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"...the best way to move an atomic bomb across a national border would be to hide it inside a truckload of marijuana." "This was the Shinkolobwe pit, the womb of the atomic bomb...a quarter-million Japanese people had been killed with the material from this cavity... ...We were there for several minutes before I realized that I still had the "letter of authorization" from the police official in my backpack. I hadn’t needed to withdraw it because...Nobody was guarding Shinkolobwe."
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
I read a lot of doublespeak here. I work for the nuclear industry and this report doesn't ring true to me at all. Why are there no links to the various reports and things they cite? If those things are true I expect to be able to see the information from the original sources.
Here's one example: They say the current reactors accident analyses don't require them to survive a breach of containment. But a breach of containment MEANS the plant didn't survive whatever accident scenario caused it. So our analyses say, for example, if you have a double ended pipe shear in the reactor coolant system, will containment survive it without a breach? And the analysis shows that it will. Will it handle an earthquake that is a 6.5 on the richter scale (the actual number varies from location to location)? And the analysis shows that it will.
So saying our analyses don't take containment breaches into account doesn't make sense. Is it clear why? Because if you analyzed an accident scenario and it showed that containment was breached, you'd have to build to higher standards than that. You'd have to build it thicker. So the place is designed such that all our design-basis analyses show that containment holds.
That's just one example of the doublespeak I'm reading here.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Another example that I don't see here but I've seen before is the statement that INPO, which is a nuclear industry standards group, is run by the nuclear industry itself. That's true and there's a reason for that. NRC is the government body that has legal oversight of the nuclear industry in the US. But the industry wants to be even better than the NRC requires. We want to be so good that the NRC would never ever have a finding against any of us. Because of that, we formed INPO, an industry group whose purpose is to foster the very highest standards of safety and operability possible. Way higher than the legal minimums. So we undergo all these INPO inspections and we share all our best practices and get report cards from INPO that are taken very seriously. All that so that we never have even the slightest whiff of a problem.
Then the anti crowd acts like this is a bad thing. That we are in charge of policing ourselves. No, that's not true at all. The NRC does a great job of policing the industry. We ourselves want to do even better than that, though, because we know that by operating to the very highest standards of safety and excellence, we can advance the industry and keep generating electricity that covers human needs without polluting or emitting greenhouse gases.
Lots of doublespeak among the antis.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Oh, another thing they said is that beta radiation was never measured. There's a good reason why we don't measure beta radiation even when calculating dose rates for ourselves inside the plant. Beta radiation doesn't travel but about one foot in air before it's absorbed. Also, anything like light clothes, the dry layer of skin on the surface of your body, etc. can block beta rays.
It's a problem if you swallow something that then radiates beta rays inside your body, so we're extremely careful about not releasing anything that is contaminated into the water supply, for instance. But we don't, as far as I know, measure beta rays traveling in free air, because they're stopped by almost anything.
I'm not a health physics person. They're the experts on exactly how much measurement we do and why. But I know enough to know that gamma rays are the real badguys. And neutrons if you have to go into containment at full power. So when I hear these antis say we don't measure beta radiation, I can't tell if they just don't know enough to realize why, or if they're deliberately trying to deceive people. I try to believe the former, that they're acting in good faith with poor information.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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