Nuclear Power Archives
"The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue. It made absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of glasnost, and I must say that I started to think about time in terms of pre-Chernobyl and post-Chernobyl."
Mikhail Gorbachev on Chernobyl, 20 years after. I'll post more on this as the April 26 anniversary looms.
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There's buzz in the enviro-blog-o-sphere about tonight's State of the Union address, ranging from whether Bush will admit that human-spewed CO2 is changing the climate (unlikely -- but my blog-buddy Kit Stolz over at A Change in the Wind has taken a poll) to how alternative his energy ideas will be to whether he'll endorse the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel as a solution to the nuclear-power waste crisis. The Union of Concerned Scientists is especially in a lather about this one, and has sent out a press release advising listeners to look for embedded clues:
For instance, if Bush uses the term "renewable" nuclear energy or "recycling," he is likely referring to reprocessing spent fuel to extract the plutonium for eventual use as new reactor fuel. Phrases such as "new, safer technologies" and "solving the nuclear waste problem" also refer to reprocessing but are disingenuous; new reprocessing technologies would still make weapon-usable materials accessible to terrorists and nations, and would change the form and increase the volume of nuclear waste, thereby kicking the waste problem down the road.
It's the new SOTU drinking game challenge -- knock one back every time you think "Hey, what'd he mean by that?" As a general rule, I'm against reprocessing for the reasons John McPhee and UCS' Dave Lochbaum are: Proliferation and pollution. But I'm open to discussion on that one.
On another note, I did a segment of a Bay Area radio show this morning, Your Call Radio, with the always inspiring John Sellars of the Ruckus Society (I profiled him years ago, here) and Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. We talked about so-called "eco-terror" threat, the many indictments of the last month and the motiviations the FBI has to exaggerate the domestic "terror" threat coming from animal rights and fringe environmental groups. I was impressed with the high-minded tone of the discussion, the host and the callers. It was a good live media experience (and I've had some disasters). You can listen here.
And on that note: Read this post over at Gristmill about the recently indicted alleged ecoterrorists saboteurs and their "unremarkable lives." Evidently Chelsea Gerlach wrote in her yearbook that her generation was born to save the earth. Lock her up!
(Cartoon source: Funny Times)
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For how long would the fish in Lake Erie have glowed in the dark . . .
by Judith Lewis
January 20, 2006 10:01 AM
. . . had the reactor head at Davis-Besse burst in a cloud of radioactive steam?
The U.S. Justice Department has ordered FirstEnergy, the owner of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant on Lake Erie in Ohio, to by $28 million in fines, restitution and community service projects for deliberately falsifying information to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about the plant's 2002 fuel leak. In 2001, acid was found to have eaten away at a steel cap on a reactor vessel; Toledo Blade reporter Tom Henry has described it as a "gaping cavity that almost burst open with radioactive steam, " and "the nuclear industry’s biggest safety lapse since the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania in 1979," according to NRC officials.
According to today's AP story (Forbes has it laid out nicely here), "Company and Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigations concluded that the rust hole had been growing for at least four years and that Davis-Besse's managers had ignored the evidence because they were focused on profits rather than safety at the plant."
I'm not going to defend FirstEnergy, but as the Blade reports, at least one NRC official had a hold of this photo of the rusted reactor, (known as the "red photo") in May of 2000, and allowed the reactor to continue operating through 2002 (FirstEnergy "fought off" a shutdown in 2001, the Blade says). It seems to me Davis-Besse points to a larger systemic failure than just one company messing up.
Nor is it possible to pin the whole mess on Andrew Siemaszko, the engineer scapegoated for the nearly averted disaster. Siemaszko claims in a whistleblower complaint that he was fired in 2002 for insisting on expensive overhauls the company didn't want to pay for.
Somehow, $28 million doesn't seem like enough. Money doesn't seem like enough. You might even say that events like this one serve to turn the public off an energy source that could avert climate change, and therefore FirstEnergy, the NRC and whoever else snoozed on the job should be held responsible for the carbon in the atmosphere.
Okay, that's a stretch. But the point is: The U.S. is never going to adopt nuclear energy whole hog unless the root causes of these mishaps -- and Davis-Besse is only the biggest in recent years -- are acknowledged and addressed. Safety vs. profit is not a fair fight.
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In the U.S., 20 percent of 1,004 people polled say they're dangerous.
In Germany: Half of 1,002 polled don't like them and 26 percent want to close all plants.
In Morocco: They scare 49 percent of the population (it doesn't say how many were polled).
In the U.K.: 37 percent said remaining plants should be maintained but no more should be build.
But in South Korea: 52 percent say bring 'em on:
The country, which already produces 38 percent of its electricity with nuclear energy, is planning to build 12 new reactors by within 10 years, said Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency spokeswoman Karen Daifuku in a telephone interview.
The IAEA hired GlobeScan to do a survey. Bloomberg has the story.
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"I find the extension of the time frame for the Yucca Mountain rules to 1 million years to be absolutely preposterous," wrote Frank A. Albini, a retired research professor of mechanical engineering at Montana State University, Bozeman."The rules should apply no longer than the current life of the nation, about 200 years. By then, the people of the U.S., if such still exists, will probably not even be able to read, much less interpret, the rules. This is silliness in the extreme."
Public comments on the Yucca Mountain standards, from the Las Vegas Sun (via Greenwire).