Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
Dear Readers,
The annual public review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of Southern California Edison's successfully (and with LUCK) managing not to let their nuclear plant melt down for one more year is TONIGHT in San Clemente, California (details given below).
This author will not attend this year, but notes that he has attended -- and spoken at -- more these pathetic excuses for democracy, these highly-structured, NOT-UNDER-OATH meetings where San Onofre gets patted on the back by its lap-dog federal regulatory agency full of ex-industry worker-bees, than any other local citizen in the past 10 years, but I'll probably have a representative attend briefly.
The three minute speaking limit is of course way too little to upbraid the NRC, SCE, and the local press properly for their behavior this past year -- or any year -- Steven Colbert needed 20 minutes to just to upbraid one man -- President Bush -- and he didn't even TOUCH on nuclear power issues!
Best wishes and I hope some of my readers will attend. See you next year, if we survive.
Ace
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NRC MEETING ON SAN ONOFRE:
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The following is from Lyn Hicks:
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TO CREED LIAISONS AND CONCERNED OTHERS
We’re invited, even though we did not receive an invitation! Edison-NRC annual public review of the year’s achievements in making San Onofre safer….this time, $80 million of our money, safer…
TUESDAY NIGHT, MAY 16, 6:30, IN THE COUNTRY INN
In that glamorous party-place, up the slope from the 99 Cent Store and Staples, in San Clemente…dinner time and City Council time! Just be glad it wasn’t set on Mothers’ Day Sunday. So….skip dinner, and skip City Council…and come get (maybe) answers to some of the questions that we have asked, and asked, and asked, and were never answered???
This is an urgent call to serve. We must have a small cadre of you who are willing to question. Please reply email that you will come, and send a question for our compilation? Will you bring another member, officer? from your organization/s? Questions/Suggestions:
If the past year’s $80 million “hardening of the site” can withstand an attempt to enter and destroy, are you similarly planning to protect against attacks that may cause a major release of the coolant water from the lethal fuel rods in cooling tanks, in attack from air or sea, or land? How would you fight the resultant fire-storm of billowing radiated material that could be lifted into the winds and carried to populations, as is the Chernobyl deadly pollution, still spread around the earth, 20 years after the catastrophe?
How much time would be required to replace or repair a demolition of the coolant water mechanisms at water level where the 2.4 billion gallons per day are carried from the ocean? How could you clean-up the shoreline thus polluted? Review for us, nuclides disposed in ocean and from stacks, in routine operation.
When did repair and replacement of failing mechanisms begin in Units II and III? How much of our operations and maintenance money was spent on that in 2005, and what were repairs?
How much of the high level, thousand years hazardous material is held on site, now: in tons and in curies, please? How much would be added in 13 years of extended life of the failing reactors?
Last year, the government of the Ukraine announced that the costs of care to those injured in the Chernobyl accident are increasing at such rate that it could no longer afford to provide medical care to them. Please tell us about US contribution of assistance to those victims. Same, please, for our own Three Mile Island accident. What other reactor accidents have been given federal government assistance, or are the customers of the reactor owners charged for the down time costs and repairs?
Please discuss insurance coverage. If an upset caused by tsunami, earth movement on the shore or off shore faults, mechanical failure, human error or terrorist action did major damage, what is the extent of current coverage for property damage in the 50mile emergency planning zone? Long term care of victims? Does our plant insurance cover on-site damage and down- time replacement energy costs? Extent?
When you assessed the costs of your prospective project to incrementally replace the reactors over 13-16 years, how were the time and costs of increased upsets due to deteriorating mechanisms calculated? How compared with the costs of the Fast Track to renewables that you suggested in your Public Utility Commission testimony, jurisdictional proceeding, as a necessity if the “generators” project is not approved?
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Dr. Webb is back:
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Last Thursday (May 11th, 2006), Dr. Richard Webb gave a Graduate Colloquium at the Purdue University School of Nuclear Engineering, West Lafayette, Indiana, titled:
The Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants, and of Nuclear Weapons, the Hazards of Radioactive Waste Disposal, and the Constitutional Law Respecting These Matters.
Dr. Webb used the opportunity to "declare the primary findings of his research of the accident hazards of nuclear power plants (performed over 36 years), and relate his analysis of the nuclear accident hazards to the law of the Constitution of the United States of America."
The audience of graduate students and staff at Purdue were UNABLE to disprove his claims, for example, that a Boiling Water Reactor could release as much as SEVENTY PERCENT of its fission products in a specific type of accident (which would require the injection of BORON within the first few seconds or the described deadly EXPLOSION would occur).
Dr. Webb has also analyzed the hazards of accidents at Pressurized Water Reactors such as San Onofre. He has determined they are AS DANGEROUS AS CHERNOBYL if not more so. The accident scenarios are utterly different from what a plant like Chernobyl can have, but the NET RESULT is the same -- FISSION PRODUCTS RELEASED INTO THE ENVIRONMENT.
Dr. Webb's history of research into nuclear issues is virtually unprecedented.
After getting a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics at the University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, in 1962, Webb had a full fellowship grant in Physics in the Graduate Studies Doctorate Program at the Case Institute of Technology.
But he left to enter the United States Navy, immediately after President John F. Kennedy's October 22, 1962 address to the nation about the Soviet nuclear missiles then being installed in Cuba.
In May, 1963, he was commissioned as a U. S. Navy Line Officer, and over the next four years of service in the Division of Naval Reactors, U.S. Atomic Energy, achieved the rank of Lieutenant, having worked on the Shippingport PWR, the nation's first so-called "civilian" reactor. Webb also worked at the Bettis Reactor Engineering School, Bettis Atomic Power Power Laboratory, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, which was operated by Westinghouse. Webb also worked at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in West Milton, New York, in 1966, and at the Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Station (a prototype Boiling Water Reactor) in Charlesvoix, Michigan (1967- 1968).
That's where it stopped. That's where things stopped adding up and he decided to find out IF they didn't add up because no one had actually done the math, or because he, himself, didn't understand the issues.
As it turns out, no one had done the math.
In 1968 Webb was offered a position in the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program Planning Office, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, but declined the offer, in order to study for his doctorate in nuclear reactor physics and engineering. He did this work at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, getting his doctorate in 1972. His doctoral dissertation was on the subject of explosive power transients (nuclear explosions accidents) in liquid metal cooled, fast neutron, plutonium breeder reactors -- popularly called "fast breeder reactors."
Dr. Webb did his post-doctoral studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, where he studied nuclear reactor accident hazards and the Constitution of the United States (1972 - 1974). After that, he did research and some teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1974 - 1976).
Dr. Webb has continued this research, independently, to this day.
Dr. Webb's recent colloquy covered the following topics (at least):
1) The design basis accidents of nuclear power reactors, and the related reactor safety systems; and worse accident possibilities and their potentialities, such as power excursion accidents, loss of reactor cooling, loss of reactor coolant without reactor scram, and fiery explosions of spent fuel rods storage as a consequence of an explosion of an adjacent reactor or its containment building.
2) The potential catastrophic consequences of the worst reactor accident possibilities in terms of human exposure to nuclear radiation and land contamination of fission product and plutonium radioactivity.
3) The harmfulness of nuclear radiation (and x-rays), as analyzed and evaluated by atomic physics calculations.
4) The theoretical potentials for catastrophic STEAM EXPLOSIONS in reactor accidents involving fuel melting, and their experimental validation.
5) Nuclear explosion potentials of the fast neutron, plutonium fueled, plutonium breeder reactors, and the nuclear explosion accident hazards of the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors (AGRs) operating in Britain.
6) Statistical analysis for investigating and evaluating the harmfulness of nuclear radiation:
a) Childhood leukemia in the Nordic Countries following the nuclear fallout from the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the 1950s and early 1060s ("a reported 488 nuclear explosions!") and following also the Chernobyl reactor eruption in 1986.
b) Stillbirths in southern Bavaria after the Chernobyl fallout in that region.
c) Cancer mortality among the workers of the Hanford plutonium production reactors, and the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
7) The Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident (March 28, 1979), the Chernobyl accident (April 26, 1986), an explosion of the Soviet Union nuclear submarine reactor, and the nuclear submarine accidents in the U.S. naval submarines.
8) The accident hazards of nuclear weapons ("briefly touched upon").
9) Use of power reactors for eliminating the plutonium that has been produced since the creation of nuclear power reactors, and the hazards and problems of nuclear waste disposal.
And:
10) Analysis of the Constitution of the United States of America with respect to the foregoing matters.
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After spending the past six years in Europe, Dr. Webb is back, and America should not ignore this opportunity to learn what Dr. Webb has to say about San Onofre and other nuclear power plants.
Dr. Webb's research has indicated, time and again, using completely different sets of possible failure trees (and completely different types of reactors), that nuclear power plants CAN have accidents outside the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's sphere of "possible" accident scenarios.
San Onofre CAN melt down, and very suddenly, at that. For example, tens of millions of people could have every cell in their body damaged by the emitted radiation over the following days, weeks, months, and even years, decades, centuries, millennia. Thousands if not millions would lose their lives, and all of them (all of us) would be irrevocably genetically mutated. Every nucleus of every cell in our body would be affected.
Dr. Webb is available for interview by the media. His web site is:
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Contact information for "Ace" Hoffman:
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