The nuclear power plants pose a sincere danger to citizens in the USA dependent on them. It will take considerable amounts of money to begin to build cooling facilities to maintain the integrity of the reactor AND it's spend fuel pools. The summers aren't going to get any cooler.
When reactors fail and people are unable to cool their immediate environment they will succumb to heat.
C.M. Glover for The New York TimesA reactor ceased operations on Sunday at the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Waterford, Conn.
August 13, 2012, 4:58 pm
By MATTHEW L. WALD
When reactors fail and people are unable to cool their immediate environment they will succumb to heat.
C.M. Glover for The New York TimesA reactor ceased operations on Sunday at the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Waterford, Conn.August 13, 2012, 4:58 pm
By MATTHEW L. WALD
A reactor (click here) at the Millstone nuclear plant
in Waterford, Conn., has shut down because of something that its 1960s
designers never anticipated: the water in Long Island Sound was too warm
to cool it.
Under the reactor’s safety
rules, the cooling water can be no higher than 75 degrees. On Sunday
afternoon, the water’s temperature soared to 76.7 degrees, prompting the
operator, Dominion Power, to order the shutdown of the 880-megawatt
reactor.
“Temperatures this summer are the
warmest we’ve had since operations began here at Millstone,’’ said a
spokesman for Dominion, Ken Holt. The plant’s first reactor, now
retired, began operation in 1970.
The plant’s third reactor was
still running on Monday, but engineers were watching temperature trends
carefully out of concern that it, too, might have to shut down....
