A Nuclear Reactor on the shore?

[CanonRay]

I'm watching CNN and the pics of the failing Nuclear plant got me thinking. Who would build a nuclear facility on the ocean shore of a country that coined the word "tsunami". What the hell were they thinking?

[Duer 157099]

1. cooling water n/t

[Davis_X_Machina]

5. The old Maine Yankee...

...Seabrook, Plymouth Pilgrim.... all along the shore.

You can get cold water for cooling, and an enormous body of cold water -- much larger than a river -- to dilute the hot water that comes out, especially if there's deep water close to shore.

And, so I am told, lobsters the size of Saint Bernards... :-)

[csziggy]

2. Several of the reactors in Florida are built on the shore or close to it

So they have access to water for cooling. The Crystal River reactor releases enough coolant water that manatees hang out near the reactor in the winter to take advantage of the increased water temperature.

[SugarShack]

4. That is gulf coast and will never be a tsunami threat in there they said today...

[jacquelope]

7. No tsunami threat? Really?

Any fool who says there'll never be a tsunami threat on any coast is... well.. foolish.

If I lived out there I'd move right now, for fear of nature teaching them a lesson.

[csziggy]

11. One of the possible tsunami creators is massive releases of methane hydrates

Or Methane clathrate from the ocean floor. The Gulf of Mexico has a LOT of those deposits.

Clathrates as a cause of tsunamis

During the formation of gas hydrates, methane and water become immobilized within the sediment pore spaces. Because of the presence of these solids (instead of pore waters and gas), the sediment can not become consolidated because the water can not be expulsed with increasing overburden as more sedimentation occurs. Cementation of the sediments does not occur when pore spaces are filled with hydrates (solid ice) rather than with water, from which minerals such as calcite can be precipitated. Gas hydrate rich sediments are thus cemented by the hydrates, which may occupy much of the sedimentary section, but which are not stable when the temperature rises or the pressure falls.

This may lead to problems during continued sedimentation and further burial of the gas hydrates: the hydrates will become buried so deeply that the temperature will increase according to the regional geothermal gradient. The hydrates will then no longer be stable, and will disintegrate into a liquid water and gas mixture. The basal zone of the gas hydrate becomes under-consolidated, possibly over-pressured because of the release of the methane, leading to the development of a zone with low shear strength where failure could be triggered and massive landslides could occur. With the landslides, more gas could escape.

Several examples of possibly gas-hydrate linked extremely large slumps have been described, e.g., on the Norwegian continental margin (Bugge et al., 1987), where debris from the giant, three-part Storegga slide, over 450 m thick, is spread over a distance of 800 km. One of the Storegga slides caused a tsunami to deposit sediment up to 4 m above the high water line in Scotland (Nisbet and Piper, 1998). There are more of these mega slides in the same region (Laberg et al., 2000).

More about clathrates: http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/ees123/clathrate.htm

[tavalon]

3. We'll I haven't been very strong pro or anti nuclear power

But building them on inherently unstable land and guiding 55 of them on that little island just doesn't seem to be the best choice.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Plants ARE built by the shore

[Cleita]

8. We would. My nuclear plant

El Diablo. Not only that it is practically sitting on two faults including the famous San Andreas fault. Now I call that stupid.

Nevermind the picture. The link doesn't work.

[Cleita]

9. Here's the picture:

[kestrel91316]

10. We've got Diablo Canyon and San Onofre by the shore here in SoCal.......

[Bluerthanblue]

12. NH has the smallest coastline of any costal state, and Seabrook takes

sits on 900 acres on the southern edge of our 18 miles of coast.

We fought it for years,- but in the end we couldn't keep it from going online.

:shrug: