Friday a reactor tripped off, and NRC got around to telling us about it today:
Millstone 3, 3.2 miles WSW of New London, Connecticut,
about half way between Boston and New York.
I hear a few people live around there.
That’s its second downtime in six months.
Why is nuclear considered reliable baseload?
Distributed solar power wouldn’t all be down at once,
and wouldn’t risk irradiating millions of people.
Here’s Event Number 49260: Continue reading
Even the VDT has caught on to cost overruns for Kemper Coal and the new nukes at Plant Vogtle.
VDT posted an AP article 29 July 2013, Miss. deal may figure into Georgia nuclear plant, and Charlotte Observer posted it the day before, including Ray Henry as the author,
In Mississippi, the Southern Co. utility took financial losses when the cost of building a new power plant went over budget. In Georgia, another of the company’s projects is going over budget, but it has not yet taken a financial hit.
Southern Company subsidiary Mississippi Power promised utility regulators that it would charge its customers only for $2.4 billion in costs for building a coal-fired power plant in Kemper Country. Those customers will also have to pay off another $1 billion in bonds for the project, though the utility cannot make a profit off that borrowed money.
The utility’s deal in Mississippi has become a point of debate as Georgia regulators consider who should pay for the increased cost of building two more nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle (VOH’-gohl), southeast of Augusta. Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols said he wants Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power to consider a Mississippi-style deal here, and Georgia regulators are carefully tracking financial developments in Mississippi.
Echols said he was interested in the idea of a project spending cap.
“I’m sure when they made that deal they didn’t think they were going to over the cap, but they did,” Echols said.
Oh, come now, they went 26 times over budget last time. Why would anyone believe Continue reading
Fukushima is dumping radioactive water into its aquifer.
Plant Hatch is the same design and sits above the Floridan Aquifer
we drink out of.
Can’t happen here?
On 19 December 2001
TEPCO said there was no possibility of a tsunami large enough to knock
out Fukushima Daiichi.
Plant Hatch is the same design as Fukushima, and while a tsunami
really is unlikely at Hatch, for all we know Hatch
still has substandard fire protection
and the risk if Hatch does go bad is like the risk if a French reactor
goes bad:
soil contamination the size of France and Germany
(or larger than Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and north Florida) plus radioactive contamination of
the aquifer we drink out of.
Harvey Wasserman wrote for the Progress today, The Fukushima Nightmare Gets Worse, Continue reading
Decrepit nuke leaked radioactive water into Lake Michigan
in May 2013, and “The same tank sprang a leak in 2012.”
That reactor has been down so many times the reporter couldn’t count
them all.
When will we realize what Korea and now Japan has:
the nuclear industry colludes to hide its mistakes from the public,
and the public needs to do something about it.
David N. Goodman wrote for AP 6 May 2013, Nuclear Regulatory Commission: ‘Very slightly radioactive water’ enters Lake Michigan,
Nope, ten times; count ’em:Early Sunday morning, the tank was ruled inoperable and the nuclear power plant began powering down. This is reportedly the ninth time that the facility has been shut down since 2011.
>
And it stayed down from May 6th to June 17th 2013. Plus who knows what it’s leaking now that they didn’t bother to take it down for? Continue reading
Should we worry about those radioactive tuna off California? Should we raise radiation limits like EPA is proposing?
J. D. Heyes wrote for NaturalNews 30 May 2012, Fukushima radiation now detected in the U.S. food supply,
“I wouldn’t tell anyone what’s safe to eat or what’s not safe to eat,” Madigan told Reuters. “It’s become clear that some people feel that any amount of radioactivity, in their minds, is bad and they’d like to avoid it. But compared to what’s there naturally […] and what’s established as safety limits, it’s not a large amount at all.”
PR from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility 8 April 2013, WHITE HOUSE APPROVES RADICAL RADIATION CLEANUP ROLLBACK: Civilian Cancer Deaths Expected to Skyrocket Following Radiological Incidents,
The White House has given final approval for dramatically raising permissible radioactive levels in drinking water and soil following “radiological incidents,” such as nuclear power-plant accidents and dirty bombs. The final version, slated for Federal Register publication as soon as today, is a win for the nuclear industry which seeks Continue reading
Fitch reaffirmed SO’s and Georgia Power’s (and Mississippi Power’s) ratings today after Southern Company backed off a week ago from risking losing the larger cost overrun request to GA PSC. Beware: SO will be back, when maybe fewer people are looking. Or maybe that tiger team will issue its summer report and the titanic Southern Company ship will finally change course towards distributed solar and wind power.
Jonathan Shapiro wrote for AP 31 July 2013, AP: Georgia Power To Waive Request for Extra Vogtle Costs
[Southern Company] CEO Thomas Fanning told analysts Wednesday that the Atlanta-based company reached a preliminary deal with Georgia officials.
Under the plan, the company would only seek right now to collect the $209 million that it spent building the two new reactors at Plant Vogtle from July to December.
The company would waive Continue reading
It’s not just a storage tank, either; radioactive water has been leaking for more than two years, from the broken reactor buildings into groundwater and the Pacific Ocean. It’s not just a local Japanese problem: Fukushima is here.
The cautious version, by Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito, Reuters, today, Radioactive water seeping into Pacific from Fukushima is ’emergency,’ official says,
Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said Monday.
This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority task force, told Reuters.
Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) are only a temporary solution, he said.
VOA News, also today, admits leaks have been going on for more than two years and nobody knows how to stop them, Fukushima Operator Under Fire for Radioactive Leaks,
Rianne Teule, a nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace International, says the issue is a serious environmental concern.
“Most of all it proves TEPCO is incapable of dealing with this situation and that the Japanese authorities should really step in and ensure that proper action is taken to stop the leaks,” said Teule.
But it is not clear what other actions TEPCO could take at this point. Former Nuclear power plant designer Masashi Goto worked on several projects with TEPCO.
“The situation is already beyond what Tepco can handle,” said Goto. “If Continue reading
Document-forging Doosan was just the tip of the Korean nuclear corruption iceberg.
It’s different stateside, right?
Oh, wait:
U.S. NRC is refusing to supply Congress with safety documents
related to the closing of San Onofre.
But Plant Vogtle is much safer, right?
Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning told us so.
Of course, he also told us Kemper Coal would come in on budget, and now
SO is writing off $611 million after taxes.
But
that bad concrete pour, the misplaced reactor vessel, the leaking tritium;
those are all flukes, right?
Meanwhile, solar panels don’t leak tritium, and if you misplace one,
you only lose money, not risk lives.
By Choe Sang-Hun in NY Times yesterday, Scandal in South Korea Over Nuclear Revelations,
Weeks of revelations about the close ties between South Korea’s nuclear power companies, their suppliers and testing companies have led the prime minister to liken the industry to a mafia.
The scandal started after an anonymous tip in April prompted an official investigation. Prosecutors have indicted some officials at a testing company on charges of faking safety tests on parts for the plants. Some officials at the state-financed company that designs nuclear power plants were also indicted on charges of taking bribes from testing company officials in return for accepting those substandard parts.
Worse yet, Continue reading
Some of the “stuff” that happened before and after GA PSC Tim Echols cheered nuclear Friday.
GA Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols wrote in the Athens Banner-Herald Friday Echols: Nuclear power can be economic boon to Southeast,
Just when we thought nuclear power might be on a comeback, well, stuff happened. Only time will tell if Georgia and South Carolina can “jump-start” a nuclear renaissance. Let’s hope we can, because low-cost base-load energy — the amount of electricity available 24 hours a day — is a key to economic growth.
Stuff like this happened:
EDF is moving to solar and wind, despite its excuse of shale gas for leaving
the U.S. nuclear market.
EDF already has almost twice as much solar and wind in the U.S., 2.3 gigawatts, as
the 1.2 gigawatts Southern Company plans by 2016.
Maybe this means
Calvert Cliffs is finally dead
maybe along with
NRC’s attempt to change foreign ownership rules to accomodate EDF.
EDF is the operator of France’s fleet of nuclear reactors,
including
caught-on-fire Cattenom
and many others
that drain over-hot water into French rivers in the summer.
Reuters in Climate Spectator 31 July 2013 EDF exits US nuclear, focuses on renewables,
French utility EDF, the world’s biggest operator of nuclear plants, is pulling out of nuclear energy in the United States, bowing to the realities of a market that has been transformed by cheap shale gas.
Several nuclear reactors in the US have been closed or are being shuttered as utilities baulk at the big investments needed to extend their lifetimes Continue reading