Japan's nuclear disaster should serve as a wake-up call for the United States.
Now that many Americans have stopped paying attention to Japan's nuclear catastrophe, shocking new details about its severity are finally coming to light.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently revealed that the cores of three of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station's reactors started to melt within hours after the loss of offsite power, right after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Tokyo Electric Power, which owns the wrecked reactors, has announced that the accident probably released more radioactivity into the environment than the Chernobyl debacle. That would make it the worst nuclear accident on record. Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 373 square miles near the power station -- an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan -- may now be uninhabitable.
The Fukushima accident should be a wakeup call for the United States to address the hazards posed by our own dangerous spent fuel pools at nuclear reactors. They are a time bomb. America's reactors have generated about 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, of which 75 percent is stored in pools, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data. No other nation has generated this much radioactivity from either nuclear power or nuclear weapons production.
The nuclear industry often claims that all the spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. would cover a football field ten feet deep.
There's a bit of problem with this assertion. If it were possible to squeeze the single largest concentration of radioactivity on the planet (12 to 14 billion curies) onto a football field, this would unleash nuclear chain reactions involving enough plutonium to fuel about 150,000 nuclear weapons and also ignite a radiological fire that would create severe contamination -- making Chernobyl and Fukushima look like pimples on a pumpkin. Thousands, if not millions, of people hundreds of miles away would receive lethal doses.
Nearly 40 percent of the radioactivity in U.S. spent fuel is cesium-137. With a half-life of 30 years, Cs-137 gives off potentially hazardous external penetrating radiation. Once in the environment it can remain there for hundreds of years where it accumulates in the human food chain and other biota.
The 4.5 billion curies of radioactive cesium in U.S. spent reactor fuel is roughly 20 times more than what all worldwide atmospheric nuclear weapons tests released. The United States has 31 boiling water reactors (BWR) with pools elevated several stories above ground, similar to those at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station. Consider this: the pool at the Vermont Yankee reactor, a BWR Mark I (the same design as the four crippled Fukushima nuclear reactors), currently holds nearly three times the amount of spent fuel stored at Dai-Ichi's Unit 4 reactor.
As in Japan, spent fuel pools at U.S. nuclear power plants don't have steel-lined, concrete barriers that cover reactor vessels to prevent the escape of radioactivity. They aren't required to have back-up generators to keep used fuel rods cool if offsite power is lost.
For nearly 30 years, Nuclear Regulatory Commission waste-storage requirements have remained contingent on the opening of a permanent waste repository that has yet to materialize. Now that the Obama administration has cancelled plans to build a permanent, deep disposal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, spent fuel at the nation's 104 nuclear reactors will continue to accumulate and is likely remain onsite for decades to come.
The U.S. government should promptly take steps to reduce these risks by placing all spent nuclear fuel older than five years in dry, hardened storage casks like Germany did 25 years ago. It would take about 10 years at a cost between $3.5 and $7 billion. If the cost were transferred to energy consumers, the expenditure would result in a marginal increase of less than 0.4 cents per kilowatt hour for consumers of nuclear-generated electricity. Despite the destruction wreaked by the earthquake and tsunamis, the dry casks at the Fukushima site were unscathed.
Money could also be allocated from the $18.1 billion in unexpended funds already collected from consumers of nuclear-generated electricity under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to establish a disposal site for high-level radioactive wastes.
After more than 50 years, the quest for permanent nuclear waste disposal remains illusory. One thing, however, is clear, whether we like it or not: the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future. In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel should be a public safety priority of the highest degree.
The Center for Public Integrity: U.S. Regulators Opening Up on Flawed Nuclear Power Plant Policing
David Wagner: Report From Tokyo: The Spread of Radioactivity
Bill Chameides: The Nuclear Option: Waste Plan or a Wasteland?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-06/reprocessing-atomic-waste-slows-repository-need-areva-says-1-.html
We have huge energy issues and a lot of companies gaining at the expense of fallout to our resources and each other. Doesn't it make more sense to learn by our push to create potential disasters, step back and truly make sound decisions on energy policy that doesn't include the fallout? Our water sources cannot continue to be assaulted from fracking, mining, drilling, bio-mass agribusiness ...
Let's not forget ... we still have two nuclear meltdowns in Japan spewing radioactive water into the Pacific.
Are you anti-hemp?
If you're concerned about storage ponds overflowing, then ensure that dry cask storage is available as an option.
Living in Pittsburgh and the Three Mile ordeal years ago has sparked outrage for many knowing that the Real Truth may not be known for years! Truth is measured on a level that is raised with every accident!
Because three melt downs PROVE nuclear is SAFE...
Because four SFP's overheating, catching fire and exploding PROVES nuclear is SAFE...
Because the spread of radioactive contamination PROVES nuclear is CLEAN...
Because uninhabitable land for decades to come PROVES nuclear is SAFE...
Because socialized losses to rate payers through tax increases to pay for TEPCO's ill prepared mismanagement PROVES nuclear is CHEAP...
YES?
.
People have gotten used to the more banal dangers of living, yet they don't understand remote dangers. Compare nuclear power even with say, hydro power, which has killed thousands over the years. In one incident, over a hundred thousand. Nuclear power just can't compete with that body count.
So yes, all of this does prove nuclear power is safe. At least if you have any sense of perspective at all. If that had been a natural gas plant it wouldn't be a long running news story, because people would have just been killed, rather than trying to clean up the mess.
As long as no report has been filed, the problem doesn't exist.
No report has been filed on nuclear waste contaminating the planet for thousands of years, hence it is a lie that nuclear waste is a problem.
Spin, spin, spin until you're dizzy.
The issuance of reports formalizes the information so far. Since the situation is still fluid, a report doesn't say it hasn't happened. It just formalizes information. A structured society requires this process. We saw it with 911, Challenger disasters.
All 3 reactors have melted down and our earth has been contaminated with massive amounts of radiation. The effects in Japan from Fukushima are very devastating to people, their livelihoods, and their economy.
Maybe there just isn't anything newsworthy. Maybe HP needs to write more stories to keep you in business. 75k posts in 3 years. Thats impressive. It also means 2k posts per month or about 60 a day. Thats not a lot of living.
Awesome!
In 1973 Alvin Weinberg was dismissed as Director of Oak Ridge Nuclear Lab for being
concerned with safety issues of the LWR {light water reactors} which he holds the patent for.
Weinberg was successfully researching liquid salt reactors for civilian electrical power production. Thorium was the nuclear fuel for this reactor not uranium! For more info look at
energyfromthorium.com.
Oh I forgot Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors also use the waste from the LWR that has accumulated through the years and just waiting for a terrorist to manufacture a nuclear device as
fuel for electrical power.
Lets not wait for a nuclear cloud to convince us we desperately need to pursue the work
Dr Weinberg started in the 1950s
Each metric tonne of thorium consumed in a LFTR could produce:
9900 GWe*hr of electricity (at 45% conversion efficiency)
up to 15 kg (8400 watts*thermal) of Pu-238 for NASA space missions
20 kg of molybdenum-99 for medical procedures
5 g of thorium-229 for targeted alpha therapy medical procedures
3300 thermal watts of strontium-90 for heating sources
150 kg of stable xenon
125 kg of stable neodymium
that%u2019s about
$600M worth of electricity
~$100M worth of Pu-238
~$200-300M worth of Mo-99
and about $300K worth of xenon and neodymium
and many lives saved through clean electricity and medical radioisotopes.
See Kirk%u2019s talk on Google Tech Talk posted Dec 6th 2010 %u2013 Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste?
http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/03/23/sorensen-rebuttal/
Our planet needs to have ALL nuclear reactors and coal plants BANNED.
You have obviously missed what has been going on in Japan since 03/11/11.
The term "safe nuclear" is an oxymoron. We are not buying what you are trying to sell.
Well, couple errors. According to the NRC's own website, there are 104 reactors in the US currently in operation. Of these, 34, not 31 are BWR's, the rest are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) which can run up to 150 times atmospheric pressure. Imagine how far that radioactive pressurized water would go if that pressure vessel ruptured.
And Fukushima had 90 tons of fuels stored, Vermont Yankee has 690 tons, that's a lot more than three times the amount. It's better than 11 times. This was the focus of a paper I just wrote for college. And the lies that Vermont Yankee is telling the NRC keep compounding.