Are You Close To A Nuclear Power Plant?
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I used to live about 16 miles away from the Pickering, Ontario plant. Now I live on the other side of Lake Ontario, but it's still about 30 miles away from me now.From the "deep south" part of Canada
Richard in Smithville
http://richardspensandthings.blogspot.com/Comment
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I'm located about mid-way across NY's southern tier with Pennsylvania. A quick "Google" and I see two nuke generators up in the Rochester area on the lake, and a few down near NYC.
We're not shown to be in any of the radiation or normal fallout zones, thankfully. Now, if we can only keep the frackiing away, we'll be fairly okay.
CWSThink it Through Before You Do!Comment
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Loring in Katy, TX USA
If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to treat all problems as if they were nails.
BT3 FAQ - https://www.sawdustzone.org/forum/di...sked-questionsComment
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I've mentioned this before but I work in the nuclear industry. The way I usually describe my job is I sell nuclear fuel assemblies. I have visited many of the plants mentioned already. So it would be easy to conclude I am biased if you want to go there. I also have material readily available that everybody may not. I think most of the fear of nuclear power plants is because people do not know much about radiation and there is a lot of mis-information or confusing information. I'll attach a couple of the smaller files I have readily available that might help with understanding. One is a one page chart relating the doses of radiation from several accidents and normal operation to radiation we get from other sources. The other is an article explaining a bit about why the most typical assumption - that low doses of radiation are harmful - is rather unscientific. The point of this is that we get exposed to radiation regardless of where we live and the radiation that is added by a nuclear power plant is very small compared to things like airplane rides or medical tests. There is no evidence that small radiation doses like these harm us. That theory is developed by extrapolation of the much, much higher doses that we know cause harmful effects. If our risk of death is 1 in 100 at a dose of X, we then assume we can calculate lower risks at lower exposures from this information. The problem is our bodies deal with radiation up to some point and then can't. An analogy that is sometimes used is aspirin. If we take a few aspirin, we get pain relief. If we swallow the bottle we may not survive. That is how God made our bodies. Small doses of a lot of things are not harmful while huge doses of the same thing will kill us. Drinking water can kill you, for instance.
If you go to nei's website I think you can get the "just the facts" brochure. It's too big for me to post here but it is a good simple explanation of nuclear power (with pictures).
JimAttached FilesComment
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Higher doses at altitude, like Denver, yet lower rates of cancers thought to be a risk for exposure is one of the reasons I don't think low doses are harmful. There are also people who live close to uranium deposits who get much higher doses. They also do not show any ill effect from it.
Major doses of radiation will clearly kill people. It happened in a Japanese fuel manufacturing facility when they let high enrichment fuel go critical. It happened to workers and army people helping with recovery at Chernoybl. But at western type reactors, including TMI and Fukushima, it did not happen. The design of the plants worked and prevented serious injury from radiation.
The plant near Sacramento was operated by SMUD, Sacramento Municipal Utility District. They had never operated a steam turbine before but were allowed to build and run a nuclear plant. They had problems. The design was the B&W NSSS that was also used at TMI. The once through steam generators are very sensitive to disruption to feedwater flow and I don't think that is a good trade-off for their slightly better thermal efficiency. But Duke operates similar plants at Oconee well and I don't think Davis Besse is any threat to the public. But SMUD should have gotten some training wheels - a fossil steam plant - before being turned loose with a nuclear plant.
JimComment
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