Concerns Rise Over Vulnerability of U.S. Atomic Facilities to Earthquakes

[jpak]

http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0718-14.htm

MARYLAND — JULY 18— The extensive damage at a seven-reactor nuclear power plant in Japan after an earthquake this week is stoking concern that U.S. reactors and other nuclear facilities may also be vulnerable to releases of deadly radioactivity into the environment due to earthquakes.

Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa atomic power plant, the largest in the world in terms of electricity output, suffered 50 cases of “malfunctioning and trouble” after a 6.7 tremor struck nearby two days ago. Radioactively contaminated water, now calculated at more than 600 gallons, leaked into the Pacific Ocean and an estimated 400 barrels containing radioactive waste tipped over, with 10% of the lids falling off. Hazardous radioactive isotopes, cobalt-60 and chromium-51, were emitted into the atmosphere from an exhaust stack.

Concerns that a similar event could happen here are confirmed by an incident in August 2004, when an earthquake in Illinois broke an underground pipe attached to one of the Dresden nuclear power plant’s radioactive waste condensate storage tanks. The broken pipe was leaking tritium (a harmful, radioactive form of hydrogen) into groundwater, creating an expanding underground plume of hazardous radioactive contamination.

Several U.S. atomic reactors may be especially vulnerable to earthquakes. The twin reactor Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo, California was already built before it was discovered that an earthquake fault line associated with the infamous San Andreas Fault lay just offshore in the Pacific Ocean.

<much more>

[phantom power]

1. I must admit, the fear-mongering fallout from this earthquake exceeded my wildest expectations.

It's as if the clock got turned back 30 years, and we're all watching silkwood again.

[jpak]

2. The nuclear industry counted on time to dissipate the memories of TMI and Chernobyl

Unfortunately for nuclear advocates, safety IS a REAL issue with nuclear power plants.

and always will be...

[phantom power]

3. I think time was beginning to provide some perspective.

With a few decades of hindsight, it's possible to stand back and observe that TMI, Chernobyl, etc, were industrial accidents. Like industrial accidents of any kind, they involved potential danger to people (and wildlife) in their vicinity. In the case of Chernobyl, that danger played out as actual loss of life.

I think the distance of time has shown that these accidents were not out of proportion to any other variety of industrial accident.

As I mentioned to somebody else the other day, there is an unspoken "conventional wisdom" that leaks of radioactive materials somehow embody a risk to life and health that is outside the realm of the risks posed by other industries. What we've seen through experience is that it isn't true.

All these dreadful headlines are right out the Lovecraft theory of energy reporting. Just throw that word "radiation" out there, and let it hang, Lovecraftian-wise. Let the reader imagine their own private horrors. It's one of the most effective horror techniques. Because in the end, who can scare us more than our own imaginations?

If the press wanted to provide an actual public service, they would get a toxicologist to provide a probability distribution that expresses the actual likelihoods of various health consequences of the leaked materials from those reactors. But they don't. They just say "radioactive materials were leaked." Lovecraft would be proud.

[jpak]

5. I beg to differ. TMI was a billion dollar (plus) accident - hardly typical and way out of proportion

to other "run-of-the-mill" industrial accidents.

and Chernobyl apologists have been hard at work to denigrate the seriousness of that accident...

"It's a wildlife sanctuary!"

"Only a few thousand kids had thyroid problems!!!"

blah blah blah

Chernobyl killed dozens, sickened thousands, spread radionuclides over much of Europe and rendered a large area around the plant uninhabitable.

It was *not* a "run-of-the-mill" industrial accident.

It was a world class industrial disaster.

...and it takes an event like the one (still) unfolding in Japan to snap folks out of their self-conceits about the "safety" of nuclear power...

[phantom power]

7. They were large, but not larger than other industrial accidents.

Just one off the top of my head: The Exxon Valdez oil spill cost $2 billion to clean up, and damaged an enormous swath of wildlife. I don't know off the top of my head how to compare the impact of Chernobyl with that of Valdez, but just an unscientific reading of the two incidents leaves me thinking that the total externalized cost of Valdez was greater.

BTW, here's a convenient write-up on Valdez:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

The point is, that accidents relating to the nuclear power industry follow a distribution like those of any other industry: some are large, most are inconsequential. And, as has been posted in E/E over and over and over again, the actual stats show that in fact the overall impact turns out lower than other alternatives.

But those facts are never ever reflected in reporting about the nuclear industry. Every accident, no matter how small, makes the news. Usually with big, Lovecraftian-style headlines. Small accidents relating to other industries are (appropriately) ignored by the news.

These Japanese reactors are, to the extend I can tell, middle-of-the-road. The main impact is loss of a major power source. Impacts from radioactive materials seem unlikely to be consequential. Again, nobody has bothered to address that question with any data, so I might in theory be proven wrong. I highly doubt it.

[jpak]

9. Just to refresh your memory....

Chernobyl's legacy still undecided

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4923220.stm

In April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, spewing radioactive material across many parts of Europe.

Yet two decades after the world's worst nuclear accident, there is still no consensus on the full impact of the disaster.

Last week, a report by Greenpeace concluded that the impact on human health had been grossly underestimated.

It challenged UN figures that said up to 9,000 people would die from Chernobyl-related cancers. The environmental group's own research concluded that the death toll would be nearer 100,000.

<more>

Cutting The Cost Of Fall-Out From Chernobyl 15 Years After The World's Worst Nuclear Accident

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/011026075752.htm

Chernobyl has made a chilling contribution to medical history, accounting for the largest group of human cancers associated with a known cause on a known date, ECCO 11 - the European Cancer Conference heard in Lisbon today. (Tuesday 23 October)

Nearly 2000 cases of thyroid cancer have been linked to the world's worst nuclear accident which occurred in Ukrainian city 15 years ago - and the number is still rising.

Professor Dillwyn Williams, of The Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge University, told the meeting: "Four years after the accident, an excess of thyroid cancers was noted among children who had been exposed to fall-out from the disaster. That increase has continued and new cases are still being seen in those who were children at the time of the accident".

Dr. Elaine Ron, of the US National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, explained: "Following external radiation exposure, the elevated risk of thyroid cancer appears to continue throughout life, but there is some indication that the risk may be highest 15 to 19 years after exposure.

<more>

Belarus put the costs associated with Chernobyl to be >$235 billion...and has already spent $13 billion...

http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/5-social-economic-impacts.htm#1p0

The effects of the Exxan Valdez spill were localized to Prince William Sound. The area affected by fallout from Chernobyl was continental in scale...

http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php?navID=2#

<snip>

International estimates suggest that a total of between 125 000 and 146 000 km2 in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are contaminated with caesium-137 at levels exceeding 1 curie (Ci) or 3.7 x 1010 becquerel (Bq) per square kilometre (5.1).

<snip>

There is no valid comparison between the Exxon Valdez spill and the Chernobyl Disaster...

[Dead_Parrot]

10. And to refresh yours...

The World Health Organization reports that 3 million people now die each year from the effects of air pollution. This is three times the 1 million who die each year in automobile accidents. A study published in The Lancet in 2000 concluded that air pollution in France, Austria, and Switzerland is responsible for more than 40,000 deaths annually in those three countries.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update17.htm

The European Union could save up to 161 billion euros a year by reducing deaths caused by air pollution, the World Health Organization has said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4444191.stm

This is what you do when you sit around in your grid-connected house, burning gas to run your PC. this is what you do when you drive out to you cabin to watch your solar-powered TV. This is what billions of people - including myself - do every fucking day, because these aren't one-off events, this is normal.

Since the Chūetsu earthquake happened, 32,153 people have died from fossil fuel use, and you've spent the whole time running around with a hard-on over the the equivalent of 25 smoke alarms.

You really need to sort your priorities out.

[jpak]

11. Your panties are in a bunch my pommy friend

I consume <5 gallons of gasoline a month and my electric bill this month was 18 cents (American).

My priorities are just where they should be...

[Dead_Parrot]

12. You missed the entire fucking point, didn't you?

No surprises there, then.

[jpak]

13. Yes, the entire fucking point

ayuh

[Dead_Parrot]

15. It's like talking to a piece of cheese

Another 121 corpses since I posted #10.

Hello? Anyone home? Any ounce of humanity lurking in there?

Guess not.

[Dogmudgeon]

16. When will they clean up the pollutants from fossil fuels?

Never.

Fossil fuels all contain radionuclides.

No they don't! Stop saying that!

How about mercury and cadmium from fossil fuels and photovoltaic semiconductor manufacture?

No radiation, no concern.

But one micro-Curie out of place in a commercial reactor, and the Four Horsemen have arrived.

Now you claim that there is something wicked and deathly "unfolding" in Japan. And you are not the first to choose that term -- it is the magic Gingrichian word of the week. I suppose it appeared in an "Activist Alert" of some kind, dispatched by e-mail and fax about 20 minutes after the earthquake struck, probably before news came out.

Most of the anti-nuclearists are gloating, hoping for more bad news, to vindicate their side in an on-line argument. Plenty on DU, too. As soon as the news came down, they went nuts over it -- "We won! We won!"

A thousand low-mortality cancers are certainly tragic. Ten thousand, even 50,000 over an 80-year period in a cohort of 50 million is also tragic, especially for a single accident that was caused by a criminal level of negligence. In the context of 150 years of fossil fuel burning and accelerated global warming, the millions who have already died prematurely and the billions who are at risk and who do not count, breathless dispatches from Greenpeace and NIRS about "unfolding" reactor damage seem just a little hollow.

Chernobyl is actively used by anti-nuclear moral entrepreneurs to raise money. The same people call everyone who supports nuclear energy "paid shills".

There are self-conceits, and anti-nuclearists are NOT immune to them. In fact, they seem to revel in theirs. They style themselves as rebels, reformers, saints, saviors, and the only ones with any concern for humanity -- aggressively. Militantly. They claim to love the planet, but their rules for allowable radioactivity would abolish it.

Events like this one, which actually do prove the safety of nuclear energy, bring out the worst in them -- and the blood-hungry press.

--p!
... they (anti-nuclearists) honestly think that NEI pays everyone off, and that we're all NEI employees. Wrong. They simply, honestly, and truly do not understand that there is a difference between the industry and the supporters of the technology.
(NIOF)

[NNadir]

14. No. It will remain climate change.

Better luck next time.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

4. no nukes in Oregon!

"In an Oregon election in 1980, a ballot measure to ban construction of further nuclear power plants in the state was approved by the voters by a landslide vote."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

[jpak]

6. And Oregon now has a 50% tax credit on solar electric and hot water systems

:thumbsup:

:toast:

[Dead_Parrot]

8. And gets 40% of it's power from coal.

And PacifiCorp want to build two more coal burners.

Woot!

:thumbsup:

[dbackjon]

17. Coal plants that if typiclal will emit more radiation into the atmosphere than any U.S. Nuke Plant