Liar, Liar, PLANT's on fire

[translation: "time for donuts, not inspections!"]

"Nukular" - George W Bush43

"Nulear"- palate problems
"Nuke-li-ar"- correct pronunciation
Nuke + liar

cultural reference
"going nuclear"= 1 blowing up, from extreme anger; 2 lying to the public about the mess you made

Why is it that nuke jockeys always lie?
"all is well", they say, until their problems can be sensed from a satellite.

I have a pretty good memory, so I can recall that just about every documentary about nukes
shows how people running nukes, and government officials, always lie. The media will always help them spin the story.
There's no such thing as a safe nuclear plant, without leaks. Greg Palast says every plant he
studied falsified records. They have no backup for accidents. They don't care.

When even George Monbiot of the Guardian likes Nukes, you know we're in trouble.
Actually, he's just worried we'll lay on the coal, and choke on the fumes.
Well, George, you're too consumerist.
You assume that we "just gotta have that power".
What about living with less until we can all get wind and solar at home?
No, eh? You and Thatcher. pals.

It started when I was a kid. Schools were often taken to Chalk River Nukeshop,
a small boiler which makes isotopes for cancer research (@irony), to show them around.
I only found out as an adult that, because it's on the Ottawa River, or a tributary,
it occasionally leaks radiation, right into the river that goes past the Canadian parliament.
People swim in the river too.

Fish live there! Sushi fish, a Japanese delicacy

[an ode to sushi, and some great Canadian fishing!]

If I had invested 10 billion in a nukeplant, I'd also want to see some return. When I say 'I', I mean the government, and they give the money to their buddies who barely know how to build an outhouse. I think that's why Thatcher was in such a hurry to kill off coal.
It takes 10 years to get the nukeplant running. It's inherently flawed, and then the waste!
It's a horribly expensive way to get energy, but when your pals are getting rich, who cares.
All this mess, just to boil water and spin a turbine.

I'd rather have rolling blackouts, thank you very much!

KEY EXAMPLES:
Santa Susanna California, next to the San Fernando valley (explains a lot)
Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania)
Chernobyl (Gorbachev's response "Americans have covered up many disasters")
Fukushima, Japan

-Costick67 ~(8^P
checkitout: 4 things



A world in denial of nuclear risks
World leaders push for nuclear proliferation, despite a past plagued with nuclear-related disasters.
Danny Schechter Last Modified: 23 Mar 2011 20:02
What will it take for our world to recognise the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the "dawn" of the nuclear age?

Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.
"It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as a warning to the world."

The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact, what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher tech weaponry.
As Hiroshima becomes yesterday's distant memory and Fukishima the current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies do not want to alarm the public.

Nuclear cover-up
Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Three Mile Island complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from a serious accident was minimised, never examined in depth by some of the very same media outlets who are today criticising Japan for a lack of transparency.

On April 6, 2009, the anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were complicit in minimising public awareness of the extensive suffering that did take place:
But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the 'mainstream' media and the 'alternative'. Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents children with birth defects, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report.

Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book, Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call '50 years of denial'.

One reviewer explained:
The authors examine what they perceive to be a conspiracy by the government to mislead and suppress information about the actual bombing, Truman's decision to drop the bomb, and the birth and mismanagement of the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim that Americans then, and now, are haunted by the devastating psychological effects of the bomb.

Lifton and Mitchell are evidence-based writers, not conspiratologists, but they could find no other explanation for how such a seminal event could have been distorted and misrepresented for a half century.

Sold to the public
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. Rory O'Connor and Richard Bell coined the term "Nuke Speak" to describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry's PR offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.
And today, as the world watches the dreadful and even Darwinian struggle for survival by the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, as information about the extent of the nuclear danger trickles out, Obama has reaffirmed his commitment to build new nuclear plants.
2
from Democraticunderground
Meltdown California: The World’s First Nuclear Accident
[like wow, man. bummer-Costick67]

My students have been asking me all week about the risks of fallout from Japan’s nuclear disaster. Californians have been emptying drug stores of iodine tablets in preparation for the impending assault on their thyroids. (Hopefully they haven’t already started consuming them, as the risk of iodine overdose is far more likely). Nevertheless, the disaster in Japan is horrifying, particularly for those in the middle of it. And it is not yet over. It will be some time before we know the true extent of the damage.

While Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident to date, it was certainly not the first. Nor was the meltdown at Three Mile Island, which miraculously had relatively minimal affects on people. The first nuclear accident occurred at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), also known as RocketDyne, in Ventura Country, California, in 1959.

According to Kim Vincent, who wrote California's Historical Nuclear Meltdown, the SSFL accident released far more radiation than Three Mile Island. The SSFL was used as a testing site for rockets and had a sodium reactor used for nuclear research during the Cold War. As such, it was fairly secretive. The details of the SSFL meltdown were essentially kept hidden from the public until UCLA researchers and few reporters tracked down the details in the afterglow of Three Mile Island’s meltdown in 1979, twenty years after the fact. Scientists and workers at the site were sworn to secrecy, one of whom never told a soul until he saw himself on a documentary about the event.

SSFL was the first U.S. commercial nuclear power plant. It was not well tested and workers were not well versed in the possible problems that could happen. On July 13th, 1959, the reactor started to act up. Workers tried to determine the nature of the problem, but failed, and turned the reactor back on and ran it for another two weeks before discovering that 13 of 43 fuel rods had partially melted. While much smaller than the Three Mile Island reactor, SSFL is believed to have released up to 240 times more radiation than the 1979 disaster. The reason for this is that it did not have a concrete containment structure.
3

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power
Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives.
Atomic power is part of the mix
Comments (1584)
* George Monbiot
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 March 2011 19.43 GMT

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either....
4

Tokyo Electric to Build US Nuclear Plants
The no-BS info on Japan's disastrous nuclear operators
Monday, March 14, 2011
by Greg Palast

I need to speak to you, not as a reporter, but in my former capacity as lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations.
I don't know the law in Japan, so I can't tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.
But what will Obama plead? The Administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas — by Tokyo Electric Power and local partners. As if the Gulf hasn't suffered enough.

Here are the facts about Tokyo Electric and the industry you haven't heard on CNN:

The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.

Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called "SQ" or "Seismic Qualification." That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from Al Qaeda.

The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie. The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York. Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from 'failed' to 'passed.'
The company that put in the false safety report? Stone & Webster, now the nuclear unit of Shaw Construction which will work with Tokyo Electric to build the Texas plant, Lord help us.

There's more.

Last night I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.
These safety back-up systems are the 'EDGs' in nuke-speak: Emergency Diesel Generators. That they didn't work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn't save a building because "it was on fire."
What dim bulbs designed this system? One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was built by Toshiba. Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel system.
Now be afraid. Obama's $4 billion bail-out-in-the-making is called the South Texas Project. It's been sold as a red-white-and-blue way to make power domestically with a reactor from Westinghouse, a great American brand. However, the reactor will be made substantially in Japan by the company that bought the US brand name, Westinghouse — Toshiba.
I once had a Toshiba computer. I only had to send it in once for warranty work. However, it's kind of hard to mail back a reactor with the warranty slip inside the box if the fuel rods are melted and sinking halfway to the earth's core.

TEPCO and Toshiba don't know what my son learned in 8th grade science class: tsunamis follow Pacific Rim earthquakes. So these companies are real stupid, eh? Maybe. More likely is that the diesels and related systems wouldn't have worked on a fine, dry afternoon.
Back in the day, when we checked the emergency back-up diesels in America, a mind-blowing number flunked. At the New York nuke, for example, the builders swore under oath that their three diesel engines were ready for an emergency. They'd been tested. The tests were faked, the diesels run for just a short time at low speed. When the diesels were put through a real test under emergency-like conditions, the crankshaft on the first one snapped in about an hour, then the second and third. We nicknamed the diesels, "Snap, Crackle and Pop."

(Note: Moments after I wrote that sentence, word came that two of three diesels failed at the Tokai Station as well.)
In the US, we supposedly fixed our diesels after much complaining by the industry. But in Japan, no one tells Tokyo Electric to do anything the Emperor of Electricity doesn't want to do....