Tag Archives: Safety

Pilgrim nuke down because of cold, heat, leak: when does it ever run?

Down in January, February, April, May, running low March and June, and now likely to go down because of summer heat, under what conditions does Entergy’s Pilgrim nuke near Boston, MA like to run? Entergy also couldn’t keep the power on during the Super Bowl and still has Arkansas Nuclear 1 down since a fatal accident in March. To be fair, many nukes can’t handle heat. Remind me, why are we building more of them?

Christine Legere wrote for Cape Cod Times 18 July 2013, Seawater temps too high for Pilgrim cooling,

PLYMOUTH — The ongoing heat wave could force Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station to shut down, as soaring temperatures continue to warm the Cape Cod Bay waters that the plant relies on to cool key safety systems.

Pilgrim’s license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires Continue reading →

Diablo Canyon nuclear units 2 and 1 down one after another

The local newspaper didn’t look past PG&E’s news about unit 2 coming back up (lightning strike) to notice that unit 1 had been down (pipe leak) a few weeks before.

David Sneed wrote for the San Luis Obispo Tribune 16 July 2013, Diablo Canyon’s Unit 2 reactor back at full power, Continue reading →

Arkansas Nuclear 1 still down since fatal accident in March

Apparently we still don’t know why this happened:

At approximately 7:50am on Sunday, March 31, 2013, a 600-ton generator stator fell onto the turbine deck and then about 30 feet to the train bay floor as was being lifted out of the Unit 1 turbine building at the Arkansas Nuclear One plant. One worker was killed and four others injured when the load fell.

Dave Lochbaum wrote for Union of Concerned Scientists 18 June 2013, Fission Stories #139: Arkansas Nuclear One Fatal Event,

The NRC reviewed U.S. nuclear plant experience with lifting loads with cranes between 1968 and 2002. The NRC reported that about two load drops per year happened during this period with ten incidents causing deaths. The NRC’s review concluded that there had been only three very heavy load drops (defined as a load weighing more than 30 tons). ANO-1 makes four.

While accidents can also happen with wind turbines or even installing solar panels on rooftops, a single solar or wind accident doesn’t Continue reading →

China ends a nuclear treatment plant after demonstrations

“In order to respect the popular will, the government of” the city of Heshan refused to proceed with a $9 billion uranium processing plant. That happened after this, yesterday:

The cancellation, unusually fast, demonstrates the increasingly important attention given by the authorities to environmental concerns that are often expressed at the local level. Several projects of petrochemical plants and metal processing have recently been postponed or relocated.

Yes, I know the plant may just be relocated somewhere else. But with enough such demonstrations it won’t be built. How about some of this respect for the popular will about, for example, the natural gas pipeline through Georgia from Alabama to Florida, or the new nukes at Plant Vogtle?

Le Monde, today, Continue reading →

Three Brooks County football players dead in morning accident

Jon Nelson wrote about an hour ago for GPB, DEVELOPING: Three Brooks County Players Die In Car Accident,

Three Brooks County (GA) High School football players died following a morning wreck near the town of Quitman in southwest Georgia. The teenagers were reportedly on their way to football practice at the high school when the accident occurred. Local police are saying that the wreck happened on the road to school around 9:30AM.

His post has the names of the students, all pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, and of a fourth student who was according to WCTV, airlifted by helicopter to Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Florida.

-jsq

Lowndes County takes no responsibility for the pipeline –Bill Slaughter @ LCC 2013-06-25

You’re on your own if that pipeline company wants your property; the county government chooses to stay completely out of it, so said Lowndes County Chairman Bill Slaughter at the 25 June Regular Session of the Lowndes County Commission.

He read a prepared statement about a proposed natural gas pipeline. Why the county couldn’t put it on their website as a press release is mysterious. I’ve added the links:

Lowndes County has been contacted by representatives of McKenna, Long, Aldridge law firm of Atlanta regarding a proposed project expected to impact property owners of Lowndes County. Spectra Energy Company and its subsidiary, Sabal Trail Transmissions LLC anticipates construction of a 465 mile interstate natural gas pipeline from Anniston, Alabama extending through Georgia and coming through Lowndes County, terminating in Orlando, Florida.
This project is for the benefit of and is the responsibility of Florida Power and Light. Lowndes County has been Continue reading →

Corbett or George Road renamed to Caney Branch Road @ LCC 2013-06-25

The road previously known as Corbett or George, part of which may or may not have been closed at some previous data, was renamed to Caney Branch Road after a creek that flows into the Alapahoochee River, at the 25 June Regular Session of the Lowndes County Commission.

6.1. Public Hearing Renaming George Road (CR #105)

This time County Engineer Mike Fletcher said the residents wanted to rename George Road to be Caney Branch Road after Caney Branch, “a small creek that runs through this area, localized”. because

EMS, 911, and postal services have an issue with locating the correct houses because there are two George Roads in Lowndes County.

He referred to the previous morning, when Commissioner Crawford Powell wanted to know Continue reading →

Why are you gambling on nuclear instead of solar? –Gloria Tatum @ SO 2013-05-22

Why is SO gambling our health and dollars on Plant Vogtle when Georgia Power could be getting on with solar power? SO CEO Tom Fanning avoided the first part of Gloria Tatum’s question by simply denying it, and danced around the second part by saying the rate hike for Plant Vogtle’s cost overruns would only be 6 to 8 percent, not 12 percent. Do you want to pay 6 or 8 percent more for a radioactive white elephant when you could be getting power from the sun for less?

The floor person at the 22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder Meeting introduced Gloria Tatum with 164 shares, representing Nuclear Watch South, and the SO CEO insisted

TF: Call me Tom. Gee whiz.
GT: Tom. Hi,Tom. It’s great to be here on this beautiful day.

TF: Thank you. Yes ma’am.

GT: And I know Southern Company’s done many wonderful things, but I want to point out a few things to you today.
First, you know, after the Fukushima meltdown, TEPCO’s $50 billion nuclear complex became a worthless liability. The deadly radiation still circles the planet, polluting the earth and increasing cancer. Other countries have abandoned their nuclear and they’re looking to renewable, but Southern Company’s affiliate, Georgia Power, continues construction on two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle. Now Shell Bluff is a community down the stream from Plant Vogtle and it has experienced a 25 percent increase in cancer since Vogtle 1 and 2 have been built.
Another problem with Vogtle Continue reading →

The stars all lined up for the homeless –Deidra White @ LCDP 2013-07-02

The homeless formerly living under the James Beck Overpass now have homes and most have jobs, said Valdosta City Council Deidra White at last night’s Lowndes County Democratic Party Annual 4th of July Barbecue.

White said the encampment under the overpass had been growing for some time, and people in her district, which contains the overpass, were increasingly concerned yet had had little success in dealing with the situation.

So I contacted many people in the community, homeless advocates, churches, governmental, civil, nonprofits; anyone that I’ve ever come across who has ever worked in any capacity helping with the homeless situation. And in a very,almost seemingly the stars all lined up a couple of weeks ago. Many people came together to do something about the specific eleven homeless persons who were living under the James Beck Overpass.
A private citizen donated property and said that they could stay on this property for a temporary time until we find a permanent solution. Members of the homeless coalition immediately began identifying potential employers….

She referred listeners to the recent newspaper stories for some details, and then continued:

Continue reading →

Interactive charts: U.S. nuclear power reactors (NRC data)

Why are all these “dependable” baseload capacity nukes down so much? See for yourself in these interactive graphs of NRC Power Reactor Status. They’re in Google annotated timeline format, with all the zoom and pan features used by Google finance for stock charts. But these Reactor Status charts show seven years of daily NRC power percentage data. Want to see last month, six months, any 7 days, or some other period? Now you can, for all 104 reactors, including the ones recently removed by NRC from status because they’ve closed permanently.

You can view your own local reactors in any of 20 charts. Why so many graphs? Google annotated timeline charts apparently were meant for comparing a few stock prices, and don’t handle more than about seven curves well. But you can see things in these graphs that are hard to spot in NRC’s daily tables.

Example: Southern Nuclear Operating Co., Inc. (Alabama, Georgia)