Hi
When this whole thing started, in the first day or so I knew it was going to be very bad and cascade. I didn't want to be right, I'd much rather be wrong, but, what troubled me was the people going "WhoCodaNew". The Bush Administration spent 8 years doing that, and we see the same thing from TEPCO, The Japanese Government, NRC, GE,American Nuclear Society, Shills like Margaret Harding and even members of this Community.
What tripped this off was catching a quote from Margaret Harding that had to set a record in the History of Shilling
That sense of duty is widespread among nuclear power industry workers, said Margaret Harding,,,,
“If they could help in Japan, they would be on planes right now,” she said. “The problem is the controls are in Japanese.”
Sorry That Line just made me Snap. That got me Looking into Meg Shilling, my little nickname for Margaret Harding (BTW, Feel Free to Google Link Meg Shilling to her)
So I found her Shillingon How the Deepwater Horizon Incident couldn't have happened in the Nuclear Industry. But you can read my critical review of her words in my diary on Meg Shilling.
What Stunned me was how long the US Industry knew the GE BWR Design was Unsafe
Why Fukushima could happen Here.
Two weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown on April 26, 1986, the United States Committee for Energy Awareness (USCEA), the public relations arm of the nuclear industry, produced a series of advertisements in an effort to distance the U.S. nuclear program from the USSR's. "We tried to make clear that there was a major difference between Russian plants and U.S. plants," USCEA leader Harold Finger told The Energy Daily shortly after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. Advertisements were placed in all major news magazines with a headline that read: "Why what happened at Chernobyl didn't happen at Three Mile Island."
Today, with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants having experienced explosions that were felt 70 kilometers away and emitting dangerous levels of radiation, the U.S. nuclear industry cannot make such a claim. Two of the Japanese reactors have been reduced to rubble and look a lot like Chernobyl. If it can happen in Japan, it can happen anywhere.
Even with no proof of outright failure of the containment structures, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission called for Americans in Japan to evacuate a 50-mile radius of the GE Fukushima reactors. This means that if a similar loss-of-station power and loss-of-coolant accident were to occur at the Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland, the U.S. government would be ordered to evacuate Washington, D.C. The White House, Congress and the Pentagon would all be abandoned. Calvert Cliffs is 44 miles as the crow flies to the U. S. Capitol building.
,,,
Seabrook is 40 miles north of Boston. The 50-mile radius around San Onofre extends all the way to downtown San Diego and includes three million people living in Orange County. The controversial Indian Point nuclear station is located 34 miles to the middle of Central Park. If a similar loss-of-coolant accident occurred at the facility, then all five New York City boroughs, including the entirety of Brooklyn to Rockaway Beach, most of Staten Island, most of northern New Jersey and the entire eastern third of Long Island would have to be evacuated. Imagine.
The massive industry with tens of thousands of well paid nuclear-trained engineers and scientists along with national laboratories that spend billions of dollars every year on all things nuclear has no capability of dealing with a serious accident. It is the second time in a year that a powerful, wealthy, profitable energy industry has been exposed for engineering fraud. British Petroleum and the entire global oil industry had no plans or available resources to deal with a worst-case scenario and it took months to close the blown out well in the Gulf of Mexico.
The inability of the nuclear industry to quickly react to a serious event anywhere in the world - with its trans-national implications - must now be addressed in order for there to be a nuclear "renaissance."
And it all feeds into the growing sense that profit for a few is taking precedence over the safety and economic security of many.
But what was so startling was that the NRC knew the GE BWR Design was designed to be cheap not safe
http://www.manufacturingnews.com/
http://www.nrc. gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/sr1150/.
http://www.nrc.gov/... collections/nuregs/staff/sr1150/v1/
• The Fukushima Plants Were Designed To Vent Radionuclides Into The Air
Nuclear Regulatory Commission studies say the GE boiling water reactor was designed with numerous vents so that the containment building wouldn't explode due to overpressurization.
The conclusion of the NRC’s initial study released in 1987 was that in the case of a severe ac- cident, there was a low degree of confidence that the re- actor would not release radiation. The GE containment was designed to vent radiation in order to avoid a cata- clysmic breach. “Station blackout accidents contribute a high percentage of the core damage frequency for the [GE] boiling water reactors,” says the study.
users of the report “should be aware of the assumptions made in the screening process for low-probability, high-consequence events. For example, the analysts assumed that the probability of total loss of dc power was less than 1 x 10-7 (.000 000 1) per year and thus could be neglected. The same assumption was made for loss of all service water. Thus, those who use the results in individual plant examination work should recognize that these assumptions may not be valid for all operating plants.
But no thought was put to the probabilty of corrrelated risk? What are the odds of losing Grid power in 2 directions? All other reactors and both Diesel Generators? Very low. Wat are the odds in the event of a natural disaster? Quite high.
There was also disagreement as to what constituted failure of a containment structure — “including leak fail-ures and penetration failures,” which is cur- rently occurring in Japan. The containment might still be intact after an accident, but that doesn’t mean it won’t stop the release of large amounts of dangerous radionuclides over a widespread area, said the NUREG-1150 re- port.
Okay here's where the shilling has occurred so hard. Meg Shilling was out there
pushing the line and even KBMAN was in total denial that the containment could have breached in the first 2.5 weeks.
If the GE plant at Peach Bottom suffered the “loss of off- site power followed by a subsequent failure of all onsite ac power, [along with] diesel genera- tors that fail to start because of failure of all the vital batteries, [then] all core cooling systems and all containment heat removal systems fail,” says the report. “Core damage begins in ap- proximately 1 hour as a result of coolant boiloff.”
The GE Mark-1 containment “is main- tained in an inerted state, i.e. nitrogen filled,”“This inerted con- tainment condition significantly reduces the chance of hydrogen combustion in the containment, thereby re- moving a major threat to its failure. However, hydrogen combustion in the reactor building is a possibility for some severe accident sequences.” he NRC did not consider what would happen “with Mark-I contain- ment buildings de-inerted.”
In order to avoid cataclysmic failure, the Mark-1 con- tainment was designed with numerous vents to allow the release of radionuclides. These vents “prevent contain- ment pressure limits from being exceeded,” according to the NRC. “The chance of survival of the containment is increased with venting.”
The Mark-1 containment system has a volume of 320,000 cubic feet and is designed to withstand peak pressure of 56 psig resulting from a loss-of-coolant acci- dent. “The estimated mean failure pressure for Peach Bottom’s containment system is 148 psig, which is very similar to that for large PWR [pressurized water reactor] containment design,” states the initial NRC report. “However, its small free volume relative to other contain- ment types significantly limits its capacity to accommo- date noncondensible gases generated in severe accident scenarios in addition to increasing its potential to come into contact with molten core material. . . The potential for early containment failure (before or within roughly 2 hours after reactor vessel breach) is of principal concern in Peach Bottom’s risk analysis.”
This means that the dominant plant damage states will be driven by events that fail a multitude of systems (i.e., reduce the redundancy through some common-mode or support system failure) or events that only require a small number of systems to fail in order to reach core damage. The station blackout plant damage state satisfies the first of these requirements in that all systems ulti- mately depend upon ac power, and a loss of offsite power is a relatively high probability event. The total probability of losing ac power long enough to induce core damage is relatively high, although still low for a plant with Peach Bottom’s design
No when KBMan was saying the Containment was Good and solid, what he was doing was denying the basics of the design. The Design was only good to 50% of the
worst case pressures and not capable of handling station blackout. Everything else was
just a matter of consequence.