[Update: Published with minor edits in the Portland Press Herald on Thursday, September 30th, 2004.]
The Portland Press Herald ran a major, but unsigned editorial yesterday -- in favor of nuclear power. It was titled "It would be worthwhile to develop nuclear power again" and subtitled "Political failures made Maine Yankee too risky for its owners, and those risks persist today". In it the editorial board argue that:
The one drawback to nuclear power, and it is a significant one, is finding an appropriate means to dispose of the radioactive waste generated by the plants. Such disposal can be carried out with minimal risk to people and the environment, but not without risk to politicians.
The editorial board errs. There are more drawbacks to the use of fission reactors for the generation of electricity than management of spent fuel loads. The literature on the subject, scientific, technical, policy and polemic, is substantial.
The editorial board errs too in representing risk as a social construct. Risk is the aggregation of physical events -- the certainties of metal corrosion and fatigue, plastic and cement aging, variations of human behavior, and the probabilities of relay failure, process logic failure, computer failure, grid failure, earthquake, fire, flood, ice, war, sabotage, and again variations of human behavior.
Least this seem hypothetical, the Equinix Ashburn F facility, a recent "five 9s" datacom build-out in the Chantilly/Dulles area just outside of Washington D.C., lost HVAC due to a tornado, and a day later that area was still without power. EQUINIX Ashburn F has 40,000 gallons of fuel on site, with a 500 gallon an hour burn rate, trucks coming with fuel, and ETA Of midnight (last night) for the critical grid transformer repair. HVAC was restored soon after the grid transformer failure event, preventing
wide-spread failure of the customer equipment (co-located data facilities for many WDC-area public agencies and businesses) due to overheating. [Update:1024x768 pixel jpeg of a an unidentified commercial data center in Virginia damaged by a tornado.]
EQUINIX Ashburn F, a modern "five 9s" node on the internet, with more datacom gear than exists in all of northern New England, came within some part of an hour of heat death, due to failure of the HVAC system, due to a power transient event, due to a transformer failure, due to line damage,
due to a tornado, due to a hurricane. The National Finance Center (NFC) in New Orleans shutdown due to Hurricane Ivan. That stopped all loan processing, withdrawals and fund transfers in the Federal 401(k) financial network, all payroll processing for the Department of Agriculture, and all records access for the Federal Thrift Savings Plan. In 1998 the NFC and the General Services Administration setup a model technology disaster recovery service, with the backup center for the NFC in Cumberland, MD. Ivan got the secondary center in Maryland the day after the NFC primary in Louisiana went dark.
Discourse about physics, engineering, and human behavior in the context of crisis management is socially constructed, but the discourse is not the ongoing, or the immanent, chains of causation.
The editorial board of any newspaper can indulge in writing about the world as if writing were the world, just as legislatures have legislated against snowfall, but reason is not a substitute for reality. Starting from the conclusion of "Nukes? Thanks!" to discover that waste stream safety is a solved problem is ... frivolous. Like the Bush regime's rational for, and ongoing sitreps of, its war in Iraq.
Familiarity with "Standard Format and Content of Safety Analysis Reports for Nuclear Power Plants" is not optional. Nostalgic prosody to accompany photos of the explosive demolition of a Stone and Webster containment dome that housed a Combustion Engineering 860 MWe PWR that was shutdown in 1972 is not sufficient.
Now there are fuel loads that it would be prudent to burn -- downblends from weapons-grade enriched uranium, but not because burning downblend is "safe", it is simply "safer" than failing to decrement the global accumulation of uranium enriched above the 5.5% threshold.
See you on the slab!
Posted by EBW at September 19, 2004 09:23 PM | TrackBackWe do have to burn off the weapons overhang if we want to get rid of it, don't we? Three-fourths of Pu239 winds up as equally weapons-ready U235, with a half-life of 700 million years.
The only good reason I know for continuing to operate reactors is to destroy our stockpile of weaponry.
That being said, that stuff's still less likely to kill you or me than the SUV next door.
Posted by: bad Jim at September 20, 2004 05:50 AMAn interesting post. I agree with much, in particular the implied point that analysis of risk is multivariate and complex.
I don't understand either comment in the paragraph:
"Familiarity with "Standard Format and Content of Safety Analysis Reports for Nuclear Power Plants" is not optional. Nostalgic prosody to accompany photos of the explosive demolition of a Stone and Webster containment dome that housed a Combustion Engineering 860 MWe PWR that was shutdown in 1972 is not sufficient."
Can you fill in some of the background I'm lacking such as what is the content of "Standard Format..." and what happened wrt the containment dome in question?
The decom of Maine Yankee reached the point on Friday that the piers under the dome were shot, dropping the dome (intact). Non-explosive demo follows.
See http://www.insc.anl.gov/plants/nrcrgf.php for the first part of your question.
Thanks for the question. I need to ask the PPH if they'll run the piece.
Posted by: Eric at September 21, 2004 05:28 AM