Vermont May Revoke Nuclear Plant License 163
mdsolar writes "Following the Vermont Senate's 26-to-4 vote not to approve a 20-year license extension for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, the Vermont Public Service Board will consider revoking its operating license as well. Meanwhile, the plant continues to operate without its Director of Nuclear Safety Assurance, who has been placed on administrative leave; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full complement of safety personnel. It may be that the NRC is not capable of doing what is needed with regard to Entergy, the plant owner, which is also facing prosecution by the Mississippi Attorney General."
Hard to Replace (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.entergy.com/ [entergy.com]
Re:Oh, my God. Oh, God, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh, my God. Oh, God, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant. AFAICS, Entergy is not capable of safely operating a coffee maker, much less a 600MW nuclear reactor.
Horrors, some was reasonable! (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me a break. If you strip away the inflammatory wording, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. When was the last time you heard of a coal fired plant or a coal mine being shut down because they didn't have a "full complement of safety personnel"?
The NRC "merely" did something reasonable rather than taking some draconian action that the fossil fuel industry apologists could then use to argue against the safety and reliability of their biggest competitor ("Look! They had to shut it down for safety violations! Oh Noooooooo!")
-- MarkusQ
Re:Oh, my God. Oh, God, no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Stalin said "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
However, from the perspective of the news media, "The death of one man is an obituary, the death of millions is a long-running and frankly rather tedious investigative series on page A15, and the deaths of a few hundred all at once is days of front page stories with large pictures"....
Re:Horrors, some was reasonable! (Score:4, Insightful)
mdsolar is not a fossil fuel apologist. He is a new-age solar energy proponent who has a hatred of nuclear power. For some reason Slashdot continues to post his frenetic articles.
Re:Horrors, some was reasonable! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the bias in the 'article' (and summary) is disgusting. Vermont is simply doing exactly what -should- be done when safety procedures are not being met. I would hate to see -any- nuclear plants shut down, but it's a lot better to shut it down than let it run unsafe, even for a short time.
Entergy was way out of line (Score:5, Insightful)
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full compliment of safety personnel
What's bizarre about the whole thing is the level of radiation leaks that started all this trouble weren't even that high, near the level we can measure accurately. There was no need to lie, unless they were trying to cover up something even bigger. They could have owned up to their troubles and fixed most of what was wrong and probably stayed out of trouble.
Now they're screwed. After the NRC proctological exam, they probably will get shut down. Of course, with all the protections the Supreme Court gives artificial corporate people, you can be sure no one will actually be held accountable.
No kidding (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay, so the company suspended the safety director only four days ago, and the submitter is bitching about "lack of full complement of safety personnel", and implying that the plant should be shut down? Give me a fucking break. He has assistants and subordinates that can fill in for him until a replacement is chosen. It's not like he never took vacation or was away from the plant during the time he was working there.
This is a serious situation and needs to be looked into closely, especially given the deceit on behalf of Entergy. I agree that long-term license renewal should not be granted until they agree to additional oversight and put forth concrete plans for resolving the maintenance problems that currently exist. However, the plant is not unsafe at this time, the problems can be fixed, and there is no reason that it shouldn't be.
Seriously, mdsolar, just STFU. It is people like you that make me ashamed to be associate with environmental groups at all.
Re:Oh, my God. Oh, God, no! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Entergy was way out of line (Score:3, Insightful)
though your last point should be marked as flame bait because it's completely untrue. care to show me an instance of a western run nuclear plant that put nuclear waste in someones backyard where it leaked? oh right you can't, because they put them deep under ground in them middle of no where, in geologically stable areas in multiple casings which can't leak.
Re:The hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you just stop reading when you hit a word you don't understand? Because the three words after "Entergy" tell you "What the hell" it is.
"Entergy, the plant owner,"
Emergency NRC Acting Director? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I don't get about this whole situation is why the NRC doesn't bring someone in (either an NRC employee, or maybe a qualified consultant) to be the Acting Director of Safety? Doesn't the NRC have anybody qualified to take over operations of Nuclear Plants when necessary? If Entergy can't run the plant safely, bring in someone who can (at least temporarily, until the 'permanent disposition' of the situation can be sorted out). If Entergy really did something bad, perhaps they should be forcibly divested of their ownership of the plant (probably with some partial compensation, but perhaps not complete compensation, as a punitive measure), and the plant sold to a company who has a track record for running nuclear plants safely?
I'm sure none of the Vermont legislators wants to appear to be taking the safety of Vermont residents 'lightly', so they are rushing to this idea of permanently shutting down the power plant. I do agree that something needs to be done, but shutting down a plant which just needs some repairs (and possibly retrofitting some 'safety upgrades') seems like an irrational, knee-jerk reaction.
Re:Entergy was way out of line (Score:5, Insightful)
No plan for waste? I'm sorry, there are two things that come out of a nuclear power plant: old fuel rods and other misc. waste. The fuel rods should be reprocessed - there is no reason not to and it is a horrible waste of materials not to do so. The other waste is currently shipped off to be buried and is relatively low-level. I believe old salt mines are pretty popular today for this stuff.
Additionally, there is a plan that has existed since the 1970s for dealing with high level nuclear waste - not fuel rods, but other stuff. That has been consistently kicked around and the State of Nevada has pretty much sat down and said they will not permit the facility to operate. So there is a plan, just nobody wants it in their State and the State that was selected has refused to allow it.
First thing that would make a positive impression on uninformed people would be to start reprocessing fuel rods. A fuel rod is no longer useful when around 3% of the uranium has been used and there are significant quantities of other isotopes present. Reprocessing would recover the 97% of the uranium and the other isotope materials leaving little or no "waste".
Now if you want to treat the used fuel rods as waste I recommend that we also consider automobiles to be waste after five full tanks of gasoline and force the owners to store them in their garage until they rust away into dust. This would make about as much sense as the current fuel rod policies and would put the problem into proper focus.
Re:Entergy was way out of line (Score:1, Insightful)
No they have history of being run by MBAs and not engineers just like most big US companies. Don't worry about the European Business Model though they have started to think MBAs are the way to manage technical businesses. MBAs don't see technical problems they only see money related problems aka cost of implanting safer systems vs financial risk of a failure of unsafe systems. Really Engineers know that Engineering is a educated guessing game so if some tells you it will hold for 10,000 lbs of load maximum under absolutely ideal conditions like minimum shock loading, perfect assembly, skilled operator not making any mistakes etc. They will know not to load it beyond say 3,500 lbs and if he thinks that's the biggest load he'll need then he'll buy something with a higher rating in case people were wrong about what the biggest load really was or a encase of a change in design. But an MBA will say 10,000 maximum load okay great our heaviest load is only 8,500 lbs lets buy that and save $20,000. Oops, design change we really need to load 12,000 lbs. MBA will say it's okay to use the already install 10,000 lbs thing for that one piece while engineer will be ready with a 30,000lbs setup probably even more if he's in high risk field like Nuclear Power. Know your going to tell me that an MBA will have engineers that will tell him to spend the extra money on safety but the problem is that the MBA will higher engineers who think like him and try to save money not lives. Engineering is also a problem solving thinking ahead game aka if you build a building what are going to be the effects on the area around the building on other building etc. MBAs only see past statistics.
Re:Oh, my God. Oh, God, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant.
It's not hard at all. Read some of the other comments to this story and you'll see it's quite easy for some people. There's a crowd that, any time any safety issue relating to any nuclear plant is mentioned, react with howls of "OMG the liberal socialist greenies want to take our clean safe never-has-any-kind-of-problem-EVAR nuclear power away!!!" They're pretty much the other side of the same coin as the "nuclear power is dangerous 'cause it's got atoms in it!!!" types, and just as ignorant.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reactionary Policy (Score:3, Insightful)
Millions dumped into the local economy aren't worth much if the entire area is rendered uninhabitable by a serious radiation leak. That's just hell on property values, whether you are a smug liberal or a stingy reactionary. Yes, it sucks that if this sticks, a bunch of people will lose their jobs. No argument from me. But the decision was taken as a result of some very bad behavior on the part of Entergy officials. If these people screw up badly, we all (that is, all of us who live in the area) lose in a very big way. So if we can't trust them, it really doesn't matter whether or not the plant is actually safe: we can't *tell* whether or not it's safe, and so we have to assume it's not.
Re:Emergency NRC Acting Director? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's designated lifespan. We don't know what the design life was, nor do we know how long that could be extended with judicious maintenance, upgrades, and equipment replacement.
Shut It Down (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and how much extra mid-east oil will we import to make up for that clean, carbon neutral power? Enquiring minds want to know.
Re:Oh, my God. Oh, God, no! (Score:4, Insightful)
It was one of the worst nuclear disasters in US history. It caused no immediate deaths and released an amount of radiation which, statistically, is probably responsible for one death.
Worst nuclear disaster. One death.
Meanwhile, literally thousands of people die in coal plant-related accidents every year, with an estimated tens of thousands dying every year from the pollution released.
Safety is not an absolute - it is relative to the alternatives - and by that measure, nuclear power is ridiculously safe.