Scores Arrested Protesting Vermont Nuclear Plant

[bananas]

Source: Democracy Now

Nearly 40 protesters have been arrested in Vermont at the gates of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Vermont lawmakers have tried to shutter the plant but it is still in operation after its parent company, Entergy Corporation, won an extension from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a subsequent court battle. The Vermont Yankee facility is one of the oldest in the country and has had a series of radioactive tritium leaks. On Sunday, anti-nuclear activists approached the Yankee plant with a 600-pound, handmade "Trojan Cow" filled with renewable energy devices. Organizers say they plan to launch a flotilla next month to raise awareness about the plant’s polluting of the Connecticut River.

Read more: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/3/headlines/scores_arrested_protesting_vermont_nuclear_plant

[phantom power]

1. I have this image in my head...

[Marksman_91]

2. What's so bad about nuclear energy?

It's efficient and produces less pollution than most of today's energy production methods. One can argue about the dangers of the radioactive waste it produces, but I honestly think the pros outweigh the cons by far. And as for a Fukushima-like disaster, well, it had to take a freaking tsunami for that to happen.

[bananas]

3. There are many serious problems with nuclear energy.

The #1 show-stopper has always been cost - that's the reason most plans for new reactors have been cancelled. The nuclear industry uses absurdly low cost estimates to try to get them approved.

• The CEO of Exelon, who is very pro-nuclear, said they won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
  http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/
  
  
• The CEO of Entergy said "the numbers just don't work" for new reactors.
  http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=248996
  

There are many other problems: safety, waste, proliferation, mining, etc.

[bananas]

4. Actually, it doesn't take a tsunami for that to happen.

There are many things which can go wrong with nuclear reactors.
The usual way of analyzing these is called Probablistic Risk Analysis, there are some variations on that term such as Safety Risk Assessment.
This is based on Murphy's Law, an engineering principle which states "Anything that can go wriong, will."
The idea is to make a list of everything that can go wrong, and estimate how often that happens.
All those little probabilities add up.
Before Fukushima, it was estimated that the probability of a meltdown was about 1 in 10,000 reactor-years.
After Fukushima, there have been some reanalysis which indicate it's closer to 1 in 2,000 reactor-years.

Back in the 1970s, the nuclear industry wanted to build around 10,000 reactors worldwide.
With a meltdown rate of 1 in 10,000 reactor-years, there would have been a meltdown about once a year.
That's one of the reasons people realized it was stupid to build that many reactors.

[bananas]

5. Also, the nuclear industry lies and has to be watched like a hawk

Reactor 4 at Fukushima had a manufacturing defect - fortunately it was off for refueling when the earthquake and tsunami occured or it likely would have cracked open.

http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/japan_whistleblower

A former Fukushima Daiichi reactor designer turned whistle blower today said the crippled plant’s reactor No 4 had been relying on flawed steel to hold radiation in its core, and that he himself helped hide the defect when the reactor – which he called a "time bomb” – was built four decades ago.

Charles Digges, 24/03-2011

<snip>

The former reactor engineer, Mitsuhiko Tanaka, who says he turned his back on the nuclear industry after Chernobyl, told Japan Today that he had assisted in covering up the critical design flaw while working for a unit of Hitachi in 1974.

Reactor No 4 was shut down for maintenance when the catastrophic 9.0 scale earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, and disabled all of the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s reactor cooling systems.

Reactor No 4 has since suffered critic lacks of coolant in its open spent nuclear fuel storage pond which has been ablaze off again and on again since last week, releasing massive doses of radioactivity into the environment. Rescue workers resorted to bombing it with seawater dropped from helicopters with questionable success.

<snip>

[bananas]

6. The earthquake may have been enough to cause the meltdowns even without the tsunami

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-explosive-truth-behind-fukushimas-meltdown-2338819.html

The explosive truth behind Fukushima's meltdown

Japan insists its nuclear crisis was caused by an unforeseeable combination of tsunami and earthquake. But new evidence suggests its reactors were doomed to fail

David McNeill , Jake Adelstein
Tokyo
Wednesday 17 August 2011

<snip>

The Independent has spoken to several workers at the plant who recite the same story: serious damage, to piping and at least one of the reactors, occurred before the tsunami hit. All have requested anonymity because they are still working at or connected with the stricken plant. Worker A, a maintenance engineer who was at the Fukushima complex on the day of the disaster, recalls hissing, leaking pipes.

"I personally saw pipes that had come apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There's no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant... I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for reactor one had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor."

The reactor walls are quite fragile, he notes: "If the walls are too rigid, they can crack under the slightest pressure from inside so they have to be breakable because if the pressure is kept inside... it can damage the equipment inside so it needs to be allowed to escape. It's designed to give during a crisis, if not it could be worse – that might be shocking to others, but to us it's common sense." Worker B, a technician in his late 30s who was also on site at the time of the earthquake, recalls: "It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaking, the pipes buckling, and within minutes I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall...

"Someone yelled that we all needed to evacuate. But I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving I was told and I could see that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn't get to the reactor core. If you can't sufficiently get the coolant to the core, it melts down. You don't have to have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out." As he was heading to his car, he could see that the walls of the reactor one building had started to collapse. "There were holes in them. In the first few minutes, no one was thinking about a tsunami. We were thinking about survival."

The suspicion that the earthquake caused severe damage to the reactors is strengthened by reports that radiation leaked from the plant minutes later. The Bloomberg news agency has reported that a radiation alarm went off about a mile from the plant at 3.29pm, before the tsunami hit.

<snip>

[cojoel]

7. A nuclear power system built by the lowest bidder?

Back in the 1970s my father was a physicist at McDonnell Douglas specializing in vacuum-related work (as part of the space program). At one point his team bid on a subcontract to a contractor building a nuclear reactor in Missouri. The proposed approach was to create a vacuum in the container and use vacuum measuring equipment to detect the most minute leaks. Of course, the winning bid was from a contractor who would instead use modest pressure and visually inspect for bubbles in soapy water to detect leaks.

[freshwest]

8. Was it Brown & Root?

[AtheistCrusader]

9. Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors 1-3 were doomed before the wave even hit.

The coolant systems broke with the force of the quake. All three experienced ground accelerations in excess of the design thresholds.