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.
An NRC rule introduced in 2009 requires that the integrity or cooling of used fuel, the containment and the cooling of the reactor core on new reactors must be able to withstand the impact of a large passenger jet. The failure of Westinghouse to explain its case amounts to a violation of that requirement.
New AP1000 reactors are proposed for numerous sites in the US, including Georgia's Vogtle, which has received $8.33 billion in loan guarantees from the Obama Administration. Site work has begun at Vogtle, which already houses two licensed reactors. But the new designs still lack final approval. At least one AP1000 plant is already under construction in China. Similar concerns about the AP1000 design (as well as France's EPR) have been raised by regulators in the UK.
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.
"In 2003, my colleagues and I reported that the drainage of a spent fuel pool by a jet crash could lead to a catastrophic spent fuel radiation fire that could render a 27,000 sq mile area uninhabitable. This is larger than the combined states of Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey," says reactor expert Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and former Senior Policy Advisor to the US Secretary of Energy, 1993-7.
"A year later the National Academy panel, convened to address our study, warned that reactor ponds were vulnerable to terrorist attack and catastrophic radiological fire," Alvarez continues. "In particular, there are 35 Boiling Water Reactors in the U.S. that have elevated spent fuel pools several stories above ground. The pools are not protected by thick concrete containment as are the reactors. They currently hold about four times the amount of highly radioactive spent fuel than their original designs."
At Vermont Yankee, New York's Indian Point and other aging reactors, underground pipes are known to be leaking significant quantities of tritium, cesium and other deadly isotopes. Health researcher Joseph Mangano, Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, says: "Reactors routinely emit a portion of high level waste into local air and water... Trends in Strontium 90 near reactors were similar to trends in local child cancer rates."
Meanwhile, new reactor pushers want Obama to cave on minimal financial requirements for federal loan guarantees. According to Alvarez, the General Accounting Office and Congressional Budget Office have both estimated that at least half the loans given for new nuke construction will fail.
But even marginal fee requirements for a proposed project at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, has prompted Constellation Energy to back out. Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, among others, has speculated that Constellation wanted out of a plant it knew to be a loser -- and used the loan fee as an excuse.
If Obama slashes builder-owner loan liability, the virtually certain failure of new reactor projects will dump billions of dollars of liabilities onto taxpayer and ratepayers.
The plants are also primarily insured against accidents and terror attacks by the public. The industry's liability -- which could be in the trillions -- is limited to $11 billion.
So continued operations at old reactors, or construction of new ones, could plunge the United States into permanent bankruptcy.
Reactor owners are now constantly pushing for license extensions. And Obama is soon expected to try to ease the loan guarantees for new ones.
Our economic future and physical health depend on stopping them both.
Unlike the reactors currently in use (which have a remarkably good safety record, despite being desperately outdated by the IFR design) it could use ALL of the uranium in the fuel (not just 2%, which is less than 0.03% of the uranium refined) and could be refueled with 'depleted' uranium. The waste product is highly radioactive, very short-lived fission products, so small in total volume that like the reactor it can be kept under a massive containment dome, impervious to attack by anything less than nuclear weapons. The problem at present is that the uranium and plutonium in the spent fuel rods is treated as "nuclear waste", although it is long-lived and therefore NOT highly radioactive.
http://skepticva.org/IFR.html
There is enough uranium and plutonium lying about in US government repositories to supply us with ALL of our energy for about a couple of centuries, had the Clinton administration and misguided environmentalists not canceled the project.
The TMI "disaster" should be compared to the natural gas incident at the Middletown Power Plant, February 2010, Six dead and 26 injured. http://www.courant.com/community/middletown/power-plant-explosion/hc-kleen-hearings-0628-20100627-6,0,1520279.story
These were real people, not imaginary possibilities. Using people's fear of the unknown to prevent building more; safe, clean nuclear power plants is more than irresponsible it's purposely negligent.
The 'airplanes can't penetrate the containment vessel' meme has become especially pervasive--as if this puts to rest any possibility of terrorist attack or sabotage of a plant. But as you point out, the plants are already compromised.
thanks again.
Why? One reason is that nuclear industry regulators are permanently assigned to be at nuclear power plants. For such danger as there is, they are at the front.
The second reason is the "energy industry shills" you mention. Their remuneration isn't all that well hidden, but it comes from fossil fuel royalties, and at one-twentieth the price of natural gas, uranium can't provide that sort of money.
But the truth is that America's nuclear power plants have an excellent safety record, you can verify that through US government and international agencies. In addition, the plants operate more than 90 percent of the time and are by far our nation's largest source of CO2-free power. In fact, a combination of nuclear energy and renewables would be our best plan for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels to produce power.
Or we could continue to give credence to incoherent rants such as these.
Nuclear power is tricky stuff to get right, but I submit that it will be easier and less costly in human and financial terms than resettling the entire populations of Florida, Louisiana, Bangladesh, etc.
Definitely not.
Your belief that this risk exists could be substantiated if you were to build an experimental rig that can fire an empty beer can -- same bulk density as an airliner -- through the wall of a bank safe. A propane-and-PVC-pipe cannon, maybe. I think such have been built as potato cannons.
Similarly, antinuclear activists, many of them well-connected with government for fossil fuel revenue reasons, could have had a full-scale experiment done with a real, remotely-controlled airliner, the way NASA once did with antimisting kerosene, and a containment building -- Maine Yankee, I think it was -- that was demolished a few years ago. If any of them had really believed the containment building was at all vulnerable, they would have wanted to prove it.
Cross-section diagram of a typical reactor on page 12 of http://canteach.candu.org/library/20044102.pdf .
And you don't think it's a good idea for a government to subsidize the one energy source we have today that can economically limit dependence on foreign oil and cut carbon emissions? Of course not; you're an anti-science scare-mongerer.
One problem with even getting them built is the corporate money invested in existing nuclear technology. They will probably fight any change.
Another problem is even if they did work and we were able to make more power cheaply, it would just encourage more waste and only put off coming to grips with the fact that we live on a finite planet with finite resources.
I think that understanding the biosphere and working with nature rather than trying to beat it into submission is the way to go. People would be happier living on a garden planet than living in plastic bubbles set in a bleak landscape.
And for pity sakes, could we please turn of some effin lights so we could see the stars again. [google light pollution]
Now-a-days, worldwide, there are a few hundred to a few thousand fossil fuel fatalities per year. Divided into a trillion or so in governmental fossil fuel revenue, this makes for a cost to government of around 100 million dollars whenever it allows nuclear energy to replace enough fossil fuel to prevent one fatality. So persons financially supported by government try to hide the fact of that lifesaving.
Keep that in mind when you wish for safer-in-theory reactor types. They couldn't be any safer in *practice*, and by not existing, they allow lucrative fossil-fuel fatalities to continue, while existing reactors prevent them.
Its enough to make folks believe that solar, etc. is safe, but nuclear clearly is not!
Take away the Price Anderson Act, and the nuclear power industry is toast.
*Safe, that is, unless you're a homeowner scrambling around on your roof.