Core breach in progress, more workers exposed and dying.

Safe, clean energy.

3/25/2011 1:45:23 PM

No energy source is safe. If you're going to troll, step your fucking game up you bitch made pussy.

3/25/2011 2:28:10 PM

This calls for a dramatic roll underneath a descending bulkhead door.

3/25/2011 3:09:21 PM

apparently trolling is a full time job for this prick.

3/25/2011 4:09:58 PM

Low-level radiation found in Massachusetts rainwater

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/27/nuclear-japan-massachusetts-idUSN2713732220110327

3/27/2011 10:30:42 PM

actually, that as my bad. My car went offroad the other day near SRS. shit happens

3/27/2011 10:32:20 PM

hey, according to NPR, Plutonium is a fission product of Uranium now we're REALLY fucked. of course, that could also be really useful... Take uranium 235, make it fission into plutonium, add some neutrons so it becomes Pu-239, wait for that to decay, and then let it fission again! perpetual energy! WOOHOO

3/28/2011 8:49:18 PM

I hate the fucking MSM. This morning on the news they basically said this "highly toxic plutonium was found near the nuclear site...in amounts small enough not to pose any health treats."

WTF, nobody's gonna even hear the second part of that sentence

3/29/2011 9:12:29 AM

Well they did topple a crane into the exposed fuel rods yesterday. That can't be good.

3/29/2011 11:07:57 AM

Great article on what could have been if the environmentalists hadn't ruined the nuclear movement in the '60s...

Quote :

"Anti-Nuclear Power Hysteria and its Significant Contribution to Global Warming The decline of nuclear power has had a significant effect on global carbon emissions and subsequently any anthropogenic global warming effect. To see the extent of this influence, let us first take a look at total U.S. carbon emissions since 1900."

Quote :

"All of these facts lead to one conclusion: if manmade global warming is a real problem, then it was in fact caused by environmental alarmism. That is not to say that some environmentalism has not been good, but this atrocious abandonment of reason hangs as an ominous cloud over everything environmentalists advocate. Rational environmentalists, such as James Lovelock, who want a high standard of living for humans and a clean planet are quick to change their minds about nuclear power. Irrational environmentalists who actually do not desire wealthy, comfortable lives for all people on the planet–as well as a clean planet–actively oppose nuclear power. Nuclear power is a litmus test for integrity within the environmentalist community. If you want to spur the economy, stop global warming, and undermine the oil-fueled, terrorist-breeding, murderous theocracies of the world, the solution is simple: build nuclear power plants. "

It's a good, relatively quick, read.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/30/anti-nuclear-power-hysteria-and-it%e2%80%99s-significant-contribution-to-global-warming/#more-36920

3/30/2011 1:30:12 PM

No one will buy crops or seafood from the Fukushima area for decades to come. Girls from Fukushima will have a more difficult time marrying, just like girls from Hiroshima. Greenpeace said today that the evacuation zone is much to small.

3/30/2011 1:40:55 PM

Greenpeace is run by a bunch of lunatics that want everyone to live in grass huts. Forgive me for not giving a damn what they say.

3/30/2011 1:52:12 PM

Okay. United Nations urges wider evacuations:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iygIs3YLbzP5Pins9eXYAT_ejgHg?docId=5ff62d348a984b2ea04a400c6204e423

Or how about the Wall Street Journal...it's about as far-right as you can get.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110330-710093.html

[Edited on March 30, 2011 at 3:26 PM. Reason : .]

3/30/2011 3:25:17 PM

Quote :

"No one will buy crops or seafood from the Fukushima area for decades to come. Girls from Fukushima will have a more difficult time marrying, just like girls from Hiroshima. Greenpeace said today that the evacuation zone is much to small."

Amusingly, smc managed to make 3 arguments of which none depend on any facts related to what happened or have any obligation to reality.

3/30/2011 4:51:04 PM

I have some fresh produce from Fukushima to sell you. I couldn't believe how cheap it was. You could be eating it tonight. Yum!

3/30/2011 6:47:05 PM

Although I do not have a Fukushima example for you, Ibaraki is its neighbor. Apparently celebrities are appearing on the news in Japan eating Ibaraki produce, just to drive home the constant assurances that produce from the region is safe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIrx2QB93gw

3/30/2011 7:15:34 PM

3/30/2011 7:49:53 PM

Quote :

"its attention has been divided by the efforts to stabilize the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which suffered heavy damage and has dragged the country to its worst nuclear crisis since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II."

What a strange comparison to draw…

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/04/02/crack-leaks-radioactive-water-into-sea-off-japan/

4/2/2011 5:12:34 PM

Surry Nuclear Plant had to shut down yesterday because of a tornado touching down in their switchyard and wrecking shop.

4/18/2011 3:35:30 PM

Did a tornado hit the switchyard, or did the storm do damage to the switchyard?

I know you might still answer with the former and have a news source for it. I'll go ahead and let you know that I think they are wrong too.

*sigh* never mind, NRC event report says that. Still question what type of wind speeds it was. Either way it resulted in a loss of offsite power and everything appears fine.

[Edited on April 18, 2011 at 4:06 PM. Reason : ]

4/18/2011 4:03:37 PM

I've got pictures from Dominion showing a 45' trash bin thrown on top of a 500kV autotransformer hard enough to bust out the cooling fins and bushings. I'd say if the tornado didn't hit the switchyard directly, it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet away.

4/18/2011 4:52:49 PM

you mean a tornado hit a nuclear power plant and the plant survived? gooooooolllllllllly geeee, I didn't know we built our plants that strong... here I was thinkin they had paper-thin walls and homer simpson sitting in the operator's chair

[Edited on April 18, 2011 at 5:57 PM. Reason : ]

4/18/2011 5:56:42 PM

You nuke lovers may be whistling at the air, but I'm not letting this thread die. Three confirmed meltdowns, situation still not under control, human error to blame. Employees waited too long to vent steam to avoid embarrassment. Only second time in human history. Safe, clean nuclear energy.

5/19/2011 10:47:09 PM

Yeah, even though the MSM isn't really reporting on this too much anymore, it's still a complete disaster. Not out of the woods...or anywhere close.

5/19/2011 11:36:58 PM

I've started investing in candles.

5/20/2011 8:47:07 AM

Well, actually, this was the worst possible outcome, and yet the damage seems to have not been that bad.

5/20/2011 9:10:35 AM

Meh, I've seen worse.

5/20/2011 12:35:56 PM

Lots of details are still emerging, for a good tour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eoYaD6yk8c

I disagree that this was the worst case scenario, but there's something to be said about the worst category of scenario. If you look at any objective criteria, the reactors are much more stable now than they were until this point, and it is clear that ultimate removal of the fuel is in the cards in a time horizon much shorter than historical examples. There were obviously problems with the industry and regulatory structure that lead to this, but the fact remains that this is a truly 'modern' nuclear accident and the assumptions we have always held about the consequences of a nuclear accident are ripe to be disproved.

5/20/2011 1:10:50 PM

I don't even know if I would call it "modern." It's 40 years old, IIRC, and that's pretty much near the infancy of commercial nuclear power. That it fared so relatively well speaks volumes about the safety of the industry

5/20/2011 6:54:00 PM

I would argue the opposite. Our generation is dumber than the last. The older, simpler designs are probably more robust. Complacency kills. Institutionalized complacency across a monopolistic industry that's been drinking the kool-aid their entire lives is a guaranteed disaster.

5/20/2011 7:04:05 PM

Quote :

"The older, simpler designs are probably more robust. "

"more robust" by having LESS redundant features and designs that tend to less reactivity in the reactor in bad situations? you might want to do a little research, dude.

5/20/2011 7:09:01 PM

I meant the accident is modern, not the reactors. People have been taking their own measurements and posting them online, it's certainly one of the most heavily covered accidents in human history by the news, that sort of thing. Chernobyl resulted in a massive loss of life because it was covered up and people didn't have information the information they needed. Although Tepco is hardly virtuous in its handling of the accident of its own accord, the pressures due to our communication infrastructure forced them to do hourly updates through the accident.

^^ Well that outright discredits you. Thanks for playing.

5/20/2011 7:25:45 PM

Do you really trust your peers to build a new reactor?

Do you really trust americans to build anything?

[Edited on May 20, 2011 at 7:32 PM. Reason : .]

5/20/2011 7:31:24 PM

I hate how these assholes are trying to destroy nuclear energy. Having a nuclear plant in a fault zone is not a problem. Having a nuclear plant in a fault zone and a tsunami zone and having a 1000 year event hit it is the problem. Nuclear is totally safe even in fault zones, 99.9% of the time...

5/20/2011 7:39:54 PM

^^ I do. Having experience with nuclear power plants, if I had to pick a weak spot it in the industry it would be operations & maintenance and not design & construction. Maybe I'm biased being on the E&C side but modern plants are so over-designed it's ridiculous. It's 90% of the reason building plants here are so ridiculously expensive.

If everything goes well I'll be a part of an engineering team working on the new ESBWR before the end of the year. We'll see though.

Also as far as "Americans" building things, I definitely still trust Americans to build things. Having experience seeing the standards that a lot of other countries build things to, I think American building standards are very high if not too conservative sometimes (making things well-designed but more expensive).

5/20/2011 8:58:45 PM

We have 40 year old plants that have been given extensions to operate for another 20-40 years. The Utility Industry as a whole is very capital intensive, which means they don't spend a lot on O&M. With an aging fleet and a utility company's unwillingness to spend what it needs on O&M since they're trying to make Wall Street happy...sometimes makes me a little uneasy when I go to sleep at night.

Worst part is that as capital intensive as the Utility Industry is, no one seems to be able to afford a new nuclear plant. All the updated and 3rd gen technology is priced out of their reach due to stringent safety requirements and inabilities to properly manage a plant's construction and not be subject to heavy cost and time overruns.

5/20/2011 10:06:05 PM

Quote :

"With an aging fleet and a utility company's unwillingness to spend what it needs on O&M since they're trying to make Wall Street happy...sometimes makes me a little uneasy when I go to sleep at night."

ummm, you do realize that the reason there are no new plants is because every time anyone says the word "nuclear" 100 groups come up and sue the piss out of that person, making it impossible to build a new plant, right? Companies aren't reluctant to build new plants. They very much want to do so! They just can't get past the bullshit environmentalists who have no fucking clue what they are talking about and think that every nuclear power plant is full of Homer J Simpsons with glowing rods sticking to their backs as they leave work.

5/20/2011 10:09:15 PM

They need taxpayer money, or rather they really want taxpayer money in order to build these things. Taxpayers have a right to question when their money may be used by a big industry to kill them.

^I fear the crippling bureaucracy more than the ineptitude, but there's plenty of both to go around.

As our population increases, we can no longer trust these people to keep us safe. The time to dismantle nuclear plants has come.

http://www.propublica.org/article/nrc-waives-enforcement-of-fire-rules-at-nuclear-plants

Quote :

"The rules required extensive retrofits, and the industry balked. Two nuclear companies sued to block them, but a federal judge agreed with the NRC that they were "urgently needed to protect the public safety." Yet over the next two decades, the sense of urgency faded. Some plants installed fireproofing material that later turned out to be defective; others never added required protection. Many companies -- acting without NRC approval -- got around the rules by substituting manual procedures. If a fire cut off the control room, for example, workers would fan out and operate switches and pumps by hand. Some of these assignments amounted to implausible acts of derring-do. Shearon Harris assigned a worker to run through the plant, squeeze into a high-voltage electrical cabinet, mount a step stool and disconnect a switch with a screwdriver. "

[Edited on May 20, 2011 at 10:28 PM. Reason : .]

5/20/2011 10:21:22 PM

^^^ I believe it has a lot less to do with the EPC companies not being able to manage the construction and a lot more to do with the insane amount of paperwork required to appease so many different people, all the different review cycles, the NRC's involvement etc.. I definitely agree with all of the safety built in to the designs, but a lot of the process of documenting and qualifying design and construction work here in the US is overbearing. The same American EPC companies are building the same GE/GEH/Toshiba/Westinghouse etc. designs in other countries for much cheaper than we can here.

There needs to be a middle-ground. Some of the other countries might not have stringent enough processes, but the documentation & paperwork process for ours has just gotten to be ridiculous.

[Edited on May 20, 2011 at 10:31 PM. Reason : ]

5/20/2011 10:31:39 PM

Quote :

"Our generation is dumber than the last."

Bullshit. How smart is a generation which accepts 55mph speeds but can't manage seat-belts? Can you really call a generation of people "smart" when so many of them died in easily preventable accidents or of easily preventable diseases?

As recently as my mother's generation here in North Carolina, the water system and sewage system were the same damn system: the creek nearest the home.

[Edited on May 21, 2011 at 5:25 PM. Reason : .,.]

5/21/2011 5:23:44 PM

^ agreed. I think we have a lot of stupid, lazy people in our generation but if the workplace is any indication, there are a lot of really bright young engineers out there. I see lots of young engineers that I consider just as good or better overall engineers compared to some senior people. The main thing they lack is experience leading to specific industry knowledge which is obviously important and in some cases invaluable, but that is learned over time. I certainly don't see the engineers of our generation as dumber than the previous.

This:

Quote :

"I would argue the opposite. Our generation is dumber than the last. The older, simpler designs are probably more robust."

is just not correct. They are still solid designs but the new designs have extra redundant safety factors and are more robust in regards to tornado and earthquake design (in some cases maybe too robust driving up the cost). The only thing I could think of that has a possible valid argument is the use of pneumatic versus digital controls and reliability. DDC automation definitely lets you do things that pneumatics couldn't. Some people will argue that digital controls are more susceptible to "glitches" but there is a whole maintenance side of old pneumatic systems that balance that out.

Either way, it is silly to say the older designs are more robust.


[Edited on May 21, 2011 at 5:47 PM. Reason : ]

5/21/2011 5:43:30 PM

Quote :

"They need taxpayer money, or rather they really want taxpayer money in order to build these things."

Only so they can defend against the asinine lawsuits of environmental nutjobs like you.

5/21/2011 6:01:41 PM

^^^ I'm not sure those are necessarily measures of stupidity. However, if I were to ascribe 'stupid' to one of the still-alive generations, it would be the Boomers. Baby Boomers did little to maintain or improve infrastructure designed/built post-war by the GI and Silent generations. Now it's falling apart and falling to those under 40 to fix it up, clean it up, and pay for it.

But, that's neither here nor there.

I do agree pneumatic controls suck. I'm not sure that shit ever worked right.

5/21/2011 6:17:07 PM

^^The even more unfortunate thing about it is that there are people out there who oppose or hold up or try and completely stop the construction of just about every kind of new power plant, not just nuclear. These same people are the reason we keep having to recommission old, aging plants who pollute more or aren't as efficient or aren't as safe (depending on the type of plant you are talking about) as new plants out there. The ones that do make it past legislation cost a lot more than they should because of all of it and then people complain that companies look for government subsidies/taxpayer dollars.

As an engineer I place huge importance on worker and public safety so I'm not trying to downplay that in the least. It's a huge part of the job. But all the red tape and circular arguments frustrate me to no end sometimes.

[Edited on May 21, 2011 at 6:32 PM. Reason : ]

5/21/2011 6:26:49 PM

Another Modern Country Wisely Abandons Nuclear Energy

http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE74L07820110522

5/22/2011 3:24:46 PM

Quote :

"Another Modern Country Wisely Abandons Nuclear Energy Becomes Russia's Bitch"

5/22/2011 4:23:30 PM

An hero:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fe20110522sh.html

Quote :

"What were the most convincing arguments you made against the plants? We concentrated on three arguments: Compared to existing alternatives, the reactors were not needed, they were unsafe, and they were too expensive. First, we had plenty of natural gas available to boil water to turn the turbines to make the electricity. Second, the pumps and piping supplying water to cool the reactor were so huge that metal fatigue would eventually occur and cause a release of radioactivity into an area that could not be safely evacuated since we are on an island. Third, the industry admitted that massive taxpayer subsidies would be needed to operate the plants."

NOW THEY WANT TO BUILD SMALLER REACTORS IN LESS SAFE ENVIRONMENTS WITH NO BODY OF WATER
http://chartiersvalley.patch.com/articles/lawmakers-unveil-plans-for-small-nuclear-reactors-6

Let's just start mounting them on tanks like the soviets did. That's a great idea.


[Edited on May 23, 2011 at 1:56 AM. Reason : .]

5/23/2011 1:52:27 AM

Quote :

"First, we had plenty of natural gas available to boil water to turn the turbines to make the electricity."

I wonder how people in ancient Rome felt when it was becoming apparent that trends in topsoil use and funds from conquests were unsustainable. I imagine anyone with a valid solution was confronted with "more of the same!" opposition.

Maybe we should add "pray to Jupiter" to the current alternatives of natural gas and renewables.

5/23/2011 10:59:26 AM

the plant was built next to a mountain. That is where the workers ran when the tsunami came in. Why didn't they locate the plant there?

of course, pumping water up-hill is costly and potentially dangerous when it comes to nuclear plants, so I suspect they thought of that and rejected the idea.

5/23/2011 1:18:22 PM

In stark reversal to the previous position of the Merkel government, Germany becomes the latest industrial nation to abandon nuclear power.


Tepco has announced that Fukushima will likely not be stabilized within the year.


[Edited on May 30, 2011 at 7:38 PM. Reason : .]

5/30/2011 7:36:53 PM