30 Years Since Three Mile Island and Still Nobody Hurt
March 28th, 2009
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… Unless you count those who have died due to coal exhaust.
Yes, it’s been thirty years since the “Worst Nuclear Accident In US History.“ An accident which claimed the lives of zero people, sent zero to the hospital and destroyed zero homes. Approximately zero acres of land were contaminated and it took zero days before the area would be safe to return to. Since then, a total of zero cancerous tumors have been attributed to the incident and zero individuals have suffered from severe birth defects.
Yes, that’s right. Not a single causality. What happened at Three Mile Island thirty years ago was a combination of miss-communications and design faults that lead to a damaged reactor core and a big public relations debockle. What happened at TMI was a caused by a combination of bad communications, lack of proper training and several design flaws in the reactor setup.
It’s worth nothing that the reactor in question, Three Mile Island Unit-2 was one of the first reactors to be approved, constructed and operated entirely under the oversight of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Unit-1 at the site was built just a few years earlier, under the oversight of the Atomic Energy Commission. It was identical to Unit-2 except for a few minor details: It didn’t have the design flaws of Unit 2 and it cost about half as much to build. Unit-1 continues to operate safely to this day. Nice job, NRC, if ever there was any doubt of your uselessness and complete incompetence, Three Mile Island should have put an end to that.
Without going into the details of the incident, there were a number of things which caused the confusion by controllers at the site:
1. An indicator light for a pressure valve was controled by whether the valve was set to open or closed but not whether the valve was actually open or closed. During the accident, the valve had been set to close and thus the indicator showed it closed, but in reality a mechanical problem prevented the valve from closing in response to the setting.
2. There was no indicator of coolant levels in the primary reactor loop that could be read in the control room. There was a sensor for this on the reactor, but it was never connected. Instead, controllers had to infer the level from the pressure sensors in the reactor, but the pressure sensors were designed to function properly only when submerged, not when the water had dropped bellow their levels.
3. An overflow tank was in place to hold any extra coolant expelled from the mail coolant loop. The tank had a sensor which would tell control room operators when the tank was beginning to overflow, but there was no sensor to alert them when it was about to overflow or to indicate the level in the tank prior to overflow.
4. There were CCTV cameras in the reactor area, but none of them were pointed in the direction of the relevant equipment to show their status.
5. Control room personnel were not aware of some of these design issues. For example, they never knew that the pressure sensors were not reliable if not submerged and they didn’t know the indicator light for the pressure valve could not be relied on to show the actual status of the valve.
6. Had this happened years earlier, the operators would have called the AEC for help, but the AEC had been disbanded and the NRC is too incompetent to actually do anything useful… EVER.
Because of these issues, operators incorrectly believed that the reactor had ample cooling water when in fact, the core had been exposed and was receiving no direct cooling. Due to the open valve, coolant had escaped but the false returns from pressure sensors made operators believe that the system was actually overfilled. When coolant should have been added to the reactor, it was being discharged.
After the core was left like this for some time, the zirconium cladding on the fuel began to break down due to the decay heat. This caused damage to the core which was contained completely within the pressure vessel, completely within the reactor sump, completely within the containment dome. The reactor was damaged, some coolant was spilled into the containment dome and the plant ventilated the area, releasing some gaseous fission products in order to make the area safe to enter.
Had this been an aircraft, the equivalent wpul;d be having an engine flame out and making a successful emergency landing: Nobody was hurt or killed, but the equipment was damaged. Had this been an ocean going vessel, it would have been the equivalent of puncturing the hull, but having a the water tight bulkheads hold and getting back to port with nobody injured or killed but with nominal damage to the ship, requiring a few weeks in dry dock.
What Three Mile Island demonstrated is the safety of modern PWR reactors and power plants. Even despite the fact that the reactor core lacked cooling and was damaged, the vessel was designed to withstand far greater pressure and stress than is normally encountered. The vessel never even came close to a failure and if it had there were still two more degrees of separation from the outside, both built to withstand anything that a catastrophic failure could dish out.
But since this was a nuclear power plant…
Damn. I almost wish they could be this dramatic with all subjects…
On a semi-related note, the death toll is up to 60 in Indonesia and they’ve already said they will rebuild the dam that burst there two days ago. I guess that’s because it’s not “nuclear”…
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, History, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 28th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Your so right it’s painful. Oh how I wish we would build more nuclear plants and advance the technology even further.
Everything about nuclear energy makes sense and yet the people who fail to understand it (or are just owned by the coal industry) prevent us from using the best fuel source we currently have.
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March 28th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
WoodEngineer said:
It’s actually the natural gas interests that are behind the antinuclear elements in government these days. They are the big gainers when so called ‘green energy’ like wind turbines and solar arrays are deployed because these sources are intermittent and need the sort of fast response backup that only a gas generator can provide.
For example former German Chancellor Gerard Schroeder, who presided over the passing of legislation to shut down the German nuclear industry, is now a member of the supervisory board of Gazprom, the Russian natural gas conglomerate. Draw your own conclusions
The nuclear renaissance isn’t going to take place without a lot of criticism from opponents along the way, and the industry needs to be prepared to field and respond to it coherently, this has been sadly lacking and the mythology that has been permitted to grow around the Three-Mile Island incident is a prime example of failing to control of the story.
The industry should have been touting the fact that the system worked as planned. They should have been spinning it as a positive when ever they could, and they should have gone after the scaremongering press in the courts. This was the worst of many lost opportunities to show just how safe nuclear energy is and it was grossly mismanaged by the industry and sadly we are now left sandbagging public opinion about the event.
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March 29th, 2009 at 1:01 am
HA! I like the fender bender Time cover spoof, which honestly is not that far off the mark in terms of being blown out of proportion.
I’d like to see how they even justify calling it a “Nightmare,” because unless they just come out and lie, how can they say that it was that big a deal when there were no injuries or deaths?
I repeatedly have heard it called the “Three Mile Island Disaster” and I don’t get that either. When I hear the word Disiaster I usually think of something that causes either mass casualties or destroys a large area or otherwise causes widespread destruction and loss.
My other thought: We need to be prepared when and if this happens again. I’m not saying it will and I doubt the exact same thing will happen, but nuclear reactors are like any machine and they do have problems some times. I don’t think they’ll have any fatal problems, but if we wait long enough we may have another non-fatal, contained, internal failure. Some day a seal is going to blow or something and the containment system will hold it, but it might damage the core or release enough coolant to cause the cladding to break down. What do we do then? We can’t let it have the same kind of PR like this!
(I hope it doesn’t happen, but honestly, you can’t ever guarantee there won’t be even small non-fatal issues once in a while)
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March 29th, 2009 at 1:31 am
Good point. Any reactor can have a non-fatal event of some kind happen. Even, for example, the molten salt reactor, is supposed to be so safe because for one thing it has feeze plugs as one of the lines of defense that if it started overheating they’d melt and let the fuel salts out into cooling tanks. Well, consider this: If the freeze plugs ever melted and forced a shutdown, that in itself could be a PR disaster. What about the pebble bed? one safety feature is supposed to be that if a seal blows and depressurizes it then the convection of air around the outside is enough to cool it. Well, what if that did happen? That would be a huge PR problem, even if the system worked!
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March 29th, 2009 at 1:56 am
Worst nuclear disaster eh?
If only the worst coal disaster or worst hydro disaster or even the worst natural gas disaster had been so merciful.
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March 29th, 2009 at 7:19 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
The history of commercial aviation is instructive here as well.
In the early days, an accident would depress ticket sales for months afterward throughout the industry and the recovery was slow, then almost overnight this effect vanished. I remember clearly that it was after the first DC-10 crash that the flying public first seemed to take it in stride. The industry held its collective breath for a few days waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it just didn’t happen. Somehow people started to integrate airplane accidents into their general risk awareness, just as they had every other mode of high speed transportation.
The point here is that as long as there are no real disasters of the Chernobyl type, where there is a major loss of containment, AND the industry controls the spin on the story and doesn’t let it get out of hand as they did with TMI, the point will come where these will no longer freak the public out.
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March 29th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Gordon said:
Well said!
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March 29th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Check this out
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,511256,00.html
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March 29th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Well you say it wasnt so bad, but couldnt the disaster have been much worse?
Also what about the waste storage problem? Yucca mountain is now dead, so I dont see how that has been, nor will be, addressed. And even if you dont like renewables Obama’ bills, the stimulus, and budget bill, have at least 130 Billion in renewable investments and that, even if its a quarter of the expected effectiveness I question the need for investment, in nuclear as well.
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March 29th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Bruce said:
Not really no.
They MELTED THE FREAKING REACTOR CORE.
For a PWR, it doesn’t get any worse.
Bruce said:
I wouldn’t mind investing in “renewables” if they actually helped. but they don’t so anything invested in them is a complete waste.
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March 29th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Bruce said:
The reactor was operating at near full capacity when it shut down, so the decay heat was at its highest, when the reactor was shut down, lost much of its coolant and effectively sat there with an exposed core and no coolant circulation. That lead to the cladding breaking down and melting and fuel either melting or disintigrating.
It really doesn’t get much worse than that…
I mean maybe if somebody opened up the core, took out the fuel, ground it up and sprinkled it on ice cream and then convinced an orphanage to have all the kids eat it, then maybe..
Bruce said:
Obama tipped his hat to his Green allies and made an attempt to drive a stake in Yucca Mountain. It’s going to help him stop more nuclear plants for the next four years, but really it does nothing.
The waste is a non-issue. it doesn’t need addressing. You can store the waste on site in concrete casks, effectively forever. It just sits there. It doesn’t pose a danger to anyone, it doesn’t really cost much to keep there. It doesn’t take up all that much room and eventually it’ll probably end up being reprocessed anyway.
Bruce said:
“Renewable” energy systems do nothing for energy independence, energy security or fossil fuel reduction. NOTHING the complex answer is that they rarely reduce fossil fuel consumption and increase natural gas dependence, the simple answer is that by and large They do nothing
When we tried investing lots and lots of money in “Renewables” in the 1970’s they did nothing to help with national energy needs When we tried in the 1990s, they did NOTHING
Everywhere they have been tried they have done NOTHING Or they have done WORSE THAN NOTHING
Let me give some examples:
Spain, “The solar capital of the world” has installed two of the largest PV plants and has the largest solar thermal power plant in the world. they plan on building more. The CO2 emissions of Spain have gone up more than most Western European countries… that’s right… not down UP Spain is more dependent on imported electricity and imported natural gas than ever before.
Germany has spent more per capital than any other country on wind and solar. Germany is planning on building several gigawatts worth of coal burning power plants in the next ten years The consumption of fossil fuels has gone through the roof. Germany has begun to erase the Co2 reductions they experienced after reunification.
It doesn’t matter how much Obama or whoever invests. Nothing times anything is nothing. One billion dollars worth gives you nothing. 130 billion dollars gives you nothing * 130 = Nothing.
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March 29th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Bruce said:
The most glaring cost of big wind and big solar is the industrial development of rural and wild areas, which arguably degrades rather than improves our common environment. That is impossible to justify if the benefits claimed by the industry sales material are in fact an illusion, propped up by subsidies and artificial markets for “indulgence credits” that actually facilitate the flouting of emissions caps and renewable energy targets.
The fight against wind development from residents who live near planned projects has taken on a life beyond the usual NIMBY (not in my backyard) complaints. Wind opponents are now using broad arguments about wind reliability to bolster their other concerns over noise, bird safety, vibration and destruction of natural vistas.
In California environmental groups are at each others throats over solar farms which will utterly destroy fragile desert ecosystems.
I have a feeling that this massive run at wind and solar is going to be more political trouble than it is worth.
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March 30th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Bruce said:
So… You’re suggesting that these ‘renewables’ are going to be so effective that they’ll negate the need for any kind of other power? They’re going to result in shutting down all the coal power plants and there will be no place for nuclear because allllll our electricity will be provided by 100% wind and solar?
Keep dreaming!
There’s no “need for investment” in nuclear, if you don’t mind the concequences of coal. We can just keep building windmills (that do nothing) and burn coal too, but a lot of people will choke on the fumes and a lot of land will be torn to shreds. If that’s okay with you then that’s okay with you.
We don’t need the feds to invest in nuclear, BTW. Just make some descent reglatory laws and the utilities will line up for it. You know there are already about a dozen utilities in the US who want nuclear reactors, even despite the hundreds of millions of dolars and years of paperwork it takes. Imagine if it didn’t have so many problems like that! There aren’t even any huge subsidies like ‘renewables’
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March 30th, 2009 at 1:56 am
In a few European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark) and some other places (New Zealand) the respective governments have instituted enormous renewable energy programs years ago and have spent many billions on them. Most of the PR paints this as being a very rosy picture and some interest groups even point to these countries and say we need to be more like them because they are ahead of us in getting things done to solve climate change and energy needs.
Take a closer look, beyond the PR and there is not nearly what some have liked to say. The truth is that said countries have found their policies to be very expensive, even to the point of being crippling and threatening to bankrupt sectors of the government and at the same time they have little to show for it. German energy policy is a good example: It receives great praise but it has put the country into a shallow recession since it was instituted and lead to energy shortages and massive imports of natural gas and electricity and at the same time it has done nothing to lower emissions.
This is sadly typical and many countries with these kind of policies, of paying huge amounts for wind and solar projects have quietly suspended work on more of them. The constant backup of hot fired reserve negates much of the energy gained from these projects and their cost economically and directly is enormous. At the same time, policies for effeciency were sold as being able to make buisiness more competitive, but the reality is that they have forced draconian conservation methods which has impacted competitiveness badly.
We should not be fooled to step into this.
Thank you. I have seen this site has some of this information. It is very hard to find any sources who will make this public. It is more often downplayed or just ignored. It is very true and very important to take notice of.
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March 30th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Great article, next time an anti-nuclear chum cites three mile in a debate ill ask him/her what happened and see how badly they spin the “tragic” event
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March 30th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Bruce said:
Bruce,
You might want to ask these folks about further investments in wind energy:
http://www.batr.net/cohoctonwindwatch/
Watch out for the cursing and thrown bottles.
Wind energy carries a huge burden on the environment, is very expensive and for a power guy, is just too unreliable to be useful.
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March 31st, 2009 at 1:05 am
March 27 (Bloomberg) – “According to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid for every new position that depends on green energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear. The premiums paid for solar, biomass, wave and wind power – - which are charged to consumers in their bills — translated into a $774,000 (USD) cost for each Spanish “green job” created since 2000, said Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at the university and author of the report.
“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices,” he said in an interview.”
So much for the notion that green energy is a job creator.
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March 31st, 2009 at 2:11 am
(ok yes I am citing Wikipedia – so sue me, this basically matches the DOE report I read a while back, but I don’t have the link)
Actually 3 Mile Island was not “The Worst Reactor Accident in the US” the Sodium Reactor accident at SSFL just outside LA seems to now be rated higher. It was secret for a while, but it became public in the 1990s. How bad was it? Well I grew up about 8 miles away and never knew it happened, never was told it happened and never had any ill effects. My dad blames his prostrate problems on it, but he is 75 and was in the Army in the 1950s (lets talk exposure then…). Either way it does not keep me up at night…..now the knuckleheads burnign chemical waste in open pits does give the the willies. Who the heck did that in 1994 – I think even the Russians were more enlightened by then. Jail time clearly was needed.
Clearly the brain trust was not running the reactor either –
+++++++++++++ (clip)
The most infamous nuclear accident at SSFL occurred on July 13, 1959, when the SRE — a sodium-cooled nuclear reactor — experienced a power excursion. Power production from the reactor rapidly rose out of control. With significant effort, the reactor was shut down. Inexplicably, a few hours later it was restarted without the cause of the initial incident having been determined. The reactor continued to operate until July 26, 1959 with high radiation readings and other signs of problems. It was finally shut down at the end of the month.
After a full shut down was complete, the reactor operators discovered that a significant fraction of the nuclear fuel had suffered melting. Tetralin, a coolant used for the pump seals, had leaked into the sodium coolant of the reactor. Carbonaceous material formed, blocking the coolant channels and preventing the coolant from reaching the reactor core. This, in turn, caused the nuclear fuel rods to overheat and melt. Approximately one-third of the fuel melted.
Radioactive gases were released from the reactor into holding tanks and then bled into the atmosphere over a period of weeks. The extent of the radioactive releases remains uncertain to this date, but estimates put the amount from 260 to 459 times the amount of radiation that was released at the Three Mile Island facility. Some monitors went off scale; but few measurements of the sodium coolant were taken. Later, the few measurements that were taken proved to be contradictory. However, the ratios of volatile radionuclides found in the coolant suggested significant releases of radioactivity into the environment may have occurred.
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March 31st, 2009 at 2:53 am
Chris said:
Actually, that event crossed my mind when I heard of this one being called the worst nuclear accident, but still that seems to be the one that stuck to TMI. It was the worst civilian power reactor incident, so perhaps that’s why?
The SSFL incident involved a highly experimental (and by modern standards very primitive) reactor which was not an actual power reactor – it was a research reactor and it was not a private commercial operation – it was a government research contract with military implications.
if you want what I consider the worst reactor accident in American history, it would be SL-1, also a minitary research reactor, although it was intended to be an early prototype for a production reactor for low power production needs. That was the only one that actually killed anyone (unless you consider a critical accident to be a reactor accident.. which it kinda is for a period of a fraction of a second).
SL-1 killed three operators, at least one was killed by being impaled by the control rods which were manually operated (as in you actually pulled on them). Apparently one got stuck and the three guys all tried to yank it out.. which they did… only a bit too far…
Chris said:
Yeah, but I don’t really know that the incident was necessarily *that* bad either, because you have to consider that most of the gaseous fission byproducts are inert in nature, like xenon isotopes and such and those would not really be that much of a hazard since they don’t accumulate or anything – they disperse pretty well. Also although iodine can be in a gaseous state, it was short lived enough to mostly have decayed in the tanks.
The fact that meters were pegging shortly after may be primarily from some of the very short lived fission products that would be all but gone by the time they got anywhere. A lot of that stuff will decay away rapidly before it reaches many and if not, it will probably disperse. The facility was up in the hills – it wasn’t as if it were downtown to begin with.
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March 31st, 2009 at 8:43 am
drbuzz0 said:
It also is an utterly meaningless statement unless one has some idea what the full-scale defection value was on those instruments.
Lines like that are straight out of the antinuke handbook on how to use half-truths to make things sound worse than they are. As are loaded statements like:“…the ratios of volatile radionuclides found in the coolant suggested significant releases of radioactivity into the environment may have occurred.”
The fact remains that there was an unplanned event that was brought under control. Full Stop.
Less radioactive substances were released than a coal burning plant does in any given 24h period. Full Stop.
It’s all in the way it’s reported.
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March 31st, 2009 at 9:52 am
drbuzz0 said:
++++++++++++++++++
I agree. I read about SL-1 not too long ago – it did lead to improvements in design (limits on the speed a control rods can be moved). What struck me was the skill of the responding health professionals – they limited cumulative exposure time of the responders to ensure nobody else got impacted. As far as I could tell non of the responders had health effects (even 40 years later). Pin a medal on those guys.
SSFL was test reactor, but it did generate electricity and sell some power initally. The logic of turning it on after the “power excursion” and running for 15 more days without finding out what happened escapes me – Wikipedia has pictures of the melted rods.
After I posted last night I found the DOE report on radiation in the SSFL area – it was done using overflights in 1978 (very poor sampling method IMHO). They did claim a 14x increase above background at the sodium reactor – no gamma increases were detected. While perhaps initally scary background is so low that a 14x increase is not that much. There was something along the lines of 15 nuke projects at the lab – some very poorly designed.
Coal plant would put out much more rads – plus the PM, SO2 and HG emmissions. Greater health effects….of course not much Coal use in So Cal. Most power in Ca is NG or hydro. NG is much cleaner than coal (no rads or HG), but it still has issues with NOx. Overall I would rather have a well run nuke.
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March 31st, 2009 at 8:24 pm
This expert testimony explores at length the conundrum of how iodine, if it volatilized from overheated fuel in the SRE (and this in itself would have been very odd, because metallic uranium strongly binds iodine), could get anywhere other than the bottom of the sodium.
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March 31st, 2009 at 9:31 pm
G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert said:
Good link, he basically flayed the other guy alive, and stretched his skin out to dry in the sun. The fun starts on page 56 of the document (66 of the PDF) ‘Conclusions’
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April 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Nothing?? That doesn’t make sense, are you saying these don’t produce any power at all? I mean I know, you guys think the variability of wind and solar make them hard to harness, but are you arguing they don’t on average produce energy. If you have enough of them, that has to be some reliable supply. I mean, that’s a pretty big claim, that it has no results, I haven’t seen any proof of that!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/23/AR2009032301350.html
Also, the total, is closer to ,b>210 Billion for Obama’s subsidies to renewable energy. That’s got to be enough to get some good results. Also, I don’t think these comparisons with spain make sense, because their economy has been grown a lot, so of course they get higher CO2 output.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Spain
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April 2nd, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Bruce said:
They produce power, although almost always less than what they are rated for, but the real issue is something called ’spinning reserve’ . This is the electrical generation that must be on hand to absorb the fluctuation in output that wind and solar suffer from, and to guarantee that a certain amount of power will be available for dispatch when the grid calls for it.
To accomplish this all of these renewable plants must have a reliable generator running in parallel, and in most cases these are the fossil-fuel plants that they were supposed to replace. As a consiquence there has been in places like Germany, (which burns a lot of coal) no net reduction in CO2 production as the coal burning plants must be kept at hot idle, or natural gas generators need to be used to deal with the intermittent flow from the renewable sources.
This is the unfortunate truth of the mater, and the proof comes from analyzing posted numbers from industry and government sources that show no net benefit from renewable energy. Unfortunately, physics bats last.
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April 2nd, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Bruce said:
They produce some power, but saying that they produce “no useful power” or “no net power gain” is for all intents and purposes factually accurate. Within the context of the variability, the needs of the power grid and factoring in the costs in terms of money that could be spent elsewhere, economic impacts leading to less money to be spent on other projects, their construction materials, the need to maintain them etc etc their net power production is approximately zero – or in some circumstances, less than zero.
If you want to be technical about it, a perfectly accurate way of saying it might be to say “their impact is often negative and when positive it is negligible”
By negligible I mean so tiny it’s not even worth considering. It’s like the difference in fuel economy you get in your car after buffing the hood with some wax. In theory there should be small decrease in the friction of air molecules against the surface if it is smoother. But will you ever see a noticable difference? No, of course not. In fact, the change is so tiny that you might even lose a tiny amount of fuel effeciency if the wax adds a few grams of weight to the car or ever so slightly reduces the cooling effeciency of the engine.
I might point out that button cell batteries like the one in a wristwatch also produce power, but nobody is saying those should be hooked to the power grid in mass because they’re so tiny you’d never notice even the slightest effect.
Of course button cell batteries are good at powering things like handheld calculators… which is also something solar energy is good at. Both have their place, but they’re equally useless as a foundation of energy policy.
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April 2nd, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Hi, I tried to sent an e-mail to your web address, but I’m receiving DNS errors. I understand it’s not a proper use of comments, but I’d like to ask you a couple things about this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FotHJvRClPc
It’s an italian TV show, talking about a French Nuclear Power Plant.
1. They say, at the minute 4.10, that the Plant release in the air radioactive gases, such as “Tritium” and “C14″. I find hard to understand what they mean exactly. Do you have a clue?
2. At minute 4.43 they show a kind of Geiger counter. It appears that the natural background is 50 (50 what?) and, near the power plant, rises up to 200-250. So they argue that it’s dangerous.
I find hard to understant exactly what they mean. I’m a chemist, but I have no particular expertise in nuclear field. Anyway I’m pissed off by this show: I suspect they’re manipulating facts, but I lack the knowledge to prove this. May you help me, please?
Thank you
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April 2nd, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Bruce said:
Bruce,
No amount of money can change the laws of physics. That money spent will do nothing to resolve energy issues and in fact will just make them worse. I once read a report of how a small wind farm nearly took the entire European grid down all the way from Antwerp where the problems started due to a scheduled shutdown of a trunk line and the misbehaving wind farm to Moscow and Bosnia. Look, electricity grids are like water systems with no reservoirs. Everything that flows in has to flow out. Demand has to be met with supply. I’ve visited the CL&P headquarters where they maintain the grid for New England and it’s a delicate balancing act meeting demand with supply. That’s why power companies want reliability over anything else. This is the renewable’s Achilles heel. 210 Billion, a trillion or all the money in the world will not make the wind blow at a steady constant rate and make the sky cloudless and sunny. Until that happens the renewables will be a pipe dream. That money would far better be returned to us the taxpayers to spend or save in our own best interest. That would free up the freedom to innovate that has solved our problems in the past. Big government just flushes the money down the toilet.
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April 2nd, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Now I have to call you on that last post…
Their are some REALLY smart and cheap “renewable” things that can be done – but the current plans to too wind and solar focused.
Solar heating is MUCH more effecent then solar electric and it directly offsets combustion which is very ineffeicent at a individual home level. If you can raise the temp of a house by even 10 degress have you greatly reduced the energy demand.
Solar hot water is also a no-brainer. Even if you cant get 105 degree water from the sun you might raise the temp from 50 to 80 degrees which is a HUGE energy input.
Solar panels on roofs will not save the planet – not now and not ever. It is a hippy pipedream.
Solar concentration to run a boiler does displace natural gas use now in parts of the Southwest and thier is room for more – but it is not worth doing north of Las Vegas (too little sun in the winter).
Tidal energy might have a future of some sort.
I live a few miles from the largest geothermal field in the US and I can tell you they make a lot of electrons up there.
Like anything you have to pic the techologies that WORK and dump the ones that don’t. Solar electric is a looser big time – it does not pencil out.
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April 2nd, 2009 at 8:52 pm
tfrab said:
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. The nucleus of tritium contains one proton and two neutrons, compared to normal hydrogen which has only one proton. It is a by-product of nuclear fission in most reactors. Although much is made of its release in antinuclear circles. the truth is that if it is vented to the outside atmosphere it nominally rises to altitudes outside of the biosphere very swiftly.
C14 would be the isotope carbon 14 if it was released as a gas then it would have to have been in the form of CO2, but how this relates to this situation is unclear. My Italian is limited to the ability to order food and drink.
As for the Geiger counter readings 200-250 CPM is well within the boundary for natural radiation depending on where you are and it varies considerably over time as can be seen here
http://www.digistar.com/boston/
This video isn’t saying anything of value.
Chris Brown said:
While you are right to some extent – and we have talked about solar hot water and such in the past – collectively these are a drop in the bucket in terms of the amount of electric energy needed to run our civilization, In the end it’s all a mater of numbers, and none of these, even the better ones can carry us forward. Ultimately when megawatts are needed they have to come from sources that can produce them and to do so with technology like solar-thermal, wave/tide and geothermal one has to build huge plants on the scale of that other successful renewable hydro, and this is not good for the local environment at all.
One of the real benefits of nuclear reactors is that they have a very small footprint for the amount of power they can produce.
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April 2nd, 2009 at 9:08 pm
tfrab said:
I switched the server recently to accommodate some additional CGI and bandwidth. Whenever this happens there’s a period of time when the DNS needs to be updated. Ideally it should update the major DNS servers in a couple of hours and be complete to all DNS systems in a day.
That might be what happened so you can try again.
tfrab said:
I don’t speak a word of Italian so I’ll go on what you tell me…
tfrab said:
Yes, tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen and C-14 is carbon 14. Both might be produced in very minute amounts in a nuclear power plant but would be hardly detectable in the plant and not detectable outside the plant in almost any circumstance.
Carbon-14 is a natural radioisotope which is produced when a nitrogen atom is struck by a neutron. Most of the the carbon-14 in the world is produced by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. It’s found in all organic materials and is what is used for radiocarbon dating. A reactor would not generate any carbon-14 worth mentioning unless it were using nitrogen in the core. This is occasionally found in some reactors. The first generation of CANDU reactors had a nitrogen gas system and some pebblebed reactors (like the Addam’s Atomic Engine) propose using nitrogen. But in a standard reactor, there’d be no C-14 to really speak of.
In reactors that do have a system that might produce C-14 there’s almost always a trap to collect it and stop it from staying in the gas system and possibly leaking out. But the PWR’s used in France shouldn’t have this issue at all.
Still, I’m sure there is plenty of carbon-14 in the area if you take anything to a laboratory and test for it. Like I said it’s everywhere and found in all organic materials.
Now as for the tritium – tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is usually produced by bombarding lithium-6 with neutrons. This is how it’s made when it’s being made intentionally for luminious dial watches, isotopic labeling of drugs and all the other uses of tritium.
However, tritium is also occasionally produced by the interaction of a neutron with a deuterium atom. Deuterium is hydrogen-2. The neutron cross section of a deuterium atom is very very small. So when a neutron strikes deuterium, it will almost never bind to it. Only once in a blue moon does it actually attach and become tritium.
A light water reactor uses water that is less than one half of one percent deuterium. So combine that with the low cross section and the tritium content is absolutely minuscule. You could drink the coolant water and you wouldn’t have to worry about tritium poisoning.
Heavy water reactors like CANDU reactors do create some tritium because their coolant has a lot of deuterium in it. But even in a CANDU reactor, the amount is relatively small and most of them have a system to continuously remove it from the coolant.
But in any case, neither would be present in any but the most minuscule amounts from the reactor and even if so, they wouldn’t be released in any significant amounts.
tfrab said:
That number could be any number of things: REM’s, Roentgens, RAD’s, Seirvett’s, Barquettes, MicroRoentgens, MilliRoentgens, Millirem or some other dose unit per hour. Normally dosimetry is measured in a per hour interval.
But… as I look at the device, it looks to me like it might actually be measuring none of the above but rather counts as in counts per second or counts per minute
That basically means the number of times the detector detects a photon or a particle per a given unit of time. It’s the pulse rate of the detector. But the thing about this is that it is meaningless except for comparison to the same detector unit. It all depends on the sensitivity of the detector.
For example, I could have a simple side-window Geiger counter probe and measure 20 counts per minute in a given area. Then if I switch the probe to a more sensitive pancake-style probe, I measure 300 counts per minute. Then if I switch again to a big scintillation detector I measure 4000 counts per minute. It’s simply that the detector is more sensitive.
So it only matters in reference to the detector in question. So I have no idea what it means other than it is implying that the area around the plant is 4-5 times greater in radioactivity, in terms of counts, than the area around it. This is not entirely unusual simply due to background changes, if you take a geiger counter around an area, you’ll find hot spots when you get near certain rock formations and then low readings in other areas.
But there’s another thing to consider: Time constant. Most Geiger counters have a time constant setting to them. The time constant represents the time sample for a given rate reading. The time constant can matter a lot, especially if you’re only showing quick shots of the counter.
Remember: Counts are basically random. They’re not entirely constant. So if you have a given sample being read it won’t click continuously. It’ll sometimes get a burst of three or four clicks in rapid succession and then be quiet for a bit and then get a couple more.
The reading means number of pulses/time – but it’s an average. If you set the time constant really fast then the meter jumps all over the place. That’s because it’s dividing the pulse number by very small amounts of time. So it will go from zero to 1000 cpm and back again with each pulse. It looks to me like they have a relatively short time constant on there, so you’d expect some dramatic fluxuations in the reading. One second it’ll read 200 and the next 20 and then next 300 and the next second 0. It’s fine if you average them all out.
But notice something: They only cut into the shot of the meeter face very briefly. Suspicious???
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January 13th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
are you ****ing people nuts have you ever read stories about people that have cancer from tmi and animals born with birth defects,**** nuclear,it will destroy the world one way or another,only takes one mistake,natural gas is the way to go
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January 13th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
eugene laylon said:
Nice try, Eugene, but everyone knows it was you. Your mom told you not to eat … what you ate … but would you listen? Na-O-O-oh!
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January 13th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
eugene laylon said:
I don’t live near TMI and yet I know people who have cancer and some who have died of it. Go figure. If you look around TMI, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of people with horrible painful stories of their struggle against cancer, because if you look around ANYWHERE you’ll find plenty of people with horrible painful stories of their struggle against cancer.
My great grandfather died of cancer years before the first nuclear reactor ever went critical.
There are birth defects in animals (and humans) everywhere and always have been. Some are genetic and a few of those might be mutation-related, but many are due to things like folic acid deficiency.
Do you realize that there are literally hundreds of thousands of human births each year that suffer from some form of cleft lip and/or pallet? There always have been, although there are less now than ever before. One in a couple thousand births has hydrocephalus – again, always has been that way.
Of course, it’s even more common in animals which breed faster and don’t get the same degree of prenatal care. There have been conjoined twin calves, two-headed sheep, goats with two feet on each leg and so on and they have been reported for hundreds, if not thousands of years!
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