It’s no secret that I support legalizing marijuana, but even the foggiest pot heads know better than to try and operate major machinery when they’re blazed … much less nuclear-frikin’ power plants. Geeze.
Though, marijuana use is not even close to the most scandalous revaluation in this ABC News article, excerpted below:
Among the litany of violations at U.S. nuclear power plants are missing or mishandled nuclear material, inadequate emergency plans, faulty backup power generators, corroded cooling pipes and even marijuana use inside a nuclear plant, according to an ABC News review of four years of Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety records.And perhaps most troubling of all, critics say, the commission has failed to correct the violations in a timely fashion.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has very good safety regulations but they have very bad enforcement of those regulations,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear scientist with the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.
There are 104 U.S. nuclear power plants.
Lochbaum and the Union of Concerned Scientists found 14 “near misses” at nuclear plants in 2010. And there were 56 serious violations at nuclear power plants from 2007 to 2011, according the ABC News review of NRC records.
At the Dresden Nuclear Power Plant in Illinois, for instance, which is located within 50 miles of the 7 million people who live in and around Chicago, nuclear material went missing in 2007. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined the operator — Exelon Corp. — after discovering the facility had failed to “keep complete records showing the inventory [and] disposal of all special nuclear material in its possession.”
As a result, two fuel pellets and equipment with nuclear material could not be accounted for.
Read the rest of this article here.
Further reading:
- In case of a nuke accident … — Boomer with an Attitude
- Long blackouts pose risk to US reactors — McClatchy
- Officials monitor radiation in U.S. air, rainwater — Reuters/Yahoo! News
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2011.
I have been sending emails to everyone that could take action to help get our top scientists to concentrate their efforts to solve the remaining problems regarding the design and development of fusion reactors. None of the existing fission reactors are safe regardless which country builds them! If you do some research you will find that the fusion reaction is safe and does not produce any radioactivity! I was in the nuclear industry for a number of years an I have had hopes that the fusion would eventually replace fission and our safety problems and I believe it could end our dependency on oil!
This paper reviews the safety and environmental issues associated with magnetic fusion reactors and discusses approaches to reduce or eliminate related concerns. The radioactive material in a fusion reactor includes tritium, burned as a fuel, and activation products produced by neutrons from the fusion reactions. Ensuring that these materials will not affect the public requires a strategy to minimize inventories, develop adequate containment and control, and eliminate potential release mechanisms. The accident with the greatest potential for a large radioactive release is a lithium fire. Less active forms of lithium, under consideration for use in fusion reactors, would eliminate this concern. Potential energy releases from large magnet systems, and the health effects of long-term exposure to magnetic fields are also concerns. Fusion power has attractive safety and environmental features and addressing safety issues early in the development program should result in an abundant source of power with risks that are understood and acceptable to the public.
Pure fusion, such as in a reactor, does not produce radioactive isotopes. Fusion by-products stop at the stage of becoming iron, which isn’t heavy enough to be fissile.