Tag Archives: Safety

Harris nuke flaw “fixed” that wasn’t found for a year

Less than 500 miles from here in NC,
what else haven’t they found if


‘Duke Energy’s examination a year ago “was supposed to have found that problem then and fixed it”‘?
This was a ‘a quarter-inch spot the NRC and the company describe as a “flaw” in the reactor vessel head, which contains heat and pressure produced by the nuclear core’s energy.’
When a solar panel has a quarter-inch flaw, you get a tiny percentage less electricity,
not the risk of radiation leak or worse.
Would you rather have two more nukes at the same site, run by the same company that can’t run the one it’s got safely, or solar power instead?

Plus where is the advantage of baseload capacity when
Harris 1 has only been up 27.41% for the past month
(NRC data),
which is hardly better than
the approximately 20% sun hours per day
for solar power in North Carolina this time of year.
Given the low and continually-dropping cost of solar panels,
Duke could simply over-provision distributed
solar panels and get way more than
20% or 27.41% effective power, and get that on budget and on time.


Harris 1 7% last 27.41% for the month

Emery P. Dalesio wrote for AP yesterday,

Harris nuclear plant in U.S. is safe to restart after reactor problem found, Continue reading →

Fire at nuclear reactor in France

Not just for

Plant Vogtle anymore:
this nuclear reactor site fire was at one of

EDF’s flagship plants at

Cattenom, Lorraine, France, on the Moselle River.

ENENews quoted MarketWatch yesterday,

Photo: “Fire broke out at nuclear reactor” — “Plumes of black smoke could be seen from a considerable distance”



French state-controlled power group Electricite de France SA said
Friday a fire started on a transformer at its nuclear plant in
Cattenom, eastern France, adding that it was outside the
nuclear-processing area.

A picture tweeted from France: Continue reading →

Birds stop cleanup work at closed Hanford plutonium plant

Birds nested using radioactive mud from WW II-era nuclear bomb production plant,


stopping attempts to clean up some of the worst leaking atomic waste,
much of which is liquid in leaking tanks near the Columbia River.
We have nuclear plants leaking radioactive tritium next to the Chattahoochee
and Altamaha Rivers, and radiation is detectible in the Savannah River
near Plant Vogtle.
How many radioactive solar panels or windmills have you heard of?



Annette Cary wrote for the Tri-City Herald yesterday,

Birds at Hanford vit plant spread contaminated waste,

Work stopped Wednesday morning at parts of the Hanford vitrification
plant after radioactive contamination was detected under a bird’s
nest, according to Bechtel National.

The contamination is suspected of coming from mud used for the nest,
which may have belonged to a swallow, said Bechtel spokesman Todd
Nelson. Only a small amount of contaminated soil was found, and the
contamination was at a low level.



Should workers believe that?

Continue reading →

UK biomass plant exploded from Waycross wood pellets

Explosions in Tilbury, England, explosions in Waycross:
south Georgia wood pellet dust blowing up here and there and
producing CO2 when burned there.
Why is
“the world’s largest wood pellet plant”
a better use of Georgia foresters’ resources than solar farms,
which don’t pollute and don’t explode?



Josh Schlossberg wrote for The Biomass Monitor 24 May 2013,

Biomass Industry Plays With Fire, Gets Burned,

A massive fire raged inside wood pellet silos for RWE’s Tilbury
Power Station in Essex, UK, on February 27, 2012. The biomass
incinerator—the largest in the world at 750
megawatts—had just been converted from coal to woody biomass a
month earlier. RWE claims no single cause can be attributed to the
fire, but suspects that smoldering wood pellets triggered the dust
fire.



In a recent editorial (apparently not online),

Robert Farris
Executive Director of the

Georgia Forestry Commission,
wrote that Georgia has nine wood pellet plants.
He didn’t name them, but
Biomass Magazine has
a list of U.S. wood pellet plants,
including these in Georgia (I added the City column): Continue reading →

Owners want out of uranium enrichment company



Maybe Southern Company and Georgia Power should listen to Urenco’s owners:
the nuclear industry is flatlining after Fukushima.

Stanley Reed wrote for Dealbook.Nytimes.com 27 May 2013,

Powerhouse of the Uranium Enrichment Industry Seeks an Exit,

The company that operates this uranium enrichment center, Urenco, is
the world leader in the field. It is also plumply profitable. So why
are its owners eager to sell it?

The answer, as with many things involving nuclear power, is a
combination of economics, geopolitics and the Promethean prospect of
an energy source that is as potentially green and abundant as deadly
dangerous….

Continue reading →

Canadian nuke nearly melted down in February

A senior plant official happened to spot a human-caused cooling shutdown
at a Canadian nuclear reactor, narrowly averting a meltdown.

Ian McCleod wrote for ENENews 15 May 2013,
‘Significance Level 1′ incident at nuclear reactor — “The highest order” — Public not alerted by officials — Characterized as ‘near miss’



[…] a Chalk River nuclear operator mistakenly closed a vital
pumping system that cools the immense heat generated within the NRU
reactor’s core […]

[…] the Crown corporation said the Feb. 27 event — which the
official report characterized as a “near-miss” —
needs to be taken very seriously. […]

[Randy Lesco, vice-president of operations and chief nuclear officer
for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd] said that further categorizing the
incident as at “Significance Level 1,” the highest
order, means AECL is treating it with appropriate importance […]

CNSC President Michael Binder questioned why AECL and CNSC staff did
not alert the public to the incident, which the Citizen first
reported on May 8. […]

And why didn’t the reactor have automatic alerts?

Ian MacCleod
wrote for the Ottawa Citizen 7 May 2013,

Human error blamed for “near-miss” at Chalk River reactor

Continue reading →

San Onofre Off Forever Soon

People standing up for safety and sanity may yet stop big business nukes.
After San Onofre is finally off for good, how about let’s cancel Plant Vogtle?
-jsq



Harvey Wasserman wrote for nukefree.org 16 May 2013,

San Onofre at the No Nukes Brink,

In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a
corporate cake walk.

Edison billed southern California ratepayers roughly $1 billion for
San Onofre in 2012 even though it generated no juice.

With its massive money and clout, Southern California Edison was
ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched
$770 million steam generator fix had kept it shut for a year.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the restart: a No Nukes
groundswell has turned this routine rubber stamping into an epic
battle the grassroots just might win.

Indeed, if ever there was a time when individual activism could have

Continue reading →

Give back what I’ve had for 37 years –Lamar Clements @ LCC 2013-05-14



A Lowndes County resident asked for school bus safety and his land back
that the county took; this was in the

Lowndes County Commission Regular Session Tuesday:

I was asked to do this for the benefit of our community.
Lamar Clements is my name,
and my wife Winona.
We live at 5138 Coppage Road, out in Hahira.
So you’d know, we’re not new residents out there.
We’ve lived there 37 years.
We’ve seen a lot of change.


Coppage and Griffin Roads
My concern is the corner of Coppage Road and Griffin Road.
I know Mike Fletcher has been recently, visited that location.
I want to report that
I have seen personally as a resident; I’ve seen two county
school buses that could have been a fatal accident
because of the structure around it.
My concern, it needs to be eliminated; that will, bottom line save lives.

Secondly, I live on the corner, and the county has progressively moved
the road over to the west, which is literally taking my some of my yard.
All I ask is: give back what I’ve had for 37 years.
And for goodness sake, when I saw those two school buses
that makes a chill go down your spine
when you’ve got that many children in danger.

So it’s in good hands.
You guys know what to do.
Go for it. Continue reading →

Look at Southern Company’s safety performance –SO CEO Fanning


SO CEO Fanning on Fukushima
At

last year’s
Southern Company Stockholder Meeting,

Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning said
about the U.S. nuclear industry and

Southern Company’s safety performance:

And if you look at our performance, we absolutely meet the standards
that our customers expect and frankly deserve.
So let’s start there.



Since then SO has

not managed to pour the concrete base correctly at Plant Vogtle
and

not managed to get a reactor vessel from Savannah port to the site.
Also

existing Vogtle Unit 1 had a fire
while Unit 2 was shut down for almost all of March 2013.
The two Plant Hatch reactors, same design as Fukushima,
so far as we know

still have substandard fire protection
and has a chronic problem of

radioactive tritium leaking into groundwater.
Tritium,

even the smallest amounts of which can have negative health effects.
And what gets into the watershed

spreads in the watershed.
The U.S. nuclear industry in general has problems with

alcohol, drugs, and broken equipment.
But

back to SO CEO Fanning about Fukushima: Continue reading →

San Onofre inside source: keep it shut down



An employee still inside and a longtimer since retired both say
the San Onofre nuclear reactor should stay shut down.
Operator Southern California Edison says it’s safe to restart
at 70% power, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
won’t show the public Socal Edison’s study about that.
Which seems safest to you?
Trust the operator that let it break in the first place,
or keep it shut down?

JW August wrote for 10bnews.com 25 April 2013,

San Onofre insider says NRC should not allow nuclear restart:
Team 10 speaks with former NRC employee, insider,

Continue reading →