A Dozen Nuclear Plants in Hurricane's Path

[Sara S]

A dozen nuclear plants in the path of Sandy

https://www.nj.com/business/index.ss...mission_1.html


“Because of the size of , we could see an impact to coastal and inland plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman based in Philadelphia for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said by phone today. “We will station inspectors at the sites if we know they could be directly impacted.”

The NRC met earlier today to discuss the necessary precautions to take for the storm, Sheehan said. Plants must begin to shut if wind speeds exceed certain limits, he said.

As of 2 p.m. New York time, Sandy had winds of 75 miles (121 kilometers) per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. It was about 430 miles south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, moving north at 7 mph.

[Valley Oak]

This is really scary.

The prospect that we could have the same nuclear disaster as in Japan is unsettling.

Edward

A dozen nuclear plants in the path of Sandy

https://www.nj.com/business/index.ss...mission_1.html


“Because of the size of , we could see an impact to coastal and inland plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman based in Philadelphia for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said by phone today. “We will station inspectors at the sites if we know they could be directly impacted.”

The NRC met earlier today to discuss the necessary precautions to take for the storm, Sheehan said. Plants must begin to shut if wind speeds exceed certain limits, he said.

As of 2 p.m. New York time, Sandy had winds of 75 miles (121 kilometers) per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. It was about 430 miles south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, moving north at 7 mph.

[Peace Voyager]

We need a plan to follow Germany and have them all phased out ASAP. !

A dozen nuclear plants in the path of Sandy

https://www.nj.com/business/index.ss...mission_1.html


“Because of the size of , we could see an impact to coastal and inland plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman based in Philadelphia for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said by phone today. “We will station inspectors at the sites if we know they could be directly impacted.”

The NRC met earlier today to discuss the necessary precautions to take for the storm, Sheehan said. Plants must begin to shut if wind speeds exceed certain limits, he said.

As of 2 p.m. New York time, Sandy had winds of 75 miles (121 kilometers) per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. It was about 430 miles south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, moving north at 7 mph.

[Karen the KAT]

Wow, amazing ignorance of nuclear physics, reactor design and operation!!!

It doesn't matter how big the storm is, it can't do any damage to a reactor. Reactors are designed to easily survive the whole structure falling on top of them. The only reason to idle them is because of the transformers and power lines, which are subject to wind damage. If your reactor is running at load, and that lead is removed, it still puts out electricity until they can shunt the steam away from the generator, and millions of watts of electricty can be pretty dangerous to neighboring people. The reactor itself suffers no damage.

The reactor vessel in Fukashima was breached because of a 9.1 earthquake, not the tsunami. It was also, as is the case of EVERY reactor failure, running in excess of 100% power at the time, was past due for a re-fueling, had the safety devices bypassed, and had not been operated properly for some time before that. When the containment vessel was breached while running in excess of full power, IE: Control rods fully withdrawn, the reactor was producing excessive heat, and excessive nasty byproducts. This made it hard to reinsert the rods, and those nasty byproducts blew out into the atmosphere. The automatic SCRAM had been bypassed for several months in order to produce power in excess of 100%. By the time they finally got most of the rods MANUALLY reinserted, too much time had gone by. Additionally, the old Westinghouse design has always been considered a very poor design for putting the fuel storage pool ABOVE the reactor. While it speeds build time, it is the only design still operating that uses this backwards design.

This is what happens when one runs a reactor at 130+% power, has disconnected the safety device, and a 9.1 earthquake hits.

Had it been running at normal power and had they not bypassed the auto SCRAM safety net, it wouldn't have made the news for very long. It should also be noted that it was long past due for a re-fueling, meaning most of the Uranium had been converted to more nasty forms of radioactive materials.

When a reactor is in low power or idle setting, it doesn't matter how big of an earthquake hits.

To play it extra safe, they did idle all the reactors in the storms path. That's why they cut off power to much of the East Coast prior to the storm hitting. A reactor at idle is only operating at 0.1%, just enough to keep it warm, because reactor start-up, and the preparation for it can take weeks.

An idling reactor poses zero threat to anybody, unless the containment vessel is breached and you happen to be standing right next to it.

A SCRAM'ed, or inactive reactor is just a bunch of un-reacting Uranium. The moderating rods must be withdrawn in order for slow Neutron fission to begin. Enrico Fermi ran the World's first reactor (un-shielded) by standing on top of it and pulling out the control rods by hand, and he lived happily to a ripe old age. The reactor was made of a 16 foot stack of Graphite blocks with holes in the filled with high grade, natural yellowcake Uranium. It was located in the squah courts under the University of Chicago.

Even old, poorly designed reactors are perfectly safe running at full power AS LONG AS THE SAFETY DEVICES HAVE NOT BEEN BYPASSED.

The reason Germany is getting rid of reactors is that they are old, Soviet designed and operated "Fast Breeder" reactors. They are replacing these with safe modern designs. The USSR, located most of their reactors in East Germany as a payback for WWII, and these were primarily fast breeders, meaning they were designed primarily to turn Uranium into Plutonium and other weapons grade fission materials as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is operating at the dangerous side of nuclear physics.

People fear nuclear power because it's generally beyond most people to understand the physics of it, and what people don't understand, they fear. So they look for like minded slanted opinions and hold them up to the light as great truths. Unfortunately what they are holding is a bag of crap. One can always find opinions that reinforce one's own opinion, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are factual.

The reactors they are replacing them with are safe modern designs. 90% of all of Europe's power is produced by reactors, and the Europeans have no problems with them.

We need to follow Europe's lead and build more modern reactors, for the very simple reason that they work and are perfectly safe.

What we should be doing is building Modular Pebble Bed Reactors. PBR's are impossible to melt down, by the passive safety of the physics involved. They are thermally throttled. Too cold and they can't react, too hot and they can't react, breach the containment vessel or hit them with a bomb and blow them apart, and they can't react, and will release no dangerous radioactivity. Additionally, they can use for fuel all those nasty byproducts we are storing and have no idea what to do with. The fuel is contained in the ceramic matrix of the "pebbles", and is safe enough to be used a a doorstop. When it is burned, it is transformed into a harmless byproduct you can use as a paperweight. They can be made small enough to carry on a rail car.

Until Fusion is made practical, they are the perfect working answer to power needs: Safe and relatively inexpensive to build and operate, and the modular design makes them easy to assemble or disassemble. All one needs is a building to house them (or not) and a power generating plant to hook them up to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble...dular_reactor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

Solar is too expensive, wind is too expensive, wave power is too expensive, and all the research in the World isn't going to change this. You still have to build the thing, you still have to pay people to built the infrastructure. I have no idea why people didn't figure this out instead of listening to the lie, that if we invest in green energy it's a good investment. Nobody but the US Government is stupid enough to invest in these technologies.

Lets break it down:

Solar - Reflecting plants require a huge amount of manpower to build all those mirror assemblies, and the target tower. Panels don't last long, and are expensive to build because of all those rare earth minerals. Additionally mining and processing all those rare earth minerals in China, about the only place on Earth where they are abundant, is a dirty, polluting affair, costing a big carbon footprint that it takes years to balance out, right about when they are no longer effective and are basically un-recyclable.

Sort of like the Toyota Prius, the dirtiest vehicle on Earth when you take manufacturing into the equation. It takes 7 years of OPTIMAL operation to see a gain. 7 years of around town, stop and go operation, and then the car is ready to recycle, well except for all the electronics, they go in a landfill... Bet they didn't tell you this when you bought one...

Wind - Oh boy, the biggest joke of all! Each wind generator costs between $700,000 to $3 million to make and install. Additionally they need constant maintenance. Then you have a tower that will power from 3 to 20 homes. Do the math, it doesn't work without subsidies.

Wave power - All the problems of wind, plus corrosion.

All three are dependent upon the environment. When it's not sunny, or windy, you have to store energy in batteries. Back to China and the landfill you go...

The same mindset that thinks flourescent bulbs and paper bags are the way to go, LOL! (Hint: They aren't!).

Well there's coal, course Obama pretty much killed coal, green or not...

Are you getting the picture people?

Denial land, a nice, warm, feel-good place to live. Too bad it doesn't work...

If you really want nice green energy, support nuclear power. Done right it is THE answer.

I can't wait for all the misinformed opinions to start flying over this. NOT!

Educate yourselves people, stop looking for people who agree with your pet theories, and search out neutral, objective and factual information. If you want to hear what you want to hear, there will always be people waiting to enable you in it...

["Mad" Miles]

KtK has her facts wrong about Fukushima, her talk of reactors running at full and over full capacity is, "inaccurate". They were shut down.

The tsunami wrecked the generators required to produce the electricity to run the pumps that circulate coolant water (yes, even shut down reactors need to be kept cool, as long as there's a reactor core with fissionable material. Same for depleted fuel tube storage. It's why they're kept in water.) and without the circulation the cores overheated and produced helium which exploded, breaching the containment buildings (not the core containment vessel) then things got worse from there.

We now know that reactor vessels (Reactor containment #1) in at least 1 & 4 were breached by super heated fuel. Super heated because coolant circulation was lost when the generators were lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukush...clear_disaster

(Spare us the, "Wikipedia?! Everybody knows how inaccurate and biased it is!!!". Actually, wikipedia has been shown to be as accurate as Encyclopedias. It's just not acceptable in academic research as a source, because it is a secondary, if not tertiary, source. I'm not writing a research paper or scholarly essay here. Wiki is just fine for this purpose.)

As for the rest of her paean to the wonders of nuclear power, radiation, even in small amounts and at low levels, is mutagenic. It's a poison that lasts, essentially, in the case of the human scale of time, forever. Concentrating it, in areas where it can, and does, enter the food chain, is hubristic stupidity.

Aside from all the well known and discussed dangers from nuclear power; nuclear fuel processing, transportation and waste storage/transportation, a factor seldom mentioned, is the cost of security. Not just the financial cost, to protect dangerous materials for generations to come, but the social, legal, political cost.

Because of the dangers (terrorism, dirty bombs, sabotage, let alone accidents) nuclear power and weapons are an iron clad justification, no necessity, for a Police State. Forget due process and other civil rights. The stuff is too dangerous to permit such niceties. We have to have a solid wall of law "enforcement" and security, to protect us from the bad guys, cause we have this really great nuclear thingie, that's worth it all! Say goodbye to your rights, and hello to Big Brother.

By the way, if the costs of building, maintaining, storing waste, and decommissioning nuclear power plants were not subsidized, and the indemnification for possible accidents weren't subsidized? They wouldn't be built. In fact, the increases in insurance costs, combined with the relatively low price of oil, in the early eighties, is why no new ones have been constructed since.

"Cheap" nuclear is a crock. As are "safe", "efficient" and "secure" nuclear.

The Obamanator is a cheerleader for nuclear power generation, although you don't hear him say it much, post Fukushima Daiichi 1-6.

[Peace Voyager]

I have educated myself my entire life on this subject; there is no argument. Nuclear weapons and power are an unsafe and misguided public and environmental risk we do not need.

This unjustified risk comes at a very unprofitable cost for those footing the bill. Only those with the right resources to game the system profit from the radioactive industries.

Your ignorance of the risks outweighing the benefits is frightening. The harm done with clean power sources can be mitigated. How well is that mitigation working for the melted reactors in Japan? How well will it work with a major earthquake in California?

Maybe you are profiting from the industry, which requires that you stir our pot on this.

Protecting our planet and species from avoidable choices which diminish our health and safety has been my prime directive since the ecology movement of the late 1960's. I did not grow out of it, these roots grew deeper. Because the facts related to the risks have not changed; and the act of buying science and public opinion has more than prevailed.

When clean power industries, research and development are supported with appropriate oversight, America can recover its economy while it improves the habitats from coast to coast. This will remove the provocation for yet another war for oil, and reduce the harmful impacts to our water, soil and climate security from: coal, oil, gas and nuclear power extractions and usage.

Colleen Fernald

Sebastopol's City Council Candidate
For a Nuclear-Free Planet

www.campaignforpeace.org

Wow, amazing ignorance of nuclear physics, reactor design and operation!!!

It doesn't matter how big the storm is, it can't do any damage to a reactor. Reactors are designed to easily survive the whole structure falling on top of them. The only reason to idle them is because of the transformers and power lines, which are subject to wind damage. If your reactor is running at load, and that lead is removed, it still puts out electricity until they can shunt the steam away from the generator, and millions of watts of electricty can be pretty dangerous to neighboring people. The reactor itself suffers no damage.

The reactor vessel in Fukashima was breached because of a 9.1 earthquake, not the tsunami. It was also, as is the case of EVERY reactor failure, running in excess of 100% power at the time, was past due for a re-fueling, had the safety devices bypassed, and had not been operated properly for some time before that. When the containment vessel was breached while running in excess of full power, IE: Control rods fully withdrawn, the reactor was producing excessive heat, and excessive nasty byproducts. This made it hard to reinsert the rods, and those nasty byproducts blew out into the atmosphere. The automatic SCRAM had been bypassed for several months in order to produce power in excess of 100%. By the time they finally got most of the rods MANUALLY reinserted, too much time had gone by. Additionally, the old Westinghouse design has always been considered a very poor design for putting the fuel storage pool ABOVE the reactor. While it speeds build time, it is the only design still operating that uses this backwards design.

This is what happens when one runs a reactor at 130+% power, has disconnected the safety device, and a 9.1 earthquake hits.

Had it been running at normal power and had they not bypassed the auto SCRAM safety net, it wouldn't have made the news for very long. It should also be noted that it was long past due for a re-fueling, meaning most of the Uranium had been converted to more nasty forms of radioactive materials.

When a reactor is in low power or idle setting, it doesn't matter how big of an earthquake hits.

To play it extra safe, they did idle all the reactors in the storms path. That's why they cut off power to much of the East Coast prior to the storm hitting. A reactor at idle is only operating at 0.1%, just enough to keep it warm, because reactor start-up, and the preparation for it can take weeks.

An idling reactor poses zero threat to anybody, unless the containment vessel is breached and you happen to be standing right next to it.

A SCRAM'ed, or inactive reactor is just a bunch of un-reacting Uranium. The moderating rods must be withdrawn in order for slow Neutron fission to begin. Enrico Fermi ran the World's first reactor (un-shielded) by standing on top of it and pulling out the control rods by hand, and he lived happily to a ripe old age. The reactor was made of a 16 foot stack of Graphite blocks with holes in the filled with high grade, natural yellowcake Uranium. It was located in the squah courts under the University of Chicago.

Even old, poorly designed reactors are perfectly safe running at full power AS LONG AS THE SAFETY DEVICES HAVE NOT BEEN BYPASSED.

The reason Germany is getting rid of reactors is that they are old, Soviet designed and operated "Fast Breeder" reactors. They are replacing these with safe modern designs. The USSR, located most of their reactors in East Germany as a payback for WWII, and these were primarily fast breeders, meaning they were designed primarily to turn Uranium into Plutonium and other weapons grade fission materials as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is operating at the dangerous side of nuclear physics.

People fear nuclear power because it's generally beyond most people to understand the physics of it, and what people don't understand, they fear. So they look for like minded slanted opinions and hold them up to the light as great truths. Unfortunately what they are holding is a bag of crap. One can always find opinions that reinforce one's own opinion, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are factual.

The reactors they are replacing them with are safe modern designs. 90% of all of Europe's power is produced by reactors, and the Europeans have no problems with them.

We need to follow Europe's lead and build more modern reactors, for the very simple reason that they work and are perfectly safe.

What we should be doing is building Modular Pebble Bed Reactors. PBR's are impossible to melt down, by the passive safety of the physics involved. They are thermally throttled. Too cold and they can't react, too hot and they can't react, breach the containment vessel or hit them with a bomb and blow them apart, and they can't react, and will release no dangerous radioactivity. Additionally, they can use for fuel all those nasty byproducts we are storing and have no idea what to do with. The fuel is contained in the ceramic matrix of the "pebbles", and is safe enough to be used a a doorstop. When it is burned, it is transformed into a harmless byproduct you can use as a paperweight. They can be made small enough to carry on a rail car.

Until Fusion is made practical, they are the perfect working answer to power needs: Safe and relatively inexpensive to build and operate, and the modular design makes them easy to assemble or disassemble. All one needs is a building to house them (or not) and a power generating plant to hook them up to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble...dular_reactor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

Solar is too expensive, wind is too expensive, wave power is too expensive, and all the research in the World isn't going to change this. You still have to build the thing, you still have to pay people to built the infrastructure. I have no idea why people didn't figure this out instead of listening to the lie, that if we invest in green energy it's a good investment. Nobody but the US Government is stupid enough to invest in these technologies.

Lets break it down:

Solar - Reflecting plants require a huge amount of manpower to build all those mirror assemblies, and the target tower. Panels don't last long, and are expensive to build because of all those rare earth minerals. Additionally mining and processing all those rare earth minerals in China, about the only place on Earth where they are abundant, is a dirty, polluting affair, costing a big carbon footprint that it takes years to balance out, right about when they are no longer effective and are basically un-recyclable.

Sort of like the Toyota Prius, the dirtiest vehicle on Earth when you take manufacturing into the equation. It takes 7 years of OPTIMAL operation to see a gain. 7 years of around town, stop and go operation, and then the car is ready to recycle, well except for all the electronics, they go in a landfill... Bet they didn't tell you this when you bought one...

Wind - Oh boy, the biggest joke of all! Each wind generator costs between $700,000 to $3 million to make and install. Additionally they need constant maintenance. Then you have a tower that will power from 3 to 20 homes. Do the math, it doesn't work without subsidies.

Wave power - All the problems of wind, plus corrosion.

All three are dependent upon the environment. When it's not sunny, or windy, you have to store energy in batteries. Back to China and the landfill you go...

The same mindset that thinks flourescent bulbs and paper bags are the way to go, LOL! (Hint: They aren't!).

Well there's coal, course Obama pretty much killed coal, green or not...

Are you getting the picture people?

Denial land, a nice, warm, feel-good place to live. Too bad it doesn't work...

If you really want nice green energy, support nuclear power. Done right it is THE answer.

I can't wait for all the misinformed opinions to start flying over this. NOT!

Educate yourselves people, stop looking for people who agree with your pet theories, and search out neutral, objective and factual information. If you want to hear what you want to hear, there will always be people waiting to enable you in it...

[Peace Voyager]

Thank you & the others for making the rest of the case.

Can we "follow the money" for the making of Kat's case? Is there some transparency lacking in what motivates a pro-nuke POV?

The pro-nuke youth who support Lyndon LaRouche really have me worried about who will be in charge when all the hippies are too old to counter bad choices.



I know the LaRouchers are getting paid, it's their zombie-eyed zeal which alarms me.

KtK has her facts wrong about Fukushima, her talk of reactors running at full and over full capacity is, "inaccurate". They were shut down.

The tsunami wrecked the generators required to produce the electricity to run the pumps that circulate coolant water (yes, even shut down reactors need to be kept cool, as long as there's a reactor core with fissionable material. Same for depleted fuel tube storage. It's why they're kept in water.) and without the circulation the cores overheated and produced helium which exploded, breaching the containment buildings (not the core containment vessel) then things got worse from there.

We now know that reactor vessels (Reactor containment #1) in at least 1 & 4 were breached by super heated fuel. Super heated because coolant circulation was lost when the generators were lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukush...clear_disaster

(Spare us the, "Wikipedia?! Everybody knows how inaccurate and biased it is!!!". Actually, wikipedia has been shown to be as accurate as Encyclopedias. It's just not acceptable in academic research as a source, because it is a secondary, if not tertiary, source. I'm not writing a research paper or scholarly essay here. Wiki is just fine for this purpose.)

As for the rest of her paean to the wonders of nuclear power, radiation, even in small amounts and at low levels, is mutagenic. It's a poison that lasts, essentially, in the case of the human scale of time, forever. Concentrating it, in areas where it can, and does, enter the food chain, is hubristic stupidity.

Aside from all the well known and discussed dangers from nuclear power; nuclear fuel processing, transportation and waste storage/transportation, a factor seldom mentioned, is the cost of security. Not just the financial cost, to protect dangerous materials for generations to come, but the social, legal, political cost.

Because of the dangers (terrorism, dirty bombs, sabotage, let alone accidents) nuclear power and weapons are an iron clad justification, no necessity, for a Police State. Forget due process and other civil rights. The stuff is too dangerous to permit such niceties. We have to have a solid wall of law "enforcement" and security, to protect us from the bad guys, cause we have this really great nuclear thingie, that's worth it all! Say goodbye to your rights, and hello to Big Brother.

By the way, if the costs of building, maintaining, storing waste, and decommissioning nuclear power plants were not subsidized, and the indemnification for possible accidents weren't subsidized? They wouldn't be built. In fact, the increases in insurance costs, combined with the relatively low price of oil, in the early eighties, is why no new ones have been constructed since.

"Cheap" nuclear is a crock. As are "safe", "efficient" and "secure" nuclear.

The Obamanator is a cheerleader for nuclear power generation, although you don't hear him say it much, post Fukushima Daiichi 1-6.

[Peace Voyager]

Follow Helen Caldicott's facebook page if you'd like to be informed on her work to end nuclear weapons and power.

www.facebook.com/helen.m.caldicott

[CSummer]

"Solar is too expensive, wind is too expensive, wave power is too expensive, and all the research in the World isn't going to change this." From Wikipedia: As of 2011, the price of PV modules per MW has fallen by 60% since the summer of 2008, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates, putting solar power for the first time on a competitive footing with the retail price of electricity in a number of sunny countries Anyone with decent solar exposure and significant PG&E bills can get solar installed for $0 and reduce their energy costs. Solar is doing away with the need for centralized power generation (much to the dismay of large power companies.) We could do quite well without any nuclear - or fossil fuels. Wind energy has also been quite competitive for many years. If it wasn't, why would several major utilities have invested in it? " Solar - Reflecting plants require a huge amount of manpower to build all those mirror assemblies, and the target tower. Panels don't last long, and are expensive to build because of all those rare earth minerals." (Wow, you'd almost think these were true facts!) Reflecting plants are not needed; they're simply another form of centralized generation which cheap, efficient photovoltaic solar panels have made obsolete. What rare earth minerals? I think someone is confusing technologies here; I find no evidence that current solar-electric panels use any such minerals. And solar panels last at least as long as nuclear power plants. My hope is that if enough Wacco users choose to "ignore" these kinds of deceptive propaganda posts, they'll no longer show up on WaccoBB.net! CSummer