America's Eggshell Nukes

[FourScore]

Harvey Wasserman
Posted: November 15, 2010 08:45 PM

America's Eggshell Nukes

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made it clear that America's 104 licensed atomic power reactors are not accidents waiting to happen.

They are accidents in progress.

And proposals to build a "new generation" of reactors are not mere scams. They comprise a predictable plan for permanent national bankruptcy.

On November 10, the USNRC delivered a stunning reprimand to Japanese-owned Westinghouse, which proposes building new atomic reactors here and around the world. The commission warned that the containment design for the new AP1000 did not include a "realistic" analysis of its ability to withstand a jet crash...

SNIP

...The hotly debated ability of proposed new commercial reactors to withstand a jet crash underscores a stunning reality: not one of the 104 old ones now operating in the US has the proven ability to do so. The reactor industry successfully fought off such requirements, complaining they would make the plants too expensive to build. More than two dozen US General Electric Mark I containments are rated as weaker than the structure that blew off Chernobyl Unit Four during its 1986 catastrophe.

Owner-operators now want license extensions that would keep those same reactors going for 20 or more additional years. Under intense multi-decade stress from heat and radiation, all suffer dangerously from embrittlement of critical metals and degradation of structural concrete.

Because spent fuel pool are overflowing, thousands of tons of highly radioactive fuel rods now sit in "dry casks" -- concrete boxes with vent holes. Neither the pools nor the casks can withstand a jet crash, or even a low level terror attack...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harvey-wasserman/americas-eggshell-nukes_b_783424.html