Many nuclear plants lack back up sirens.

[NNadir]

"MIDDLETOWN, Pa. - More than two dozen nuclear power plants across the country lack sirens that would warn of a nuclear emergency if electricity also was blacked out, according to a report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.


Twenty-eight U.S. plants lack backup power for sirens that are supposed to alert residents in a 10-mile radius of trouble, the NRC said. Seventeen plants have full backup for the systems, while 18 others have at least some sirens that would remain operable during an outage.

The NRC released the information Wednesday as part of its response to a coalition of 17 activist groups and elected officials that petitioned the commission in February for information about the siren systems.

"Basically, we have an inoperable emergency system at a majority of the sites," said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

Plants that lack any backup power for sirens include the Indian Point plant just north of New York City and the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio. At Three Mile Island in Middletown, the site of a March 28, 1979, partial meltdown that remains the nation's worst nuclear plant accident, only 19 of the 96 sirens would operate if power went out..."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050527/ap_on_re_us/sirens_no_backup

Thank goodness our media is on top of things. Who knows what would happen if they weren't.

Sometimes they get into such stupid stuff, global climate change, wars to secure oil in which tens of thousands of innocent people are killed, the collapse of habitats, the depletion of rivers, the destruction of ozone, etc, that they forget the important things:

Back up sirens.

If you want to know why there is no future, look in the mirror.

[Mnemosyne]

1. Thanks for the post NNadir.

Homeland Security, working to make politicians and polluters safer by way of the corporate media.

:grr: :nuke:

:hi: