Anatomy of a nuclear disaster and you cannot trust FPL ... by gimleteye

Judge for yourself:On March 14, Reuters reported: "Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the reactor vessels of nuclear power plants affected by the disaster remained intact and, so far, the amount of radiation that had been released was limited. “The Japanese authorities are working as hard as they can, under extremely difficult circumstances, to stabilise the nuclear power plants and ensure safety,” Amano said in a statement, adding at a news conference later that it was “unlikely that the accident would develop” like Chernobyl."

On March 16, CNN reported: "Are we facing a Chernobyl-scale disaster?" Experts say this is highly unlikely. The authorities are seeing -- and will continue to see -- much lower levels of radioactive material being released at Fukushima than at Chernobyl, according to Malcolm Grimston, Associate Fellow for Energy, Environment and Development at London's Chatham House think tank. "It won't be a Chernobyl because at the point of that accident the reactor was still operating," he told CNN.

The assurances that the failing nuclear reactors in Japan would not result in a Chernobyl-style explosion led the media to falsely report that the disaster would not be on the same scale as Chernobyl, when it was patently obvious to any observer that nothing about the Fukushima disaster was under control.

For example the blog sponsored by GOP strategist David Frum instantly published a post by Sean Linnane on March 16, "There is one thing though of which we can be certain: a) Given the basic design features of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, a Chernobyl-type disaster was never a possibility." He goes on, "The point is that the American nuclear industry has designed our plants according to careful analysis of local events; we’re not going to have a tsunami here."

Today, April 12, The New York Times reports, "Japan has raised its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday."

There are a couple of conclusions here, related to Turkey Point and its two existing nuclear reactors and two planned reactors. (Miami New Times quickly joined EOM as sceptics of FPL.) First of all, you cannot trust FPL or the county in the case of a nuclear emergency. Why? Because there is already demonstrable failure of reporting and fixing failed cooling canals at the existing reactors, that FPL continues to mischaracterize and that the county has failed to explain to the public. (see our archive) Like Fukushima, a radioactive event in any one of the units or spent fuel rod pond could make servicing the other reactors impossible. Any spill of radioactive water is going directly into our aquifer because of the porous underlying limestone. These are just a few reasons to halt nuclear expansion at Turkey Point now. FPL should be decommissioning the existing reactors. The price of a mistake is incalculable.