A $50 Billion Nuke Power Bomb Is Dropping Toward Obama's Stimulus Package-by Harvey Wasserman

[kpete]

Published on Saturday, January 31, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
A $50 Billion Nuke Power Bomb Is Dropping Toward Obama's Stimulus Package
by Harvey Wasserman

The desperate, dangerous nuclear power industry has dropped a $50 billion stealth bomb meant to irradiate the Obama Stimulus Package.

It comes in the form of a mega-loan guarantee package that would build new reactors Wall Street wouldn't finance even when it had cash. It will take a healthy dose of citizen action to stop it, so start calling your Senators now.

The vaguely worded bailout-in-advance provision was snuck through the Senate Appropriations Committee in the deep night of January 27. It would provide $50 billion in loan guarantees for "eligible technologies" that would technically include renewable sources and electric transmission. But the handout is clearly directed at nukes and "clean coal."

The Stimulus Package is explicitly meant to create jobs within the next two years. But according to sources at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, no new reactors could be licensed for construction within that time. Nor could any new coal plants. And thus the funds in this rider are to "remain available until committed." That means their "stimulus" might not go into effect for many years.

more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/31-4

[RollWithIt]

1. We are simply doing what France did already...

Government funded nuclear power. It has actually been very successful there. The safety risks with todays technologies are reduced to such a low point as to be irrelevant.

[NNN0LHI]

3. Because no one wants a nuclear reactor built near their home and they will sue to prevent it

We went though this back in the 1970's.

Don

[madokie]

8. Yes we did Don but looks like we'll have to do it again

[NNN0LHI]

10. I am torn on this issue myself

Its not all black and white as it was 30 years ago I don't think?

I trust Obama's judgement on this issue. Got to trust someone.

Don

[madokie]

13. President Obama's decision on that will be fine by me too

I'd like to see more research on fusion though.

[Tesha]

30. Until there's a solution for the nuclear waste, it's still pretty black-and-white. (NT)

[Pavulon]

39. Nevada, nuked them plenty. They get the short straw, problem over (nt)

[struggle4progress]

24. It'll be harder this time: the ground rules have changed a lot since then.

<edit: clarification>

[w4rma]

4. This bill is meant to create jobs, not fund things that don't need funding. (nt)

[Vincardog]

17. The French have successfully been dumping their nuclear waste in the north sea. I call BS on their

"success". We do not need to duplicate it.

[Sirveri]

20. The US Navy dumps radioactive water into the Ocean too.

It's called the degas procedure, it's typically done prior to returning to port to decrease the ammount of radioactive Argon 41 left in the pressuriser.

Here's a good question though, how much of that radioactivity gets back to shore.

Here's another good question, how many curies are they dumping, into what area, how much of it escapes the containment vessel, and then if you could go ahead and compute dilution over a circular area that intercepts the nearest land mass that would be excellant.

I'm guessing you can't do those calculations though, since you don't have any real knowledge about nuclear physics, or radiological controls.

[Vincardog]

32. I do know that not creating and dumping pollution that is going to be around 50,000 years from now

is worse than not doing it.

Excuse me professor but WTF is it in your post that should make me respect your opinion?

how many curies are they dumping,Good question as the FRANCE.
Into what area? The North Sea.
how much of it escapes the containment vessel? Who said they use a containment vessel?


and then if you could go ahead and compute any damn thing you want it is a bad idea.

[Sirveri]

34. so you're talking about something you have no idea of how it works.

Unlike you I actually was trained in nuclear engineering, and have operated a nuclear plant. I have dumped radioactive materials over board.

You throw around 50,000 years, yet have no idea what the concept of a curie is. I could dump material into the ocean that has a half life of 50,000 years, but if it takes 20,000 pounds of the stuff to even get a single curie out of it, it doesn't matter. But since you don't understand radiological controls or the science that goes into it, you wouldn't know that.

As for you telling me to go ask the French, you said they were doing it, back yourself up. The burden of proof is upon the person making the claim, and that's not me.

Also it helps to think before you post, as most of what you typed was nearly illegible.

[Vincardog]

35. If you want links about the French dumping waste look here

<http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search?invocationType=client_searchbox&query=french%20dumping%20nuclear%20waste >

If you admit to dumping radioactive materials over board from your nuclear power plant I hope repent doing it. How long do you believe we can survive after you kill off the oceans?

[Sirveri]

37. I don't repent anything. Because it won't kill the oceans.

We caused more damage because we were venting straight steam overboard more than anything else.

The half life of the primary radionuclide was 14 hours, which means that it has completly dissipated within a week, it's also a noble gas, so it doesn't enter the food chain (even if it did it would still decay away to background after a week).

Stick to talking about things you actually know something about.

[leveymg]

18. Every buck for nukes takes away $$$ from solar and wind conversion.

Wonder who snuck that sneakily crafted provision in there? Could it have been Senator Glows in the Dark DiFi (whose husband owns a nuclear waste dumping company)?

[StreetKnowledge]

48. Point taken. but reality doesn't favor wind and solar

They are not reliable. The sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. As a result, those generators need backups - which at least here in Canada are usually natural-gas fueled generators. So, the net result is pretty obvious.

Nuclear waste isn't as ugly a problem as some make it out to be. You could fit all of the nuclear waste ever made by the world's 1500 civilian and military nuclear reactors onto a supertanker. And yes, it's highly radioactive and extremely dangerous, but if you do the smart thing and reprocess it, it reduces the half-life of the waste from 25,000 years to about 25. Even if you are very careful and wait out 20 half-lifes (which the nuclear industry gentleman above assumed 15 in his argument), that waste becomes largely harmless in about 500 years. Yes, that's still a long time, but there is no need to say "it'll be dangerous for 50,000 years!", but that's onyl true if one is stupid enough to neither irradiate, reprocess or both waste. Uranium is a finite resource, and Pressurized and Boiling Water reactors, which are the majority in the United States, can run on plutonium with minimal modifications. Larger isotopes of nuclear elements generally are more unstable but decay faster. Iodine for example, Iodine-131 has a half-life of a little more than eight days, so reactor-hot Iodine is dangerous for about five to six months. Iodine-133, by contrast, has a half-life of 21 hours, so its danger period is about two and a half weeks.

Plutonium-239, which is what is primarily used to make nuclear weapons, has a half-life of 24,100 years. But the heavier element, Plutonium-240, drops that number to about 6500 years, And Plutonium-241 drops that to 14 years.

Simply using additional reactors to run the dangerous elements through again to reduce half-life (if for a short period they become far more radioactive) is a way to make the nuclear waste problem much less of one.

As for the inevitable concern about terrorists, don't bother. Countries can't figure out how to enrich uranium enough to make bombs, and plutonium is extremely difficult to work with - denser than hell, the dust can very easily ignite, and you cannot machine it in the presence of oxygen (it oxidizes rapidly) and reacts violently to nitrogen, so trying to machine it for a weapon is a pain in the ass, as some researches at Los Alamos found out in the 1940s. (Some died as a result, it should be pointed out.)

Nuclear energy is portrayed as a boogeyman with extreme dangers, when the reality is far from the truth. Living near a modern reactor gives off less radiation than a transatlantic airplane flight and far less than a chest x-ray. Most modern reactors cannot meltdown, as they could only hit a certain level before either the temperature of the reaction kills it or in the case of heavy water reactors, the heavy water boils off, which deprives the fuel of a way to fission, thus killing the reaction. In the western world today, you cannot build an older-style reactor.

The costs are so high now because the reactors are very few in number with highly sophisticated components, and very advanced engineering that can only be done by people with many years of experience and education. Combined with regulatory hurdles and extensive site analysis, the price for a new station is stupidly high. But once the plant is built, it can operate for decades with few issues. Most modern designs can also refuel while in operation, and the uranium fuel itself is plentiful. Extensive deposits of uranium exist in much of the American West. Once the plant is built, the running costs are not so high as many think.

Even with plants in zones that are vulnerable to natural disasters - Turkey Point in Florida and San Onofre and Diablo Canyon in California, for example - the facilities are designed to take the hits. Turkey Point was hit head on by Category 5 Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and sustained minimal damage. And as Palo Verde in Arizona has proved, you don't need a major body of water right there to have such a plant operating.

Nuclear power plants are a good option for filling the energy needs of a nation with sufficient capital to build the plants. If you get a few plants going, economies of scale will reduce the price on later ones, and its far better than relying on fossil fuels, either in primary or in backup with wind turbines and solar cells. Don't get me wrong, the ideas are good, but one cannot rely on them for power needs, at least with current technology.

[MadHound]

21. Really? If the safety issues are so low, why can't any reactor get private insurance?

Oh, yeah, those darn safety risks.

Until you figure out how to eliminate human error, and figure out what to do with all that nuclear waste, nuclear power is simply a disaster waiting to happen.

[StreetKnowledge]

49. Let's Look Again, shall we?

Let's look at these.

- Human error is a problem ruled out of modern designs. Any one of new generation designs, even if the operators try to melt the thing down or cause a disaster, cannot cause a major accident.

- Nuclear waste is a small amount (as I said, all of it ever made could fit in a supertanker), and using technology available could reduce the half-lives of the radioactive material and danger enormously.

It's only a disaster waiting to happen if its run badly, engineered badly or you have a bunch of horrible circumstances. Three mile Island was operator mistakes compounded by equipment failure, which should have been unacceptable in a plant that was literally months old. Chernobyl was a rickety plant design, modified from a reactor designed to make plutonium for the military, that would have never have been built in the West. Powerful, but unstable at best.

[MadHound]

52. Wrong on both counts

The newest generation of reactor, the Westinghouse AP1000 is having some very severe problems, so much so that the NRC is pulling back from certifying it.

If you're talking about the pebble bed reactors, well they have problems also. For one, the risk of a graphite fire goes way up (same sort of fire as Chernobyl). Furthermore, why should we go with a technology that has been found wanting, and unsafe, time and again? <http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/pbmrfactsheet.htm>

As far as nuclear waste goes, are you actually going to sit there and tell me all the nuclear waste ever made can fit into a super tanker? I suppose that depends on what you call nuclear waste. If you're including just the fuel rods, sure, you're probably right. But nuclear waste is much larger than that, ranging from low level waste, gloves, swipes and such, to high level waste, such as activated aluminum cans and activated tools, to reactor components itself, like the containment vessel. Sorry, but all of that put together is a hell of a lot more than a super tanker can carry, or for that matter, many super containers can carry.

Besides, it isn't necessarily the volume of nuclear waste that's the problem(though that problem is growing). The real problem is what the hell are you going to do with it? Bury it in Yucca Mt.? Way to condemn Las Vegas to toxic water. Store on sight, hmmm, all sorts of problems as tritium and other nasties leak into the ground water. Drop it in the ocean like France does? Now that's real responsible, NOT. The simple fact of the matter is that there isn't a single good solution to the waste issue.

Oh, and back to the private insurance question, there still isn't a private insurance company that is willing to insure a nuclear reactor, including pebble beds. That should tell you something right there.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

2. We are in trouble

From all quarters we get "The American way of life is non-negotiable" and all sorts of dangerous schemes to keep it going.

[TheWraith]

5. Yet more CommonDreams muckraking. nt

[starroute]

6. You say that like it's a bad thing

Where I come from, the muckrakers are American heroes. What's your problem?

[movonne]

7. Do you find this a good thing???

[bvar22]

12. If you can't argue with the message....

...attack the messenger!

[bvar22]

14. If you can't argue with the message....

...attack the messenger!

[sam sarrha]

9. there are much cheaper and exceedingly safer "Nest Reactors", recycle the Bomb material into them.

i have always felt that the "Cold War" was nothing buy a Scheme by the power industry to produce and store nuclear reactor fuel for fake peak oil times at taxpayers expense.

[Greyhound]

23. Is this the one that "burns" DU? I heard a guy talking about them a few months ago

and have not found anything else since.

It uses the spent fuel from traditional breeder reactors and produced almost no waste.

[Sirveri]

38. burning DU is already accomplished in traditional breeder reactors.

The CANDU reactor is a good example of it. But what he was talking about was Plutonium MOX fuel, which is more heavily used in Europe as an alternative fuel source. The problem with DU is that it needs fast neutrons to fission, or it needs neutron activation to transmute to Pu-239. Both of which are possible in certain varients of breeder reactors.

[sam sarrha]

51. no, it cant melt down..very simple an cheap to build and run

[bvar22]

11. These things don't "sneak in" by themselves.

Someone has to put them in.
In our new era of transparency, we should know the name of the Senator who "snuck" this into the bill, and also his relationship to the parties that benefit.

The American People have a right to this information.
Obama has promised to make this available to us.

[snot]

15. k&r'd

[PurityOfEssence]

16. Just say "no"

Nuclear power is simply not safe; the waste is unmanagable by fallible human beings, and mistakes with it are disasters.

[Sirveri]

19. Nuclear is one of the safest power sources today.

Modern nuclear designs are near fool proof, a three year old could run one during a LOCC and likely not cause fuel damage. Triple redunancy and state of the art maintenance QA procedures learned from 60 years of usage. But anti-nuke wing nuts like to trot out old out moded designs from the 1950's, or ancient soviet era bomb making plants.

But you probably have no idea how a nuclear plant actually works, let alone actually operated one.

[NNN0LHI]

25. If they are so safe why won't my homeowners insurance cover against a nuclear accident?

[struggle4progress]

28. Speaker to investigate 'rigging of parliamentary procedure' in Sellafield deal (Guardian)

Michael Martin to look into claim that MPs were not properly consulted over deal to indemnify a private consortium from any liability in the event of an accident at the nuclear reprocessing site

David Hencke, Westminster correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009 00.05 GMT

A government decision to rush through a scheme indemnifying a US-led private consortium who took over Sellafield from any liability for a nuclear accident is to be investigated by the Speaker of the Commons, Michael Martin.

He has accepted a complaint from Paul Flynn, the Labour MP for Newport, that former energy minister Malcolm Wicks had not properly consulted MPs when he granted the consortium, made up of the American company URS Washington, French firm Areva and the UK company Amec, an indemnity ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/22/sellafield

The industry isn't viable unless the risks are borne by the public rather than investors

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

33. Nothing to insure.

The chances of an accident are miniscule and the government would fund any recovery from an accident.

David

[struggle4progress]

42. If it's so safe, why does the industry need the Price-Anderson liability cap?

[Sirveri]

44. because insurers aren't knowledgable about nuclear science.

Insurance companies are ran by people, people are human, and the wonderous media has done a great job stoking fears that other people have about things because they don't know what those things do. Did you know I absorbed 1000 millirem? Wow, it's this wonderous foreign sounding thing, but it's a pointless number since it doesn't mention time period for exposure, and it's also 1/5 the yearly legal limit. People go crazy when they say that 3 mile gave an average dose of 5 mrem. Despite 5 mrem being less than I got in a single month operating a nuclear reactor. It's the worst type of fear and paranoia tactic employed by people who want to use certain debate tactics to squash something they don't understand, rather than face the facts about nuclear power. It stifles the discussion and instead fills it with non-sensical noise.

[StreetKnowledge]

50. Well said.

From the son of a US Navy man who worked on more than one nuclear vessel. :)

Folks, think about this - every time you get an X-ray, step on a plane, use a glow in the dark watch or clock or walk through a metal detector, you get exposed to radiation. The amount of radiation needed to kill a person is far more than such things cause, of course. Chernobyl was damn near a worst-case scenario for anybody - a reactor that literally self-destructed and blasted most of its contents into a 100,000-foot tall plume, where the prevailing wind carried it all around the world. Even that didn't have horrible effect for everybody, did it? The area around for 30 miles was evacuated and may never be inhabited again, but that gap has since shrunk to 10 miles. The radiation from that disaster sank down to miniscule levels with days if not hours.

[struggle4progress]

57. Uh .. insurance companies do actuarial calculations to decide what to insure:

nobody makes such decisions by gut instinct

[struggle4progress]

26. There was lots of leaky nuke news in January:

Vermont Yankee sprung two leaks in two days. There was a radioactive leak at Sellafield when Gordon Brown visited. We heard about a fourteen year radioactive leak at the Bradwell plant in Essex. The Chalk River plant dumped radioactive water into the Ottawa River. The industry's notion that a three-year could run one of these things may be part of the problem

http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20090109/NEWS04/901090353
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/1.507046
http://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/4024439.North_Essex__Bradwell_nuclear_waste_leak_claim/
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/266279

[Sirveri]

36. Radiation is SO scary.

I've been exposed to high level ionizing radiation. I had my gonads about a foot away from a 1 rem per hour hot spot once.

Guess what, I'm perfectly fine. And so are the residents of Vermont. ENVY was actually one of the plants I applied for an operations position at. They're one of the older operating plants. BWR style reactors like this generally treat the entire plant as a containment structure, which means that any fluid which drips on the floor drains to special storage tanks to prevent discharge to the environment. Also since it is from the feedwater system, it is likely downstream of the condensate polishers, which means that all the short lived radioactives have decayed out, and most of the long term have been scrubbed out by the polishers.

So the public is entirely safe, and the only people at risk of contamination are the employees, and the contamination levels are likely so low that they won't even register anything above background.

And I also like how you decided to quote me out of context. What I said was that a three year old could run a MODERN plant during a LOCC casualty without causing fuel damage. Since the majority of the statement consists of technical terms, it's fairly important to keep the phrase intact. So since this plant was a second generation BWR and not a 4th gen, it really doesn't count. That said it was 'technically' a LOCC, however the leak rate was so slow it likely didn't impact core water levels, or require a scram. In fact it barely qualifies as a leak, since it's 60 drops a minute. Considering that the pressure in that pipe could be as high as 1000 psi, that's not very obscene, they likely get worse leakage if you combined the leakage rate from every single valve packing gland.

[struggle4progress]

41. Since "rem" is an idealized approximate absorbed dose, your claim to have

had your gonads a foot away from a 1 rem per hour hot spot really doesn't make sense: the emission type and source matter, and what constitutes suitable shielding matter varies accordingly; the length of exposure will generally also matter. Deliberately or otherwise, you're unclear about whether your location would have produced a whole-body dose or a dose to your gonads of 1 rem in an hour. I myself wouldn't deliberately subject my my gonads anything like a 1 rem dose, absent some justifying medical need: since BEIR estimated a 15 rem testicular dose would produce temporary sterility, it is prudent to assume that even 1 rem dose is likely to produce some unrepaired damage to germ cell DNA, that might appear in a following generation

Your claim that the entire plant is treated as a containment structure actually means the entire site is treated as a containment structure -- and it's not always a particularly effective one. Offsite radiological contamination is not unknown, despite frequent industry claims that it is impossible: the following example took me about 30 seconds to locate

UNITED STATES
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
OFFICE OF NUCLEAR REACTOR REGULATION
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20555-0001
July 10, 2006
NRC INFORMATION NOTICE 2006-13: GROUND-WATER CONTAMINATION DUE TO UNDETECTED LEAKAGE OF RADIOACTIVE WATER

... Braidwood Nuclear Power Plant
In March 2005, the licensee was notified by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of tritium detected in a nearby residential well ...

Dresden Nuclear Power Station
... Following the 2004 leak, the licensee sampled the private wells of nearby residents. One of the residents’ wells that had shown detectable tritium for a number of years had tritium levels of approximately 1,000 pCi/L. Additionally, three other residential wells were found to have measurable but lower levels of tritium ...

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/2006/in200613.pdf

Anyone who wants to consider the credibility of your claim, that a three year old could handle a loss of coolant accident at a modern nuclear plant, should read the beginning of the Scientific American article I posted down-thread, which discusses the corrosion at Davis Besse (discovered, at best, only a few months before loss of reactor head integrity) -- where further investigation found major coolant system problems

The dishonesty of nuclear industry propaganda continues to suggest that we should generally regard its claims with some skepticism

[Sirveri]

45. thank you for exposing your lack of insider knowledge.

Reactor compartment survey maps typically map out general area radiation levels in mrem/hr and they also note hot spot locations with an asterick also with mrem/hr notation (note that these are on contact). And yes, it makes complete sense, if you have ever actually worked inside an RCA (Radiologically Controlled Area). The emission type and source are all irrelevant (though our instrumentation was calibrate to detect Co-60). This is because our counters would pick up and display in mr/hr, so the shielding from the piece of piping that the hot spot was in is already taken into account. You are right that time in area was an issue, since I was doing primary valve ops in the area and it was just to verify a torque value I was probably only there for about ten minutes.

For background for the curious, this hot spot occured when we were replacing differential pressure detectors for the loop flow detectors for an I&C upgrade we were performing. This caused a hydraulic/mechanical shock which caused a hot spot to settle in a leg of piping near one of the detectors.

as for you saying that my claim that the site is a containment vessel... you're wrong. The plant is not the same as the site. The plant is the reactor building and the turbine room (which the condensor and associated feed piping would be in the basement of). The site would extend to the fence line and include auxillary support, administrative, and training buildings. BWR style reactors are kept locked down tight to prevent releases. Even if there was a release it is minimal and harmless.

Hey while we're at it, lets talk about that 1000 pCi/L ammount. Wow, that sounds like a huge number, until you realise that the legal limit in the US for drinking water is 20,000 pCi/L. So they found a very small contamination at 1/20th the legal levels? Wow, now I'm really scared. They might get an extra 0.2 mrem/yr from that (Considering the legal limit is designed to give 4 mrem/yr). Compared to the 300 mrem/yr I get just from being on earth, you'll pardon me for not being impressed.

As for dishonesty... well you're either being incredibly dishonest about what you post, or you have no clue what you're talking about. You can toss out all the buzz words you want, but that won't give you actual operating experience. There is more to a correct answer to the question than key words and tricky phrases, despite what power school might teach.

[struggle4progress]

59. You claimed "the only people at risk of contamination are the employees": I provided links

showing that not everything is contained "at the plant," even if one regards "the plant" as comprising the entire site. If you want now to say that "the plant" comprises merely various buildings and paved surfaces, that does not affect the fact that not everything is contained on-site -- and the fact that radiological contamination occurs off-site obviously implies that not everything is contained at the various buildings and paved surfaces

[Sirveri]

64. you provided links showing that offsite levels were safe.

You also provided links showing that coal produces more radioactivity than nuclear off site. Congratualations, thanks for arguing my point for me.

[struggle4progress]

66. Anyone who wants to know what I posted should read my posts, not your "summaries"

[Sirveri]

67. don't like being called out on your BS I see.

[struggle4progress]

60. If you regard emission type as irrelevant, you know nothing about radiobiology

[Sirveri]

63. nice of you to ignore the actual content in my post.

But hey we'll follow up this tangent. The majority of contamination sources are beta decay emitters, meaning a gamma ray and an electron (for the high energy emitters we're generally concerned with, ie not tritium). beta only provides a skin dose (if it's even powerful enough to do that), while gamma provides a whole body dose. alpha emitters are generally only found in the core, as they primarily exist in the super heavy elements. Neutrons only come from the fission process, which occurs rarely in man made isotopes such as Pu-239 which will undergo spontaneous fission, but is otherwise limited to the core.

Alpha is only dangerous if you eat it, neutrons can create unstable radio isotopes. That said, they're irrelevant in the majority of cases because the primary emission source encountered is gamma, beta will be blocked by clothing, and is generally fairly weak. gamma has a quality factor of 1, which means for every roentgen you pull you will get 1 rem. alpha has 20, neutrons are differant depending on if they're fast or thermal.

if you want to argue about the 'ideal man' used to compute the REM that's fine. It's really all fairly irrelevant since people will still be absorbing similar levels. Sure someone who is overweight will have a greater water mass and tenth thickness and will absorb more radiation. But when you're talking about levels in the millirem spectrum it's irrelevant, since you need to pull a dose of 100 REM in a short period of time to get anywhere near radiation poisoning. All it does is provide a baseline for comparison, that way you can get a standardised number.

But you just go ahead and ignore the legal limit of 20000 pCi/L, and keep posting about that 1000 pCi/L of tritium, which is barely enough to give an internal dose of .2 mrem/yr (assuming you drink 2 liters a day of that source). Of course if you stand next to a cup of water containing that tritium you won't get any dose, since the beta it emits is so weak it can't even give a skin dose.

[struggle4progress]

65. So, despite your claim in #45, that "emission type is irrelevant," you now admit it matters

[Sirveri]

68. all I did was explain differant types of radiation.

5 Curies is still 5 curies, and it will still produce 5 rem per hour at 3 feet if it's a gamma emitting point source, which is what the majority of fission waste products are. so yeah, emission type is irrelevant. The only signifigant distinction that should be made for emission types is for radio iodine, since that likes to enter the body and attack the thyroid. But when you're talking about tritium it might as well be Co-60. It just takes less Co-60 to get the same Curie count.

[struggle4progress]

27. Indian Point is a nice example of the glorious nuclear industry:

17 safety problems found at Indian Pt.

Federal regulators want Indian Point to address 17 safety issues before considering whether the plant's two nuclear reactors can operate for an extra 20 years ...

"Whether they can resolve all the issues remains to be seen," <NRC spokesman Neil> Sheehan said ...

Sheehan said, as an example, the plant wouldn't need to stop tritium and strontium 90 leaks at the site before July ...

http://lohud.com/article/2008901220424

Hudson River Lovers Fight to Shutter Aging Nuclear Power Plant

... “There are very toxic, highly irradiated tanks partially buried on site,” says attorney Phillip Musegaas, who serves as Hudson River Program Director for Riverkeeper, the nonprofit guardian of the Hudson River and protector of 2,000 square miles of watershed that feed New York City’s water supply ...

Then there’s the plant’s cooling system, which uses river water as a coolant -- to the peril of millions of fish, fish eggs and larvae that get sucked into the system.

“They use 2.2 billion gallons of water a day,” says Riverkeeper’s boat captain John Lipscomb. “All the life in that water gets cooked. It’s a massive impact” ...

The company did just announce it would spend $100 million on various cosmetic improvements, such as enhancing public access for tours and landscaping to make the site less of an eyesore ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a.Y7MW1H7PTM&refer=muse

[Sirveri]

40. Reporters need to report better.

Just because something is irradiated, doesn't make it radioactive. By radioactive I mean more radioactive than it normally would be. People are radioactive. The streets are radioactive. Asphault will give you a dose of about 40 mr a year. Dirt gives about 20, the sun can give you 100. As for the cooling system, I guess all those coal and oil plants are somehow exempt? A large plant near by my house uses bay water, and it's nat gas fired. It's not like they WANT to fry wild life, because that increases maintainance costs. So they do what they can to avoid ingesting sea critters.

[struggle4progress]

43. Reactor components near the core will become radioactive by neutron activation;

some piping not significantly irradiated itself will pick up scale and crud from tramp irradiated fuel and corrosion of irradiated piping, hence contains radioactive materials produced by irradiation. Some of these materials can be quite radioactive, as can products associated with flushing and cleaning pipes

[Sirveri]

46. Well that's all nice and good. But the article didn't say what the tanks

were even for. For all I know they could have been storage tanks for recycled pure water (e.g. water that has gone thru the plant, and then came out and was filtered a few dozen times and repurified for future reactor usage). What's the internal curie count on those tanks? I don't know, the reporter apparently doesn't either. But it just sounds so cool to say irradiated doesn't it.

[struggle4progress]

56. Since shutdown Indian Point 1 is not using DECON, its wastes are onsite:

the resulting radioactive parts and wastes are merely "storage tanks for recycled pure water"

[struggle4progress]

29. Atomic Weight: Balancing the Risks and Rewards of a Power Source (Scientific American)

January 29, 2009
By David Biello

On Feb. 16, 2002, the nuclear power plant called Davis–Besse on the shores of Lake Erie near Toledo, Ohio, shut down. On inspection, a pineapple-size section on the 6.63-inch- (16.84-centimeter-) thick carbon steel lid that holds in the pressurized, fission-heated water in the site's sole reactor had been entirely eaten away by boric acid formed from a leak. The only thing standing between the escape of nuclear steam and a possible chain of events leading to a meltdown was an internal liner of stainless steel just three sixteenths of an inch (0.48 centimeter) thick that had slowly bent out about an eighth of an inch (0.32 centimeter) into the cavity due to the constant 2,200 pound-per–square-inch (155-kilogram-per-square-centimeter) pressure.

That cavity of as much as 30 square inches (194 square centimeters) had formed on the Unit 1 reactor head—a hole apparently missed during prior safety inspections in 2000 and 1998 by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the government agency charged with monitoring the nation's nuclear reactors. The inspector noted deposits of boric acid but underestimated the potential impact, despite more than three decades of issues in nuclear reactors involving boric acid corroding metal. The hole was only discovered when a replaced nozzle tipped over during the repair process in 2002 ...

A subsequent review of the entire power plant by the NRC in the wake of the near-miss revealed that its emergency cooling system—a critical line of defense in the event of a meltdown—might have failed due to clogging resulting from "generic" flaws built into the plant prior to 1977.

"The reactor vessel head could have failed between two and 14 months further out, that would have been a major loss-of-coolant accident," says NRC spokesman Scott Burnell. "There would have been a very real possibility of damaging the core. In terms of coming up with probabilities, the staff determined that this event was one of the most serious situations since Three Mile Island," the Pennsylvania reactor that partially melted down in 1979. And other models put the incidence of an accident as little as two weeks away, due to the cracked and buckled stainless steel ...

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-power-plant-safety

[Sirveri]

47. You should read past the first page.

Page 3: Speaking about the 3 Mile accident.
"If they kept their hands in their pockets, everything goes much better," notes Gary Callaway, a former reactor operator at the Palo Verde and Indian Point nuclear plants in Arizona and New York State, respectively, and now an NRC trainer.

Page 4:
In fact, a typical coal-fired power plant exposes local residents to as many as 18 millirems of radiation yearly, whereas a nuclear power plant emits less than six millirems per annum, according to researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Reed adds: "Radiation should be respected, not feared."

Page 5:
And, even in the case of Three Mile Island, a catastrophe was averted, although nearby residents were evacuated and the damaged Unit 2 waits to be dismantled. More recently, the problems at Davis–Besse resulted in one independent contractor receiving a jail sentence and FirstEnergy paying $33.5 million in civil and criminal penalties—and no accident occurred. "The agency is committed to making sure that nothing like that ever happens again," says the NRC's Burnell.

I remember reading about this a while back. This independant contractor decided to ignore the boric acid he spilled and not tell anyone. It's why the most stressed character trait in nuclear power is Integrity.

[struggle4progress]

53. No, corrosion at Davis-Besse was caused by caused by leaks, NOT by a contractor spill

Fact Sheet on Reactor Pressure Vessel Issues

... Reactor Vessel Damage at Davis-Besse

In early March of 2002, during an inspection prompted by, Bulletin 2001-01, Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station identified a football-sized cavity in the units reactor vessel head. The cavity was next to a leaking nozzle with a through-wall crack and was in an area of the vessel head that had been covered with boric acid deposits for several years. Inspections at Oconee Unit 1 and Millstone Unit 2 also identified nozzle cracking. The discovery of leaks and nozzle cracking at Davis-Besse and other PWR plants called for more effective inspections of reactor pressure vessel heads and associated penetration nozzles ...

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/prv.html

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff,
v.
DAVID GEISEN, RODNEY COOK, and ANDREW SIEMASZKO, Defendants ...

.. On February 16, 2002, Davis-Besse shut down for refueling and inspection. On
March 8, 2002, the reactor vessel head was discovered to have significant degradation, in the
form of a corrosion hole. Subsequent investigation revealed that a crack in nozzle three, at the
top of the reactor pressure vessel head, had allowed boric acid to leak onto the head, where it
attacked the carbon steel head, causing a six-inch deep corrosion cavity ... http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:jGnTq8vOwi4J:www.corporatecrimereporter.com/documents/indictment.pdf+Davis-Besse+nozzle+crack+leak+corrosion&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=19&gl=us&client=opera

Davis-Besse admits it put production before safety
08/16/02
John Funk and John Mangels
Plain Dealer reporters
Chicago

... FirstEnergy earlier had analyzed and reported to the NRC the technical reasons why the milk jug-size hole formed undetected for six years, corrosion eating its way through the 6½-inch-thick lid that covers the reactor core. Only a thin, stainless-steel liner, bulging from the strain, kept the high-pressure coolant from spewing out of the reactor vessel and causing a major accident.

Workers found the hole in March while fixing cracks that had formed in nozzles on the lid. Leaks from those cracks and elsewhere formed the caustic sludge that eroded the lid ...

But plant executives didn't take the appropriate actions to keep the lid clean and to stop other sources of coolant leaks so that inspectors might have easily and quickly spotted the residue from leaking nozzles, the analysis says ...

Workers cleaning the reactor lid during each refueling shutdown weren't adequately trained, the report says. The lid inspection program didn't take into account that it might be the nozzles, and not less critical parts, that were leaking. Reports detailing the individual problems that pointed to nozzle leakage were left unresolved by managers for long periods while damage occurred unchecked ...

http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/electric/pre2003/it_put.htm

[struggle4progress]

54. I try not to cite mere opinion or blatant horseshit:

Callaway's entitled to his opinion but "If they kept their hands in their pockets, everything goes much better" is an opinion, not a statement of fact

"A nuclear power plant emits less than six millirems per annum" is blatant horseshit: a millirem is a calculated estimate of individual dose, not an emission. Although it is tempting to blame this on the SciAm reporter, the little Oak Ridge clique that preaches "coal is radiologically more significant than nuclear power" seems to specialize in misleading comparisons (such as tons v. millirems) that produce this sort of confusion. Since it is tiresome to debunk such crap repeatedly, I'll merely reference one of my many posts on this:

Radioactivity releases from nuclear operations dwarf radioactivity releases from coal
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3592611&mesg_id=3592910

<edit: link>

[struggle4progress]

31. IAEA starts check of nuclear plant

Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009

... In August 2004, superheated steam from a ruptured corroded pipe at the No. 3 nuclear reactor at the Mihama plant scalded four workers to death ...

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090121b1.html

[anonymous171]

22. Commondreams is worthless. However I will say that Nuclear Power is a waste of money

[Occam Bandage]

55. Good. Nuclear power is clean and cost-effective. Coal releases more background radiation. nt

[struggle4progress]

58. Radioactivity releases from nuclear operations dwarf radioactivity releases from coal:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3592611&mesg_id=3592910

[Occam Bandage]

61. Yes, I suppose if every plant turns into Chernobyl, we'll have problems. nt

:eyes:

[struggle4progress]

62. Even the TMI release represents about 9000 times the current radiological releases from coal

that is, the Three Mile Island accident dwarfs the radiological releases from all human coal burning since the last ice age

There are grave issues with coal -- but the radiological issues associated with coal are miniscule compared to the radiological issues associated with nuclear power

[K Gardner]

69. Ask the people in Kingston, TN about clean coal, i.e., billions of gallons of sludge in your yard.