Last night on Hardball, Sen. Domenici was talking about completing Yucca Mountain and going full-on Nuclear Power

Here's the partial transcript from the show:
LINK

You know, I have a Love/Hate relationship w/my former state of New Mexico.

I love Bill Richardson, but CAN'T STAND Domenici.......

What a pompus a**hole...

oh, and for the record, I'm against Nuclear Energy/Yucca Mountain. There's a better way, we just need the funding to research it......

Well, nuclear energy is relatively safe, clean, and it's sustainable for over 1000 years for meeting our energy needs.

BTW, the U.S. military has buried more radioactive materials out in the Nevada desert from weapons testing than Yucca mountain will ever hold.

Nuclear energy is the way to achieve energy independence.

Yes. I know. Those of us in the Southwest are quite aware of the radiation levels in our area......

I'm sorry, but "realtively safe" just doesn't cut it for me. I'd rather see solar or wind power get more funding than nuclear. It's just replacing one problem for another IMHO......

If nuclear power is only relatively safe, then so is wind. You are more likely to be distracted by a wind turbine and swerve into oncoming traffic than you are to die of cancer as the result of a nuclear meltdown.

The odds of an above-ground breach of containment- the only way that members of the public can actually be killed or subjected to significant doses of radiation- are about 1 in 10 million reactor years.

However, the odds of an actual meltdown- with a below ground breach of containment- are closer to 1 in 10 thousand reactor years (the only time we ever came within the slightest chance of this happening was at Three Mile Island). A below ground breach would make the groundwater undrinkable for 10-20 years, and we'd see about 10 more cancer deaths total as a result. Background radiation would increase modestly in a 10 mile radius around the plant (maybe 10% more than it had been before), but I'd be perfectly willing to raise my children there starting about a month after the accident, assuming we didn't have to drink the groundwater.

Well said..this is how France became independant of the OIL! with the price of gas in Europe, something was to be done!

Nukes....NO SALE!

November 26, 2003

DOE predicts nuke reactions in casks

Nevadans worry about danger at Yucca
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department predicts up to 60 uncontrolled nuclear reactions would take place inside nuclear waste casks stored at power plant sites should the casks corrode, according to a department study obtained by Nevada officials.

After a review of the documents, state officials say they believe the same thing would happen at the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The state wants the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent board set up by Congress to review the potential dump, to look into the matter.

"We were amazed to learn, after finally obtaining some of the pertinent documents from the Department of Energy through the Freedom of Information Act, that DOE's own studies anticipate that, if the repository operates as is now planned, up to 60 nuclear criticalities may plausibly occur inside the mountain, and that (the) conditional probability of occurrence may be greater than one in 1,000 per year," Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects wrote to board Chairman Michael Corradini.

Criticalities are uncontrolled nuclear reactions that could occur if water -- or other liquids -- got inside the casks. It could start a mininuclear reaction inside the casks and cause a steam explosion, said Washington attorney Joe Egan, who represents the state on Yucca matters.

The issue of water seepage at Yucca Mountain has been a critical point of debate over the planned nuclear waste repository. Scientists are still studying how water moves through the mountain. With or without water, the casks are eventually expected to corrode over a period of thousands of years.

State officials expressed surprise that the report wasn't disclosed as part of the Yucca Mountain debate.

They say Energy officials have said that the issue won't affect Yucca Mountain and state officials say this study shows that it does.

But Allen Benson, a Yucca Mountain project spokesman in Nevada, said the documents the state received do not relate to Yucca Mountain but are from a 4-year-old report looking at on-site waste storage facilities at nuclear power plants.

Benson said the department was glad Loux sent the letter to the board since it can now choose to review the matter, but that on-site storage and storage inside Yucca "are two different things."

Benson said that since the report shows that criticalities can take place inside above-ground storage containers at the 103 nuclear power plants throughout the country, especially if water gets in them, it makes even more sense to store the waste in Yucca, which is in the desert.

But state officials say the fact that the Energy Department acknowledges in this report that criticality is an issue is a huge threat.

Egan and Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval filed petitions with the U.S. Court Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking the court to include the FOIA documents in the court record. The state's major court arguments on the site will take place there on Jan. 14.

Loux said the department only predicated an "extremely low probability of occurrence" of such reactions in the Final Environmental Impact Statement issued last year. He quotes the document's specific text to that effect in his letter to Corradini.

State officials had Michael Thorne, a criticality expert, review the report and found that an expected 60 chain reaction events would occur throughout the lifetime of the repository since the department anticipates the waste packages will degrade over time.

"A criticality occurring in the repository could severely compromise the entire facility, vastly increasing radionuclide releases and making waste packages irretrievable," Loux wrote.

The department documents do not have a timeline for the events to occur, according to the letter.

"These are not nuclear explosions," Egan said. "We are not trying to scare anyone ... we are not saying this is going to happen, but DOE's own analysis notes it was a nonspeculative scenario."

But if the casks were to burst, the radioactive material would go with it. "It's literally a dirty bomb, a conventional explosion with radioactive materials," Egan said.

"Their maximum accident scenario in transport is $18 billion in clean-up (costs) and 44 early fatalities, and that's with a small puff of radiation not an explosion -- they call it a 'violent event' which is a euphemism for explosion," Egan said.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Russian Nuclear Waste Dump Explosion 1957


http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Ligh...-Hertsgaard.htm

"I am become Death,
the shatterer of worlds."

The line of Hindu scripture that flashed through Oppenheimer's mind at the moment "gadget," the first test bomb exploded above the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.

Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 11
The Vision of the Universal Form
Lord Krishna is beseeched by Arjuna to reveal His universal form showing all of existence.

Lord Krishna said: I am terrible time the destroyer of al beings in all worlds, engaged to destroy all beings in this world; of those heroic soldiers presently situated in the opposing army, even without you none will be spared. Bhagavad-Gita 11:32

(exerpt)
As such, Mayak was the site of perhaps the biggest nuclear catastrophe in history after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. There had been three nuclear disasters at Mayak whose damages were comparable to, and probably worse than, the reactor meltdown in 1986 that made Chernobyl a household name around the world. The difference with the Mayak disasters was that they never became media events. On the contrary, they were kept secret-not only from the outside world but from the Russian people, including hundreds of thousands of local residents who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation. In a striking case of Cold War duplicity and doublethink, the news from Mayak was suppressed by both the KGB and the CIA, each of which apparently feared an informed populace as much as it feared the enemy arsenal. (The CIA learned about the accidents in the course of normal intelligence gathering but declined to publicize them. Thus, when I reached Chelyabinsk in 1991, the three Mayak nuclear disasters still remained largely unknown to all but a handful of international nuclear policy experts.

Astonishingly enough, the first Mayak disaster was not an accident at all but the result of deliberate policy. From 1949, when the Mayak complex produced the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon, until 1956, Mayak officials poured their nuclear waste directly into the nearby Techa River. Tens of thousands of people living downstream received average doses of radiation four times greater than those subsequently received at Chernobyl. For the twenty-eight thousand people most acutely exposed, average individual doses were fifty-seven times greater than at Chernobyl. Nevertheless, only seventy-five hundred people were ever evacuated from their homes, and people were not forbidden to use the river water until 1953, four years after the contamination began.

The second, and most terrible, Mayak disaster took place on September 29, 1957, when a nuclear waste dump exploded, spewing seventy to eighty metric tons of waste into the sky. The waste facility had been constructed in 1953 as an alternative to more river dumping. When its cooling system malfunctioned, the waste began to dry out and heat up, eventually reaching the unearthly temperature of 350 degrees Celsius. The resulting explosion was equivalent to seventy to one hundred tons of TNT-enough to blast a thick concrete lid off the tanks and hurl it twenty-five meters away. The total amount of ejected radioactivity measured twenty million curies -- ten times more than had already been dumped in the Techa River. Ninety percent of the radioactivity fell immediately back to earth, but the remaining two million curies formed a plume half a mile high that spread across the Chelyabinsk region, severely contaminating air, water, and soil. All the pine trees in a twenty-square-kilometer area died over the next eighteen months. Approximately 272,000 people were exposed to average doses of 0.7 rems of radiation, the same amount that 750,000 Chernobyl victims would experience in 1986.

The third Mayak disaster occurred in 1967, and again nuclear waste was the culprit. In 1951, after Mayak officials realized they could no longer dump waste in the Techa River but before they built the storage facility that would explode in 1957, they began pouring waste into Lake Karachay, a natural lake within the Mayak complex; since Karachay had no outlets, this measure, it was assumed, would keep the waste from contaminating the regional water system. However, in 1967, a cyclone swept across the drought-exposed shores of Lake Karachay and whirled its deadly silt high into the air and across the surrounding landscape. Five million curies of radioactivity ,were dispersed over fifteen thousand square miles; nearly half a million people were affected.

Atomic Age Timeline Animation:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf

Posted for educational and research purposes only,
~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001584.html

Nuclear Power Has Cost And Proliferation Problems

MIT chemistry professor and former CIA chief John Deutch has co-authored a New York Times Op-Ed with MIT physics professor Ernest Moniz entitled Nuclear Power Can Work.

We built a model to compare the costs of producing electricity from new nuclear, coal and natural gas plants. The model focuses on economic cost, not regulated or subsidized cost. According to our study, the baseline cost of new nuclear power is 6.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 4.2 cents for coal and natural gas (when the price of gas is $4.50 per thousand cubic feet). Plausible, but unproved, technology could reduce nuclear costs to those of coal and gas.

However, if a cost is assigned to carbon emissions — either through a tax or some other way, as in a current Congressional proposal that would limit emissions but allow companies to buy and sell the right to discharge more pollutants — nuclear power could become an attractive economic option. For example, a $50 per ton carbon value, about the cost of capturing and separating the carbon dioxide product of coal and natural gas combustion, raises the cost of coal to 5.4 cents and natural gas to 4.8 cents.

Well, even with the cost of CO2 removal included that still leaves fossil fuels cheaper than nuclear power. Clearly nuclear power can not currently compete on the basis of production costs.

The Op-Ed alludes to a recent study done at MIT on the future of nuclear power of which both Deutch and Moniz were among the co-authors. That study, The Future Of Nuclear Power, outlines a number of problems with nuclear power.

"Fossil fuel-based electricity is projected to account for more than 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020," said Deutch. "In the U.S. 90% of the carbon emissions from electricity generation come from coal-fired generation, even though this accounts for only 52% of the electricity produced. Taking nuclear power off the table as a viable alternative will prevent the global community from achieving long-term gains in the control of carbon dioxide emissions."

But the prospects for nuclear energy as an option are limited, the report finds, by four unresolved problems: high relative costs; perceived adverse safety, environmental, and health effects; potential security risks stemming from proliferation; and unresolved challenges in long-term management of nuclear wastes.

The study examines a growth scenario where the present deployment of 360 GWe of nuclear capacity worldwide is expanded to 1000 GWe in mid-century, keeping nuclear's share of the electricity market about constant. Deployment in the U.S. would expand from about 100 GWe today to 300 GWe in mid-century. This scenario is not a prediction, but rather a study case in which nuclear power would make a significant contribution to reducing CO2 emissions.

"There is no question that the up-front costs associated with making nuclear power competitive, are higher than those associated with fossil fuels," said Dr. Moniz. "But as our study shows, there are many ways to mitigate these costs and, over time, the societal and environmental price of carbon emissions could dramatically improve the competitiveness of nuclear power"

Nuclear power used worldwide would greatly accelerate nuclear proliferation. In my view this isn't just a hypothetical risk to manage and minimize. Place nuclear reactors all over the world and it is inevitable that more countries will use the presence of reactors as an opportunity to get the materials needed to make nuclear weapons. Just a single nuclear bomb exploded in an American city could kill millions of people and cause hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in economic losses. Nuclear power has to be weighed against that risk.

The biggest argument Deutch and Moniz make for nuclear power is that increasing its use will slow the growth in CO2 emissions. For the sake of discussion leave aside the question of whether CO2 emissions are a threat to the environment. Reduction in CO2 emissions can be accomplished at less cost by using methods to capture CO2 emitted by fossil fuel plants.

The use of fossil fuels from the Middle East also sends money to the Middle East that helps fund the spread of Wahhabism, support for terrorism, and efforts to make weapons of mass destruction. But an increased use of nuclear power only in the United States will do little to decrease those cash flows. What is needed are power sources that can displace Middle Eastern fossil fuels at a cost much lower than current Middle Eastern fossil fuels market prices.

As far as increasing the use of nuclear power is concerned, the US government should pursue two main policy objectives:

Develop a nuclear fuel cycle that greatly reduces the risk of proliferation.
Develop technologies to much more cheaply build and operate nuclear power plants and to dispose of nuclear waste.
If a form of nuclear power that does not pose proliferation risks could be developed and if it could be made to be much cheaper than current fossil fuel-powered electricity then it would become a viable option.

England's nuclear white elephant...Sellafield.

Sellafield's £600m nuclear fuel factory faces closure
before opening

The Guardian
Paul Brown and Rob Evans
October 18, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,...1329787,00.html

A nuclear fuel plant that has so far cost the taxpayer
more than £600m without generating any income may be
shut down.

An inquiry by Sir John Bourn, the head of parliament's
watchdog, the National Audit Office, following a
Guardian investigation, has revealed that the option
of closure is being discussed within the government.
It could mean that the factory at Sellafield in
Cumbria, known as the mox plant because it makes new
nuclear fuel from mixed oxides of plutonium and
uranium, is shut down before it completes its first
contract. But Sir John also found that closure would
cost a significant extra amount of public money.

In July the Guardian revealed that Tony Blair had
overruled warnings from ministers that the factory
would be a financial disaster when he ordered the
plant to start production. Serious technical problems
have meant that the plant, now eight years behind
schedule, has not yet produced a single saleable item.

Sir John reveals that costs have shot up by £225m,
piling up the debts of the already technically
bankrupt, state-owned British Nuclear Fuels.

The inquiry was launched at the instigation of Michael
Meacher, the former environment minister. While in the
government, Mr Meacher had advised against opening the
plant, but was overruled by Mr Blair.

Mr Meacher said yesterday: "It is astonishing that the
government is in the position of considering closing
the plant before it has produced anything. The
situation is far worse than I thought."

In a report, Sir John says that "any decision on the
future of the [plant] will involve a choice between
continuing to operate and closure". He adds that "a
decision to close immediately would incur large costs,
including contractual penalty payments to customers".

BNFL has claimed that it could win enough orders to
make the plant financially viable, but has only been
able to land two contracts.

Sir John reports that BNFL continues to claim that it
will be able to secure enough contracts to keep the
plant going: "Furthermore, their assessment indicates
that it would be much more expensive to close the
plant immediately than to continue operating."

The plant is intended to reuse plutonium and uranium
from spent nuclear fuel rods from overseas power
stations, to produce new fuel for these stations. The
DTI said it was assessing the improvement programme
for the mox plant and deciding whether the technical
problems could be overcome.

Sir John's report says it is "likely" that the
government will review the future of the plant when it
takes over direct responsibility for it in April.

At that point, BNFL's rising debts could embarrass the
Treasury, which has anticipated a large income from
the mox plant to fund Britain's nuclear clean-up. The
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which will come
into existence in April to take charge of the clean-up
of Britain's nuclear waste mountain, has been told by
the Treasury that half its annual £2bn costs should
come from income from Sellafield's mox plant and
associated reprocessing works.

* See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net *
(Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. section 107) *

France's nuclear crisis.

Nuclear plants in the hotseat

Environmental News Network
Thursday, September 11, 2003
By Paul Schwartz

http://www.enn.com/news/2003-09-11/s_8086.asp

Perigueux, France — The worst heatwave to strike Europe since the end of
World War II vanished at the end of August, leaving in its wake
thousands of deaths and an enormous amount of public outrage.

In France, much of the blame has been placed on the government's health
service, which lacked the facilities, equipment, and personnel to care
for the many elderly citizens who became the heatwave's victims.

As the casualties of August were buried, little was said about another
sobering fact. The heatwave revealed a dangerous flaw in France's vast
system of nuclear power plants, a deficiency that could have brought the
country to the brink of catastrophe.

Temperatures soaring to more than 100 degrees for more than a week at
the beginning of August strained electrical systems all over France.
Seventy-five percent of the country's electricity is generated from
nuclear power plants. As demand for power rose with the heat, the system
quickly reached its limit.

Nuclear plants are usually located on riverbanks or by the ocean to take
advantage of the availability of cooling water for the reactors. In
France, all but four of the country's 58 nuclear power plants are
situated on riverbanks. By the beginning of the second week in August,
the French power company Electricité de France (EDF) said the extremely
hot weather and lack of rainfall had severely reduced supplies of river
water with temperatures low enough to sufficiently cool reactors. The
implications were clearly unsettling. A reactor that can't be cooled is
a reactor out of control.

According to David Lochbaum, an expert on nuclear plant safety with the
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a water-cooled reactor needs cool
water. "If the water temperature of the river gets too high, the ability
of the plant to reconvert back to water the steam it has generated to
run the turbines is impaired. The steam isn't sucked out of the turbine,
and the pressure inside the turbine tends to go up."

In addition, temperature levels inside the buildings that house the
reactors were reportedly rising dangerously. By law, nuclear plants in
France must shut down operations if the temperature inside reaches 50
degrees centigrade (122 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperature limit is
in place to protect the instruments that control the reactor and also to
contain the potentially serious hazards in the event of a malfunction.

"The plants are designed so that if an accident occurs, there are
systems in place to mitigate it so that the radiation doesn't get out to
the public," said David Lochbaum. "If the temperature in the building
gets too hot, the electrical equipment starts to fail, and that failure
can be very unpredictable. It could impact the ability of the plant to
contain the reactor and withstand the consequences of an accident. Once
a building gets to 50 degrees [centigrade] the reactor should be shut
down. It's not a very forgiving technology."

The gravity of the situation became evident when EDF revealed that it
had begun experimenting with jury-rigged garden sprinklers to hose down
the exterior shell of a hot reactor building on an old plant in the
Alsasce region. According to reports, the plant had already reached 48.8
degrees
(119.8 Fahrenheit).
---------------------------------

Click on the URL then scroll down and click on 'preview film'.

http://www.garynull.com/Events/FatalFallout.aspx

FATAL FALLOUT.

"Keep them confused."
-President Eisenhower, in a memo to advisers when asked what to tell the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons testing and the construction of nuclear power plants.

Since 1895, and the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, scientists have known about the dangers of exposure to low-level radiation. Yet even after 100 years of incontrovertible evidence that the products of nuclear fission pose a severe and fatal threat to the human species, nuclear reactors and weaponry across the country and around the globe continue to operate and proliferate. Meanwhile, the atmospheric fallout from weapons testing and nuclear accidents, such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, continues to plague the health of human populations on a geographic scale as far west as Nevada and Wyoming, and as far east as Belarus and China.

Low birth weights, infant and breast cancer mortality rates, and leukemia - not to mention the widespread poisoning of our food, milk and drinking water predicted by Rachel Carson - are just some of the legacies of atmospheric bomb tests and power plants. The United States is now buckling under the sheer weight of the evidence against it and paying out-of-court settlements to people who were exposed to radiation. But then why does the Bush administration want to license new nuclear power plants and renew the license of as many as 103 nuclear power plants currently in operation? New York Times bestselling author, Gary Null, Ph.D., an acclaimed documentary filmmaker and syndicated radio host, investigates this deadly deception.

Kucinich video on DU:
http://www.kucinich.us/dkdu.html

Depleted Uranium Weapons: The Trojan Horse
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html

* See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net * (Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107)

UGH....

This is my state. Why is it that Nevada is singled out for this? Well it could be because we have the most federally controlled land.

Geeze you want to create more waste. What so a terrorist can get a hold of it and either one make a dirty bomb or perhaps refine the waste and make weapons grade plutonium. Geezee.....

Not to mention putting all the eggs (waste) in one basket. Why am I so worried about that?

"Relatively Safe" doesn't do it for me, either. And there's all the toxic gunk left over that has to be stored for way too long. I have to say, you have more faith in the safety of living near a nuclear plant after an accident than I do. Not to mention how attractive nuclear power plants are to terrorists as targets for attacks. I've driven past wind power mills with out getting into any traffic accidents, thus far. Solar, geothermal and wind power are all worthy of further research. No, they're not practical everywhere, but they ought to be used where they ARE practical. Not that I have a hope that Bush WILL fund such research.

Melissa

I'm an engineer. I'm trained to trust science and reason; if I couldn't do that, I couldn't trust my work on computers.

If "Relatively Safe" doesn't do it for you, then you probably need to live in a bunker 40 feet underground. Thousands of people get hit by lightning every year. Dozens of people die every year when an airplane crashes into their house. The coal industry gives tens of thousands of people lung cancer and asthma every year. There's a 1 in 10^13 chance that all the air in your room will randomly move to one side and you'll suffocate.

The nuclear industry kills, on average, 1/2 a person a year based off of the public's exposure to radiation (assuming the anti-nukes' claim that radiation translates linearly into cancer deaths) and the effects of meltdowns amortized over their periods of likelihood.

As for the waste: after 500 years, it becomes as inactive as the ore it was mined from. Also, Yucca Mountain is right next to the Nevada Test Range, which has a heckuvalot more radioactive materials buried in the sand than Yucca mountain will ever have- and none of those materials are sealed in dry storage casks.

Uncle Roy has posted conspiracy theories on nuclear energy from time to time, and most of them are merely anecdotal tails of the military (not the U.S. nuclear industry) doing something stupid and irresponsible or the Soviets (who weren't subject to public scrutiny) doing something insane.

Yucca mountain is not going to blow up like a bomb. It's physically impossible. Nuclear plants cannot blow up like nuclear bombs because they only use 3% fissile Uranium (Ask anti-nuke Union of Concerned Scientists engineers, and they'll even tell you this). Yucca Mountain will have even less fissile Uranium. On top of that, even if there was an explosion, the wastes will be buried so far underground that it's not even funny. An underground explosion will not breach the surface.

Goillini,
Chernobyl did not explode "like an atom bomb" as you say....but it released
FAR MORE long-lived radioactive contamination world wide. There are some 440
(aging) nuclear power plants, of those 103 in the USA. They all produce spent
fuel (nuclear waste) from which nuclear weapons and "dirty bombs" can be
fabricated.
----------------------------

Pressure Reactor Sump Failure
http://www.nirs.org/reactors/ucspwrsumpbrief.pdf

Radiation Basics
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/WhatisRadiation.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/08/national...print&position=

September 8, 2003
Safety Problem at Nuclear Plants Is Cited
By MATTHEW L. WALD


ASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — The emergency cooling systems that are meant to protect nuclear reactors from melting down in case of a ruptured water pipe could fail after a few minutes of use at most reactors, according to a nuclear watchdog group that is citing a government study to argue that the problem makes a catastrophe at one power plant in New York 100 times more likely.

The group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a New York environmental organization, Riverkeeper, plan to petition the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week to ask that the two Indian Point reactors in Buchanan, N.Y., on the east bank of the Hudson River, should be shut until corrections are made. The problem, they argue, is that leaking water or steam would scour off pipe insulation, paint and other materials, forming debris that would clog the coolant pumps.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recognized the possibility years ago, and in September 1996 classified it as a serious problem, but does not anticipate that corrective action will be completed until early 2007. A commission official said, however, that the problem is complicated to solve and need not be fixed immediately because the accident that would require use of the safety system was unlikely in the first place.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, contended that the emergency core cooling system "is virtually certain to fail at some plants."

"Right now you're relying on a pipe not breaking," he said.

According to Mr. Lochbaum and to data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the problem involves 69 plants of a design called pressurized water reactors, in which the water that is used to carry off the useful heat, and to keep the fuel from over-heating, is kept at a pressure of about 2,200 pounds per square inch. If a pipe breaks and the pressure is released, the water would boil into steam because it is heated to more than 500 degrees. The steam could not cool the fuel, and the fuel would melt.

So the plants are equipped with an automatic emergency core cooling system. Drawing water from a tank outside the reactor dome, the system can dump thousands of gallons a minute into the reactor, making up for even a large leak.

In this design, water from a broken pipe would flow into the reactor basement. The outdoor tank typically holds 125,000 to 300,000 gallons, and when it was nearly empty, the system would start drawing water from the basement instead. The problem is that if the water picks up debris along the way, that debris could clog the screens over the pipes that lead back to the emergency pumps.

At the request of the commission, the Los Alamos National Laboratory studied the 69 plants, and found that for some, the risk of core damage was multiplied 100 times because of the debris problem. It ranked the plants but did not name them; Mr. Lochbaum's group used various detailed characteristics included in the report to determine which plant was which, and discovered that the Indian Point reactors were both in the worst five.

more...

*********************************************************************

Dave Lochbaum
Nuclear Safety Engineer
Union of Concerned Scientists
1707 H Street NW Suite 600
Washington, DC 20006-3962
(202) 223-6133 x113
(202) 223-6162 fax

From the UCS fact sheet:
Who is exposed to undue risk?
Anyone living near any one of the following PWRs is at unnecessarily
high risk as long as NRC allows the reactors to operate seriously
impaired by the containment sump problem:
PWR Name Location
Farley 1 Dothan, AL
Farley 2 Dothan, AL
Arkansas Nuclear One 1 Russellville, AR
Arkansas Nuclear One 2 Russellville, AR
Palo Verde 1 Wintersburg, AZ
Palo Verde 2 Wintersburg, AZ
Palo Verde 3 Wintersburg, AZ
Diablo Canyon 1 Avila Beach, CA
Diablo Canyon 2 Avila Beach, CA
San Onofre 2 San Clemente, CA
San Onofre 3 San Clemente, CA
more.....

What can you do?
If you work at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant, pat yourself on the back
for voluntarily fixing a serious
safety problem and being the first PWR in the United States to have done so.

If you work for the NRC, put aside the license renewal applications and
power uprate amendment
requests until this PWR containment sump problem is fixed.

If you are a member of the US Congress, ask the NRC why it is putting
the financial safety of the nuclear industry ahead of public safety.

If you live near one of the 68 PWRs, tell the NRC (opa@nrc.gov) or your
US Senators and/or
Representative that you want the NRC to fix the PWR containment sump
problem THIS year.

What will UCS do?

UCS will interface with the NRC trying to get the PWR containment sump
problem fixed sooner rather than later. And we will interface with the
US Congress, the media, and people living around the unnecessarily
dangerous reactors to try to pressure the NRC to fix this problem THIS year.
Prepared by: David Lochbaum
Nuclear Safety Engineer
Union of Concerned Scientists

``We must now worry about the children of the
children of Chernobyl,'' said Gennady Groushevoy,
head of Children of Chernobyl. ``The health danger
is reaching into a second generation ... but the
government has retreated into a Soviet-era
attitude of silence.''

In all, 7 million people in the former Soviet
republics of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are
believed to have suffered medical problems as a
result of the April 25, 1986, accident. In
Ukraine, more than 2.32 million people, including
452,000 children, have been treated for
radiation-linked illnesses, including thyroid and
blood cancer and cancerous growths, according to
Ukrainian health officials.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP...html?oref=login

Activists: Chernobyl Radiation Lingers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 13, 2004

Filed at 8:34 p.m. ET

SVETILOVICHI, Belarus (AP) -- The signs say ``KEEP
OUT'' and warn of radiation contamination, but the
mushroom-pickers trudge right past them carrying
their pails. Eighteen years after the reactor at
Chernobyl in neighboring Ukraine exploded, spewing
a cloud of radiation that blew north and
contaminated 22 percent of this ex-Soviet
republic, activists warn of a new threat facing
Belarusians: the longing to return to normal life.

more....
------------------------------

Half-Life: Living With Nuclear Waste
http://archive.greenpeace.org/mayak/index.html

Dr. Rosalie Bertell...new book,
http://www.iicph.org/planet_earth.htm

NIRS URL
http://www.nirs.org/

Zeitung,
19 November 2003

Chernobyl fallout still contaminating food chain

The effects of the world`s worst nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, are still being felt in Switzerland 17 years after the event.

Scientists have discovered a high concentration of radioactive caesium in wild boar, which are increasingly ending up on Swiss tables.

The Federal Health Office has announced that tests carried out across the country last year discovered traces of radioactive Caesium 137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl reactor disaster.

The highest levels were found in the southern canton of Ticino and eastern Switzerland.

"It is astonishing that the caesium concentration is pretty much at the same level as it was after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986," said Hansruedi Volkle of the health office.

The tests were ordered after the Ticino health authorities came across a wild boar with a level of caesium five times the accepted limit of 1,250 Becquerel (bq - the unit of radioactivity) per kilogramme during routine checks of meat.

Radioactive truffles
Suspecting that the high level of radioactivity was coming from the truffles the boar ate, scientists of the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research tested 20 specimens of the fungus across Switzerland.

Although the truffle in question - the deer truffle - is inedible for humans, boars eat it in large quantities. And in Switzerland boar meat is growing in popularity, meaning the radioactive caesium can be passed to humans.

---------------------------


http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,385...-107983,00.html

Plutonium from Sellafield in all children's teeth
Government admits plant is the source of contamination but says risk is 'minute'

Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday November 30, 2003
The Observer

Radioactive pollution from the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria has led to children's teeth across Britain being contaminated with plutonium.

The Government has admitted for the first time that Sellafield 'is a source of plutonium contamination' across the country. Public Health Minister Melanie Johnson has revealed that a study funded by the Department of Health discovered that the closer a child lived to Sellafield, the higher the levels of plutonium found in their teeth.

Johnson said: 'Analysis indicated that concentrations of plutonium... decreased with increasing distance from the west Cumbrian coast and its Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant - suggesting this plant is a source of plutonium contamination in the wider population.'

Professor Eric Wright, of Dundee University Medical School, is one of the country's leading experts on blood disorders and a member of the committee. He believes that the tiny specks of plutonium in children's teeth caused by Sellafield radioactive pollution might lead to some people falling ill with cancer.

He said: 'There are genuine concerns that the risks from internal emitters of radiation are more hazardous [than previously thought]. The real question is by how much. Is it two or three times more risky... or more than a hundred?'

They have known for six years that Sellafield has contaminated the population with plutonium but done nothing. Yet the plant continues to discharge plutonium into the Irish Sea. It shows the wanton disregard the nuclear industry has for public health and there needs to be an independent inquiry.'

Janine Allis-Smith of the campaign group Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment said: 'There is no safe amount of plutonium. The plant must be closed down immediately.'

* See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net * (Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *

Roy,

The soviet government and the U.S. military are insane and ignorant, respectively, when it comes to handling nuclear materials. The U.S. nuclear industry is so much more safely designed and so much more regulated than Soviet plants are that it's hard to mention both in the same paragraph.

I'll agree with you that the remaining RMBKs should be shut down immediately; they pose an ongoing hazard to the people around them. They lack a containment building, and if the reactor ever loses coolant, you're liable to have a steam explosion. Result: another Chernobyl. Russia was actually very lucky to only have one Chernobyl in the 40 years they've been running their 10 RMBKs.

Info on Chernobyl's RMBK design for everyone else:

The RMBK was designed hastily to be a cheap and easy to build nuclear plant that the Russians could use to generate electricity and plutonium. Because U.S. nuclear plants are heavily regulated, you will NEVER see a design like that here. Not even the Republicans would allow it.

Dirty Bombs:

The radioactive materials in the bomb will kill fewer people than the explosion. My Nuclear Engineering professor actually calculated what would happen if a dirty bomb was exploded in Times Square with 100,000 people present. There would be no acute radiation deaths, and assuming everyone cleared out of the square within a few hours, only a few people would die from cancer as a result over the next 20 years.

Cleaning it up might pose a more difficult challenge. However, if all of the outsides of the buildings are cleaned along with the streets, Times Square could probably reopen with background radiation levels only slightly above normal. Workers cleaning up would receive a dose of radiation comparable to living in Colorado instead of New York for a year.

Turning radioactive waste into a nuclear bomb requires a breeder reactor. Terrorists might have the technology to build such a device, but it would take LOTS of money and time to build, no matter how shoddily they built one. And how are they going to hide a massive building from us?


End of the World & Conspiracy Theories at PWRs:

Claims that the ECC's on PWR's don't hold water (pardon the pun). The ECC worked flawlessly at TMI, and they constantly test these systems at every nuclear reactor in the country. If they noticed water leaking from a pipe when they tested an ECC, the plant would be shut down immediately. Apparently, the pipes are holding up fine.

It should also be noted that the nuclear reaction shuts down automatically if the fuel elements aren't covered in water. This isn't the result of some computer inserting control rods; it's physically impossible for a nuclear reaction to occur with 3% fissile material without water to act as a moderator.

Roy, you need to start thinking for yourself and stop posting random articles from NucNews and the UCS. But hey, at least the UCS is too smart to compare the U.S. nuclear industry to Soviet Russia or the U.S. military.

Goillini,
Move to Chernobyl...they have work for you there.

Chernobyl was extremely poorly constructed. Reactors that would be constructed in the U.S. in this time would be virtually impossible to melt-down.

Uncle Roy,

Move to an underground bunker. It's safer there.



Exactly. An above ground breach of containment like the one at Chernobyl is impossible for the following reasons:

1. Every nuclear reactor has a nuclear engineer on-site 24/7. Any nuclear engineer would have stopped the safety test, because it was unsafe.
2. A steam explosion like the one at Chernobyl is physically impossible in Western water moderated/cooled reactors. When the fuel elements at Chernobyl lost water, the reaction went even faster. In the U.S., the reaction shuts down when the fuel loses water.
3. Chernobyl did not have a 6 ft thick concrete containment. All reactors in the U.S. have this. A containment could have easily kept the radioactive materials inside the plant (though the plant would have been ruined).
4. The Russians did not have intense regulation of their nuclear industry.

A meltdown isn't totally impossible, but it is highly unlikely. And in the case of a meltdown, the results will be relatively mild. If there's a below ground breach of containment and everyone evacuates within 12 hours, you'll see only a few extra cancer deaths over the next 50 years. Also, the area surrounding the plant would be safe to return to very soon (maybe a few months later). The only major problem would be that the groundwater might be unsuitable for drinking for a few decades.

Citizens:

It is quite obvious from looking at the positions given regarding nuclear power that there is one voice trying to drown all others by copying articles.

This voice is using the same tactics as the Republican party uses. The same lies are repeated over and over. All people do not have sufficient time to adequately study an issue. They hear these same lies over and over and begin to believe them.

The forces of anti-nuclear power are employing this tactic. Although the facts clearly show that this industry has a safety record second to none, these people can take advantage of people's ignorance. These people can obscure the issue. These people can spread lies. This is wrong! This is evil! It cannot be too far from the truth to call these individuals as forces of darkness. (They want your lights to go out.)

I think it is time for the progressive people in this country to rise up and spread the truth to all. The United States was given many gifts by the Creator. Our forefathers created a system where equality, wisdom and truth were intended to reign supreme.

As noted above, there are deluded individuals who are spreading half-truths and lies about nuclear power. To silence them is wrong. To silence them represents a tear in the fabric of our highest principles. I commend those who respond to these forces of darkness. You represent the force of light. You represent the direction to which our country must be guided. You represent the solution to one of the greatest problems facing modern mankind.

The forces of darkness advocate impractical and untried alternatives to nuclear power. Although they portend that these alternatives are better for mankind and the earth, in truth they are not. Only nuclear power can supply the future needs of this country and the world. Only nuclear power will provide the electricity needed to help build the products and feed the burgeoning millions of the future. To avoid an apocalypse, the truth must be promalgated to all.

This website represents one opportunity both for you to spread the truth and to learn the truth.

I ask for assistance in this endeavor. Please share the truth about the goodness of nuclear power so that those individuals who seek this truth shall not be blinded by the obfuscation given by those who would not allow one to see this truth.

The United States needs to make the right decisions today to provide our energy needs. If the wrong choice is made, it will be one more mistake that will cause our noble experiment in Democracy to be swept away by the currents of history. Do not let this happen. Share the truth. Expose the lies. May the creator help us in our work.

Wow. There's someone on this forum that's even more pro-nuclear than I am. Thanks for the support against crazy Uncle Roy.

In any case, I just want to make it clear that I don't think nuclear energy is some sort of silver bullet when it comes to energy policy. However, it currently beats all of the other realistic alternatives, and if nuclear plants continue to be safely designed, constructed, and implemented, they should have more of a place in our energy mix than coal and natural gas while we work towards getting all of our energy from fusion and renewables.

Brand new to this site, pardon if I bobble a protocol here and there while learning my way around.

This has been a pet of mine for many years. Long ago, I worked concrete crew at Shearon Harris nuke plant in N. C. People, if the terrorist had a bomb big enough to breach containment on an American plant, he'd use the bomb and forget the nuke plant. The NRC guys on site then told me the design specs called for exterior containment to soak up a crashing 747 (then they were contemplating accidents, not 9/11, but all same) Watching that go up, I have no trouble believing it easily would do just that.

Trolling through previous posts, I saw reference to Yucca Flats and then the Dominici interview. The two bring me to America's biggest blind spot. Almost hate to admit the French got it right, but along with generating most electricity nuclear they greatly reduce the disposal problem by reprocessing spent fuel. This our biggest DUH! in nuclear policy. If spent fuel is hot enough to be hazardous it is also by definition a more concentrated source of new fuel than any ore in nature.

Nuclear tech has not died just because we bailed out. New designs do not even require coolant flow, could not do a Three Mile Island regardless of operator idiocy. Far as that goes, TMI was the an incredibly overblown scare. No one outside the perimeter fence was exposed to more than the radiation equivalent of a single chest x-ray, but 200,000 panicky residens bailed out. I have never seen anyone study exactly this, but any avctuarilly based risk assessment makes it certain more people were injured and killed in traffic accidents related to that diaspora.

Really want to clean up vehicular emmissions and improve metropolitan air quality? Hydrogen has promise IF we can provide the hydrogen. Makes no sense to burn coal to make electricity to crack hydrogen to run a clean car past the dirty coal plant. Not only could nuclear electricity crack hydrogen out of water, there are promising designs that would produce hydrogen directly from the generation process.

Add another voice to the pro-nuclear side. I am surprised to see so many pro nuke people here!!

Times are changing in America. I think that people are beginning to see TMI as a huge exception in nuclear plants rather than the norm.

We've come up with a somewhat responsible way to deal with the waste Yucca mountain is a drop in the radioactive bucket next to the Nevada Test Range, and the dry casks will last for thousands of years. Uncle Roy; the casks will last for thousands of years, and even if they don't, the contents of those casks will be no more radioactive than the uranium ore it came from after 500.

I think that many, if not a majority of environmentalists are willing to see a safe and responsible nuclear industry as preferable to most of the other conventional energy sources.

There are problems with ANY power generation source. The questions around nuclear stem fromits history, nuclear "fuel" was a byproduct, the original purpose was to create material for weapons. Reactors happened to be very hot and have possibilities as electrical generators.

Today's DOE "energy " budget is 23 Billion ( dollars...and most of that is not "alternatives"or "balance" but 1) fuel and material procurement for the Defense department to continue the weapons program. 2) Subsidies to the nuke operators. 3) subsidies and concessions and help for the oil companies. Then comes a pitiful few dollars for PR , so the various government agencies can pretend they are doing something about non-oil based or non nuclear technologies.

It is a mess and a deception.

If you look at what the French have done, it is evident they used common sense and the cards they were dealt to strive for independence. They generate an increasing amount of their electrical energy from non-oil based sources. They standardized a electrical plant design and cut off endless squabbles and litigation. They even have a tidal power project, which the US oil companies have fought and scuttled off the coast of NE these past 40 years or more. Their recycling efforts are for more meaningful and economic (biomass, ecodiesel,etc) than the US efforts.

Nuclear got a bad rap, and deservedly so. It has been a shell game to cover up the D.O.D's interest , not the supposedly for America's benefit D.O.E.

If there was disclosure and the full facts on the table, a transition program with nuclear could help bridge this century 's fuel needs. Places like Africa's Madagascar and other remote location could get a reliable design and clean power source rather than a supertanker with increasingly expensive hydrocarbons.
That resource is needed to produce medicines , plastics, all of the important manufactured items of the modern age. Simply burning them in stationary plants or up the tailpipe is not the best use.

A political solution, where nuclear gets a share and helps stave off the decline of oil and the negatives during the transition to better systems is realistic. Again, it is a political problem. IMHO, the oil companies' nuclear profit centers SHOULD NOT BE the ones calling the shots on this. They have already failed in their monoply in the MidEast and elsewhere.

Once again it is a POLITICAL problem, not a technical one. The oil monopoly suppresses, actively inside the USA and elsewhere alternatives, until there is no a viable solution OTHER THAN THE ONE THEY CONTROL, then they attempt to bring their latest racket or controlled effort to market. "Independence is not feasible for 25 years or more(head of Exxon-Mobil) So an alternative plan that factors in environmental,consumers, citizens and a balanced "bestuse" approach is urgently needed. The oil company shills, BushCo, Cheyney et al,are obviously not it.

In fact, TMI was an excellent test case that proves the reactors ARE INDEED VERY SAFE. How many people died? None. How much radiation was released? A small amount of gas. Big Deal. Another media feeding frenzy. Where is the Laci Peterson trial when you need it?

As far as Yucca Mtn is concerned, why not keep the stuff above ground in containers in a building secure like Fort Knox. That way, if the containers start to look shabby in 100 years, we can re-encase them. End of problem.

If you add up all the fatalities and health problems associated with the procuring, processing, utilizing, and disposing of coal, oil, and natural gas, they virtually eclipse the total problems with nuclear.

Science over superstition and fear.

against nuclear power period. After being irradiated twice (Sellafield/Windscale) and then bits from Chenobyl

But you're still here.

So either go freeze to death or continue to send $$$ to our GOOD FRIENDS, THE SAUDIS, so they can support their Wahabbi Madrassas which breed jihadis.

no, I've developed horns and 3 heads. I would rather use our more natural resources like water, wind and sun. Besides we waste so much energy in this country.

Three heads are better than one, so you've upgraded yourself. Horns is a problem we all have to deal with.

As to water power, it's pretty well tapped out; solar is still not economical, except for swimming pool heaters, and wind will only solve a small fraction of the problem.

As for saving energy, the best way to do it is to price it high -- tax the hell out of it. Use the taxes to pay for the programs that Clinton and Bush have cut out.

maybe it comes up downthread from the messages i'm responding to but the safety of the power generated is a very separate issue from the safety of the waste.

can anyone here conceive of 100,000 years or 1,000,000,000 years?

i've used this timeline in my global warming arguments, it's pretty effective in getting across SOME idea of time:

http://www.naturalsciences.org/funstuff/paleo/timeline.html

i'll have to check my isotope charts again but i don't think 500 years dealt with anywhere near the halflife of some of the reaction products. please correct me if i am wrong...

From a syllabus for Geology 106 - Environmental Geology
RADIOACTIVE WASTE DISPOSAL


Why is radioactive waste of such concern?

What is unique about nuclear waste that sets it aside from other toxic wastes?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RADIOACTIVITY BASICS

Nuclear species are characterized by their number of neutrons (N0) and protons (P+)
All nuclear species with the same number of protons are called ELEMENTS
Elements with variable mass (N+P), but constant number of Protons, are called ISOTOPES of an element
Use a sub/super script notation
235U stands for Uranium-235 (an element with 92 protons and how many neutrons??)

Radioactive Decay

Numerous natural and man made isotopes of some elements are naturally unstable and spontaneously decay with the release of energy.

[a] Alpha Particles (2N+2P; a Helium nucleus)
Heavy, easily absorbed
{b] Beta Particles (N->P+ + e-)
Penetrative
[g] Gamma rays -
Very short wavelength, very energetic

Half Life = Time for 1/2 of the radioactive substance to decay to its daughter product.

After 1 half life 50% of radioactivity is gone
After 2 half lives 75% decayed (25% left)
After 3 half lives 87.5% decayed
About 7 half lives needed to reduce radioactivity to below 1% of its initial level

Some Naturally Radioactive Isotopes

14C...........................5,730 yr
235U.........................70.4 million years
40K .........................1.25 billion years
232Th ......................1.40 billion years
238U ........................4.47 billion years


Radioactive Isotopes from Nuclear Reactors

239Pu ..(Plutonium).....t = 24,000 years
3H (Tritium)................t = 12.3 years
131I ..(Iodine).............t = 8 days
90Sr ..(Strontium).......t = 29 yrs
137Cs ..(Cesium) ........t = 30 yrs


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Radioactivity and Power Generation

Heavy elements have natural instability and spontaneously decays to other isotopes of other elements (Uranium, Radium, ...)
Natural Uranium composed of two isotopes: 238U and 235U in ratio of 137:1 [MORE 238U]
Only 235U can fission efficiently and only if present in high enough concentration to have critical mass
Natural Uranium must be enriched in 235U before it can be used in a reactor (or a bomb)


Chain Reaction

Neutron --> 235U atom -->

fission products plus neutrons


Power Generation from Nuclear Material (fission reactions)

A TYPICAL FISSION REACTION
1 neutron -> 235U ==> 102Molybdenum + 131Tin + 3 neutrons + energy
131Tin ->b-decay steps to 131Iodine (8 day half life)

Breeder Reactions

Need 30 lbs. of pure 235U for critical mass
235Uranium can ABSORB neutrons and produce ìtransuranicî elements, especially

Plutonium a highly radioactive and fissionable substance.

n + 238U -> 239U -> 239Np + e- (t = 24 min.)
239Np -> 239Pu + e- (t = 24,000 yr)
Need 5 lbs. of 239Pu for critical mass

Moderate a Nuclear Reaction

235U fission produces ìfast neutronsî
Moderators (carbon, heavy water) slow neutrons and increase chance of neutron absorption by the next 235U atom.
Criticality is the point where the same number of neutrons are generated as are absorbed by the Uranium (steady state)
Control rods absorb neutrons and are designed to keep reactors at steady state.

Nuclear Reactors Produce:

Enriched Uranium (in 235U) decays by fission into two isotopes of different masses
One group has mass range of 85-105
Other group has mass range of 130-145
Most of these fission products are radioactive and decay into a wide range of other isotopes

FUEL ROD ELEMENTS typically last 3 years before being ìspentî
Highly radioactive AND hot.
Must be stored approx. 10 years in a water pool to cool enough to transport

RADIOACTIVE WASTE DISPOSAL

Three Kinds

High Level Radioactive Waste
Transuranic Radioactive Waste
Low Level Radioactive Waste

High Level Waste

Spent reactor fuel rods
Spent fuel and process wastes from nuclear weapons production facilities

Transuranic Waste

Largely from nuclear weapons production facilities
Radioactive elements heavier than uranium (Plutonium)

Low Level Waste

Radioactive waste with short half lives (weeks to 100 years)
Waste with 500 or longer year half life, but below levels of activity for high level wastes
Materials that have been in contact with low radioactivity materials
Contaminated clothing, containers, low level solids, hypodermic needles, animal carcasses, tools, rags, paper, test tubes, ...




The Solutions?

1- Rockets to space
2- Deep well injection
3- Oceanic Sediments
4- Shallow sub-surface sites
5- Reprocess it
6- Burn It



Low Level Waste
(WARD VALLEY, CA)
Transuranic Waste
(WIPP SITE, NM)
High Level Waste
(YUCCA MT., NV)
Other Criteria/Concerns

Safe transportation from Reactors to waste site(s)
Containment of waste in case of transportation accident
Migration of nuclides following containment vessel degradation
PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS and Vulnerability to unsubstantiated claims.

http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~chuck/Geo106/lect19.html

-----------------

so i present this syllabus with a few key points highlighted to emphasize the problem with the waste itself. now i realize that planning for invasion of iraq was not done by nuclear scientists nor by anyone claimed to be among the smartest people in the world. but i'd guesss that not all the engineering in the world nor perhaps even all the smartest people in the world can forsee what plans and whims God or Nature has in store for a site that must be stable for 20,000 years.

we still have pyramids as evidence of early engineering success but they're less than 10,000 years old. admittedly, they do manifest signs of wear and tear and we have discovered the means to penetrate them.

i'm a scientist by training, am generally happy with systematic scientific and engineering approaches to solving problems. i presented that timeline earlier to give some idea of scale only. i use it to argue with the 'no such thing as global warming' types that we are only beginning to see the effects of releasing millions of years worth of geologically-locked-up carbon across the span of 100 years or so.

do we have enough foresight to store these isotopes for better than 20 centuries? i don't know, it's likely that we'll simply do it and let future generations figure out if we were right or not.

I think that's what my textbook and my Nuclear Engineering professor gave me. I think that most of the fission products decay away after 500 years, and you're mostly left with the trans-uranics, which don't emit as much radiation.



Indeed. At TMI, the structure ultimately did its job. The containment rendered an above ground release, like the one at Chernobyl, impossible, the reaction shut down when the reactor lost coolant, and the public was ultimately safe. The investors, however, just saw a plant go from being a billion dollar asset to a billion dollar liability.


Better to have horns and three heads than to have drowned. Hydroelectric dams are more likely to kill people than nuclear reactors. And indeed, over the past 30 years, dam failures have killed more people in the U.S. (a couple hundred) than failures at nuclear plants (0).

Look at the curve in the following link. (relatively fast decay)


http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/sfdecay1.htm

Link One

Short Text Article giving timeline of decay.

http://www.Link Two

Text Article agrees with your professor. Interesting perspective as well.

Hate to bust your bubble, but unles you have been living in a lead-lined cave, you have been irradiated all your life. Good ol' natural sun is the primary source, plus cosmic rays, and God forbid you ever visited Denver, background radiation is almost double sea level. Assuming you believe in Darwinian evolution, radiation is the primary source of the mutations allowing for natural selection. More than being a natual component of life, it is unlikely life could have evolved without thoroughly natural radiation.

Bit of trivia most nuclear-phobic people ignore; in that traces of radionucleotides are naturally scattered randomly throughout the Earth's crust, the Oklaunion coal fired electric plant regularly releases hundreds of pounds of very slightly radioactive ash into the atmosphere every year, more than all the nuke plants in America combined. Just a little day-brightener for you there.

Question: If the cost of building energy sources like water, wind and sun is more expensive to build than a nuclear plant for the equivalent amount of energy is far more expensive than a Nuke plant, are these sources of energy still worth it? Consider, as well, that hydro, solar and even wind are not totally environmentally benign.

Nothing comes completely free. Nuclear plants produce a small amount of deadly waste, but they still may be the best alternative energy source.

Welcome aboard, Eino, I have not been here that long myself, but this is an interesting site. A good many actually bother to know something about a topic before chiming in. Good post friend.

You pegged it on "nothing comes completely free". We really have two choices: drastically reduce population and reduce standard of living for the survivors, or come up with new energy sources. IF we were not utterly nuclear-phobic, it would have a very real seat at the table. Compared to millions of tons of widely dispersed atmospheric waste, hot nuke haz-mat is manageably tiny.

I have nothing against "alternative" sources, but California is already redoing the world's largest wind farm to keep from killing birds. These geniuses are going to make the towers higher. We could carpet half of Arizona in solar cells and do well to power Phoenix. I don't care if we open ANWAR and every off-shore field now off limits, all we do is temporarily reduce, by a small percentage, dependance on foreign crude.

Nuclear is a realistic 200year source, if we can get past the mythology of glow-in-the-dark three headed babies.

Hope you enjoy the site, a lot of well informed people here.

I'm very pro-nuclear, but I'm somewhat dubious about Yucca Mountain. Why can't we treat haz-mat as if it were gold bullion and build a kind of "Fort Knox" for storage? The stuff is really harmless if stored correctly, and if the storage coffins develop any problems, they will all be above ground and easy to re-encapsulate.

Good point, I touched on it, post #23. Any spent fuel hot enough to be hazardous is by definition higher grade "ore" than all the yellowcake in Niger. The French have reprocessed fuel for years, the technology is certainly no reach for a country that has produced fissiles for tens of thousands of bombs. Why not indeed except that Congress in its infinite stupidity has made it illegal.

In the interim, I'm all for above ground, well guarded, continuously observed for leakage, and accessible if we ever recover from this recto-cranial inversion storage. God knows we have plenty of nothing with nobody on it out west.

Here is the problem with nuclear energy in the US (as I see it)

1) long term solution to waste?

2) enviromental implications of the mining of the uranium?

3) our free market economic approach to designing nuclear plants: nuclear power works best when there are relatively few designs out there, each of which has been tested and had the bugs worked out. For example, the US Navy does a good job with its nuclear plants.

On the other hand, it seems as if every new construction is handled "from scratch"; hence we have cost overruns, bugs that haven't been worked out, operators who have to be trained on an unknown, brand new system, etc.

It seems to me that if we had only a few designs out there, then things would go much smoother.

I think that nuclear energy can work, but we'll have to change the way that we do things.

Ollie, as far as I know, and mind it has been years since a new license was even applied for, but every reactor in America was a process of reinventing the wheel, and NRC encouraged this idiocy. Again, the French, once they got serious, settled on one good design and rebuilt it with minimal modification.

If we ever get back in the game, we want to take a new look at this. Just because we bailed out, research and construction continued. There are passively cooled reactors which could not even do what Three Mile Island did, no pumps to fail, no coolant to get low.

Mining uranium we have done for decades. Long term waste, if we reprocess, the volume of "waste" goes way down, gets even more manageable. Find the middle of a great big empty, build a nice thick earthen berm and set the storage casks there, where we can a) keep an eye on them and potentially reuse them further.

Changes can and should be made from twenty years ago, unfortunately the first, and politically most difficult change, we nedd to pull our overly terrified heads heads out of our a**es and give reality a chance.

France is the world's largest nuclear power generator on a per capita basis, and ranks second in total installed nuclear capacity (behind the United States).

Because of France's limited domestic energy sources, energy supply security and reliance on imports are major issues in France. Government policy has strongly promoted increases in nuclear power generation over the past three decades. Currently, about 77% of France's electricity comes from the country's 58 nuclear reactors. This represents a dramatic change from 1973, when fossil fuels accounted for more than 80% of French power generation.

France is now seen to be retreating slowly from its staunchly pro-nuclear position. Previously, the government planned to have nuclear power reach 100% of electricity generation. Environmental objections have increased in recent years, however. Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power started a public debate within France about the future of its own industry, and public opinion polls showed that a growing percentage of the public favors an end to nuclear power.

France must now decide whether to replace obsolete nuclear plants with more modern nuclear plants, or to begin phasing out nuclear power. A number of reactors will need to be replaced around 2015-2020. The new center-right government has indicated that it is preparing to authorize EdF to begin planning a new nuclear unit, based on the Franco-German EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) design. However, it will wait on making a final decision until the conclusion of the national energy policy debate, which began in January 2003.

In September 2001, the French government restructured its nuclear sector into a single government holding company, Areva. The Areva Group is a combination of Cogema, Framatome, CEA Industrie, and the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA), the French Atomic Energy Agency, which is the major shareholder of the Areva Group with nearly 80%. The group presides over the country's major nuclear enterprises, including mining, fuels, treatment, recycling, decontamination and engineering. The French government plans in the long term to offer Areva shares to outside investors, although the CEA will retain control.

France is one the few countries in the world with a nuclear reprocessing plant. Cogema's La Hague facility received authorization from the French nuclear energy regulator to start operations of two new facilities, hull and end-pieces compacting and plutonium purification and conditioning, in January 2002.

Source: Energy Information Agency. April 2003.


http://greennature.com/article744.html

Wow, am I behind the times. On those passively cooled reactors: what gets the thermal energy to the turbines? What is used as moderator? I take it there is no longer a connection between moderator temperature and thermal flux?

Interesting stuff; it looks as if I'll have some catching up to do.

All the people living in Europe, at that time, included me, got some radiations, but nothing to compare with the people living North of Europe: Scandinavia and Tchernobyl, of course.
I still think that pollution kill more people, and so do junk food!
Still around and believing in nuclear energy...

How quickly we forget 3 Mile Island.
Also, why is it those who want Nuke power do not want to store the waste in their back yards.
Any state that has toxic waste should be the ones to keep it. Do not send it to someone else. Expecially a location as Yucca Mountain. Earthquakes occur there all the time. If you lived by it, you would be aware of that.

For alternate power there is wind and solar. They are renewable with no toxic waste.

OK, by the numbers, my apologies to those who bothered to read the previous threads for repitition.

Three Mile Island is far from forgotten. This overblown catastrophe that never was has somehow come to be accepted as the American Chernobyl and there is no comparison. No one outside TMI's perimeter fence was ever, even briefly, exposed to as much radiation as is in a single medical chest X-ray. Real people were killed and injured in traffic accidents as 200,000 unneccessarily panicked residents fled a non-existent hazard.

Those who have nuclear energy DO store waste in their "backyards". I helped build the spent fuel storage pool at Shearon Harris nuclear plant in North Carolina. Like all existing plants, spent fuel is stored on site waiting for the feds to come through with a long overdue repository.

We at least agree on Yucca Mountain being a poor idea, though I suspect for different reasons. Spent fuel should be hoarded and held as a precious resource awaiting reprocessing into useable new fuel. Remnants from that ought be kept above ground where the containment casks can be continously monitered for leakage.

Wind and solar are wonderful to the limited extent they can work. The Blowing Rock NC farm was shut down years ago because the neighbors couldn't tolerate the continual "WHOOP WHOOP" noise. California is trying to redesign the largest wind farm now going because it kills thousands of birds a year. The Texas site might work, the few people out in trans-pecos will think the noise sounds like money and they'll bury the birds before anyone can count them. Solar is great if you don't need megawatts, but you could carpet Nevada and not power Las Vegas.

In the words of the late Robert Heinlien, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. All energy production has costs. Fossil fuel production, refining and transportation costs hundreds of workers' lives every year without factoring in environmental health. Limiting energy production will increase price, do we just tell poor people to buy more blankets? Never forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. It is a fact of geology that radionucleotides are scattered in trace amounts throughout the Earth's crust, a consequence being that every day we burn coal to generate electricity we release hundreds of pounds of ever so slightly radioactive ash into the air.

Sorry to be a while getting specifics, but here goes. I had in mind primarily the gas cooled reactor family. Already in use in the UK is the High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor. Only used in UK, but a big selling point aside from site safety is it can operate on "natural" uranium, i.e. not enriched and no potential as bomb fuel. The American firm General Atomics has a Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor, seeing some use in Russia as it cheerfully chews up some of that bomb grade plutonium the Russians need to dispose of (or pretend to dispose of; Putin scares me)

Not in production, but part of DOE's Generation IV research is a Very High Temperature Gas Reactor. It got a boost as soon as Bush said the word "hydrogen" in last State of the Onion speech, the excess heat could be diverted to eith cracking hydrogen out of water or desalinating water.

I particularly like the South African Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. Designed to be turned out as smaller modules rather than megawatt giants, it can still be scaled up by adding modules. Fuel is in billiard ball sized, carbon/graphite coated units packed in cylinders with inert gas flowing through. Test units claim 45% thermal efficiency.

There are other Generation III and Generation IV designs, light water, heavy water, liquid metal, breeder, non-breeder. Best single site I've found is (pray I get all this right) www.eia.doc.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/nucenviss2.html Lots of links from there.

I enjoy your posts. Very informative. I am 1963 BSEE. Back then, we were expecting the electric power industry to use MHD (Magneto hydro dynamics) as a stop gap until fusion came on line around 2000.

So much for higher education in the 60s.

I still feel, however, that fusion will save our asses in the long run. It it this awkward in-between period when we can't get fusion to work yet that we need to cover. And it could be 50 years, 200 years even, till we make it work. And I don't think we are spending enough $$$ on research; I think only Lawrence Livermore and Princeton have active programs.

Maybe the Oilgarchs in power don't really want progress.