amituvh01: Open thread for night owls: Another Senate hearing on nuclear safety does not soothe

Monday, June 20, 2011

Open thread for night owls: Another Senate hearing on nuclear safety does not soothe

At The Nation, George Zornick writes:

In the two months since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant suffered a catastrophic breakdown during an earthquake and tsunami in Japan, what has the United States learned about nuclear safety? How are regulators working to prevent a similar disaster at one of America?s 104 nuclear power plants, about a quarter of which share the same design as Fukushima Daiichi?
This was the topic of discussion at a hearing by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday?and for the second time since the disaster in Japan, it summoned all five commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to appear and answer questions. The results weren?t exactly comforting, and demonstrated there?s still a long way to go towards a ?safe? nuclear power infrastructure in the United States?if that?s even possible.

Spent fuel rods posed a grave threat at Fukushima, as Christian Parenti outlined here. They are packed with radioactive uranium, and are very unstable. They are also generally not well-protected. NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, when asked by Sen. Tom Carper about the spent fuel pools in the United States, admitted that ?we have not given that enough attention.?

Jaczko also said that until Fukushima, the NRC had never really considered the possibility that multiple reactors or even multiple plants could fail at the same time, due to some sort of large-scale natural disaster or other event. ?Our traditional approach has always been to assume a single incident at a single reactor,? he said. ?Clearly Fukushima-Daiichi showed us that we have to consider the possibility of multiple units at a single site, perhaps multiple spent fuel pools being affected at the same time.?

Commissioners also had no answers about how to fix backup power systems that continue to cool nuclear material in the event of a major power outage. The batteries at Fukushima ran for only eight hours?not nearly long enough. In the United States, the standard length is only four hours. ?This is something we have to look into and take action on,? said commissioner George Apostolakis. ?I?m not sure what that action would be.? ...

Yet one more round of the it-can't-happen-here perspective that has plagued the nuclear industry and its captured regulators since the first commercial power plant came on line 54 years ago.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2003:

In one of the most hilarious moments of the Bush presidency, Dubya blasted "revisionist historians" with apparently no sense of irony.
However, in another sign that the WMD rationale is nearly exhausted, Bush did not mention the word once in his defense of the war. Rather, he said:

Referring to the ousted Iraqi president, Bush said, "Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted."

Of course, the question is still, "WHY was he a threat?" He can say "threat, threat, threat" until he's blue in the face. Fact is, you have to back up such assertions.
Given that reality didn't back up his "threat" assessment, Bush and his cabal invented one -- WMDs. The LIES continue to be exposed.

And no amount of revisionism will rescue Bush from the truth.

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