https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/29/us/38-year-plutonium-loss-at-plant-equals-7-bombs.html
Seven nuclear bombs' worth of plutonium escaped into air ducts at the Rocky Flats weapons plant near Denver over the 38 years of the plant's operation, Federal officials said yesterday.
Officials of the Federal Department of Energy said workers had detected 28 kilograms, or about 62 pounds, in the ducts, more than twice the amount of plutonium they had been expected to find. Plutonium is so toxic that it is usually accounted for in quantities expressed in grams or thousandths of a kilogram.
----------
Trust us! What could possibly go wrnog?
Other than the fact that this has absolutely nothing to do with the issue being discussed (nuclear power plants), that article confirmed that the system at Flats
weapons plant did not "go wrong". It appears to have worked exactly as designed. The glove boxes operate under negative pressure so any dust will be forced into the ducts where it is trapped rather than escaping into the environment.
The only error is that they apparently under-estimated how much dust there would be. But then the system was obviously designed to handle even a much greater erroneous estimate.
Unfortunately, the nuclear industry has had a long history of be sloppy.
That's simply not true, unless (yet again) you are conflating power with bombs.
The nuclear power industry has a better record of safety than any other industry in the history of humanity. In the entire sixty year history of nuclear power, there has been exactly one fatal accident, with a death toll of fewer than 100 people; Any other industry would be envious of such a record.
I live in Houston, Texas, a place that is well within the cancer melt, thanks to oil and chemistry industry.
Yup. Those industries stink. They need to do a LOT better.
Lots of EPA sites to clean up. Almost yearly chemical plant explosions due to sub-contracter poorly trained employees doing stupid things. Fighting efforts to clean up their act like a pack of rabid raccoons. Since my job of 35 years was closely related to these industries, including a good share of legal models to explain to juries, jusu what went wrong that killed 3 workers, I am quite aware of just how stupid and careless these "experts" can be All crying "Regulation BADDDDDD!" any time there is an effort to end the worst stupidities. So, I am biased.
Presumably, biased in favour of the nuclear power industry, where such things have never been tolerated?
My company long ago did work on nuclear energy sites, and we got of lot of industry journals that told their fair share of horror stories to consider
"horror stories' that involve neither injury nor fatality are not that horrifying. Or were your company (not you personally I notice) working on sites unrelated to nuclear POWER?
So for me, it is a generic case of "stupidity abounds and you cannot trust anybody to regulate themselves".
Nobody is suggesting that you can, nor that we should. We should have tight and strictly enforced regulations to protect the health and safety of workers and of the wider community.
What we do NOT need is regulations that treat dirty laundry as some kind of lethal hazard for no reason other than to make one particular technology more expensive, thereby encouraging the use of other (FAR more dangerous) technologies instead.
Of course there are other aspects of this nuclear nonsense. Mining leaves radioactive wastes that are still killing miners.
Sure, mining is dangerous. Coal mining leaves far more waste than uranium mining does; And that waste is ALSO radioactive, and ALSO still killing workers. I would suggest we choose the lesser risk, rather than pick the worse case because we are uniquely and unreasonably fearful of the better one.
We had drums of nuclear waste exploding
Citation needed. 'Exploding' has a very specific meaning; merely 'splitting due to internal pressure from the slow expansion of the contents' is not 'exploding'. And what kind of waste was it? Nuclear power plant waste isn't routinely mixed with bentonite clay (I presume that's what you mean by 'kitty litter'); This poorly evidenced anecdote has all the hallmarks of yet another attempt to place the errors of nuclear bomb makers at the feet of people who use fission to make electricity. By the way, you still haven't apologized for napalming all those people. I mean, you didn't do it yourself, but you use gasoline, so that's basically the same thing, right?
because they were mixed in drums of kitty litter, but the wrong kind of kitty litter. The entire Yucca Flats fiasco.
Yucca flat is a nuclear bomb testing range. It has between three quarters and seven eighths of fuck all to do with nuclear power. Seriously, you need to learn about a subject before opining on it, if you don't want people to think you are either stupid or lying.
Sure, build a nuclear waste storage facility on an active earth quake fault. And fight that stupidity tooth and nail for decades. We don't need no steenkin' regulation! Or common sense. Sorry. But I am prejudiced because I had a ringside seat into industry stupid for many years. Now we have another myth. Over regulation run amuck. No. Regulation because otherwise, stupid.
What makes you think that you can't have both?
A few years ago here in Houston, we had some big coal fired plants of old design spewing large amounts of particulate matter. Studying that type of particulate matter the EPA found it was deadly stuff. The EPA estimated these plants would kill 12,000 people over 10 years.
There were laws proposed to mandate scrubbers to eliminate that particulate matter. The idiots running these plants went into full rabid industry mode opposing those measures and pressed the Texas legislature to not pass clean up regulations, crying their usual battle cries. "Too much regulation! Jobs! Jobs!" They were under pressure from solar and fracking, natural gas. 12,000 dead over a decade? Didn't care a peep! I have seen this sort of crap for many decades now.
Yup. That's why it makes sense to switch those plants for nuclear ones. By avoiding genuinely hazardous shit like this, nuclear power has already saved millions of lives. If every power plant currently burning coal was replaced by a nuclear power plant, then we could have a Chermobyl disaster every single week, and STILL be saving lives. Of course, even if those nuclear plants were designed, built, and operated by people as incompetent as the Soviets who designed, built, and operated the RBMKs, the actual frequency of such accidents would be measured in decades rather than weeks. With modern designs, they will be measured in centuries rather than decades.
Nuclear power isn't perfect. But is is tens of thousands of times better than coal power from a safety perspective (or indeed by pretty much any other measure you can think of, apart from public image). So if saving lives and removing health risks is important to you (and it should be), replacing coal plants with nuclear, as quickly as possible, should be your number one priority.
Bilby doesn't have my backround.
And you don't have mine.
Has not seen the stupidities I have seen.
Indeed not. But I have seen plenty of stupidities - just different ones. I have seen people genuinely trying to argue
against changing from an industry that kills millions every year, to one that kills fewer than a dozen per decade, on the basis that the latter industry 'isn't safe enough'. I mean, that's some seriously impressive stupidity right there.
I don't trust anybody to do the right thing, not through some hard headed ignorance, but because I have see how this crap happens.
Except you haven't. You have NEVER seen a situation where a person was killed or injured by the nuclear power industry. Never. (Unless you were in the Ukraine in April 1986 - I'm betting you weren't).
You have seen people killed and injured by other industries; And you are determined to claim that nuclear must be just as bad - despite OVERWHELMING evidence that this is not true.
