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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."
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.
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.
Haha, I haven't been RickRolled in months... :)
Failsafe fails safely, mass gibbering ensues.
It seems everything mdsolar keeps writing about nuclear tech has a sensationalist fear-mongering spin to it.
Damn, where is "Useful Offtopic" when we need it?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
That is not "sad". That is good engineering. If you have $X dollars to spend on safety, it is almost always better to build multiple shoddy levels than one really good level. Three layers that are 90% reliable are ten times better than one layer that is 99% reliable, and probably cheaper.
You were mistaken. Or whoever wrote what you are referring to was mistaken. Noone has dies due to radiation exposure at Fukushima.
I agree. Stop spreading misinformation.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
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.
Nobody who matters, anyway
... planetary-scale hazardous installations ...
Are you aware that nuclear power is safer, in terms of death toll and environmental impact, than both fossil fuels and hydroelectric power? Source
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 guys crack me up. Thousands of dead from a tsunami. Massive destruction in Japan, and you want to continue acting as if the nuclear plant, where no one died by the way, was the evil villain. Christ, the earthquake didn't even do damage to the plant, it was a tsunami larger than anyone would ever expect. Hey I live 6 hours from the gulf. Maybe I should put my house on stilts because the next hurricane could flood me out... Doesn't make much sense does it? You take the worst case based on historical record if you have it, then you add some more to be safe. You don't just pull some giant number out of your ass and build to prevent it.
I agree that were a natural disaster to strike a nuclear plant (you seem to have misspelled this, by the way), there is a possibility of radiation leakage, and possibly even casualties.
However, a coal fire power plant is continuously pumping soot, CO2, and a whole host of other unfriendly substances into the atmosphere. A report from last year estimated that coal power kills roughly 13,000 Americans each year.
So, yes, nuclear power is not perfect, but the perceived risk is far greater than the actual risk. This can be blamed, in part, to the scaremongering of the media, but mostly stems from the the fact that the general public does not understand radiation, so is naturally scared of it.
(Source)
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.
Nothing can be built to withstand anything. However, the cleanest energy around (wind power) still requires some auxiliary source of power for low-wind periods, and an entirely different distribution infrastructure. What auxiliary power do you have in mind? The candidates right now are basically fossil fuels or nuclear power sources; hydroelectric is somewhat useful but there is not enough water pressure to go around.
If it takes a combination of an extremely rare high-magnitude earthquake and a tsunami to create the sort of situation that Japan is facing, that is not so bad. It is made better with newer reactor designs, which feature passive safely (no need for a backup generator to keep the coolant flowing). I'll take a 4th generation nuclear plant in my backyard long before coal or natural gas.
Palm trees and 8
Yeah, look, we get it. You're into solar power.
You also live a long way south, where you get lots of sunshine, and - crucially - long days during the winter.
Solar power is completely bloody useless if you haven't got long days. Clear sunshine isn't so important. Guess when you tend to need electricity the most? On dark winter days. Guess when solar panels just plain don't work? Go on... there, I knew you could say it.
Here in Scotland we have one of the largest on-shore wind farms in Europe. It's spent roughly three-quarters of the year to date shut down, because it's either not windy enough, or too windy to operate it. So, wind is right out. We've got hydroelectric power too, but flooding huge areas isn't exactly ecologically very nice either.
We need to invest in modern nuclear plants. All this "renewable" stuff is just putting a pretty green elastoplast on a gaping wound.
It takes an extremely powerful disaster to actually create a dangerous situation. The earthquake that struck Japan was near-record setting. A typical natural disaster would put a nuclear power plant into an emergency mode, but to cause explosions and radiation releases takes something very unusual.
On the other hand, what other power source would you like to see deployed? Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy. What would you like to use? Coal, with the slag piles that kill people who live near them? Natural gas, which leaves people living near the mines with flammable tapwater? There is not enough wood to burn, not when we are trying to sustain billions of people on the planet.
What we need is more investment in new reactor designs, which have passive safety features (they do not require a power source to maintain coolant flow and prevent meltdowns). We should also look more closely at the thorium fuel cycle, since there is more thorium available than uranium. Nuclear power is not going away; we need it, and when we can't get any more oil out of the Earth we are going to need even more nuclear power. This is not the time to throw away plans to deploy nuclear plants; this is the time to develop safer nuclear power plants and start deploying them.
Or we could continue to hope for cold fusion. I won't hold my breath on that one.
Palm trees and 8
Both nuclear plants issued flooding alerts earlier this month, although they were routine as the river's rise has been expected.
Yeah, that's not fear mongering. That's pooh-poohing. Everywhere in the article it says something scary, it surrounded with a calming rhetoric. WTF is a "routine" nuclear plant "alert", other than an oxymoron?
The federal commission had inspectors at the plant 20 miles north of Omaha when the 2,000-foot berm collapsed about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Water surrounded the auxiliary and containment buildings at the plant, it said in a statement. The Omaha Public Power District has said the complex will not be reactivated until the flooding subsides. Its spokesman, Jeff Hanson, said the berm wasn't critical to protecting the plant but a crew will look at whether it can be patched.
See? Inspectors were standing by, but couldn't avert the collapse. The berm isn't critical but after this is over they'll probably fix it anyway, just in case.
No mention that Fort Calhoun is the spent fuel repository for both Nebraska reactors, and that the spent fuel is kept in in-ground pools which seem likely right now to be under the Missouri river. The soothing, cooling Missouri river, wending its way to the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf of Mexico - providing essential irrigation for America's breadbasket along the way.
Nope nope. This is not fear mongering at all. Quite the opposite.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Who is demanding a News Black Out? I only see people demanding honest news which properly puts the risks into context.
If I told you "Coal plant kills hundreds of people!" you would be alarmed but we don't get those kinds of stories since they're boring and mathy. Instead we get "Catastrophic failure* at nuclear plaNT!#@!!!" and a fine print story below that then clarifies that nobody was hurt, there isn't any danger and this is pretty much a non-story.
How about "Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people and make hundreds of square miles uninhabitable!!#*!"
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?
And a coal mine that catches on fire can burn for decades as well. Unlike the sort of doomsday scenarios that people predict for nuclear, the coal fire has already happened. New Straitsville, Ohio And that's not the only multi-decade coal mine fire either.
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.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
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.
There are billions of people to feed. We are going to start running out of oil eventually, and then most of the world's tractors are going to stop running, and we are going to have to put a lot of energy into the process of making fertilizers, plastics, medicines, and just about everything else we currently use oil to make. Where do you think that energy is going to come from? Wind? Hydroelectric? They need to be augmented with something else, and if not nuclear, what then? Coal? Natural gas? You really think that is better for the world than nuclear power?
Palm trees and 8
The pro-nuclear lobby has been at the GP, but I'll go ahead and answer this.
Modern geothermal takes less water than nuclear. One tenth as much actually and greywater can be used for those little inputs. And since everything that comes up from the ground goes back into the ground, there are no emissions or outputs whatsoever except electricity. There is no fuel, no fuel waste, no radioactivity, no danger in earthquake, tornado, hurricane or flood. No danger of losing the source of fuel in global conflicts because there is no fuel. The damned thing works under water, and probably should - there are offshore thermal resources and ocean water makes a great thermal delta. It's cheaper too.
In context with the present fine article, there is absolutely no situation where geothermal energy could contaminate the entire Missouri and Mississippi rivers from the site to the sea, all of the fields irrigated thereby, and the entire Gulf of Mexico with nuclear waste. Which is a significant advantage over the current situation referenced in the fine article.
Mollified? I thought not. You folk don't care if there's now a better answer. You've got one drum and you're going to bang it. You just want to work your current fission deal no matter what it costs the rest of us. I have a question for you: If you don't give a fuck what we think, why should we give a fuck what you think? You're a one-issue constituency with a disproven business model. Let me show you the onion on my belt. Now could you please get your fissibles off my lawn?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Can we stop the incredibly selective reporting already? When discussing coal casualties we seem to include power station fatalities, mining fatalities, pet fatalities, people who ever lived within 50,000km of a piece of coal who subsequently died for any reason. When we look at nuclear fatalities it has to be caused by gamma radiation above 1,000,000,000TBq and only if the guy is called Ivan and was touching the PV within 1 minute of actually dying. Oh and he must have mutated terribly and grown 6 more legs or it wasn't really the radiation.
Or to be brief, judge the safety of nuclear the same way as you judge the safety of coal. No selective reporting please, we call that "lying" where I come from.