The case for hardened dry casks
Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts held a press conference Thursday calling for the 32 nuclear plants that store excessive amounts of spent nuclear fuel in vulnerable elevated pools - one of which is Oyster Creek - to off-load it into hardened dry-storage casks. Doing so would dramatically reduce the risk of terrorist attack. Five members of Congress were present at the news conference, representing three states - New York, Nevada and Massachusetts. It's unfortunate no one was there from New Jersey.
The press conference included a Power Point presentation spelling out the case for taking action. View it here: http://www.nukebusters.org/uploads/media/Spent_Fuel_Presentation.pps
The press conference included a Power Point presentation spelling out the case for taking action. View it here: http://www.nukebusters.org/uploads/media/Spent_Fuel_Presentation.pps
posted by Randy Bergmann at 7:05 PM
4 Comments:
The so-called "spent" fuel pool at Oyster Creek, has roughly 500 metric tons of highly radioactive and thermally hot used reactor fuel densely packed in racks under forty feet of water in a pool elevated six to ten stories up on top of the reactor building outside the reactor containment system. In a pre-911 NRC report publicly released in January 2001 technical report, the staff concluded that on three sides of the building there are "no significant structures to prevent aircraft penetration" of the spent fuel pool.
The combination of aircraft pentration, explosion and fire of the nuclear waste pool would likely drain down or empty out the cooling water. The used nuclear fuel would self ignite and burn from one tightly packed assembly to the next until the entire inventory could be involved in an intensely hot and radioactive fire outside containment.
NRC and AmerGen currently choose to ignore this incredibly vulnerable situation given the Nationally Academy of Sciences in another publicly released report April 2005 identified that the inextinguishable fire that would loft enough radioactive fallout to cause tens of thousands of cancer fatalities out hundreds of miles.
Now five years after the attacks of 911, it is absolutely irresponsible to tolerate this vulnerability any longer in view of the broadening war in the Middle East and the threat of domestic strikes here in the United States.
In my view, the most relevant immediate action for the interim is to get the radioactive waste in the elevated storage pool into robust compartmentalized onsite structures that have been qualified as fortifications against attack by aircraft, rockets and improvised explosive devices. The next step is halt the production of nuclear waste at Oyster Creek thereby taking the initial step to completely empty out the vulnerable fuel pool structure.
Paul Gunter, Director
Reactor Watchdog Project
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
6930 Carroll Avenue Suite 340
Takoma Park, MD 20912
301 495 3971
Congressman Markey? Every idea that liberal has ever had involves a bigger government taking more money out of my pocket. Forgive me for ignoring his latest thoughts.
Mr. Gunter has been asking terrorists to attack nuclear power plants for many years. That is because his agenda demands an energy-starved nation and he cares little for whomever might be hurt in his crusade.
However even demented terrorists are a bit more rational then Mr. Gunter. They know that they would fail in an attack on a nuclear power plant and they have plenty of tall building left to attack that are completely undefended and filled with people who they can kill.
Of course Markey is on board with the destruction of America. If Markey were just a tad honest, he would admit that the spent fuel is where it is today because and his allies have worked continiously to prevent the fuel from being moved to Yucca Mountain or Skull Valley. If Markey and his allies would have been honest, the fuel would have been safely stored in Yucca Mountain years ago. If they would have been a little less dishonest, it would be on its way to Skull Valley tomorrow.
As for Mr. Kosloff's comments, my source on Oyster Creek's vulnerable to aircraft attack is a matter of publicly available documents generated by NRC that were available on the internet up to 911. In fact, you can still get that document through the NRC website.
Perhaps Mr. Kosloff would also question the motives of the 911 Commission Report for its investigation turning up al Qaeda's original plan to hijack ten aircraft with two nuclear power stations among their targets. Oh, maybe al Qaeda's plan would better have been kept a secret from the American people, as well. As they say, "Ignorance is bliss," right, Don?
But let's not stop there? Perhaps, Mr. Kosloff would also like to blame the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, for publicly exposing in its April 2006 report that NRC staff, informed by military intelligence, recommended that defenses be raised around target sets at US nuclear power stations to defend against common battlefield weapons that are being used against US military forces in Iraq and Afganistan. According to the congressional transcript, the staff's informed judgement for defenses against on two specific weapons was denied after the Commissioners vetted their recommendation through the Nuclear Energy Institute (the nuclear industry lobbyist) who said that such defenses would be "prohibitively expensive." As GAO pointed out in its testimony before Congressman Christopher Shay's ( a Connecticut Republican)subcommittee on emerging threats, these same weapons are easily smuggled over American borders. It appears that some,perhaps Mr. Kosloff among them, have more loyalty to defending company profit margins than raising realistic security margins around these pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction.
As for Yucca Mountain, this is akin to political mugging more than it is a scientific process. Surrounded by the Lathrop Wells cinder cones, some of the youngest volcanoes in North America and criss-crossed by earthquake faults, this site is never going to be licensed as the projected licensing date just keeps slip sliding away.
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