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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."
Contradicting official statements are these employee-made videos of flood levels at the plant.
Its time to go back to burning dead dinosaurs, this nuclear stuff is clearly too dangerous!
Just look at how many news stories there are about it.
This must be what it was like to live in the 70s.
Motorola Radio Programming
CP200, in particular
If you get the prompt:
"invalid codeplug password"
The answer/password is:
727797
It shows up in the CPS main memory if you search "password" with winhex and page down about 1
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.
"...said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger."
Yep, we really heard that a lot lately.
I personally find that in Japanese it sounded even better.
Failsafe fails safely, mass gibbering ensues.
news for nerds.
also "almost news" and "might maybe ever become news"
"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
It seems everything mdsolar keeps writing about nuclear tech has a sensationalist fear-mongering spin to it.
Oh great, more ammunition for the protest against nuclear power. Just what this planet needs.
One of the sad things about our approach to nuclear safety is that we do shoddy work at each level because we thing the other levels will save us. The 2 km water berm was fragile so it is not too surprising it failed. It lead to loss of external power. Luck the emergency generators worked, but they don't always.
What about the next time when a major natural disaster hits another one of these nuclear perils ?
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is definitely NOT more planetary-scale hazardous installations that can poison entire countries. too much convenience may be hazardous for your health - suddenly you may find yourself eating radiation in dinner instead of having a cheap power bill.
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Fear mongering is something the media has been good at lately. Let's just shut off all forms of power and deal with the brownouts... then let's see who's complaining then.
I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.
Misinformation does not help the cause of nuclear power.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
in its place: on submarines defending our country. It makes no sense on a commercial scale since accidents are inevitable, it is too expensive, and there is no place to put the waste or even a safe means of transporting it at the required volume. The Thresher was an acceptable loss given the mission but no commercial accident is acceptable.
How are your escape routes doing? Is I-29 open all the time?
Nice to see the pro-nuke people out in force, demanding news black outs, and telling us that everything is 100% just fine. You guys do more damage to the nuke industries image, than Greenpeace has been able to achieve in their entire existence.
It's not "fear mongering" to report the news.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're correct, the death toll due to Fukushima is single digits.
However, the main reason for that being so is because the authorities evacuated people far away from the plant; hundreds of square miles of land surrounding the plant is now considered uninhabitable for many years.
Likewise with Chernobyl ... again, the mandatory evacuation is why the death toll there has been relatively low.
In both incidents, if people had been allowed to stay, the death toll would be in the thousands, at minimum, and potentially tens to hundreds of thousands, including many outside of the area...
How? Because not only are the people exposed to radioactive fallout at risk, but so are those that later come into contact with them. By keeping people out, there's less chance of the fallout debris being spread around contaminating other areas.
In short, the hazard is very real - it's the mandatory evacuations that has kept the death toll so low.
Nice to see the pro-nuke people out in force, demanding news black outs
The only people seeking to block access to anything are you and your kooky cohorts, trying to convince everyone the great noodley tentacles of Flying Spaghetti Monster of Nuclear Power have come to spread radiation across the land and claim us all.
Meanwhile you bury any attempt at transmission of anything like facts about radiation or safety in your mass of gibbering alarm.
And I'll bet you do that all with bananas sitting right in your house, if only you knew...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After all, what can go wrong?
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.
Seems like the flood preparations at the operating plant Cooper have made it very difficult to access emergency equipment. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27nuke.html
Do you know what kind of berm it was?
"Some sort of machinery came in contact with the berm, puncturing it and causing the berm to deflate, said Mike Jones, a spokesman for the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD), which owns the Fort Calhoun plant." http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/26/nebraska.flooding/
No matter how many solar cells you have, they will not work when covered in snow.
As for; "Just use enough to work in winter." surely you jest! You would over produce all summer long, just so you can scrape by in the winter! LOL.
On a side note; Solar may provide sufficient power for home use, It will never be sufficient for industry.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot.
Yeah, so in other words, the plant was never in any danger. And in other news, yesterday they had wind gusts up to 40 kts at that power plant, but the wind gusts weren't expected to get to get up to the hundreds of kts the plant was designed for. I think last month they had some 0.3 magnitude earthquakes there too. EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!
So the dry cask fuel storage is now wet.
So the power went out again ( after a fire June 7th) and they reconnected after the diesels kicked in and for once did not fail.
So "everything is safe" bullshit propaganda is pumping full volume.
These greedy stupid A-holes built a nuke plant at the BOTTOM OF A FLOOD PLAIN. They should be renditioned and questioned strenuously for the dirty bombage they created and let loose. They did not even bother to fill 30 feet to keep it dry. They did not care what happened to us, they just wanted the money.
Time to get tough with nukes. Enough happy talk techno-utopia crap. Time for some capital crime convictions for high treason.
What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In other news: The sun today released an enormous amount of radiation. Enough to irradiate and kill everyone on earth! However, scientists report negligible risk in the event one limit themself to 15 minutes of direct exposure..
Thanks for wasting my time, Slashdot editors.
Now that we've all learned from the Fuck-U-Shima accident in Japan, let me give you a refresher. The power to the plant is off, disconnected, out of order. That means the pumps for the spent fuel pool are running on diesel generators. That's all well and good, but you are one fuel shortage away from a complete power outage. If the power goes out for a few days, the spent fuel pools start to boil off water, the rods get exposed - which means not enough cooling - and then they melt - right there in the swimming pool which is not contained anything like a reactor core - in fact, since it's shut down the core is probably in the pool. Is this scenario likely to happen? If I had to bet money I'd say no. If I lived nearby I'd pay close attention. As it is, I eat enough food from the midwest to follow this one, and I'm down wind like half the country. It doesn't look easy to do maintenance there with a couple feet of water for miles around. Nuclear plants that are "shut down" are not safe to evacuate and leave until the flood waters subside - not even close.
It's probably going to take that long to design a prototype let alone build it. As always the R&D we are not doing is the problem.
An example of what I'm talking about is that the "cutting edge" is the 1990s Japanese derived design (because US R&D was effectively abandoned) of the AP1000 of which none have been completed yet. We won't really know if the AP1000 is any good and worth deploying widely until one actually exists - and it will be the same story with any other reactor design. Very small reactors would cut the time but not by much.
"In response to the berm collapse, the NRC has activated its Incident Response Center." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304447804576410083499886642.html
This site stores the spent fuel for both Nebraska plants - a little in dry casks which should be safe, but most in in-ground cooling ponds. Presumably these ponds are now under the Missouri river. Cooling ponds need to be continuously cooled in order to stay cool. Spent fuel ought not come in contact with a flowing river. That by itself would be very bad, as the radiation would contaminate normal river debris but I'm not worried about that as the river's breadth would dilute it a few miles downstream. Cooling is known failed and the article doesn't say if the ponds are covered and structurally engineered to withstand being covered with several meters of river. If the ponds are in the ground and the site is underwater, it seems likely the ponds are under the river. If the structure of the cooling ponds is compromised by the weight of water, the river is silting up the spent fuel with debris normally found in a flooded river: mud, trees, the debris of homes washed downriver. But that's not the worst of it.
From the original design this would probably not be a problem as old spent fuel which is still very active but not commercially viable would have no chance to "go critical" since it was spaced adequately to prevent that. Unfortunately we've not had the promised national disposal site this last three decades and spent fuel ponds have been re-certified over and over again for more and more material far past their original design limits and these ponds may contain more than three times their original design limits and ten times the fuel in the reactors themselves - dangerously close to sustaining a critical reaction outside of containment. Of course additional cooling becomes mandatory as the more densely you stack this nuclear material the more likely it is to "go critical" and create a self-sustaining fission reaction - particularly in the presence of water and unknown debris, and particularly if the cladding is burned off. The cooling in these ponds, river notwithstanding, is now known to be failed according to the fine article and no repair date is estimated. As the fuel heats, it expands - which makes it closer to the other fuel, and proximity is one of the things that make nuclear fuels work so the design constraints of the spent fuel ponds are important, as are the moderators such as water and clays. Thermal heat does impact radioactive output to some small degree.
The worst possible case in this scenario involves some 30+ active nuclear reactors worth of commercially unviable but still powerful nuclear fuel going uncontrolled critical, superheating, burning off its zirconium cladding and releasing unimaginable quantities of nuclear byproducts - particularly iodine and cesium - inside the flowing Missouri river that covers it, which by happenstance irrigates more than half the crops our nation produces. It's the biggest possible nuclear energy fiasco that makes the recent fiscal difficulties look trivial. The entire downstream lengths of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers would become uninhabitable and un-navigable for a hundred years or more from this site to New Orleans, and we can't irrigate crops with radioactive water because we then get radioactive crops and radioactive soil that grows radioactive crops long after the radioactive water is gone. Which leads to another American Dust Bowl as farmers suddenly refuse to irrigate crops with radioactive water. And of course flooding too, as the normally used water passes unused downstream. The entire Gulf of Mexico becomes a no-go zone to ships that want to thereafter make port somewhere else. Even if it doesn't happen there's a good novel in the possibility.
My post is a plea: someone please comfort me. Tell me those ponds are above the current level of the river. Tell me they're designed for this. Tell me they have containment of the spent fuel ponds. Please, for God's sake, tell me the fuel can't go critical. Jesus, lie to me if you have to. I'd like to go to sleep tonight. The article, the summary and the comments don't answer these questions.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Define alert. Define routine. Reconcile the difference. It's an oxymoron. These two terms are not compatible. A "routine alert" is an oxymoron. That's what the word "oxymoron" means. Words mean things. If they didn't, communication would become impossible. If it's routine, it's not an alert. If it's an alert, it's not routine. The terms are mutually exclusive.
The only possible world where these terms could be in agreement is a world that is routinely on alert. I don't want to live in that world. Do you?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're right. Now turn off your computer!
He thinks he can avoid you reading the parent comment by modding it down. He's mistaken. You'll read it now because it was modded down and I cared enough to bump it, and because he didn't want you to read it. There's good stuff in there. Trust me. If you don't think so you're free to mod me down twice for the same comment, more so since I've given this one all my bumps, which I almost never do.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All you nuke fetishists who tag any nuke-extension story with "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense", tell me now that these risks don't exist, because nobody got killed or something.
--
make install -not war
Swim along.
Seriously, can the moderators please stop accepting posts from a rabid hysteria-mongering paid shill for the 'renewables' lobby?
"...we are screwed!"
you must have a problem with continuum of time. radiation is not something that strikes like lightning.
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Haha I remember a long time ago using a hex editor to rip my carrier's GPRS password from a file on my PDA, I used to have to take it to them whenever I restored my PDA, and that model lost all its data when the battery died, so that happened sometimes. More recently I did the same to find the login info my telco used to remote-admin my modem, it was welcome1 or something. That was with a Telnet login BTW. Great work guys.
Also there's a small local chain of coffee shops around here that boasts "FREE WIFI" and then the wifi's fucking encrypted, no password on the wall or anything. I bought something from them once, no info on the bill about "here's the wifi passphrase now that you bought from us!"
Well the other day I guessed it, it's $BUSINESSNAMEwifi. They use some kind of Windows box to host the wifi with ftp and icslap ports open.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It takes an extremely powerful disaster to actually create a dangerous situation.
yes it does.
and apparently, you are willing to take a gamble by living until one of them hits.
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perceiving what risk is.
"coal mines kill more per year" vs "a nuclear disaster will make at least 1/4 of the world unlivable"
to put these two in the same basket, one has to be either a fool, or a moron.
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"Also, the river is not expected to rise higher than the level the plant was designed to handle."
But what happens when it eventually does?
There are truly ridiculous amounts of money being spent to convince you that thorium reactors are the way to go. In reality, a thorium reactor can't even be ignited without a conventional reaction, and every really serious investigation into the thorium cycle has concluded that it's an expensive boondoggle.
You should really, seriously investigate this (don't take my word for it) before you even consider hyping thorium ever again.
Don't be a tool - do your homework, look at the sources of information... see who is telling you this is a good idea. You might be surprised at who has been whispering in geek ears...
"Oh, if only there were some other choice besides COAL and NUCLEAR!"
Imagine me languishing with the back of my hand to my sweaty brow.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/27/fort-calhoun-nuclear-flood-nebraska-plant_n_885067.html
Don't worry, nothing to see, carry on, please don't use your camera or we may beat you to bloody pulp.