Recovery funds are accelerating the cleanup of contaminated facilities, soil, and ground water at one of the nation’s key nuclear weapons sites.
During the early 1950s, the Savannah River Site (SRS) produced tritium and plutonium-239 to be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
[…]
Since the 1990s, the Department of Energy (DOE) has been working to clean up contamination on the 310-square-mile site in South Carolina. Recovery funds totaling $1.6 billion are allowing DOE to accelerate these clean-up efforts. DOE says the Recovery funds — from six separate awards — will reduce the SRS footprint by 75 percent by 2012, seven years earlier than previously planned.
It is amazing how large of an area is contaminated or otherwise impacted by these nuclear facilities — 310-square-miles!
Just one segment of the project, which already is completed, had 23 buildings spread over 40-square-miles. Quick trivia check: 40-square-miles is the same as 25,000 acres and…
Imagine if $1.6 billion was earmarked by the federal government for the same 310-square-miles to fund innovation and production instead of just reclamation (making the area usable again). Although innovation and jobs for reclamation are notable, this is a good example of the back-end costs that are sunk into fixing pollution.
Robert Reich brings up whether GE was cutting corners with security controls within the Mark 1 Reactor, but he does not address why and how regulators failed to stop a 90% failure calculation from widespread adoption. Did they accept compensating controls? Liability offset? Low probability of melt?
The New York Times reports that G.E. marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.
Yet American safety officials have long thought the smaller design more vulnerable to explosion and rupture in emergencies than competing designs. (By the way, the same design is used in 23 American nuclear reactors at 16 plants.)
In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the Commission concluded that “Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.â€
Deutsche Welle has had the best coverage I have seen anywhere of the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan. The interview with analysis of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, for example, was extremely useful to understand the various risks in different reactors.
Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Tuesday that seven of Germany’s 17 nuclear power stations would be shut down, at least until the end of a three-month moratorium on the extension of the lifespans of Germany’s nuclear stations.
The decision was made as a direct result of the nuclear disaster currently unfolding at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.
Merkel is banking on the fact that Japan has brought new risk calculation data to light. Her opposition is not buying it. They accuse her of ignoring the risk before the disaster.
Sigmar Gabriel, head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was withering on Merkel’s new plan: “She claimed then that all safety concerns in German nuclear power stations had been cleared up, and she claimed we needed nuclear power in Germany. Now we know that none of that was true.”
With 80% of Germans now said to oppose nuclear energy, it could just be a wise political move but it is still good to see infrastructure security receive serious attention.
The effect of Japan’s unfolding nuclear catastrophe on Germans could not be clearer. After the protests in Baden-Württemberg on Saturday, an estimated 110,000 people demonstrated in 450 German towns on Monday against the extension of nuclear power.
Up to 100,000 people protested at the Wisconsin state Capitol on Saturday against a new law curbing the union rights of public workers that is seen as one of the biggest challenges in decades facing U.S. organized labor.
Wow, perspective. More Americans are protesting in Wisconsin today than during the Vietnam war; about the same as the number protesting today’s nuclear crisis in Germany.
The prosperity of cities and countryside of the late 1940s England, France, Italy, etc. benefited significantly from inexpensive and “off-grid” two-wheeled technology — these economies all were rebuilt on bicycles.
When I lived in London in the 1990s and studied post-WWII History, I regularly noticed this kind of footnote (pun not intended) on two-wheeled transportation for much of Europe.
My curiosity in European cycling might have been a bit biased, as I myself rode a bicycle everywhere and everyday (spinning through the dark rainy days along dirty double-decker red buses, black cabs and the anti-terror Ring of steel that obfuscated downtown London).
It wasn’t just a link with history. The math of cycling appealed to me: A car at that time would have taken at least 30 minutes plus parking time for me to go from home to the city. I could ride a bus for 45 minutes plus waiting, take the train for 30 minutes plus waiting, or… I could go door-to-door on a bike in just 20 minutes.
Besides saving money, the time I saved on a bicycle made the choice obvious (I have to admit I did not properly account for the pollution/health costs caused by lax vehicle emission laws).
Despite these simple calculations, I usually found at all times I was the only cyclist on any London roads.
It seemed odd to not see others on bikes especially since London had been through a period of extremely popular two-wheel transportation use in the past that had proved their value.
Take for example this video of the Cyclist Touring Club from Britain, which talks of “rediscovering common humanity” and “getting rid of our enemies” in the 1950s:
Another good example is the light scooter industry of Italy — a result of the war industry. While bicycles were obviously popular, after 1945 the prevalence of metal tubes (frame), wheels, tires and sheet metal manufacturing for Axis war planes was re-purposed into two-wheeled transportation. It all started with the single model motor scooter in 1946 by Piaggio & Co. SpA of Pontedera, Italy
I won’t go into why people moved away from these logical options for transportation and to the illogical gasoline automobile. Kunstler does a good job of that in The Geography of Nowhere. Instead, I want to point out here that the recent tsunami devastation in Japan is showing a sudden uptick in two-wheeled commuters.
Bicycles sold like hotcakes at supermarkets and bike shops after Friday’s megaquake shut down train services in the Tokyo metropolitan area, attracting local residents — and people from farther afield — who wanted to cycle home instead of facing the prospect of walking for several hours.
Disaster planners should not underestimate the importance and resilience of two-wheel transportation (and power generation), especially given recent advances in motorcycle ambulances in Africa that greatly reduce mortality rates.
WWI cycle engineering eerily still seems modern in concept
A bicycle ride to a data center, office or even a hospital might seem ridiculous until you take a good look at these disasters and factor transportation dependencies. The next days and weeks unfortunately will illustrate the automobile infrastructure weakness as well as how gasoline hoarding by automobile owners can negatively impact recovery.
The growth of automobiles always has been based on questionable assumptions about the government’s ability to collect taxes in order to protect and provide smooth highways, right-of-way, and inexpensive fuel. A national disaster puts these assumptions in a very different light. It shifts the economic playing field and puts the automobile back into its more natural disadvantaged state.
The biggest irony of this all, perhaps, is how often I find avowed libertarians driving exactly the kind of inefficient cars that depend heavily on the commonality of infrastructure and centralized services — only after a national disaster do they realize that a gas-guzzling shiny and fragile “success-mobile” is the ultimate sign of their unsustainable yet socialist tendencies.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
