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Reuters | US nuclear plant leaks fuel health concerns
by Rattle at 2:05 am EST, Mar 5, 2006 |
Years of radioactive waste water spills from Illinois nuclear power plants have fueled suspicions the industry covers up safety problems and sparked debate about the risks from exposure to low-level radiation. The recent, belated disclosures of leaks of the fission byproduct tritium from Exelon Corp.'s Braidwood, Dresden, and Byron twin-reactor nuclear plants -- one as long ago as 1996 -- triggered worries among neighbors about whether it was safe to drink their water, or even stay. "How'd you like to live next to that plant and every time you turn on the tap to take a drink you have to think about whether it's safe?" asked Joe Cosgrove, the head of parks in Godley, Illinois, a town adjacent to Braidwood. "The president's plan is misguided. It presents health risks, creates additional nuclear waste that we have no long-term solution for, creates additional terrorist targets that we do not adequately defend, and costs an enormous amount of money. (Bush's) phrase 'clean, safe nuclear power' is oxymoronic," he said.
The problem isn't nuclear power plans. The problem is nuclear power plants built on 60's technology operating way past their design lifetimes. Every nuclear power plan currently in operation in the United States should be scrapped and rebuilt using modern technology. They would be safer, more efficient, and produce more output. We don't need to create new plants. We need to update the ones we have. The old reactor cores can be stored on site. Just incase them in plastic and concrete, or something that should last for a few hundred thousand years. Give it a nice external layer of granite so it looks pretty. Put a statute on top of whoever actually manages to make it happen. Have the statue holding an old school lantern in one hand and a bundle of electrical cable in the other. All these plants already have waste storage on site. In many cases the waste storage facilities have been the only thing these plants have changed over the years. They have been augmented to store more waste from inefficient plants that have been operating for too long. Plans like Yucca Mountain cannot be counted on. A distributed approach is necessary, and we already have it to a certain degree. Start with this plant, please. |
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RE: Reuters | US nuclear plant leaks fuel health concerns
by k at 9:47 am EST, Mar 6, 2006 |
Rattle wrote: "The president's plan is misguided. It presents health risks, creates additional nuclear waste that we have no long-term solution for, creates additional terrorist targets that we do not adequately defend, and costs an enormous amount of money. (Bush's) phrase 'clean, safe nuclear power' is oxymoronic," he said.
Perhaps, but a more precise statement may be "'clean, safe power' is oxymoronic. The fact is that no power tech is completely clean or safe. Some are better than others, certainly, and some have different time scales for safety and cleanliness, but we don't live in a perfect world, and, hint-hint, we need to find new ways to generate power. All these plants already have waste storage on site. In many cases the waste storage facilities have been the only thing these plants have changed over the years. They have been augmented to store more waste from inefficient plants that have been operating for too long. Plans like Yucca Mountain cannot be counted on. A distributed approach is necessary, and we already have it to a certain degree. Start with this plant, please.
I think the "long-term storage of waste" issue is a canard as well. I read an article not long ago (though I can't now recall where) that posited that in the absense of a truly verifiable long-term solution, we should use a short term solution. Such as the concrete caskets we already use. They're safe for about 100 years and the thought is that by the time 100 years has passed, we'll have that magic long-term solution. But to write off the entire nuclear realm because we haven't quite tackled that problem seems unnecessary. I'm not convinced that a distributed approach, as posited above, is correct. The aformentioned article argued that waste storage should be centralized, even if we use caskets. It allows us to have only a single facility to secure and reduces the scale of the monitoring process. I think the benefits outweigh the risks of such a centralization, though I haven't done a great deal of research certainly. Regardless, the list of viable alternative energy sources hasn't changed much in the past 30 years. Our energy usage has. It's time to sac up and do what's necessary. I'd love it if some research lab came out and said they'd found a way to create 90% efficient solar cells for cheap. But you can't rely on pure providence, so we're stuck making choices as to the balance of power generation technologies. |
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