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Message Subject Why U.S. nuclear power plants are vulnerable to severe accident with nuclear fallout
Poster Handle ehecatl
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ANYTHING that requires the CONSTANT NONSTOP working of mechanical equipment AND trained personel in order to keep it from become a smoldering mass of danger for the next 10,000 years is temping fate ... and eventually fate WILL BITE BACK.

Easy to conceive scenarios:

Grid goes down (any reason) and for the same reason no more fuel can be delivered to fuel the backup power generators ... voila GUARANTEED meltdown.

Natural disaster, say EQ OR Tornado strike on plant, takes out both the power grid connection AND the backup power generators (we already KNOW that a tsunami can do this) ... voila GUARANTEED meltdown

A terrorist attack on a nuke plant takes out the power grid feeding it AND the backup generators ... don't even have to get into the control room or reactor building itself ... voila GUARANTEED meltdown

Some sort of disease or other event kills off the control room operators and replacements can't be found (hit by same disease) ... voila GUARANTEED meltdown

We already have had 4 major meltdown events (and several smaller ones), more are on the horizon GUARANTEED if we continue to operate Nuclear Power Plants as they are currently designed.

* Fermi 1 - Michigan US
* Three Mile Island - Pennsylvania US
* Chernobyl - USSR
* Fukushima - Japan

There have also been several NEAR meltdown scenarios ... but for luck, or the expert minute by minute managing of a deteriorating situation, they would have happened also.
 Quoting: Anonymous Coward 20589235

Don't forget the melt-down of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Sodium Reactor in Simi-Valley CA.

It is admitted even by the officials to have released more isotopes into the environment than Three Mile Island, but was not even revealed to the public that it happened till more than a decade later, and it is still hardly known about, but the contamination is still measurable far and wide north of LA.

It is interesting, that the sodium reactor that they ran for 7 years, was testing the system that would have recycled all the nuclear waste that is piling up now from water reactors, and by passing the material between the two kinds of reactors would have yielded many times more energy from the same material, and neutralized almost all of the isotopes in the process.

The basic idea of producing power from just the first run on the control rods and not cycling it back and forth between water and sodium reactors would have been totally not acceptable to the founders of the technology.

[link to en.wikipedia.org]

[link to en.wikipedia.org]
 
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