Flood Berm Collapses At Nebraska Nuclear Plant

mdsolar writes "A berm holding the flooded Missouri River back from a Nebraska nuclear power station collapsed early Sunday, but federal regulators said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger. The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station shut down in early April for refueling, and there is no water inside the plant, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. Also, the river is not expected to rise higher than the level the plant was designed to handle. NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said the plant remains safe."

Comments

Nothing to worry about, move along

[KlomDark]

Still alive here in Omaha, right by the river. Water's not glowing, no evacuation orders.

The plant has been turned off since April, there's not any danger of anything catastrophic. Spent fuel ponds are not flooding, although I have no idea if they've drained/moved them or not. As much as I love conspiracy theories, there's nothing here to be worried about.

Re:Nothing to worry about, move along

[fyrewulff]

Also here in Omaha. For Calhoun to be compromised in a significant way, the Missouri has to exceed 45 feet. At 45 feet, the rest of Omaha's flood defenses (and Council Bluffs) will have failed. A plant getting decommissioned will be the least of everyone's worries.

Re:Nothing to worry about, move along

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you mean in unlikely case of extreme flooding you do not mind to have radioactive problem on top? That sounds like reasonable idea.

A side note: I find it extremely funny when people make this a dichotomy i.e. either fission or fossil fuel. It may be that we reached the sustainable population level long time ago but have not noticed and reproduced further - the realization comes when there is no fuel, no forest and nothing to eat and as a bonus one have a steady level of radiation caused by series of accidents. Not that I care - the processes that we started are usually slow enough for me to die before the full extent of the problem becomes apparent.

Emergency generators used Sunday

[mdsolar]

"The berm's collapse didn't affect the reactor shutdown cooling or the spent fuel pool cooling, but the power supply was cut after water surrounded the main electrical transformers, the NRC said. Emergency generators powered the plant until an off-site power supply was connected Sunday afternoon, according to OPPD." http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwsIdVXW-V7xE60P0dUnI_qSIaIw?docId=252989d1dda94c1d83ee47ba8907e484

Re:Stop helping

[CrimsonAvenger]

I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.

You were mistaken. Or whoever wrote what you are referring to was mistaken. Noone has dies due to radiation exposure at Fukushima.

Misinformation does not help the cause of nuclear power.

I agree. Stop spreading misinformation.

Re:Stop helping

[Anonymous Coward]

One worker was dosed with levels that will show up in around 30ish years. Middle-adged man, part way through his career, not going to be that much damage done. Not to mention, any workers dosed have signed up for this kind of thing, and no real outward displays of regret as it should be.

Re:Stop helping

[mpyne]

I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.

Who was it? When did it happen?

There have been fatalities at nuclear plants related to the reactor or radiation in general. For instance, Louis Slotin was heavily irradiated and died within a week after mishandling a plutonium core, and the (3) workers at the early military power production facility SL-1 were killed due to a criticality accident. There have not, on the other hand, been radiation-induced casualties from civilian plants that I'm aware of, with the exception of Chernobyl (a non-Western style design).

If you're referring to Fukushima, there was a plant worker at Fukushima Dai-ni who died in a crane after the tsunami, but this was not radiation-related, as this was before the meltdowns occurred, and this was at Dai-ni, not the site with the meltdowns (Fukushima Dai-Ichi). At Fukushima Dai-Ichi itself there were workers who went missing after a hydrogen explosion who I'd never heard about afterwards -- it's possible that they were killed, although this also would not have been due to radiation (not that it matters to them...).

There have been ~9 or so workers exceed the already-raised 250 mSv exposure limit but as far as I'm aware there have been no fatalities due to radiation exposure, so I'd be interested to know what I'm missing that you read about.

Re:Stop helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody who matters, anyway

A decade and a half before it blew apart in a hydrogen blast that punctuated the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant was the scene of an earlier safety crisis.
Then, as now, a small army of transient workers was put to work to try to stem the damage at the oldest nuclear reactor run by Japan's largest utility.

At the time, workers were racing to finish an unprecedented repair to address a dangerous defect: cracks in the drum-like steel assembly known as the "shroud" surrounding the radioactive core of the reactor.
But in 1997, the effort to save the 21-year-old reactor from being scrapped at a large loss to its operator, Tokyo Electric, also included a quiet effort to skirt Japan's safety rules: foreign workers were brought in for the most dangerous jobs, a manager of the project said.

"It's not well known, but I know what happened," Kazunori Fujii, who managed part of the shroud replacement in 1997, told Reuters. "What we did would not have been allowed under Japanese safety standards."

The previously undisclosed hiring of welders from the United States and Southeast Asia underscores the way Tokyo Electric, a powerful monopoly with deep political connections in Japan, outsourced its riskiest work and developed a lax safety culture in the years leading to the Fukushima disaster, experts say.

Hastily hired workers were sent into the plant without radiation meters. Two splashed into radioactive water wearing street shoes because rubber boots were not available. Even now, few have been given training on radiation risks that meets international standards, according to their accounts and the evaluation of experts.
The workers who stayed on to try to stabilize the plant in the darkest hours after March 11 were lauded as the "Fukushima 50" for their selflessness. But behind the heroism is a legacy of Japanese nuclear workers facing hazards with little oversight, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former nuclear workers, doctors and others.

Since the start of the nuclear boom in the 1970s, Japan's utilities have relied on temporary workers for maintenance and plant repair jobs, the experts said. They were often paid in cash with little training and no follow-up health screening.
This practice has eroded the ability of nuclear plant operators to manage the massive risks workers now face and prompted calls for the Japanese government to take over the Fukushima clean-up effort.
Although almost 9,000 workers have been involved in work around the mangled reactors, Tokyo Electric did not have a Japan-made robot capable of monitoring radiation inside the reactors until this week. That job was left to workers, reflecting the industry's reliance on cheap labor, critics say.

"I can only think that to the power companies, contract workers are just disposable pieces of equipment," said Kunio Horie, who worked at nuclear plants, including Fukushima Daiichi, in the late 1970s and wrote about his experience in a book "Nuclear Gypsy."
Tokyo Electric said this week it cannot find 69 of the more than 3,600 workers who were brought in to Fukushima just after the disaster because their names were never recorded. Others were identified by Tepco in accident reports only by initials: "A-san" or "B-san."

Makoto Akashi, executive director at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences near Tokyo, said he was shocked to learn Tokyo Electric had not screened some of the earliest workers for radiation inside their bodies until June while others had to share monitors to measure external radiation.
That means health risks for workers - and future costs - will be difficult to estimate.

Wrong

[SuperKendall]

Wrong. There are a great many deaths that may be attributed to the Fukushima mess.

Possibly in 20 years a HANDFUL of workers actually in the plant might get cancer. To claim anything more than that is fantasy - not science fiction to be sure, since there's no basis in science for your claims.

Cooper still operating

[mdsolar]

I'm surprised Cooper continues to operate since the NRC identified escape route problems in 1994.

"The elevated river level caused the closure of several area roads including a portion of Interstate 29 and Route 136 in the State of Missouri which isolated one of the planned emergency evacuation routes."

http://cryptome.org/0004/cooper-npp-flood.htm

Don't raft down stream I guess.

Re:Well that does it.

[PopeRatzo]

I miss the 70s and 80s - there was hope back then.

Were you alive in the 70's?

It was not really a decade of hope. And anyone with eyes to see and a brain to think could see that the events of the 80's were a precursor to what is happening today.

I remember seeing Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office and thinking "we are SO fucked!"

I remember talking to a lot of people who shared my belief that we were in for a half-century of decline.

Re:Stop helping

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Two workers died after the tsunami flooded the turbine building of unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi, their bodies were recovered two weeks after the tsunami. Those two are the only casualties related to the disaster in a meaningful way. Another worker from a partner company died from a hearth attack apparently, but he started to work in Fukushima Daiichi 3 or 4 days before his death. 6 workers in total have received radiation doses above the emergency limit of 250 mSv, two of them had around 600 mSv of exposure. A female worker had surpassed the fairly smaller limit for female workers by their child bearing condition, but since she is around 55 years old, she shouldn't face any trouble.

Re:Really?

[Required Snark]

Bullshit. There have been at least two suicides. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110623f1.html

On June 11, a dairy farmer in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, chalked a note on the wall of his cattle shed. "If only there wasn't a nuclear power plant," the message read, in reference to the damaged Fukushima No. 1 plant just 45 km away, which had effectively ended his livelihood.

The man already had culled his livestock after raw milk shipments from the area where he lived had been stopped. Now, he chose to end his own life, too. "I have lost the energy to carry on working," he added in what would be his final words.

In March, a cabbage farmer in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture, hanged himself after radioactive substances detected in the soil resulted in restrictions being placed on local produce

The current number of displaced people is around 90000. Not all of these are because of radiation. There are many older people in shelters, and the living conditions are harsh. This is taking a physical and mental toll. Some vulnerable people have already died, and the suicide rate is up. Those evacuated because of radiation are among the most effected because of increased health worries and uncertainty about the future. I was unable to find any online figures, but it is clear the survivors have a lower life expectancy.

The situation for people working at the plant is also uncertain. According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

TEPCO has been criticized in providing safety equipment for its workers. After NISA warned TEPCO that workers were sharing dosimeters, since most of the devices were lost in the disaster, the utility sent more to the plant. Japanese media has reported that that workers indicate that standard decontamination procedures are not being observed. Others reports suggest that contract workers are given more dangerous work than TEPCO employees. TEPCO is also seeking workers willing to risk high radiation levels for short periods of time in exchange for high pay. Confidential documents acquired by the Japanese Asahi newspaper suggest that TEPCO hid high levels of radioactive contamination from employees in the days following the accident. In particular, the Asahi reported that radiation levels of 300 mSv/h were detected at least twice on 13 March, but that "the workers who were trying to bring the situation under control at the plant were not informed of the levels."

In the Japanese press these people are being referred to as "disposable employees".

So I guess these people don't count. Not the ones who are already dead, or the ones who will be dying sooner or later. Or maybe you don't think these people are humans, and their lives don't count?