Anyone know about Shoreham nuclear power plant?

[anti_shrub]

I had the local Rush wannabe on the radio this morning and he was screeching about how the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil environmentalists are to blame for the blackout because they got this plant in NY shut down.

Anyone know the real story?

[Kolesar]

1. 7 Million people on Long Island with scant highways to escape

So they built a nuclear generating station there. Bad idea, indeed.
Long Island Light Company went bankrupt due to this.

http://www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/9/hs9shore.htm

[anti_shrub]

2. That story doesn't exactly clear environmentalists

When the header refers to "anti nuke activists"........

[htuttle]

3. For one thing, an extra power plant would not have mattered

The collapse of the grid seems to have been due with transmission lines failing when they couldn't cope with a surge in Ohio.

An extra plant in Long Island would simply have shut itself down with the rest of them. It's irrelevant to the problem (as are most of the Fatman's remarks...).

[DoYouEverWonder]

4. The bad thing this last blackout proved

Is that it is impossible to evacuate the metropolitan NY area in a timely fashion.

If you do have a problem with either a terrorist attack or one of the nuke plants, millions of people will be exposed to whatever is released and there are no adequate provisions in place to do anything about it. Heck, it takes them at least 5 hours, just to get W sobered up enough, to bumble his way through a short and meaningless statement.

Folks need to realize, the next time something happens, you and your neighbors are on your own. People are proving that they can pull together and help each other get through these emergencies but forget about depending on the WH or the Dept of Homeland Security to be of any real use.

[Warren Stuart]

5. The plant was half built

Before it was decided to stop working on it. Environmental activism was responsible for a good part of this. Our electric rates went through the roof because of it, we were paying the highest in the nation at one point.

Whether or not this was the correct thing to do will never be known. It did take a lot of money out of circulation, whether or not these funds would have been spent on maintaining the electric infrastructure likewise will never be known.

For some reason I didn't feel threatened by having a nuclear power plant on Long Island, call me naive but when the ones most responsible for building the plant, would be the ones most impacted by a disaster. For some reason I would tend to think that they would make sure it got built right.

I do have a science background, so I guess that makes me one of them.