Flood Berm Collapses At Nebraska Nuclear Plant 417
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."
Something against nuclear... (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems everything mdsolar keeps writing about nuclear tech has a sensationalist fear-mongering spin to it.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...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.
People who died as a result of the earthquake/tsunami: 20000
People who died as a result of the nuclear power plant incidents: 0
It seems that there really was no danger.
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.startribune.com/nation/123466069.html [startribune.com]
Of course people are only going to start worrying when the shit has already hit the fan. Until then, everything's peachy.
Re:Well that does it. (Score:3, Insightful)
One of you deserves a whoosh, and I don't know who. Probably GP.
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm also from the area. The spin on these stories that the sky is falling are both funny and annoying.
Even if there was some kind of catastrophic failure at FCS that required immediate response, the surrounding infrastructure is still more than able to deal with it. Omaha is still standing and chugging along just fine. The rest of the country isn't exactly paralyzed by a Japan style disaster.
People need to be more concerned about the levees around Omaha and Council Bluffs and the areas already effected by significant breaches. A few feet of water at the station is nothing compared to what is happening elsewhere in the area.
Re:Ok. safe this time. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [newscientist.com])
Evacuation = Low Death Toll - Danger Very Real (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I support nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ok. safe this time. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Evacuation = Low Death Toll - Danger Very Real (Score:2, Insightful)
So, what you are saying is that nuclear power is harmless because deaths can be prevented? What's the problem then?
How about a car analogy: the only reason why people don't die by the thousands every day is because they take the precaution to stop at red lights.
When you can get an insurer to cover the cost of abandoning an entire small region in case something goes wrong at your plant, I will buy your car analogy.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're forgetting that the nuclear accident seriously hampered search and rescue efforts within the evacuation zone.
In other words: the Fukushima reactor has not killed anyone, but the government's response to the problems at Fukushima lead to an evacuation, and more people who were brought to the verge of death due to being buried in Tsunami debris died than might have died if the government reacted differently.
Sorry... neither the reactor nor nuclear power killed those folks; all their injuries were caused by the Tsunami. Their death was certain unless they received timely assistance, and the chaos created in the wake of the Tsunami and the poor government response caused them to not receive any assistance.
Re:Well that does it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe in papal infallibility, so I'll argue with you. I graduated high school in 1974, and the '70's were a decade of hope. Now, as for the '80's, yeah, you're pretty close to right. The steel industry set the example for all the rest of corporate America. Stop paying those Union wages, and ship the jobs to Europe, Asia, even Africa if you can find enough people there with the intelligence to run a furnace.
Half century of decline? I like optimism. We might come back in 50 years. But, I look at so many of today's young people, and they have no drive, no hunger, no need to do anything. Seems to me that we need a new generation of hungry men and women with drive to make any kind of a comeback. These 30 year old game players have nothing to offer America!
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:2, Insightful)
Ummmm... you would think so. But I call your attention to Fukushima spent fuel pool #4. The reactor itself was shut down for months before the earthquake and tsunami, but the spent fuel rod assemblies cooling in the pool above the reactor still need electricity for years to cool the spent rods. Otherwise they go critical again without any sheilding. Which has been problematic since the disaster.
Arnie Gunderson from Fairwind describes #4 as the most intractable of problems at Fukushima.
So when the nuclear dudes say Ft. Calhoun is "safe" because it was proactively shut down, I don't totally believe them.
P.S. Typing this from Tokyo...
Re:Well that does it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm. How can I be polite... Nope. Can't.
So.
Fuck you.
Seriously. This generation of 30-year-old gamers is the least criminal, the most altruistic there is. Unlike their parents, they played civilization, and they know what happens to empires with no research and no roads... They grew up without internet and know, much more deeply than their parents, what it means to be connected. They know of the passions, travails and interests of all everywhere. And they know how it was before.
They are not hungry, because they can see how wrong their hungry parents were. The pox that is suburbia. The obsession of ownership. The small-mindedness of the symbols of success. And the failure of it all to bring security or satisfaction. And now, we have reached peak oil, and there is no infrastructure to cope. They know there is no contentedness to be reached in following their parent's footsteps.
They know that the one thing that brings improvement is knowledge. And they know it is a double-edged sword. And they see how their hungry parents are defunding education and research to pay for the retirements they can't afford -- because they won't pay taxes. Yes, the GP is right: Reagan was a calamity. Not so much because of his policies, but because he made legitimate a deeply wrong view of the World.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Nuclear plants have the unique ability to make a bad natural disaster even worse by creating a man-made catastrophe which impacts a large area and mandates additional evacuations and displacement.
And Japan is lucky, in that it has an incredibly developed (some might say overdeveloped) infrastructure, one which generally held up pretty well to the massive quake and subsequent tsunami.
You live under a rock don't you? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well that does it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Let's see how knowledge serves you, when no one is willing to grow the food to feed you. I said "hungry", and that is what I meant. So long as obesity runs rampant in America, none of you kids can claim to know what hunger is. Hunger is not to be equated with the greed for superflous bullshit that you cite above.
BTW - it was your parents and grandparents, maybe your great grand parents who made this nation a superpower. Today, we see that superpower status slipping away. Yes, we are in decline, as PopeRatzo suggested. Enjoy your delusions of superiority. They won't return power to the United States, though.
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:4, Insightful)
Exceed 45 feet only if the water has to go over the wall, instead of thru it or under it.
Re:Well that does it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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! [wikipedia.org]
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 [wikipedia.org] (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.
Re:Stop helping (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that during the nuclear accident in Japan, the Japanese authorities were saying the same thing.
It's nice to see a little skepticism out of our media for once.
Re:Stop helping (Score:4, Insightful)
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.