Nuclear Depression

Just for those of you missing your daily dose of depressing news about Fukushima and the nuclear industry may I present to you the following links.

#Japan #Earthquake April 7 Aftershock: Diesel Generators at Nuke Plants Didn't Work, Still Don't Work, But Don't Worry It Is So Safe

#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: NISA Admits They Did Not Plan for Hydrogen Explosion

Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Video Footage of Inside the Evacuation Zone

More on Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Aomori That Has Lost External Power and Has 3,258 Tons of Spent Fuel

M7.1 #Earthquake Off Sendai, Japan at 11:32PM JST April 7, 2011; Some Nuclear Facilities Have Lost External Power Supply

New York Times Article on #Fukushima I Nuclear Reactor Hints at Fresh Troubles

Ballooning costs of nuclear waste cleanup at Savannah River Site

Hanford - Toxic Soil Shows Rigors of Nuclear Cleanup. Note that this is a WSJ article. Not hardly the hysterical leftist press. An excerpt:

The contamination discovered last month here in eastern Washington state under a disused research building is so radioactive it could kill on contact, said Don McBride, a radiation expert with the federal contractor cleaning up the building.

At Thursday's meeting, contractors outlined their next steps for dealing with the situation: figuring out a way to test the extent of contamination, then strategizing how to remove it without spreading it or exposing workers, the contractors said.

Federal contractors say that as long as it remains undisturbed, the soil poses no danger to people because it is buried under a concrete slab.

"There's a high level of difficulty because of the unknowns," said Gary Snow, a project manager with Washington Closure Hanford, the federal contractor managing the effort to deal with the newfound waste. The find, he said, "is a key example of encountering those unknowns."

The appearance of more radioactive soil at Hanford illustrates the difficulties the federal government faces in cleaning up nuclear-waste sites, many of them the legacy of Cold War-era research. In 2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office studied 10 nuclear cleanups and found nine were over budget by more than $100 million and one was delayed by 15 years.

Hanford, which the Department of Energy says is the U.S.'s biggest environmental cleanup site both by size and by cost, occupies 586 square miles of desert along the Columbia River. One of its reactors produced plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. The activities left more than 1,000 contaminated sites around Hanford.

The government has been cleaning up the mess for two decades. So far, an Energy Department spokesman said, at least $34 billion has been spent.

A September report by the Government Accountability Office said an effort to clean radioactive tanks at South Carolina's Savannah River nuclear site would likely cost $4.6 billion, $1.4 billion more than expected. A GAO report last year said a separate underground-tank cleanup at Hanford could go $23 billion over budget and take 19 years longer than originally projected.

Depressed yet?

Some books:

The Accidents Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants

And an archive: The Richard E. Webb papers (1974-2005; 0.2 cubic feet) document the research conducted by Dr. Richard E. Webb on the hazards of nuclear power plants.