Posted on 01/10/2017 7:11:27 AM PST by C19fan
The ironic thing is that Mother Nature proved them wrong a few years later when Hurricane Bob came up the coast and large parts of LI had to be evacuated. How did they do it? Well, they dusted off the evacuation plans for Shoreham and just did what they said. Everything went like clockwork, but the papers never mentioned it. Suffolk County used NRC regulations at the time (which said Emergency Plans would not be approved without country participation in drills, and without an EP they would not license a plant) to do a back door veto of the plant operating license.
FWIW I am looking at places along the SE NC coast. With my luck, it will become even more of a hurricane magnet than it is now if I move there.
Look, regardless of all the yoda speak, both of these incidents rendered large areas uninhabitable. We are detecting materials emitted in sea/ground water. Animals and sea life have become contaminated. Most facilities operate with few serious emissions, but accidents happen. It is extreme conditions such as earthquakes, Tsunamis, sabotage and the like that is the issue.
Not to mention the waste disposal. My opinion.
Any kind of industrial facility is going to have to have a design basis for safe shutdown. The only way to obtain a credible design basis is to use historical data. If you are dissatisfied with that, the only thing you can do is never build anything, not just nuclear plants. But, again, you should know that.
The waste issue was actually solved a while back. Simple partitioning of used fuel will get you a 95% reduction in volume and recover most of the useful material left in the fuel assembly. Actinide recycle burns out the heat-producing forms, leaving such a small residue that geologic isolation like at WIPP would be more than adequate. No need for Yucca Mountain. This concept is embodies in the IFR design developed at Idaho Lab. It had already passed the proof-of-principle test and was ready for a full-scale demonstration run using the EBR-II as the actinide-burning FSR. But Clinton pulled the plug on it, which ended up costing more than completing the test. When this was pointed out, his response was: "I know, but its a symbol". A symbol of what? Again, a Ph.D. in NE would know these things.
Recent sampling of the seawater and biota in the offshore vicinity of F. Daiichi show no detectable levels of 134Cs and 137Cs, which are the most mobile forms of fission products in the biosphere.
If TSHTF Hydro Quebec will be the least of your worries.
Good ol clean natural gas. Plentiful, clean burning, no hazardous waste disposal and if there is an accident, minimal cleanup and repairs...back in business.
Not so with Atomic....urr urr newkler energy. Quite the opposite. By the way, I don't just comment on topics just to comment or start some sort of flame war.
I do research the topics of interest. My sis worked for the plant in South Texas and in North Carolina so I get a lil insight in that regard. In my younger years, I worked in some of these plants as a radiography tech. So I gained a little experience with X/Gamma ray sources, typically Cobalt.
....and I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Industrial radiography is tricky business. The very few accidents that have occurred using radiation sources (you can probably count them on the fingers of one hand) have been accelerators and gamma sources. I worked for years with a linac and while never harmed by radiation, working with high vacuum systems drove me crazy.
Natural gas is advertised as clean burning, but it isn't. The most efficient combined cycle gas plants emit about 400 grams of CO2-equivalent per kwhr of energy generated. Simple (or Single) cycle gas turbines are worse, about 500 grams per kwhr. If you replaced all of the energy generated at IPEC with natural gas, you'd have about 7 million more tons of CO2 thrown into the biosphere per year. That is equivalent to putting about 1.2 million more cars on the road per year.
And that's just CO2. The fugitive emissions of methane from the natural gas extraction step alone (not even counting transport and end use) in this country dwarf the carbon footprint of all the nuclear plants in the world combined. Fracking gas wells only exacerbates the fugitive emissions problem. And methane is a terrible, terrible greenhouse gas, doing anywhere from 30 to 70 times more damage to the atmosphere on a per molecule basis than CO2. The only reason there isn't waste disposal with natural gas is the waste goes up the stack and out into the environment. You never see it, but its there.
As far as safety goes, check out the San Juanico disaster of November, 1984. An entire LPG terminal blew up and essentially burned the town of San Juan Ixhuatepec off the face of the Earth. Fatality estimates were in the range of 500-600 people, most burned to a crisp. Another 7000 of so suffered injuries of the most horrible kind.
I don’t live in the Northeast anymore, so I don’t have those worries. If I did, I would, because I understand what a prolonged disruption in electricity supply would mean to modern society. If that area suffered such a catastrophe, we wouldn’t be talking about a wall across the Mexican border, but maybe one across the northern border of NJ and PA.
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