Posted on 03/17/2011 1:23:41 PM PDT by Scythian
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is calling for a comprehensive safety review at the 104 nuclear reactors in the U.S. in the wake of the Japanese disaster.
The president is asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to examine nuclear plants to ensure they can withstand earthquakes and other disasters. Obama said lessons can be learned from the unfolding nuclear disaster caused by last week's earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
In televised remarks Thursday, The president said U.S. officials do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the West Coast of the continental U.S., Hawaii or Alaska. He repeated the statement for emphasis.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Its clear...the Obama Administration needs to regulate, and if needed, BAN basements. Radon causes more lung cancer than smoking.
My guess right now...the ‘first wave’ of closures will be the GE ‘sister units’ to the one in Japan.
Wow. I am so comforted that President Know Nothing about Anything Scientific is assuring US that we’re ok. I may ask my daughter to steal some of her science teacher’s potassium iodide. Just in case.
“examine nuclear plants to ensure they can withstand earthquakes and other disasters. “
This is done during the design process. There are scads of standards that must be followed.
IEEE_323 requires testing of all the components of a plant, right down to lightbulbs and toilets, to assure they will survive a worst-case quake at end-of-life for that component. This is why a simple industrial control switch costs $98 if put on a CNC machine but $2245 if put in a nuke control panel.
There are also many standards for the design of the building itself, and more standards for the piping, and separate requirements for valves and pumps and backup batteries.
So what he’s ordering has already been done!
This may cause some of the models to be re-run with “new seismic data”. One way the greens would try to stop a plant from being built was to wait until the structural and piping seismic design was signed off, then “find” a new fault or “find” a new motion for an existing fault (academia can provide this), forcing a re-design. Do this four times and your $300 million plant goes over a billion, and yo have not even broken ground.
His action on this was aimed at people who do not know how plants are designed, and licensed.
And I fully expect at least one plant to be shut down “temporarily”.
Isn't the government allowed to validate those regulations are being adhered to? Or allowed to revise regulations where deficiencies are noted?
“Entirely appropriate course of action.”
Why? Are you expecting a 9.1 earthquake?
The earth quake design requirements are set in stone. You can not review and validate a design to make it better able to withstand an earth quake...
As far as lessons learned -we are STILL in the middles of the mess -NO ONE knows the extent of what happened. To what new information is the government going to review?
It is real simple:
Paper and testing evidence adequacy to design -all plants are approved already...
paper and inspections evidence compliance to regulations -all plants are compliant or they would be shit down...
0marxo wants to change the rules and this is yet another opportunity. That is all this is -a power grab...
Idiots supporting this apparently learned NOTHING from the ongoing gulf oil spill premised fiasco OR they themselves are anti-Americans...
The time to reflect is once all the facts are in and then with a measure of rational weighing of all considerations. Acting out of fear is STUPID...
I would hope that person would say something like "Why do you limit this potential disaster scenario to just an earthquake? We certainly do not."
"Firetrucks!? . . .your kidding me, firetrucks, that's your big idea?! . .. get out'a 'here, really, get out'a'here, go back to the drawing board & don't come back until you come up with something infinitely better than F I R E T R U C K S ! ?
" . . firetrucks, I can't believe these guys......
Stuck on stupid are the leftists who want to rebuild government subsidized housing in New Orleans flood zones that are as well hurricane targets...
Fire trucks were an innovative stop gap answer during an unforeseen an unexpected successive even tragedy... You call it stupid -I call it taking care of business when the chips are down...
I think that the one BIG thing that the industry will gather from all this is that they MUST have adequate backup power supply available. All nuclear plants already are required to have on-site backup power as well as redundent off-site power sources. Basically, they’re built to withstand double or triple contingencies. I suspect that another layer of supply will become the next rule, or they may look at the conditions under which on-site supply may fail.
Obviously, an inland plant doesn’t need to protect against a tsunami, but it needs to be able to deal with situations perhaps beyond the 100-year flood or 100-year earthquake.
If not for the loss of off-site and backup generator power, Fukushima I would have experienced a normal shutdown just as Fukushima II did.
From those same people, I'm reading that private inspectors who adhere to government regulation certify without error that all plants are compliant and that, since they're the experts, they need no oversight: Of course they've made no mistakes, the power plant is still running isn't it?
That's pretty extreme. Especially since at least in the Fukushima plant's history there's been evidence of falsified reports. Never could happen here? Regulations are just guidelines, and they never need updating or validation that they're being adhered to, or that in the years since that some part of the checks and balances system has decayed? Can't even check to see if the diesel fuel tanks for the backup generators aren't rusty, or leaking, or have soaked up too much water for the generators to run accurately? A water coolant spillway is free of debris or has developed a zebra mussel infestation? Can't even check if a security door is properly locked? Oh, but I bet if some Muslim extremist managed to get employed at the plant these people would go ballistic that the US government dropped the ball, right?
Like I said, it's too cavalier and reckless here to say "Ah, that's just them Japs. Couldn't happen here in the USA." on the heels of the BP Deepwater Horizon spill and how negligent the private engineers and US government inspectors were shown to be there.
I do believe that questioning the curious dismissal of the need for these security and safety reviews doesn't make me a Communist or anti-American or stupid or any other names people want to call me.
Obama is in a corner now. He is gradually permitting nuclear power at a rate slow enough not to raise the wackos.
That plan is now toast........ except if he provides a new report rehashing the old news.
Nucs in their present form are ok.
The new nucs are safe
...IF its purpose is simply to ensure that our nuclear facilities are as failsafe as possible, rather than to help fulfill an ideological agenda.
That is one thing I can agree with. IF a catastrophic event knocks out all power sources then there should be a 'portable' option that can be brought to the location to be a stop gap until alternate power can be routed. I would think all nukes would cooperate on establishing this type of idea...
Only fools rush in...
Insuring nuke plant safety is one of the government's roles... and therefore has been his responsability since he took office. In theory, recent events in Japan shouldn't change any of that.
I suggest you get your blamky and suck your thumb. Let the big boys do the real work... Useful idiots are a dime a dozen these days...
“There is nothing in the events in Japan to suggest that US plants are not prepared for what nature can reasonably be expect to throw against them.”
I suppose this is exactly what the Japanese though about two weeks ago about their own level of “preparedness”....
Just sayin’.....
Everyone who's disagreed with me, their only beef is that Barack Obama may be credited for doing something right, and they'll just blow a gasket if his Rasmussen poll goes from -22 to -19 overnight.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.