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Environment & Energy
Showing Original Post only (View all)A Fukushima on the Hudson?: The Growing Dangers of Indian Point [View all]
from TomDispatch:
A Fukushima on the Hudson?
The Growing Dangers of Indian Point
By Ellen Cantarow and Alison Rose Levy
It was a beautiful spring day and, in the control room of the nuclear reactor, the workers decided to deactivate the security system for a systems test. As they started to do so, however, the floor of the reactor began to tremble. Suddenly, its 1,200-ton cover blasted flames into the air. Tons of radioactive radium and graphite shot 1,000 meters into the sky and began drifting to the ground for miles around the nuclear plant. The first firemen to the rescue brought tons of water that would prove useless when it came to dousing the fires. The workers wore no protective clothing and eight of them would die that night -- dozens more in the months to follow.
It was April 26, 1986, and this was just the start of the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the worst nuclear accident of its kind in history. Chernobyl is ranked as a level 7 event, the maximum danger classification on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. It would spew out more radioactivity than 100 Hiroshima bombs. Of the 350,000 workers involved in cleanup operations, according to the World Health Organization, 240,000 would be exposed to the highest levels of radiation in a 30-mile zone around the plant. It is uncertain exactly how many cancer deaths have resulted since. The International Atomic Energy Agencys estimate of the expected death toll from Chernobyl was 4,000. A 2006 Greenpeace report challenged that figure, suggesting that 16,000 people had already died due to the accident and predicting another 140,000 deaths in Ukraine and Belarus still to come. A significant increase in thyroid cancers in children, a very rare disease for them, has been charted in the region -- nearly 7,000 cases by 2005 in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
In March 2011, 25 years after the Chernobyl catastrophe, damage caused by a tsunami triggered by a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake led to the meltdown of three reactors at a nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. Radioactive rain from the Fukushima accident fell as far away as Ireland.
In 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency had, in fact, warned the Japanese government that none of the countrys nuclear power plants could withstand powerful earthquakes. That included the Fukushima plant, which had been built to take only a 7.0 magnitude event. No attention was paid at the time. After the disaster, the plants owner, Tokyo Electric Power, rehired Shaw Construction, which had designed and built the plant in the first place, to rebuild it.
Near Misses, Radioactive Leaks, and Flooding
In both Chernobyl and Fukushima, areas around the devastated plants were made uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. In neither place, before disaster began to unfold, was anyone expecting it and few imagined that such a catastrophe was possible. In the United States, too, despite the knowledge since 1945 that nuclear power, at war or in peacetime, holds dangers of a stunning sort, the general attitude remains: it cant happen here -- nowhere more dangerously in recent years than on the banks of New Yorks Hudson River, an area that could face a nuclear peril endangering a population of nearly 20 million. .........(more)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176122/tomgram%3A_cantarow_and_levy%2C_could_nuclear_disaster_come_to_america/#more
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Shutting Indian Point, as is the case with shutting any nuclear plant, will kill people.
NNadir
Apr 2016
#1
One possible effect of solar flares and loss of the ultimate heat sink - is multiple
Baobab
Apr 2016
#2
A High-Pressure Pipeline Next to a Nuclear Power Plant. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Lodestar
Apr 2016
#3
Despite the endless nonsense, nuclear energy remains, by far, the world's largest...
NNadir
Apr 2016
#10
No, being anti-nuke requires you accept fossil fuels, pollution, and climate change.
wtmusic
Apr 2016
#13