Story Here.
The reactor at the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant was shut down Monday afternoon after a coolant leak was detected, officials said.
I’m no expert on nuclear power, but I do know something about heat exchangers–vital components in all nuclear power plants. What happened in Michigan was that a heat exchanger developed a leak. No radioactive material escaped.
American nuclear power plants are the safest, most monitored facilities in the world. There are multiple safeguards in place, and alarms to indicate not only problems with the system, but with these safeguards. Instantly, a pressure differential in the cooling water system or a humidity sensor tripped an alarm and the system was shut down until the reason could be discerned and fixed.
Perhaps we’ve matured in this country. The headline on Drudge, once flashing red, is now gone. I had to do a Google search to find anything about the “nuclear accident” as something like this was once called. That eases my mind about our collective reaction to such events.
We live in a country which requires copious amounts of energy–just stating the obvious. We are consumers, every one of us, including the activists who whine about our level of consumption. We fight “wars for oil” and destroy the ozone layer by using things which create ozone-depleting vapors or increase the greenhouse effect with carbon monoxide and dioxide. Yet the very people who complain about such things are the same ones who would march and lie down in the streets if any community attempted to provide the cleanest, most efficient power production vehicle known to man–nuclear power.
“I don’t want an atomic bomb in my back yard.” Well, a nuclear power plant cannot explode. It can burn, and it can melt, and it would release nasty things if that ever happened. But it can’t explode. But the emotion trumps any logical discussion.
What about waste?
Yes, there is waste. Yes, it is radioactive. It is about as radioactive as natural uranium which is scattered underground throughout the western US. It can be easily contained and buried in such a way as to not even be detectable.
We have had nuclear power plants operating in this country for forty years. The only “accident” we’ve had in that time was Three Mile Island, which resulted in panic by the usual environmental suspects. Unnecessary panic:
Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a full set of chest x-rays is about 6 millirem. Compared to the natural radioactive background dose of about 100-125 millirem per year for the area, the collective dose to the community from the accident was very small. The maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem.
When politicians and activists complain that we have no energy policy (as did Hillary Clinton this week), someone needs to point out the safety record of nuclear power and demand that we build and use such generation capability until the time when the Holy Grail of alternative energy becomes known.