13-14yr olds standing next to used nuclear fuel

[KennyG]

Yes, you can replace most of the parts of a nuclear power plant. And that works up to a point. Except in a case like San Onofre where the replacement heat exchanger turned out to be a piece of junk manufactured in Japan. Cracks showed up in the new equipment soon after the reactors were restarted. SCE decided to decommission the plant rather than fix that screwup.

The San Onofre case is one that is really interesting but takes a bit more evaluation than what you see in the press, especially the California press. The steam generator was manufactured very well, but it was designed wrong. Why Southern California Edison decided to go with a Japanese design company that had never designed this specific type of equipment rather than US companies that had successfully done it 50 times remains a mystery. In spite of that, the design error only impacted operation at 100% power. The plant could have been restarted and run at 90% indefinitely. Alternatively, the steam generators could have been replaced again. Instead, SCE decided to bail out because of concerns about regulatory and political pressure.

There is some reluctance today to make changes or improvements in operating plants because any minor glitch will be jumped on as a reason to completely shut the unit down.

 

[jaotguy]

Used fuel "Radioactive and dangerous for 100,000's of years". Just a bunch of lying self serving rogues in Green Peace.

we've already established the 1000-2000 years to get to normal background levels .... and a couple of hundred if you were to walk past it , and still be safe ..... but you wouldn't grow your garden there , build a house or playground for your kids ....

it was stated that the US and Canada probably won't exist in 500 years time ( so true ) ... and their records will probably be gone too.
we'll probably be using a new form of energy and have abandoned nuclear 75 years ago ...

then someone comes along and says " hey , we found splattoniun ( fictitious of course ) in the north ... lets mine it " .... and a couple of blastings later in the "stable geological structure" , and we have "a problem" .... (OH sh*t !!! , that's where they buried that stuff )

far fetched , you bet ... possible , yup ....
stranger things have happened, such as nuclear subs sitting on the bottom of the ocean , too deep for recovery, yet still potential problems ....

in Ottawa , there was an industrial section of the city that produced toxic waste ( during the war ) ... they expropriated the land and buried it and turned it into fields ... 30 years later someone said "lets build a park on that empty piece of land" ... that's when they rediscovered the toxic waste and soil .... spent millions hauling it away and making the land safe for a park... no one remembered.

I've got an OLD nuclear reactor (one of the first) upstream of me on the river ... it has "incidents" all the time, they've had to shut it down for months at a time for repairs .... yes I'm on a well ... yet you don't see me protesting or running around in the streets with signs saying the sky is falling ...

the main point of all of this is : stay well informed, get the "true facts", think for yourself , make reasonable choices after weighing the pros and cons .... and be aware, there are rabid zealots on both sides of every fence ....

good luck to all of us on this planet :thumbsup: