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
Not all was lost in the Lieberman Warner bill debacle; Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has publicly stated her support for nuclear energy. From MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday,
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"They have put the whole power of the government behind the safety question. here, we don't do that. so i think if you had, if you make sure that it was safe and that we really worked harder to make it safe, it would have more acceptance."
Boxer is an idiot - nuclear is safe and the NRC (part of the govt that she loves so much) ensures that.
Liberals!
A tornado recently hit a research reactor building in Kansas. Guess how many died? ZERO! How many injured? ZERO. Amount of damage to the reactor? ZERO.
Kinda puts the anti-nuke ranting in its place, huh?
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/en.html
Stupid liberal politician.
The only thing better would be Harry Reid making similar remarks.
The KSU research reactor is a 1,250kilowatt TRIGA reactor. This type of reactor requires no active cooling--- so what's your point?
Wasn't Davis-Besse hit by a tornado 10 years ago?
I think that you'll agree that Davis-Besse requires active cooling, no?
How many people were killed? How much damage was done to the reactor?
Turns out her real goal was to prevent fuel shipments to a nuke on the North Coast that would have had to traverse Marin County by rail.
With organized pushback, the proposed rule was quickly watered down to a "sense of the board" resolution.
If Senator Boxer is now willing, based on her increased wisdom, to restrain her opposition to nuclear, we should welcome her conversion.
I suspect she realizes that she and her fellow Democrats are now extremely exposed politically based on their decades of anti-energy policy.
That's the way the game of politics is played in a democratic republic.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the comment.
Would Boxer's proposed statute pass muster with the courts? I thought that federal law takes precedence in regulation of radioactive materials. There would probably be Constitutional issues as well (interstate commerce and the like). Our local county commissioners tried something similar sometime back. The courts ruled that they could not prohibit shipments of rad materials to local users. The only thing they could do was require that "through" shipments of "hazardous materials" avoid the downtown area, and use the interstate bypass around town. As that did not add an undue burden to shippers, they let that one stand.
That was one of the issues that was raised both with the County Attorney and publicly at the first scheduled meeting of the Board. Clearly, it would not have stood a legal challenge but it would have used county taxpayer dollars to tie up transport in the courts. The process can be the punishment in the US legal system. Remember, anti-nuclear folk are happy to conduct economic warfare.
Boxer tried to push this through without adequate noticing too, announcing the proposed statute one week and hoping to vote on it the next. Fortunately, we rallied in time to block it.
The path of the tornado that "hit" Davis-Besse went between the cooling tower and containment so I wouldn't call that a demonstration, per se.
Also not sure of the force levels?
It was strong enough to take out the offsite power where the emergency diesels struggled on and off for the several hour duration of the outage---with both emergency backup power trains down just as offsite was restored. Even with the battery backup I would say this event was more in the category of "close call" or "near miss" than a demonstration of the robustness and resislence of safety systems.
More impressive are photos of the tornado that obliterated La Plata, MD (Catagory F4) taken by an anonymous worker from one of the decks of Calvert Cliffs as the funnel passes within a mile of the facility. If you havent seen them anybody that wants the jgps can respond with an email address and I am happy to send. Sorry Anon.
Given an F4 or F5 where the diameter of the funnel on the ground in some cases has been described as as much as a mile and more across, I hold out more hope for the bunkered-type dry cask storage systems than the individual upright casks as out on the open tarmac at North Anna.
How would you like to see one of those babies rolled into each other or pitched?
How would you like to see ... those babies rolled into each other or pitched?"
That would make a hell of a video... but I don't think there would be any resulting problem, given the level of resilience that is engineered into those casks and of course their sheer density, making them poor fliers in the first place.
Depite the lack of serious threat, I'm sure some terrorist organisation like NIRS would attempt to foment panic in the local population.
Does anyone monitor this blog for libelous statements?
Joffan, I respect your opinion but we both know that label is wrong and adds nothing to the debate.
Of course I only meant "an organization which advances its agenda through the cultivation of public fear based on misinformation". I should wait until someone actually gets killed in an unnecessary panic before I start handing out the ultimate label. The many thousands of avoidable coal-power deaths in the last twenty years are probably not sufficiently directly linked to warrant the description.
What's the scenario here? NIRS hands out a few anti-waste-cask pamphlets and everyone downtown runs screaming into traffic? Yeah, that'll happen.
The scenario is that an antinuke organization undertakes a long-term program of media indoctrination and fearmongering so that minor incidents produce public overreaction. I'm not talking about something they do on the day of a minor incident.
Incidentally, my comments are mine alone. My work is not in the nuclear or power generation industries.
OK, but I still don't see how people end up getting killed. Has there ever been a fatal panic reaction due to a minor nuclear incident? This scenario still assumes that most members of the general public are idiots, which is incredibly condescending.
"OH NO, a cask fell off a truck! Let's all drive really fast on the wrong side of the road, like NIRS told us!"
come on
This must be why nuclear advocates are having anti-nuke protesters dragged out of public meetings in Idaho in handcuffs for just sitting there. Now we know it's a public safety matter: Can't take any chances on mass traffic chaos due to anti-nuclear-incited confusion!
As for your supposedly sarcastic response, I could imagine that a cask being transported might be in a road accident; that the road would be closed while the cask was put on another truck; and that by chance someone arriving at the scene, when told of the problem would react by driving away and making rash decisions about overtaking on their hasty retreat. Their decisions on the relative risks of overtaking would be based on the exaggerations fed to them about the risks of the spent fuel.
I note that trend of misinformation extends to your description of one (singular, not plural) deliberately provocative activist being escorted under arrest, not dragged, from a meeting that, although open to the public, had rules of order that he persistently broke.
As for the arrested protester, I'm still not clear on how sitting and listening to a meeting is "disturbing the peace"