Earlier, we posted a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s “Creep”. Today, we came across (via Dangerous Minds) a different children’s choir version of “Creep,” this time, with video from the life of Charlie Brown.
So, rising floodwaters in Nebraska have completely surrounded two nuclear power plants. But, hey, don’t worry! The plant at Fort Calhoun Station (a full 19 miles from Omaha – stay put, Warren Buffet!) has been in “cold shutdown” since April. The plant’s managers decided not to restart the nuclear chain reaction, given the impending floods.
Of course, they did have a “small fire” that…well, actually, it only knocked out the cooling water pumps in the “spent fuel” storage pool for 90 minutes, during which time the temperature in the pool rose “a few degrees.” But, hey, at that rate of temperature increase, it would’ve taken days (well, 88 hours) for the water in the pool to start boiling away. What happens then? The fuel melts… it oxidizes… it can catch fire and spread radioactive materials over a large area.
But, don’t panic! How could a nuclear plant possibly lose all of its power? I mean, they have grid power and backup generators, right? How could the grid connection fail? (Certainly not due to a massive regional flood!) How could the diesel generators fail? (Certainly not due to being submerged by the aforementioned flood!) After all, the operators of Fort Calhoun have planned ahead! They installed a giant rubber innertube around the plant to hold back the waters:
[Plant spokesman] Gates said an Aqua Dam currently protects the switchyard and substation at Fort Calhoun, tall enough to withstand floodwaters at a 1,010 elevation (the river level is currently at an elevation of 1,005 feet, 7 inches).
[Source: OPPD: Nuclear station “safe and will continue to be safe”, The Washington County Pilot-Tribune and Enterprise, June 17, 2011]
How could the river rise another four feet, five inches? I mean, it’s not like the levees and dams upstream are stressed and starting to breach? It’s not like it might rain any more than it already has…
Perhaps the most significant impact of the [June 20] storm was the large area of 1 – 4 inches of rain it dropped on Nebraska and South Dakota. This rain will run off into the Missouri River, further aggravating the flooding that has breached two levees and overtopped two other levees in the past week. The large, slow-moving low pressure system responsible for the rains and severe weather will bring additional heavy rains of 1 – 3 inches over portions of the Missouri River watershed today [June 21], and will touch off a new round of severe weather today and Wednesday as the storm progresses slowly eastwards.
[Source: Jeff Masters, Ph.D., founder and chief meteorologist of the Weather Underground, Inc.]
Well, the good thing is that nuclear plants in the United States are designed with extremely conservative assumptions, so there’s a very high margin of safety! Oh, and also… even for plants that were built 37 years ago, like the Cooper Nuclear Station, just downstream from Fort Calhoun (and also inundated with floodwaters), they’re subject to constant inspections and tough regulations!
Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes — all of these and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in the AP’s yearlong investigation. And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident.
Yet despite the many problems linked to aging, not a single official body in government or industry has studied the overall frequency and potential impact on safety of such breakdowns in recent years, even as the NRC has extended the licenses of dozens of reactors.
[…]
Records show a recurring pattern: Reactor parts or systems fall out of compliance with the rules. Studies are conducted by the industry and government, and all agree that existing standards are “unnecessarily conservative.”
Regulations are loosened, and the reactors are back in compliance.
[Source: “U.S. nuke regulators weaken safety rules,” by the Associated Press, June 20, 2011]
As Harry Shearer says, “Safe! Clean! Too cheap to meter! Our friend, the atom.”
Imagine a “station blackout” occurs at the Pilgrim Nuclear Generation Station in Plymouth, MA. Within days, a hydrogen explosion shatters the secondary containment building, possibly breaching primary containment as well. The government orders a mandatory evacuation for areas within 20 km of the plant, but the BBC World Service is saying that the British government has advised their citizens not to travel within 50 miles of Plymouth.
This catastrophe at Plymouth (or Seabrook, or Vermont Yankee, or Millstone in Connecticut) hasn’t happened…yet. But the notion that “it can’t happen here” has taken quite a beating over the last month. If and when a disaster like this strikes, we’ll have hours to evacuate. Think for a moment what it would take to evacuate just the inner “exclusion zone” around one of these reactors. Where are we going to put all the people from Brockton, Plymouth, Taunton, Fall River, Buzzards Bay, Sandwich…? And what about the more than a million people that live within 50 miles? Remember that, even now, the US government is advising Americans not to travel within 50 miles of Fukushima, a month after the crisis began. How can we avoid travel to the entire Boston metro area?
Of course, Pilgrim only has one reactor, where Fukushima Daiichi has six. On the other hand, Pilgrim has more than TWO MILLION POUNDS of radioactive spent fuel assemblies stored on site. A loss of coolant water in the tightly-packed spent fuel pool at Plymouth – which has far less containment, and far more fuel, than the reactor core – could quickly lead to a fire and a massive excursion of radioactive isotopes of cesium, strontium, iodine, and others. An explosion could spread deadly plutonium and uranium particles for miles (as happened at Fukushima). In other words, even with fewer reactors, a station blackout at Plymouth could have worse radiological consequences than the ongoing disaster in Japan.
The reactor at Plymouth is a General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor, the same design and vintage of the “troubled” reactors in Japan. Of course, America’s Nuclear Industry and Regulators (is there a difference?) are quick to point out that American reactors have strict safety standards and have been upgraded and so on. Ask them about the spent fuel pools. Ask them how long they can run the pumps to maintain sufficient cooling in the event of a station blackout (whatever the cause). Ask them the consequences of allowing the operator to store 2,918 spent fuel assemblies in a pool that was designed and originally licensed to hold just 880 assemblies.
Of course, the spokesman for Vermont Yankee is quick to assure us, “We believe pools are perfectly safe. It was designed to be safe and there are redundant systems so there is never a loss of coolant.” Indeed. For some reason, those fools in Japan neglected to design their pools to be safe, and that’s why they suffered a complete loss of coolant and melting of the fuel rods in the spent fuel pool. Silly Japanese!
Here’s a fun fact about Libya: every one of the more than 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched at Libya was embossed with the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama! As John Pilger says, he’s America’s “First Black President to invade Africa.”
Stay tuned for more fun facts!
Today, the U.S. government is on the verge of “shutting down” over a budget impasse in the Congress. Republicans are insisting that massive spending cuts are required to avert disaster. Just today, Illinois Republican Representative Judy Biggert said, “We’re facing an economic disaster. We have to cut the spending.”
But during the Bush era, Republicans were singing a very different tune. After the 2004 elections, Dick Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved: deficits don’t matter” (according to then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill). Whether or not Cheney actually said those exact words, that’s certainly how the Cheney-Bush administration behaved:
During his eight years in office, President Bush oversaw a large increase in government spending. In fact, President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ. In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent.
During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton. Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 11 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 104 percent.
[source: Spending Under President George W. Bush, Veronique de Rugy, George Mason University.]
Conservative commentators must have been outraged, right? After all, deficit spending is mortgaging our children’s future!
Turns out, not so much. Here’s the tune that the Weekly Standard was singing back in 2005:
WHEN DICK CHENEY SAID, “Deficits don’t matter,” economists took that as proof of the economic illiteracy of the Bush administration. But it turns out there is a case to be made that Cheney was onto something.
On the deepest level, the vice president was echoing, in slightly exaggerated form, an idea put forward a few years ago by Irving Kristol, the Godfather of the neoconservatives who have had such a wide-ranging effect on Bush administration policy. Kristol wrote then, and still believes, that “We should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse.”
[…]
The deficits that Bush ran up in the years in which the country was teetering on the verge of a serious recession had the beneficial effect of righting the economy. In that sense, deficits not only didn’t matter, but were a force for economic good.
[source: Do Deficits Matter?, Irwin M. Stelzer, Hudson Institute]
Something has changed in the last five years, however. For some reason… can’t quite put my finger on it… but for some reason, Republicans now fear the DOOM of deficit spending:
“There’s no daylight between the Tea Party and me. What they want is they want us to cut spending. They want us to deal with this crushing debt that’s going to crush the future for our kids and grandkids. There’s no daylight there.”
[Source: John Boehner talking to ABC’s George Stephanopolous on April 7]
I wonder if having a Democrat in the White House could possibly have anything to do with their objections?
And besides… if they’re so worried about improving the government’s balance sheet, maybe they could do something about this:
General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
[Source: tG.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether, New York Times, March 24, 2011]
Nah. The Republicans would much rather shut down essential government services, fire public employees, and ensure that poor people become even more desperate for any crumbs the rich may throw their way.
In fact… isn’t that the GOP’s 2012 campaign platform?
[S]ince 1993 [Omar] Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.
Pedro M Cruz’s visual history of European empires of the 19th and 20th centuries:
Built in Processing. More on the project HERE.
Spotted this track in the background of the trailer for the new movie about Facebook, and had to buy it immediately! It’s a young women’s choir called Scala performing Radiohead’s “Creep.” You want to listen to this, trust me.
[audio:http://www.noiselabs.com/blog/audio/scala_creep.mp3|titles=Creep|artists=Scala]
Lawrence Yang documents the obvious problem with Verizon’s $100 million integrated ad campaign for the Google/Droid phone. He was inspired by Nancy Friedman, who is a delight to read.
(Be sure also to read Nancy’s linked discussion of anthimeria, which is, loosely speaking, when someone verbs a noun.)
(Below: the actual $100 million ad campaign.)
The government of Israel agreed to sell nuclear-armed Jericho missiles to the apartheid South African government in 1974.
London’s Guardian revealed on Sunday evidence that Shimon Peres signed a top-secret agreement with P. W. Botha to sell to South Africa the long-range Jericho nuclear missiles and warheads. Both men were the Defense Ministers of their respective nations, and each would later become head of state. Peres and the Israeli government deny that such an agreement ever existed. Ultimately, South Africa chose not to purchase the missiles from Israel, and later developed its own nuclear weapons. (The musical satirist Tom Lehrer joked in 1967 of their nuclear ambitions, “South Africa wants two – that’s right! – one for the black and one for the white!”)
Adding yet another layer of painful irony, in a letter to South Africa’s Secretary for Information in 1974, Shimon Peres wrote,
“This cooperation is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it.“
Indeed, one can only imagine “the unshakeable foundations of common hatred (…)” that Israel and apartheid South Africa shared.
And so it goes.