From France to Berlin is as close as 32 nuclear reactors to here. Here’s a scenario for “Core meltdown accident in the nuclear power plant Cattenom (France) contamination of leafy vegetables by radioactive iodine with wind from the southwest”:
I was in Germany shortly after Chernobyl, when all the cows were inside so they would not eat the radioactive grass, and all the salads were frozen.
Here’s a scenario for radioactive iodine in mother’s milk, with a similar map: Continue reading
Less than 500 miles from here in NC,
what else haven’t they found if
‘Duke Energy’s examination a year ago “was supposed to have found that problem then and fixed it”‘?
This was a ‘a quarter-inch spot the NRC and the company describe as a “flaw” in the reactor vessel head, which contains heat and pressure produced by the nuclear core’s energy.’
When a solar panel has a quarter-inch flaw, you get a tiny percentage less electricity,
not the risk of radiation leak or worse.
Would you rather have two more nukes at the same site, run by the same company that can’t run the one it’s got safely, or solar power instead?
Plus where is the advantage of baseload capacity when Harris 1 has only been up 27.41% for the past month (NRC data), which is hardly better than the approximately 20% sun hours per day for solar power in North Carolina this time of year. Given the low and continually-dropping cost of solar panels, Duke could simply over-provision distributed solar panels and get way more than 20% or 27.41% effective power, and get that on budget and on time.
Emery P. Dalesio wrote for AP yesterday, Harris nuclear plant in U.S. is safe to restart after reactor problem found, Continue reading
Not just for Plant Vogtle anymore: this nuclear reactor site fire was at one of EDF’s flagship plants at Cattenom, Lorraine, France, on the Moselle River.
ENENews quoted MarketWatch yesterday, Photo: “Fire broke out at nuclear reactor” — “Plumes of black smoke could be seen from a considerable distance”
French state-controlled power group Electricite de France SA said Friday a fire started on a transformer at its nuclear plant in Cattenom, eastern France, adding that it was outside the nuclear-processing area.
A picture tweeted from France: Continue reading
Birds nested using radioactive mud from WW II-era nuclear bomb production plant,
stopping attempts to clean up some of the worst leaking atomic waste,
much of which is liquid in leaking tanks near the Columbia River.
We have nuclear plants leaking radioactive tritium next to the Chattahoochee
and Altamaha Rivers, and radiation is detectible in the Savannah River
near Plant Vogtle.
How many radioactive solar panels or windmills have you heard of?
Annette Cary wrote for the Tri-City Herald yesterday,
Birds at Hanford vit plant spread contaminated waste,
Work stopped Wednesday morning at parts of the Hanford vitrification plant after radioactive contamination was detected under a bird’s nest, according to Bechtel National.
The contamination is suspected of coming from mud used for the nest, which may have belonged to a swallow, said Bechtel spokesman Todd Nelson. Only a small amount of contaminated soil was found, and the contamination was at a low level.
Should workers believe that?
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
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,
Continue readingThe 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….
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 readingPeople 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,
Continue readingIn January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a corporate cake walk.
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.
Edison billed southern California ratepayers roughly $1 billion for San Onofre in 2012 even though it generated no juice. 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
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.
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
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