Japanese Nuclear Researcher Cautions Westchester on Indian Point

The TRUTH has it right. Great reference by the way.

Yes, people make mistakes and machinery eventually fails, but there are safety procedures in place to mitigate both. Every critical system has a backup. Critical backups have their own backups as well.

And, Yes, the surrounding area will be affected should a disaster occur. But that will be the case no matter what the disaster is. What is Irwin Redlener trying to say, that in the case of a war, major earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or other event, that it would somehow not be the end of normalcy for hundreds of thousands? Honestly, should the unthinkable happen, as long as my family is safe, I'll worry about the rest later. He does have a point, that the area's evacuation plan is severely lacking. Hell, just getting home during that freakish snowstorm before Halloween took me two hours, and that was just to go 20 miles. Imagine a full-scale evacuation? This is not just a nuclear concern, it is a concern for everything from natural disaster (see the Hurricane Katrina evacuation) to terrorism (see 9/11). Our area is too dense and the roadways are so poorly designed/maintained, that full-scale evacuation in a timely manner is impossible.

As for Fukushima, something as simple as retrofitting the generators so that the flooding (not the tsunami) would not have knocked them off line would have eliminated the radiation damage outside of containment completely.

The damage occurred because without operating backup generators, there was no way to keep the reactor cool. Neither the earthquake, nor the tsunami did any critical damage to the reactor in containment, it was the lack of cooling, or rather, more specifically, the lack of electricity to power the pumps that provide cold water that caused the disaster. Then, their disaster recovery plan was to utilize offsite power, but, obviously, the damage was significant enough that off-site power transmission was unavailable. Finally, they decided to bring in generators, and that would have worked, but they could not find a way to deliver the power to the facility (there were a number of issues that seem obvious now, but at the time was likely not a consideration).

Ultimately, without water to cool the reactor, the water in the system turned into steam, increasing pressure until the inevitable happened. The major explosions that everyone saw is from steam separating into hydrogen (an explosive gas) and oxygen (another explosive gas) and the normal reactor processes also producing hydrogen with no means to vent it out. In a high pressure, highly volatile environment with explosive gasses, an explosion was bound to occur.

At this point, the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is well-aware of the shortcomings that were the contributors in Japan, and has (and still is) performing safety inspections of all nuclear power plants.

Frankly, the thoughts that a 7.0+ magnitude earthquake AND a 35+ foot tsunami occurring at Indian Point is absurd, but I do know that the site was designed to withstand a 6.1 earthquake. Nuclear reactors in California are designed to handle much larger earthquakes because they are in an active seismic zone. Since Fukushima, most facilities are upgrading their safety procedures and equipment, including updating backup generators to be more "flood resistant", meaning that these generators are being encased in a building, or flood walls are being built around them.

Honestly, the unexpected always happens, but nuclear energy has, by a huge margin, the safest operating parameters of any energy producing mechanism. This includes Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Before Fukushima, more people died during the construction of the Hoover Dam, than died from radiation poising in the entire history of nuclear power.

Nuclear power simply has the highest energy density of any generating method. There is no other technology available that can produce as much electricity in as small a footprint. An equivalent energy generating capacity from a solar or wind farm would require tens of thousands of acres. Both solar and wind operate at such a low efficiency that even in ideal conditions (i.e. sunny days with no cloud cover) a farm in place of Indian Point would produce just a few percent of what is being generated there currently. Then we have to factor in acquisition cost, maintenance cost and other overhead and we will find that it would cost us (the consumer) 5x-10x as much for electricity.

Keep in mind that nuclear energy, at it's inception was designed to be "too cheap to meter." Eventually, the states and federal government found a rich source of tax revenue and the operating price has just about reached parity with coal and gas power plants - with most of the costs being driven by state mandates, taxes, surcharges, levies, and other bureaucratic money grabbing. Each plant also has to maintain a decommissioning fund, which is supposed to completely defray the costs of closing down and remediating the surrounding environment.

I would be curious to see what the anti-nukes alternative proposals would be. Usually they tout "green" energy sources, but they often have no idea what the associated costs would be. Then, when I tell them about efficiency, operating costs, generating capacity, their faces usually glaze over and they say that it can all be subsidized by the government. I usually respond with, "So you want higher energy costs AND higher taxes?"

• Login or register to post comments