These control zones would have existed all the way from Rhode Island to Portland, Maine. This is what a nuclear disaster would look like for the region. For our region — the place where we live and breath every day. This is what would happen to our homes, our forests and our friends and family. In many cases, we’d simply never see them again. Such a disaster would seem unfathomable — but hopefully a picture speaks a thousand words.
Now, of course, a worst-case scenario wouldn’t look exactly like this map. Wind patterns, geography and the size and scope of the disaster would all come into play. And, certainly, the likelihood of such an event happening may be one in a hundred years. Yet — it’s been several hundred since our last major earthquake in the region — and we are not immune. The risk, after all, is great enough for the plant to be ranked second highest for earthquake threats in the country. Given Murphy’s Law, whatever can go wrong eventually will, a catastrophic event being “unlikely” is not good enough. This is a serious problem that deserves a serious amount of attention, and quite likely a difficult set of choices.
I wanted to use the larger version of the map to show that it was in scale, but here’s a cut-and-paste of just New England. It has the added bonus of being a little easier to see through the transparent Chernobyl image layered above the Google map.
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If Plymouth blew up, radiation would travel NORTH WEST to Boston, and Cape Cod downwind of prevailing winds would be unscathed?
of the radiation from Chernobyl on the Boston area. Our fallout patterns would be completely different. It would depend quite a bit on the weather. Kiev got quite likely that the wind wasn’t blowing from the North when the accident happened.
I think his point was to superimpose the Chernobyl map, to scale, over Plymouth. The prevailing wind in Ukraine took fallout northwest, so this illustration shows fallout in Boston.
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p>Maybe the same point could be made by twisting the Chernobyl image around to match North American weather patterns, or by converting the image to radii showing potentially affected areas. Ryan’s right, that is hard to do using GIMP, so I don’t blame him for that.
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p>But then it might also be useful to point out that this absolute worst case scenario resulted in 30 deaths from injuries at the time of the accident, and deaths from long-term radiation numbering in the thousands, and that this risk is perceived as so severe and dangerous that power generated by fossil fuels is preferable.
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p>In short, the reactions among governments, people, and media to the situation in japan seem to be lacking in the rationality department.
Or perhaps an attempt was made to imply that radiation would spread over heavily populate Boston, insead of more lightly populated Cape Cod.
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p>We are well aware that if Plymouth blows, we are toast. We would like to use the nonsensical blue ‘Evacuation Route’ signs as frisbees, as there will BE no evacuation PAST THE SITE OF THE EXPLOSION in the event of a catastrophe.
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p>But the liklihood of a tsuname coming in from Greenland makes us breathe easier – from what I’ve read, it wasn’t the earthquake that caused the problem, it was the lack of electricity to run the pumps that was a result of the tsunami.
I wrote in the very article…
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p>I agree with you. If a full-scale disaster occurred at Pilgrim, it would look different than the map — the map is more to give people an idea of the scope of such a disaster. Whether that second big red area would be in Portland, Maine, or Manchester, New Hampshire, is almost beside the point. The point is incredible damage would be done and large-scale, highly-populated areas of national importance to this country could literally become closed to the public.
If you install the plugin GIMPShop. đŸ™‚
I had a helluva time making that, actually (because the only place to change opacity is on the stupid layer window, which I had a helluva time finding out how to open – or even that I needed to open it — and was not under the “layered” menu). It’s been a looooooong time since I’ve done anything remotely complicated with graphics, needing something like GIMP or photoshop, and I don’t have a big graphics background… so I’m actually relatively happy with the way it turned out.
According the the American Lung Association, pollution from coal-fired power plants kill 13,000 people annually.
when they go kaboom?
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p>No one said this was going to be easy, and I’m certainly not willing to suggest we shouldn’t even research nuclear technology in the days ahead…
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p>but there’s literally potential of Boston and New York City being wiped off the map because of old nuclear reactors built in earth-quake-prone areas in range of either or even both of those cities at once. If Pilgrim ever went after an earthquake and containment was breached in a significant way — be it the reactor or the pools — there’s enough radioactive material to cause a giant and never-recoverable population shift to the West Coast there…
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p>At the very least, we need to do something about Pilgrim and the other plant near NYC, as well as other high risk plants out there.
…pollution from coal is a constant source of health problems by definition, whereas there has to be the rare catastrophe to cause widespread nuclear harm. In other words probability seems to favor nuclear, but then renewables don’t have either problem.
Chernobyl killed 31 people directly, and there have been about 1800 documented cases of cancer resulting from it. http://www.iaea.org/newscenter…
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p>And that was the worst nuclear disaster in history.
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p>Nowhere near the 13,000 who die yearly from coal pollution. Even a nuclear catastrophe would kill fewer people than coal does every year.
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p>I like those odds.
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p>What do we do?
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p>And now the prez wants to open up offshore drilling! Offshore drilling! I’ve been GIMPing up pics of BP oil slicks all week. YOU THINK YOU CRAPPED YOUR SHORTS? CHECK OUT MY LAUNDRY!
There’s a reason once-in-a-lifetime events are called that, folks. Anyone familiar with architecture knows that in the event of a 9.0 earthquake right off Boston’s coast, Pilgrim will be pretty far down our list of problems, far below the “hey everyone’s dead” issue.
That’s unlikely, but honestly it’s actually a fair bet that we get a 6 or so. And are people confident our plants will stand that test? I think we ought to at least have a public dialogue about it, with real answers and knowledge of all the contingency plans -at least to set minds at ease.
Not wrong about a 9.0 earthquake, but very wrong about no risk.
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p>See this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42…
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p>The second most likely nuclear plant in the country to have a meltdown due to an earthquake is our very owl Pilgrim 1 reactor, right after Indian Point, which is quite near another large east coast city you may have heard of.
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p>Why, these and not, say, Diablo Canyon, which sits very near California’s San Andreas Fault? Because our East Coast plants were not designed with earthquakes in mind. So even a relatively small quake could damage the reactors core.
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p>The risk is still fairly small 1 in 10,000 for Indian Point and 1 in 14,493 for Pilgrim each year, but given the proximity of large cities and the risk of widespread contamination, it is still a larger risk than we should accept.
We know that coal kills about 13,000 people a year.
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p>We know that the largest nuclear catastrophe in history (Chernobyl) killed, at most, something on the order of 2,000 people.
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p>Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that the risk of nuclear catastrophe, from all causes, is ten times the risk of catastrophe from earthquake alone. I think that’s about 1 in 1,500 per year (that’s an outrageously high figure, by the way). Using this greatly exaggerated risk, if you’ll allow me to round the risk figure to 1 in 2,000, I get an expected death toll of about 1 person/year (1 in 2,000 times 2,000 deaths).
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p>There are about 100 nuclear plants operating in the US. Even if each was as risky as this, that makes the expected death toll from nuclear power about 100 people per year. That makes coal a whopping thirteen hundred times more deadly than nuclear.
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p>Please note that I’ve made extreme overstatements of risk and consequences at each step of this thumbnail “analysis”.
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p>I’m no nuclear apologist. I do think, however, that we should be very cautious about adopting an essentially superstitious attitude towards nuclear power. In particular, I find your conclusion (“[the risk from Indian Point and Pilgrim] is still a larger risk than we should accept”) unsupported by the facts.
which is certainly not the case. What this does to your numbers I know not.
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p>Your analysis also ignores the value of property. Chernobyl destroyed an awful lot of property.
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p>Finally, your analysis ignores proximity. Nuclear plants nearer or farther from population centers will have different results of devastation.
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p>In short, I think a bit more analysis is necessary, even for a “back of the envelope” calculation.
I think we have a compelling need to do analyses like these.
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p>I think the most important factor, mathematically, is the fundamental differences between Chernobyl and any US nuclear facility. A repeat of the scenario at Fukushima (probably triggered by some other cause) is, in my view, the most likely episode that we’ll face in the US. The likelihood of a Chernobyl-style explosion and fire is vanishingly small.
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p>That’s why I have a fundamental issue with attempting to conflate Chernobyl and Pilgrim (or any other US plant), and that’s why I particularly resist unsupported statements of risk. Instead, I’d like to see some real analysis along the lines that you suggest.
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p>Finally, so long as we’re risk analysis for local disasters, I’d like to remind us that Bhopal was far more deadly than any nuclear plant accident. Fortunately, there have been minimal injuries and no deaths from explosions like the recent explosion at Bostik in Middleton or the 2006 chemical plant explosion in Danvers.
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p>The residents of Danvers dodged a bullet in that “Thanksgiving miracle”, and we won’t always be so lucky. When it comes to protecting the public from risk of disasters like these, I suggest that nuclear power plants are not nearly at the top of the list.
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p>For example, the Distrigas LNG terminal in Everett is a major urban disaster waiting to happen. LNG tankers gingerly threading past the ends of at least two active runways to head up a river surrounded by the some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the region? Perhaps I’m mistaken, but my own gut says that this dwarfs the likelihood of anything that might happen at Pilgrim or, for that matter, Seabrook or Vermont Yankee.
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Rather we need to make the plants safer in earthquakes. If power plants right next to major strike slip faults are safer than ours in areas where the earthquake risk is much smaller, it means the plants need to be upgraded.
Last week, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies was interviewed on NPR’s Living on Earth. The conversation focused on the current conditions and concerns surrounding spent fuel rods at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
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p>When the discussion turned to alternative containment possibilities and the loss of off-site power, I was stunned to hear that pools in the U.S. and Japan, “…do not require backup diesel generators to keep the water circulating. They are not considered sufficiently hazardous enough to warrant this additional layer of protection.”
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p>The host asked if he heard his guest correctly. He did. Evidently, the design was chosen as a matter of convenience connected to transportation of the rods. Right or wrong, sounds as if the approval of this design is tied to the NRC’s contented relationship with the regulator, which was disturbingly compared to the SEC and Wall St. – IMO, a pretty serious parallel to be making openly. A transcript of this interview is available at the show’s site to download.
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p>I want to know how the NRC substantiates such decisions and hope they don’t depend on the almighty buck. What determines a ‘sufficiently hazardous’ situation? It doesn’t take a geologist to acknowledge the likelihood of a major earthquake in California, or elsewhere in the U.S., and potential resulting power loss. Add that to the threat of plants operating in coastal areas – which could bear the brunt of a Katrina-like storm.
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p>So Ryepower, your concerns shared. Though I believe most folks do not wish to be paranoid, they are worried about drifting radioactivity, and rightly so. Take a look at the online auction sites – as I type this, bidding on Geiger counters is competitive! There’s a lot of talk, but too much (without action) risks apathy. President Obama’s request for an across-the-board review should also include the potential consequences of the current design. Japan may be a bellwether – if nuclear is to ever again earn the confidence of the public, its time to put ALL the cards on the table….
The backup genrarators may not have been ‘required’, but the Plymouth plant has three. Additionally, the nearby NORAD facility in Sandwich has five. So lack of electricity to keep the water running is not a likely scenario.
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p>Why does NPR allow a ‘scholar’ who apparently hasn’t researched the facility in question to make inflamnatory statements unchallanged?
Thanks for the info – I’ll dig into this a bit more…
…in the program’s defense – how much ‘control’ does an interviewer have over statements made during?
I found the link to the Plymouth paper in 2.2 seconds. And I’m not a respected scholar. Ypu would think that they would at least attempt to see if the claims they are broadcasting are true?
They don’t report news, they just interview nitiwits
Is NPR’s weekly descent into self parody.
and how many do not, given that it is not required? PP is right in that Plymouth has backup generators [with diesel tanks underground instead of the above-ground-and-washed-away layout at Fukushima.
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p>I didn’t hear the radio program, but I wonder if the bigger point is not whether or not Plymouth has diesel backup generators, but rather that the NRC is simply not strict enough.
This post is all about “what if Chernobyl happened here.” But even in the “worst case” for the Pilgrim plant, is that actually possible? Isn’t it more likely that we’d have something like Three Mile Island or Fukushima – which, while very serious and certainly to be avoided if at all possible, don’t approach the devastation of Chernobyl, as we have discussed several times?
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p>In other words, I do wonder about the utility of asking what would happen if “Chernobyl happened here.” Because I’m not sure it can. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could enlighten me.
I’m not a nuclear scientist, but I’ve read a little about Chernobyl and why it was so much worse than, say, Three Mile Island (which resulted in zero human deaths). The plant in Chernobyl used a Soviet design lacking significant safeguards that have always been standard in Western-style nuclear plants. The control rods in the Chernobyl plant were made of different materials, the reactor was designed differently, and on the whole it’s safe to say that a disaster of that scale is extremely unlikely in the context of an American plant like Pilgrim.
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p>We should always be vigilant and skeptical when it comes to nuclear power, but let’s not go overboard. As Dave S. pointed out above, coal power plants are much more dangerous. It seems that nuclear power will have to play a role if we want to be serious about reducing our carbon emissions while maintaining our quality of life.
The role nuclear power is currently playing for residents of Japan is not one I think we should embrace. I have seen claims that the Fukushima reactors are the same design as Pilgrim. Whether that’s true or not, it is known that Pilgrim and VT Yankee are beyond their designed lifespan, and that decommissioning them would take years. Where is all that spent fuel that’s currently stored at the site (as at Fukushima)going? Rowe Yankee took 15 years to fully decommission, and its spent fuel has not gone anywhere.
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p>Any new nuke plant will take at least three years to get on line. Why do that anyway, when safe renewable power is available practically immediately?
You make very good points, and I don’t mean to downplay either the suffering in Japan or the serious risks of nuclear power. However, I disagree that “safe renewable power is available practically immediately.” Power plants using solar, wind, geothermal, water or biofuel sources face high political hurdles — just look at Cape Wind. Biofuel raises its own ethical questions in a world with rising food prices. Solar power is barely cost-effective in sunny places, let alone New England. How many hydroelectric dams can we build in Massachusetts? How many geothermal sources do we have?
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p>I think we should do everything we can to reduce our dependence on coal power, which remains the most destructive and dangerous of our energy sources. We should prioritize the development of renewable energy sources, but it doesn’t look like they will be able to meet our needs anytime soon. In the meantime, nuclear power works well and is a lesser evil than coal power.
As opposed to the very popular nuclear power plants? Please don’t bring up biomass; it’s just burning different stuff, and is still a bad option.
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p>The reason people keep saying that renewables won’t meet our needs soon is because we keep believing that, and spending subsidy money that could be used to build them on fossil fuels and nuclear. President Carter tried to get renewables going decades ago. If Reagan hadn’t reversed that, we would be much farther along with energy independence.
There wind farm is getting off the ground very quickly. Cape Wind only ever ran into difficulty because of the wealthy elite vacationers who owned million-dollar houses on the beach, not to mention the fact that a certain prominent political family lived there…
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p>And the typical wind turbine project does get off the ground much, much quicker than nuclear plants.
…that whatever safeguards Chernobyl had were turned off because of the test they were running.
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p>A Space Shuttle is dangerous; a Space Shuttle burning millions of tons of fuel is much more dangerous. Same with nuclear power plants.
and it’s not really getting better. The waste pools are more toxic than the reactors, and there’s a lot less protecting it from getting out into the general public. And, yeah, it’s enough to cause Chernobyl-like problems even without the reactor blowing. We share the same design flaws here with those waste pools.
See, I just haven’t seen anyone else saying that. And you’ll forgive me for not taking your word for it.
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p>Don’t get me wrong – I’m well aware that Fukushima is a bad situation that is still not under control, and I’ve already criticized those who seek to minimize it. But I do think we need to keep some perspective.
5 seconds + Google = http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03…
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p>http://www.vancouverobserver.c…
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p>Emphasis mine.
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p>Certainly, I didn’t get the idea that the spent fuel rods catching fire could be worse than Chernobyl on my own. Various experts from around the Globe have been saying it almost from the beginning. Perhaps the risk wouldn’t have been so great if the pools had the same kind of containment protections as the reactors do, but they don’t. That could of course be part of the conversation I think we, as a state, need to have as we talk about these aging plants.
http://www.americablog.com/201…
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p>That making anyone feel comfortable?
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p>and another
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p>http://vinceseconomicblog.word…
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p>I think it’s time to recognize the blatant scoffing at the idea that this could become as bad as Chernobyl, when all is said and done, is as much to do with the government’s desire to avoid panic than it is the actual truth.
Most times the interests of the people are at odds with those of government and business. We’re all familiar with the SEC and FDA rulings as well as countless others that give short shrift to the interests of the citizenry.
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p>Now that our party has adopted nuclear power as a green fuel we can expect the poisoning be added to the environment as depleted uranium and plutonium is on the earth through our endeavors. The nuclear industry need only worry about their next quarter’s profit. Corporations (and governments) have no morals.
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p>The statistics spouted by the nuclear industry are true. The chances of a disaster are remote. What were the chances that two aircraft would crash into the World Trade Center? When a nuclear plant does have a disaster (however unlikely) how large is the scope? How long does the radiation live? Is it acceptable to lose an area as large as New England? Forever?
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p>If we have a disaster every hundred years, how long before the earth is fully contaminated?
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p>I can’t help but think of the Dream. Will we kill ourselves off for the good quarter?
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p>“The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.” –Omar Bradley