As a result, use of coal has been unfettered for decades.
30,000 people die every year from coal plant pollution.
Global warming is causing the Earth's climate to destabilize. That's colossal!
Radioactive waste---not colossal.
Saying, "Peace. Love. Solartopia" ----not helpful.
Real leadership for conservation of energy has the potential to reduce our energy needs far more than all proposed US nuclear plants could produce.
There is no leadership because the coal, nuclear, and oil industries have complete control of the news media and our government.
Until there are real discussions on conservation, all this is just hot air - none of these people have any interest in the welfare of our children - they only care about their own pocket book.
Shared sacrifice is great for the planet and great for community of humanity - but will we see it being proposed as an option? No, because shared sacrifice is only acceptable when it comes to killing people in war, otherwise it is that evil evil socialism.
Sad sad sad.
What does it matter if one of the or all of the newly proposed nuclear power plants are built to withstand a major airliner impacting it? What matters is the 'fuck you' attitude we send to our children's children's children's children which is we want our power and YOU have to deal with the poison and toxins our greed makes just especially for you our children's children's children.
Let me see:
Half life of
Plutonium
Pu-238 - 87.74 years
Pu-239 - 24065 years
Pu-240 - 6537 years
Pu-241 - 14.4 years
Pu-242 - 3.76E5 years
Pu-243 - 4.956 hours
Pu-244 - 8.26E7 years = 8,300,000 half life
Uranium
U-232 - 72 years
U-233 - 1.59E5 years
U-234 - 2.445E5 years
U-235 - 7.03E8 years
U-236 - 2.34E7 years
U-237 - 6.75 days
U-238 - 4.47E9 years = 4,500,000,000 half-life
U-240 - 14.1 hours
Our mutated progeny sure will like us for this, won't they?