GE Reports

Jeff/Keith/John and Sean …This is a great endeavor and effort by the GE team demonstration GE Way of compliance to the regulatory requirements…It would be nice if NY times could adopt this new data of the design compliance into their next print…otherwise, GE could put a commercial advertising pages on the FT, Japanese Economics news for broader knowledge’s …again, this is great and tremendous …

This was very good information – especially the white paper. Those of us who have defended nuclear energy for years are encountering a lot of “I told you so’s” from people who we’ve argued this issue with in the past. This incident is a hard one to argue against, so good factual information is vital to us. When the communications take on the look of company propaganda it lets us down. We need something we can show to the skeptics that won’t have them laugh us out of the room. Some of the earlier communications fell in this category and were not helpful. This is a big improvement. A lot of us are engineers and our GE training has taught us to challenge and poke holes in any technical argument being made to us. This is no exception and you should expect us to do it here. GE needs to take the lead on getting credible factual information out to the public even if some of it may be embarassing. If we don’t get it out, the media will and it will look a lot less flattering. Better to err on the side of too much information. Nuclear is an important resource but we as a country will lose access to it if the industry doesn’t maintain its credibility with the public.

After ten days and no response to my question, and now with radiation leaking into the Pacific Ocean, I and thousands are rapidly concluding that neither TEPCO, General Electric nor NISA intend to keep people up to date and instead appear to hide information from the public that are being affected by this disaster. When things go bad, it is apparent that corporate strategy is to hide and enforce a code of silence for all involved. We have seen this before in the aviation and automobile industries.

Absence of planning (as per the immediate failure of the primary backup generation system) is one thing but to ignore the concerns of not only the Japanese people but increasingly those around the world who will be affected by these fundamental failures is unconscionable and reflects upon the entire nuclear industry in all countries embracing the technology.

The critics are right: given silence, withholding of information, serious planning shortcomings and the inability of the industry so-called experts to address organizational and corporate failures which have a known history in this industry, there are now no good reasons for permitting nuclear power to exist as a viable alternative to other means of electrical generation. The industry has not earned the right to exist.

This is in it’s most primary sense, a massive failure of one country’s regulatory oversight, of far too much comfort between regulator and industry, on a scale not witnessed before. This is not a Chernobyl; this is a Bopal.

The so-called “white paper” on nuclear energy, available from GE on this site, shows that both the industry and the regulatory authority are incapable of correctly assessing itself in terms of the level of ultimate safety of nuclear power.

Like many, I am no longer neutral on nuclear power, not because it cannot be done safely given sufficient capability and integrity, but because this industry has clearly demonstrated to the world that does not possess such integrity, and has instead shown by these failures that here at least, it is unwilling and incapable of doing it safely and moreover is dishonest and therefore cannot be trusted to design, manage and regulate itself.

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Sincerely,

D. F. Hudson
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My “ultimate” question:

What is the “ultimate” solution in case of all standard operational “safeties” fail ?

What about to have Graphite sleeves to cover the Uranium Rods to lower the temperature to normal low temperatures .

This, of course, for future Nuclear plants.

I see that the nuclear plants are needed and should be built as needed and see new ones in the near future, also, one model ONLY, world wide, to avoid re-inventing the “wheel” every time one is wanted.

Nando

“Coincident long-term loss of both on-site and off-site power for an extended period of time is a beyond-design-basis event for the primary containment on any operating nuclear power plant.”

Scientists, pro-nuclear people, and share owners: please explain this quote (It’s at the top of the ‘white paper’ on the Mark I). Please explain how this will work the next time. Please explain how what will happen when Seattle and L.A. get hit by the scientifically-based predicted earthquake. Please explain what is going to happen to the 250,000 tons of nuclear waste – will you be storing it by your child’s school? Will you be storing it in the empty lot beside your house? I’m waiting……

Silence. I hear nothing but silence.

Having worked on a nuclear power plant myself I was never an opponent of them but this incident causes me to reflect that while the risk of an accident is small, the consequences of one if it ever happens can be devastating. TMI was hardly the only serious accident at a nuclear plant in the US, Brown’s Ferry for one had the potential to be a catastrophe also.

Considering that a nuclear power plant has an output about equal to two fossil plants, that the US has a 200 year supply of coal and at least 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and that all nuclear plants in the US are over 30 years old and reaching the end of their useful lives, it is time to think about decommissioning them and replacing them with fossil plants.

Nuclear power has been given a chance and has proven it is not a good idea at all. As a whole, we’ll be much safer without them.

it’s easy to rant and rave.
with not much more effort one can do something consrtuctive.

there’s been a good discussion at the site linked belowwhere a bunch of ordinary people came together as strangers, shared what they could dig up in way of information and all learned a lot.

check it out. here’s last page at present,, recommend start at beginning. http://tickerforum.org/akcs-www?post=182121&page=298

the level of discourse will surprise you. They’re way ahead of the media.

(i expectto be shouted down over that one.)

my real opinion -
iworked thirty years in a plant as a maintenance man fixing instruments.
It’s disconcerting to see that one of these contraptions can do this.
I have only two comments:
1. Compare the area contaminated to the size of strip mines that would have been dug to make same amount of electricity last forty years.
2. Nuclear power was sold to us a beinig clean and safe as a housecat.
If mankind is going to continue abusing nuclear power as a political football instead of doing the right thing, which is tend to its litterbox, we should get honest and abandon it as too good for the likes of us.

That was Hamlet’s dilemma he dithered asking “to be or not to be” when the real question was “to do or not to do”.

Crane summed it up it –

[q]Man said “I Exist”.
and the universe replied “The fact does not create in me a sense of obligation.”[/q]

These plants are here, mankind.
Deal with them.
and do it Well.

old jim himself