What, Me Worry?

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I’m sure many Vermonters have been turning the same question over in their minds that I have.  What relationship does that ominously percolating reactor at the Fukushima Dailichi plant in disaster-struck Japan have to our own little hot pot at Vermont Yankee?  As it turns out, the answer is,”quite a bit.”

Like VY, Fukushima’s troubled reactor is a BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) with a G.E. Mark 1 containment design. Also like VY, it appears to be approaching 40-years in operation.

I did a little digging and learned that there is reason for concern about the ability of the Mark 1 containment design to successfully hold up to pressure.

in 1986, Harold Denton, then the NRC’s top safety official, told an industry trade group that the”Mark I containment, especially being smaller with lower design pressure, in spite of thesuppression pool, if you look at the WASH 1400 safety study, you’ll find something like a 90%probability of that containment failing.”Some modifications have been made to U.S. Mark I reactors since 1986, although thefundamental design deficiencies remain.

The NRC, who has never met a reactor they couldn’t relicense, just yesterday signed-off on another twenty years of wear, tear and capricious management for VY.  Gives you pause, doesn’t it?

About Sue Prent

Artist/Writer/Activist living in St. Albans, Vermont with my husband since 1983. I was born in Chicago; moved to Montreal in 1969; lived there and in Berlin, W. Germany until we finally settled in St. Albans.

9 thoughts on “What, Me Worry?”

  1. Scary stuff at this point as often is the case in a crisis.

    45,000 evacuated at the first plant and very sadly Two workers were reported missing at the Daiichi plant, but the company did not explain what might have happened to them.

    Japan Orders Evacuation Near 2nd Nuclear Plant

    The problems at the facilities were described as serious but still far short of a catastrophic emergency like the partial core meltdown that occurred at the Three Mile Island plant in the United States in 1979.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03…

  2. I think I read in today’s paper (could’ve been a typo, I suppose) that the relicensing of Louisiana-Enetergy’s VY nuclear plant was actually for 30 years.

    And i heard on NPR that one of Japan’s nuclear plants needed to release some “slightly radioactive” steam because the pressure was building and there was nothing else they could “safely” do. Not very radioactive, “but you wouldn’t want to breathe it,” according to the report.

    NanuqFC

    In a Time of Universal Deceit, TELLING the TRUTH Is a Revolutionary Act. ~ George Orwell  

  3. They’re advising people to stay indoors because, you know, your house will be perfectly safe!  Now Entergy can say, hey, what’s a little tritium?

  4. http://theenergycollective.com…

    Earthquake hits, high vibration on the main turbine automatically trips the turbine by rapidly closing stop valves. Reactor automatically shuts down (scrams) all rods go in. Earthquake disrupts off site power to the plant and back up diesel generators should have started, maybe they did not. Main sources of water to the reactor are not available. If there is no pipe break off of the reactor, the pressure will slowly increase. After about an hour, a relief valve(1 of about 10) will open at about 1100 psig and drop pressure to about 1080. The steam is sent to a pool of water called a suppression pool in the containment that condenses the steam. This valve will cycle open and close every 5-10 minutes. Operators would use a small steam driven turbine (RCIC) to supply water at high pressure to the reactor under these circumstances for several hours. You can sit like this a long time, hot and at 1000 psig it’s no big deal as long as water covers the fuel in the reactor pressure vessel. If that turbine is not available, there is a larger steam driven turbine (HPCI) that supplies more water meant to provide make up if there was a pipe break.

    If neither of these systems is available, the relief valve will continue to cycle and reactor water level will slowly drop. At some point before the water level lowers to the point of uncovering the fuel, all the relief valves would be open (ADS) and pressure would be reduced to below 300 psig to allow the low pressure but high flow systems (CS & LPCI) to restore water level and cooling. These pumps however, need electricity, like from the diesel generators, to run. If things get this far but there is no injection, in US plants there are things like diesel fire pumps that can be tied in to provide alternate sources of water. I’m not sure if they are set up to do this in Japan. Without cooling, eventually the fuel temperature will exceed 2200 deg F and the clad will melt. Fission products that are highly radioactive will get dispersed into the reactor vessel. If there is a pipe break or relief valve open, those fission fragments get dispersed through containment.

  5. Every time one agency makes a decision, something happens to show how dumb that decision was.

    Policy: NRC rubber stamps VY.

    Karma: Japanese plant of similar design has problems after earthquake, has to release radioactive gas to control system.

    Policy: GOP’s budget cuts would stop tsunami warning system immediately.

    Karma: West Coast hit by tsunami.

    Policy: Rep King (NY) says there are no non-muslim terrorists.

    Karma: FBI announces arrest of non-muslim terrorist that planted real bomb on MLK day in Portland, OR.

    There are so many recently, it’s almost a pattern.

  6. All man-made disasters have one common denominator-they are due to human error. Nearly all claimed to have used state of the art equipment & standards. During TMI, NRC & industry had the audacity to claim possibility of meltdown to be next to impossible. Months before the catastrophe, they had been falsifying ‘leak data’. Sound familiar?

    And there’s this:

    (Smith) “Every nuclear power plant is built to withstand hurricanes, floods, a tornado and earthquakes. Specifically, Vermont Yankee is constructed on bed rock and can withstand an earthquake with the epicenter at Vermont Yankee of 6.5 on the Richter scale.”

    http://www.vpr.net/news_detail…

    Just last June, a mild earthquake north of Gatineau, Quebec, Canada triggered an ‘unusual event’ at VY. Traveling directions have it at 375 miles away. A geology professor refuted Smith’s claims:

    http://www.topix.com/forum/sci…

    Now we are watching a natural disaster including 54-ish reactors in an area the size of California, in map the ones in nearby South Korea can be seen:

    http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmap…

    http://www.japannuclear.com/nu…  

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