Lots of unfortunate "could have"s

 Whoops

Improperly calibrated monitoring equipment at Entergy’s Waterford 3 nuclear power plant could have low-balled the public health threat of radioactive gases released had there been an accident during three months in 2022, according to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Entergy officials notified NRC inspectors of the problem during an Oct. 23 to Dec. 7 inspection of Waterford’s emergency preparedness programs. Incorrect engineering conversion factors for measuring gases were loaded into the radiological dose assessment modeling software of two “wide range gas monitors” at the plant that are used in emergency responses, according to a Jan. 12 NRC letter.

The letter — from Mary Muessle, director of NRC’s division of radiological safety and security, to John Ferrick, a vice president with Entergy Operations Inc. — said the errors resulted in readings that were 30.5% lower than the actual radiological conditions, which would have made public health and on-site dose calculations inaccurate

The thingy that measures how hot the radioactive gasses *could have* been *if* any such gasses were to escape has since been fixed.  One wonders if it had been turned down too far to overcompensate for this. 

Waterford 3 was actually placed under increased oversight by the NRC in September because of another incident involving improper calibration of radiation monitors that could have triggered unnecessary evacuations.

It’s unclear whether last year's inspection was added as a result of the earlier problem, where NRC found radiation monitors at the plant were being calibrated improperly between January 2011 and February 2022.

Anyway this is why I always say it's a good idea to get one of those hanging oven thermometers so you can watch whatever it is you are baking instead of just relying on what the display says. Who knows what's really going on in there.

He's just a dumb guy trying to be President

Sometimes that's all there is to it.

President Donald Trump repeatedly addressed the possibility of a U.S. nuclear attack on North Korea in a private call last month with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, according to a transcript of the call obtained by The Intercept.

“We can’t let a madman with nuclear weapons let on the loose like that. We have a lot of firepower, more than he has times 20, but we don’t want to use it,” Trump told Duterte. (In fact, the U.S. has 6,800 nuclear warheads and North Korea is thought to have about 10.) “You will be in good shape,” he added.

“We have a lot of firepower over there. We have two submarines — the best in the world — we have two nuclear submarines — not that we want to use them at all,” Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like they are, but we don’t have to use this, but he could be crazy so we will see what happens.”

It's a marvel we haven't accidentally nuked ourselves or others yet

Just reading the description of this system and the confidence its keepers appear to have in it makes me nervous.

Those familiar with the nuclear briefings say they demand a sharp focus.

“It’s not something that someone even with vast experience can easily digest,” said Leon Panetta, a former secretary of defense intimately familiar with the briefings.

“He’s got to be ready from the get-go to respond if necessary,” Panetta said. “There really is a long process, a classified process, that involves a lot of checks in the system to make sure no mistakes are made. It involves a number of key people.”

Clearly this is the set up to an awful and inevitable punchline. And that's even before we add Trump to the equation. Now that he's there, though.  Well.. 

From the day Trump takes the oath of office, a military aide will shadow him everywhere, carrying a black satchel containing the system to convey a nuclear launch order. The satchel is popularly known as “the football.”

“His first briefing will be just about how the process works: ‘There will be a military aide with you at all times and he has the football,’ ” said P.J. Crowley, a retired Air Force officer and special assistant on national security affairs to former President Bill Clinton.

Trump will learn how a launch order would “send key people to underground bunkers,” Crowley said. “That’s a critical dimension of this. Even for the Strategic Command out in Nebraska, this would send an airborne command up in the air.”

The black satchel operates with a dual key system, and part of the system is for the president to take a card from his pocket to input the correct codes.

“The card itself is critical to begin the process that activates the system,” Panetta said.

Everyone in grown-up media world is lecturing everyone else about paying too much attention to random shit Trump tweets out. But I kind of think this is a perfect week to be watching. You never know what he might post.  

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article117054908.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article117054908.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article117054908.html#storylink=cpy

That's not the scary part

Joe Scarborough's unnamed source says Trump said a scary thing about nukes.

According to a report from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump asked a foreign policy advisor three times during a briefing why he couldn’t just use nuclear weapons to solve the nation’s problems.

Scarborough shared the anecdote on Morning Joe Wednesday, speaking deliberately to avoid naming his source. “I’ll be very careful here. Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on international level went to advise Donald Trump.”

“Three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked, at one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?'”

That sounds pretty scary.  We really wouldn't want to put the US nuclear arsenal in the hands of a crazy person willing to use it.  We do, however, seek to put it in the hands of sane people willing to use it.

As long as means of nuclear annihilation exist & are controlled by command hierarchy willing to answer "yes" to this pic.twitter.com/1kZHgAtf5J

— Billmon (@billmon1) August 3, 2016

If you're asking whether this is a distinction without a difference, then you may already have hit upon the actual scary part of this story.  It's not so much that Donald Trump is asking why we can't use nukes, it's that the Obama Administration is already asking that question itself. 

Mr. Obama has long advocated a “nuclear-free world.” His lieutenants argue that modernizing existing weapons can produce a smaller and more reliable arsenal while making their use less likely because of the threat they can pose. The changes, they say, are improvements rather than wholesale redesigns, fulfilling the president’s pledge to make no new nuclear arms.

But critics, including a number of former Obama administration officials, look at the same set of facts and see a very different future. The explosive innards of the revitalized weapons may not be entirely new, they argue, but the smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use — even to use first, rather than in retaliation.

Gen. James E. Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was among Mr. Obama’s most influential nuclear strategists, said he backed the upgrades because precise targeting allowed the United States to hold fewer weapons. But “what going smaller does,” he acknowledged, “is to make the weapon more thinkable.” 

Everybody's got a bomb, we could all die any day

Happy Monday

I know of no person who understands the science and politics of modern weaponry better than William J. Perry, the US Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997. When a man of such unquestioned experience and intelligence issues the stark nuclear warning that is central to his recent memoir, we should take heed. Perry is forthright when he says: “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”¹ He also tells us that the nuclear danger is “growing greater every year” and that even a single nuclear detonation “could destroy our way of life.”

How will we all die under President Trump?

The choices right now are

1) Superbug

(CNN)Superbugs could kill one person every three seconds by 2050, the equivalent of 10 million people a year, according to the final report last week from the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, established in 2014 to keep the world from being "cast back into the dark ages of medicine." 

The authors highlight the increasing burden of resistance and call for greater awareness of the problem, including the need for public campaigns beginning as soon as this summer.

2) Loose nukes

The term "wake-up call" is a tired cliché, but it is appropriate in the case of Command and Control, the frightening new exposé of America's nuclear weapons mishaps by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser. (Click here to read an excerpt and my detailed review.) In short, Schlosser delivers a book full of revelations that left me agape. While we still worry in the abstract about Iran and North Korea and Pakistan, it's easy to forget that we still have thousands of our own ungodly devices on hair-trigger alert at this very moment. And even if we never drop or launch another nuke on purpose, these weapons are, in his words, "the most dangerous machines ever invented. And like every machine, sometimes they go wrong."

That's what the book is about. Through hard-fought documents and deep digging and extensive interviews, Schlosser reveals how close we've come, on numerous occasions, to a domestic nuclear detonation or an accidental war in which there are only losers. Command and Control will leave many readers with a deep unease about America's ability to handle our nukes safely. Schlosser's hope is that this unease will beget a long-neglected debate about "why we have them and when we use them and how many we need." But his book is no screed. He delivers an engrossing page-turner. Would that it were fiction.

That interview with Schlosser is from 2013. But since we're talking about Hiroshima today, it's worth a look.

3)  Robot uprising

One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post.

Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: "More companies are likely to follow suit."

China is investing heavily in a robot workforce.

In a statement to the BBC, Foxconn Technology Group confirmed that it was automating "many of the manufacturing tasks associated with our operations" but denied that it meant long-term job losses.

 4) Trump Drunkeness

In his speech at an energy conference, Trump called for cutting regulations and for building the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration has blocked.

"I'm drunk on Trump," proclaimed John Olson, a North Dakota unbound delegate and attorney representing oil, natural gas and coal companies.

It's probably that one.

Sounds like a real job-killer

Those 47 Republican Senators are just trying to keep Obama from imposing a job-killing Iranian nukes moratorium.

The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27th. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability.

Hewson replied that “that really isn’t coming up,” but stressed that “volatility all around the region” should continue to bring in new business. According to Hewson, “A lot of volatility, a lot of instability, a lot of things that are happening” in both the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region means both are “growth areas” for Lockheed Martin.

Keep on nukin'

The Obama Administration is spending $1 trillion to update and expand the US nuclear arsenal.

This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. The original idea was that modest rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling nuclear complex would speed arms refurbishment, raising confidence in the arsenal’s reliability and paving the way for new treaties that would significantly cut the number of warheads.

Instead, because of political deals and geopolitical crises, the Obama administration is engaging in extensive atomic rebuilding while getting only modest arms reductions in return.

You know for only five percent of that sum, you could fully fund Louisiana's $50 billion coastal restoration plan.  But everyone says we're too broke for that.

Happy Birthday!

Nukes. They are 69 years old today.  Still haven't quite blown up the whole world. But then again, Tom Benson is 18 years older than you are so there's still time.

Regulatory capture

Everywhere you look

Although the agency says plants are operating more safely today than they were at the dawn of the nuclear industry, when shutdowns were common, safety experts, Congressional critics and even the agency’s own internal monitors say the N.R.C. is prone to dither when companies complain that its proposed actions would cost time or money. The promise of lucrative industry work after officials leave the commission probably doesn’t help, critics say, pointing to dozens over the years who have taken jobs with nuclear power companies and lobbying firms.

"It's kind of like MMS (Minerals Management Service) all over again."

Quote is from this Gambit article which looks at the state of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Burnell says funding for the NRC has ebbed and flowed over the years. It increased during President George W. Bush's second term, reflecting that administration's interest in nuclear power. According to the NRC's website, however, the agency faces an 18 percent cut in net appropriations for 2012, wiping out a $25.6 million increase it received in 2010. The cuts include $8 million from the Nuclear Reactor Safety Program, which is responsible for continuous oversight, licensing and other duties that ensure reactors operate safely; and $20.7 million from the Nuclear Materials and Waste Safety Program, tasked with the transportation and extended storage of radioactive waste. It is not immediately clear what impact Congress' cuts will have on the affected programs.

The NRC is dependent on the nuclear industry for 90 percent of its funding. Olson argues that while Congress has an oversight role in approving the budget, "Ultimately the industry pays its regulator, and you tend to work for the people who pay you, and there has not been strong evidence of independence on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, particularly in the last 20 years."

The article also investigates the reliability of back-up power systems at nuclear power facilities in our region. The findings aren't all that bad. For instance, it's noted that there are redundancies in available power generation systems that have performed properly at Waterford during Katrina and at River Bend during Gustav.

On the other hand, this was concerning.

Compared to all other factors that could lead to a meltdown, a "station blackout" at River Bend posed a greater proportion of risk — 88.2 percent — than at any other plant in the country, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's most recent report, published in 2005.

And this was just plain odd.

An Entergy spokesperson says the chance of a meltdown now stands at one event per every 1 million years. Nevertheless, representatives at the NRC and Entergy could not say why the comparative threat of a blackout at River Bend ranked so high in the first place.

A "station blackout" type scenario is the cause of the failure at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant which today was upgraded to the highest level designation on an international severity scale for severity of radioactive accidents.

Sawdust and shredded newspapers

Actually this is past "Junk Shot" mode. More like what the school janitor throws on vomit.

TOKYO -- Engineers pinned their hopes on chemicals, sawdust and shredded newspaper to stop highly radioactive water pouring into the ocean from Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant Sunday as officials said it will take several months to bring the crisis under control, the first time they have provided a timetable.

Update: Also the newspaper bit reminded me of something... oh yes that. Apparently New Orleans is already protected from nuclear fallout. Who knew?

ugh

CNN: Official: Spent fuel rods exposed, heightening concerns

The water served to both cool the uranium fuel and shield it. But once the uranium fuel was no longer covered by water, its zirconium cladding that encases the fuel rods heated, generating hydrogen, said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former official with the Department of Energy.

That caught fire, resulting in a situation that is "very, very serious," he told CNN. He said the next solution may involve nuclear plant workers having to take heroic acts. Asked to be more specific, he said, "This is a situation where people may be called in to sacrifice their lives. ... It's very difficult for me to contemplate that but it's, it may have reached that point."

Prepared to do a heckuva job

Study: U.S. States 'Poorly Prepared' For Radiation Emergency

38 state health departments participated in the survey, including 26 of the 31 states that have nuclear power plants. States with nuclear power plants were asked to consider their responses independent of plant-specific plans and resources.

The study found several gaps in states' radiation emergency preparedness. For one, the survey reports that 73% of states "reported having minimal (53%) or no (21%) plans to conduct population-based exposure monitoring." Meanwhile, only 13% of states surveyed reported having "any written or detailed operations plan for radiologic analyses of biological or clinical samples." And 42% of states reported little or no planning to test first responders for radiation contamination.

Some information about Louisiana's radiological emergency response can be found via the state HSEP website although it looks like a generic description of what "Federal, State, and local officials" are expected to do.

Federal, State and local officials work together to develop site-specific emergency response plans for nuclear power plant accidents. These plans are tested through exercises that include protective actions for schools and nursing homes.

The plans also delineate evacuation routes, reception centers for those seeking radiological monitoring and location of congregate care centers for temporary lodging.

If the Department of Health and Hospitals has a radioactivity response plan, it doesn't publish it anywhere I could find it during the 30 minutes I spent interruptedly searching... although I did manage to find this pamphlet on "The Darker Side of Tanning" which kinda sorta has to do with radiation poisoning. Of course, the fact that I didn't find it online doesn't mean Louisiana isn't one of the 13% of survey respondents who actually have such a plan. So there's at least some degree of comfort we can take given our proximity to the potential hazard.


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Question

If nuking the Macondo well was on the table, why has no one yet suggested dumping oil on the Fukushima plant?

Great moments in energy policy

"Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills"




"There's no reason why, technologically, we can't employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way. Japan does it and France does it, and it doesn't have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way."*



"It's pronounced Noocyoolar"



*Mother Jones: Obama Touted Safety Record of Japan's Nuclear Industry

Update: See also Reactor Design in Japan Has Long Been Questioned

"Worse than a meltdown"

Still waiting for news to get better.

A 1997 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island described a worst-case disaster from uncovered spent fuel in a reactor cooling pool. It estimated 100 quick deaths would occur within a range of 500 miles and 138,000 eventual deaths.

The study also found that land over 2,170 miles would be contaminated and damages would hit $546 billion.

That section of the Brookhaven study focused on boiling water reactors — the kind at the heart of the Japanese crisis.

How many more?

Human exploitation of nuclear energy is barely even 70 years old.

If all workers do in fact leave the plant, the nuclear fuel in all three reactors is likely to melt down, which would lead to wholesale releases of radioactive material — by far the largest accident of its kind since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago.

Are we to expect a major release of radioactivity every 30 years or so from now on? How much damage can we do?

I think I speak for all of us when I say...

uh oh

TOKYO — An explosion early Tuesday morning may have damaged the inner steel containment vessel of the No. 2 reactor at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, leading to the wide release of radioactive materials there and forcing the evacuation of some emergency workers, the plant’s operator said.

The blast appeared to be different — and more severe — than those that at two other troubled reactor at the same nuclear complex because this one, reported to have occurred at 6:14 a.m., happened in the “pressure suppression room” in the cooling area of the reactor, raising the possibility to damage to the reactor’s containment vessel.

I wish I had something funny to say here but I just don't. Nothing any of us can say from here will make a bit of difference one way or the other anyway. Note, then, that if this is true, it would be nice if we could lay off people for saying whatever irrelevant thing comes to mind. But I guess we can't have nice things.

Just please don't use the word moratorium

Reuters: Japan nuclear woes cast shadow over US energy policy

WASHINGTON, March 13 (Reuters) - Anxiety over Japan's quake-crippled nuclear reactors has triggered calls from U.S. lawmakers and activists for review of U.S. energy policy and for brakes on expansion of domestic nuclear power.

President Barack Obama has urged expansion of nuclear power to help meet the country's energy demands, lower its dependence on imported fossil fuels and reduce its climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Prediction for 2012: GOP stirs up voters with a winning "Glow, Baby, Glow!" movement