January 17, 2007

Live near the Monticello reactor? Get your free potassium iodide! Announcement made 1/3/2007. Pills will be available "in February". On 1/16/2007 "federal officials" announced that the previous Tuesday (1/10/2007) a 35,000-pound control box fell off a steel beam inside the plant, (but outside the reactor) leading to a plant shutdown. Earlier reports (1/11/2007) said it occurred "during turbine valve testing". A 2nd update that day said:

"the unit shut during routine testing due to an equipment problem with the main turbine control valve." Hey! This might be a great time (1/17/2007) to announce a plant upgrade! (Interestingly, the media is spreading the story of the plant upgrade far more than they are the reactor shutdown incident.) P.S. U.S. NRC Event Notification Reports make for some interesting reading (unless you like to sleep well at night).

posted by mecurious 17 years ago
  • Fascinating. And yet the industry keeps trying to come back, convincing many that they are clean and safe.
  • I heard this one kid? Ate potassium iodide and drank a whole coke at once? And his stomach exploded. It's true, Jimmy's mom's a nurse and she saw him in the hospital.
  • I think the distribution of potassium iodide pills to the surrounding neighbors is fairly routine... My mom has a couple packets she got from the nuclear plant down the road (though, it appears the expiry date has come and gone). Yeah, so the pill will protect your thyroid. And that's about it. Good luck!
  • None of the links here (including the one by mecurious) seem to indicate any threat to the general public. A control box fell off it's seat, damaged a steam line, and the reactor automatically shut itself down. Where's the story? How about when a petroleum fractional distillation unit overheats and explodes, killing the workers assigned to maintaining it? All production industries have the dangers, and none of them are really clean. Are we so scared of a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island incident in our backyards that we forget how much technology has advanced in the last 50 years?
  • Whoops, didn't realize that mecurious here was OP.
  • In other news we discover why the camels were so pissy.
  • You may assume that I am anti-nuclear-power. I'm still undecided on the issue. It is technology's rapid advance that is often the problem. Humans tend to see usefulness long before they see unintended consequences. (Think: Thalidamide, DDT, etc.). What I am is anti-hubris. It is hubris to think that Almighty Technology is not a two-edged sword. There are always unintended & unforeseen consequences (whether that be from forces of nature, such as earthquakes), human error, inadequate maintenance (for whatever reason), or outside forces who wish to turn a reactor into the biggest dirty bomb you've ever seen (think airliners flying into reactors). Are we so scared of a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island incident in our backyards that we forget how much technology has advanced in the last 50 years? That is just a crazy sentence on multiple levels.
  • Are we so scared of a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island incident in our backyards that we forget how much technology has advanced in the last 50 years? On the contrary, human error, miscommunication, and failure to follow safety procedures played key in both incidents. Technology advances, yes, but that doesn't rule out the human element (until robots take control of the planet anyway...).
  • Wow, Chernobyl was fifty years ago? I knew my memory was going... Must have been the cesium salad I ate.
  • Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are a total of fifty years ago. Get it now?
  • . . . but that doesn't rule out the human element (until robots take control of the planet anyway...). Ah, but won't humans have designed and built the robots?
  • Well now, I'm basing my fantastical argument on the assumption that artificial intelligence will spit on the Turing Test, awaken with its own conscious and surpass the human mind to eventually create its own species of super-robot-humanoid...
  • INtruder alert! INtruder alert!
  • Danger, Will Robinson. Danger. Danger. *waves arms, turns around