Anti-nuclear Numskullery

jj

Penultimate Amazing
J
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A little bit after 8PM I was listening to KOMO AM on the way to dinner here. The DJ brought up the fact that there have been two new nuclear licenses permitted in Georgia, and then took a call from an 'expert' who said that:

1) The reactor at TMI melted down (no, not even close)
2) Huge amounts of radiation were released because of a bad valve (err, no)
3) 200,000 people had to be evacuated (um, no)

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) it wasn't a call-in show.

It seem some people just want to spread utter, total, abject lies about TMI and the radiation release there over and over again.

The disc jocky then went on to hypothesize how bad it would be when a Fukishima-sized earthquake hit Piedmont Georgia. (USA Georgia, the state, that is)

I don't know where to start. Literally, zero right for the 10 minutes it took me to get to the restaurant.
 
jj said:
1) The reactor at TMI melted down (no, not even close)
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One unit did have a partial meltdown and is now permanently entombed in its own containment dome.

The other reactor at TMI is still operating and is licensed to continue until 2034.

2) Huge amounts of radiation were released because of a bad valve (err, no)
Click to expand...

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that one engineer at TMI sent his wife and kids to stay with family in Denver, Colorado when the event occurred. Due to the airplane flight and extended stay in "the Mile-High City", his wife and kids received a greater radiation dose than he did.

If the story is not true, the science behind it still is. Anyone who would have flown from Harrisburg to Denver the day of the incident and stayed a week would have received more radiation than any of TMI's on-site staff or anyone who had stayed in Harrisburg and lived their lives normally.
 
Sword_Of_Truth said:
One unit did have a partial meltdown and is now permanently entombed in its own containment dome.

The other reactor at TMI is still operating and is licensed to continue until 2034.



There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that one engineer at TMI sent his wife and kids to stay with family in Denver, Colorado when the event occurred. Due to the airplane flight and extended stay in "the Mile-High City", his wife and kids received a greater radiation dose than he did.

If the story is not true, the science behind it still is. Anyone who would have flown from Harrisburg to Denver the day of the incident and stayed a week would have received more radiation than any of TMI's on-site staff or anyone who had stayed in Harrisburg and lived their lives normally.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I know. The guy on the air claimed something more like "melted completely down", not "the top 10% of the reactor core split the zirconium casings", which is more accurate.
 
Oh, and, a Richter 9.0 earthquake in Georgia? :o
 
Well I guess it's a good thing they are designed for earthquakes even in Georgia.
 
Solitaire said:
Nah.

I'd say 7.0 to 7.5 through old rock transmission at 1000 km from New Madrid fault.

I wonder if the Appalachian Mountains probably filter out any transmission of force from earthquakes in the east.

Hm. Nope. Darn.
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The New Madrid quakes were, if I recall correctly, Mercalli 5.5 to 6. This is far off a 9.0 subduction zone earthquake with 3 meters of vertical drop at the coast, which is what happened in Japan.
 
Sword_Of_Truth said:
One unit did have a partial meltdown and is now permanently entombed in its own containment dome.
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Ummm, no. The destroyed reactor was dismantled. It took more than ten years and a billion dollars, but it was done. See, for example, http://books.google.com.au/books?id=gckmUJNYqA8C&pg=PR6&lpg=PR6&dq=book+review+%22TMI+25+Years+Later%22&source=web&ots=mdgZxF1vmM&sig=SBatOx0ysyWmOlVO5gAbG7Kxfg0&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#v=onepage&q=book%20review%20%22TMI%2025%20Years%20Later%22&f=false

or



Last word from wiki: "Today, the TMI-2 reactor is permanently shut down with the reactor coolant system drained, the radioactive water decontaminated and evaporated, radioactive waste shipped off-site, reactor fuel and core debris shipped off-site to a Department of Energy facility, and the remainder of the site being monitored. The owner says it will keep the facility in long-term, monitored storage until the operating license for the TMI-1 plant expires at which time both plants will be decommissioned.[14] In 2009, the NRC granted a license extension which means the TMI-1 reactor may operate until April 19, 2034.[89][90]"
 
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jj said:
Oh, and, a Richter 9.0 earthquake in Georgia? :o
Click to expand...

Solitaire said:
Nah.

I'd say 7.0 to 7.5 through old rock transmission at 1000 km from New Madrid fault.

I wonder if the Appalachian Mountains probably filter out any transmission of force from earthquakes in the east.

Hm. Nope. Darn.
Click to expand...


I'm as much pro-nuke as anyone here, but Charleston, SC is only about 80 miles east of Vogtle, and it does have a long history of earthquakes of intensity (Mercalli) greater than or equal to V, the largest of which was in 1866; a 7.3. Yes, that's a long way from 9.0, but ignoring that fact will only lead to a bloody nose.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/south_carolina/history.php

Personally I'm of the opinion that the containment can be built to withstand even a close by 8, but it seems a bit like tempting fate.
 
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jj said:
The New Madrid quakes were, if I recall correctly, Mercalli 5.5 to 6. This is far off a 9.0 subduction zone earthquake with 3 meters of vertical drop at the coast, which is what happened in Japan.
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Gees, guys, don't we ever check any more? The four major New Madrid quakes, between Dec 16 and Feb 7 of 1811-12, have been estimated to have been from 7.2 to 8.0 Richter. They used to be in the ranges of 8.0-8.9; I guess the USGS is reworking the data. One scientists said they were all in the 7-8 range. Yes, this is still an order of magnitude from a 9.0, but with the damage witnessed I'm really hoping (forlornly, for sure) nothing greater than a 7 ever happens there again; I'd hate to see what a 9.0 there will do, now that there are real masses of people living in the area.

Yes, the New Madrid and the Charleston quakes weren't subduction zone quakes, but that fact is only important concerning tsunamis, which is not a problem for Vogtle (as the sarcasm in this thread suggests). No, the problem here is simple destruction of foundation and superstructure, and a deep failed rift fault is just as bad, or worse, than a subduction fault. Anyone who reads about the area of the east and mid-west affected by quakes in those areas has to jitter a bit, I think.
 
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jj said:
A little bit after 8PM I was listening to KOMO AM on the way to dinner here. The DJ brought up the fact that there have been two new nuclear licenses permitted in Georgia, and then took a call from an 'expert' who said that:

1) The reactor at TMI melted down (no, not even close)
Click to expand...

No, he was right on this one. It did melt down, almost as badly as Chernobyl #4 did, but thankfully without the explosion. What a difference containment (and different engineering) makes.

2) Huge amounts of radiation were released because of a bad valve (err, no)
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Well, 13 megacuries of 90Xenon and 17 curies of 135Iodine were released, according to the Kemeny report. Xenon isn't so bad, except that after a couple of hours (half-life) it decays into 135Cesium, half-life 30 years, which is spread all over hell-and-gone and is washed into the soil. Luckily it was all finely dispersed before most of that happened.

And the problem started with a bad valve, one that had failed at least ten times before in TMI and other similar reactors. The manufacturer never fixed it, just like Douglas didn't fix the faulty cargo door design in their DC-10 jumbo until an otherwise excellent airplane died of passenger starvation.

3) 200,000 people had to be evacuated (um, no)
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Well, according to wiki, "Governor Dick Thornburgh, on the advice of NRC Chairman Joseph Hendrie, advised the evacuation 'of pregnant women and pre-school age children...within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility.' The evacuation zone was extended to a 20 mile radius on Friday March 30.[9] Within days, 140,000 people had left the area.[10][11][14] More than half of the 663,500 population[55] within the 20-mile radius remained in that area.[9] According to a survey conducted in April 1979, 98% of the evacuees had returned to their homes within three weeks.[9]"

I wouldn't give the guy 100%, and he is making hay of a bygone time and one-off occurrence, but he's not totally wrong on any of his points, either.
 
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It's my opinion - I don't really know what the rest of y'all think - that underplaying the seriousness of the accidents that have happened, and off-handedly sneering at people who bring up criticisms, is a very bad practice. As witnesses in the prosecution I call the AEC, abetted by the military, which hid, downplayed and locked up information that was vital for understanding radiation, in spite of what their own scientists said, the fore-mentioned airplane industry, and hundreds of other examples where those in charge didn't have answers but tried to fake it, or had the answers and didn't want to bear the embarrassment. I'd think we should learn from that.
 
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shadron said:
Ummm, no. The destroyed reactor was dismantled. It took more than ten years and a billion dollars, but it was done. See, for example,
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I stand corrected on the status of TMI-2. Wikipedias article on TMI doesn't mention the deconstruction and has photographs showing both containment vessels still intact as of 2010. I just assumed the damaged core would still be in there.

TMI-1 however is still operational.
 
Sword_Of_Truth said:
I stand corrected on the status of TMI-2. Wikipedias article on TMI doesn't mention the deconstruction and has photographs showing both containment vessels still intact as of 2010. I just assumed the damaged core would still be in there.

TMI-1 however is still operational.
Click to expand...

The containment vessel is still there, but it's just a shell, essentially. The reactor innards have been cleaned out and shipped away.
 
shadron said:
Gees, guys, don't we ever check any more? The four major New Madrid quakes, between Dec 16 and Feb 7 of 1811-12, have been estimated to have been from 7.2 to 8.0 Richter.
Click to expand...

We are talking about the INTENSITY IN GEORGIA, not the intensity at the epicenter.

Were you looking for an argument or what?
 
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