Have you everwondered what is happening with all of the used up nuclear fuel these days,since there is no permanent storage solution? Well, here are the unbelievable details. It will make your head spin.

 

Nuclear plants aretheoretically designed with multiple back up systems, which are designed tocounter all ‘normal’ risks that the plant may encounter during it’s lifetime.

 

However,  this theory of safety is NOT turning intoreality for many reasons. Here are the many reasons why nuclear plants need tobe shut down. Be sure and read the very last reason at the very end, if you only read only one.

 

Reason #1

 

No permanent storageis available for highly dangerous, radioactive spent fuel. Uranium mining is dirty, dangerous and radioactive. The radioactive waste tailing pilings from mining uranium generates dirty, radioactive dust and heavy metal poisoning in kids. Both the radioactive and dangerous spent fuel ispiling up at reactors around the world and these toxic uranium tailing piles are also increasing in number. Depleted uranium, which is the ‘garbage’ left over from nuclear power plants, is used worldwide in shells, bullets and bombs, polluting the planet for 40 BILLION years. http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/03/depleted-uranium-effects-in-human-body.html 

Recycling facilities reprocess only3 percent of nuclear fuel coming out of nuclear reactors as opposed to the 97 percent claim that the industry makes. ‘Recycling’ creates HUGE amounts of radioactive waste, which is legally dumped into the sea and into the air. Whole areas of the ocean bottom are becoming nuclear toxic waste zones. To see this happening, watch this short clip. http://youtu.be/7UsX22QtaRc

Radioactive gases Krypton and Xenon are pumped out into the air constantly at these recycling facilities.  In one year they pump out more radioactive gases than all of the radioactive gases released by over 500 atomic bomb tests. Depleted uranium hexaflouride is stored outside with no protection in toxic waste drums after ‘recycling’. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.  http://youtu.be/KUJoiUWHVtU

 

Theamount of spent fuel at just one spent fuel pool is enough to contaminate andmake a 15,000 square mile area permanently uninhabitable, besides killingpotentially millions of people. If spent fuel pool #4 falls over at Fukishima Daichi, Japan can kiss itself goodbye.

But Fukushima Daichi is not an isolated, solitary danger.  Mostnuclear power plants and their associated spent fuel pools are located close to major cities,such as Chicago, New York, San Diego, etc. This is not a risk that we as a human family can live with. 

Fukushima should be teaching us this very important lesson about playing with anti-life forces, but the media is not talking about this or other dangers that nuclear plants present to humanity at all. Why not? 

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the mass media is owned by GE (which makes nuclear reactors and nuclear medical devices) and a few other large corporations involved in profiting from things like nuclear energy. They also profit from advertising how ‘clean’ and ‘safe’ nuclear energy, carbon fuel and coal is, These are the most polluting  anti-life fuels and energy sources on Earth.  

 

Reason #2

 

As we can see, spentfuel rods are very dangerous and should be isolated from everything andeveryone, in case something bad happens. However, in all nuclear power plants,these spent fuel pools are right next to or on top of the nuclear reactors. 

This meansthat if a spent fuel pool melts down or explodes, odds are that this explosionwill also destroy or cause a further explosion in the reactor right next to it,or the other way around, as happened at Fukushima Reactor #3. 

Spent fuel poolsshould definitely be located FAR away from all population centers anddefinitely NOT close to reactors, but in fact, that is where they all are. Thisis pure insanity. All spent fuel should be separated from other rods, so thatthey cannot react together and cause radiation release via just a passivecooling method, but the opposite is happening. This is pure insanity.

 

 

Reason #3

 

At Fukushima Daichi,all reactors and spent fuel pools are connected with pipes that supply water toboth the reactors and spent fuel pools. 

These pipes can also transfer things likeexplosive charges, which is what happened at Fukushima complex. At Fukushima, all reactors andspent fuel pools are connected together, and all spent fuel pools are connectedtogether to these reactors, with common cooling water and other piping systems. 

 

Operators atFukushima Daichi blamed explosions and/or melt downs at one reactor or spentfuel pool for causing the explosion and/or melt down in other reactors andspent fuel pools for this very reason. Anything bad affecting one reactor orspent fuel pool can and does affect all of the rest.

 

This money savingstrategy of connecting all of these reactors and spent fuel pools together with piping and central control rooms that operate multiple reactors at the same time, greatly increases risk,rather than reducing it. 

Reactors and spent fuel pools should NEVER beconnected together in any way, and each should have it’s own independentcooling and control systems, PERIOD. We do not have to be scientists to understand thisbasic and fundamental risk management strategy. Fukushima should be teaching us this lesson and many others. According to Arnie Gunderson, we are not learning ANY lesson, YET. 

 

The opposite is beingdone at nuclear power plant complexes globally. They are being connected togetherwith common piping and control rooms.  Again, this is very unsafe, and we could callit pure insanity, because the consequences of this can wipe out all ofhumanity. Combine this with other things being done to reduce safety andincrease risk, and we end up with a global life extinction disaster in themaking.

 

Reason #4

 

All nuclear plantsstore all of their spent nuclear fuel onsite. These onsite spent fuel pools weredesigned to safely hold only a couple of years of nuclear fuel waste products,before being shipped off to a permanent storage place. Since the industry neversolved this problem, all nuclear waste products are stored right next to or ontop of each reactor, making any disaster MUCH worse, if and when it happens, suchas Fukushima for example, where multiple reactors and spent fuel poolspartially or completely melted down.

 

What makes thissituation MUCH worse, is that each plant is cramming more and more fuel rodsinto the spent fuel pools, when they are not designed for this. The spentnuclear fuel that comes out of reactors is not cold and inert, but very hot andhighly radioactive. Without active cooling 24 hours a day, these spent fuelrods can melt down and/or blow up in spent fuel pools.

 

If the cooling pumpsfail, or not enough water covers the spent fuel rods, or if the water boils offdue to loss of power, a catastrophic melt down or nuclear explosion can happen.This  has happened at Fukushima spent fuel pool #3.

 

Each plant isincreasing the storage capacity at each spent fuel pool by packing all rods intighter together. While this may seem cost effective,  logical and easy, it is actually VERYDANGEROUS and increases RISK EXPONENTIALLY. Why?

 

When spent fuel rodsare stacked in a spent fuel pool, they normally do not need any specialcooling, because the water covering them is enough to transfer residual heataway until many years later when they can be transferred out of the spent fuelpool, to a safer and much more secure dry cask storage method. (Many nuclearplants never transfer spent fuel rods into dry cask storage, because it costsmore money.)

 

However, when fuelrods are crammed closer and closer together, the residual heat generated by allof these rods packed close together must be removed mechanically with a hugeheat exchanger and massive cooling pumps, rather than passively removing heatwithout any power required. This cramming technique also requires addingneutron moderating chemicals to the water to keep the fuel from overheating,even with the water cooling pumps and heat exchanger operating 24 hours aday. 

 

When spent fuel rodsare packed in tightly together, the neutrons from one rod ‘excite’ the neutronsin another rod, which causes a fission process to start happening. Fission iswhat happens in a nuclear bomb. So to keep spent fuel rods from fissioning andcreating a meltdown or explosion, they require 24 hour a day cooling ANDchemicals added to the water 24 hours  aday.

 

If either or both ofthese things stop for any reason, the spent fuel pool will melt down and/or beat a much higher risk of blowing up in a nuclear explosion. This can and doeshappen fairly rapidly. This is what happened at the Fukushima Daichi Complex,but it has effectively been covered up. 

 

What happened at Fukushima can happen anywhereelse in the world, and it will happen again, because of the same defects indesign and risk management. At Fukushima, the electricitywas out for eight hours and the reactors melted down in that time. The spentfuel pools boiled off their water and also melted down either partially orcompletely not long after that. Then these reactors and spent fuel pools wentinto uncontrolled fission reactions, spewing out deadly radiation that wentaround the world.

 

The whole industry hasbecome corrupt, dishonest and incompetent, endangering not only localcommunities and large cities, but also humanity and all life on the planet.

 

Reason #5

 

Basic design flawsat all nuclear power plants are built in and cannot easily be ‘fixed’. For example,Arnie Gunderson has stated that the Mark I reactor design is flawed anddangerous and should NEVER have been approved. There are 21 Mark I reactorsoperating in the US today and many moreoperating around the world. 

Listen to Arnie discuss the dangers of nuclear power plants and the NRC not learning any lessons from nuclear disasters such as Fukushima. 

 

Basic designs ofnuclear plants minimize the size of earthquakes and tsunamis that they aredesigned for. They may be built to resist a Level 5 earthquake, but not a Level9, which is what hit the Fukushima plant. There are even stories coming out of design engineers being forced to sign fraudulent statements that certify nuclear reactors for earthquakes, when they are actually nowhere close to being ready for an earthquake.  Large earthquakes are less common than smaller ones, but they DO happen.  Click on link to find out more about the potential fraud around earthquakes and nuclear plants. http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2012/03/12/the-fukushima-story-you-didn-t-hear-on-c

Reactors built on the ocean mayhave walls designed to counter a 5 foot Tsunami wave, but the regularoccurrence of 10-40 feet tsunamis in many areas is going to overwhelm thesewalls, just like they did at Fukushima Daichi.

As Arnie Gunderson explains,nuclear plants should be designed for a one in 2,000 year event such asearthquake or tsunami, but they are NOT. They are designed for a 20 year or 30year event. This is a basic risk that every nuclear plant has build into it,which CANNOT BE FIXED.

 

Reason #6

 

Now that nuclearplants have reached the end of their effectively and safety designed lifetimes,the NRC is approving them to run another 20 years or longer, with no changes ormodifications. In one case, A worker at one of these plants scraped some rustfrom a huge cooling pipe and the pipe sprung a huge leak, because the rust wasthe only thing keeping the pipe together.

 

The NRC is not eveninspecting them before approval. The only one they inspected as part of thisnew relicensing program was shut down. They stopped inspecting after that.  This is pure insanity. Why?

 

Licensing old wornout plants to keep going is like taking a car with 250,000 miles that has beenabused and misused, and then saying it is ok to do that (with your kids in it)for another 250,000 miles, running at 120 miles per hour. Would you trustsomeone who did not inspect, replace or repair anything in that car with your familyin it? 

According to Arnie Gunderson, these plants should never have been approved in the first place, much less be approved to run another 30 years. Then we also have the issue coming up of a state, counties and cities NOT wanting nuclear plants, but the federal government coming in and FORCING nuclear plants on these localities, despite their strenuous objections. http://fairewinds.com/content/arnie-and-maggie-talk-vermont-yankee-fukushima-and-nuclear-industry

 

Reason #7

 

 

Reason #8