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An 8.9 Quake Could Have Irradiated the Entire US
Had the massive 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.
The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.
All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as fifty countries.
San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.
Diablo Canyon is at Avila Beach, on the coast just west of San Luis Obispo, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A radioactive eruption there would pour into central California and, depending on the winds, up to the Bay Area or southeast into Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles. The cloud would at very least permanently destroy much of the region on which most Americans rely for their winter supply of fresh vegetables.
By the federal Price-Anderson Act of 1957, the owners of the destroyed reactors---including Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison---would be covered by private insurance only up to $11 billion, a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars worth of damage that would be done. The rest would become the responsibility of the federal taxpayer and the fallout victims. Virtually all homeowner insurance policies in the United States exempt the insurers from liability from a reactor disaster.
The most definitive recent study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster puts the death toll at 985,000. The accident irradiated a remote rural area. The nearest city, Kiev, is 80 kilometers away.
But San Luis Obispo is some ten miles directly downwind from Diablo Canyon. The region around San Onofre has become heavily suburbanized.
Heavy radioactive fallout spread from Chernobyl blanketed all of Europe within a matter of days. It covered an area far larger than the United States.
Fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within ten days. It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States.
Chernobyl Unit Four was of comparable size to the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, and somewhat larger than the two at San Onofre.
But it was very new when it exploded. California's four coastal reactors have been operating since the 1970s and 1980s. Their accumulated internal radioactive burdens could exceed what was spewed at Chernobyl.
Japanese officials say all affected reactors automatically shut, with no radiation releases. But they are not reliable. In 2007 a smaller earthquake rocked the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki site and forced its lengthy shut-down.
Preliminary reports indicate at least one fire at a Japanese reactor hit by this quake and tsunami.
In 1986 the Perry nuclear plant, east of Cleveland, was rocked by a 5.5 Richter-scale shock, many orders of magnitude weaker than this one. That quake broke pipes and other key equipment within the plant. It took out nearby roads and bridges.
Thankfully, Perry had not yet opened. An official Ohio commission later warned that evacuation during such a quake would be impossible.
Numerous other American reactors sit on or near earthquake faults.
The Obama Administration is now asking Congress for $36 billion in new loan guarantees to build more commercial reactors.
- Posted in
85 Comments so far
Show All1) We are not all dead;
2) The system works;
3) Trust our leaders.
Ipso facto QED.
I haven't read it yet, the title made me blind with stupid! the closed my ears it rage!.
An Earthquake has no falout! it's just moving earth! B. if you spent the next year with a cutting torch you couldn't get enough radition out thet type of reactor, to shave with!
To ego-freaks Nuclear power remains satan I know, But learn somethng about japan, it's a risk the had to take! Like us, we could bury our country in coal and coal smoke! of we could start freah with the safest nuclear that money can buy, and not whine when the world throws a curve ball like a 8.9 earthquake, they don't happen every day. I understand those plants are built for 8.5 I isn't reasonable to ask for more.
>^^<
You don't know junk! These plants were built to withstand a Richter or Moment Magnitude scale of 6.5. They revised this upwards in 2007 to 6.7 following the 16 July 2007 magnitude 6.8 Niigata Chuetsu-Oki earthquake that occurred with an epicentre only 16 km from Tepco's Kashiwazaki Kariwa 7965 MWe nuclear power plant. Three of the 7 reactors remain shut down to this day.
How much radiation does it take to shave?
The French show a similar chauvinism discussing American nuclear power. They like to assume that they are safe because their plants are not made by the lowest bidder, like American plants. The Americans, at least within the industry, like to imagine that their plants are superior because of competition, though it is not clear with exactly whom the likes of GE, Westinghouse, Bechtel, PG and E, or SC Edison might be said to compete.
A cutting torch would hardly be the best way to get into a power plant, but if you applied it to doors and locks rather than spritzing it at a containment wall, you could find enough radiation in an afternoon to kill you and not need a lot of prior instruction to do it. There's no lack of the stuff inside. There are routine tasks that bring people beyond their lifetime radiation allowance within 45 minutes when the suits don't rip. With a key or a security clearance, you could just scramble right down a hatch A, skip along a catwalk B, past the mops discarded by hasty "contractors," and fry--figuratively, over a bit of time, but you'd be just as dead, and not particularly near the core.
All these opportunities are designed right in.
Now, about an earthquake having no fallout ---
That would rather depend on whether it set off a radiation leak, wouldn't it? Nuclear plants are largely ferroconcrete buildings. There's more to it than that, but there is plenty of structurally vital ferroconcrete in them.
Now, what effect does an 8.9 quake have on ferroconcrete?
Cracks, perhaps? Collapse, in many cases. Moving, ripping, tearing of plumbing, snapping of cables. Go back and check some old photos of San Francisco bridges and LA high-rises collapsing in on themselves. None of these housed nuclear reactors, and that's thicker ferroconcrete. On the other hand, we're talking about earthquakes at less than 8.0 as well, and without tsunamis--less a likelihood on the US west coast than in Japan, but certainly not an impossibility, given the latticework of faults along both sides of the California coasts and the geologic record of fairly recent major tsunamis up the coast in Oregon.
There is also the possibility, not mentioned here, of massive damage to coolant and outlet pipes. Of course that might result in a major meltdown, broadly remniscient of Chernobyl, but it might more likely just amount to massive discharge into the Pacific Ocean, assuming the plant could still be shut down in a timely fashion.
What makes the idea of an 8.9 quake unfair? Do we imagine that this is not possible in California? Why should we assume that any plant in California is authentically designed to withstand an 8.5 or even a 7.5 quake? Are we trusting GE here, or Westinghouse, or Bechtel, or the US government? I suppose it has to be both, since any one of them could screw up and not tell the next party.
The companies that design and run the plants are overwhelmingly secretive, even to their own employees, even to those in responsible positions. And the government agencies that regulate them have over a half-century of regularly lying to people about fatal tests and incidents that are really far, far worse than what the power companies themselves have done.
The winds in California are prevailing westerlies, NW to SE, though this is not reliable. The current runs north to south up the California coast from San Diego until an hour or so south of San Francisco. As far as I know, this is reliable.
Other power options exist. Wind, water, and sun are all quite workable. They cost less than nuclear power today, so much less that an in-home system purchased today and used by a typical American family would pay for itself before any single nuclear plant could go online.
The whole either|or false dilemma is a self-serving industry proposition based on what it would cost the industry to keep these things in-house and maintain the dependence of the population on a few large companies with a technology that does not lend itself to such things, and also based on the continuation of massive subsidies to the nuclear industry alone, in the form of limits to liability and sweetheart waste-disposal deals that have led almost every power company in the States to sue the government for malfeasance in waste disposal.
Taxpayers pay the power company once for storage, pay the lawyers for the suit, pay the government to cover its malfeasance and breach of contract to the power companies -- and the stuff still has to get stored for what we had might as well call perpetuity, since it is far longer than a single species of Earthling generally lasts. Nuclear plants not only have all sorts of dangers, they're not even economically viable on anything resembling a level playing field.
When something has a half-life of 25,000 years, it makes no sense to consider only daily events. Among other things, the plants at San Onofre and Diablo will submerge and re-emerge several times before their materials become radiation-safe.
The purpose of building nuclear energy plants, at taxpayers expense, is to perpetuate the monopolies of the utility companies along with the graft and corruption derived from it. The private sector will not finance nuclear plants so the politicians are bribed by the utility monopolies to use taxpayers monies for the utilities benefit.
Really, a plant that generates millions of kilowatts? Don't know what Koolaid you been drinking, but are proof that propaganda and misinformation are VERY effective in perpetuating ignorance. Thanks for the lesson!
Most nuclear plants generate "millions of kilowatts." I believe the Fukushima complex generates in excess of 4 gigawatts, which would be four million kilowatts.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no nuke supporter, but please do a little research before rebutting things if you don't really know the answer. Google is your friend: http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Your lack of critical thinking is matched only by your inability to write a coherent sentence. Stop watching the teevee and start reading.
Forum: France no example for nuclear power
By Linda Gunter - Commentary
Published Saturday, January 23, 2010
Buzz up!
It is perhaps no accident that the nuclear power industry chose a French word - "renaissance" - to promote its alleged comeback. Attached to this misapplied moniker are a series of fallacious suggestions that nuclear energy is "clean," "safe" and even "renewable." And, in keeping with its French flavor, a key argument in the industry's propaganda arsenal is that the United States should follow the "successful" example of the French nuclear program.
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France serves as a convenient sound bite for politicians and others advocating a nuclear revival. A failure to challenge this facile falsehood has cemented the myth of a French nuclear Utopia in the minds of the public. It masks a very different reality.
France gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. However, this results in the production of an enormous amount of radioactive waste that, as is the case for all other nuclear countries, has nowhere to go.
France has no operating geological repository for nuclear waste. To date, it has resorted to reprocessing, a highly contaminating chemical process that separates uranium and plutonium while releasing large quantities of liquid and aerial radioactivity. These wastes have rendered the seabed near the French La Hague reprocessing center equivalent to radioactive waste.
Contrary to myth, reprocessed French waste is not "recycled." The hottest waste, about 4 percent of the total, is stored at La Hague, along with about 81 tons of separated - and proliferation-friendly - plutonium, 1 percent of the total. The remaining 95 percent, mostly uranium, is stored at another nuclear center, Pierrelatte, in Southern France. Rather than being "recycled," this waste is simply transferred from the La Hague operator, Areva, to the French electricity utility, lecticité de France (EDF). France does not have the technology to re-enrich this uranium, but some of it is exported to Russia, which does.
Nuclear energy has not gained France energy independence. France imports all uranium used in its 58 reactors - having abandoned the last of its 210 uranium mines in 2001. These latter also produced a large waste stream, including tailings - radioactive rocks and soils - that have been used to pave children's playgrounds and public parking lots.
Today, French uranium is imported largely from Niger where Areva - which, despite its corporate appearance, is 90 percent government-owned - has mined for 40 years. Its legacy in one of the poorest countries on the planet is one of depleted and contaminated water, wide dispersal of radioactive dust and discarded radioactive metals that have been sold in local markets and used in homes.
Nor can nuclear power meet all French electricity needs. France imports coal-powered electricity from Germany at peak times, because of its heavy use of electric home-heating. During heat waves and droughts, the French have been forced to power down or close more than a third of their nuclear plants, which rely on water sources such as rivers and lakes for cooling.
None of this has deterred Areva or EDF from driving aggressively into new nuclear markets, especially the United States, where Areva is promoting its huge Evolutionary Power Reactor, with seven targeted at six U.S. sites. Because new reactors are too expensive to build unless federally funded, EPRs in the United States could result in American tax dollars flowing to the French government.
However, French nuclear success overseas has proved as elusive as it is at home. All but two of the U.S. EPRs are now on the back burner or canceled altogether. A recent joint report from the British, Finnish and U.K. nuclear safety authorities challenged the safety of the unproven EPR design. The two EPR flagship construction sites in Finland and France have experienced cost overruns and delays. The Finnish Olkiluoto site is more than three years behind schedule, with cost estimates soaring from $3.6 billion at preconstruction to more than $8 billion currently. Technical errors have plagued both sites.
These problems are by no means unique to the French nuclear industry. They typify the nuclear "renaissance" as a whole, which resembles more of a retreat.
• Linda Gunter is co-founder of Beyond Nuclear, which advocates for a sustained, benign energy future.
Yawn.... There is no single form of energy that is capable of supplying the world's energy needs. The key is to diversify our energy portfolios, and nuclear is a much better alternative than coal. And, for the record, when has anyone looked to the French for advice on anything?
BProgress, the key is not diversification; it is what no politician and few citizens will face. We use/waste energy supporting our stupid, extravagant, selfish lifesyle, which we call the American way. More after I return from the mall in my two ton SUV to buy some plastic shit I don't need. Conservation has gone the way of the eight track.
Blow up your TV, talk to your neighbor, tend you garden.
Philiphoko,
Yea. I have a neighbor that owns a huge SUV and a boat. I listen to him whine and bitch about the gas he cannot afford . What a MORON> People make idiotic CHOICES and cry about the results. He has taken in renters for one of his extra rooms..
Goodness, it sounds like you live in my neighborhood. Lots of boats on the sides of the houses, SUVs in the driveway, illegal apartments galore and/or rooms being let out to rent.
Excellent use of stupid rhetorical ploys:
- Do not question the world's energy "needs";
- Set it up so anyone who disagrees with you is defending coal;
- Make fun of the French.
You are so smart!
Nuclear, must be a temperory measure. The fact is our local fusion reactor(the sun) is spewing our more wasted/ for free power than this sorry world will ever need. I say it's raining soup and you show up with some sheets and a cup! Humans are supposed to be better than this! We need for planetary use 3 teathered geo-syncronous solar power collecting sattelites. Power can be routed thru the teather, and would never stop. it never gets dark at 30,000km and with three all the land masses could be covered. it wouldn't be long till the energy was too cheap to meter. Then we can do other things like express shielded elevators thru the van-allen belt! Launching space craft anytime, to anywhere, eventually join all three in a ring, with more floor then the entire earth.
Think about it. we'll need that urainiam for space ships, not just to keep your hands warm.
>^^<
Oops. You got there first with the fusion reactor line. I wasn't nicking it. Honest.
Damn. And I thought some of my suggestions were forward-looking...
They hesitate putting radioactive materials in space ships, lest they crash on liftoff.
@philiphoko, you're correct, I neglected to mention the need for reducing the energy we use and building an infrastructure that wastes less electricity. Which is an obvious component in building a sustainable energy economy.
Aside from that, you people are entirely too quick to jump all over someone who has a differing opinion. Diversification of our energy portfolios is the ONLY way to build a sustainable society that has electricity. If you don't like electricity I'm not sure why you're in the conversation, go play with the Amish. Nuclear power is not as dangerous as you people would like to make it out to be. And the French are just fun to pick on, loosen up, it was a joke....
BProgress
"If you don't like electricity" Not sure where you got that or why you mock the Amish.
You sound like the typical ranter who wants change just as long as yoiu don 't have to change. I get the impression you will do whatever your told by whoever tells you to do it.
Lovely post. Thanks.
When the current civilization of the Earth is irradiated (I like that word - kinda like "scrubbed free of"), and the next civilization is born, I wonder if there will be any indication left behind to show how we irradiated ourselves?
Well we know it could take anywhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of years for a creature to evolve that can make fire (i.e."invent"). Assuming our sun is still 'burning brightly' that future civilization might eventually come across an "indication left behind." But consider, it may come to resemble - a million years from now - what we call "fossil fuels" today.
I can't believe the Japanese government could be this f-ing bad at covering up nuclear like this. As it is, I enjoyed visiting Japan a year ago and feel terrible about the damage done. True, Japan's economy is too heavily reliant on petroleum but that has to stop and so do our military bases and troops occupying them. It's time for the military and the oil cartels to get out of the way and let Japan and the rest of the Far East revive the good Eastern traditions and values worth following. The US Empire is dying already ! I also have a suspicion that the US government has a connection to Japan's government doing the cover up on nuclear even after the atomic bomb disasters on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
I'm afraid we aren't past the crisis yet. *** A core meltdown with worse effects than Chernobyl remains a real possibility. ***
The first level of backup power for cooling down one plant (both reactor and storage) failed and they're still trying to get the 2nd level (battery power) adequately on line before the current batteries run out. They're selectively venting radioactive gas to avoid an explosion (at 1000x the normal radioactivity) and the evacuation is now expended to 10km and approx. 70,000 people. The status of several more plants is not available to news sources. I'm watching various news feeds on this. One which is being updated is at .
It was really Godzilla! I've seen whirlpools like that before.. In 1/2 the Godzilla movies I've seen.. Thats why the cover is so thin, nobody cares! their all runing around screaming, just like in the movies. I just hope Mothra doesn't showup next!
>^^<
Billy is entirely bogus and has been thoroughly discredited.
One of the industry workers who only attend Common Dreams in order to post industry propaganda.
Very nice though.
On the contrary, some of us are incessant gobshites.
You might have underestimated the ability of people here to spot a classic strawman-and-binary-choice trick. We both know it's a handy technique for getting funding out of mangers, but we're only dealing with managers there. These bunnies are smarter than that. The gas industry statistics are questionable, but that doesn't mean that the others aren't.
All [significant] available energy can originally [eventually] be attributed to a big fat fusion reactor, but that has the advantage of being around 150 million kilometers from any populated areas (unless there's something Mercury and Venus aren't telling us). Always tickled me how the "Nuclear Power, No Thanks" bumper stickers showed a picture of it.
Chernobyl (and others) show the risks of having them closer to home. Is nuclear power better than fossil fuels? Probably but, again, those aren't the only choices. Photovoltaic cells are popular because they fit neatly into the corporate economic structure, but extraction of their constituents could become the next crisis. My own preferences - with limited applications for my vested interests - are for thermal updraft or reflector/steam based solar power and combined high/low frequency (waves/tides) buoyant arrays (the trick is to have them behave as a high frequency point but a low frequency raft), but those will involve a distribution grid and trans-national co-operation that seems unlikely in the present political climate.
Reducing consumption is a biggie, but with a lot of people that's fighting talk (or, as the scientist said to the engineer "You want to make something of it?").
Ah well, back to the drawing board...
Hey webwalk,
My comment was aimed at Billy, not yourself, but he seems to have vanished in a puff (or possibly a mushroom cloud) of smoke and the thread collapsed.
You don't get that with alternative energy...
Thanks, i figured out pretty quick you weren't talking to me.
i would guess Billy has been (for the second time? third time?) blocked from shilling for nukes at Common Dreams (that's why his moniker was "i was Billy..." 'cause it used to just be "Billy").
Somebody's gotta keep you hippies grounded! Really you seem to think we can keep 6+billion people fed housed and warmed with so-called renweable means. ain't happening!
Unless you want to signup for the population curtailment lottery, Stand back and let folks work things out.
>^^<
This is the most pointless article I've ever read on CD. What is this author even talking about? He clearly knows absolutely nothing about plate tectonics/earthquakes. Japan lies near a subduction zone which is capable of producing earthquakes in the 8-10 richter range. The west coast of North America lies along a transform boundary, which a few people may have heard of, its called the San Andreas Fault. The San Andreas is capable of a maximum ~7.8 on the richter scale. Which for the record is about one tenth of the energy released in the 8.9 that occurred in Japan today. This article is full of pointless dribble intended to scare people away from nuclear power. Which for the record is much safer and cleaner than burning fossil fuels. But what else would I expect from an advisor for GreenPeace? Leave it to the environmental activists to be pissed off about something they know nothing about. Try learning some science if your going to write articles about it Mr. Wasserman...
I don't know about pointless, but your post certainly is dribble, likely funded by the nucleur industry which is to be feared as much as earthquakes, probably more. Where are you going to run when the radioactive cloud from a meltdown heads for your tidy little neighborhood? I'll take an earthquake any day. I hope they are able to stabilize the reactors in Japan. If not, things could get much worse.
So BProgress guarantees that there will never be an 8.9 magnitude earthquake in the US, especially not near a nuclear power plant. Can't ever happen according to him. Relax folks, not to worry and the other nuclear troll, IwasBilly, says that bananas are naturally radioactive so don't worry about that radiation thingy. Everything's fine with nuke power, no problems, these two "experts" have it all covered.
It's kind of like saying that God couldn't sink the Titantic, and then down she goes. Anything is possible. Frankly, I'm kind of glad Shoreham was shut down, although if Long Island got hit with a big-ass tsunami there would be a lot of death. It's impossible to get off this island, especially once you get west of Huntington in Suffolk COunty, regardless of the so-called evacuation plans they supposedly have in place. But death by tsunami has to be quicker than death by radiation.
I don't need to be an expert to tell that you,BP, are a TOOL
Wow. I'm a tool and paid by the nuclear industry! Awesome. First of all, I study earthquakes for a living, as I previously stated transform faults ARE NOT capable of an earthquake over an 8. How many nuclear reactors are there in Alaska? Because thats the only place in the US thats capable of an earthquake of the magnitude which we're talking about. Secondly, its funny how Chernobyl blew up in 1986, yet all of our lives are threatened by a nuclear holocaust, but no one on this post can tell me why. You guys have fun with your name calling, and imagining that this article is anything but some fear mongering dribble, I'm sure so many people are jumping in line to join your cause....
Maybe you can explain then the earthquake experts who had not believed an 8.9 would take place where it just did?
And in any case why we should place our trust in "experts" who assure us that such an event cannot take place?
Gosh, have respected experts in their fields ever proved mistaken about the range of possible events?
And given the incalculable catastrophic nature of an "oops" here, why should we even be having this discussion?
But you have fun with your shilling. i know you feel very attached to your attachment to nukes, don't let any demands for basic precautions get in your way, or the FACT that taking such risks is scientifically 100% unnecessary.
I have no idea which experts you speak of. I just stated that subduction zones, like the one near Japan, are capable of that size earthquake. Anyone who says differently, is probably getting paid to say so...
The San Andreas Fault has been extensively studied as large portions of it rupture at the surface, making it accessible for paleoseismologists to study. The largest event in the last 10,000 years was ~7.8 in the late 1800's. The northern segment already had a major rupture in 1989 (6.9), so for the next 300 years or so Diablo Canyon should be safe...
We're having this discussion because the whole premise of this article, an 8.9 ripping off in Southern California, aka destroying San Onofre is a fantasy. The author bases his hole argument about an event that can't happen, and an event that happened in 1986, which engineers have since learned how to prevent. I have no personal affection for nuclear power, I do however, feel it is a necessary source of energy as we transition to renewables. Which, for the record, is not happening nearly fast enough.
Here's where i got it, from the LA Times yesterday:
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-japan-earthquake-20110310,0,7154967.story
*********
The magnitude 8.9 earthquake that struck Friday off the coast of Japan "is going to be among the top 10 earthquakes recorded since we have had seismographs," said seismologist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena. "It's bigger than any known historic earthquake in Japan, and bigger than expectations for that area."
Geologists had expected the portion of the Pacific "Ring of Fire" that produced this quake to yield a temblor on the order of magnitude 8 or perhaps 8.5, she said. "Something as big as an 8.9 is a bit of a surprise," she said.
A quake that big usually requires a long, relatively straight fault line that can rupture, such as those found in Peru and along the eastern coast of South America. Friday's quake occurred in the Japan Trench, where the Pacific tectonic plate slides under the Japan plate.
Scientists did not expect such a big quake in the area because the plate boundary is not straight, but is fairly irregular. According to Lucile Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey, a quake of that size would require rupturing a zone at least 300 miles long.
*********
Surprise! Event outside the scientifically-predicted range. "Black swan" events are INEVITABLE, just a matter of probability, predictability and timing.
Regarding your willingness to place our future in the hands of shills who claim that "science" supports their schemes to dominate our economy, our humanity and the Earth... i'm way more trusting of journalists like Grossman who distrust such military-industrial complex shills, than i am of the dominator-class who seek every possible avenue to bend public discussion, very rationally and reasonably, toward support for their dominator schemes.
Surprise, surprise, a scientist's computer model of earthquake ruptures for a fault that resides 8,000 meters below sea level was conservative. Tell me, which do you think is easier to do research on; A fault at the bottom of an ocean, or one that has a giant trace thru the middle of a desert? Its fairly evident you're not very familiar with the concept of physics.
Accusing me of supporting the shills of some dominator-class, MIC-lovers is just completely counterproductive. Its not their "science" I believe in, it's mine. But have fun running around throwing out accusations at everyone who has a slight difference of opinion with you. At the end of the day, as far as any human being knows, the San Andreas Fault is not capable of an 8.9, so the whole premise of this article is B.S...
It's fairly evident that you have taken a heavy dose of the scientific hubris that has humanity and the Earth on the brink of ecological destabilization and civilizational collapse. You are free to believe that your personal and scientific assurances assure that nukes are safe. But you are spouting unmitigated bullshit.
There is no need for them, they are time bombs wherever and however they are designed and situated, and the consequences of a worst-case scenario mean there is no place for them on Earth.
Whether or not the specific geology of a location is prone to whichever level of sudden energy release in an earthquake, is merely one matter. Possible scenarios for catastrophic incidents are myriad. You are free to focus in on one specific scenario and declare it bogus as part of your defense of the "safety" of nukes, but that is simply your hubris.
Here's another scenario: a nuke is designed to withstand a certain level of earthquake energy. The geologists are correct in their estimation and that level is not surpassed. But engineers make errors, and unforeseen cascades of events of course remain unforeseen (such as a tsunami following on an earthquake and disabling the back-up generators, as a pertinent example).
So despite the accurate (for the scenario) estimation of earthquake power, events go out of control and the cooling fails and the core melts down. How happy are we that the seismologists were correct about their estimation of the upper limit of potential earthquake energy released at the site?
Why on Earth should we rest our future on your assurances (and the assurances of the powerful interests that are actually behind the incessantly reliable propaganda assaults about "safe clean nukes")?
And there are deeper arguments about the ugly history and ugly reality of colonialism, resource extraction, uranium mining, uranium tailings, nuclear waste, military interests, war economy, economic centralization, corporate power, democracy, etc etc etc that are all important parts of the overall narrative of nukes, and that all offer potent reasons for denouncing, resisting, and stopping this evil.
Nice dismissive reference to "some dominator class," isn't it quaint that the vast ugly distortions of political economic and social power actually appear real to some of us?
WTF?? Why hasn't this ever been talked about before - "accumulated internal radioactive burden"?
Funny how I understand the phrase pretty well. "Radioactive Burden" refers to the buildup of long-lived radioactive isotopes over 40 years (a 40 year plant lifespan is begging for a really big disaster) of the plant's operation. Some notable long-lived isotopes created by uranium fission are strontium-90, cesium-137 and plutonium-238.
I take it that you're in the 40 hour a week disinformation business.
To the best of my knowledge, this is not a formally measured parameter, and, to respond to Billy as well, the author may just mean what the usual associations to the words might indicate, with nothing more rigorous than that intended. There is more radioactivity in a nuclear plant that has been used over time because it has been exposed for longer. There is more radioactive material if used equipment and other waste is not moved offsite -- to create more problems offsite.
One reason this is not usually discussed may be that it is likely not a major factor in the increasing danger of an old plant. It will only be a very large factor where spent fuel is stored onsite. This was certainly done extensively at Oak Ridge and Hanford at one time, but my understanding, though I can't vouch for this, is that it is not current practice at the light-water reactors -- that is, at most American plants. Larger factors, in general, are likely the corroding infrastructure and control systems, and the profit-inspired attempt to run the plant without repairs as long as possible.
I bet Mr. Wasserman is now in anti-nuke heaven. All his prayers have been answered. Something finally went wrong at a nuke plant. Took a 8.9 earthquake to do it.
and yet . . . 8.9 earthquakes HAPPEN.
And I wouldn't say "finally went wrong." Not the first time something "went wrong" at a nuke plant.
yes. last one was 100 years ago.
Are you being sarcasitic? Small incidents dont get reported. There is a whole pile of secrecy associated with nuclear reactors.
Almost 1million people have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. I regard that as a huge incident.
You are such an ass.
Yes, the best thing in the world for people who critique stupid gigantic industrial idiocy is when this stupid gigantic industrial idiocy predictably breaks down.
i'm in f***ing heaven you utter idiot and contemptible fool.
"i'm in f***ing heaven you utter idiot and contemptible fool."
potty mouth. does mommy know you talk like that?