Reply #17: I've "tracked" the nuclear waste in my state

[greenman3610]

to the beach on Lake Michigan, where it's steadily
being produced, and stored, at 2 large reactors along the
coast.
This certainly makes for good work for the hired
security staff, (Blackwater, so I hear), but
does not give me confidence in the long
term safety of the storage plan.
I believe this problem can be solved, because
it MUST be solved, for national security reasons
if nothing else, but I fear we will wait till
a tragic incident occurs to act.

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If you learned that the man in this photo -- a professional assassin -- was the head of security at one of our nation’s most vulnerable nuclear facilities, would it trouble you? Or would it sound like one hell of a story?


The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, Michigan, is real. It produces 778 megawatts of electricity, and the electricity keeps the lights burning for about half a million residents. The nuclear reactor inside the nuclear plant is also real. It gets really hot, and anyone driving on Interstate 196 on his way to Grand Rapids or St. Joe can see thin clouds of steam rising from its cooling towers, as constant a presence as the weather. The steam is real; it’s water from Lake Michigan, pumped in to keep the reactor cool. The nuclear power plant is on the shore of Lake Michigan, right next to the tourist town of South Haven and about eighty miles from Chicago as the crow flies. Lake Michigan is real, definitely, though it comes off as an illusory ocean, offering the horizon as its only boundary. South Haven is real, too, although it empties out in the cold of winter. And Chicago? As real as the millions of people who live there, and the strange American fervor they generate. Chicago is so damned real, and so damned American, that it’s hard to imagine an American reality without it -- it’s hard to imagine an American reality if, say, a terrorist attack on Palisades Nuclear contaminated the big lake for the next thousand years or so and emptied out Chicago, not to mention St. Joe and South Haven and Covert.

http://www.esquire.com/features/mercenary0607