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As Sea Levels Rise, Are Coastal Nuclear Plants Ready? (nationalgeographic.com)
mdsolar writes with this National Geographic story about the danger of rising sea levels to low-lying power plants across the country. According to the story: "Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, off Florida's Biscayne Bay, two nuclear reactors churn out enough electricity to power nearly a million homes. The Turkey Point plant is licensed to continue doing so until at least 2032. At some point after that, if you believe the direst government projections, a good part of the low-lying site could be underwater. So could at least 13 other U.S. nuclear plants, as the world's seas continue to rise. Their vulnerability, and that of many others, raises serious questions for the future."
The one one Hutchinson Island? I used to stay there every summer. This article is (surprise!) alarmist. Read carefully, it claims nothing prior to 2032 - and makes references only to things that could happen in the fairly distant future. Compared to the cleanup costs, shoring up a road or building a berm along the Indian River would be pretty cheap.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You mean the expanding ice sheets in Antarctica ?
https://www.nasa.gov/content/g...
You do realize that if the road gets wiped out while they are trying to decommission the plant ... they'll just build one on a bridge, right? As a Floridian, you're probably aware of just how good Florida's construction crews are at rebuilding after the REGULAR hurricanes and tropical that come pretty much every year ...
Building roads and bridges is pretty trivial and cheap compared to decommissioning a nuclear power station. And do you know how they brought a lot of the construction materials to the site ... probably by barge actually (thats what happened at the Crystal River plant)
And decommissioning takes years because its cheaper to wait out certain things than to deal with them while hot. You have to shut the planet down, get it into cold shutdown (no need for active cooling measures), remove the fuel, then wait for all that shit to 'cool down' radioactively enough that it doesn't require robots to work on it. During that time you go tear down all the other crap thats not radioactive and wait for 10 years. Then you come back and get the rest of it with men in some radiation suites that cost about 1000 times less than trying to do it with the robots you'd have had to design, build and use if you tried to do it immediately after shutdown.
But to answer you actual question.
Yes, thats all been thought of, before the plant was even built, its all part of the initial environmental studies and is public record if you really want to go digging for it. At one point Looked up all that information for the Crystal River plant, so unless the state was thinking completely differently between the studies for the two stations we're referring to, yes, they've thought of all that already. It might no longer apply (environment changes, hence this discussion), but its been considered.
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And no thread is complete without a self righteous zealot being incorrect on the volume
In the U.S. we already have entire cities that are below sea level.
City, singular: We have exactly one city below sea level, New Orleans, elevation -2 meters.
Not sure if I'd call that the best example of why it's ok to have levees keeping out the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There you go again confusing sea ice with land ice. You do this every single time, and it gets pointed out to you every single time. Your failure to take on board such simple information is staggering, but would go quite some way to explain why you believe abject nonsense in the face of scientific rigour. Or, maybe, you do understand the difference, but are prepared to lie in order to make some point. Pick one. Please. It's tragic, but fascinating.
Miami Beach Florida already has issues with tides - certain high tides of the year flood the city, leaving it deep enough for fish to swim into major roads. In some areas they had to raise the roads a full meter above land level so that at least the roads are clear. Of course this leaves the houses, parking lots, businesses all flooded.
The main problem with Florida is that the water doesn't come from one direction it comes from all six directions. Rivers flow from the other states into Florida, sea water on 3 sides, rain falls down onto it and finally the land itself is porous limestone that sea water seeps into and UP out of the ground. Basically, most of the state of Florida is not solid land, but a sponge. That's why it has sink holes and why floods are so bad. Florida, unlike Holland, does not have a sealing salt/anihydrite layer that blocks water movement.
For this reason, unlike the Dutch, merely building a huge dike is not enough. As global warming raises the sea level it invades deeper into the center of Florida's porous, limestone ground. What used to be safe relatively dry land, miles from the dangerous shore, is now wet, eroded limestone. Fresh water wells turn into salt water wells, sink holes open up, new springs suddenly appear where there were none before.
Some of those new springs will be INSIDE the grounds protected by the dikes built around the nuclear power plants.
In such circumstances, to truly protect a nuclear power plant, you have to put a solid layer of water proof concrete UNDER it, connect that to the water proof 10 ft wall around the nuclear power plant and then arrange for a pumping station to drain out any rain water that falls into the plant area. Good luck with that.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Fortunately, we have these things called dikes, levees, and cofferdams that we can build when we need to to protect them from actually being underwater (as long as they're properly built and maintained).
Dikes and levees to keep the sea out don't work very well in much of Florida because the underlying bedrock is largely porous limestone. Even if you build a levee the water will just come up through the ground.
"Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."
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