Peak Oil is You
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Page added on March 3, 2014
Half of the Reactors Operating Today In The US Do Not Meet NRC Regulations
… a Third Of The Reactors In The United States Aren’t Protected Against Flooding If An Upstream Dam Were To Fail … Another 27 Reactors Are Not Protected Against Earthquake Hazards”
The risk of a nuclear meltdown in the United States is even greater than it was at Fukushima.
Yet the U.S. Nuclear regulatory Commission (NRC) has weakened safety standards for U.S. nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster.
David Lochbaum – Director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, who worked as a nuclear engineer for nearly two decades, and has written numerous articles and reports on various aspects of nuclear safety and published two books – explained today:
There are a lot of safety regulation shortcomings that we think need to be rectified to provide a solid foundation for the existing nuclear power plants and any new nuclear power plants we build in the United States. For example, half of the reactors operating today in the United States do not meet the NRC’s fire protection regulations, even though the fire hazard represents the same threat of reactor core meltdown as all other threats combined. And that’s when you meet the regulations. In addition, about a third of the reactors in the United States aren’t protected against flooding if an upstream dam were to fail. So another 25, 27 reactors are not protected against earthquake hazards. And we’ve known this for years, and we’ve tolerated that rather than fixing it.
The proper foundation for nuclear power new and existing would be a nuclear regulator that enforces federal safety regulations, rather than in just setting them and watching plants live well beneath them year after year.
See this and this for interviews of Lochbaum by Washington’s Blog.
8 Comments on "Half of the Reactors Operating Today In The US Do Not Meet NRC Regulations"
J-Gav on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 2:19 pm
This is why no less a figure than former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, stated last year that all 104 plants in the U.S. had major, unfixable security issues and should be phased out as quickly as possible.
Nony on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 5:11 pm
Nuclear power is definitely not a walk in the park. SL-1, Chernobyl, etc. have shown that. That said, skyscrapers are not perfectly safe either. 3000 people died in the World Trade center attacks in 2001. Everything has risks and you have to look at the amounts.
ghung on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 6:56 pm
Jeez, Nony, too bad we’re in the habit of passing risks on to future generations instead of keeping our Faustian bargains to ourselves. We reap the rewards while our great grandchildren reap the consequences. It won’t matter that they’ll hate our guts; posthumously, of course. We’re too busy creating new messes to clean up our own.
Nony on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 7:08 pm
It seems to have worked pretty well so far. 2000 was better than 1950 which was better than 1900 which was better than 1850.
Are you next going to tell me that we are at “peak wealth”? Seriously? GDP is not a depleting reservoir…
Northwest Resident on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 7:37 pm
Nony — How was 2000 better than 1950? Will your answer be “more advanced technology”? Whatever answer you give, the fact remains that between 1950 and 2000 there was a catastrophic wastage of natural resources while toxic wastes, cancer-causing chemical agents and deadly pollution were dumped en-masse into our oceans, landfills and atmosphere. There are things that have improved since 1950, but those are counterbalanced by an equal or greater number of things that have gone straight to hell in a hand basket since the “happy days” of 1950.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 8:45 pm
I’d give my left nut to be born again in 1950! Screw 1980 and beyond. Around 1980 is when the industrial poisons became turbo charged! We may have been living like fossil fuel Kings for all these years which I have enjoyed immensely. Yet, especially in the last 10 years I feel the guilt of association with a species who has raped and pillaged Mother Nature, our mother and our home! I agree with N/R 100%
Northwest Resident on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 8:58 pm
Nony — Sorry for targeting you, bro, but for the last couple of hours I’ve been trying to get my work done and this statement keeps jumping into my mind, begging for a response:
“Are you next going to tell me that we are at “peak wealth”? ”
YES, that is exactly what I am going to tell you. We are well past the point of “peak wealth”, in fact. I’m talking real wealth, not all that digital QE dollar wealth that the fed is dumping into the system on a monthly basis.
First, what is real wealth?
“Real wealth has intrinsic value, as contrasted to exchange value. Life, not money, is the measure of real-wealth value. Examples include land, labor, knowledge, and physical infrastructure.”
The land is already owned and has been for a long time. It is steadily degrading in quality as toxins are dumped into it, the natural resources on that land are strip-mined to feed BAU, and the soil quality is degraded by industrial agriculture and a host of other factors, not least of which is caused by climate change.
Labor has been shipped overseas where slaves toil to build the gadgets and “stuff” that the world buys. Labor has lost much of the respect that it once earned. Skilled laborers aside, the labor pool these days are a bunch of desperate unemployed people willing to work for just about anything, but not being given a lot of opportunity because there isn’t any to be had.
Infrastructure: Crumbling, in bad need of repair, not enough money or resources to build new infrastructure much less maintain what we have.
Yes, we have passed peak wealth. Peak wealth was inextricably tied to the amount of cheap excess oil we could get out of the ground, and like cheap excess oil, real wealth is in rapid decline.
Kenz300 on Tue, 4th Mar 2014 2:22 pm
Nuclear energy’s true cost and environmental damage has shown that it is too expensive and causes too much environmental damage to exist.
How much will it cost to store nuclear waste forever. Who will pay those costs and maintain those facilities?
There are safer, cleaner and cheaper alternatives.
We need to learn some lessons from the disasters at Fukishima and Chernobyl and begin to phase out all existing nuclear power plants and stop building any more new ones.