Is this Claire McCaskill (D-MO)? I've never heard of her before.
Posted on 04/28/2011 10:16:33 AM PDT by CedarDave
Wednesday’s storms took out all of TVA’s electric power transmission lines in Mississippi and North Alabama, and forced Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant unto diesel backup power and into emergency and automatic cold shutdown.
Bill McCollum, the chief operating officer of Tennessee Valley Authority, said it may be weeks before power can be restored to all of the 300,000 customers whose power is supplied by the federal utility.
“With the level of damage we have, it will be — we hope it will be days until we get most of the customers back on, but it will be weeks before we’ve fully repaired all of the damage,” he said.
McCollum said the reactors, now being cooled by backup diesel power, are safe.
He said the spent fuel pools also are being cooled by backup diesel power and are safe.
The transmission lines are the monster power lines that carry electricity from TVA power plants to power distributors such as EPB and Huntsville Utilities.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesfreepress.com ...
Zero ignored previous natural disasters in the south. Now that he is in campaign mode, and running for re-election; he visits Alabama.
An expression of concern that is as fake as his second birth certificate.
...and FU, Mr. Beck.
So how exactly did “the rest of us” get “screwed”?
I had to check my browser address to make sure it didn't read www.DemocraticUnderground.com when I read your post.
Ignorance is bliss
Sour grapes make your mouth pucker.
Outright lies kill your soul.
Yep, stick your head in the sand and maybe all the bad things will go away and the unicorns and glitter will come out to play...ha, I’m a poet and don’t know it.
Funny thing to read and see the picture you posted!!
I guess reasoned, thoughtful dialogue isn't your cup of tea? And you haven't backed up your knee jerk attack on GWB with anything substantial.
I am listening to Ronald Reagan's diaries right now on CD.
He had to put up with the same garbage from his critics.
As will Sarah Palin.
I’m a Reaganite and I like Palin. None of the Bushes deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. The biggest mistake Reagan ever made was to select a Bush as his vice president.
Bush was as good as anyone we had who could win. It’s a very imperfect world out there.
There are some very good candidates who could do great things if we could get them in office.. Congressman Steve King from my state for example.
But I would probably not support a candidate like that as he would not be electable on a national stage.
Listening to the Reagan diaries mad me realize that he had a lot of critics on the right and the left.
I’ll bet if FR was around then; we would have had posters ripping into Reagan as a RINO.
Keep in mind we also have better modeling tools available to us than even those from five years ago. Some of the more detailed modeling shows stress distribution is more efficient than originally calculated. Also, we are better able to model the small-scale wind flows around the containment shell which leads to complex but understandable pressure distributions over the entire structural surface.
Bottom line is, I don't think containment integrity is going to be the driving factor in any post-Fukushima regulatory ratcheting. It is most likely going to focus on remediation of unexpected loss of emergency AC.
Reagan was not liked by the Republican establishment, and Sarah Palin isn't liked by them either. Consider what Barbara Bush said about her recently.
"I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful. And I think she's very happy in Alaska and I hope she'll stay there."Sadly, the GOP has reverted back to what it was before Reagan came along.
You are absolutely correct. They've already made strides in this area since TMI and 9/11. I 'think' that each unit at Browns Ferry has two diesels, plus there are two additional diesels added more recently (I think it was in response to 9/11). In all, there are 8 at Browns Ferry, of which 7 were available at the time of the tornado. 7 easily handled all the loads for the few minutes that off-site power was unavailable, and the 8th one was to be restored to service ASAP (down for maintenance).
He also wasn’t loved by all conservatives. He mentions that in his diary.
Oh, I never thought TVA would ever have a containment problem. The containment portion of nuke plant designs is wildly over-engineered.
Where Fukushima has opened our eyes is the support infrastructure design issue. The tsunami exposed cascading, multiple system failures. Outside power failed, then the gensets failed, then the battery systems failed. With no power, they had no way to vent H2 out of the building containment, which is a large part of what has complicated their situation.
I think that two things come out of Fukushima for those of us who aren’t henny-penny anti-nuke types:
1. We really have to get away from the uranium/plutonium fuel cycle for power reactors. The only reason why we’re actually using u/Pu as fuel is an artifact of the Cold War and the nuclear weapons fuel processing.
2. Nuke plants need to think more about the SHTF scenarios and start modeling some really big crapstorms that include such things as “OK, you’re going to be cut off from the outside world of resupply for 30 days. How do you use what is on-site to get back to a stable state?”
Claire McCaskill (D-MO) posts here? Who knew?
Is this Claire McCaskill (D-MO)? I've never heard of her before.
There is no firm evidence at this point that the use of MOX fuel in Unit 3 has complicated or made the overall event worse in any way. Pu production is a natural consequence of the use of LEU and most of the added Pu is burned up fairly early in the fuel cycle because of it's enhanced fission properties. So I don't see any compelling reason to abandon it at this point.
If you're referring to advanced fuel cycles or thorium-based systems then it's going to be a tough go at least initially because of the huge investment in the LEU/LWR infrastructure. Until there is a market-driven reason to move away from that, I don't see much change in the near future.
2. Nuke plants need to think more about the SHTF scenarios and start modeling some really big crapstorms that include such things as “OK, you’re going to be cut off from the outside world of resupply for 30 days. How do you use what is on-site to get back to a stable state?”
I don't have a problem with reasonable thinking-outside-the-box exercises, as long as they don't go hog wild into unreasonable scenarios. I've seen editorials and blog postings faulting the Japanese nuclear program for "ignoring" evidence of tsunamis in the past that reached up to the lower slopes of some of the nearby mountain ranges. Well, cripes, you're talking about events millions of years passed in that case. It is simply unreasonable to single out a particular industry and hold them to standards that are based in data millions of years in the past, when no other industry has to do likewise.
Thorium is one idea out there now, for certain. I agree that there’s a big infrastructure startup cost, but thorium is so plentiful that the sooner we get started, the sooner we can reduce our energy costs, IMO.
As for the disaster planning: I’m not so much talking of planning for huge million-year volcanos, quakes, etc. I’m talking of just better self-reliance for the plant infrastructure. For example, I have a hunch that it will come out in the analysis of Fukushima that they didn’t have anyone on staff who knew that much about diesels. They didn’t have a plan for what to do if the diesels got flooded, etc. I’ve seen this again and again in high-tech companies that had diesel backups - they had no one on staff (formally) who knew what to do if the engine didn’t start. They simply assumed that “Hey, we paid all this money for a backup genset system, we test it once a year... so we can just assume it is going to work.”
OK, oh-so-very-brilliant-MBA’s in management... what it if doesn’t? What then? Call the local diesel shop at 0300? Um, that’s not a way to achieve the uptime promises you’re making to customers.
That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. I’ve seen no shortage of this short-sighted thinking that “Oh, it will just work,” followed by “and we outsource the maintenance and repair to reduce staffing costs....”
This leads to some rather unexpected (by management) failure modes. For want of a farrier, the horse couldn’t go to town to get help ... that sort of thing.
Some of these are pretty scary just watching from behind my laptop...check out what happens right around 0:57....
OH NO! WE ARE GONNA DIE! OMG! IT’S GONNA MELT!
AAAAHHHHHH!
(big freakin’ deal)
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