My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.
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Nuclear Reactors 145 – NRC Region I in the United States is the Best Regulated of the Four NRC Regions
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has divided the country into four regions for the regulation of operating nuclear power plants. Region I is New England, Region II is the South East. Region III is around the Great Lakes and Region IV is the Western half of the country. Recently David Lochbaum, the director of the Nuclear Safety Project gave his evaluation of the performance of the NRC in Region I.
Lochbaum had created a check list for the evaluation of nuclear power plant operators back in the late 1990s. He was looking at 10 nuclear power plants that varies from well run to poorly run. Here is the list of questions.
1. Who identified the problem?
2. How was it identified?
3. Was it evaluated properly?
4. What caused the problem?
5. When was it identified?
6. Had the problem occurred before?
7. If so, had the problem been fixed?
8. If so, was the fix effective?
9. Has the problem been corrected?
This set of questions was originally created to evaluate performance of nuclear power plant operators but in the new statement by Lochbaum, the same set of questions can be used to evaluate the performance of the NRC.
Generally, Lochbaum said that if a problem is found during the aggressive investigation of another problem at the same facility or another problems at a different facility, that is a good indication of proper regulation of a powerplant. If a problem reveals itself to the operators or a problem keeps repeating, then that is an indication of poor regulation of a facility.
The seventeen nuclear power plants in Region I include Beaver Valley, Limerick, Peach Bottom, Susquehanna and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania; Calvert Cliffs in Maryland; Fitzpatrick, Ginna, Indian Point, and Nine Mile Point in New York; Hope Creek, Oyster Creek, and Salem in New Jersey; Millstone in Connecticut; Pilgrim in Massachusetts; Seabrook in New Hampshire; and Vermont Yankee in Vermont. There have been problems with these reactors but Lochbaum says that they do not show that the NRC could have found the problems sooner or that the NRC is guilty of not applying sufficient solutions to the problems. Lochbaum concludes that Region I is performing better with respect to dealing with problems than the other three Regions.
Lochbaum points out that his system of scoring performance is the opposite of that used in judging performance in sports such as Olympic figure skating. In skating, the best and worst performances are thrown out and the rest are averaged. In contrast, Lochbaum focuses on the best and the worst performances in nuclear power plant regulation. The best performance serves as an example of what can be done and the worst performances indicate where more work needs to be done.
While it is encouraging to see proper regulation of nuclear power in Region I, it can be discouraging to consider that much more work needs to be done to improve regulation in the other three Regions.
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Radiation News Roundup July 14, 2014
Fukushima plant is now like a swamp of radioactive material due to the contaminated water. Enenews.com
Fukushima radioactive releases into ocean can continue thousands of more years, says nuclear expert. Enenews.com
Long abandoned by the White House, the Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository project in Nevada still shows signs of support in Congress. Nuclearstreet.com
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Radiation News Roundup July 14, 2014
Fukushima plant is now like a swamp of radioactive material due to the contaminated water. Enenews.com
Fukushima radioactive releases into ocean can continue thousands of more years, says nuclear expert. Enenews.com
Long abandoned by the White House, the Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository project in Nevada still shows signs of support in Congress. Nuclearstreet.com
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Geiger Readings for July 14, 2014
My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance. -
Geiger Readings for July 13, 2014
My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.
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Geiger Readings for July 12, 2014
My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.
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Wild Ideas for Using Nuclear Bombs to Terraform the Planets
At the dawn of the Atomic Age, there was talk of using nuclear bombs for civilian purposes such as digging canals and harbors. In the Soviet Union, there was even a plan to use nuclear bombs for fracking natural gas. Fortunately this plan was never carried out. However, it turns out that these proposals were tame in comparison to ideas expressed by an astronomer named Fred Zwicky at CalTech.
Zwicky was the first astronomer who conceived of dark matter, supernovae and neutron stars. He presented many advanced theories in academic articles, newspaper interviews and magazine articles between the 1940s and the 1960s. He was highly critical of his fellow scientists. He felt that they lacked vision to really make use of advanced technologies. He once said that “Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.”
One of his ideas was something called a “terrajet.” He claimed that it would make it possible to send missiles directly through the Earth to attack an enemy from beneath. He envisioned that the terrajet would gather rock and dirt in and then blow it out through an exhaust system as they tunneled.
Zwicky had a plan to colonize the solar system with nuclear bombs. He thought that Venus and Mercury could be moved further away from the sun into the habitable zone with a series of nuclear explosions. He also had the idea to use nuclear bombs and the terrajet to reduce the size of Jupiter to the point where it could be inhabited. The debris left over from carving up Jupiter was to be added to the moons of Jupiter to make them more suitable for colonization.
If a planet or a moon lacked sufficient atmosphere, he thought that the terrajet earth borer could produce oxygen and water as byproducts of digging channels for lakes and rivers. If a planet or moon had a poisonous atmosphere, nuclear bombs could be used to blow it off. He claimed that it should be possible to build nuclear bombs that would not create a high level of radioactivity when detonated. This would mean that the planets that were terraformed with nuclear bombs would not be rendered uninhabitable by radiation generated by nuclear explosions.
As wild as these ideas are, Zwicky had even more outrageous plans for space exploration. He claimed that it should be possible to accelerate the sun by triggering nuclear fusion reactions on the surface of the sun. Properly positioned, such reactions would cause the sun to eject huge solar flares that would impart momentum to the sun. This was to be accomplished by injecting particles of the proper composition and size into the sun to trigger the reactions. As the sun was accelerated in a particular direction, it would drag the planets along with it. So, in essence, the whole solar system would become a sort of spaceship.
It will be decades or more before these ideas are even theoretically possible whether or not they are a good idea.
Fred Zwicky:
