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Nuclear Energy Advocates Insist U.S. Reactors Completely Safe Unless Something Bad Happens

By Joe Romm on Mar 17, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Humor from America’s Finest News Service:

WASHINGTON””Responding to the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sought Thursday to reassure nervous Americans that U.S. reactors were 100 percent safe and posed absolutely no threat to the public health as long as no unforeseeable system failure or sudden accident were to occur.

“With the advanced safeguards we have in place, the nuclear facilities in this country could never, ever become a danger like those in Japan, unless our generators malfunctioned in an unexpected yet catastrophic manner, causing the fuel rods to melt down,” said NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko, insisting that nuclear power remained a clean, harmless energy source that could only lead to disaster if events were to unfold in the exact same way they did in Japan, or in a number of other terrifying and totally plausible scenarios that have taken place since the 1950s.

“When you consider all of our backup cooling processes, containment vessels, and contingency plans, you realize that, barring the fact that all of those safety measures could be wiped away in an instant by a natural disaster or electrical error, our reactors are indestructible.” Jaczko added that U.S. nuclear power plants were also completely guarded against any and all terrorist attacks, except those no one could have predicted.

- The Onion

Best recent Onion climate, energy, and politics pieces :

11 Responses to Nuclear Energy Advocates Insist U.S. Reactors Completely Safe Unless Something Bad Happens

  1. Prokaryotes says:
    March 17, 2011 at 4:07 pm

    Lol:)

  2. catman306 says:
    March 17, 2011 at 4:48 pm

    Are you sure Jazcko wasn’t interviewed on Morning Edition this AM? A lot of it sounds the same. Wait! That’s not possible: The Onion is satire.
    http://www.npr.org/

  3. paulm says:
    March 17, 2011 at 4:51 pm

    :)

  4. Leif says:
    March 17, 2011 at 5:18 pm

    “If something can happen, it will happen…”

    It is the law!

    “A common mistake made when attempting to make something fool proof is underestimating just how creative fools can be…”

  5. denim says:
    March 17, 2011 at 5:23 pm

    Black Swans happen. See? And we will incorporate all the lessons learned from these Black Swans into our designs….provided we survive.

  6. Edith Wiethorn says:
    March 17, 2011 at 6:10 pm

    This study provides a sampling of the various US rationales re preparedness in the abstract …

    http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/3031/
    “In nearly a third of the states with nuclear power plants, nearby residents do not have the protection of federally-supplied potassium iodide pills for treatment in the event of a radiation crisis like that in Japan …
    Nine states — Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Texas, and Washington — do not participate in the federal program administered by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to NRC records and a survey by the Center.”

  7. Prokaryotes says:
    March 17, 2011 at 6:49 pm

    Not sure to post this here but this is filed under kids program

    Understand the Fukushima Nuclear Plant situation with manga http://smt.blogs.com/mari_diary/2011/03/understand-the-fukushima-nuclear-plant-situation-with-manga.html

  8. llewelly says:
    March 17, 2011 at 7:16 pm

    Not the Onion:

    Nuclear plant risk assessments are really not risk assessments because potential accident consequences are not evaluated. They merely examine accident probabilities — only half of the risk equation. Moreover, the accident probability calculations are seriously flawed. They rely on assumptions that contradict actual operating experience:

    * The risk assessments assume nuclear plants always conform with safety requirements, yet each year more than a thousand violations are reported.

    * Plants are assumed to have no design problems even though hundreds are reported every year.

    * Aging is assumed to result in no damage, despite evidence that aging materials killed four workers.

    * Reactor pressure vessels are assumed to be fail-proof, even though embrittlement forced the Yankee Rowe nuclear plant to shut down.

    * The risk assessments assume that plant workers are far less likely to make mistakes than actual operating experience demonstrates.

    * The risk assessments consider only the threat from damage to the reactor core despite the fact that irradiated fuel in the spent fuel pools represents a serious health hazard.

    The results from these unrealistic calculations are therefore overly optimistic.

  9. Mike Roddy says:
    March 17, 2011 at 8:43 pm

    It comes down to money. The people who are hired to do the risk assessments are being paid by those who want to build reactors, including DOE bureaucrats.

    When they learn that adequate safeguards make the systems unaffordable, they go back to the drawing board to redefine “safe”. Happens every time.

  10. Leland Palmer says:
    March 18, 2011 at 3:02 am

    Yes, we need reactors with inherent safety, not engineered safety.

    It would be very nice if laws of physics prevented meltdowns, not redundant engineered backup systems.

    Or we need no reactors at all.

    Oh, and we need a place to put the spent fuel. Yucca Mountain is just fine, IMO, and certainly much safer than spent fuel pools on the third story of buildings right next to the ocean, vulnerable to tsunamis.

  11. Mark says:
    March 18, 2011 at 4:52 am

    The 1957 Windscale (Sellafield) disaster in the UK is often forgotten

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/oct/10/guardiansocietysupplement.environment

    We still have a large amount of high level waste in pools there. No sign yet of any means of disposal being opened.