News & Analysis
Snaking across the face of the Sun right now is a million miles long filament made up of massive clouds of plasma, NASA revealed October 3. It’s part of the “solar maximum” in its 11-year cycle.
The filament, barely a month old, probably will tear off the Sun from one end to the other like a giant flaming zipper in a spectacular coronal mass ejection, or CME. Billions of tons of plasma will blast off our closest star at millions of miles per hour. Pity anything that gets in its way.
Should the serpentine CME hit Earth head-on, the consequences would be catastrophic. Electrical grids across the globe would crash and with them life on this planet as we know it.
In late July, NASA confirmed that a full CME would knock America and the world back into the Dark Ages. One related U.S. government study put the mortality rate in the United States at 90 percent in the first year in such an event. The odds of such a CME in the next decade are an astounding 12 percent, which is about the same as the chances of a major earthquake long overdue to hammer Southern California.
Less than a month after the NASA statement, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rubber stamped new rules that will allow electrically run spent nuclear reactor fuel rods to be stored in spent fuel ponds indefinitely. The NRC dismissed any chance of fiasco, let alone a longtime crashing of the grid, multiple nuclear meltdowns and spent fuel pools (SFPs) catching fire.
Instead, the U.S. government codified policy that ensures that nuclear catastrophe awaits the country, and the world, if nuclear power plants and SFPs aren’t protected from the inevitable CME that will toast the nation’s and planet’s infrastructures.
Massive amounts of radiation would spew into the air and water fouling the land and triggering a never ending nuclear nightmare. People and advanced mammals not killed outright by societal breakdown and mass disorder would face fallout far fiercer than anything put out by the ongoing triple meltdowns at Fukushima Japan.
Yet as daunting as the challenge is, the cost of fixing electric grid infrastructural weaknesses and beefing up replacement transformers fried by the CME in the U.S. would be $2 billion, which per person is roughly the price of half a pack of cigarettes in New York City, $6.27.
Of course, the crucial additional cost of safely storing spent nuclear fuel will be more but not by much, $3.8 billion or $11.28 per American. That would involve moving spent rods from the SFPs to “dry casks” which can keep the toxic tubes air-cooled for up to twenty years with no electricity needed. Each dry cask can hold about a metric ton of fuel assemblies and costs about $1 million each.
All told, the cost per capita to fortify the electric grid in the United States, and to expedite movement of spent nuclear fuel rods to electricity-free dry casks domestically, would be $17.55, or less than the price of a small White Pizza at America’s oldest licensed pizzeria in lower Manhattan, Lombardi’s Pizza.
Don’t expect to see that estimated $5.8 billion budgeted anytime soon. A higher priority for the Obama Administration is to spend $355 billion over the next decade to overhaul nuclear weapons systems that can, in all practicality, never be used. It’s part of a trillion dollar initiative over 30 years.
While ensuring our very existence is priceless, even at these mouthwatering prices, EnviroReporter.com has uncovered a pattern of insipient stupidity that has made it virtually impossible for anything to remedy the dangers exposed herein. Serious discussion of these issues, based on sound science, isn’t taken seriously and gets lost in a blizzard of half-baked denunciations, and defenses of, nuclear power.
There is no room or willpower to address a very certain natural event that will destroy the country, and world, if nothing is done. The public is largely disinterested in things hard to understand and deemed unlikely to happen. Coronal mass ejections, grid collapse and radioactive nightmare don’t generally register. It’s easier to surf Facebook and forget about it.
Lights Up Over Broadway
Before the world revolved around electricity, even before the American Civil War, the main effects of a massive CME strike was the beauty it created along with compasses that no longer read right. The skies over New York City lit up with undulating waves of rainbow sherbet-shaded lights in the first week of September 1859. The phenomena painted the heavens so bright with luminous red, purple and green auroras that newspapers could be read at midnight.
What hit Manhattan 155 years ago caused Northern Lights to pulsate as far south as Hawaii, El Salvador and Cuba. This solar storm was the largest recorded CME ever.
Other major CME’s, though not as powerful as the 1859 Carrington Event, include the “Great Geomagnetic Storm” during May 14-15, 1921 and the March 1989 Quebec blackout that took down the Canadian province’s grid in less than two minutes.
We experienced more solar unrest last month on September 9 and 10 when two coronal mass ejections blasted out of the Sun and bore down on the Earth at over 1.5 million of miles per hour. The CME’s missed hitting the planet dead on – but just barely.
Instead of crashing electrical grids across the globe, the September CME relatively glanced off the northern part of the globe. The result was a display of the Northern Lights as far south as an arc in the United States as “low as Pennsylvania to Iowa to Oregon” according to the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA ranked this solar storm “G3-Strong.”
One Week from Extinction
Two years ago, we really got lucky. Americans found out from NASA this summer that in July 2012, Earth missed by a week being hit head on by the largest solar storm ever recorded, nearly 60 percent more powerful than the Carrington Event. It would have been lights out, literally and figuratively.
“If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” said Professor Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado in NASA’s article Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012. “If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire.”
An American solar observatory in orbit, STEREO-A, was able to capture the solar storm’s eruption and analyze its eruptive power without damage as it was constructed for such an event. The odds of another humongous CME blast hitting Earth straight on in the next decade are a whopping 12 percent according to a physicist cited in the NASA piece.
And if that doesn’t drive home the seriousness of the threat, your smart phone won’t work as well. Not much else either will for years, even decades, meaning diseases and famine will unfold fairly quickly as medicines sour without refrigeration and the computerized food distribution systems disappear on blank screens everywhere. Your electronically-controlled money won’t pop out of an ATM even if you could prove what you own if it evaporates in a mirage of data bits. Stores wouldn’t be able to process transactions so your plastic cards would be useless anyway. There would be no way to buy food or fuel or even know what’s going on via the Internet which would be down for as long as the grid was.
What NASA’s article on the 2012 near-miss didn’t take into account was that over 100 nuclear reactors in America would also melt down as a result of a CME bull’s-eye hit of Earth. After the scant emergency fuel generators and batteries at these sites give out, nuclear reactor cores overheating and melting wouldn’t be the only nuclear nightmare that would unfold.
Even with the low blow-out pizza prices that it would take, per capita, to remedy America’s vulnerable electric grid and expedite dry casking spent nuclear fuel rods, active nuclear reactor cores would remain vulnerable. Removing the active rods threat means scrapping nuclear power entirely, which would be hugely expensive and politically impossible with the current industry-influenced government.
The estimate of the extraordinarily high cost of canning nuclear plants once and for all is exorbitant. The price of decommissioning the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) will be $4.4 billion according to a September 23 plan submitted to the NRC by majority owner of the plant, Southern California Edison.
America’s nuclear power industry isn’t about to shut down anytime soon so this aspect of securing the population against CME-induced meltdowns is still unsolved. Rods pulled from a reactor need at least five years in a SFP before they are cool enough to transfer into a dry cask.
Nevertheless, the amount of radiation in SFPs dwarfs that in active rods still producing power in operating reactors. That safeguarding spent fuel rods through expedited dry casking would cost but $3.8 billion is hugely important because it’s relatively cheap and SFPs are far more dangerous and radioactive than nuclear reactor cores themselves.
There are fewer government rules mandating adequate backup power for SFPs which make them incredibly perilous especially when the Big One CME scorches Earth with billions of tons of Sun plasma. The crucial radiation water buffers and heat diffusers risk becoming burning pools.
Once the power was cut off and emergency generator fuel exhausted, spent fuel pools would cease circulating with cool fresh water and within a matter of days begin to boil off the liquid. Once the tops of the nuclear fuel rods were exposed to the air, radiation would become so intense that no one could approach the impending infernos. Once the rods’ zirconium cladding inevitably caught fire, nothing would be able to put out the radiation blaze.
Yet barely a month after NASA released its sobering report, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency in charge of insuring that America’s nuclear power plants are safe, signed off on a plan that will leave spent fuel pools essentially in place permanently, rather than speeding up plans to move cooled spent nuclear fuel rods into dry casks.
These spent fuel pools aren’t just susceptible to catastrophic failure due to solar activity; they are lightly protected sitting ducks as EnviroReporter.com exposed in Black Swan SONGS.
But not only did the NRC blindly ignore the cautionary NASA CME report, it has ignored man-made magnetic threats with destructive results identical to those threatened by CME’s, electromagnetic pulses or EMPs.
The NRC decision to leave lightly protected spent fuel pools as is for its stated periods of 60, 140 and 240 years up to and including indefinitely assures an avoidable catastrophe. It ignores intelligence that revealed that an EMP nuclear war strategy is foremost with the Chinese and Russian militaries. Yet the NRC hears and sees no evil.
Instead the NRC blew off the threat of something extraordinary even happening to the hundreds of spent fuel pools across the U.S. in the footnotes of its recent decision saying it was “so unlikely that it is a remote and speculative occurrence.”
A twelve percent chance in the next ten years of a Carrington Event-level CME is anything but “remote and speculative.” What is remote and speculative is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s take on reality.
“In the wake of the Japanese reactor problems, there has been much attention given to the question of how a solar storm-driven power grid failure might affect North American nuclear plants,” Prof. Baker told EnviroReporter.com August 28. “This is a very important issue.”
Scientists postulate that a Carrington Event-level CME smashes into Earth about every 150 years. By that measure, we are already due. Even with that relative certainty – and it is certain – looking for solutions has been illusory.
Of course even if the United States government took the threat of CME’s and EMP’s seriously enough to make it a national priority to armor plate the electric grid immediately, hundreds of nuclear plants globally, and their associated spent fuel pools, would remain vulnerable to catastrophic failure. The odds of getting the 31 countries worldwide that have nuclear reactors to fortify their national electric grids against CME catastrophe is probably near zero.
The EnviroReporter.com investigation Fukushima – The Perfect Crime? exposed how media and public reactions to the ongoing triple meltdowns in Japan have been treated with derision and disbelief, leading to a completely lackadaisical reaction to one of the greatest environmental catastrophes ever caused by humans.
It is likely that the multitude of warnings about the impending nuclear holocaust that could be triggered by a CME or EMP will be greeted with similar incredulous disdain. No matter. Previous studies bear the burden of proof and calm reasoned logic portends a very hot and nasty time in store for planet Earth in just a blink of geologic time. Humanity, and indeed all mammals, stand in the crosshairs of the gun mankind has built all about the globe and aimed at itself.
Lights Out in The City that Never Sleeps
When the inevitable coronal mass ejection fires up the New York City skyline plunging the Big Apple into darkness, it will be just a matter of time before the two reactors at the Indian Point Energy Center, 38 miles north of Manhattan, begin to melt down and their spent fuel pools boil off and catch fire.
New York City is the second most populated metropolitan area in the world after Tokyo, Japan. Over 23.5 million work and live with 50 miles of Indian Point.
In The Unforgettable Fire, EnviroReporter.com showed how the spent fuel pool at Fukushima Dai-ichi’s Unit 4 could collapse, destroying Tokyo in the process. Just one spent fuel pool crashing to the ground could, in this case, make Tokyo and the middle third of Japan uninhabitable for humans and other mammals.
Assessing Indian Point’s potential to make New York City and its surrounding area a potential hot zone has already been done in a September 2004 report by Edwin S. Lyman, PhD, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. In his study, Chernobyl on the Hudson? The Health and Economic Impacts of a Terrorist Attack at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, Lyman investigated the consequences if one of the two reactors were wrecked causing a full meltdown.
“We find that, depending on the weather conditions, an attack could result in as many as 44,000 near-term deaths from acute radiation syndrome or as many as 518,000 long-term deaths from cancer among individuals within fifty miles of the plant,” Lyman wrote. “These findings confirm that Indian Point poses a severe threat to the entire New York metropolitan area.”
Lyman’s report cites a Sandia National Laboratories’ 1982 study positing that a single core meltdown at Indian Point could cause 50,000 “near-term deaths from acute radiation syndrome.” Logically, if both cores melted down, that figure would double to 100,000 near-term deaths from anywhere from ground zero at the plant itself “as far as 60 miles away in the worst case evaluated.”
“The economic damages within 100 miles would exceed $1.1 trillion for the 95th percentile case, and could be as great as $2.1 trillion for the worst case evaluated, based on Environmental Protection Agency guidance for population relocation and cleanup,” the report concluded. “Millions of people would require permanent relocation.”
Of course this is based on one Indian Point reactor being successfully destroyed and melting down with none of the spent fuel pools on fire. The next Carrington Event-level CME or an EMP strike would take out both reactors and all three spent fuel pools. The cost in lives and capital exceeds any of the previous estimates many times over.
Unforgettable Fires
Indian Point’s spent fuel pools are reportedly built into bedrock and not above ground which probably makes them much better adapted to seismic events. The pools are 40-feet-deep and are submerged under 27 feet of constantly circulating water designed to absorb the residual heat of the rods and create an aqueous buffer to the spent fuel’s radiation.
Indian Point is powered by pressurized water reactors (PWRs). A PWR core can have 193 fuel assemblies made of 50,000 fuel rods packed with 18 million enriched uranium dioxide pellets. The plant on the Hudson River has 2,073 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies according to the March 31, 2011 DOE report Inventory and Description of Commercial Reactor Fuels within the United States.
The total inventory of Indian Point’s active and spent fuel calculated by EnviroReporter.com comes to approximately 12.7 nuclear reactor cores worth of extremely hot rods. The nuclear power plant less than 40 miles from Manhattan has four diesel generators for each reactor as backup power. The NRC, operating from the belief that sustained electric grid collapse isn’t even in the stars, let alone the Sun, requires that only one week’s worth of fuel for the generators be kept on hand at reactors like Indian Point.
So all bets are off when the next massive coronal mass ejection envelops Earth with its electrical grid-demolishing geomagnetic destructiveness. Even if the four diesel generators for each Indian Point reactor and spent fuel pool worked after the CME passed, the massive blackout would cause total disruption making the refueling of these generators indefinitely next to impossible.
Once the generators gave out, the cores of the two operating Indian Point reactors would be at risk of total meltdown. The three spent fuel pools, which aren’t in a fortified building like the reactors to prevent radiation leaks, would take longer to go critical. The rods would eventually begin to be exposed as the overheating water evaporated.
EnviroReporter.com explored a spent fuel pool catching fire with the October 2013 article SONGS’ Lethal Legacy. A 2007 Nuclear Regulatory Commission report postulated what would happen if just one of the two spent fuel pools at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) cracked after an earthquake and drained. Six hours after the water drained, the exposed rods would catch fire and begin releasing 40 million curies of cesium-137 into the air in the unfortified building.
That is about 150 percent of all the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests from the 1940s to the 1960s all up in flames that water can’t quench as it would explode upon contact with the SONGS spent rods’ melting cladding. The Friends of the Earth advocacy group said in that “[t]he resulting doses to people living within a 10-mile radius would be in the lethal range.”
Now imagine hundreds of times this amount of radiation going up at the same time not only in the United States but around the world on both sides of the equator. That’s The 12 Percent Question. When Earth gets shellacked by a solar storm the size of the 2012 whopper that NASA said missed the planet by a week, hundreds of spent fuel pools like those at Indian Point and SONGS are set to blaze along with their associated reactors which would melt down.
Nearly five million Americans, or about two percent of the population, live within 10 miles of an operating nuclear power plant. Over 111 million people reside within 50 miles of a nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools, fully 36 percent of the population.
The 2011 DOE study said that there was over 77, 161 tons of “used nuclear fuel” in the country three years ago. This amount continues to grow by tons each year with nowhere to put the expanding inventory of now-useless rods so hot they will be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
“Over the last few decades of commercial reactor operation has resulted in spent fuel pools that have been reaching capacity,” the report read. “Reracking of the spent fuel pool grids and fuel rod consolidation operations undertaken by the utilities has significantly increased fuel pool capacity at existing reactor fuel pools. However, these activities have only postponed the inevitable situation of having full fuel pools.”
The DOE report included a map showing the locations of “reactor storage pools, independent spent fuel storage installations, federal and other sites.” Most of the nation’s sinister stockpile of useless but highly poisonous spent fuel is stashed east of the Mississippi River. This huge area, coincidentally but fatally nonetheless, is where the greatest complete power grid failure is predicted when the Big Sun One clobbers the planet.
The Congressional Research Service published for members and committees of the U.S. Congress the May 24, 2012 report U.S Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage that broke it down even further. “As of December 2011, more than 67,000 metric tons of SNF [spent nuclear fuel], in more than 174,000 assemblies, is stored at 77 sites (including 4 Department of Energy (DOE) facilities) in the United States located in 35 states,” the CRS report said, “and increases at a rate of roughly 2,000 metric tons per year. Approximately 80% of commercial SNF is stored east of the Mississippi River.”
“A variety of forces or ‘threats’ acting on spent fuel could result in containment being breached, resulting in potential exposures and risks,” the CRS reported, including “loss of power for water supply, circulation, or cooling, which can have significant consequences for SNF in wet pool storage.”
Counterintuitively, spent nuclear fuel is far more radioactive once it is used up. The NRC began several years ago allowing “high burn-up” fuel where the reactor rods are essentially charred atomically to squeeze every usable bit of energy out of them. The resultant high burn-up spent fuel is far hotter and much more radioactive necessitating a longer period of time in vulnerable spent fuel pools.
About three quarters of America’s spent nuclear fuel rods are stored in the electrically-circulated SFP water but, as CRS points out, “wet storage pools become filled to capacity using “dense packing” storage methods, dry storage is increasingly being used, although there are 27 sites with 36 wet storage pools with no current dry cask storage capabilities.”
The NRC published the final “Generic Environmental Impact Statement for Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel” September 10 codifying the what the rule calls “continued storage of spent nuclear fuel beyond the licensed life for operations of a commercial nuclear reactor.” No matter the revelations in an exposé like this, American spent fuel pools will be still operating electrically when the unescapable coronal mass ejection wipes out the world’s electrical grid with plasma shot out of the sun at millions of miles per hour. The American government has had its final say no matter the outrage, which NRC has turned a deaf ear to, whether it comes from environmentalists or U.S. Senators like Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California).
Even without considering the threat to America’s nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools from CMEs and EMPs, the August NRC decision to allow spent fuel pools to function as indefinite repositories radioactive rods has enraged nuclear watchdogs. They have long asserted the dangers of nuclear power, especially spent nuclear fuel rods which have no permanent repository anywhere on Earth yet need to be safeguarded and monitored for hundreds of thousands of years.
Hirsch, President of Committee to Bridge the Gap, is a veteran nuclear watchdog who was instrumental in shutting down the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Together, with Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles and the Southern California Federation of Scientists, Hirsch made a persuasive argument in 50 Years of Power – 500,000 Years of Radioactive Waste that not only does nuclear power not make sense economically, except for the very few who profit from it, it is immoral to pass its impacts upon the unborn.
“Our society reaps the benefits of these atomic power plants: roughly fifty years of electricity,” Hirsch continued. “But thousands of generations to come may pay the price if even a small fraction of the radioactive waste contaminates water, soil, or air over the time period for which it is dangerous. We get fifty years of power; they get 500,000 years of radioactive waste.”
That anything could go wrong on a grand scale, such as the inevitable grid-wrecking CME, plays no apparent part in government planning for nuclear power plant disaster. It’s as if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no clue at all as to what NASA has so clearly spelled out: a massive coronal mass ejection is coming and it’s going to destroy modern civilization for the unlucky ten percent of Americans that the government predicts will survive.
In its Waste Confidence Rule report, the “NRC arbitrarily dismisses—in a footnote—the prospect that institutional controls may not be durable and effective over these extraordinary time periods, asserting that loss of institutional controls is “so unlikely that it is a remote and speculative occurrence,”” Hirsch said in the environmental coalition’s comments.
The lunacy of assuming spent fuel pools will be properly maintained for hundreds and thousands of years with nary a hiccup like earthquakes, terrorist attacks or a major CME strike isn’t just stupidity, it is a threat to the national security. Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has assured that the surviving ten percent of the American population will have hundreds of meltdowns and burning spent nuclear fuel rod pools to contend with.
“The latest iteration of the Waste Confidence Rule relies on a remarkable regulatory fiction: that just leaving large amounts of extraordinarily hazardous and long-lived material sitting on storage pads at numerous locations around the country will not result in unacceptable environmental impacts because institutions will continuously guard, regularly maintain, and periodically repackage the waste for hundreds of years, or even hundreds of thousands of years,” Hirsch concluded. “This seems, to use a favorite phrase of the NRC, “non-credible.””
Dry Caskets
Nuclear plants around the world churn out more than just tons of high-level radioactive waste yearly that wants for a permanent repository that will be safe for the required hundreds of thousands of years. Atomic power pioneers could not have foreseen that they built high value terrorist targets that if attacked and destroyed would kill scores and ruin the land with radioactivity.
One elemental way to remove the threat is to remove the target. Advocates of using dry casks to store spent nuclear reactor rods have long argued that system is safer than overstuffing spent fuel pools. The NRC’s decision to allow the pools to remain in place indefinitely has crippled any chance of moving the hot rods into dry casks that don’t need electricity to cool as they maintain a stable temperature without power or much human oversight.
But even this solution seems less than ideal. No two dry cask designs are the same as the activists who helped put the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station out of business have recently learned. They are questioning SONGS majority owner Southern California Edison’s decision to spend $400 million on a dry casking system they consider inferior.
SCE has set an ambitious goal of moving its spent fuel rods to dry casks by June 2019. That would sound sensible in light of the array of security concerns EnviroReporter.com exposed in Hit Men for Hot Zones last October. The decision on which dry cask to use is imminent according to SONGS Chief Nuclear Officer, Tom Palmisano, who was before the California Public Utility Commission August 12.
Getting the choice right is crucial to San Clemente residents Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org and Gene Stone of Residents Organized for a Safe Environment. They are concerned that SCE will choose either a French or American design for the dry cask’s stainless steel canister walls that are thin.
The SONGS activists recommend that the fuel rods be inserted in 20 inch thick cast iron German casks and housed in reinforced concrete buildings. Stone and Gilmore advocate no more than 24 fuel assemblies per cask in order to keep their decaying heat down and maintaining an empty spent fuel pool in place to have a functioning workspace to replace casks or canisters.
To their credit, Gilmore and Stone take the issue of nuclear safety seriously at one of the most at-risk sites in the country from earthquakes and terrorist attacks as EnviroReporter.com revealed in Black Swan SONGS in mid-October 2013. Yet it took just a week after the exposé concluded for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to say it planned to terminate its bi-yearly evaluation of SONGS’ emergency procedures after SCE did a final risk assessment of its spent fuel pools. So much for the community input that SCE claims it values so much.
It’s common practice not to evaluate emergency contingencies at nuclear power plants by FEMA once they’ve gone offline said Richard Grundstrom, FEMA’s Technological Hazards branch chief to San Diego’s KPBS Radio News October 24. “The likelihood of it involving a risk beyond the site boundary is pretty small,” Grundstrom said, “and so we don’t do any evaluations of exercises or plans or procedures at those locations anymore.”
FEMA’s failure to understand the threat of any kind of a natural or terrorist disaster at offline nuke plants, like San Onofre, makes a mockery out of government emergency planning, such as it is. Instead, FEMA fell in line with the NRC not even considering the consequences of what NASA has pointed out is going to happen. This is government at its most fatally inept.
However, knowledge of this extinction event-level threat is clearly no path to panacea. Action must be taken with all the muscle a united nation, and world, can muster. The chances of that happening are practically non-existent. No evaluations or exercises are in store for preparing America, let alone the planet, for the certain coronal mass ejection that will slam into Earth.
None of these countries have completely hardened their electrical grids against the effects of a major coronal mass ejection pulverizing the planet in solar plasma. Nor have the same system-wide fixes, including having backup transformers in place at key locations throughout the grid, been initiated.
Even progressive countries like Germany, who are weaning themselves off of nuclear power, aren’t protected from the fallout from neighboring fission-friendly France. The Germans may have just nine reactors but the country borders upwind France putting it in the cross-hairs of any French nuclear disasters, CME-caused or not. Italy, which voted to shut down all its reactors decades ago, also borders France and would receive the brunt of French fallout from the Gallic country’s melting reactors and blazing SFPs.
War with the so-called Islamic State means that nations with nuclear plants have to think outside the reactor about what a successful EMP would do to their sites and countries. Much concern has also been raised about foreign fighters trained by ISIS returning to their home countries intent on bringing terror back with them. Nuclear reactors and SFPs are tempting high value targets which, if destroyed, would spread terror far beyond the borders of resultant radioactive contamination.
Doubling down on a visible deterrent with beefed up security at these oft-times vulnerable nuclear power sites should be a national priority at least in the United States. Hardening the target, short of removing it altogether, should be a NRC-mandated order based on this new acknowledged war. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of plutonium.
Of course an EMP attack on the United States like the one Woolsey describes would pale in scope compared to the Big One CME but that makes his recommendations no less imperative. America’s role in leading the world would be no better served than facing the menace of a nuke generated electromagnetic pulse or the sun’s plasma by bulletproofing the electrical infrastructure.
“Surge arrestors, faraday cages and other devices that prevent EMP from damaging electronics, as well micro-grids that are inherently less susceptible to EMP, have been used by the Defense Department for more than 50 years to protect crucial military installations and strategic forces,” Woolsey opined. “These can be adapted to protect civilian infrastructure as well. The cost of protecting the national electric grid, according to a 2008 EMP Commission estimate, would be about $2 billion—roughly what the U.S. gives each year in foreign aid to Pakistan.”
While Woolsey’s clarion call to action seems a no-brainer, don’t expect any concrete steps anytime soon. A bipartisan House bill introduced in June 2013 called the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage, or Shield Act, is hung up in the Energy and Commerce Committee. Another bipartisan House bill, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, has sat without being voted on since October 2013.
With the sun beating down on our necks, and ISIS looking to cut them, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that these bills could save millions of American lives and trillions of dollars. The problem is even our rocket scientists are faring poorly in a country that ranks behind 22 other nations in science and after 29 in math. Many Americans just can’t grasp the threat because it is beyond much mainstream media and an underfunded public science infrastructure to explain it to them clearly.
So where does that leave us? Staring at the Sun with fingers crossed hoping we’re not in the coronal mass ejection crosshairs of solar plasma bearing down on Earth at six million miles per hour. Hoping against the inevitable is a uniquely human trait. In this case, though, the whole planet will pay the price. It will be Earthnocide.
Coronal Mass Extinction
The million mile long filament of plasma twisting and churning across the Sun that NASA reported October 6 will probably not come anywhere near our world. The CME was gauged to be too far east on the face of the Sun to be Earth-directed October 7.
The filament CME was moving at a relatively slow 447,387 miles per hour according to an October 8 bulletin issued by the Space Weather Prediction Center. “It appears narrow and directed well south,” the notice read, “but analysis will continue as more imagery becomes available.”
There will be nothing to prevent us from knowing when the Big Sun CME will, without doubt, wallop Earth. Excellent satellite and telescope monitoring of the Sun worldwide will give the planet about two to three days warning. The same may not be said of an EMP strike by the likes of ISIS or North Korea.
Even with warning, even with preemptively shutting down the electric grid nationally and across the globe, the Sun will come. Transformers will blow as sheets of lime green and fuchsia illuminate solar charged particles collide with gaseous particles in Earth’s atmosphere. The lights will ripple like curtains, arc and shoot up rays that will bath the planet in light from the poles to the Equator.
The dancing aurora lights will be helpful at night for illumination if the electric grid stays down. But beyond the dawning realization that nothing works, including all the systems for people getting food, fuel and information, for readers of this exposé that remember, there is the added element of time.
Should the power stay out for over a month, many nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools will begin to run out of emergency backup fuel for generators and batteries. That’s when the melting down will begin if the reactors aren’t powered up even if they manage to remove the rods from the core. Not too long after, the SFPs will evaporate and catch fire.
Since most people wouldn’t know why they were starting to feel nauseous and vomiting, they might think it was Ebola and contagious adding a further terrifying scenario as society breaks down. Radiation sickness does have some of the same symptoms as the dreaded Ebola virus including spontaneous bleeding, bloody diarrhea and severe fatigue.
Radiation poisoning portends a particularly gruesome death with sloughing of the skin, mouth ulcers and infections precursors to an agonizing death. Life expectancy would depend on dose but considering the amount of radiation that would be released, it could likely impact and eliminate the entire population, including all warm-blooded animals.
Ironically, our nuclear missiles will remain immune to the horrors of the grand goo apocalypse that awaits. A trillion dollars will be spent to make sure it stays that way. Your share, and the share of every American, will be over $3,134 according to analysis of the latest population figures by EnviroReporter.com.
The missile crews, however, will suffer the same fate you, your family, friends, communities and nations will. The radiation will eventually kill them too. Needlessly, because while we can’t prevent a CME, we could prevent the full scale devastation that one would cause. We just don’t have the sense to do it.
Nearly five years ago, EnviroReporter.com exposed the vulnerability of nuclear power plants’ unfortified spent fuel pool buildings as Black Swan Songs shows. The government has done nothing about it and, at SONGS, the spent fuel moved out of the still-exposed pool buildings is being dangerously placed closed to the surf line along the Pacific coast instead of across the San Diego Freeway to a much more safe and defensible site as illustrated in Stopping SONGS’ Black Swan.
Now, Greenpeace France has proved our point by successfully – and easily – flying a Superman drone into a Bugey nuclear power plant spent fuel pool building in Bugey, France. “This action again highlights the extreme vulnerability of this type of buildings, which contain the highest amount of radioactivity in nuclear plants,” Greenpeace said. “Spent-fuel pools must be turned into bunkers in order to make nuclear plants safer.”
Time has run out. The SONGS spent fuel pool buildings could immediately be started to be made much more secure from drone attack with metal mesh structure facades such as GKD World Wide Weave makes (if the U.S. Marines finds it beyond their ability to do this themselves on their own land which SONGS is situated). But don’t hold your breath, unless you live downwind of a nuclear plant that has been successfully attacked, as nothing of the sort will be done despite its relatively reasonable cost. The last five years have proven that EnviroReporter.com‘s warnings have not been heeded and probably won’t be until it’s too late.
EnviroReporter.com‘s prescient exposés over the years showing how vulnerable our aged and dangerous nuclear power plants are should have been a wake-up call to toughen up standards and security. Now it may be too late with Russia having penetrated America’s critical and nuclear infrastructure according to today’s Ides of March U.S. U.S. Department of Homeland Security Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) ALERT.
Original release date: March 15, 2018
Systems Affected
Domain Controllers
File Servers
Email Servers
Overview
This joint Technical Alert (TA) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This alert provides information on Russian government actions targeting U.S. Government entities as well as organizations in the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors. It also contains indicators of compromise (IOCs) and technical details on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by Russian government cyber actors on compromised victim networks. DHS and FBI produced this alert to educate network defenders to enhance their ability to identify and reduce exposure to malicious activity.
DHS and FBI characterize this activity as a multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors who targeted small commercial facilities’ networks where they staged malware, conducted spear phishing, and gained remote access into energy sector networks. After obtaining access, the Russian government cyber actors conducted network reconnaissance, moved laterally, and collected information pertaining to Industrial Control Systems (ICS)…[MORE]
EnviroReporter.com‘s work exposing these nuclear power plant vulnerabilities is more pertinent than ever. It is never too late to at least try to defend these ‘in-place nuclear weapons’ from Russia and other bad actors.
When the DOD moves, it is because there a serious concern about readiness in this area. That’s both good and bad news. The good news, they are working on an appropriate response. The bad news, the DOD can’t do much about a massive solar flare or prepare us for the consequences. A similar threat is looming with the EMP worries from North Korea. What can individuals do? Prepare for a life with few electrical or electronic conveniences. Create a list of devices and portable power sources that you cannot do without and take steps to protect them in Faraday cages. Batteries, solar cell chargers, small multi-band radios, flash drive backups, an extra small tablet or laptop. A small water pump might also come in handy.
The U.S. Department of Defense is conducting a “very bad day” scenario training exercise Nov. 4-6, 2017 simulating DoD response a major coronal mass ejection. Ham radios will be a big part of that response. While the statement below doesn’t say just how this exercise will work, that this U.S. Army operation is openly online goes a long way to dispel some deep state conspiracy which is making the rounds. Government action on this threat is a good thing.
Full Text of online announcement:
ZCZC AG19
QST de W1AW
ARRL Bulletin 19 ARLB019
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington CT October 24, 2017
To all radio amateurs
SB QST ARL ARLB019
ARLB019 Communications Interoperability Training with Amateur Radio Community Set
Elements of the US Department of Defense (DOD) will conduct a “communications interoperability” training exercise November 4-6, once again simulating a “very bad day” scenario. Amateur Radio and MARS organizations will take part.
“This exercise will begin with a notional massive coronal mass ejection event which will impact the national power grid as well as all forms of traditional communication, including landline telephone, cellphone, satellite, and Internet connectivity,” Army MARS Program Manager Paul English, WD8DBY, explained in an announcement.
During the exercise, a designated DOD Headquarters entity will request county-by-county status reports for the 3,143 US counties and county equivalents, in order to gain situational awareness and to determine the extent of impact of the scenario. Army and Air Force MARS organizations will work in conjunction with the Amateur Radio community, primarily on the 60-meter interoperability channels as well as on HF NVIS frequencies and local VHF and UHF, non-Internet linked Amateur Radio repeaters.
Again this year, a military station on the east coast and the Fort Huachuca, Arizona, HF station will conduct a high-power broadcast on 60-meter channel 1 (5330.5 kHz) on Sunday from 0300 to 0315 UTC (Saturday evening).
New this year will be an informational broadcast on Sunday, on 13483.5 kHz USB from 1600 to 1615 UTC (Sunday morning). Amateur Radio operators should monitor these broadcasts for more information about the exercise and how they can participate in this communications exercise, English said.
“We want to continue building on the outstanding cooperative working relationship with the ARRL and the Amateur Radio community,” English said. “We want to expand the use of the 60-meter interop channels between the military and amateur community for emergency communications, and we hope the Amateur Radio community will give us some good feedback on the use of both the 5-MHz interop and the new 13-MHz broadcast channels as a means of information dissemination during a very bad day scenario.”
Contact Paul English for more information or questions about this exercise via email at: mars.exercises@gmail.com.
NNNN
Space weather can knock out the power grid. The Sun can produce flares and Coronal Mass Ejections powerful enough to do this. Some effort has been taken to mitigate this, but we are still vulnerable to extreme events. The vulnerability cannot be entirely eliminated, so preparing in advance for extended power outages is a good practice for everyone to consider. Let’s hope our nuclear power infrastructure is ready to absorb extended outages, because if nuclear power plants do not have supplemental electricity to operate safety systems, they are at risk of melting down. Michael Collins has addressed this concern in his excellent “Lights Out” article. An enlightening story Michael, especially valuable after this recent X9 class solar flare reminds us of the power of the Sun.
14th largest solar flare ever recorded released from the Sun. Reports suggest it has the potential to damage parts of the electrical grid. So we have this major solar flare occurring at the same time as an unprecedented hurricane.
Great Solar Flare | September 6, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQXu4JmbvzU
Current Solar Data (from NOAA). At preset there is an X-class flare event, an electron, and proton storm, plus a major disturbance showing on the Magnetometer.
http://www.n3kl.org/sun/noaa.html
International list of real time Radiation monitoring stations can be helpful in tracking radiation events worldwide.
http://sccc.org.au/international-radiation-monitoring-stations
@All: Exactly two years and one day after our solar-breaking exposé – which is entirely accurate and fact-checked irrespective of any rambling natter to the contrary – the White House has acted. The October 13, 2016 Executive Order — Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events reads as follows:
EXECUTIVE ORDER
– – – – – – –
COORDINATING EFFORTS TO PREPARE
THE NATION FOR SPACE WEATHER EVENTS
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to prepare the Nation for space weather events, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy. Space weather events, in the form of solar flares, solar energetic particles, and geomagnetic disturbances, occur regularly, some with measurable effects on critical infrastructure systems and technologies, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite operations and communication, aviation, and the electrical power grid. Extreme space weather events — those that could significantly degrade critical infrastructure — could disable large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, healthcare, and transportation. Space weather has the potential to simultaneously affect and disrupt health and safety across entire continents. Successfully preparing for space weather events is an all-of-nation endeavor that requires partnerships across governments, emergency managers, academia, the media, the insurance industry, non-profits, and the private sector.
It is the policy of the United States to prepare for space weather events to minimize the extent of economic loss and human hardship. The Federal Government must have (1) the capability to predict and detect a space weather event, (2) the plans and programs necessary to alert the public and private sectors to enable mitigating actions for an impending space weather event, (3) the protection and mitigation plans, protocols, and standards required to reduce risks to critical infrastructure prior to and during a credible threat, and (4) the ability to respond to and recover from the effects of space weather. Executive departments and agencies (agencies) must coordinate their efforts to prepare for the effects of space weather events.
Sec. 2. Objectives. This order defines agency roles and responsibilities and directs agencies to take specific actions to prepare the Nation for the hazardous effects of space weather. These activities are to be implemented in conjunction with those identified in the 2015 National Space Weather Action Plan (Action Plan) and any subsequent updates. Implementing this order and the Action Plan will require the Federal Government to work across agencies and to develop, as appropriate, enhanced and innovative partnerships with State, tribal, and local governments; academia; non-profits; the private sector; and international partners. These efforts will enhance national preparedness and speed the creation of a space-weather-ready Nation.
Sec. 3. Coordination. (a) The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in consultation with the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), shall coordinate the development and implementation of Federal Government activities to prepare the Nation for space weather events, including the activities established in section 5 of this order and the recommendations of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), established by Executive Order 12881 of November 23, 1993 (Establishment of the National Science and Technology Council).
(b) To ensure accountability for and coordination of research, development, and implementation of activities identified in this order and in the Action Plan, the NSTC shall establish a Space Weather Operations, Research, and Mitigation Subcommittee (Subcommittee). The Subcommittee member agencies shall conduct activities to advance the implementation of this order, to achieve the goals identified in the 2015 National Space Weather Strategy and any subsequent updates, and to coordinate and monitor the implementation of the activities specified in the Action Plan and provide subsequent updates.
Sec. 4. Roles and Responsibilities. To the extent permitted by law, the agencies below shall adopt the following roles and responsibilities, which are key to ensuring enhanced space weather forecasting, situational awareness, space weather preparedness, and continuous Federal Government operations during and after space weather events.
(a) The Secretary of Defense shall ensure the timely provision of operational space weather observations, analyses, forecasts, and other products to support the mission of the Department of Defense and coalition partners, including the provision of alerts and warnings for space weather phenomena that may affect weapons systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States.
(b) The Secretary of the Interior shall support the research, development, deployment, and operation of capabilities that enhance the understanding of variations of the Earth’s magnetic field associated with solar-terrestrial interactions.
(c) The Secretary of Commerce shall:
(i) provide timely and accurate operational space weather forecasts, watches, warnings, alerts, and real-time space weather monitoring for the government, civilian, and commercial sectors, exclusive of the responsibilities of the Secretary of Defense; and
(ii) ensure the continuous improvement of operational space weather services, utilizing partnerships, as appropriate, with the research community, including academia and the private sector, and relevant agencies to develop, validate, test, and transition space weather observation platforms and models from research to operations and from operations to research.
(d) The Secretary of Energy shall facilitate the protection and restoration of the reliability of the electrical power grid during a presidentially declared grid security emergency associated with a geomagnetic disturbance pursuant to 16 U.S.C. 824o-1.
(e) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall:
(i) ensure the timely redistribution of space weather alerts and warnings that support national preparedness, continuity of government, and continuity of operations; and
(ii) coordinate response and recovery from the effects of space weather events on critical infrastructure and the broader community.
(f) The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shall:
(i) implement and support a national research program to understand the Sun and its interactions with Earth and the solar system to advance space weather modeling and prediction capabilities applicable to space weather forecasting;
(ii) develop and operate space-weather-related research missions, instrument capabilities, and models; and
(iii) support the transition of space weather models and technology from research to operations and from operations to research.
(g) The Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) shall support fundamental research linked to societal needs for space weather information through investments and partnerships, as appropriate.
(h) The Secretary of State, in consultation with the heads of relevant agencies, shall carry out diplomatic and public diplomacy efforts to strengthen global capacity to respond to space weather events.
(i) The Secretaries of Defense, the Interior, Commerce, Transportation, Energy, and Homeland Security, along with the Administrator of NASA and the Director of NSF, shall work together, consistent with their ongoing activities, to develop models, observation systems, technologies, and approaches that inform and enhance national preparedness for the effects of space weather events, including how space weather events may affect critical infrastructure and change the threat landscape with respect to other hazards.
(j) The heads of all agencies that support National Essential Functions, defined by Presidential Policy Directive 40 (PPD-40) of July 15, 2016 (National Continuity Policy), shall ensure that space weather events are adequately addressed in their all-hazards preparedness planning, including mitigation, response, and recovery, as directed by PPD-8 of March 30, 2011 (National Preparedness).
(k) NSTC member agencies shall coordinate through the NSTC to establish roles and responsibilities beyond those identified in section 4 of this order to enhance space weather preparedness, consistent with each agency’s legal authority.
Sec. 5. Implementation. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall develop a plan to test and evaluate available devices that mitigate the effects of geomagnetic disturbances on the electrical power grid through the development of a pilot program that deploys such devices, in situ, in the electrical power grid. After the development of the plan, the Secretary shall implement the plan in collaboration with industry. In taking action pursuant to this subsection, the Secretaries of Energy and Homeland Security shall consult with the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
(b) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the heads of the sector-specific agencies that oversee the lifeline critical infrastructure functions as defined by the National Infrastructure Protection Plan of 2013 — including communications, energy, transportation, and water and wastewater systems — as well as the Nuclear Reactors, Materials, and Waste Sector, shall assess their executive and statutory authority, and limits of that authority, to direct, suspend, or control critical infrastructure operations, functions, and services before, during, and after a space weather event. The heads of each sector-specific agency shall provide a summary of these assessments to the Subcommittee.
(c) Within 90 days of receipt of the assessments ordered in section 5(b) of this order, the Subcommittee shall provide a report on the findings of these assessments with recommendations to the Director of OSTP, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and the Director of OMB. The assessments may be used to inform the development and implementation of policy establishing authorities and responsibilities for agencies in response to a space weather event.
(d) Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretaries of Defense and Commerce, the Administrator of NASA, and the Director of NSF, in collaboration with other agencies as appropriate, shall identify mechanisms for advancing space weather observations, models, and predictions, and for sustaining and transitioning appropriate capabilities from research to operations and operations to research, collaborating with industry and academia to the extent possible.
(e) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretaries of Defense and Commerce shall make historical data from the GPS constellation and other U.S. Government satellites publicly available, in accordance with Executive Order 13642 of May 9, 2013 (Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information), to enhance model validation and improvements in space weather forecasting and situational awareness.
(f) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Homeland Security, through the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and in coordination with relevant agencies, shall lead the development of a coordinated Federal operating concept and associated checklist to coordinate Federal assets and activities to respond to notification of, and protect against, impending space weather events. Within 180 days of the publication of the operating concept and checklist, agencies shall develop operational plans documenting their procedures and responsibilities to prepare for, protect against, and mitigate the effects of impending space weather events, in support of the Federal operating concept and compatible with the National Preparedness System described in PPD-8.
Sec. 6. Stakeholder Engagement. The agencies identified in this order shall seek public-private and international collaborations to enhance observation networks, conduct research, develop prediction models and mitigation approaches, enhance community resilience and preparedness, and supply the services necessary to protect life and property and promote economic prosperity, as consistent with law.
Sec. 7. Definitions. As used in this order:
(a) “Prepare” and “preparedness” have the same meaning they have in PPD-8. They refer to the actions taken to plan, organize, equip, train, and exercise to build and sustain the capabilities necessary to prevent, protect against, mitigate the effects of, respond to, and recover from those threats that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation. This includes the prediction and notification of space weather events.
(b) “Space weather” means variations in the space environment between the Sun and Earth (and throughout the solar system) that can affect technologies in space and on Earth. The primary types of space weather events are solar flares, solar energetic particles, and geomagnetic disturbances.
(c) “Solar flare” means a brief eruption of intense energy on or near the Sun’s surface that is typically associated with sunspots.
(d) “Solar energetic particles” means ions and electrons ejected from the Sun that are typically associated with solar eruptions.
(e) “Geomagnetic disturbance” means a temporary disturbance of Earth’s magnetic field resulting from solar activity.
(f) “Critical infrastructure” has the meaning provided in section 1016(e) of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 (42 U.S.C. 5195c(e)), namely systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.
(g) “Sector-Specific Agency” means the agencies designated under PPD-21 of February 12, 2013 (Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience), or any successor directive, to be responsible for providing institutional knowledge and specialized expertise as well as leading, facilitating, or supporting the security and resilience programs and associated activities of its designated critical infrastructure sector in the all-hazards environment. Sec. 8. General Provisions.
(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) the functions of the Director of OMB relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE,
October 13, 2016.
First, there is no reason to believe a nuclear power reactor can be protected — for any price — from meltdowns caused by a CME or EMP, because everything would be fried, including backup transformers, trucks to move them, phones to assemble a work force, and backup diesel generators when all else has also failed. Meltdowns would begin within minutes, not a month as stated in the article.
To prevent this, the reactor companies would have to build whole new control rooms, new cables, new valve actuators for the pipes, new motors and controllers for the pumps, new everything. They couldn’t do that in time. Who could they order the parts from? Who could deliver/assemble it in time? There is no “ounce of prevention” that will protect against CMEs, EMPs, or many other hazards. Except to stop making more plutonium and fission products, and let the fuel cool (both radioactively and thermally).
To suggest that we could fix the grid and the spent fuel pool pumping systems — making them both impervious to CMEs and EMPs for a few billion dollars — is wishful thinking. Back in the days of the Carrington Event, everything was made of large, discrete circuits. Now even the small runs of wires inside a computer chip can pick up enough current to fry the delicate transistors on the chip itself — and even stronger pulses would come from the wires that run from chip to chip on the motherboard, or from the motherboard to the power supply, keyboard, monitor, control valves in the reactors, etc..
In short, there is little practical advantage to protecting the spent fuel pools without first shutting down the reactors.
Second, while a SFP contains more radioactivity than an operating reactor, an operating reactor has short-lived (8 days, for instance), very dangerous isotopes which would be released. Operating reactors contain ~50 to ~70 tons of nuclear fuel, so that’s a lot of radiation, regardless of how it compares to a spent fuel pool. And it’s far more likely to be released, and far more quickly, than the radiation in a Spent Fuel Pool.
In all likelihood, in the case of an EMP or CME, both would be released, but the SFP might take a few days or even as much as a week to begin releasing its radioactive fission products, while the reactor would have melted down moments after power was lost, if the motors, controllers, actuators, etc. are also fried, which is sure to be the case. Once the water evaporates in the spent fuel pool, it too would release its fission products quickly.
The plutonium and uranium is less likely to be released immediately, but will eventually enter the groundwater (like Fukushima is doing now). However, with an operating reactor it is much more likely that there will be a plutonium/uranium fire, in addition to a zirconium fire.
If there wasn’t a melting-down reactor right next to the spent fuel pool, a bucket-brigade from a nearby lake could be operated to keep water in the pool. But keeping it properly circulating would be much more difficult. (And that’s assuming nobody was busy doing anything else, like surviving, and assuming word could be gotten out that it was needed, through word-of-mouth since nothing else works.)
Third, dry casks are really only useful against a CME or EMP if the reactor is off and the spent fuel pool is emptied. And they offer little or no protection against a wide variety of other natural and manmade events: Earthquakes, tsunamis, jumbo jet strikes, terrorist attacks, embrittlement (to name a few).
Fourth, “Millions of tons” should be “nearly 100,000 tons” (if ~80,000 tons is close enough for “nearly” (the correct figure occurs later in the article)).
Fifth, the NRC never had a plan that would relieve the spent fuel pools of their danger from a CME or EMP, let alone, to protect the reactors themselves from it. Their plan was to reduce the overcrowding in the pools by adding the danger of dry casks to the mix. The hottest fuel would still be in the pools and the time-to-catastrophe after a power loss would still be just a couple of days at all operating reactor’s pools. Perhaps more importantly, by reducing the overcrowding, criticality events would be less likely. A CME or EMP would not alter the configuration of the fuel, so it would not create a criticality event immediately, like a conventional weapons placed in a spent fuel pool, or a jumbo jet landing on top of it, could do. (Once the fuel rods start burning, the fuel will fall to the bottom of the pool, and criticality events are possible, but not certain.)
Sixth, during operation, San Onofre put billions of dollars away for the inevitable decommissioning. No reactor puts enough away to get the job done, simply because then, people would be more inclined to demand it be done. But the final cost that San Onofre’s owners cite should not be used as a standard. They alternately try to include all sorts of expenses that should not be included, and not include many more that should be! No doubt, it will be expensive — but meltdowns are vastly more expensive.
Seventh, each dry cask holds quite a bit more than one metric ton of fuel assemblies (more like 10 to 15 or 18 metric tons). I think the million dollar estimate is old; it’s probably closer to two million per cask these days. And that’s for thin, easily-damaged dry casks, and doesn’t include the pad they sit on, for instance. Stronger casks are quite a bit more expensive. San Onofre wants to cut corners.
Eighth, if one of San Onofre’s spent fuel pools lost all its water, it is believed (by the experts at Southern California Edision) that the fuel rods would no longer have enough heat to catch fire even if ALL the water drained out. Your estimate was for when it had fuel that had recently been removed from the reactor. It’s probably accurate for Indian Point, but not for San Onofre.
Ninth, there is absolutely no reason to think the “atomic power pioneers” could not have foreseen the mess they have made for us. They talked themselves out of worrying about it for a variety of reasons, but they knew there was a problem right from the start.
Tenth, as for Woolsey’s claim that the defense department has been using EMP-hardened electronics for “more than 50 years” that’s only true in a very limited sense: They have experimented enough to know how, but they’ve actually only protected a few vital targets, and a few vital tools. The vast majority — perhaps 99%, maybe even more — of military hardware is not protected against a CME or EMP in any way.
Heck, it’s not even protected against fraudulent parts! The country’s armed forces equipment is riddled with them.
It will cost many billions of dollars to re-equip our military with hardened (and hacker-proof) devices, and many more billions to restructure our energy grid. Woolsey’s 2008 cost estimates were woefully low then, and are even more inaccurate now. And even having hardened the grid and the pools, at any cost, it would still leave all our civilian equipment vulnerable — all our smartphones and personal computers — including everything that a “modern” reactor contains. All modern reactors are computer controlled — because humans make mistakes! (Like they did at San Onofre…and at Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Santa Susana, Fermi 1, SL1, etc..) (Computer programs can have bugs, too!) All the controllers for the individual pumps and valves are computer-controlled too — not just the control room.
This may seem like a long list but it was a long article!
@All: The U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent us a “WARNING” from its Space Weather Prediction Center just over an hour ago:
Space Weather Message Code: WARK07
Serial Number: 57
Issue Time: 2015 Sep 08 0323 UTC
WARNING: Geomagnetic K-index of 7 or greater expected
Valid From: 2015 Sep 08 0321 UTC
Valid To: 2015 Sep 08 0900 UTC
Warning Condition: Onset
NOAA Scale: G3 or greater – Strong to Extreme
NOAA Space Weather Scale descriptions can be found at
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation
Potential Impacts: Area of impact primarily poleward of 50 degrees Geomagnetic Latitude.
Induced Currents – Power system voltage irregularities possible, false alarms may be triggered on some protection devices.
Spacecraft – Systems may experience surface charging; increased drag on low Earth-orbit satellites and orientation problems may occur.
Navigation – Intermittent satellite navigation (GPS) problems, including loss-of-lock and increased range error may occur.
Radio – HF (high frequency) radio may be intermittent.
Aurora – Aurora may be seen as low as Pennsylvania to Iowa to Oregon.
[Our emphasis]
@vital1: This is amazing information dutifully ignored by the U.S. and world governments. And by most folks in general because it is too grim to face the humanity-ending reality of what a ‘Killshot’ will do to the hundreds of nuclear reactors and spent nuclear fuel rod pools surrounding the globe with over 70 more to come on both sides of the Equator. But not you, vital1, thank goodness.
However, what is to be done if no one does anything in the face of a major CME killshot, estimated to have a 12% chance of slamming into the Earth full blast in less than 10 years? Know this: If the lights go out, and all electrical systems you can detect go down for more than two weeks due to a CME killshot, we are beyond being blown back into the Dark Ages; we will have entered the Atomized Age where all we have exposed in Lights Out will occur with near certainty.
HUGE Solar Blast – ‘Killshot’ will Miss Earth | S0 News February 22, 2015
Comment:
If this 21st of February 2015 solar CME event was Earth facing, it would have been “Lights out!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze3mwO7N-KQ
From the NRC notice sent to EnviroReporter.com this morning:
NRC Initiates Special Inspection at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has begun a Special Inspection at the Pilgrim nuclear power plant to review issues surrounding a storm-induced unplanned shutdown on Jan. 27. The single-unit boiling-water reactor is located in Plymouth, Mass., and is owned and operated by Entergy.
The six-member team, which will arrive on-site today, will be tasked with reviewing equipment issues that occurred during the shutdown, including the partial loss of off-site power; the failure of a condensate pump motor associated with the plant’s High-Pressure Coolant Injection (HPCI) system; and the malfunctioning of one of the plant’s four safety relief valves.
Pilgrim, like other nuclear power plants, transmits power to the grid but also receives power back for operational purposes. During the recent major winter storm, one of two 345-kilovolt lines that provide off-site power to the plant tripped. In response, plant operators began reducing power. At about 50-percent power, the second 345-kilovolt line also tripped, resulting in a reactor shutdown, or scram, at about 4 a.m. A third off-site power line, a 23-kilovolt line, remained available.
Operators started the plant’s two emergency diesel generators and transferred electrical loads for safety systems to those on-site power supplies due to concerns with off-site power. The transfer was performed by the operators prior to the loss of the off-site power lines.
“The Pilgrim reactor was safely shut down following the loss of two off-site power lines,” NRC Region I Administrator Dan Dorman said. “Nevertheless, we want to examine more closely the challenges that surfaced during the event, including safety system and equipment problems and the loss of the two off-site power lines.”
An inspection report documenting the team’s findings will be issued within 45 days after the completion of the review.
It is so beyond stunning that these plants were ever built in the first place,let alone the industry be handled in such a criminally negligent way. Insane psychopaths is the only thing I can think of. No matter what the issue is nowadays, it’s always money first, and let humanity and the planet be damned.
There’s no money to harden the grid, but there certainly is plenty of it to overlay the system with the “SMART” GRID! The whole system may go down anyway without any so-called black swan event when they finish putting millions upon millions of uncertified, building code busting, hot running, and RF/EMF pulsing, dangerous, and spying military weapons on our homes. Let alone all the mandated “STAR” energy appliances ‘talking to the meters’. With one of those meters on my home my light bulbs constantly burn out, the GFCI outlets trip all the time, LED TV screen burned out and I have to run the A/C 5 degrees cooler in the summer heat than I ever had to before because the house seems to be cooking (I probably am too), and it just runs hotter now.
Thousands have been made sick from the powerful spikes of RF and dirty electricity, yet the utilities and their brothers, the utility commissions, now threaten to shut your power off if your refuse to let them put one on your home! They do not care! Nothing will stop them when the gov. is pouring ‘grant money’ by the billions to ‘deploy’ the meters. By the way they will charge you higher to recoup ‘their’ investment that’s for your own good. Don’t forget, your homeowners ins. will NOT cover any damages from fires or losses due to the SMART meters, and there have been plenty. We may be looking to trade places with the other illegals that are just dying to get into this wonderful AmeriKKa. So sad that the scum of the earth ended up running the earth.
* Thank you(!) Michael Collins for adequately addressing the consequences of an electrical grid blackout –a threat the potential extent of which can not be over-stressed.
My biggest regret in having to take down my old web pages was losing the one in which I posted similar warnings, but you’ve handsomely relieved me of that duty, Michael.
* Unfortunately, our efforts to spread this alarm are unlikely to have much effect. Dr. Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, has been jumping up and down about this extinction level threat for years, but to no material avail –per:
> http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/04jun_swef/
“A report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity enables a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss, a risk that significantly outweighs that of major earthquakes and tsunamis.”
> http://www.ibtimes.com/severe-solar-storms-could-disrupt-earth-decade-noaa-826351
Given the intransigence of Congress, the President and those vested corporate interests calling the shots, the logical private response is to get busy burying long term time capsules (high fire ceramic tiles seem the best bet) in greeting, support, apologies and warnings to our (hopefully humanoid) inheritors.
Craig
OMG Michael…what a horrifying scenario you have described in “Lights Out”!!!! You have most certainly climbed out on a very fragile limb to describe the planet destroying certainty of a CME added to Fukushima, which is already an ELE…an Extinction Level Event in progress…..and by our beloved life sustaining and planet warming sun!
The whole world is,currently, at tremendous risk from thousands of spent fuel rods cooling around the world, until they can, possibly, be placed into those million dollar dry casks, and meanwhile placing all of us severely at risk of a terrorist or enemy government attack. The world simply cannot afford the dire risk of leaving tons of nuclear waste lying around, to be seen and easily targeted every time the sun rises. And now,it seems that the sun itself is likely to become a mortal enemy!
Given all of the above, it is extremely frightening to consistently observe that our Government remains in denial about such an ELE, and that they continue to remain in bed with the Nuclear industry, being apparently concerned only with MONEY and not human welfare or our very SURVIVAL!
Michael, please keep your sole and unique investigative articles coming… no matter what!
If a solar or wind farm were to go down because of a CME, or terrorist attack, it wouldn’t wipe out half a country and poison the land for centuries.
Michael, your article clearly documents how Nuclear technology threatens all life on our beautiful planet. Nuclear power is a technology dinosaur of the 20th century. It should be quickly abandoned for newer, much safer sources of power generation.
A recent inspection of a Diablo Canyon two year old canister shows stress corrosion cracking conditions are present now — not in the 30 years the NRC estimated. The canisters cannot be repaired. And there is no technology to inspect for cracks. The NRC thought it would be years before the temperature of the canister would be low enough for salts to adhere to the canister (85 degrees C or less). Canister prices are close to $4 million each — not the $1 million number everyone has been using. What else do you need to know to stop this madness of putting fuel in canisters that may fail short term? We need better casks now. Here’s link to Diablo report summarizing findings.
https://sanonofresafety.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/diablocanyonscc1.pdf
Here’s link to handout: Top Ten Reasons to buy Thick Casks.
https://sanonofresafety.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/thincanistersvsthickcasks2014-10-14.pdf
Nature’s power can neither be controlled nor mastered.
I agree that the Spent Fuel Pool ‘situation’ is one of the biggest problems humanity faces.
😯
The massive amount of radioactive contamination that could be released from these Spent Fuel Pools could easily become the source of Planetary Mass Destruction in the blink of an eye.
“Atomic power pioneers could not have foreseen that they built high value terrorist targets that if attacked and destroyed would kill scores and ruin the land with radioactivity.”
– Michael Collins
I’m thinking that governments and nuclear power related stakeholders are simply choosing to “assume it will never happen”. This allows the greatest profit to be generated by underspending on safety-related engineering. When the EMP or CME disaster finally happens, we will be wiped out of existence in the “blink of an eye”. Who will be held accountable? No one, because at that point, justice is moot. That will be the perfect crime.
My only hope is that reasonable men and women will finally say, “This has the potential to become the greatest disaster humanity has ever faced. How can we stand by, take no action, and allow this risk to continue? If your going to do nuclear power, do it safely. Otherwise, don’t do it at all.” Need a sound bite mass media? “Do It Safe or Not at All.”
Thanks Michael for connecting the dots. We’ll do what we can to help because this plan makes profound economic sense and “can create jobs” (Argle Bargle).
@Joan Bien: Thank you for the kind words but our exposé has nothing to do with the theory or plot of this novel so I didn’t suss out the details of it. Indeed, I never heard of it before you wrote this comment. The novel is about EMPs but not about CMEs with resultant meltdowns and spent nuclear fuel pool fires. Also, this isn’t an “odd scientific theory;” this is connecting the dots between several very real scenarios using NASA and Nuclear Regulatory Commission information and EnviroReporter.com investigation based on what we’ve been reporting on for years.
Politics can be decidedly weird. Republicans who detest spending money on anyone other than themselves are the ones who are sounding the alarm. They have embraced a fictional novel that is set in just such a disaster. It is well-written and makes a compelling case for getting off our asses and hardening the grid. It can be done less expensively before a flare although it is not cheap. Freedom ain’t cheap either. That, too, would be a casualty.
This particular form of disaster is not even on the radar of most people. The book “One Second After” makes a few important points. One is that once it does happen, you are on your own.
We need to prepare NOW in order to survive whatever could possibly come. We live in earthquake USA but are in complete denial. If we are ready to survive the Big One, we will be better prepared to live without the juice.
The other point made in the book is there will be no way to find out what happened. Was it an act of war? An accident? A test gone wrong? A solar flare?
The conclusion in the book: Does it really matter?
Here, Collins did a wonderful job of sussing out the details. In such a scenario, it is the details that can make the difference between life and death. Thank you for making an odd scientific theory completely relevant and understandable.