Category Archives: Safety

UK biomass plant exploded from Waycross wood pellets

Explosions in Tilbury, England, explosions in Waycross: south Georgia wood pellet dust blowing up here and there and producing CO2 when burned there. Why is “the world’s largest wood pellet plant” a better use of Georgia foresters’ resources than solar farms, which don’t pollute and don’t explode?

Josh Schlossberg wrote for The Biomass Monitor 24 May 2013, Biomass Industry Plays With Fire, Gets Burned,

A massive fire raged inside wood pellet silos for RWE’s Tilbury Power Station in Essex, UK, on February 27, 2012. The biomass incinerator—the largest in the world at 750 megawatts—had just been converted from coal to woody biomass a month earlier. RWE claims no single cause can be attributed to the fire, but suspects that smoldering wood pellets triggered the dust fire.

In a recent editorial (apparently not online), Robert Farris Executive Director of the Georgia Forestry Commission, wrote that Georgia has nine wood pellet plants. He didn’t name them, but Biomass Magazine has a list of U.S. wood pellet plants, including these in Georgia (I added the City column): Continue reading →

Owners want out of uranium enrichment company

Maybe Southern Company and Georgia Power should listen to Urenco’s owners: the nuclear industry is flatlining after Fukushima.

Stanley Reed wrote for Dealbook.Nytimes.com 27 May 2013, Powerhouse of the Uranium Enrichment Industry Seeks an Exit,

The company that operates this uranium enrichment center, Urenco, is the world leader in the field. It is also plumply profitable. So why are its owners eager to sell it?

The answer, as with many things involving nuclear power, is a combination of economics, geopolitics and the Promethean prospect of an energy source that is as potentially green and abundant as deadly dangerous….

Continue reading →

Canadian nuke nearly melted down in February

A senior plant official happened to spot a human-caused cooling shutdown at a Canadian nuclear reactor, narrowly averting a meltdown.

Ian McCleod wrote for ENENews 15 May 2013, ‘Significance Level 1′ incident at nuclear reactor — “The highest order” — Public not alerted by officials — Characterized as ‘near miss’

[…] a Chalk River nuclear operator mistakenly closed a vital pumping system that cools the immense heat generated within the NRU reactor’s core […]

[…] the Crown corporation said the Feb. 27 event — which the official report characterized as a “near-miss” — needs to be taken very seriously. […]

[Randy Lesco, vice-president of operations and chief nuclear officer for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd] said that further categorizing the incident as at “Significance Level 1,” the highest order, means AECL is treating it with appropriate importance […]

CNSC President Michael Binder questioned why AECL and CNSC staff did not alert the public to the incident, which the Citizen first reported on May 8. […]

And why didn’t the reactor have automatic alerts? Ian MacCleod wrote for the Ottawa Citizen 7 May 2013, Human error blamed for “near-miss” at Chalk River reactor

Continue reading →

San Onofre Off Forever Soon

People standing up for safety and sanity may yet stop big business nukes. After San Onofre is finally off for good, how about let’s cancel Plant Vogtle? -jsq

Harvey Wasserman wrote for nukefree.org 16 May 2013, San Onofre at the No Nukes Brink,

In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a corporate cake walk.

Edison billed southern California ratepayers roughly $1 billion for San Onofre in 2012 even though it generated no juice.
With its massive money and clout, Southern California Edison was ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched $770 million steam generator fix had kept it shut for a year.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the restart: a No Nukes groundswell has turned this routine rubber stamping into an epic battle the grassroots just might win.

Indeed, if ever there was a time when individual activism could have
Continue reading →

Give back what I’ve had for 37 years –Lamar Clements @ LCC 2013-05-14

A Lowndes County resident asked for school bus safety and his land back that the county took; this was in the Lowndes County Commission Regular Session Tuesday:

I was asked to do this for the benefit of our community. Lamar Clements is my name, and my wife Winona. We live at 5138 Coppage Road, out in Hahira. So you’d know, we’re not new residents out there. We’ve lived there 37 years. We’ve seen a lot of change.

Coppage and Griffin Roads My concern is the corner of Coppage Road and Griffin Road. I know Mike Fletcher has been recently, visited that location. I want to report that I have seen personally as a resident; I’ve seen two county school buses that could have been a fatal accident because of the structure around it. My concern, it needs to be eliminated; that will, bottom line save lives.

Secondly, I live on the corner, and the county has progressively moved the road over to the west, which is literally taking my some of my yard. All I ask is: give back what I’ve had for 37 years. And for goodness sake, when I saw those two school buses that makes a chill go down your spine when you’ve got that many children in danger.

So it’s in good hands. You guys know what to do. Go for it. Continue reading →

Look at Southern Company’s safety performance –SO CEO Fanning

SO CEO Fanning on Fukushima At last year’s Southern Company Stockholder Meeting, Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning said about the U.S. nuclear industry and Southern Company’s safety performance:

And if you look at our performance, we absolutely meet the standards that our customers expect and frankly deserve. So let’s start there.

Since then SO has not managed to pour the concrete base correctly at Plant Vogtle and not managed to get a reactor vessel from Savannah port to the site. Also existing Vogtle Unit 1 had a fire while Unit 2 was shut down for almost all of March 2013. The two Plant Hatch reactors, same design as Fukushima, so far as we know still have substandard fire protection and has a chronic problem of radioactive tritium leaking into groundwater. Tritium, even the smallest amounts of which can have negative health effects. And what gets into the watershed spreads in the watershed. The U.S. nuclear industry in general has problems with alcohol, drugs, and broken equipment. But back to SO CEO Fanning about Fukushima: Continue reading →

San Onofre inside source: keep it shut down

An employee still inside and a longtimer since retired both say the San Onofre nuclear reactor should stay shut down. Operator Southern California Edison says it’s safe to restart at 70% power, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission won’t show the public Socal Edison’s study about that. Which seems safest to you? Trust the operator that let it break in the first place, or keep it shut down?

JW August wrote for 10bnews.com 25 April 2013, San Onofre insider says NRC should not allow nuclear restart: Team 10 speaks with former NRC employee, insider,

Continue reading →

Sinkhole costs, and prevention vs. reaction

The day after the VDT ran Lowndes County’s admission that the sewer line break was theirs, not Valdosta’s, did the VDT start a series of financial investigation like they did about Valdosta’s water issues? Nope, they ran a piece about how much weather costs the county, with no recognition of watershed-wide issues, nor of any need for the county to participate in proactively dealing with them, to reduce costs, for better quality of life, to attract the kinds of businesses we claim we want. Nope, none of that.

Jason Schaefer wrote for the VDT 27 April 2013, What natural events cost Lowndes taxpayers,

In the Deep South, near a river plain where floodwaters rise and ebb from season to season and wetlands that distinguish the region from anywhere else in the nation, flooding makes a significant portion of the concern for Lowndes County emergency management.

OK, that’s close to getting at some of the basic issues. We’re all in the same watershed, and we need to act like it instead of every developer and every local government clearcutting and paving as if water didn’t run downhill. Does the story talk about that? After all, the county chairman attended the 11 April 2013 watershed-wide flooding meeting that led to the city of Valdosta’s likely participation in flodoplain planning. Nope; according to the VDT, everybody around here seems to be hapless victims of weather:

Continue reading →

Another rat at Fukushima: cooling down third time in five weeks

It doesn’t take a tsunami to take down Fukushima: rats can do it repeatedly.

Mainich.jp, and Google Translate version,

Inspection and rat carcasses found cooling system stop: Unit 2 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant

(23 minutes 15:22 April last update) 01 minutes 13:22 April Mainichi Shimbun in 2013

From state = Fukuichi live camera of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant of 50 at around 2:00 pm
The 22nd, TEPCO announced that it had stopped the cooling system of the spent fuel pool of Unit 2 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Since the corpse of two dogs rat is found inside the transformer in the outdoors, I will check the equipment.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and Tokyo Electric Power, 15 at around 10:00 am the same day, workers found a dead rat in the two animals terminal near the pool cooling transformer inside. Remove the mouse, stop the power for inspection of equipment 35 at around 11:00 the same. expected start is 3 to 4 hours later.

Water temperature of the pool of power stop time is 13.9 degrees. There is enough time to rise up to 65 degree of operational safety, TEPCO has “no problem. Administrative stopped just in case for inspection” he said. [Torii true flat]

Reuters’ version, Fukushima nuclear cooling system offline for 3rd time in 5 weeks, adds:

Last month, a 29-hour power supply halt affecting nine facilities, including four spent fuel pool cooling systems, was caused by a rat touching exposed wires in a temporary switchboard, triggering a circuit breaker.

In early April, the No.3 unit’s spent fuel pool cooling system stopped, after workers appeared to have had inadvertently caused a power outage when they were trying to install a net to keep small animals from crawling into the reactor building. (Reporting by Risa Maeda; Editing by Chris Gallagher)

Apparently that net didn’t work. Should we trust our safety to nuclear plants that can be shut down by rats? The tritium-leaking reactors at Plant Hatch at Baxley are the same design as at Fukushima. Former U.S. NRC Chairman Jaczko says we should phase them all out while former Indian Atomic Energy Regulatory Board Chair Gopalakrishnan says the reactors currently building in India, already three years behind schedule and now found to incorporate numerous defects and deficiencies amid gross lack of transparency, must be stopped. We know a better way: solar and wind power. Let’s get on with that.

-jsq

Owed to Masaichi Shiozaki.

Gulf 3 years ago; Caspian 5 years ago: BP oil well blowouts

Two years before BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig poisoned the Gulf of Mexico (Saturday was the third anniversary), apparently BP had a very similar disaster in the Caspian Sea and covered it up. Is this a company or this the 13 spills in 30 days industry we want piping tar sands crude across America to the Gulf for all of 35 permanent jobs and CO2 emissions like 51 coal plants? There’s a cleaner, cheaper, and more energy-independent way: solar and wind power can power the U.S. and the world.

Greg Palast wrote for EcoWatch 19 April 2013, BP Covered Up Blow-out Two Years Prior to Deadly Deepwater Horizon Spill,

Two years before the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP off-shore rig suffered a nearly identical blow-out, but BP concealed the first one from the U.S. regulators and Congress.

This week, EcoWatch.org located an eyewitness with devastating new information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had concealed from government and the industry.

The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival. But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate.

One cause of the blow-outs was the same in both cases: the use of a money-saving technique—plugging holes with “quick-dry” cement.

By hiding the disastrous failure of its penny-pinching cement process in 2008, BP was able to continue to use the dangerous methods in the Gulf of Mexico—causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history. April 20 marks the second anniversary of the Gulf oil disaster.

There’s more in the article, such as this:

Continue reading →