Some words on Three Mile Island, nuclear powr and climate change at Climate Progress

[kristopher]

Inside a nuclear power plant 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital, the first of a series of pumps supplying vital cooling water to the reactor unaccountably “tripped,” or shut down, at 36 seconds after 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979.

The tense, sometimes terrifying week that followed, marked by official confusion and “surreal” misstatements about the crisis’s severity, became known forever as the Three Mile Island accident, named after the reactor site on the Susquehanna River.

So opens the Greenwire (subs. req’d) story, the source for my headline. Now the nuclear power industry is trying to make a comeback, 30 years after the event that defined it for a generation.

But the legacy of TMI looms. As Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner, has noted:

"The abiding lesson that Three Mile Island taught Wall Street was that a group of N.R.C.-licensed reactor operators, as good as any others, could turn a $2 billion asset into a $1 billion cleanup job in about 90 minutes."

Nuclear power has many, many other limitations:

* Prohibitively high, and escalating, capital costs
* Production bottlenecks in key components needed to build plants
* Very long construction times
* Concerns about uranium supplies and importation issues
* Unresolved problems with the availability and security of waste storage
* Large-scale water use amid shortages
* High electricity prices from new plants

For supporting, quantitative analysis, a good place to start is:...

Full article here: http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/27/three-mile-island-anniversary-meltdown-nuclear-power-problems/

[havocmom]

1. But but but.... that was in the olden days, yada yada yada

Did you set the stop watch? ;)

[immoderate]

2. What's wrong with taking huge risks?

I'm sure our luck will hold. :)

--imm

[druidity33]

3. this post

has been up for 8 hours and it's still not being vehemently disputed by our resident Nuclear "hobbyist"... i wonder why? What's the name? ZZenith or something?

:shrug:


K&R

[ljm2002]

4. My argument to nuclear plant proponents is simple:

You show me a deal where the private insurers are willing to take on the insurance liability. If you can do that, I may reconsider my position on the overall, long-term safety of the technology.

Say what you will about our private insurance industry -- rapacious, greedy, etc. -- one thing most everyone agrees on: they are damned good at assessing risks, specifically, on determining ROI for insurance premiums vs. the potential $$ they might have to pay out.

The fact is, nuclear reactors do run clean, and they do produce a lot of power considering the size of the fuel source. So there are arguments to be made in favor of the technology, no doubt about it.

But one must also do the risk analysis, including factoring in worst-case scenarios. That is where nuclear energy reactors fail the private-insurance test. No private entity is willing to take on the scale of risk of a worst-case scenario for a nuclear reactor. Thus, the government (i.e. you & me) takes it on -- and that's just the financial aspect. Now if you consider what the worst-case scenario entails, well it seems to me that caution is in order. IMNSHO