To "Anonymous" on Yesterday's Post. By Geniusofdespair
Yep, this is where I want 4 Nuclear Reactors bunched together. Why not hedge your bets and not put them all in one place? (Hit to enlarge illustration from NOAA)
Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - Page updated at 02:03 AM Japan nuclear leak 50% bigger than reported By ERIC TALMADGE The Associated Press KASHIWAZAKI, Japan -- The radioactive water leak at an earthquake-damaged nuclear plant in northern Japan was 50 percent bigger than previously announced, but still below danger levels, the power company running the facility said today.
The water leaked into the Sea of Japan after Monday's 6.8-magnitude earthquake shook the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant. After reviewing data, Tokyo Electric Power said today that leak was actually 1.5 times the amount previously announced.
The mayor ordered the plant be shut down until its safety could be confirmed after a long list of problems -- including radiation leaks, burst pipes and fires -- came to light.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world's largest nuclear plant in power-output capacity. Signs of problems after Monday's quake came first not from officials but in a plume of smoke that rose when the quake triggered a small fire at an electrical transformer.
It was announced only 12 hours later that the temblor also caused a leak of about 315 gallons of water containing radioactive material. Officials said the leak was well within safety standards. The water was flushed into the sea.
Later Tuesday, it said 50 cases of "malfunctioning and trouble" had been found. Four of the plant's seven reactors were running at the time of the quake, and they were all shut down automatically by a safety mechanism."
Considering a direct hit from possibly the strongest hurricane ever to hit land anywhere (Hurricane Andrew) couldn't make a dent in the containment facilities, I think they'll be OK.
Dave: You forgot one thing, remember the China Syndrome, remember Bart Simpson? Man -- ah yes, human error can undo the best of safeguards.
I remember teaching kids to windsurf (what a task that was). There are steps you have to take. Almost ALWAYS, kids decide half way through the lesson, they have an easier/better way to do it, and directly downwind they went. I would have to rescue them which was one royal pain in the ass. (Kids lessons were more money than adult lessons). Try sailing upwind someday on a windsurfer. Adults followed directions better, but not all of them.
Perhaps we should spread the reactors out so that there is a greater probablility that any single one will be hit?
When you buy more lottery tickets you are more likely to win. When you build nuclear plants in more places, one is more likely to be hit by a hurricane than a single group.
In any event, has it occured to you that engineers might just take hurricane-force winds and attendant flooding into account when designing these things for the FL coast?
Engineers do, after all, take direct airline crashes into account, which are considerably less likely events than hurricanes.
I have to admit there is a delicious irony here: Polar bears are drowning right now, in part because anti-nuke opinion makers ensured that only CO2 emitting coal and gas fired plants would be built in the past 30 yrs.
Okay, let's be honest. Brutally honest. What if one of the reactors were much further from my house?Wouldn't that be better?
I used to work for an engineer -- he told me this story about both ends of the bridge not meeting at the middle. There was also that scaffolding mishap we never talked about.
While it would be nice to put all the nukes (and other undesirable industries) out in the middle of the southwest desert, there are certain logistic difficulties.
Large electrical loads like major cities and heavy industry drag down system voltage, making it difficult to push power in from outside the area. Then too, there is electrical congestion, which limits how much power can be pushed into a region.
Ideally you locate the power plant quite close to the power demand, both for voltage support and to reduce congestion.
If the power demand is large, then a large power plant is necessary. If it is a large nuke or fossil-fired plant, you need a great deal of cooling water.
I'm not sure of the relevance of these apocryphal bridge and scaffolding incidents, unless it's to express distrust of engineering in general.
If that is the case I need to ask if you advocate against driving across bridges?
Last anon, I thought I was the only one trying to take the other side on this in the past. I have given up on the power plant thing on this Blog. It is very clear to me that ANY generation proposed by FPL will be spoken of in a negative light on this Blog. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the press. Good Luck
LOL ty for the well wishing. I thought I would allow an avowed environmentalist a few words of wisdom in this blog:
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace.
Last year, in The Washington Post, Moore wrote:
"In the early 1970s, when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change. Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power."
Either rationality needs to enter this discussion (if that is what it is) or EyeonMiami needs to put their money where their mouth is and start sending life jackets to Polar Bears.
On more comment on this. I like the blog and 95% or more of the time agree with Gimleteye and G.O.D. I just don't get the Anti power generation stuff. I love the focus on the Miami Dade and city of Miami government waste and corruption. I also know that FPL ain't perfect. So blog on with the anti generation stuff, I will will stay on the sidelines on this.
I am asking questions, and posting my concerns. I am listening to yours. Give and take. I just don't like painting a target for nut jobs. 4 reactors to me is a target. It doesn't mean we can't have a discussion, I am learning a lot from your input so don't stop disagreeing. Sometimes we can agree to disagree. I just don't like being a target. They picked the highest building in New York.
What would be a good target here for terrorists? You can get to Florida very easily by water, as we have seen with all the illegals...so what do we have on the water...???
I thought the point was that the reactors would be in the path of a hurricane. Now we are talking about terrorism?
Why does the point of so many posts on this blog change whenever someone raises an issue in the comments?
Nuclear facilities, which as far as I know are essentially concrete bunkers, are probably the type of structure that has the least chance of sustaining hurricane damage.
I assume that all of your readers can understand the different kind of impact one endures from a earthquake rather than a hurricane.
A plane crashing into a nuclear reactor would disintegrate on impact and leave the structure relatively unscathed. It makes your typical skyscraper look like a house of cards by comparison.
Give and take. I am fine with that - it's far better to have a rational discussion about real concerns than to bring up irrelevant and flippant anecdotes.
OK we've discussed the apparent need for energy - and FPL is probably way more on top of that demand than you and I are. We've discussed that these facilities will probably be engineered for the environment they will be built in (hurricane-prone).
I would imagine there are chemical processing plants that are *far* more lethal and far more poorly defended than nuclear plants. I should not need to reminded anyone about the non-nuclear catastrophe in Bhopal, India.
Today I spoke with a truck driver who makes deliveries to nuclear plants about twice a week.
When he enters a nuke plant, he is escorted within arm's length at all times by an armed guard who carries both an automatic rifle and a pistol. When he is not physically in the cab of his truck the acclerator pedal has a block locked under it, and his steering wheel is chained and locked. They would not even let him in the gate one time when he had an unpaid traffic violation. Every single time he enters, his truck is rifled through, driven over a mirror, and inspected for 'devices'.
Please note: This is just the security that one chemical delivery truck driver has experienced. I would imagine there is a great deal more security that he is unaware of. It's quite likely that there are submerged security measures in place as well.
Just for the give and take part, I will admit there will likely be at some point a screw up that will almost certainly melt the core of a large reactor again. It's damn near as certain as airplane crashes or space shuttle disasters. If humans are involved, then so is human error.
However even if this occurs, that does not mean anyone will be injured or exposed to radioactive material. These things are designed first to keep the crap inside the coolant loop, and if that fails, inside the containment building.
Nobody is so profit-obsessed that they want to see the public endangered, let alone harmed, contaminated or irradiated.
This paranoia toward nukes and power industry is astounding. You should save it for the financial sector - they really are trying to screw you ;)
I see no question but that we need more nuke reactors, All other forms of power generation are ruining the world. we are better off taking a chance on the nuke plant then killing our grandchildren with poisoned air.
How many of you live within the close area of the potential radiation plume? How many of you were told at closing of your mortgage that you were in the way of a nuke plant?
I had a neighbor who worked out there who said during the height of Andrew the windows were vibrating so bad people working that night were freaked. Can anyone confirm or not?
Unless I am wrong, Andrew came in at an angle at about SW 184th street and went diagonally across to Homestead. Would that put the plant on the weak side? They did lose a stack didn’t they?
What about the way the existing plant was built? Was it built to withstand the size of the current generation of jets?
After 911, there was a web site for nuke workers. It had the interior drawings of the site/buildings, information on what hotels to stay at near by and even the map quest map to help you get there. It took me 6 weeks of hassling FPL and the website to make that stuff disappear. I finally went to the FBI. I found out about it through a net friend, who would travel from plant to plant doing maintenance work. The web site was a job posting center for their trade.
And how does 4 nukes fit into the Homestead Air Base plans? More cooling canals = more wading birds in the area of the planes taking off and landing. They already have to shoo the bird away prior to take offs. What happens if one the birds gets in the way and causes a plane to crash in the community? Then would it be worth the power plants? Are we going to push the base into BRAC and the hands of the developers?
I am sorry, I am not convinced that I want this just down the road from me.
I was going to stay out of this but I would like to make a comment on the last Anon. As I have said in previous posts, I had access to the plant and at one time I was badged for what is called “unescorted access”. Unescorted access allowed me to move without an escort in areas that my card reader badge allowed me to go.
The containment area and the control room do not have windows. Both are built like bunkers and are heavily fortified. As with any industrial facility there are buildings that house the many functions that go along with supporting any industrial operation. Those buildings consist of anything from guard shacks, office trailers, warehouses and office buildings both inside the various secure areas and outside them. So depending on where the person you talked to it is very possible that “the windows were vibrating so bad people working that night were freaked”.
From the infrastructure damage in South Dade and the lives lost in the Homestead and Florida city area I think you are mistaken about Turkey Point being on the “weak side”. Three people were killed in the Naranja lakes area alone and many CBS structures were taken down to the floor slabs.
The Naranja Lakes area homes collasped due to improper construction (I think the tie beams failed) and maybe some skipping tornados along with it.
If you looked at the buildings in Sea Pines and Naranja Lakes you could see one up and one down...just like something had squashed one row of units and not the other.
I don't want to go there again, either by nuclear incident or hurricane.
Before we start building to allow more people to live here, nuclear or not, should we not just be restricting population to deal with the already existing effects of global warming? We don't need the government to do this thru repression just get the government out of subdizing coastal areas and into tracking externalities caused by over development right now. Let insurance rates rise as the free market would demand, force developers to pay the REAL costs of externalities like flood control and environmental protection as well as roads and schools etc, and then we will see who can live here. Also, force luxary developments to provide transit friendly housing for household or service workers located nearby workplaces. All of this can be regulated thru a market centered approach, however the truth is even if we just got rid of our current level of Republican socialism, i.e. Citizens, federal flood programs etc, no one could live here anymore.
Moreover on nuclear power, just where is the cooling water to come from if seas continue to rise and oceans heat up? Or are we just to allow power plants to cause externalities on the environment with no remediation? Furthermore, what about sea level rise over 500 years or more? Since no one really thinks that waste will ever be pulled out, how are we going to ensure that it will be stored on site safely? Cement does not last forever, and neither does our limestone rock provide a solid foundation.
Well wonder how new power plants might deal with the unknowns of climate change in Florida? What if we suffer new extreme levels of rainfall like in the UK now?
From The Independent UK: _______________________ England under water: scientists confirm global warming link to increased rain By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor Published: 23 July 2007 It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.
More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established for the first time an effect which has long been predicted but never before proved.
The study's findings will be all the more dramatic for being disclosed as Britain struggles to recover from the phenomenal drenching of the past few days, during which more than a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours in some places, and floods forced thousands from their homes.
The "major rainfall event" of last Friday fully predicted as such by the Met Office has given the country a quite exceptional battering, with the Thames still rising. In Gloucester water levels had reached 34 feet, just 12 inches below flood defences the same level as during the flood of 1947 although a police spokesman said last night that the River Severn had stopped rising.
Last night vast areas of the country around Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were still inundated, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, transport links were widely disrupted, and yet more householders were standing by to be flooded in their turn, in one of the biggest civil emergencies Britain has seen.
About 150,000 residents in Gloucestershire were left without drinking water when the Mythe Water Treatment Works in Tewkesbury became inoperable after flooding. Another 200,000 people are at risk of losing their supplies. The water shortages may last until Wednesday and 600 water tanks were being drafted to the area.
Panic buying of bottled water was reported, with supermarkets selling out of stocks, and there were contamination problems in south London, where 80,000 households and businesses in the Sutton area were advised to boil their water after rain got into a tank. Yet another potential danger was from car thieves; West Mercia police warned drivers who had abandoned their cars in the floodwater to collect them quickly to prevent theft.
The Great Flood of July is all the more remarkable for following right on from the Great Flood of June, which caused similar havoc in northern towns such as Doncaster and Hull, after a similar series of astonishingly torrential downpours on 24 June.
Meteorologists agree that the miserably wet British summer of 2007 has generally been caused by a southward shift towards Britain of the jetstream, the high-level airflow that brings depressions eastwards across the Atlantic. This is fairly normal. But debate is going on about whether climate change may be responsible for the intensity of the two freak rainfall episodes, which have caused flooding the like of which has never been seen in many places.
This is because the computer models used to predict the future course of global warming all show heavier rainfall, and indeed, "extreme rainfall events", as one of its principal consequences.
The new study, carried out jointly by several national climate research institutes using their supercomputer climate models, including the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, does not prove that any one event, including the rain of the past few days in Britain, is climate-change related.
But it certainly supports the idea, by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world, including the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and linking this directly, for the first time, to global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study is being published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, and its details are under embargo and cannot be reported until then. But its main findings have caused a stir, and are being freely discussed by climate scientists in the Met Office, the Hadley Centre and the Department for Environment For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
One source familiar with the study's conclusions said: "What this does is establish for the first time that there is a distinct 'human fingerprint' in the changes in precipitation patterns the increases in rainfall observed in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, which includes Britain.
"That means, it is not just the climate's natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause climate change, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall. So this is very significant.
"Some people would argue that you can't take a single event and pin that on climate change, but what happened in Britain last Friday fits quite easily with these conclusions. It does seem to have a certain resonance with what they're finding in this research."
The Hadley Centre lead scientist involved with the study was Dr Peter Stott, who specialises in finding "human fingerprints" sometimes referred to as anthropogenic signals on the changing climate.
Last September Dr Stott, who was not available for comment yesterday, published research showing that the climate of central England had warmed by a full degree Celsius in the past 40 years, and that this could be directly linked to human causes the first time that man-made climate change had been identified at such a local level.
The human fingerprint is detected by making computer simulations of the recent past climate, with and without emissions of greenhouse gases and then comparing the results with what has actually been observed in the real world.
In Dr Stott's research, and in the study to be published on Wednesday, the observed rises in temperature and rainfall could be clearly accounted for by the scenario in which emissions were prominent.
The conclusions of the new rainfall study are regarded as all the more robust as they are the joint work of several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, with each using its own supercomputer climate model.
Global warming is likely to lead to higher rainfall because a warming atmosphere contains more water vapour and more energy. Since climate prediction began 20 years ago, heavier rainfall over Britain has been a consistent theme.
20 comments:
The Latest from Japan:
Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - Page updated at 02:03 AM
Japan nuclear leak 50% bigger than reported
By ERIC TALMADGE
The Associated Press
KASHIWAZAKI, Japan -- The radioactive water leak at an earthquake-damaged nuclear plant in northern Japan was 50 percent bigger than previously announced, but still below danger levels, the power company running the facility said today.
The water leaked into the Sea of Japan after Monday's 6.8-magnitude earthquake shook the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant. After reviewing data, Tokyo Electric Power said today that leak was actually 1.5 times the amount previously announced.
The mayor ordered the plant be shut down until its safety could be confirmed after a long list of problems -- including radiation leaks, burst pipes and fires -- came to light.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world's largest nuclear plant in power-output capacity. Signs of problems after Monday's quake came first not from officials but in a plume of smoke that rose when the quake triggered a small fire at an electrical transformer.
It was announced only 12 hours later that the temblor also caused a leak of about 315 gallons of water containing radioactive material. Officials said the leak was well within safety standards. The water was flushed into the sea.
Later Tuesday, it said 50 cases of "malfunctioning and trouble" had been found. Four of the plant's seven reactors were running at the time of the quake, and they were all shut down automatically by a safety mechanism."
jeepers! I hadn't seen that map before..makes me want to plan a move out of here asap! Scary as hell.
Will the recent Japan quake resutling in the spill of nuclear waste into the sea revive Godzilla?
Honestly, how Man has reached the year 2007 is absolute proof there is an enormous (unlimited?) luck in the universe.
Considering a direct hit from possibly the strongest hurricane ever to hit land anywhere (Hurricane Andrew) couldn't make a dent in the containment facilities, I think they'll be OK.
Dave: You forgot one thing, remember the China Syndrome, remember Bart Simpson? Man -- ah yes, human error can undo the best of safeguards.
I remember teaching kids to windsurf (what a task that was). There are steps you have to take. Almost ALWAYS, kids decide half way through the lesson, they have an easier/better way to do it, and directly downwind they went. I would have to rescue them which was one royal pain in the ass. (Kids lessons were more money than adult lessons). Try sailing upwind someday on a windsurfer. Adults followed directions better, but not all of them.
Anon from yesterday again...
Perhaps we should spread the reactors out so that there is a greater probablility that any single one will be hit?
When you buy more lottery tickets you are more likely to win. When you build nuclear plants in more places, one is more likely to be hit by a hurricane than a single group.
In any event, has it occured to you that engineers might just take hurricane-force winds and attendant flooding into account when designing these things for the FL coast?
Engineers do, after all, take direct airline crashes into account, which are considerably less likely events than hurricanes.
I have to admit there is a delicious irony here: Polar bears are drowning right now, in part because anti-nuke opinion makers ensured that only CO2 emitting coal and gas fired plants would be built in the past 30 yrs.
Well done.
Okay, let's be honest. Brutally honest. What if one of the reactors were much further from my house?Wouldn't that be better?
I used to work for an engineer -- he told me this story about both ends of the bridge not meeting at the middle. There was also that scaffolding mishap we never talked about.
While it would be nice to put all the nukes (and other undesirable industries) out in the middle of the southwest desert, there are certain logistic difficulties.
Large electrical loads like major cities and heavy industry drag down system voltage, making it difficult to push power in from outside the area. Then too, there is electrical congestion, which limits how much power can be pushed into a region.
Ideally you locate the power plant quite close to the power demand, both for voltage support and to reduce congestion.
If the power demand is large, then a large power plant is necessary. If it is a large nuke or fossil-fired plant, you need a great deal of cooling water.
I'm not sure of the relevance of these apocryphal bridge and scaffolding incidents, unless it's to express distrust of engineering in general.
If that is the case I need to ask if you advocate against driving across bridges?
Last anon, I thought I was the only one trying to take the other side on this in the past. I have given up on the power plant thing on this Blog. It is very clear to me that ANY generation proposed by FPL will be spoken of in a negative light on this Blog. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the press. Good Luck
LOL ty for the well wishing. I thought I would allow an avowed environmentalist a few words of wisdom in this blog:
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace.
Last year, in The Washington Post, Moore wrote:
"In the early 1970s, when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change. Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power."
Either rationality needs to enter this discussion (if that is what it is) or EyeonMiami needs to put their money where their mouth is and start sending life jackets to Polar Bears.
On more comment on this. I like the blog and 95% or more of the time agree with Gimleteye and G.O.D. I just don't get the Anti power generation stuff. I love the focus on the Miami Dade and city of Miami government waste and corruption. I also know that FPL ain't perfect. So blog on with the anti generation stuff, I will will stay on the sidelines on this.
I am asking questions, and posting my concerns. I am listening to yours. Give and take. I just don't like painting a target for nut jobs. 4 reactors to me is a target. It doesn't mean we can't have a discussion, I am learning a lot from your input so don't stop disagreeing. Sometimes we can agree to disagree. I just don't like being a target. They picked the highest building in New York.
What would be a good target here for terrorists? You can get to Florida very easily by water, as we have seen with all the illegals...so what do we have on the water...???
Genius,
I thought the point was that the reactors would be in the path of a hurricane. Now we are talking about terrorism?
Why does the point of so many posts on this blog change whenever someone raises an issue in the comments?
Nuclear facilities, which as far as I know are essentially concrete bunkers, are probably the type of structure that has the least chance of sustaining hurricane damage.
I assume that all of your readers can understand the different kind of impact one endures from a earthquake rather than a hurricane.
A plane crashing into a nuclear reactor would disintegrate on impact and leave the structure relatively unscathed. It makes your typical skyscraper look like a house of cards by comparison.
Give and take. I am fine with that - it's far better to have a rational discussion about real concerns than to bring up irrelevant and flippant anecdotes.
OK we've discussed the apparent need for energy - and FPL is probably way more on top of that demand than you and I are. We've discussed that these facilities will probably be engineered for the environment they will be built in (hurricane-prone).
I would imagine there are chemical processing plants that are *far* more lethal and far more poorly defended than nuclear plants. I should not need to reminded anyone about the non-nuclear catastrophe in Bhopal, India.
Today I spoke with a truck driver who makes deliveries to nuclear plants about twice a week.
When he enters a nuke plant, he is escorted within arm's length at all times by an armed guard who carries both an automatic rifle and a pistol. When he is not physically in the cab of his truck the acclerator pedal has a block locked under it, and his steering wheel is chained and locked. They would not even let him in the gate one time when he had an unpaid traffic violation. Every single time he enters, his truck is rifled through, driven over a mirror, and inspected for 'devices'.
Please note: This is just the security that one chemical delivery truck driver has experienced. I would imagine there is a great deal more security that he is unaware of. It's quite likely that there are submerged security measures in place as well.
Just for the give and take part, I will admit there will likely be at some point a screw up that will almost certainly melt the core of a large reactor again. It's damn near as certain as airplane crashes or space shuttle disasters. If humans are involved, then so is human error.
However even if this occurs, that does not mean anyone will be injured or exposed to radioactive material. These things are designed first to keep the crap inside the coolant loop, and if that fails, inside the containment building.
Nobody is so profit-obsessed that they want to see the public endangered, let alone harmed, contaminated or irradiated.
This paranoia toward nukes and power industry is astounding. You should save it for the financial sector - they really are trying to screw you ;)
Anyway, I said my share... Peace!
I see no question but that we need more nuke reactors, All other forms of power generation are ruining the world. we are better off taking a chance on the nuke plant then killing our grandchildren with poisoned air.
How many of you live within the close area of the potential radiation plume? How many of you were told at closing of your mortgage that you were in the way of a nuke plant?
I had a neighbor who worked out there who said during the height of Andrew the windows were vibrating so bad people working that night were freaked. Can anyone confirm or not?
Unless I am wrong, Andrew came in at an angle at about SW 184th street and went diagonally across to Homestead. Would that put the plant on the weak side? They did lose a stack didn’t they?
What about the way the existing plant was built? Was it built to withstand the size of the current generation of jets?
After 911, there was a web site for nuke workers. It had the interior drawings of the site/buildings, information on what hotels to stay at near by and even the map quest map to help you get there. It took me 6 weeks of hassling FPL and the website to make that stuff disappear. I finally went to the FBI. I found out about it through a net friend, who would travel from plant to plant doing maintenance work. The web site was a job posting center for their trade.
And how does 4 nukes fit into the Homestead Air Base plans? More cooling canals = more wading birds in the area of the planes taking off and landing. They already have to shoo the bird away prior to take offs. What happens if one the birds gets in the way and causes a plane to crash in the community? Then would it be worth the power plants? Are we going to push the base into BRAC and the hands of the developers?
I am sorry, I am not convinced that I want this just down the road from me.
I was going to stay out of this but I would like to make a comment on the last Anon. As I have said in previous posts, I had access to the plant and at one time I was badged for what is called “unescorted access”. Unescorted access allowed me to move without an escort in areas that my card reader badge allowed me to go.
The containment area and the control room do not have windows. Both are built like bunkers and are heavily fortified. As with any industrial facility there are buildings that house the many functions that go along with supporting any industrial operation. Those buildings consist of anything from guard shacks, office trailers, warehouses and office buildings both inside the various secure areas and outside them. So depending on where the person you talked to it is very possible that “the windows were vibrating so bad people working that night were freaked”.
From the infrastructure damage in South Dade and the lives lost in the Homestead and Florida city area I think you are mistaken about Turkey Point being on the “weak side”. Three people were killed in the Naranja lakes area alone and many CBS structures were taken down to the floor slabs.
well, I am glad to hear there were no windows.
The Naranja Lakes area homes collasped due to improper construction (I think the tie beams failed) and maybe some skipping tornados along with it.
If you looked at the buildings in Sea Pines and Naranja Lakes you could see one up and one down...just like something had squashed one row of units and not the other.
I don't want to go there again, either by nuclear incident or hurricane.
Before we start building to allow more people to live here, nuclear or not, should we not just be restricting population to deal with the already existing effects of global warming? We don't need the government to do this thru repression just get the government out of subdizing coastal areas and into tracking externalities caused by over development right now. Let insurance rates rise as the free market would demand, force developers to pay the REAL costs of externalities like flood control and environmental protection as well as roads and schools etc, and then we will see who can live here. Also, force luxary developments to provide transit friendly housing for household or service workers located nearby workplaces. All of this can be regulated thru a market centered approach, however the truth is even if we just got rid of our current level of Republican socialism, i.e. Citizens, federal flood programs etc, no one could live here anymore.
Moreover on nuclear power, just where is the cooling water to come from if seas continue to rise and oceans heat up? Or are we just to allow power plants to cause externalities on the environment with no remediation? Furthermore, what about sea level rise over 500 years or more? Since no one really thinks that waste will ever be pulled out, how are we going to ensure that it will be stored on site safely? Cement does not last forever, and neither does our limestone rock provide a solid foundation.
Well wonder how new power plants might deal with the unknowns of climate change in Florida? What if we suffer new extreme levels of rainfall like in the UK now?
From The Independent UK:
_______________________
England under water: scientists confirm global warming link to increased rain
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 23 July 2007
It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.
More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established for the first time an effect which has long been predicted but never before proved.
The study's findings will be all the more dramatic for being disclosed as Britain struggles to recover from the phenomenal drenching of the past few days, during which more than a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours in some places, and floods forced thousands from their homes.
The "major rainfall event" of last Friday fully predicted as such by the Met Office has given the country a quite exceptional battering, with the Thames still rising. In Gloucester water levels had reached 34 feet, just 12 inches below flood defences the same level as during the flood of 1947 although a police spokesman said last night that the River Severn had stopped rising.
Last night vast areas of the country around Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were still inundated, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, transport links were widely disrupted, and yet more householders were standing by to be flooded in their turn, in one of the biggest civil emergencies Britain has seen.
About 150,000 residents in Gloucestershire were left without drinking water when the Mythe Water Treatment Works in Tewkesbury became inoperable after flooding. Another 200,000 people are at risk of losing their supplies. The water shortages may last until Wednesday and 600 water tanks were being drafted to the area.
Panic buying of bottled water was reported, with supermarkets selling out of stocks, and there were contamination problems in south London, where 80,000 households and businesses in the Sutton area were advised to boil their water after rain got into a tank. Yet another potential danger was from car thieves; West Mercia police warned drivers who had abandoned their cars in the floodwater to collect them quickly to prevent theft.
The Great Flood of July is all the more remarkable for following right on from the Great Flood of June, which caused similar havoc in northern towns such as Doncaster and Hull, after a similar series of astonishingly torrential downpours on 24 June.
Meteorologists agree that the miserably wet British summer of 2007 has generally been caused by a southward shift towards Britain of the jetstream, the high-level airflow that brings depressions eastwards across the Atlantic. This is fairly normal. But debate is going on about whether climate change may be responsible for the intensity of the two freak rainfall episodes, which have caused flooding the like of which has never been seen in many places.
This is because the computer models used to predict the future course of global warming all show heavier rainfall, and indeed, "extreme rainfall events", as one of its principal consequences.
The new study, carried out jointly by several national climate research institutes using their supercomputer climate models, including the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, does not prove that any one event, including the rain of the past few days in Britain, is climate-change related.
But it certainly supports the idea, by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world, including the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and linking this directly, for the first time, to global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study is being published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, and its details are under embargo and cannot be reported until then. But its main findings have caused a stir, and are being freely discussed by climate scientists in the Met Office, the Hadley Centre and the Department for Environment For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
One source familiar with the study's conclusions said: "What this does is establish for the first time that there is a distinct 'human fingerprint' in the changes in precipitation patterns the increases in rainfall observed in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, which includes Britain.
"That means, it is not just the climate's natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause climate change, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall. So this is very significant.
"Some people would argue that you can't take a single event and pin that on climate change, but what happened in Britain last Friday fits quite easily with these conclusions. It does seem to have a certain resonance with what they're finding in this research."
The Hadley Centre lead scientist involved with the study was Dr Peter Stott, who specialises in finding "human fingerprints" sometimes referred to as anthropogenic signals on the changing climate.
Last September Dr Stott, who was not available for comment yesterday, published research showing that the climate of central England had warmed by a full degree Celsius in the past 40 years, and that this could be directly linked to human causes the first time that man-made climate change had been identified at such a local level.
The human fingerprint is detected by making computer simulations of the recent past climate, with and without emissions of greenhouse gases and then comparing the results with what has actually been observed in the real world.
In Dr Stott's research, and in the study to be published on Wednesday, the observed rises in temperature and rainfall could be clearly accounted for by the scenario in which emissions were prominent.
The conclusions of the new rainfall study are regarded as all the more robust as they are the joint work of several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, with each using its own supercomputer climate model.
Global warming is likely to lead to higher rainfall because a warming atmosphere contains more water vapour and more energy. Since climate prediction began 20 years ago, heavier rainfall over Britain has been a consistent theme.
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