Nebraska nuclear plants

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Nebraska nuclear plants

Postby KLA2 » Fri Jun 24, 2011 2:51 am

U.S. nuclear regulators say two Nebraska nuclear power plants have protected critical equipment from the rising waters of the Missouri River even though flooding has reached the grounds of one of them.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is confident those safeguards will prevent a disaster at either plant


http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/23/nebras ... ?hpt=hp_c1

You know, if they build them on a floodplain ... if they cannot absolutely guarantee their safety in the event of earthquakes, floods, tornados, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, meteor impacts, volcanos and lots of other stuff which does and WILL occur ... perhaps they ought not to build them??? (Yeah, I know, once in a 10,000 year event ... bullshit.)

Hope MM_Dandy, and all are safe. [-o<
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Re: Nebraska nuclear plants

Postby Мастер » Fri Jun 24, 2011 3:33 am

KLA2 wrote:U.S. nuclear regulators say two Nebraska nuclear power plants have protected critical equipment from the rising waters of the Missouri River even though flooding has reached the grounds of one of them.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is confident those safeguards will prevent a disaster at either plant


We will find out.

KLA2 wrote:You know, if they build them on a floodplain ... if they cannot absolutely guarantee their safety in the event of earthquakes, floods, tornados, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, meteor impacts, volcanos and lots of other stuff which does and WILL occur ... perhaps they ought not to build them??? (Yeah, I know, once in a 10,000 year event ... bullshit.)


Well, that's the thing - they can't absolutely guarantee the safety of anything. There is no safe/not safe, there is only more safe and less safe (or if you prefer, more dangerous and less dangerous).
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Re: Nebraska nuclear plants

Postby MM_Dandy » Fri Jun 24, 2011 2:35 pm

KLA2 wrote:Hope MM_Dandy, and all are safe. [-o<


Thanks again for your concerns, and for the most part, I think the people living in harm's way have been as sensible about it as anyone could expect. They defended what they could and evacuated what they couldn't. Nobody's happy about it, and the financial burden and loss of property will be substantial, but at least they and their families are safe and sound.

Relatively, we're in good shape. While Canton is on the banks of the Big Sioux, we're 60 miles and 150 feet above its confluence into the Missouri. Plus, my house is about 50 feet above the river and about 1/2 mile away from the river.

As far as the power plants go: well, they probably should have built them further up from the river. But I imagine it's not practical to move them at this point, and at least they seem to be monitoring the situations closely. At least they're several days downriver from Gavins Point, so they should have some time to do something if they increase the flow rate again.
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Re: Nebraska nuclear plants

Postby Halcyon Dayz, FCD » Sat Jun 25, 2011 8:49 pm

KLA2 wrote:Yeah, I know, once in a 10,000 year event ... bullshit.

With something like 450 nuclear reactors world-wide that still gives you a catastrophic event every other decade.
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Re: Nebraska nuclear plants

Postby Мастер » Sun Jun 26, 2011 3:30 am

Halcyon Dayz, FCD wrote:
KLA2 wrote:Yeah, I know, once in a 10,000 year event ... bullshit.

With something like 450 nuclear reactors world-wide that still gives you a catastrophic event every other decade.


Hmm, since you mention it, that does seem roughly consistent with the rate at which they are occurring . . .
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Postby rmercure » Sun Jun 26, 2011 4:19 pm

So, does it take (sorry for the mockery, I'm "in a mood") an extremely enlightened, fully vested with eye-in-pyramid-tatooed-on-forehead, to realize that these heavily subsidized, far too complicated for levels of employee paid to safely manage them, "steam kettles" are truly stupid idea "as fucked up as a football bat?"

For some reason (perhaps where the jobs are; where the congressional bribes - oops, meant "contributions" are; where the university chairs endowed by the industry are; and where the massive amount of "sunk" - and sinking rapidly - is) we keep on being fascinated with these monsters despite the fact that we still don't know what to do with much of the low level waste much less the "refinable into bomb stock" (fission, fusion, or "dirty" - does it really make a shit?).

If you read and listen to the press - even much of the respected science press - you'd think the idea is still viable but at some point you have to cut your losses and stop simply throwing away joules of energy flippantly. It's been a long time since I was truly versed this stuff - back when Ronnie Ratzass was ready to launch the "boomerang" ICBMs - and since then, like many of us, we've been lulled by continuous false promises designed to quell our justified fears and concerns. After all, in the USA, no commercial nuclear plant would have ever been constructed if congress had not assumed all of the accident liability. Imagine what any of us could with capital if were were insulated from all responsibility? The only reason the industry was created was to provide sufficient high grade fissionable material to threaten the USSR. But the USA's cultural mythos is of a "peaceful" people (although I'd be hard pressed to point to a spot on the globe we haven't put troops into) and "PPs" don't make threatening jestures (when you finish laughing please read on) so we had to find another reason for the massive nuclear infrastructure.

As said, I'm out of date on the issues but during the late 1980s a respected "poison ivy" league university economist looked at the entire costs of the USA nuclear fuel cycle and concluded that with the incredible electrical demands of gaseous diffusion enrichment the industry had not produced a net watt of electricity until around 1982-83 (most of the enrichment power came from coal plants) and that if the "externalities" of mining reclamation (much less land than coal - much, much more expensive to make safe much less productive) and final clean up and entombment of the reactors and waste were taken into consideration that no net power would ever result - merely shifting around air pollution sources. I can't say that this prof (who's name I'll try and find - I do remember the source material) "is" right but I remain confident he was then and for a long while afterward.

It would be a "joke" of the sickest and most cruel - and so very believable in this "economy" - if it turned out that the whole mess was just another "redistribute the wealth upward" scheme that actually managed to "forward redistribute" current liability to future generations.

Hope yer still awake - before moving to Wise at 12 I lived in Erwin, TN, where Nuclear Fuel Services is and I've got at least one interesting and scary first hand experience I can relate if you're interested.

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Postby KLA2 » Mon Jun 27, 2011 1:57 am

rmercure wrote:Hope yer still awake - before moving to Wise at 12 I lived in Erwin, TN, where Nuclear Fuel Services is and I've got at least one interesting and scary first hand experience I can relate if you're interested.

Rob


Well, Rob who would NOT be interested? Please tell on. :)
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Postby KLA2 » Thu Jun 30, 2011 1:40 am

Hey, MM_Dandy, are you and yours still high and dry in SD?
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Postby MM_Dandy » Thu Jun 30, 2011 6:45 pm

Canton and Sioux Falls are in no danger. Places like Yankton, Dakota Dunes, Sioux City, etc. on the Missouri itself, though, will likely experience flooding through August as the CoE expects to keep the flow at Gavins Point Dam around 160,000 CFS through the summer. There's also some low-land flooding in some places away from the river (mostly in the north-central part of the state, but some in the north-east and south central, too).
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Postby KLA2 » Fri Jul 01, 2011 12:58 am

Glad for you. Sorry for those other, unfortunate folks.

But, if you build your home on a flood plain, by what miracle do you expect it will never flood?
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Postby Enzo » Fri Jul 01, 2011 12:58 am

There was a lovely aerial view of some school roof in Minot, ND, in today's paper. That was the only part of the school above water.
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Postby rmercure » Fri Jul 08, 2011 5:10 pm

Sorry I've been occupied for a while: OK, the "interesting" tale - at least to me. First a wee bit of geology: The Nolichucky River (trib of the TN) passes through a narrow gorge with no roads through it - only a single RR track - before spilling out into the Nolichucky bottom land in Erwin (one of the most beautiful pieces of Applachian bottom land I've seen). The gorge cuts through the Blue Ridge/Upper Great Smokey Mountains and the resultant material at the entrance to the bottom is rounded creek cobbles from pea to boulder size - very porous, no retention of was spilled as it goes straight to river.
Nuclear Fuels Services was the second larger industry to come into Erwin (the first was the Clinchfield Coal Company famous for hanging the elephant to death - 'nother story) hence it was sited on the rockier material. When the plant was built it was laid out on the creek cobbles and was a somewhat innocuous facility - a machine shop that precisely machined sub-critical slugs of U 233, 235. & 238 for the reactors used in nuclear subs and aircraft carriers (for a long while it was the only one). But sometime in the late 1960s the parent company in NY decided to get into the business of separating isotopes (and elements) from spent fuel rods - sort of a mini-experimental version of what the French were into. So fairly quickly the parking lot was moved to the back of the plant and about 1/2 dozen acre sized circular ponds were excavated. Clay lining, I believe, but still basically at or below river level during flood stage.
It it an overwhelming overstatement to say that environmental awareness wasn't on corporate America's radar. My younger brother and I (approximately 10 & 12) were allowed to wonder amongst the PCB contaminated grinding grit at Hoover Ball Bearing (we used the bearings for marbles), cut across the main CCR machine stock (railroads bought their locomotives and bogies but made most of their own cars); and - being the nephews of the plant bosses secretary - wonder around the ponds around the Nuclear Fuels lot (no fence, no guards anyway).
One summer day while there a bull frog (Nolichucky bull frogs and cat fish are legendary) crawled from one of the ponds. Full width, almost 4" across head, except from where the hips would have been it just tapered to a point! It obviously could have not escaped me as I tended to catch frogs but there was something just so "wrong" about this animal that I simply watched it. How it fed, how it escaped the great blue herons there I'll never know but there it was. A couple of years later the ponds were simply filled in with sand - nothing removed - and still sit there under the new, paved, front parking lot. But since there was no clay nor organic matter to grab a hold of any uranium has either lodged itself well in the cobbles or more likely washed down the Tennessee River long ago.
The Nolichucky Gorge is still magnificent and a white water rafting industry has grown up there and when well I love to swim in the cold turbulent water - but I get out a couple of miles upstream of the plant even though the white water folks continue all the way down to "the Devils Looking Glass."
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Postby tubeswell » Sat Jul 09, 2011 2:41 am

I'm with you Rob. With a major nuclear disaster on average every decade since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 (and I count the various atmospheric and subterranean Pacific atoll tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Proving_Grounds in the 50s and 60s as disastrous, since they are virtually in my back yard), including 3 Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, the Kursk in 2000, and Fukushima in 2011, it won't be long now until the earth's fragile ecosystem is totally well and truly f**ked...

Add up all the decay chains http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain and it will be hundreds of thousands (or millions) of years before some of those places are 'safe' to visit. So how long have we got?

I'm afraid that 'as safe as possible' is still nowhere near safe enough.
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Postby rmercure » Sun Jul 17, 2011 9:15 pm

Yeah, way back when when the absurdity of coal stripmining slapped me my in the face as the surrounding landscape disappeared I learned a voodoo ("vodun") power word of the economist tribe that must never be uttered in corporate or governmental decision making as it caused loss of profit mojo and the resultant impotence that comes from migration of trophy wifes and mistresses: "externalities." Yes, that word - the one that due to it's power is dismissed as "unmeasurable" so the ogre need not be faced for several generations.

In this case, let's talk about the costs of cleaning up the uranium mining, milling, and processing sites as well as tailings piles. Effectively unusable land and almost never included in the equation when we consider long-term "clean up costs" (same with coal - restoring these mountains would actually involve creation of a deity to get the work done). But while there is some chemical toxicity associated with the coal sites the uranium mining sites combine chemical with radiological toxicity - and add some additional threats to the diminishing fresh water supplies in the west.

Again, if you really consider what went into the nuke industry there ain't no way in hell that it's ever netted a milliwatt of electricity systemwide.

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