Reminder-they're blowing up the cooling tower at Trojan nuke plant Sunday

[LiviaOlivia]

Countdown to Sunday May. 21, 2006 7 AM sharp (Pacific Daylight Time)

http://laughingsquid.com/2006/05/11/trojan-nuclear-power-plant-demolition/
(more great pics and info)

http://laughingsquid.com.nyud.net:8090/wp-content/uploads/trojan_nuke.jpg

from the AP

RAINIER, Ore. - One of Oregon's most recognizable and controversial landmarks is about to collapse in a cloud of dust. Portland General Electric Co. plans to implode the massive cooling tower on Sunday at its defunct Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, northwest of Portland.

The 499-foot tower will be reduced to a 41,000-ton pile of rubble by about 2,000 pounds of explosives. It was Oregon's first and only nuclear power plant.

"The nuclear history in Oregon is a troubled one at best," said David Stewart-Smith, retired assistant director for the Oregon Department of Energy. "It started off as the new and exciting technology but didn't pan out very well."

Trojan opened in 1976 and was beset by problems until it closed in 1993.

The plant was built near a geological fault in the Columbia River in the '70s. In 1989, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined PGE for debris in two sumps that could have prevented its emergency core-cooling system from working in a disaster.

~snip~

from the power company:

Trojan Demolition
Cooling tower implosion details

The 499-foot cooling tower is scheduled to be imploded on May 21, 2006. PGE has chosen a contractor, Controlled Demolition Inc. (CDI), which has safely imploded a number of large structures, including the Kingdome in Seattle. Every demolition bid proposal PGE received recommended implosion of the tower as the safest demolition method with the least community and environmental impact. The Trojan cooling tower is made of concrete and steel and contains no hazardous materials. It never contained any radioactive material, and all asbestos has been removed.

CDI is obtaining all necessary permits and coordinating the event with local, state and federal agencies. There will be short-term closures of the nearby river, roads, railway and air space, immediately prior to and during the implosion.

To implode the tower, CDI will place explosives in the lower half of the tower which, when detonated, will cause the tower to fall into itself. Debris will be contained almost entirely within the tower's footprint. The implosion, from the first detonation of explosives to the settling of the tower, will take between eight and 15 seconds. After the tower is imploded, the concrete will be crushed to three-inch pieces or smaller and left on site. The steel will be recycled.

Minimal public impact is expected as a result of the implosion. Ground vibration will be imperceptible. Noise levels will be equal to or less than that of a summer thunderstorm or a typical fireworks display. While dust will be created, the majority of it will quickly dissipate. Fine particles may travel downwind and if so, would appear as a fine layer of dust.

The best place to watch the implosion will be on television. Portland television stations plan to carry it live. Public viewing areas may be difficult to find, and traffic will be held up at several points before and during the time of the implosion.

[uppityperson]

1. Thanks, I missed this.

[MissB]

2. It starts at 6 am, though the actual explosion is supposed to be at around

7 am.

They have some pretty serious exclusion zones. Within the 1/2 mile radius, only the media and the explosive people (and police, one would assume) are allowed in. There is also a one mile zone, but I didn't catch what that was. Maybe limited in/out?

The river is closed for a five mile stretch. Entering it during the exclusion time could result in a $32k fine.

oregonlive.com and katu.com are usually decent local sites.

[LiviaOlivia]

4. Thanks missb

op updated. :)

[NNadir]

3. That's too bad.

I wish they'd found a way to fix the plant's problems and keep it open.

It would never have been as dangerous as the coal facility that has probably replaced it.

[LiviaOlivia]

5. How do "they" fix a geological fault ?

didn't know that was possible.

[NNadir]

6. You do not need to "fix" the fault.

What is often missed in conversations about energy is risk comparison.

Every coal plant costs lives when it operates normally. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand only cost lives when they fail.

Thus one determines an expectation value, which is the maximized consequences of loss of life vs the probability of that loss of life.

Nuclear power plants operate in earthquake zones all over the world, most notably in Japan. It is impossible to assert that an earthquake at a nuclear plant will never result in a loss of life owing to an earthquake, but it is also very, very, very clear that a loss of life from normal coal operations is a certainty.

People feel mystical about the nuclear power plant, but they are being irrational. The actual events do not back up the fear.

These claims of mine are measurable and quantifiable, since many tens of thousands of reactor-years have been accumulated, with just one fatal accident event, an event that occurred in a type of nuclear reactor that was rare and was operated under extreme conditions.

The comparison is found here: www.externe.info. If one looks through the "results" links, one can see that nuclear power is easily among the safest forms of energy in the world. Coal, oil and natural gas are more dangerous by orders of magnitude. Simply because people ignore the danger associated with fossil fuels, does not improve the actual loss of life connected with these fuels.

I care about global climate change. If I lived in Oregon, I would be very sad (and a little frightened) by the decision to shut this plant prematurely. It is a loss for the human race.

[gratuitous]

11. The plant is on a geological fault line

It's also right on the Columbia River. A radioactive leak or an earthquake would foul the main waterway in the Pacific Northwest. It's also in sight of an active volcano, Mt. St. Helens. While the Trojan plan had only minor "incidents" during its brief useful life (it hasn't generated one kilowatt hour of electricity for over a decade), the cost to Northwest ratepayers has been sucked out of our pockets for the last 30 years, and the costs of de-commissioning and storage of the radioactive fuel rods will be with us for the rest of my life.

Portland General Electric, the local utility, has done a sterling job of passing along its costs associated with Trojan to the ratepayers and spending decadent sums of money to defeat any citizen initiatives to make the company pay for its mistake in building the plant. While it was a subsidiary of Enron, PGE also had the ingenious idea of collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and state taxes, then running them through their Houston headquarters, and voila! their tax burden disappeared, and so did all the tax money they collected, offset by paper losses in other Enron divisions. Hundreds of millions of tax dollars collected, zero made it to state or federal treasuries.

The plant has been shuttered for years, remaining a burden on local ratepayers' electric bills. It was not closed "prematurely." It is not a loss to anyone, except some know-nothing kooks who still haven't come up with a workable idea for what to do with leftover pollution of a nuclear power plant: The spent fuel rods, which will remain lethally radioactive for thousands of years.

[NNadir]

16. Speaking of "kooks"....

Do you know of any kooks who have come up with a workable "practiced" idea for what to do with the pollution left over from a coal fired power plant? Here are some of the toxic and extremely dangerous compounds from coal plants that no one knows what to do with: Carbon dioxide, number 1 - since it threatens all of humanity, (Number 2 Mercury - which has poisoned most of our sea food) number 3, coal ash which destroys rivers and water supplies = 75 miles of the Big Sandy River were completely destroyed a few years ago by a coal ash impoundments. In fact coal pollution doesn't remain highly toxic for a few thousand years. It remains toxic forever.

You would never dream of posting a thread about the Big Sandy River, nor do you really have a clue about the seriousness or magnitude of global climate change. I'll bet you have never dreamed of the impact of coal ash - which by the way, often contains uranium and thorium and is, in fact, radioactive.

Since you are claiming that it is kooky to not worry about spent fuel rods, maybe you can name just one person in the United States - ONE - a number greater than ZERO - who has been killed by the storage of a spent fuel rod. Unless you can do that, I would like to suggest the description of spent fuel rods as "lethal" is a kooky hallucination.

As for fault lines, maybe you can also list with thousands of nuclear reactor years of operations - many in geologically active areas, how many people have been killed by nuclear reactor leaks resulting from have killed as many people as will die in New York City next year from air pollution.

Next you will show us that the risk associated with any earthquake near a nuclear power plant anywhere on earth will compare with submerging the nation of Bangladesh under the sea with 110,000,000 people in it.

There is no doubt that the Trojan nuclear power plant was poorly operated, but the fact is that not fixing it was far more dangerous to the environment than fixing it would have been.

You offer the rote response, which is clearly not thought out, you have no data whatsoever to support the loaded words you use like "lethal" and "kooky."

Let me tell you something. If there is anything at all in this very kooky country, inhabited by dogma spouting luddites and anti-science mystics, that is really kooky, it is the idea that nuclear power could ever be as dangerous as what is now happening connected with global climate change. For some reason the distracted and scientifically illiterate American population think energy should be risk and cost free. There is NO such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy, and that energy is nuclear energy.

If one looks at figure number 9 in this technical report:

http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf

one can easily see how "kooky" the idea that nuclear power is unacceptably dangerous is.

It is ignorance, not things like the Trojan NPP that is dangerous.

[gratuitous]

18. Sell it to the folks at Chernobyl

Nice try. As long as you draw your lines very carefully, you can never go too far wrong from the kook line.

It's pretty clear that you don't have a clue what you're talking about when it comes to power generation in the Pacific Northwest, and your overwrought hyperbole and desire to talk about anything except the history of Trojan show that. Right now, in addition to the storage at Trojan, we're also having to deal with the prospect of fouling a much longer segment of the Columbia thanks to the short-sighted placement of the nuclear reservation a couple of hundred miles upstream at Hanford. When the radioactive materials buried there leach into the groundwater and the Columbia's flow, pilots flying in from points east at night will at least have the advantage of following the green glow of a dying river to guide them to Portland International Airport.

All thanks to our pal, nuclear power: The gift that keeps on giving. For thousands of years.

[Name removed]

19. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Warren DeMontague]

14. The human race now? Or the human race 100,000 years from now?

When some of the by-products of today's nuclear power will still be deadly?

Look, I'm no neo-luddite. I think we need to look aggressively at ALL possible solutions to the energy and environmental crisis upon us. I wouldn't say nuclear couldn't ever be a part of that, but we sure as shit need to do a better job of figuring out what to do with the waste and how to keep everything safe.

(I, personally, wouldn't put having a nuclear plant sitting directly on a fault line under the "safe" category.)

More of the same, whether it's in terms of fossil fuel dependence or the technological answers of 30-50 years ago, isn't gonna cut it. I think we should be plowing a shitload more money into cutting edge research (where to find it? The Military-Industrial complex and the drug war would be two good places to start) into all different kinds of answers. Solar. Wind. Tidal. Fusion. Fission, if appropriate. Shit, cover the moon with solar panels and beam the power back to earth via microwaves.

But I don't agree with you that the decomissioning of this nuclear power plant is a bad thing, particularly when it's on a fault line. We need some new answers, and this is an old one.

[NNadir]

17. I'll ask you what I'll asked the other person and every person who raises

this point about so called "nuclear waste."

Why is so called "nuclear waste" special? Can you name one person who has been injured by its storage in the United States? One? Do you know what to do with coal waste? Carbon dioxide? What about petroleum waste. I will submit that many of these wastes are eternal. Coal strip mines will be leaching sulfuric acid probably for the rest of human history.

It is well known on the other hand, that nuclear fission products come into equilibrium, as will any substance that decomposes at the same time as it is created. While it is true that nuclear power plants increase radioactivity the effect is temporary. It is well known by any one with the technical ability to look into the matter, that after 1000 years of operation of an actinide nuclear fuel recycling technology, the radioactivity of the earth will be reduced with respect to uranium and thorium ores.

As for the comments about 40 or 50 years, maybe you can comment on what you mean by that. As reported in the scientific journal Ind. Chem Eng. Res., a publication of the American Chemical Society in a series of 15 scientific papers, there are at least some ways to potentially make the supply of nuclear energy close to infinite. I will just cite one paper, since one can use the references therein to find hundreds of other such papers: Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2000, 39, 2910-2915 by bootstrapping through the references.

The external cost of solar is higher than the external cost of nuclear energy. Nobody notices the external cost of solar energy because, even after 50 years of research, solar energy has yet to produce a single exajoule of energy. (The world uses 440 exajoules.)

http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf

Moreover solar energy cannot compete with coal, since it is intermittant. Building energy storage systems involves increasing the external cost of energy and threatening humanity even more.

If you will look at my journal, you will see the energy flow chart which gives an eye to the scale of things. If you think there is time on our hands to embrace everyone's pet fantasies about renewable energy (which is generally fairly dangerous except for wind power), you're not cutting it.

Speaking as a human who breathes the air, who depends on the climate for food, who cares about the third world - which is even more dependent - I wish they had fixed the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant. Of course there was some tiny risks connected with doing that, but they do not compare in any way with the vast, incredible, almost unimaginable risks of fossil fuels.

Personally I would love to have the 50% of the electricity provided by means other than nuclear in my state, New Jersey, provided by nuclear power. I would be thrilled if more nuclear power plants were announced here. I would be proud and happy to have one in my town.

[jpak]

21. Please, tell us how uranium is extacted by in situ leaching

(clue: that's where they inject sulfuric acid into the ground to extract uranium)

http://www.wise-uranium.org/uisl.html

pot meet kettle...

[NV Whino]

7. Don't try to argue with this dude

he has blinders on.

[LiviaOlivia]

8. smile

:) I know.

[NNadir]

24. You can't argue with me, because you have no insight.

Sometimes when I look at the absurd crap that passes for environmental awareness in this country, duh dude, I am acutely aware of how it is that the catastrophe is upon us.

Neither you nor her are aware of even the simplest concepts of risk analysis, and so you appeal to the child like option of covering your ears and shouting "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I can't hear you!"

Eventually all people who are high must come down. Maybe at that point you will have barely enough lucidity to recognize that you are getting what you deserve. It is probably too much to hope however that you will ever have a remote concept of what blinders are.

[bananas]

9. Those pics are great!

Looks like it was operated by the Swiss family Robinson!

[MADem]

20. LOST IN SPACE, more like!!!!!!!

The OTHER Robinson family!!! DANGER, Will Robinson, DANGER!!!!

[Kailassa]

10. So CDI are bringing this massive chimney down.

The Loizeaux Family of Controlled Demolition, Inc., has pioneered the process of implosion whereby explosive charges are placed at strategic positions within a building's frame, weakening the structure and allowing it to fall in on itself. Elaborate planning and engineering precision are required to bring down these massive structures without disturbing the surrounding buildings, and with thousands of tons of concrete and steel crashing down in seconds, safety is always a primary concern.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1579121497/102-1631835-8363364?v=glance&n=283155

The same company was responsible for the fast and efficient removal of all debris after both the Oklahoma City bombing and the Twin Tower bombing.

I'm sure they will perform this job with great skill and efficiency too.

[LiviaOlivia]

12. kick

[NorthernSpy]

13. super! when they blew up the Maine Yankee containment dome...

... a crowd gathered to watch from a safe distance. Everybody clapped and cheered.

There was a great feeling of relief and triumph. Maine is nuclear-free now.

It was just like when they breached Edwards Dam on the Kennebec and let the salmon come home. They even rang church bells for that one.

I'm hoping that Point Lepreau in NB will be shut down soon, and also Vermont Yankee and Seabrook (NH).

[jpak]

22. yup

:)

[LiviaOlivia]

15. kick

[paparush]

23. Will it drop straight down like WTC #7?