Posted on 03/16/2011 11:47:33 AM PDT by presidio9
Gaze up the Hudson River and hope, hope, hope our regulators are right.
Hope they could not possibly be as wrong as the regulators in Japan who said their nuclear reactors could withstand any calamity.
Hope we never, ever have an out-of-control reactor just 35 miles north - a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson.
We are assured the Indian Point nuclear plant, which has had its share of problems, is designed to shrug off an earthquake under a magnitude 6.1. That's a bit above the most powerful one on record in New York - a 5.25 way back in 1884.
We are also told not to be unduly worried that scientists at Columbia University have discovered Indian Point is within a mile of where our region's two most active fault lines intersect.
The 2008 paper reporting this discovery estimated the chances of a earthquake here measuring a potentially disastrous magnitude 7 are 1.5% over a 50-year period.
Those are very long odds, but as the lottery ads say, hey, you never know.
Can't you just hear the Japanese regulators saying before their disaster, "What's the chance of a 9 anyway?"
The Columbia paper noted Indian Point is located "closer to more people" than any other nuclear plant in America, at "clearly one of the least favorable sites in our area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective."
In other words, if the folks who built the plant had searched the whole region, they could not have found a worse spot.
Astonishingly, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined even to consider the newly discovered fault lines in reviewing the plant's application to extend its operating license by 20 years.
"[The NRC] ... has not permitted any new information to be used or old information on which the old licenses were based to be contested," the paper noted.
The same agency quickly removed from its website after 9/11 a report estimating fatalities from a full meltdown at Indian Point for fear terrorists would find the information "advantageous."
That report said a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson would pose a dire threat to people as far as 500 miles away and necessitate the evacuation of 93 million Americans and Canadians for as long as a year.
After all the lies at Ground Zero, who would believe it was safe to return?
Sea-level view of the Fukushima plant Monday. (Reuters TV)
The mayor on Monday described Indian Point as "far away from New York City," but you can bet that if a nuclear mishap like the ones in Japan struck it would suddenly seem just upriver.
How safe do you think it feels to be 35 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant now there is the threat of an uncontrolled release of radiation into the air?
A spokesman for Indian Point's owner, Entergy of New Orleans, Monday reported that the application to extend its license is "pretty far along," including a safety evaluation whose requirements include hardening against the "postulated maximum earthquake" for the particular area.
If the extension goes through, Indian Point will continue providing a third of the city's power. The two remaining hurdles are state permits involving the 2.5 billion gallons of water that pass through the plant each day, more than twice the water consumed by all five boroughs.
One permit concerns the temperature of the water after it passes through. The other concerns the fish and their eggs sucked into the 40-inch intake pipes.
In the meantime, a mysterious pool of water on a floor at the plant led to the discovery last year of a leaking underground pipe feeding a backup cooling system.
And, a transformer explosion triggered a brief shutdown in November.
At least the area surrounding Indian Point finally has a properly functioning warning system after only three years of delays and screwups.
Of course the system's 172 sirens are just a precaution.
A nuclear disaster could never happen here.
Just ask the regulators.
The 2008 paper reporting this discovery estimated the chances of a earthquake here measuring a potentially disastrous magnitude 7 are 1.5% over a 50-year period.
This sort of logic leads to natural conclusions like "We need to move everbody off of Long Island permanently. The chances of it getting hit by a major hurricane every 20 years are 100%." Furthermore, the Island will eventually be hit by a major tidal wave when the volcano in the Azores falls into the sea. Additionally, we should never have rebuilt NOLA. And why, in God's name, are people still living and working in NYC skyscrapers, when we know that sooner or later a terrorist will get luck again.
And, BTW, a 6.1 earthquake is EXPONENTIALLY more powerful than a 5.25.
Who’s idea was it to put this planet only 93 million miles away from a star that’s going to explode some day?!!!!
Who’s idea was it to put this planet only 93 million miles away from a star that’s going to explode some day?!!!!
How to tell if an article on Japan is fearmongering:
1. If it raises the question if another Chernobyl is possible - for many many reasons...NO!
2. If it discusses the possibility of a nuclear explosion - not possible
3. If the article was written by Reuters - it was unreliable before the earthquake, why would you believe Reuters to be reliable now?
4. Consider the article suspicious if it uses cutsie terms “Hail Mary”, “Point of No Return”, etc - this is someone trying to grab a headline
5. If the article gives credibility to “The China Syndrome” - repeat after me...it is only a movie, it is only a movie
“Hope they could not possibly be as wrong as the regulators in Japan who said their nuclear reactors could withstand any calamity.”
Utter and complete BS!
Hysteria sure sells newspapers, though.
Hurry! Find an alternate source of sunlight! Something renewable that doesn't pollute, cause medical damage or cost anything.
And be sure to stop the sun from shining immediately before you find the new solution.
Thanks.
Anything can happen anywhere.
The only thing one can do is take reasonable precautions based on the technology available at the time.
Heck, how many people have been burned to death in hideous automobile accidents because of the dangerous nature of petroleum? (Incidentally, hydrogen is supposedly even worse.)
There’s a risk with everything. We have to mitigate it as much as possible, but we don’t control the universe and sometimes there may be something that is well beyond our control at a given moment.
This statement is a lie. Japan built their reactors to withstand an 8.1 quake, they never said they could withstand ANY diaster, just the ones most likely to occur. They built for the once in 100 years events and got hit by the once in 1000 years event. Fear mongering at its best, this article is.
When that stupid movie first came out I was talking to some liberals who were aghast at the thought the core could melt down and come out on the other side of the earth(really, they thought that). When I pointed out the core could only drop down to the center of the earth and would stop due to the fact that all directions from the center would be up, they came unglued and called me every name but nice. They didn't want to NOT believe in some huge disaster associated with nukes.
Chernobyl was not the disaster it has been made out to be. LOOK IT UP. People live there today. Old folks who refused to move live in the exclusion zone. Animal & plant life is abundant. No two headed deer. Heard on the news just yesterday that after twenty years they still can't prove that increases in cancers is related to Chernobyl. After twenty years of trying to prove something you already believe to be true, and you can't do it, time to give up.
Like almost everything these days, the HYPE is rampant. They (news media, scientists, etc.), hypes absolutely everything. Why is this? Isn't just the truth enough?
If there are various opinions, lets hear them, and we can decide for ourselves.
The builders of the plant did exactly what the regulations call for. They looked up the historical records, and designed a system that could safely shutdown the plant in the event of an earthquake at least twice as powerful as the most powerful earthquake on record for that region (which is called the design basis earthquake).
It never ceases to amaze me why anti-nuke kooks hammer the nuclear industry for their care in following the rules. They should hammer people who don't follow the rules, not those who do. Geez, you do everything you are supposed to do in this case, and you still get hammered. I guess you can't win for losing.
“Besides, the growth in the number of children born with genetic defects has been simply impossible - assert UNSCEAR experts. Even after the highest radiation doses incurred by people because of the atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (hundreds of times higher than the Chernobyl doses and absorbed within a fraction of a second), no genetic disorders have been observed in the offspring of the Japanese nuclear attacks survivors.”
http://www.wonuc.org/xfiles/chern_02.html
0% risk is the goal, well at least ONLY when looking at nuclear power. When talking about the mercury in a CFL or the heavy metals used in solar collector manufacturing these 0 defect or 0 accident or 0 risk approaches don’t apply.
Incidently, anyone who took an introduction to statistics class knows that there IS, in fact, a “chance” that Godzilla is currently sleeping at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and will someday wake up and treat downtown Tokyo like a mosh pit.
http://www.nuclearmuseum.org/events/detail/trinity-site-tour/
Hundreds of thousands of years of unlivable high radiation levels my @ss. There are places in CO that naturally have higher radiation levels than Trinity today, and people live there!
Nothing that has to deal with nuclear is dealt with in a pragmatic, logical or realistic way. It seems like when people hear the word “nuclear” or “atomic” they just freak out.
The Big Sh*tty could be made uninhabitable?
We should be so lucky.
There should be a rule on FR against people sharing asinine opinions like this, even in jest. All it does is provide fuel for lurkers to shape public opinion that this website is only for ignorant rednecks.
I left NYC to live in South Florida for a year. It was the longest year of my life.
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