Nuclear reactors aren't built to last forever. Only until the builders are paid.
posted by JwB58
over 2 years ago
I though they fixed that dang leak once….
But why build it in the center of a highly populated state???? They could have put them all in the high desert, instead of places like Pennsylvania or Washington.
I would not want that to be part of my backyard........ Or places like Love Canal, remember that one???
I live just outside the critical mile marker for TMI. We were within minutes of a meltdown in '79 (which is not quite what you think - the containment facility drops into the aquifer rather than causing a mushroom cloud. Not that, in an area where the water table can be as close as fourteen feet below the surface, this is much comfort.) Following the last problem, NRC biologists located one thousand new mutations (permanent, self-perpetuating genetic changes) among river plants. We had German toadstools and spiders several hundred times their normal mass. Pregnant animals withing a five mile radius (not humans, though) miscarried or delivered altered offspring but it was limited to that single gestation. Incidences of leukemia went through the roof. Though investigations dispute it, local residents also noted an increase in breast and prostate cancers. CDC chalks them up to other cause. Yeah.
This was someone doing something stupid while cutting pipe for the new generator. Last time it was someone sleeping through a temperature alarm on the water flow system (TMI is a water cooled plant.) It isn't the plant or the design, it is the nature of how humans work that is the problem. Being vigilant 100% every day for the full length of a shift, day after day, when nothing happens is impossible. Hasn't been a human born who can do it. They are constantly applying the latest in industrial psychology to the work patterns at TMI trying to overcome human nature.
For all the reactors working in the US today, the number of failures is quite small when compared to other systems. The day-to-day operation is far 'cleaner' than other currently practical methods.
If you want to see TMI, just take a flight into Harrisburg International. You'll start landing just past the tip of the island it sits on.
If TMI ever does have a catastrophic failure (or Peach Bottom or any of the others on the Susquehanna which provide power to NYC, mostly - yeah, we live with the risk but none of the power is sold locally,) it will be the water that will glow, all the way down to the Chesapeake, not the air.
In Michigan, all 3 of our nuclear power plants are located on the Great Lakes. Cook
view link and Palisades
view link are on Lake Michigan while Fermi2
view link is on Lake Erie.....On October 5, 1966 Fermi 1 suffered a partial fuel meltdown, although no radioactive material was released or so they said.......
smart, eh......imagine the possibilities!!
Yeah-I hear ya! Nice fishing spot..mmm glowing walleye..
My brother has had stock in Hershey for decades. I remember in 1979 when the near disaster struck, he joked that he was invested in the only candy that glows in the dark.
Nothing like adding a little radiation to environmental estrogens already dumped in the water. Soon the glowing walleyes may have breasts.
Oh now that is too much, we all have terrible horrors awaiting us with these places around the US. That is just like what they do with the waste, they truck it across country to dispose of it, but how they do that I am not exactly sure. Would not anything it touches be contaminated forever????
