Notes on Paris and Amsterdam

We just got into Flekkefjord, Norway, where Susan’s great grandfather Siefert Helle (Johnson was his given American name) was born. This sort of marks the half way point in our trip, so I’ll briefly recant what we done so far.

Three nights in Paris was wonderful. Stayed at the Pont Royal Hotel with a small room, but fabulous view of Paris…Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeure, Arch de Triumph, etc. Spent the first day walking the ritzy area behind the Louvre, around Opera, and then down through the Marais. Walked across the Ile de St. Louis and found the hotel we will stay in on our return from Norway before flying home; and then back along Rue St. Germaine to our hotel. The next day we spent most of out time around the Sorbonne. This is probably my favorite area because it is hip, lots of little cafes and quaint restaurants, and near the Luxembourg Gardens, Notre Dame, the quays of the Seine…all the charm I love about Paris. When we come back, we will return to the Minerve Hotel where we stayed before because it is reasonably priced and a perfect location.

We took the Thalys fast train to Amsterdam…I love train travel…comfortable, efficient, and views of the countryside. We stayed two nights at the Amrath Grand Hotel near Central Station…real nice location…close to the Red Light District! and all the touristy restaurants. We took a nice canal cruise, and went to the Van Gogh museum, and drank some good beer (finally!) We had booked a standard room at the Grand, but for some reason we wound up with the Presidential Suite ($2400/nite)…huge living room with conference table, work desk, eating area, free minibar, and plush bedroom and bathroom. This is the second time this has happened to us; if it happens a third, I’ll have to change my name to Obama or something.

Amsterdam is very cool, but vary touristy in the area we stayed. For a more old time sense of architecture, canals, and history, we really liked Bruge in Belgium much better. A lot less of an “in your face” mob scene!

We flew up to Oslo and then took a short flight down to Kristiansand on the south coast. Rented a car…a Peugot 380 diesel…drives nice…we’ll see what kind of mileage it gets since gas is over $10/gallon. Everything here is expensive; I’d say that food, beer, etc is about 3x as much as in the states. I peeked into a MacDonalds…a happy meal was around $12. We ate at an Irish pub…good beer, burgers, packed with both youngsters and oldsters alike. People are very friendly…not as much English spoken here as in other places, but enough to get by. We drove the 80 miles to Flekkefjord today, and took mostly all back roads along the coast. At one point we wound up on a narrow gravel road over the mountain…fantastic views…lots of photos. Everything is neat and clean, roads are great, and everyone seems to have a relaxed lifestyle.

So here we are. I think it is Monday; and we’ll spend a few days here exploring. Internet access here is very slow, so I don’t know how many photos we’ll be able to upload. We’ll do some on Facebook, some via emails, and some with this blog.

The sun is shining…off to drink some beer…I think pizza is in the not too far distance.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore the two graveyards in town, and drive around the countryside.

The State of Things in Early April

The government said last Sunday it will be several months before the radiation stops and permanent cooling systems are restored. Even after that happens, there will be years of work ahead to clean up the area around the complex and figure out what to do with it. I think those numbers are very optimistic.

As it stands today, all six reactors on the site are still experiencing problems, some much more serious than others. Water has to be pumped in to cover and cool the reactor cores and the spent fuel in the pools. Since the building, the pools, and two of the reactor vessels themselves have been ruptured, it’s like pouring water into a cracked, leaking bathtub. "We must keep putting water into the reactors to cool to prevent further fuel damage, even though we know that there is a side effect, which is the leakage," Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear Safety and Industrial Agency, said. That leakage is the water poured in that is now radioactive. “Iodine-131 in the water near the sluice gate of reactor No. 2 hit a high on April 2 of 7.5 million times the legal limit” At unit #2, “experts estimate that about seven tons an hour of radioactive water is escaping the pit…that’s 1650 gal/hr, and it is 10,000x above the allowable radiation limit.” After an unsuccessful attempt to flood the pit with concrete to stop the leak, workers on Sunday turned to trying to plug the apparent source of the water — an underground shaft thought to lead to the damaged reactor building — with more than 120 pounds of sawdust, three garbage bags full of shredded newspaper and about nine pounds of a polymeric powder, used in Depends and Pampers, that officials said absorbs 50 times its volume of water. Now there’s a great high tech solution. The reality…nobody really know anything!

Japan's government has asked the operator of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant to consider wrapping a giant sheet around the facility to contain further radioactive leaks.

The proposal calls for building framed structures around the 45-meter-high reactor buildings and then wrapping them with the sheeting. If all of the four damaged reactors were wrapped in this manner, it would take up to two months and cost about 80bn yen ($950m), the sources said. It is not clear what kind of material would be used for the sheeting. Atomic energy experts are skeptical about the feasibility of the plan that was proposed by a general construction firm. They stress the risk that such sheeting would be torn apart by heat emanating from nuclear reactors, and that it would also hamper restoration work, including the spraying of water onto the reactors.

“I’ve never heard of anything like it at a nuclear power plant,” said Itsuro Kimura, emeritus professor at Kyoto University and director of the Japan-based Institute of Nuclear Technology. The problem is NOBODY has a clue as to what to do; so this will drag on for months, years, ??? Where are all those nuclear power “geniuses?” What are the guys at Oregon State and MIT thinking and saying? They are the ones who sit in their ivory towers, sucking at the DOE funding tit, and exposing that their “new” modular reactors are totally safe, will be less costly, and produce little or no waste. Of course, not one has ever been built, operated, tested, or licensed. The heads of state and industry continue to lie, beg, and steal with the mantra that we have no other choice. Maybe they should all go to Fukushima and put their fingers in the dike. What if this was happening here in the US?

Meanwhile, even the NRC doesn’t have a clue. The experts are silent. “Japan has asked Russia to send a floating radiation treatment plant, used to decommission nuclear submarines, which will solidify contaminated liquid waste from the country's crippled nuclear power plant, Russian media reported.” Does the US have one of those?

In 1976, Gregory C. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard, and Dale G. Bridenbaugh were fired from GE for “whistleblowing” about the reliability of the Mark 1 design that has now failed in Japan. Many other experts have been silenced for years, and the regulatory agencies have been infiltrated by industry people…government business as usual, at our expense. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are still living in shelters, 200,000 households do not have water, and 170,000 do not have electricity. This will go on for years, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars, if that’s the only impact we want to quantify.

Right now, we are still “gut-reacting,” and the news flashes are becoming less and less bright. But the significance of this tragedy will be with us for a long long time, and the “lessons” learned will be far reaching across the globe, impacting nuclear development not only in the US but in France, Russia, China, and all those other countries who have wanted to join the “nuclear club.”

The Demise of Nuclear Power

As I follow the ongoing nuclear events in Japan, I am relieved that we here in Humboldt County dodged a major bullet. We once had used nuclear fuel from our tiny shut-down reactor stored in a fuel pool which could have ruptured with "the big one," a tsunami, a terrorist attack, or just plain human error. Loss of cooling water would have exposed us to the same dilemma facing the workers and residents at Fukushima today.

Two years ago, PG&E spent $64 million out of the $500+ million decommissioning fund to put the 150 tons of spent fuel into 5 heavy duty lead/concrete canisters. These casks are now firmly secure in a concrete vault on site. They won't tip over or roll around in a big earthquake; they won't be affected by a huge tsunami since they are stored below ground level. If anything should happen within their lifetime, they are constantly guarded, monitored, and readily accessible for repair, modification, etc. It's the best storage option for this material until something better comes along.

And yet, I ponder what could have happened here. Suppose the fuel pool had been damaged. What impact would that have had on me? I live about 20 miles from the site. Would I have had to evacuate? Permanently? What would have happened to our population centers within a 50-mile radius? Our gas-fired electric power plants are located on the same site; another local wood-fired generator is just a few miles away. Would these facilities have been shut down and abandoned? What would have happened to beautiful Humboldt Bay? What about the milk and vegetables we produced? What effects would this have had on the lives of all the wonderful people living in Humboldt County?

Well, it didn't happen here. And yet, I am concerned about my fellow Americans in Southern California, New York, and the 30+ locations where nuclear power plants exist in this country. Most of them are still at risk.

The 104 operating nuclear plants in the US, have generated some 78,000 tons of spent fuel - most of it stored in pools. If safety regulations become more stringent, and these rods are mandated to be stored in dry casks, the cost could exceed $50 billion. In 2007, the cost estimate for the Yucca Mountain project, the permanent repository for this waste, was $106+ billion. $13 billion has already spent on excavation and site characterization. Chances are it will never open. If we add in the future costs (about $5 million/yr at Humboldt Bay) of maintaining dry casks all over the US, and eventually delivering them to their ultimate disposal site, could the costs be $200 billion? $300 billion? Half a trillion dollars??? Taxpayers will be paying this bill for a long, long time.

Nuclear power generates 18% of the electricity in the US, about 6% of the total energy we use. This industry could not exist without massive taxpayer subsidies. Even today, utilities can't find investors willing to risk building new reactors. The industry has never been able to find insurance coverage. The Price Anderson Act limits industry liability to $12 billion, a fraction of the costs Japan is facing . You and I have paid, are paying, and will continue to pay for the $500+ million to decommission our small reactor. There are 104 much larger ones to eventually dismantle.

Is this cheap, clean, cost-effective electricity? Hardly! The industry today is mounting a renewed arrogant campaign to mislead the public into believing that nuclear is safe, and our only option. Nukes generate electricity…period. Less than 1% of our oil is used to generate electricity. Building more reactors would do NOTHING to make us less reliant on imported oil. The proposed new generation of nuclear power plants may be safer, but they still face and create the same financial, waste disposal, and ultimate safety and proliferation problems.

Hopefully, in these tough economic and political times, government-subsidized nuclear power will finally meet its demise. The potential for a sustainable RENEWABLE energy economy is enormous. The best part is that the fuel is free. We just need the political will to harvest it.

It's a new day, and here comes the SUN!