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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's right! There are "vast" "untapped" seas of oil everywhere! And beneath that, there is more "vastly untapped" oil! Some rocks, then more oil! Infinite supply of energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years to be consumed and consumed and consumed so that it can be all used up in a few centuries ... no wait! God would never let it happen! How would all them born-again Christian Texan Oil company magnates get their righteously owed due?! (or alternatively, how would Allah's chosen families of the house of Saud get theirs?!)
So its Oil! Oil! Oil! Oil all the way down!
And its only because these unreasonable tree-huggers and pinko-commies wont let the Glorious and Righteous Oil Men to drill and drill everywhere until the entire landscape is covered in Glorious Oil Wells, horizon to horizon, instead of them sissy trees and the like, that the prices ever go up! Bastards! Off with them bushes and shrubbery, off with them fish, make way for The Towers that Squirt Black Gold, The Liquid Glory of Supreme Greed at All Costs!
And bonus! There is more! If you squint just right you will see that God (or Allah, if that's your vice) provided for the future (with the somewhat unlikely help of the Soviets) too when the center of the Earth somehow runs dry at the end of slurping tubes of the Glorious And Magnificent Oil Men!
So while all these godless commie tree-huggers panic, real God-fearing men like you should all get a bigger Hummer. 48litre displacement, 26 cylinder one.
Or bigger.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, you've been, just a little bit, a totally gullible victim of the ever more whiny and panicky propaganda courtesy of the utterly blind and irresponsible greed of oil-men and die-hard ideologues of this supposed cure-all system called "Capitalism" who are ever more desperate to hide the fact that their activities (and the long cause-effect chains of these activities) are nothing less than some of the most wasteful and destructive actions in the entire history of mankind, no? Oh and that little small problem: the entire planet's biosphere in total never had enough biomass to account for all of these "vast and untapped" oil "reserves", never you mind in the time-frame during which accumulation of fossil fuels occurred. And that doesn't even include factors such as the amounts of the solar energy thus trapped and the efficiency of the entire process.
Outside of the demented fantasies of oil companies and all those whose comfortable life-style depends on insane actions of irreparably destroying reserves accumulated over period near a billion of years in just a tiny percentile of that time, oil is running out. Permanently. The energy trapped within (along with the base materials for polymers) is nearly gone. And because, thanks to idiots like you, most of the Western world is dependent on wholly insane prices of what is ultimately a unique and irreplaceable material, any shortages of this material will cause societal upheavals the like the world has never seen.
I just hope that all these apologists like you get to live to see that day and get a full, violent brunt of the reckoning when it comes. Right in your faces.