You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...
Here's John Wheeler on one of the lesser known benefits enjoyed by communities that host nuclear power plants:
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Harris sirens are not fully backed up with emergency power should an accident or attack coincede with a electrical grid failure.
Gunter, NIRS
Harris sirens are not fully backed up with emergency power should an accident or attack coincede with a electrical grid failure.
Gunter, NIRS
Gunter
How strange.
So your 99.9999% is just made up...
Before you all start crowing about emergency plans around nuclear power stations lets look at this case in point.
As part of their licensed condition reactor operators committed to emergency plans that included operable public notification systems.
The fact is that siren systems routinely go down because of grid problems, adverse weather, equipment failure where the majority of US reactor emergency planning zones rely on public notification sirens that are solely powered by the grid not equipped with emergency backup power systems or even batteries.
There are just enough EPZs with fully backed up sirens systems to show how inconsistent and arbitrary the notification process is... any wonder with what the federal government demonstrated during Katrina?
Well it just so happens that Station Blackout is a big contributor to core melt frequency, just look at NUREG-1150.
So just when you might need public notification systems the most, let's say with an initiating event caused by the power lines going down because of adverse weather or as the first of a target set in an attack on a nuclear power station, the sirens wont work.
Its just another example of the absurd length that the nuclear power industry and its compliant regulator will go to to save money to the potential detriment of public safety.
Moreover, there is the issue that the emergency planning zone is absurdly small set at a politically arbitrary 10 mile EPZ and a 50 mile ingestion pathway.
The TMI 2 accident alone demonstrated that spontaneous evacuations of 120,000 people occured when only the evacuation for pregnant women and children under 5 was recommended (a population of 5000). In the event of an accident or attack where evacuation is ordered, or for that matter shelter-in-place, the populations out to 25 miles are going to be moving en masse and create a shadow evacuation phenomenon, causing a grid lock for populations in close.
Those that manage to get to these so-called "reception zones" which by an large are only 15 to 20 miles away from the nukes, will find that the resident population and much of the responder network have already left, spontaneously.
The actual studies on human behavior in response to a radiological release with the TMI event as a case study, found hospital emergency rooms out to 25 miles without doctors, nurses and technicians. NRC and industru doare in a state of denial re: the evidence of role abandonment and delay given real human behavior where police, medical and all those school teachers who are conscripted to stay in the schools or board buses with their classes, when in fact in all likelihood are going to leave to save their own families first, particularly in fast breaking events.
Real civil defense begins with stopping reactor construction and closing down existing reactors.
Gunter, NIRS
Gunter, NIRS
The purpose of functional checks is to exercise the system, identify any deficiences, and correct them. That is exactly what happened here. The system worked. The problem was identified and corrected. The plant operators did precisely what the law and regulations required. They did what they were supposed to do.
There are many industries out there who do not do even that. I live near a private airport. It came to light that some of their emergency systems and equipment were non-functional, and had never even been tested. There is a railroad crossing a few miles from here that had a (fatal) accident because the warning equipment did not function. There had never been any maintenance performed on it. It cost lives (unlike the siren test outage). Yet no wackos were around complaining about the railroad. There was a train derailment a few months agao and the cars were carrying toxic materials. The cause was that the tracks there had not been inspected as they should have been.
So, my question is, why do the anti-nuke wackos hammer the nuclear industry for doing what they should, but never utter a whisper about other industries that do not do anything? Why are there no protests and lawsuits from the anti-nuke wackos about these other things? Why do you spend time hammering an industry that goes the extra mile for safety and turn a blind eye to these other things, many of which cost lives among the public, something the nuclear industry never has?