http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000216/aponline002131_000.htm

Alert Declared at Nuclear Plant

By Jim Fitzgerald Associated Press Writer

Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2000; 12:21 a.m. EST

BUCHANAN, N.Y.  A leak in a steam generator at a Hudson River nuclear power plant resulted in a brief release of radioactive steam Tuesday night but it was confined to the plant and below dangerous levels, power company officials said.

Con Edison, which owns and operates the Indian Point 2 plant in northern Westchester County, declared an alert, the second of four increasingly serious emergency classifications, company spokesman Michael Spall said.

There were no immediate reports of any evacuations.

The size and duration of the leak had not been measured.

He said the plant was shut down, but there was "a momentary release of radioactive material to the environment, below any level that poses a threat to the safety of plant personnel or the public."

Radioactive steam was released for "a few seconds," but it was held within the plant's containment building, the sealed concrete building that holds the reactor, Spall said.

He described the plant as stable but said the alert would last several hours overnight as the shutoff reactor is cooled.

The accident occurred at 7:29 p.m. in a tube used to carry hot, radioactive, high-pressure water to a pool of cool, non-radioactive water, Spall said. When the hot water hits the cool water, steam is produced, which turns a turbine and generates electricity.

Federal, state and local authorities were notified, Spall said.

The alert was the first in the plant's 16-year history, Spall said.

) Copyright 2000 The Associated Press

-- mmmm (mmmm@mmmm.com), February 16, 2000

Answers

As Hokie would say, "Yikes!"

-- Lurkess (Lurkess@Lurking.XNet), February 16, 2000.

Double Yikes! =(

-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), February 16, 2000.

This is a little close to home. As an undeclared "polly" I have read with interest the seemingly large number of events with nuclear plants since the CDC. I am starting to wonder if these are date related.

Do we have any nuclear engineers on the board who might want to comment? It would certainly be easy to conclude these are date related-but I want to avoid emotionally-drawn conclusions and get the technical facts behind this newest event.

-- Futureshock (gray@matter.think), February 16, 2000.

--my opinion, nuke power was a serious accident waiting to happen right from the gitgo. Nuke waste lasts something like 10,000 years. Show me a society that's still intact after 10,000 years, where they could have kept the glowing and deadly genie in the bottle. I've been waiting for that answer since I first asked it in like 60 I think.

I won't live any where near one of those places, I don't care if they have 15 containment buildings around them. It's a retardo way to make juice, too. Sure, it can be done,SO WHAT,it's still dumb. Centralized power was a concept foisted on the US way back in the early days of the century by men and corporations who wanted a monopoly, and to send you a bill FOREVER. It makes the country and citizens more vulnerable for disaster, not less. In the long run it costs more,pollutes more, and lowers our over-all security.

There's still a Jacobs windcharger spinning merrily along at the south pole that was put there in the 30's, still putting out clean juice.

Point is there are alternatives, and there always have been, but corporate monopolists controlled the media and the congress back then, same as now. double phooie.

I'm partially off the grid now, my goal by end of summer is 100%, NO MORE paying for nuke plants, coal plants, oil plants, and huge obscene profits for the already rich. They've had enough I'm thinking, take the money and go, move over, new cleaner technologies are coming shortly, and older clean technologies have been around a long time.

Nope. Putting my loot and energy into something working for me that I'm not contributing-granted,a very, very small way-to the overall "mess" of things. It all adds up. Chipping away can work for the good, too, not just necessarily the bad.

-- zog (zzoggy@yahoo.com), February 16, 2000.

Can't tell from the description about ... we've got a 3-D model of this steam generator and the containment building, but from the press release/story, there's no way to tell what pipe/valve/sensor leaked, nor why it failed.

The containment concrete is thick enough (24" of concrete, with an inner liner of stainless steel) to prevent the gamma rays from penetrating to the outside. The small quantity of water isn't enough to be a problem, though it is mildly radioactive.

Not a tremendous technical problem, but more of a nuisance (and extremely expensive) to shut down the plant, go into the containment, clean up the water, monitor everything, fix the problem, then restart. The NRC fines for this one are going to probably be as expensive as the lost production time.

And, as you've seen, the penalty in lost public trust and confidence is also tremendous.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 16, 2000.

Thank you Robert for your "expertise." It's apparent that you've "been there - done that."

And thank you Zog for your "expertise." It's apparent also that you've "been there - done that" as well.

The truth is that Nuclear Power *is* an accident waiting to happen. The design of the whole rig supposedly answers to that fact. Is it 100 percent foolproof? Emphatic NO! Nothing is. It is the "energy answer?" Emphatic NO! Nothing is. (Am I repeating myself a lot here?)

Nuclear is just one more way of carrying our "energy eggs" and one that seemed to make sense considering the economics of it's day and time. Eisenhower looked at the roadsigns of his day and (erroneously) commented "Nuclear Power would soon be too cheap to meter."

We're learning. And one of the things we're learning is that there are no "absolutes."

Even Solar Power, Windpower, Hydropower, and all the other "renewable" energy sources have their up and downsides.

"Homepower Magazine" will be the first to admit that under today's economics, Solar (Photovoltaic) electricity does not make "economic sense." The recent removal of the Edwards Dam in Maine is an environmental "counterreaction" to the downside of hydropower. And windpower is unsightly, blenderizes birds, and causes noise pollution.

That isn't to say we shouldn't go these ways, however. And that also isn't to say that they won't be economic - someday.

The energy field is drawing closer together. I left the Nuclear industry about the same time that nuclear powerplants degraded to economic "parity" with coal and oil powerplants (about 1988.) Currently natural gas seems the "fuel of choice" for price and environmental reasons. This too will change.

Kenetech (a major supplier of utility sized windturbines) recently went bankrupt and the company has been reformed. There didn't seem to be any shortage of buyers for their company or assets. To my knowledge Kenetech Turbines are still available, albiet under a different nameplate, and the "economic margin" is closing.

And in the background are still the solar water heaters, photovoltaic panels, wind generators, and good old "yankee ingenuity" waiting in the wings for the next evolution.

And what will drive them forward will be somebody wanting to "make a buck," or "save a buck."

And I wish them both well.

Best regards,

-- Joe (KEITH@neesnet.com), February 16, 2000.

Amazing how quickly we are being told,not to worry,there is no Danger to anyone,including the Maintenance Crews,BUT,when it comes to producing Evidence,that Chemicals added to our Soil,Foods and Environment are dangerous,it takes Years to come to a Conclusion.In the meantime,Corps.like Monsanto keep spreading Death and Disease among us. NO NUKES IS GOOD NUKES.Tobacco Smoke is not addictive or a Health Hazzard.:)

-- Nick (NONUKES@ISGOOD.NUKES), February 16, 2000.

Zog,

I know we've gotten OT, but I think you're right on about TPTB desiring to centralize electric production in order to lock us in to a lifetime of payments, and ...control. Ditto with oil/gas. "They" don't want a free population.

To positive side is that centralization can result in cost savings though economies of scale. The down side is, some or most of those savings may not be passed on to the coustomer. Therefore, the end-user looses both money and freedom.

-- No Polly (nopolly@hotmail.com), February 16, 2000.

Yes, but ..... you can't run a close-packed city from solar cells, nor wind or tides.

Simply isn't enough energy per square meter to do that. Can't run most industrial processes - not enough square miles available to run an oil refinery or chemical plant, steel mill, or fabrication center. Bigger, lower energy things (like a school, warehouse, store or shopping center) have a chance during the day during summertime, but can't store enough power over the back shifts or over preiods of cloudy weather to use solar either. Same with high "volume" buildings that don't have enough "roof" area to gather enough power: an apartment building, a hospital, and almost all offices and retial stores.

Simply too many kilowatts of energy used all day and night to try solar.

So, we are left with central plants for power - whether we like it or not, until fusion comes on line - for many of the actual "jobs" and facilities that are (at least now) irreplaceable.

---...--- Note: shameless advertisement follows.

To start getting your own house off the grid, which is becoming practical, contact Alternate Power Solutions (Dave Stroub or Jim Berry) at 1-800-805-9289 (www.beoffthegrid.com)

After I'd (finally) found all the components and assembled my own solar sytems last fall from all the parts, pieces, wires, circuit breakers, enclosures, panels, brackets and charge controllers, etc., etc. I found their company up north of me the other side of Marietta.

They've got a neat pre-packaged "plug-in-play" series of home-size/small business sized packages that are expandable to actually start weaning your family off of the grid. (Depending on power level and reserve capacity, prices vary obviously.) What I like about their packages is that you don't have layout everthing at once - you can begin with just an emergency backup power supply module, then add more later. Lots simpler that way than what I did.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 16, 2000.

Robert,

You made a good point that urban life is only possible through the umbilical of electricity, as supplied by centralized generation.

But, who would want to live in a city anyway??? (Rhetorical question, lots of people must).

Anyway, back to one of Zog's points, we can all do our little bit. I'm no one to talk. My setup consists of a modest solar array, deep cycle batteries, and an inverter. I only run my ham shack from it.

-- No Polly (NOPOLLY@HOTMAIL.COM), February 16, 2000.

Someone made a Comment about Windpower,Noisy?Unsightly?You must have gotten Your Corporate Brainwashing early,maybe in Kindergarten???I think you should get a couple of "good looking"55 Gallon Drums of radioactive Waste for Your Grandchildren to play with,and don't forget to join them.

-- Nick (no@nukes.com), February 16, 2000.

Ah - small steps, but you have contributed with even those steps.

But don't get all bent out of shape patting yourself on your back - recognize the total environmental impact of even your choices:

the batteries contain chemicals, and required energy to produce and distribute; and will require even more energy to recycle the internals and then dispose of (properly) the residue.

entropy expands to fill the space available - all of our actions affect the space around us: the heat to produce the solar sets, the chemicals to fabricate them, to clean them, to polish and set them must be factored in. secondary impacts (the shaded area under the modules, the copper used in the wires, the (unrecoverable) plastic in insulating them, all have an economic cost (and life cycle cost) that must be judged.

That judgement may be "This wire is more valuable than leaving the copper in the ground for somebody else in the future" - it's a valid decision based on your and my lifestyles - but keep in mind we have made that decision based on our needs, not on their needs.

Thus, what is mined from the earth for our needs needs to be saved/salvaged/maintained forproperly for reuse in future generations...at least until they can start harvesting the asteroids for Cu, Fe, Ni, Cd, U (?), etc.

Where the radical ecologists (and most Democratic politicians) err is that they have decided that THEY are the ones who will make this decision for the world - and WANT (in their hearts) to end up with a utopian result of everybody wandering in a pure world, technology free and "safe for all living things" - in other words: the African plains of 200,000 years ago.

Where most people lived free from technology, but died before reaching age 12. They are zealots armed with a missionary zeal to stop capitalism at any price, replacing it with a socialist one-world economy - with them in charge of their ivory-tower utopia.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 16, 2000.

You ever seen (or tried to maintain) those thousands of generators spread over hundreds of thousands of acres needed for wind farms in the few California passes where they actually have been tried?

It's not a practical method for any more than 2-3% of the population. Sorry - I'd rather have one barrel of radioactive waste, rather than thousands of tons of radioactive coal dust, carbon dioxide, and coal ash being released into the air and water......or didn't you realize that a coal fired plant releases more radiation than the average nuke does?

Nuclear waste is (literally) a small problem - one with a terrible press story, but they aren't interested in the truth anyway. Best to recycle the nuclear waste, get more power from it with none released to environment.

But the nuclear critics don't want that to happen. They want to burn our kid's oil and natural gas.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 16, 2000.

--Robert, I want answer D-none of the above. and what I REALLY want is to dump edison, give him a page in the books, swell, and bring back tesla, use his original brains and insights. There's truth all around, there's truth in that AS IT'S SET UP NOW, you can't power a "city" with alternate power. Well, two obvious solutions, one, take a better look at the way "cities" are set up now. Whole lotta problems with cities, especially as they are allowed to grow like amoebas. Being in cobb county, and I'm sure seeing gwinett and the outlying areas over the past decade or two, you can see my point there. Now two, you know that tesla had it much better, his entire view of how things "work", and on how to go about dealing with electricity-well, I'm assuming that, excuse me. I'll rephrase, I believe tesla's outlooks, if implemented in the past, would have given us by now much better alternatives than coal or oil or nuke or natgas plants, in fact, we would probably be running on a variation of shakeys static charge deals, using the potentials between the various layers in the planet and the atmosphere, not to mention the huge leyden jar that makes up 3/4 of the surface of the planet, the oceans. Burning ANYTHING is nutz and inefficient. I know you make your loot from nukes, so that's that, that's reality, you basically have to defend it. I don't, and I still maintain that no civilization has lasted the 10,000 years that it will take to safeguard the waste, and I distinctly remember way back then that all the nuke guys in the press where EMPHATICALLY saying that by now, the YEAR 2000, that magical year, that not only would the genie be bottled up safely, but that "they" would find a way to automagically transform radioactive waste to non-radioactive waste. well...that little deal didn't happen, best we got now is still cork it up with expensive bottles and corks, about the same as 30 years ago, not really much different, cork it up, stick it in some old mine some place, isn't this the deal now in a nutshell?

Yep, photovoltaics are currently expensive, but there was a breakthrough late last year that has a predicted output costs of 1.5 cents a watt, not too shabby, and soon, too. It's a-happening. Also, the fuel cells. Lotta stuff, but as long as the BILLIONS of dollars keeps going into yesterdays technology, and only a few mil world wide into tomorrows, well the energy companies equivalent of detroits 1800's pushrod motor will keep getting produced. C'mon, it's true isn't it, what's the real level of r&d on alternatives? It's overall pitiful isn't it? Just ramping up production of some model A PV panel to millions of units a year as opposed to the dozens or so now would SIGNIFICANTLY lower costs, it does in every other product known to man.

I'm just saying that there needs to be some common ground for this to get better. Speaking as a guy who ONE TIME goes into a nuke, and they have a serious accident while I'm there, well, hope you know where I'm coming from. And yes indeedy, been hip to coal plants and radiation since 68, not that long, doesn't make me a professional on power, but have been aware of it. Face it, nukes have cost way,way more than first projected 'back then", haven't they? We were told that juice would be really really cheap, and that even by now small nukes in every basement, like those downtown chicago "pigs". So, willing to admit maybe some exaggeration and problems on the "big glowing" side, just a little? I'm willing to admit that at current levels, there is no complete source of available alternative power that would maintain a city.

Of course, I also feel that cities have mostly outlived societal usefullness, because if they hadn't, people would be moving into them, and they are not, all over the US people have moved as FAR away as they can comfortably commute, and a lot of them are now working outside the big cities. Isn't that true as well?

I maintain that there are better ways, it just has to be done, on as big a scale in terms of money and manhours and time and research and development as say-the manhattan project or y2k remediation. I'm fairly confident that wonderful great things would come out of that research, if it was taken on with enthusiasm and support from industry, instead of kicking and screaming and being drug every step of the way. It's hard to change, it's hard for me, and every year harder, but I think it's something humans and societies should do. And the really whopper lesson is to learn from the past, not just keep making a bigger example of mistakes from the past, but to TRULY learn something. Communism and socialism don't work, and neither does "government sponsored monopolistic capitalism". I call it that because that is the best description-when just a very few people and industries can determine how everyone else lives, simply by the lobbied for and paid off monopolies. I give you-Microsoft, and down here-The Southern Company. sure there's still "choices", but I think you can see my point without getting ridiculous in the examples.

Both extremes are fascist, they are centralized and dictatorial, they both stifle creativity, drive and spirit. We could go much further as a species, as humans, if we could get past that point of "needing" to be ruled. This is why I speak of politics so much, because it ties in to everything practically. We claim we have "free" enterprise, but we really don't. It's the rule of the mega corps, who gobble up and by using government regulations, stifle competition. Who knows what fabulous technology we could have had by now if there truly was "free competiton". We have now what I would characterize as "kinda" competiton. Is this an accurate view, or am I far off?

Well,covered some ground, and it is late for me, manana....

-- zog (zzoggy@yahoo.com), February 17, 2000.

<<. Who knows what fabulous technology we could have had by now if there truly was "free competiton". We have now what I would characterize as "kinda" competiton. Is this an accurate view, or am I far off? >>

Most likely, much better off than we are now.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 17, 2000.