Sea Skimmer wrote:Broomstick wrote:
The problem is that those cooling ponds are not secure from natural disaster or even a truly determined attempt at theft. We already have problems with flooding in this area - I don't think having floodwater overtop the cooling pond margins will result in a Chernobyl-level disaster, but there is the potential for garbage and other items on the plant site to be swept away.
Wow, so trash could be washed away, who fucking cares?
I do, since I live in the area.
People throw trash in the streets.
Yes, that's called littering and around here there's a $500 fine per violation for it, even if it's harmless paper. Toss something hazardous out the window while going down the road the penalities get steeper.
A nuclear plant is not some death zone littered in deadly radioactive debris.
No, it's not. Regardless, I don't find the possibility that
any hazardous garbage, of
any sort, could be washed into my front yard (figuratively, I don't live
that close to a plant) or into the source for peoples' drinking water to be acceptable.
I’d be way more worried about a flood at an industrial chemical plant, many of them are highly exposed to it and floods could release toxic clouds big enough to blanket cities.
Yes, that is also a concern. The fact that chemical plants also have issues does not excuse sloppiness in regards to nuclear plants.
The spent fuel isn’t going to move, and the degree to which is makes water radioactive is miniscule, with the elements decaying within a few hours. That’s why getting rid of the cooling water from nuclear reactors isn’t a problem.
What if a flood results in damage to the systems keeping the spent fuel covered with water? Are you going to tell me that isn't hazardous?
If someone is going to steal fuel rods, it will be during transport when the guard force is limited, and the waste already packaged for transport.
Actually, the convoys going through here have a heavy guard presence, including being armed. Not only do guards travel with the convoy itself, but local law enforcement provides additional support. You can't even get
close to the trucks, they make you keep your distance when they go down the road.
On the other hand, I've seen a lot fewer guys with guns standing around the outbuildings at the nuke plants. Now, granted, I know damn well that the security in those places goes beyond what's readily visible from either the ground or an overflight (up until September 2001 we GA pilots not only used to fly over these plants at low altitude, we used to ride the thermals rising from the cooling areas to gain altitude while saving fuel so yeah, I've had a look at these from several angles).
They are not going to break into a nuclear power plant in ordered to use a crane to carefully hook onto a waste cask 40 feet underway and make off with it.
Pools aren't 40 feet deep - more like 15. And the fuel rods aren't in casks in those pools, they're in metal racks open to the water because that's how the cooling works. Now, I don't doubt that there is security there, but those facilities are
not as durable or as secure as the reactor containment building.
Lots of places in the US still dump raw sewage into the waterways are a normal course of operation, maybe we should go spend the money to fix that problem first. Or those huge lakes of coal waste ash.
Yes, we should fix those problems, too. And your point is....?
If you have 1 ton of fuel rods being cooled and something happens to scatter them that's bad enough - 1000 tons of them and I have to ask what the fuck you were thinking, to leave them stored in a vulnerable place?
Bundles of uranium fuel rods don’t float the last time I checked.
No, but they can be damaged and contaminate waterways and the local environment. In fact, there have been instances where water supplies
have been contaminated by crap from nuclear plants and research facilities.
Yes, that is a problem. The fact our current best shot at a true long term storage facility was sabotaged by fucking idiots does not suddenly make indefinite storage in cooling ponds a good idea.
It’s not that good an idea, its not that bad. But it fucking works, and more importantly the plants can do it easily instead of just being shutdown and forcing us to pile up billions of tons more in those ever so safe coal ash lakes.
Yeah, and Chernobyl worked fine until it didn't - just because it's been OK so far doesn't mean it's really OK. YOU say it works, I can't see where this shit is really contained in a genuinely
long term safe manner.
How many cylindrical buildings made of several foot thick concrete have you seen uprooted? How many freight trains are made of concrete and actually anchored to the ground at all? Trains are not highly stable objects. It doesn’t take more then five PSI to totally destroy a typical wooden building, concrete can withstand thousands of PSI which is why we build bunkers proof against atomic bombs out of it.
The buildings with the cooling ponds are NOT the reactor containment buildings! They aren't "cylindrical", they're fucking squared-off industrial buildings. My area saw several cinder-block buildings ripped apart by a
small (F2) tornado last year. No, a tornado won't take out the reactor building but that's NOT what we're talking about here!
A dry cask is going to be near immune to the wind
I'm not just talking about the dry casks here. You think a building over cooling ponds is somehow immune to storm damage?
typical tornado shelters in the US are built out of a single layer of cinderblock. and we deem that adequate to protection millions of lives from direct death from those same tornadoes.
And yet, it was only a few years ago that we had a bunch of people killed in in a tornado that cruised through the Chicago area
despite them being in a tornado shelter
underground underneath a cinderblock building. Granted, that was unusual, but that's my point - you have to design a nuclear waste facility for the
worst case storm, not just the average tornado.
We do get tornadoes of that magnitude in this region, although thank goodness they aren't a yearly affair, but the point remains that dry casks sitting on a lot ARE vulnerable.
Yeah sure, this is why we build ICBM silos out of concrete, air pressure easily defeats it!
We also put those underground, don't we?
Look, even if the dry casks
won't break if tossed around by an F5 tornado (and if anything is going to survive that, it would be something along those lines) I'm not at all reassured by the notion of multi-ton casks rolling about unrestrained on the landscape. Hence my comment about freight trains being flung around - the train doesn't have to be full of hazardous shit to be dangerous, just the fact you have that massive an object being flung around is going to cause a fuckload of damage.
I'd be a
lot happier if the dry casks were
underground which would elminate the above-ground hazards, in an area that is
not prone to flooding. Which is why Yucca Mountain looked like a good idea to me.
Likewise, floodwaters can contaminate cooling ponds that are open to the air, or even in regular buildings. Debris swept in by floodwaters could damage stored materials in those ponds.
Damage to the fuel cladding would slightly increase the risk… but shear volume of floodwater would then nullify the problem anyway.
Oh, yeah - fucking Joliet, Illinois would find that REALLY reassuring if some shit happened to the Braidwood plant upstream from them. Or did you forget that some of these nuke plants really are near/in urban areas and really are close to sources of drinking water for large numbers of people? It's not just radioactivity, uranium is
chemically poisonous, it fucks up your kidneys long before the radiation has a chance to kill you. That shit does not belong in the water supply any more than arsenic, mercury, or any other number of toxic elements. Saying other industries don't handle their waste well, either, does not give a free pass to the nuclear industry.
Of course, like I pointed out before, you MUST have those fuel ponds so the risk will always exist anyway. The old fuel is much much less dangerous then the stuff fresh from the reactor and still loaded with medium to short life isotopes of high radioactivity.
Yeah, we have to have the fuel ponds, but they could be better protected, just for starters. Second, you dunce, some of the rods in those ponds ARE "fresh from the reactor". Third, it's much easier to manage a small pile of bad shit than a big pile of bad shit. Making the pile bigger does
nothing good.
I’m ignoring most of the rest of what you said because its all stemming from this false belief that a giant concrete cylinder is going to be destroyed by a fucking tornado.
No, it's more a matter of I'm concerned that cooling ponds with spent fuel rods that AREN'T in uber-casks are in buildings that are more vulnerable than necessary, and we keep making bigger piles of the shit instead of
really dealing with the problem posed by it.
I don't care whether we secure it better on site, come up with a depository deep inside a mountain, or reprocess the shit -
I want it handled better than it is at present. I am not satisfied with the current method, it's not the best we can do.
Furthermore since you just bitched about the casks being unsafe, why the hell would we want that we go and engage in the transportation of waste on a mass scale, which is far more dangerous then any form of static storage, just to put the carp into those unsafe casks? Did you think about that logic at all?
Because the slight risk entailed by transporting a cask of shit to a
truly secure site is justified by that site (presumably) being a truly secure, long term storage facility.
But meanwhile, storing on site in casks shares risk equally and avoids the potentially pointless transportation of tens of thousands of tons of nuclear fuel along US roads and railroads which it would be highly exposed to accidents.
Except that the on-site storage is just as vulnerable to accidents as the stuff being transported - actually
more so as the transport casks are actually tougher. Also, the transport convoys, being mobile, can avoid hazardous weather and the like, unlike stationary site which have to deal with whatever shit falls out the sky.
We are paying to have the state oppose the placement of the facility. Am I the only who thinks this is stupid?
