'Reckless' nuclear plant dumps waste on beaches

[Karmadillo]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1512884,00.html

SAFETY breaches at one of Britain’s biggest nuclear research stations resulted in hundreds of thousands of radioactive particles escaping into the environment, a former safety officer has revealed.

Highly radioactive waste was pumped into the sea and evidence of the pollution was covered up by managers who had a “reckless” disregard for public health, according to Herbie Lyall, a health physics surveyor at the Dounreay plant in Caithness for 30 years.

They come as the plant’s owner, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, is facing a possible criminal prosecution over a series of radioactive leaks. More than 50 radioactive particles have been recovered from a public beach two miles west of the plant.

The latest find was on Friday when a stone contaminated with caesium-137 was recovered from another beach 20 miles from Dounreay. The authority has admitted that “at least several hundreds of thousands” of plutonium and uranium particles, each the size of a grain of sand, have been released from Dounreay.

more...

[fryguy]

1. what is nuke oversight like in the UK?

just wondering if they have a regulatory agency or if the industry is left to self-regulate. if the latter, this should be a wake-up call for all the people (read: repugs) in this country that champion the idea of industry self-regulating.


but then again the british model for social security reform, creating individual savings accounts which are now bankrupt, doesn't seem to register with the pukes so why should this.....

[Bemis]

2. A great song.

..."In nuclear Caithness Atoms are good news
They brought us jobs an money, we'd be stupid tae refuse
So now we've nuclear fish, fine atomic coos
Plutonium-coated people an radioactice booze oh
Ah'm the man that muffed it ah'm the chief that boobed
Ah wonder will they find their radioactive tube
But there's no goin'tae be a search or any big to do
For the storeman says he's lost all the geiger counters too."

The last lines from "Ah'm E Man At Muffed It"
by Nancy Nicolson, Gallus Music

From Flames on the Water by The McCalmans 1990

One of a number of songs on this album that were written by
Scottish songwriters critical of British Authority.

[megatherium]

3. unfortunate story: we need nuclear.

We cannot afford to keep powering our civilization on fossil fuels. The only realistic alternative to coal for producing electricity is nuclear. If a story like this feeds public resistance to nuclear, we will continue to burn a lot of coal (which ironically puts more radioactivity into the environment than does nuclear) -- 50% of our electricity comes from coal.

There is a place for renewables, but they each have limitations that will prevent them from being a significant portion of our electricity. E.g., a 1 gigawatt solar power station would be 60 square miles of collectors, and would perhaps be the largest engineering project ever made.

Of course nuclear must be done properly, using modern reactor designs inherently resistent to failure. The fuel cycle ought to include reprocessing, to reduce waste and increase the supply of fuel. (In theory, nuclear power can power our entire civilization indefinitely.)

[ecoalex]

4. Too expensive and risky

And more waste to handel . Nuclear is not the answer , it's a continuing problem .

[megatherium]

5. Not too expensive.

The electric power industry is warming back up to nuclear as natural gas (20% of our power) gets much more expensive.

Waste can be handled by careful reprocessing (recycling). We're not doing this now but other countries are.

Again: You want increased reliance on coal? Ick!

[illflem]

6. A New, Much Safer Nuclear Reactor Design From China

But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.

A soft-spoken scientist named Qian Jihui has no doubt about what the smaller, safer, hydrogen-friendly design means for the future of nuclear power, in China and elsewhere. Qian is a former deputy director general with the International Atomic Energy Agency and an honorary president of the Nuclear Power Institute of China. He's a 67-year-old survivor of more than one revolution, which means he doesn't take the notion of upheaval lightly.

"Nobody in the mainstream likes novel ideas," Qian says. "But in the international nuclear community, a lot of people believe this is the future. Eventually, these new reactors will compete strategically, and in the end they will win. When that happens, it will leave traditional nuclear power in ruins."

Now we're talking revolution, comrade.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html?pg=2&topic=china&topic_set=

[mom cat]

7. Please post this separately so that it can reach more people. .

The Chinese are beating us at our own game.

[ashmanonar]

10. that's REALLY COOL!

the world could use safer designs, at least until solar/geothermal/biomass sources get better and cheaper. yes, nuclear isn't 100% efficient and 100% ecologically non-impact, but it's better than coal, gas, oil, etc.

[AndyTiedye]

8. So Then You Have All This Plutonium

and you don't think someone is going to make it go BOOM :nuke:

[gratuitous]

9. Oh no, no, no

See, we have the most forward-thinking, progressive government ever seen on the planet. Surely we'll keep all that plutonium safely locked away for the millions of years of its half-life, and nobody will ever succumb to the lure of millions (or even thousands) of dollars to look the other way while devious folks boost enough to make a weapon.

Right? I mean, if our only choices are between burning more coal and fissioning more atoms, right? It's not like we should conserve energy or make more efficient storage systems or require more effective pollution controls or anything. Why, it's positively unamerican to talk about using less!

[jpak]

13. Nuclear is much much more expensive than fossil fuels right now

The last few reactors built in the US came in at $4950 per kW

The FOB price for PV produced in the US is currently $3380 per kW and dropping every year.

Coal-fired capacity is currently $1-1400 per kW.

Wind power is $1-1200 per kW

and gas-fired capacity costs only $600 per kW.

Gas prices will have to rise dramatically to make it uneconomic relative to new nuclear capacity.

The only spent-fuel reprocessing plant to operate in the US was a commercial failure. It will cost taxpayers 4-8 billion to clean up the mess they left behind.

Every reprocessing plant in operation in the world today is government-owned, highly subsidized and produces an enormous amount of high-level liquid waste.

It's a dirty nasty uneconomic business and only exacerbates the problems associated with disposal of nuclear waste.

[jpak]

12. Not true

The notion that coal-fired power plants release more radioactive materials than nuclear power plants originated from a study conducted by the Office of Technology Assessment back in the '70's.

They looked at three power plant designs: a 1000 MW pressurized water reactor design, a 1000 MW boiling water reactor design and a 1000 MW coal-fired plant design.

They did not measure emissions from actual power plants.

They also used an assumed value for the radionuclide content of coal. As the radionuclide content of coal varies widely, one can manipulate emissions from coal-fired plants any way one wants.

The conclusion of the study was that the coal-fired plant design emitted slightly more radionuclides than the PWR design, but the BWR design emitted more radionuclides than the coal-fired plant.

This (flawed) study made its way into the mythology of nuclear power advocates in the late '70's and has been used unchallenged ever since.

(PS I am no big fan of coal)

The Clinton administration proposed its One Million Solar Roofs campaign back in the late 90's.

One million solar homes mounting 2-4 kW PV arrays would have a peak generating capacity of 2-4 GW - and would not gobble up land in the countryside.

The Gropenator has also proposed a million roof PV initiative for California...

yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_18556.shtml

Both Japan and Germany have highly successful residential roof-top PV programs.

www.cleanenergystates.org/ Innovative%20Practices%20Report/PV_in_Japan_Germany.pdf

Japan and Germany currently have 320 and 110 MW of installed PV capacity, respectively.

The US produced ~109 MW of PV in 2003 - half of which was exported. The US currently installs ~50 MW of PV capacity each year and ~222,000 US residences are now equipped with roof-top PV arrays.

Global production of PV modules in 2003 was 934 MW (equivalent to one large nuclear reactor) and global PV production growing exponentially (~27% per year).

Global PV production in 2020 is expected to be 200 GW per year.

...and there are plenty of roof-tops and farmland fence rows available to deploy PV in the US.

Deployment of PV in the US will proceed one roof-top at a time - not as one large engineering project.

[megatherium]

16. thanks for the clarification

concerning radioactivity from coal.

But I don't think PV is anywhere close to really making a difference: really replacing fossil fuels. If you price PV by the kilowatt, it's still 5 times more expensive than coal or nuclear. This is simply unrealistic. Maybe later it will be less expensive, but in the meanwhile, there's a lot of carbon going into the atmosphere. (Unfortunately, whether our future is solar or nuclear, or both, this is going to happen.)

[MadHound]

15. No, we don't need nuclear, and it would be foolish to switch to it

Despite "modern reactor designs inherently resistent to failure", failures would still occur, for the largest, by far, factor in nuclear incident and accidents is human error.

Then there is what to do with the waste. Do you honestly want to bury the mess, which leads to groundwater contamination, and a huge problem that we pass on to future generations? Recycling nuclear waste does take care of some of the waste problem, but not all by any stretch of the imagination. Neither is a good option, and until you satisfactorily solve the waste problem, nuclear is a dead end technology

Renewables and conservation is the way that America has to go. Solar on every viable rooftop, wind where appropriate, biodiesel, biomass, etc when combined together can not only vastly reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, but are less polluting, benefit family farms, and have technological curves that are quite steep, ie, we can further refine renewable technologies to the point where they will sustain us.

Sorry friend, but nuclear power is a chimera that will kill us all, either quickly through human error, or slowly through the effects of toxic, radioactive waste. Rather than passing our problems on to our kids, let us get to work passing on a solution.

[this_side_up]

11. Rural Alaska community researches nation's first tiny nuclear reactor

...

In need of relief, the community of 700 people is turning to nuclear power. But Galena's plant would be far different from other U.S. commercial nuclear power plants — at 10 megawatts, it would be downright tiny.

...

The smallest U.S. commercial nuclear power plants are the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant, 19 miles north of Omaha, Neb., and the Ginna Nuclear Plant, east of Rochester, N.Y. Both have electrical output of 470 megawatts, roughly 45 times larger than what Toshiba is contemplating, said NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.

...

Galena began considering nuclear power after determining that wind and solar power were impractical and that coal was too costly. After discussions with Toshiba, city officials concluded nuclear power would be the cleanest and least expensive alternative, lowering costs to 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

...

Yoder expects an encased reactor, with few moving parts using a low-grade plutonium or other fuel that could not be reused for weapons, would be cheaper to operate and protect than a conventional reactor.


http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050305/BUSINESS01/503050384/1066/BUSINESS01...

[TexasLawyer]

14. kick n/t