A Nuclear Renaissance?

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Tuesday, March 30, 2004 | VIJAY V. VAITHEESWARAN

[presidio9]

Twenty-five years ago this week, something went horribly wrong at Three Mile Island. Those very words are now synonymous with nuclear meltdown, but back then they merely referred to an obscure nuclear plant in central Pennsylvania. Human error and mechanical failure conspired to send the temperature in the reactor core soaring, threatening a blast of deadly radiation. All of America watched in apprehension. Politicians and regulators bickered, and the media whipped up a frenzy.

[shrinkermd]

Uranium has been going up, and up. Cameco and Denison Mines are Canadian uranium companies that are also going up. Do your own due dilegence.

[Robe]

Ted Kennedy has killed more people that nuclear reactors !

[alloysteel]

And Homer Simpson, with his alert response, deft handling of the controls and quick thinking, saved the day.

Of course several million people got the bejeezus scared out of them that day.

Unfortunately, they vote.

[Carry_Okie]

Ted Kennedy has killed more people that nuclear reactors !

Excluding Chernobyl?

[hopespringseternal]

Of course several million people got the bejeezus scared out of them that day.

They were scared by false news reports and ignorant political rhetoric.

[Peter J. Huss]

Ted Kennedy has killed more people that nuclear reactors !

Humor aside, this is not true. Chernobyl immediately killed 31 people when it exploded, not to mention the scores of people who were baked putting out the fire. The isotopes given off at Chernobyl will take 900, 46000 and 100000 years to decay to safe levels.

(Thread Highjack) Check this site out for a tour of Chernobyl today:

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

[Peter J. Huss]

Actally, The Three Mile Island accident was not retorical.

The dirty little secret not talked about is that US authorities waited until the winds were blowing to Canada to release the radiation from the reactor building. It's not that they hated Canada, but the would dispurse the radioactive steam over the least populated area.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Not one penny more of taxpayer money should go to this begging bowl until the industry itself tackles the third big obstacle: cost. No banker in his right mind will finance a new nuclear power plant in America today."

And exactly WHY is it expensive?? It isn't because of the hardware costs--it is because the "green" jackasses use every POSSIBLE avenue to delay implementation/construction and thus drive up the FINANCING costs. Building the plants with borrowed money means that the interest has to be paid, even if the plant isn't completed and earning money.

[Robe]

OK ,OK .....Picky...Picky.....

I meant REAL nuclear Reactor with proper containment
buildings and NOT being used to make weapons
grade plutonium in a civilian facility.

Point taken ,though
Robe

[alloysteel]

They were scared by false news reports and ignorant political rhetoric.

Hey, demagogues got to make a living too. Unfortunately, when the do well, almost everybody else suffers.

[hopespringseternal]

Actally, The Three Mile Island accident was not retorical.

I didn't say that. I said what scared people was the ignorant political rhetoric. The dirty little secret not talked about is that US authorities waited until the winds were blowing to Canada to release the radiation from the reactor building. It's not that they hated Canada, but the would dispurse the radioactive steam over the least populated area.

If you can wait until the wind changes direction to release pressure, that is an indication that you don't really have that much of a problem. For one thing, if you are really worried about the radiation, you wouldn't vent the steam to the environment anyway. You would pump it into a storage tank.

[Peter J. Huss]

no time for spell check.. so forgive.. You would pump it into a storage tank. I have always thought this myself. I am no engineer, but a fellow former worker who was a nuclear engineer on the USS Enterprise (not the Space Ship, but the aircraft carrier) told me all kinds of stories. He said disperal is the best method of getting rid of anything. On a side note, when he was in charge of the reactors on the Enterprise, he said they would wait for moonless or cloudy night and then fire up all 4 reactors at once to full capacity. Apparently, it was totally against the rules. He said the ship would tilt 15 degrees like a speed boat. It's actual speed was a secret, but that it was so fast that if you saw it on the horizon and looked away - When you looked back, it would be gone.

[chimera]

The dirty little secret not talked about is that US authorities waited until the winds were blowing to Canada to release the radiation from the reactor building.

That's bogus. Canada is to the north. But so is Harrisburg and Hershey. You're saying "they released" effluents in a direction of a less-populated country, but doing so would have exposed a greater number of people than an eastward or southward release. What a bunch of BS.

It's not that they hated Canada, but the would dispurse the radioactive steam over the least populated area.

There was no "radioactive steam" released. The only measurable effluents were noble gases, mostly 133Xe and a little 85Kr. How do I know this, you ask? I was downwind of the plant near the fenceline using one of the first "portable" high-resolution gamma spectrometer systems available at the time. When we saw those fission gases in the release plume we knew there was fuel damage, probably before many people in the plant knew. We were also one of the first to estimate the source term for that accident, and come up with downwind dose estimates (in the range of millirems for worst-case camping out at the fenceline). We passed those numbers on to the people in charge but they wouldn't listen, and ended up ordering an unneeded evacuation that carried more risks to the population than staying put.

[Peter J. Huss]

There was no "radioactive steam" released. The only measurable effluents were noble gases, mostly 133Xe and a little 85Kr. How do I know this, you ask? I was downwind of the plant near the fenceline using one of the first "portable" high-resolution gamma spectrometer systems available at the time. When we saw those fission gases in the release plume we knew there was fuel damage, probably before many people in the plant knew. We were also one of the first to estimate the source term for that accident, and come up with downwind dose estimates (in the range of millirems for worst-case camping out at the fenceline). We passed those numbers on to the people in charge but they wouldn't listen, and ended up ordering an unneeded evacuation that carried more risks to the population than staying put. Can you elaborate in more detail what you saw? I can't get enough.

[Carry_Okie]

OK ,OK .....Picky...Picky.....

I was just saving you from a future public embarassment that might discredit the legitimate point you were trying to make about the relative safety of modern nuclear power generation reactors. Condsider these..

[wingnutx]

is because there are three big obstacles that still stand in the way of new nuclear plants: complacency, conviction and costs.

Plus a fourth: hippies.

[muleskinner]

Good post. My B.S. meter went up when I read the

The dirty little secret not talked about is that US authorities waited until the winds were blowing to Canada to release the radiation from the reactor building.

storey.

Isn't a good chunk of Penn. and New York north of 3-Mile? Whenever I see, "The dirty little secret not talked about...", it should be preceeded by Liberal Kookism Alert.

[chimera]

Isn't a good chunk of Penn. and New York north of 3-Mile?

Yes, but I suppose some good could come of it if we dosed Ithaca. But please not Lake George...

Releasing effluents to Canada is really off the scale on the Ridiculous Meter. Even a crude model for dispersion would show that you're down into the attocurie per cubic gigaparsec concentration range for the TMI source term, within a few tens of miles of the release point. I doubt that the thought of Canada as a measurable dose zone ever crossed the minds of any accident analysts or emergency planners.

[chimera]

Can you elaborate in more detail what you saw? I can't get enough.

Didn't really see much. Just took a lot of data on what are today old-style instruments and ancient computers (late 1970s technology, which goes back into the minicomputer era). Made a lot of runs back to the liquid nitrogen storage tank to keep the spectrometer detector cooled down. We had a micro-rem meter that we'd check now and then. Once in a while we'd see a "spike" upward to about twice normal background reading, which we interpreted as non-uniform dispersion effects.

In general, some long, cold, less-then-pleasant nights of data collection in an out-of-the-way place (woodlands and hillsides). Watching The Blair Witch Project and its setting brought some flashbacks. There was a stirring in the most primitive jelly of my brain thinking about being "lost in the woods". There is something deeply frightening and eldritch about wooded areas, and, believe me, radiation (or, in this case, the lack thereof) is the least of your worries...