Royal Oak Protest Against Plans to Build Fermi 3 Nuclear Power Plant

[Lowell]

A protest over the weekend was held in RO on the second Anniversary of the Tsunami that led to the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

An disaster of similar size at Fermi would have have devastated and made unlivable a large part of Metro Detroit-Windsor.

But then that would never happen here.

Source WWJ 950

[gnome]

Good job, Lowell, no one likes tsunamis. We should turn Lake Erie into a tsunami-free zone.

[Lowell]

Good job, Lowell, no one likes tsunamis. We should turn Lake Erie into a tsunami-free zone.

Lake Erie, particularly eastern Lake Erie, is an earthquake zone and tremors there are not unusual events. However, in the name of progress I agree that it should declared a tsunami-free AND terrorist-free zone.

[nain rouge]

Nothing like electric gadget addicts going around protesting nuclear power. They'll feel so good about themselves when they fire up the ol' 55 inch TV.

[JBMcB]

Living sixty years next to a nuclear power plant is as dangerous as driving ten miles on a freeway.

Drinking two cups of coffee a day is 20 times more dangerous than living next to a nuclear power plant.

You're 800 times more likely to die of radiation from radon poisoning, but I don't see people freaking out over radon.

Moving the US to a *completely* nuclear based power grid is as risky to the average person as increase the speed limit of a road from 55MPH to 55.0006MPH. It's as risky as a smoker indulging in one extra cigarette every 15 years.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter8.html

[Lowell]

Living sixty years next to a nuclear power plant is as dangerous as driving ten miles on a freeway.

Drinking two cups of coffee a day is 20 times more dangerous than living next to a nuclear power plant.

You're 800 times more likely to die of radiation from radon poisoning, but I don't see people freaking out over radon.

Moving the US to a *completely* nuclear based power grid is as risky to the average person as increase the speed limit of a road from 55MPH to 55.0006MPH. It's as risky as a smoker indulging in one extra cigarette every 15 years.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter8.html

I'm sure the thousands of poisoned and evacuated residents of Chernobyl and Fukushima find that reassurance comforting.

[Jimaz]

Attachment 18580
Japanese Govt's Promise to Decontaminate After Fukushima is "Impossible" Say Environmental Activists

Two years after the meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex following a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011, former residents who lived near the facility face at least a four-year wait before they can return home. Aileen Mioko Smith, Executive Director of Green Action describes the government's reaction to the disaster so far. She also discusses the growing anti-nuclear power movement.

• The entire interview with Aileen Mioko Smith

[JBMcB]

I'm sure the thousands of poisoned and evacuated residents of Chernobyl and Fukushima find that reassurance comforting.

Again, weigh the risks. Is nuclear power completely safe? Of course not - because if it was it would be the only completely safe thing on the planet.

You are literally thousands of times more likely to die in a car accident than from a nuclear disaster - even a relatively minor radiation leak. But you still drive a car.

How about this: miniature nuclear reactors that are meltdown-proof [[they only operate in a very narrow temperature band, too hot and the reaction kills itself):
http://gigaom.com/2012/03/05/hyperio...doe-test-site/

One of these things - about the size of a sedan, generates enough power to light up a small city. They are maintenance-free and self-contained, you never need to adjust anything it and they don't need water for cooling. When they run out of fuel after about 10 years - you replace the whole unit and recycle the old one. Total amount of nuclear waste is about the size of a softball. We have enough nuclear fuel lying around in warheads and old reactors do build thousands of them, we wouldn't even have to mine for more uranium.

Mass produced, these things would make electricity *DIRT* cheap, with zero emissions. Want ubiquitous plug-in electric cars for cheap? How about completely replacing natural gas with electricity for heating? Desalinization plants for easy access to fresh water on the coasts [[so they stop trying to mooch off the Great Lakes?) How about bringing the cost of recycling down to almost nothing [[currently it's almost break-even for metal, a loss for plastic and paper, due to energy costs)

But, no, because 40 year old nuclear power plants that were designed 50 years ago aren't safe, we shouldn't build new ones. Makes a lot of sense.

[Wesley Mouch]

I'm sure the thousands of poisoned and evacuated residents of Chernobyl and Fukushima find that reassurance comforting.

Or you can be like the Europeans and die from coal instead: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/nei...e-report/4924/

I'll take my chances with nuclear.

[guito13]

What are bunch of hippies doing protesting in ROYAL OAK when the plant is about 30 miles SOUTH of Detroit???

I live in the "Safety Zone" of Fermi and every year I get the booklet that talks about the plant, what to do in case of emergency, and a free "perscription" for the potassium iodine pills [[Still havent ever picked any of that stuff up).

A few years ago a TORNADO hit the damn cooling towers and all it did was shut down things for a couple of days LIKE IT WAS DESIGNED to do. Is nuclear the best option, of course not, but for now it is the best we have.

[KarmicCurse]

When there is an accident on a freeway or a coal mine you do not need to evacuate the entire state.

[birwood]

I live with a mile of Fermi NPP as the crow fly's, but all you nay sayers never seem to have a truthful logical answer. You don't want Nuke Power, you don't want Coal, you don't want natural gas cause of the drilling and needed pipe lines, most your so called Green Energy companies have gone belly up, the average joe can't afford a solar array on his roof or backyard, so what the answer?. With out electrical power how are you going to charge your batterys in your your IPad, iPod, Lap top, Cell Phone, your electric hybrid car, power the big screen TV's in your home, your microwave ovens? Oh...maybe Global Warming will help...crap, I'm sorry I forgot, Al Gore is against that too !

[DetroitPlanner]

What are bunch of hippies doing protesting in ROYAL OAK when the plant is about 30 miles SOUTH of Detroit???

My thoughts too. I would have been protesting at a place with either a lot more visibility or in front of the plant.

[Wesley Mouch]

When there is an accident on a freeway or a coal mine you do not need to evacuate the entire state.

I think you'll find that over the last 50 years, more people have died in coal mine disasters in this world than nuclear disasters. And that doesn't count the early deaths from lung diseases of miners and residents.

[Lowell]

I ask all the nuke supporters. If you were offered a million dollar home and given a lifetime income for your family to live in a house in Fukushima or Chernobyl, would you live there?

Comparing nuclear to any other energy generation facility is like comparing apples to oranges, no make that hand grenades to oranges.

You may cite all the evils of coal or other means of energy generation [with which I agree] that the nuclear industry likes to pass along but it doesn't change the fact when a nuclear plant melts down it creates permanent uninhabitable environments.

The nuclear industry likes to set up deflective and false choice arguments, "If you don't like what our disasters have created look at what coal does." There are other choices and technologies are providing them.

You know what else? Your home owner's policy is meaningless when their fail-safe plants fail. The nuclear industry gets liability exemptions, right along with earthquake and war damage, clearly stated in every homeowner policy. Why?

If they are so safe why aren't insurers falling over themselves to sell them insurance policies?

Finally to think that Royal Oak could not possibly be made unlivable by a melt down at Fermi 30 miles away is a refusal to accept reality.

[Hypestyles]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b54rB64fXY4 Gil Scott-Heron, "We Almost Lost Detroit"...

[Det_ard]

Radioactive radon gas kills 21,000 people every year in the US. When's that protest?

[Zug]

New nuclear power plants are safer than older ones. When operating, they are more environmentally friendly too. I have bought into the mini reactors that JBMcB discussed. However, the problem with big plants comes when it's time to decommission them...

I'm still on the fence about Fermi 3, and leaning towards support. If something does happen at Fermi, it will likely be reactor 1 or 2, and not the new one.

[old guy]

We're still dealing with the problem of what to do with the waste from these plants. Right now, there are 120 nuclear waste facilities in 39 states storing 60,000 tons of spent fuel. Everybody's up in arms about the debt that we're creating and possibly leaving for our kids and future generations, but what about all these other problems we're leaving behind, assuming that they'll come up with some new technology to deal with it.

I know that in France and Japan they've begun reprocessing spent fuel rods, but it's expensive and won't really make a dent in the amount of existing waste. You can complain that Obama put the Yucca Mountain storage facility on hold, but that was because when the EPA found flaws in the plan, the Bush administration wanted to proceed with it and figure out the problems later. They basically just want it to be out of sight, out of mind.

If you live near a power plant, that's generally where these waste facilities are located, above ground, often several stories up. Remember the problem they had with that in Japan? That's the normal way they store it.

Even if you can cut back to small, for every pound of uranium that's used in a reactor, 3,500-4,000 pounds of radioactive uranium tailings are generated. That's separate from the fuel rods. There you go kids, sorry we didn't have time to figure this all out when we were doing it.

[Jimaz]

... If you live near a power plant, that's generally where these waste facilities are located, above ground, often several stories up. Remember the problem they had with that in Japan? That's the normal way they store it....

They're still fixing new problems at Fukushima: Crucial Cooling Systems Restored at Fukushima Plant, Company Says

Vital cooling systems at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were restored by Wednesday morning, more than 24 hours after a partial power failure cut cooling water to four spent fuel pools, the company that operates the plant said. The latest problem raised new fears about the continuing vulnerability of the plant, which suffered a triple meltdown two years ago and still relies on makeshift equipment.

[beachboy]

The problem is locality ...

For example, over 30,000 people died in the US last year from vehicular crashes. If those deaths all happened in Detroit, that story would make international headlines and there'd be "an investigation", regardless of the cause. Instead, approximately 30k casualties were distributed around the country, so the impact was dispersed -- and so was the concern. But in either case, there would be no less tragedy.

The NIMBY syndrome [[Not In My BackYard) operates most effectively [[as the politics of "no!") when risk is concentrated geographically, temporally, and economically.

Hence the difficulties with licensing of new nuclear power plants.

[aj3647]

Lake Erie, particularly eastern Lake Erie, is an earthquake zone and tremors there are not unusual events. .

So what? What is the threat to the nuclear power plant? The damage to Fukushima was caused by the Tsunami, not the earthquake.

[JBMcB]

I ask all the nuke supporters. If you were offered a million dollar home and given a lifetime income for your family to live in a house in Fukushima or Chernobyl, would you live there?

No, but I wouldn't move to New Orleans, or Centralia, or anywhere near an oil refinery. I'd have no problem moving into the safe zone of a nuclear power plant for free.

Comparing nuclear to any other energy generation facility is like comparing apples to oranges, no make that hand grenades to oranges.

Yes you can. To judge the safety of any technology, you need to compare it's lethality, in total. How much land has coal mining destroyed? How much land will be eaten up by wind farms?

=If they are so safe why aren't insurers falling over themselves to sell them insurance policies?

What on earth are you talking about?

http://www.amnucins.com/

[Lowell]

So what? What is the threat to the nuclear power plant? The damage to Fukushima was caused by the Tsunami, not the earthquake.

So a massive quake in Lake Erie couldn't send a tsunami across the lake?

Nuclear plants are a frightening terrorist prospect. It's a little different than a coal plant or wind farm if they get attacked or worse seized.

The onsite stored mounds of radioactive waste means potential dirty bomb material is spread all across the country.

Can government, that so many say can't do anything right, insure the security of all that material, in all those places, all the time and for the thousands of years that it will remain deadly?

[old guy]

Yes you can. To judge the safety of any technology, you need to compare it's lethality, in total. How much land has coal mining destroyed? How much land will be eaten up by wind farms?

How much land will be eaten up by wind farms? You're kidding, right? I know farmers that were going under. They allowed wind generators to be erected in their fields. They make close to $15,000.00 per generator, per year. There's a good chance that their family farms, which are bio diversified rather than corporate production farms that might now have the ability to survive. That's a big plus to the planet as a whole.
Their crops grow right up to, and around the wind generators with no disruption to the ecology of the land.

There's a wind farm in Texas, same scenario, crops still being grown with very little disruption other than the small footprint of the wind generators. That wind farm produces enough power for 250,000 homes.

The greatest threat to our economy is the cost of health care. People are getting sick at an alarming rate. It's coming from somewhere and I'll guarantee it isn't from wind turbines or solar panels. Do you love, or feel comfortable with uranium? Benzine in the air is a comforting thought. I like healthy kids and hate the thought of being tied to the greediest generation to inhabit this planet.
The technology is being developed to clean things up and possibly allow for future generations to live normal lives and if it costs a few bucks and we have to make a few sacrifices and work hard to do it, than so be it.