What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

[GreyGeek]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

A possible reason why the Fukushima reactors failed worse than they should have:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video...ups.cnn?hpt=C2

[woodsmoke]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

GG YOU are a SCARY PERSON!!!!

WHERE....did you get that map!!!??

BRAVO for your searching skills!!!!!

I had never seen that before....and it is really kind of scary as to how much radiation that thing spread over the U.S.

To this day, there are still folks that I communicate with from "back then" that think it was done on purpose.

Don't know....just what they still think.

BUT YOU.....ARE A SCARY PERSON!!! Not really, just jokin' with ya!

woodsmoke

[MoonRise]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

This is an interesting read.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42103936...s-asiapacific/

[GreyGeek]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

Yes, it is.
The ridicule "There's a power plant just like these in Omaha. If it gets hit by a tsunami...." makes the joke of the fact that the Fort Calhoun power plant isn't in any danger of a Tsunami.

BUT, that power plant is a lot closer to the north end of the Nemaha Uplift and Humboldt Fault than Fukushima was to the epicenter of their 9.0 quake. Those two geologies, while only in the 4.0 risk category,
[img width=400 height=241]http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/2011/March/110312/110315-USMap.grid-6x2.jpg[/img]
are long over due for a quake. A list of earthquakes in the central US is here. The fact that Fort Calhoun is on the Eastern side of the Ogalala Aquifer, which is being pumped down faster than it is being recharged, increases the risk of triggering earthquakes. Central Arkansas has had a series of recent earthquakes which noticeably dropped in frequency after two injection wells (2ndary oil recovery) were shut down. It would be difficult to recharge the aquifer in a rapid manner.

Fort Calhoun sits right on the west bank of the Missouri river but is built on land that has been elevated above the highest 500 year flood plain. It is cooled by water from the Missouri river. It is also on the North end of a recent Ox Bow lake. If the Missouri took a sudden turn away from the power plant it would be in serious trouble. While I doubt an ice jam on the Missouri below the plant could raise the level of the river above its 500 year flood level it could surround the plant with water. An ice jam above the plant could lower the water level below the intake valve or divert it altogether. Add to those possibilities an overdue earthquake and what could happen is anyone's guess.

A similar plant is on the Missouri river 20 miles South of Brownsville, Ne. It is the Cooper Nuclear power station. I took a boy scout troupe there in the 70s, while it was being built. We watch as a group of construction workers finished lunch and began working again. One of them took an empty beverage can he had just polished off and threw it into a tube, about 36" in diameter, that had perhaps 16 - 24 bolts connecting it to another section of tube. He then closed the connection and begin tightening the bolts. We discussed that on the ride home. I suspect that it was the cooling water outlet tube and he knew it would be flushed into the Missouri when the water began flowing.

And, we must not rule out the possibility of a Jihad terrorist attack by a well trained and equipped group of people making a lightening attack. Having someone "on the inside" would make it only easier. Even though predicted earlier, no one gave the 9/11 hijackings any credibility, until it happened. Then it was "obvious".

The one thing I do know is that the NRC represents the American people in just the same way that the other "regulatory" agencies do. Their upper level management is in a revolving door exchange with the management of the businesses they are supposed to regulate. The result is situations like the BP fiasco last summer where BP officials were instructing the Admiral of the National Coast Guard on what rights of access to the Gulf to allow to citizens and members of the press. It was difficult to confirm or deny BP pr memos. If ways to access BP's primary video feeds prior to their cutoff switches hadn't been found I couldn't have made the claim early on, or confirmed similar claims by others, that oil was leaking into the gulf at a rate in excess of 1 bbl per second, i.e., 87,000 bbls/day or more, when BP was claiming only 1,500 bbls/day and then later only 10,000 bbls/day. Subsequent analysis proved my estimates were more accurate. Now we have a 5" thick layer of oil covering hundreds of square miles of ocean bed around the well head. ALL life down there on the ocean floor is dead, even though oil in the ocean layers above the bed have been cycled out into the Atlantic and/or consumed by microbes. At a few degrees above freezing it will take CENTURIES for that material to be covered up with fresh biomass descending from above and life to reestablish itself there.

[woodsmoke]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

That is an outstanding map GG I'll use it in Env sci in a few weeks, thanks muchly.

Yep, that thing about pumping out the aquifers and I won't even get into now we are going to import oil shale from canada and use 7 gal of water for ever gal of gas produced. >

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

You might find this link useful: http://eprinc.org/?p=698
It has several very useful graphs, the first being a map showing the TransCanada's KeyStone pipeline from central Alberta to Patoka, Il. They are proposing a second one (gold dotted line) which will extend the pipeline to the Gulf coast where refineries can process it. We recently had a big fight in Nebraska about allowing the second pipe through the Sand Hills, a very fragile environment. Consider that the government rammed COHO down the throats of Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas. COHO controls all ground water use along the Platte River and tributaries feeding into it. It has put a lot of farmers out of business because they wouldn't let them use existing pumps or drill new ones, so they couldn't raise crops. (The Platte river valley is so sandy it is essentially hydroponic gardening.) The primary concern was wild life. Now, that very same government jams a BP backed venture to put the KeyStone pipeline through that same territory.

Not only that, TransCanada, even though it doesn't begin and end in the US and doesn't carry anything or anyone indigenous to the US, now has "common carrier status" and with that comes the authority to condemn property!!

In Nebraska:

Still, in early September Republican Gov. Dave Heineman told a Nebraska reporter, “I just haven’t focused on that issue to any great extent because it’s a federal regulatory issue. So I’ve let our congressional delegation deal with that.”

Interestingly enough, Heineman didn’t mention a link to TransCanada that researchers at Common Cause’s Nebraska office turned up. Records at the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission show that Heineman, now running for a third term, accepted a $2,500 campaign contribution from TransCanada in January. Jon Bruning, the Republican attorney general who is also up for re-election, accepted the same amount from TransCanada, according to records.

“All of a sudden, TransCanada is giving money to the governor and attorney general when he we keep hearing that this is a national issue, not a state issue,” Jack Gould, state issues chair for Nebraska Common Cause, noted in an interview.

You might find this link interesting.

It is being fought in Canada, too.

[woodsmoke]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

great stuff!
thanks

yep we are sneezing at gnats and swallowing camels and it seems that all the people in the U.S. that "should" be protesting are strangely silent. >

woodsmoke

[MoonRise]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

Don't forget the SC Savannah River Site. It still operates and is in a very dangerous location.

[woodsmoke]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

Japan's situation is equivalent to 3 mile island.

For people who have no idea of history, because our politically correct schools don't want to create "anxiety" in students...they will probably believe this.

So....ten years from now the ant-nuc people will be able to say...see.....3 mile island was the same as the Japanese problem, and show a pic of the Japan reactors..... and people will believer them...

because one of the agendas in education now is to rewrite history, and I know it from personal experience.... there is simple factual information that is being re-written and the students have no clue.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapc...lear.reactors/

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

Let's just hope that those 600,000 "spent" fuel rods in the pools on the roof of the complex don't become so uncovered that the resulting heat generated melts the Uranium and causes a non-nuclear explosion.

For those who are not familiar, here is a shorthand version of the physics behind a fission reactor:
Nuclear power plants are only 30% or so efficient, compared to 40% for coal fired plants. So, a nuclear power plant generating 1000 MW of electric power needs 3000 MW of heat from fission. Fission occurs when a Uranium-235 atom is hit with a Neutron which sticks to the nucleus, creating an unstable proton-neutron imbalance in the newly formed Uranium-236 nucleus. (Uranium-238 is not fissile and therefore cannot sustain a chain reaction, from which huge amounts of energy is created. So, although uranium-238 is fissionable -- able to undergo nuclear fission--, the neutrons created by the initial fission are not fast enough to produce new fissions. Therefore, uranium-238 is not a nuclear fuel.) The unstable Uranium-236 atom splits into two "daughter" atoms, or fission products, like Barium and Krypton, each with about half the number of protons that the Uranium atom had. Also released are an average of 2.4 Neutrons, and about 215MeV of energy is produced. The 1 to 3 Neutrons that are emitted hit other Uranium atoms, continuing the process. Some daughter products are stable, some are not. A list of at least 211 radioactive fission products (F.P.) found in a 10 year old spent fuel rod bundle is given here. IF the forth column contains three yen-signs then each Kg of fuel rods indicates the presence of over a million becquerels of radiation emitted by that element.

Each Uranium atom that splits releases 215MeV of energy, which requires the fusion of 37mg of U235 per second, or 3.2 Kg/day. For comparison, the same coal fired plant would require 10,600 tons of coal per day. (Each coal train, 110 cars, is about one mile long. New York City requires around 24 coal trains per day, IIRC !!!).

About 20% of the energy generated by fission plant is actually generated by Beta emissions from daughter products of fission, like Iodine-131 and Cesium-137. Even though control rods can be inserted into a reactor to almost immediately shut down the Uranium fission, the fission products continue emitting Beta particles and generating heat, and there is NO physical or chemical process that man can employ to stop it. For a 1000MW power plant that is about 200MW of heat. All that can be done is to absorb the heat that is generated to prevent a melt-down of the Uranium (both the 235 that remains and the 238) in the rods. The heat will continue to be released for centuries in diminishing amounts, following the laws of exponential decay, so cooling and/or long term storage is required. Unfortunately, there is not a place on the planet that anyone can guarantee is geologically stable for over 10,000 years. How much time is really required for some of the fission products? Here is a list of some of the fission products and their half-lives. Multiply any of their times by 10 to get an estimate of how long it will take 10 half-lives to reduce the amounts to 1/1024th of the initial amounts. For some toxic isotopes 10 half-lives may not be long enough.

A coal plant is more efficient than a nuclear plant because energy has to be used to keep the spent fuel rods of the nuclear plant cool. IF actual long term costs were truly factored into the costs of a nuclear power plant it would never reach economic viability, a fact kept hidden from the public by PR campaigns by the nuclear power industry and not rebutted by regulatory agencies whose heads come out of that industry. The 200 MW of heat has to be released into the environment. The environmental damage that heat causes, the costs associated with it and with keeping the spent fuel rods cool for such a long time, and the toxicity of the fission products led me to oppose nuclear power decades ago. The financial responsibility for that damage, and the long term storage, and any legal consequences, has been foisted off onto the American taxpayers. It's the old game corporations have become very good at over the last 50 years: privatize the profits, socialize the costs.

My view was formed and re-enforced in summer of 1970 when I was a team leader of one of two teams sent by the University of Wyoming into the Shirley Basin to explore the claims by farmers and ranchers in that area that Uranium mining was poisoning the land and the water and killing their livestock. It turns out that Uranium in the environment was, at the time, worth mining down to 1ppm, and about the ONLY place that any uranium was found was in the water leaking out of tailings of the open-pit mines. Even then I had to build scintillation detectors and take readings on samples for 24 hours to get an energy curve spectrum that could be identified as Uranium. Using ion exchange columns helped concentrate the samples as well. What was interesting at the time was that the mineral rights, the mines, the processing plants and the refineries were owned, lock stock and barrel by G.E. (Babcock vessels), BP, Shell, Standard, Phillips, etc. The oil companies were switching their grip from oil to nuclear, until protests halted the building of new nuke plants, which is why only one Uranium mine is in operation in that area of Wyoming today.

--edited for typos and additional comments --

[woodsmoke]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

GG
I do actually believe that you may have done MORE things that OI.

Digging through books today I still have my old AEC books from the fifties and sixties.

woodsmoke

[Detonate]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

After reading this thread, I feel much more educated on this subject. Thanks to all of you for the enlightenment. Many years ago, I worked at a underground coal mine. I became well acquainted with the industry. Yes, it would take a lot of coal to equal the energy output of a small amount of nuclear fuel. But we have a lot of coal. We have enough coal to satisfy the electrical energy requirements of this county for the next 100 years. Great progress has been made in learning how to burn coal efficiently, cleanly, and safely. And I might add, cheaply.

[toad]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

Fossil fuels? Oh well, climate change is upon us anyway and soon we'll look back and think: remember when all we had to worry about was earthquakes, a couple of hurricanes and the odd thunderstorm?

Having said that, I have no idea how carbon capturing technology has progressed but unless that is sorted, I for one wouldn't want to upset the system earth much further.

[MoonRise]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

Having said that, I have no idea how carbon capturing technology has progressed but unless that is sorted, I for one wouldn't want to upset the system earth much further.

+1

But I will add that the technology is there, it's just Corporate Earth (yes I mean Corporations World Wide) are to greedy and don't want to spend the money now to better us now and for future generations and all for the bottom line.

[Detonate]

Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?

There are no perfect choices. Every method we have to produce electricity comes with problems or potential problems. So we have to choose which method will be best, taking all of the factors into consideration.