Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of electricity. As a former policy advisor at the Department of Energy
said, nuclear reactors “are just like old machines, but they are ultra-
hazardous.” By pushing their operating span to sixty years, he says,
“disaster is being invited.”
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He did not mention that most commercial
nuclear power plants are located in densely populated areas, where the
electricity they generate is most needed.
In 2002, forty-eight of fi fty-nine nozzles in the reactor vessel head of
a reactor in Virginia were found to be cracked. Leaks have been discov-
ered at the bottom of a reactor's pressure vessel in Texas. In 2006, 148
gallons of a highly enriched uranium solution leaked into a laboratory
in Tennessee, causing a seven-month shutdown of the plant.
In 2002, workers discovered a foot-long cavity eaten into the head of
a reactor vessel at a plant in Ohio. In one part of the lid, less than 0.4
inch of metal remained to contain over 80,000 gallons of highly pres-
surized radioactive water. The defect had not been discovered earlier
because of falsifi ed reactor vessel logs. The company that operates the
plant acknowledged that it had resisted an inspection because that would
have forced the temporary closing of the reactor. After reviewing the
Ohio event, the NRC inspector general found that “the fact that [the
licensee] sought and the [NRC] staff allowed Davis-Besse to operate past
December 31, 2001, without performing these inspections was driven in
part by the desire to lessen the fi nancial impact on [the licensee] that
would result in an early shutdown.”
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The fact that concerns about
profi tability can trump concerns about public health and safety in a plant
using nuclear fuel is both shocking and horrifying.
Seventeen nuclear plants in Japan have been closed because of safety
concerns. Nations in eastern Europe and the countries of the former
Soviet Union house dozens of operating nuclear reactors that are not safe
enough to be licensed in the United States, but these countries do not
have the money to make repairs or upgrades or alternative energy sources
that would allow them to shut down the reactors. In 2003 partially spent
fuel rods ruptured and spilled fuel pellets at a nuclear power plant in
Hungary. Boric acid was used to prevent the loose fuel pellets from
achieving criticality, the point at which a chemical reaction goes nuclear.
In 2005, 20 tons of uranium and 350 pounds of plutonium that were
dissolved in nitric acid leaked for several months from a cracked pipe
into a sump chamber at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in England.
One of the near-misses of catastrophe in nuclear reactor operation
occurred in Sweden in 2006.
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A former director of the reactor said, “It
was pure luck there wasn't a meltdown.” The reactor was out of control
