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August 31, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Point Beach Reactors Pose Needless Risks

By Al Gedicks*

On July 31, 2021 the operators of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant on the shore of Lake Michigan had to shut down the 52-year-old reactor after a cooling pump failed and waste heat was vented into the atmosphere.

According to Physicians for Social Responsibility and Nukewatch, two anti-nuclear groups, the shutdown “was caused by a failure to adequately monitor and maintain the aging and outmoded components in the Point Beach reactor” (“Questions about nuclear safety,” La Crosse Tribune, August 14, 2022).

ups have told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the plant is operating beyond the 40- year lifespan of its 1960s design and questioned the agency’s oversight of the plant’s safety.

One of the most serious safety questions for aging nuclear reactors is the problem of neutron embrittlement of the nuclear reactor. Scientists have long been aware that neutron radiation from inside the nuclear core would gradually destroy the thick metal reactor that surrounds the core.

According to nuclear expert Arnold Gundersen: “If embrittlement becomes extensive, the dense metallic reactor can shatter like glass…creating what the NRC calls a Class 9 Accident, which is the worst nuclear catastrophe acknowledged by the NRC…The NRC has identified that NextEra’s Point Beach Reactors are the most embrittled operating reactors in the United States.” NextEra Energy is the owner of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Two Rivers.

Neutron embrittlement happens to all reactors, but the issue is especially crucial in reactors built before 1972, such as Point Beach. Those vessels were built using copper – which is no longer used in reactor construction because it is more prone to embrittlement – in the walls and welds.

The NRC estimated that both the Point Beach 2 reactor, located on Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline, and the Palisades nuclear power plant, also located on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Covert, Michigan, were expected to reach the traditional embrittlement screening limits in 2017. Some scientists have called embrittlement the single most important factor in determining the life span of a reactor.

Unlike the Palisades reactor that has announced permanent closure by May 31, 2022, Point Beach has sought permission to operate 20 more years, despite increasing age-related degradation risks. The current licenses for the two reactors are set to expire in 2030 and 2033.

With thermal shock from rapid cooling or from overheating, the steel vessel could crack, releasing coolant from around the fuel rods, leading to a core meltdown, as it did at the Fukushima Daiichi site in Japan on March 11, 2011. Pressurized thermal shock is a problem most severe in the older generation of reactors such as Point Beach.

In 1982, Demetrios Basdekas an NRC Reactor Safety Engineer, expressed his concern about the age-degradation risks of reactor embrittlement in a letter published in the New York Times: “There is a high, increasing likelihood that someday soon during a seemingly minor malfunction at any of a dozen or more nuclear plants around the United States, the steel vessel that houses the radioactive core is going to crack like a piece of glass. The result will be a core meltdown, the most serious kind of accident, which will injure many people, and probably destroy the nuclear industry with it.”

The casualty and property damage figures from the NRC’s “CRAC-2 Report on Accident Consequences for Point Beach, Units 1 & 2, Two Rivers, Wisconsin,” show that a reactor meltdown would have catastrophic negative impacts on health and the economy of nearby neighborhoods and the people who live and work in those communities.

This level of risk justifies serious consideration for shutting down the plant. Renewable energy sources would provide safer alternatives to this threat.

* Al Gedicks is executive secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council in La Crosse. This report was first published in La Crosse Tribune as ‘Nuclear Safety Must be Focus’, Aug. 31, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Fukushima, Nuclear Power, Radiation Exposure, Renewable Energy

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Zero-Emission Canada Possible

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By John LaForge
David Suzuki Foundation Study

Canada can achieve 100% carbon-emission-free electricity production by 2035 by urgently promoting renewable energy, energy efficiency, smarter transmission, and by avoiding the cost, pollution, and delays of nuclear power, fossil gas, carbon capture, and carbon offsets. So says the David Suzuki Foundation in a new study. The report details an overhaul of Canada’s electricity sector and identifies vast potential to expand wind and solar capacity, sources cited by the International Energy Agency as “the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in history.” Energy transition pioneer Amory Lovins told the Guardian, “far better to deploy fast, inexpensive, and sure technologies like wind or solar than one that is slow to build, speculative, and very costly. Anything else makes climate change worse than it needs to be.”

— The Energy Mix online, May 27, 2020; the Guardian, Mar 26, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. Renewable Energy Output Surges Ahead of Nuclear

Nuclear-Free Future, photocredit: Sierra Club
Nukewatch Quarterly 
Summer 2022
By Lindsay Potter

In 2021 domestic renewable energy — wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, and geothermal — outproduced nuclear power for the second year running, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) found. Clean sources were responsible for 795 million megawatt-hours (MWh), 21% of energy production, while nuclear totaled 778 million MWh, or 20%. Solar Industry Mag reported April 26, 2022, that wind, the largest producer of renewable energy in the U.S., increased outputs by 12% in 2021 (14% in 2020), and utility-scale solar produced 28% more in 2021 (26% in 2020). The EIA predicts an additional 10% hike in renewable production for 2022. Globally, hydro-electric together with solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal produce more than twice as much energy (24.2%) as nuclear (10.3%), according to world-nuclear.org.

The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021 (WNISR) found that nuclear power production fell by more than 100 terawatt-hours (TWh), the greatest drop aside from the standstill following the Fukushima disaster. Although hydro-electric steadily outproduced nuclear over the last 30 years, other renewable sources such as wind, solar, and biomass have now globally surpassed nuclear. Proof possible: for the first time this year, hydro, wind, and solar together generated more than all fossil fuels in the European Union — though France still relies on nuclear for 71% of its energy.

Competitive clean energy casts shade on the need for nuclear, as the industry flounders to innovate expedient and economic technology. Given the minimum of 10-15 years needed to bring new Small Modular Reactors online, trials in Argentina, China, and Russia have been unimpressive. Furthermore, WNISR announced “net capacity addition” fell for nuclear to 0.4 gigawatts (GW) and rose by more than 250 GW in the renewable sector last year, leading the report to conclude “nuclear is irrelevant in today’s electricity capacity newbuild market.” The WNISR also cites cost, health effects, climate change effects, the global impact of COVID-19, and “bribery, corruption, and counterfeiting” in the nuclear industry as additional evidence that nuclear power is dying.

By 2050, the EIA predicts that wind and solar technologies will become as affordable as natural gas, as nuclear and coal continue to fall out of use. To make way for clean energy Congress must severe ties with dying industries, promote carbon fees and sunset credits, shut down pipelines and drilling leases, and halt initiatives to develop new poisoned nuclear theories or bailouts that keep dangerous reactors running past their licensed closure dates.

Solar Industry Mag, Apr 26, 2022; World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021; Deutsche Welle, Sept 28, 2021; EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear goodbye: The future must be solar, wind, battery and LED/efficiency

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By Harvey Wasserman

The nuclear industry has been pushing the fantasy of yet another “renaissance” of nuclear power, based on the absurd idea that atomic reactors — which operate at 571 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in substantial greenhouse gas emissions and, periodically, explosions — can somehow cool the planet.

The fact is that no more big, old-style light water reactors are likely to be built in the United States, and today’s 93 licensed U.S. reactors (there are 400-plus worldwide) grow increasingly dangerous every day.

As a green power advocate since 1973, I’ve visited dozens of reactor sites throughout the U.S. and Japan. The industry’s backers portray them as high-tech black boxes that are uniformly safe, efficient and reliable, ready to hum for decades without melt-downs, blow-ups or the constant emissions of heat, radiation, chemical pollution, and eco-devastation that plague us all.

In reality, the global reactor fleet is riddled with widely varied and increasingly dangerous defects. These range from inherent design flaws to original construction errors, faulty components, fake replacement parts, stress-damaged (“embrittled”) pressure vessels, cracked piping, inoperable safety systems, crumbling concrete, lethal vulnerabilities to floods, storms and earthquakes, corporate greed, and unmanageable radioactive emissions and wastes — to name a few.

Heat, radiation, and steam have pounded every reactor’s internal components. They are cracked, warped, morphed, and transmuted into rickety fossils virtually certain to shatter in the next meltdown.

Twice-bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric of California has been found guilty in the 2010 burning deaths of eight San Bruno residents caused by under-maintained gas pipes. The company was also convicted in the deaths of more than eighty people when its faulty wires ignited whole northern California forests and towns in a series of fires.

Today, the utility’s two uninsured Diablo Canyon reactors threaten more than ten million people (living downwind) with potential catastrophes made possible by any of a dozen nearby earthquake faults (including the San Andreas).

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, San Luis Obispo County, Cali.

 

In 2003, [Ohio’s] Perry and Davis-Besse power reactor operators blacked out 50 million homes in southern Canada and the northeastern United States. The FBI has linked them to a $61-million-bribe handed to the majority leader of the Ohio House of Representatives, and possibly tens of thousands more to the former chair of the state Public Utilities Commission.

The industry’s “regulators” have turned blind eyes to crumbling concrete at the Seabrook and Davis-Besse facilities, whose “hole-in-the-head” defects almost brought Chernobyl to the shores of Lake Erie. When Diablo Canyon’s resident site inspector warned that the reactors could not withstand a likely seismic shock, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut him up and moved him out.

The industry’s four most recent reactor construction projects include two at South Carolina’s Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station — totally abandoned after over $10 billion was spent — and two at Georgia’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, years late and costing more than $30 billion. Plagued by corruption, incompetence, design flaws, and labor problems, Plant Vogtle might never open — especially in light of the astonishing advances in renewable and efficiency technologies, which have completely buried any economic or ecological justification for atomic power, new or old.

Desperate atomic cultists including Bill Gates are now touting small modular reactors. But they’re unproven, can’t deploy for years to come, can’t be guarded against terrorists, and can’t beat renewables in safety, speed to build, climate impacts, price, or job creation. Our energy future should consist of modern solar, wind, battery and LED/efficiency technologies, not nuclear reactors. Let’s work to guarantee that none of them explode before we get there.

— Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the weekly Election Protection 2024 Zoom. His People’s Spiral of U.S. History is at www.solartopia.org. Reader Supported News.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.

 

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy, Uncategorized

March 2, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

 “End war, build peace” by Ray Acheson

RAY ACHESON, 1 MARCH 2022

Ray Acheson is an activist for peace, justice and abolition, director of the Women’s Int’l League for Peace & Freedom disarmament program in New York City, WILPF representative on the steering committee of ICAN, and author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy (Roman and Littlefield 2021).

Russia’s war in Ukraine is intensifying, with cities and civilians being targeted with missiles and rockets and a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding. The threat of nuclear war, the billions of dollars being promised to militarism, racist border crossing restrictions and ideas about conflict, and the ongoing climate crisis are intertwined with the already horrific violence in Ukraine. To confront these compounding crises, war and war profiteering must end, nuclear weapons must be abolished, and we must confront the world of war that has been deliberately constructed at the expense of peace, justice, and survival.

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report, finding that human-induced climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly. “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of an IPCC working group.

The IPCC report was released five days after Russia launched an imperial war of aggression against Ukraine—a war that itself is fossil-fueled and wrapped up with energy and economic interests, and that will contribute further to carbon emissions. Furthermore, this report comes one day after the Russian president ordered his country’s nuclear forces to be put on “combat duty,” escalating the risk of nuclear war and threatening climate catastrophe.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has already seen violations of international humanitarian law and human rights, including Russian forces using banned weapons such as cluster munitions and using explosive weapons in populated areas, hitting hospitals, homes, schools, and other civilian infrastructure. The conflict has also already involved severe environmental impacts, including pollution from military sites and material, as well as from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, radiation risks from fighting at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility, groundwater contamination, and more.

Now, it risks becoming nuclear, putting the entire world at risk. The use of even a single nuclear bomb would be absolutely devastating. It would kill hundreds of thousands of people, it would destroy critical infrastructure, [and] it would unleash radiation that will damage human bodies, animals, plants, land, water, and air for generations. If it turns into a nuclear exchange with NATO or the United States, we will be facing an unprecedented catastrophe. Millions of people could die. Our health care systems, already overwhelmed by two years of a global pandemic, will collapse. The climate crisis will be exponentially exacerbated; there could be a disastrous decline in food production and a global famine that might kill most of humanity.

In this moment, everyone must condemn the threat to use nuclear weapons, as well as the ongoing bombing of civilians, the war in general, and the Russian government’s act of imperial aggression. Providing humanitarian relief, ending the war, and preventing it from turning nuclear are top priorities. But we must also recognize what led us here. This crisis is the inevitable result of building a world order based on militarism, just as the nuclear dimension is an inevitable result of the possessing nuclear weapons and claiming they are a legitimate tool of “security”.

READ THE FULL POST HERE:

End war, build peace

 

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Military Spending, Nuclear Weapons, Radiation Exposure, Renewable Energy, War

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