[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
Embankment, rolled-earth and chalk-fill, the kind of dams that can fail, and fail in a catastrophic manner. Check the wiki articles on them. It’s not a secret.
[/QUOTE]
Any kind of dam can fail. Do you have any evidence that any of the dams upstream to the nuclear plant are in imminent danger of failing or are inherently unsafe/unstable? That was the actual question I was asking for a cite on.
Why yes…I already knew that they hadn’t released the water as a lark or for the hell of it. However, your cite doesn’t show either that any of the upstream dams are in danger of failing or that earthen dams are inherently unsafe.
Well, if they save don’t the dams (6 of them) by flooding everybody downriver, (even if it means fucking up a couple of reactors), the dam will fail, so it’s not like they have any choice. They have to save the dams. If the first one goes they all go. Then everything goes. All the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
The really and truly serious problem is, even if the engineers say, “Hey, this dam is starting to fail, we have maybe a couple of days at best”, everybody can evacuate. People might even have time to grab shit and valuables and get out of the way. But even if they tell the nuclear people they have a month to clear out, there is no way to make the nuclear plant safe. The essential problem is made clear.
Even if you give them 2 months warning, say they have two months to get the fuel out of the plant before it will be destroyed, they can’t do it. The plant is already flooded, and even with perfect conditions they have no way to simply load up the 6,000 tons of highly radioactive fuel rods and move them.
I’m really really praying for a miracle, and that the worst flooding in history, which is happening right now, I really pray it doesn’t take out the reactors. From what I am reading in the reports today, it’s going to be touch and go. The good news is levees all over the place are failing and the water is spreading out, rather than rushing down river. It’s no doubt it is going to be the worst flood in that area ever, but as long as they can save the nuclear plants, it will be forgotten.
As Arnold Gundersen said, nuclear power plants and sand bags aren’t things you should hear in the same sentence. I’ve heard this is the worst flooding in 40 years. Well, 40 years isn’t exactly the Pleistocene, now is it? Just like Fukushima, the builders have had ample foreknowledge and time to prepare for exactly this scenario, but it wasn’t in the budget and was apparently hand waved away as an “acceptable loss” if it did. Most likely, it was simply scoffed at as “inconceivable!”
We don’t need a massive radiation release for these things to get broke, and stay broke, at huge taxpayer cost.
How’s Minot’s nuclear ICBMs doing? I’ve been there, way back in my arms-control days in the military. They’re designed to get a little wet of course, and my faith in the military’s ability to protect their nuclear toys is far greater than any faith I have in civilian profit-motivated safely preparedness. Still, things get expensive fast when it comes to nuke.
It’s trivially easy to see, and photograph in detail, just about anything you want from considerably higher than 3500 feet. The US military regularly photographs and targets precision weapons from a lot higher than that. The flight restrictions are not intended to hide anything. Unless the authorities who decided on that minimum altitude are idiots.
Why did Cecil omit nuclear fusion? It’s not for cars, of course, but it does not produce any radioactive byproducts and it’s virtually limitless. The only problems are getting to a few dozen million degrees and containment
Fort Calhoun nuclear plant has had a berm collapse. external power was cut off, emergency generators are now doing the shutdown reactor and spent fuel cooling.
It’s amusing how every single article about this has the same quote about the berm. “That was an additional layer of protection we put in,” says the power company spokesman.
That’s supposed to make people feel better? Dudes, it collapsed.
This article claims the flooding is the result of a change of Corp of Engineers policy away from their flood control mission and trying to revert the river to it’s natural state so they didn’t drain down the river during the winter in order to create a spring pulse. In short, this flood was an easy to anticipate consequence of the CoE environmental policies.
You forgot the smiley face. Right now fusion power is just another kind of unobtainium. It is possible that we might achieve a sustained fusion reaction is a few decades, but we have no idea how build a fusion reactor that isn’t many times more expensive than a fission reactor. The part about radioactive byproducts is also imaginary. You fling neutrons around and you will have radioactive isotopes generated.
Here’s an excellent little article The Truth About Nuclear Power about Koide Hiroaki, nuclear engineer, outspoken critic of nuclear energy and now important voice in Japanese media.
Among other things, Hiroaki shows what a limited resource uranium is, and then bursts the fast breeder reactor (FBR) myth of virtually limitless energy.
It is never going to happen. It can never happen. I love this part:
Then,
Then he goes on to talk about Fukushima and how not only would TEPCO going bankrupt many times over still not cover the damage, but that Japan itself going bankrupt might not be able to pay the real, long-term costs of Fukushima.
And we want to build thousands of these things all over the earth?