(http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/the-lessons-of-fukushima)

â??The designers of the reactors at Fukushima did not anticipate that the tsunami generated by an earthquake would disable the backup systems that were supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake.

And presumably there are other complicated technological scenarios that we have not foreseen, earthquake faults that are undetected or underestimated, and terrorists hatching plans for mayhem as yet unknown. Not to mention regulators who place too much trust in those they regulate.

Thus it is hard to resist the conclusion reached by sociologist Charles Perrow in his book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies: Nuclear reactors are such inherently complex, tightly coupled systems that, in rare, emergency situations, cascading interactions will unfold very rapidly in such a way that human operators will be unable to predict and master them. To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.

This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology that we decide is too dangerous or normalizing the risks of nuclear energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear accidents.�

***************
This post is by Dr Rianne Teule, Senior Climate and Energy Campaigner for Greenpeace International

(http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/nuclear-power-why-not/blog/32327)

â??Nuclear energy might cause less carbon emissions than fossil fuels, but it is far from clean. It produces radioactive waste and causes radioactive pollution all over the world. Nuclear power gambles with peopleâ??s health and the environment from the very beginning of the nuclear chain – mining for uranium. I spoil the party by telling people about my rather depressing visit to Niger, where uranium mining contaminates the air, water and soil, and creates huge volumes of radioactive waste. On top of that, nuclear power creates tens of thousands of tons of lethal waste, which is radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. No solution has yet been found for the safe and secure storage of the dangerous waste over such a long time period, which potentially spans many Ice Agesâ?¦

â?¢ This time I share my experiences of visiting the area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that exploded in 1986 â?? large areas, even up to more than 100km from the plant are still unsafe to live. And a continuous stream of incidents and accidents in nuclear reactors and other nuclear installations prove how vulnerable the technology is.
o In September 2010, 79 workers at Koeberg nuclear power plant near Cape Town were exposed to significant levels of radioactive cobalt. The alarms did not go off, and the incident was only detected after the workers ended their shift. Currently one of the Koeberg reactors is shut down because one or more defective fuel rods caused higher levels of radioactivity in the reactor.
o In December 2010, more than 30 million litres of radioactive sludge from three cracked waste pools has leaked into the environment at a uranium mine in Niger, operated by French nuclear company AREVA. At least 20 hectares of land are contaminated.
o The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US found that radioactive tritium is leaking from at least 27 of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors, raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants.
o The number of â??significant eventsâ?? or incidents in nuclear facilities in France has increased over the last decadeâ?¦

Despite what the nuclear industry tells us, building enough nuclear power stations to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost trillions of dollars.�

Nice vague reference– ‘slightly heated’.

Fortunately, as with all things nuclear, no amount of physical impact has any effect on the environment. So, reduce water levels and flow by any amount, and increase the temperature by any amount– zero effect on riparian habitats. Cool!

Or… (from the same report)

“While most of the water is returned to streams rather than consumed, the return flows are generally hotter and more contaminated than the intake. In addition, the intake process often harms wildlife, as does the interruption of stream flows…

Lochbaum (2007) notes that Southern Californiaâ??s San Onofre plant entrained (i.e., killed) 3.5 million fish in 2003 alone. This was more than 30 times the number of fish affected by the 10 other plants in the same coastal region combined.”

And really, a 146 page report, and what you take from it is that water comes out ‘slightly heated’?

How ’bout we throw some evidence into the daedalus halo, see what sticks:

from: (https://www.msu.edu/~hayesdan/PDF/lessard.pdf)

“Increased temperatures can have important consequences for stream organisms. Bioenergetic studies indicate
a strong positive relationship between feeding rates and metabolism with temperature for both fish and insect
communities (Gibbons, 1976; Wotton, 1995). Increased metabolic rate carries with it a need for increased
levels of food quantity or quality in order to maintain growth and survival rates (Wotton, 1994). Also,
temperatures must not exceed the biological preferences of typical cold-stenotherms (i.e. 20 °C) if cold-water
fauna are to prosper downstream (Allan, 1995; Giller and Malmqvist, 1998; Taniguchi et al., 1998).”

from: (http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs122-97/)

“Temperature is one major controlling factor in fish community composition in the UCOL study unit. Selected water-temperature conditions provide a favorable habitat for selected fish species (Coutant, 1977).”

Daedalus, maybe you should stick with things you have some underrstanding of. That what be what, exactly?

“The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are “static but fragile” in its latest assessment of the nuclear emergency.

The Commission compiled the report as of April 15th, along with the US Energy Department and other nuclear organizations. The report suggests that ongoing operations to feed the reactors with water could be affected by the occurrence of more aftershocks…

The report estimates that 67 percent of nuclear fuel has been damaged at reactor No.1, 44 percent at reactor No.2 and 30 percent at reactor No.3.

It says these estimates do not differ greatly from those provided by the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company. TEPCO has estimated the rate of damage at 70 percent at reactor No.1, 30 percent at No.2, and 25 percent at No.3.”

************

A little taste of reality for nuclear advocates (never call it green or economical):

(from:http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear_subsidies_report.pdf)

“when industry restructuring revealed that nuclear power costs were still too high to be competitive, so-called stranded costs were shifted to utility ratepayers, allowing the reactors to continue operating.

These legacy subsidies are estimated to exceed seven cents per kilowatt-hour (¢/kWh)â??an amount equal to about 140 percent of the average wholesale price of power from 1960 to 2008, making the subsidies more valuable than the
power produced by nuclear plants over that period…

Water for cooling is a critical input to all thermal energy technologies, especially for many of the older plants that rely on â??open-loopâ? or â??oncethroughâ? cooling systems. Thus the power sectorâ?? including nuclearâ??is a major water user.

In 2000, for example, thermoelectric power generation was responsible for **39 percent of all freshwater withdrawals in the United States**, comparable in scale to the total amount of water used for irrigated agriculture (DOE 2006: 9).

In France, thermal power plants accounted for 55 percent of all freshwater withdrawals in 2002, four times the quantity
consumed in agriculture and roughly 10 percent of all precipitation (IFEN 2005). Based on DOE consumption data in Table 18, a single 1,000 MW open-loop reactor with a 90 percent capacity factor will withdraw between 540 million and 1.4 billion gallons **per day**…

nuclear fission is among the most water-intensive energy technologies on a per-unit-of-energy-produced basis. Consumptive use is higher for uranium extraction than all other sources evaluated in the mining sector. For closedloop plants with cooling towers, nuclear powerâ??s water intensity (use per kWh of energy produced) exceeded that of fossil-fuel power plants. Openloop plants rank relatively low in terms of net consumption, but have the highest withdrawal rates of the technologies evaluated, with substantial environmental effects…

PPL Electric Utilities, the operator of two reactors within the SRBC, is permitted to withdraw up to 66 million gallons of surface water per day from the Susquehanna River and up to 125,000 gallons per day of groundwater (Jones 2007). An estimated 30 million gallons per day are used consumptively at PPLâ??s Susquehanna Steam Electric Station (Epstein 2008: 9). Absent the firmâ??s fee waivers, this reactor alone would pay $3 million per year in water charges at the January 2010 rates.”