For 18 months, operators at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo didn’t realize that a system to pump water into one of their reactors during an emergency wasn’t working. It had been accidentally disabled by the plant’s own engineers, according to a report issued Thursday on the safety of nuclear reactors in the United States.
The report, from the Union of Concerned Scientists watchdog group, lists 14 recent “near misses” – instances in which serious problems at a plant required federal regulators to respond. The report criticizes both plant operators and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for allowing some known safety issues to fester. “The severe accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 occurred when a handful of known problems – aggravated by a few worker miscues – transformed fairly routine events into catastrophes,” the report notes. The problem at Diablo Canyon, which is owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., involved a series of valves that allow water to pour into one of the plant’s two reactors during emergencies, keeping the reactor from overheating.
The loss of water in a reactor can lead to at least a partial meltdown – a process believed to be under way at Japan’s stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant after last week’s earthquake and tsunami. Engineers at Diablo Canyon inadvertently created the problem while trying to solve another issue, according to the report. A pair of remotely operated valves in the emergency cooling system was taking too long to move from completely closed to completely open. So engineers shortened the distance between those two positions, according to the report.
Unfortunately, two other pairs of valves were interlocked with the first. They couldn’t open at all until the first pair opened all the way. No one noticed until the valves refused to open during a test in October 2009, 18 months after the engineers made the changes. “It was disabled, and they didn’t know it,” said Jane Swanson, spokeswoman for the Mothers for Peace anti-nuclear group, which frequently spars with federal regulators over Diablo Canyon. “That’s unforgivable, and it’s not that unusual.”
Well if no one will hire a an assistant for Homer Simpson, these things will continue to happen.
What we KNOW is that “to err is HUMAN” so ANY evaluation of Nuke Power has to include the consequences of meltdowns and leakage. so far, no matter how many “accidents” occur, our experts and leaders tell us it is safe. so, how many 50 mile diameter rings of uninhabitable earth are justified in our desire for cheap energy?
These melt downs don’t actually concern me that much–100′s of circles are manageable. Its the china syndrome that gets me wherein and entire water table system covering 1000′s of miles will be taken out poisoning fractions of continents.
Any who here says it won’t happen?
Just reported that Obama’s budget includes 54 Billion for Nuke. Don’t know what that means but how “affordable” would green energy be with that kind of welfare?
Big oil, Big Nuke, Big Coal==see any similarity? Yes, they are all BIG. BIG,BIG,BIG==Meaning large centralized capital that is not economically competitive without corporate welfare.
Green: decentralized==not so prime for corporate greed and political corruption. Thats the ONLY reason we aren’t energy self sufficient right now.
And the beat goes on.
#2. Happening already.
Tokyo water sample shows radioactive iodine: government
http://reuters.com/article/2011/03/19/us-japan-water-idUSTRE72I29J20110319
Good find McCullough: we don’t need a Radioactive Cloud overhead when it seeps below our feet.
Love the talking heads on tv and Obamagod/actual experts who talk with absolute surety about the safety of Nuke. How much credibility do these fools have?
None in my book. I can discuss/consider tradeoffs/risk with someone who is honest. Very few honest people when it comes to money.
completely related: watched the documentary on Harlan Country Coal Strikes of the 1970′s where the rich/government/police/church were united against the working man.
Nothing changes.
Near miss? So there indeed was a “hit”?
The idiot hysteria continues. See above.
Incapable of seeing the plain truth.
“Health problems linked to aging coal-fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year, including 2,800 from lung cancer”
Hummm… 24,000 lives a year…
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/ns/us_news-environment/
No, wait!! It’s 30,000 lives a year!
“Fine particle pollution from U.S. power plants cuts short the lives of over 30,000 people each year.”
http://ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm
So what about Nuclear? It MUST be MUCH worse! After all, Bobbo says so…
“A National Cancer Institute (NCI) survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, March 20, 1991, showed no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living in 107 U.S. counties containing or closely adjacent to 62 nuclear facilities”
http://cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/nuclear-facilities
“According to the Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, there were 35 fatalities associated with wind turbines in the United States from 1970 through 2010. Nuclear energy, by contrast, did not kill a single American in that time.”
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/lachlan-markay/2011/03/17/inconvenient-truth-wind-energy-has-killed-more-americans-nuclear#ixzz1H5CZVsOa
That can’t be right! Wind turbines more dangerous than Nuclear? Bobbo can’t be wrong!
And don’t give me that IDIOT argument about Chernobyl.
“In the International Chernobyl Project organised by the IAEA (IA91), field studies were undertaken in the latter half of 1990 on the permanent residents of the rural settlements with a surface caesium contamination of greater than 555 kBq/m2 … The medical examinations were quite comprehensive, and the general conclusions reached were that there were no health abnormalities which could be attributed to radiation exposure”
http://oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c05.html
But don’t let facts get in the ways of hysteria.
Bobbo and the like would rather kill the 30,000/year they do know than kill the … Noone … a year they don’t.
Reason why the US government is so involved in nuclear power generation: because they (we) are insuring the plants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
The industry says that there’s no way to get private insurance for a nuclear plant. Maybe because the designs are fatally flawed?
The Price-Anderson act puts the cost of insuring a nuclear plant the same, no matter the location, design, age, safety record, etc. If these things were taken into account I have a feeling a lot of plants would be shut down tomorrow.
Instead we have the NRC/DOE granting operating license extensions to plants that are way past their design lifetime because industry/Wall St. has no interest in putting any capital into new power generation (except for drop-in-the-bucket “green” tech).
Sort of reminds one of the budget in Washington: No one willing to cut anything that will make a dent, but everyone piles on earmarks, which are basically not even enough to be noticeable on a percentage basis.
Tokyo must use surface water. Aquifer water moves fairly slowly. Years to travel a mile.
Seems very early for contamination to be showing up at the tap. Unless there is a lot of it.
Ah Yea–nice spin. Now–what would the effect be of a China Syndrom into a water aquifer?
Ha, ha. Yes, Nuke is entirely “safe.” but come to think of it, weren’t those pilots who tombstoned chernobyl dead within a few weeks/months yet “Nuke has never killed anyone?” course that doesn’t count the 100′s killed in the mining operations or the 1000′s in the concentrated tail drainage.
Just how hostile to common sense are you Ay Hea? Tell us the skull and cross bones are just friendly mascots?
Stupid hoomans. another tidbit on Harlan County: “There is no connection between breathing coal dust and getting Black Lung Disease.” Swear to god, it was Oh Yeps grandfather!!!!
Ha, ha. Worse than a tool.
#6–Bubba Hope Yea==I guess WHO is just a progressive shill for Obama?
http://who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs303/en/index.html
Lots of death and sickness.
Skull and Crossbones==totally safe.
A lot of very, very old nuclear power plants are still being operated without suitable government scrutiny of safety and maintenance. The very worst that could happen now would be to put the military in charge of operating them. Then they become invisible.
#6. No matter how hard you try, you’re never gonna get a date with Annie the Tranny.
No one noticed until the valves refused to open during a test…
Why we run tests.
A good reason to not try to run Nuke plants on the cheap. BTW, the USN has a very long and {reasonably} good track record for running nuke power plants, since I’m Ex-USAF, I’m no lover of the Navy, nevertheless, give the devil his due.
Does this all mean that Humans should not design, build and operate Nuclear power plants because Humans are inherantly unreliable?
That goes for everything. You pay’s your money and you take your chances. I suppose we could just go back to the stone age, but I wouldn’t trust my neighbor with a stone axe. Personnaly I would rather have a Navy run nuke power plant than a PG&E plant.
in #8 WmDE said: Aquifer water moves fairly slowly. Years to travel a mile.
That’s true in lots of places, except Japan where hot springs (onsen) are everywhere.
Its like with Old Faithful in Wyoming.
Japan does not really have large aquifers like those under the ground in the US and Canada.
They should build nuke plants a half a mile or so under the cities where they are required.
That takes care of them:
• attracting unwanted attention, (nuclear terrorism,)
• incident response (you just have to take the elevator)
• running out of coolant (build holding tanks above the reactor
• radiation dispersal (none of that happened with the underground tests,)
• expropriation (there is none, no MIMBY here, no neighbors either)
• no size issues (you need a fuckin’ big hole, you dig a fuckin’ big hole. You need lots of fuckin’ big holes, you dig lots of fuckin; big holes, one per reactor. None of this 6 reactors in one spot crap, lots of neutron absorbing dirt between each of them.)
While discussing alternatives, take a look at
the true cost of Britain’s clean, green wind power experiment from dailymail.co.uk
http://bit.ly/hQs9H8
Bobbo, McCullough, and WmDE concerning aquifer vs surface water. From the Tokyo Waterworks website .pdf
I would say the source of “1.5 becquerals per kg of iodine 131, well below the tolerable limit for food and drink of 300 becquerals per kg” was almost certainly from airborne contamination, rather than the China Syndrome Bobbo referred to.
Here is some more of the article from SFGate, home of the San Francisco Chronicle:
In an emergency, Diablo Canyon operators still could have opened the valves manually.
They could also have used a separate system of pumps to inject water into the reactor, PG&E spokesman Kory Raftery said.