Nuclear Power Plants are safe.
UCS 10
(“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: How the Nuclear Power Industry Handles Safety”, Union of Concerned Scientists, Nuclear Power, 2010, http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_risk/safety/the-good-the-bad-and-the.html)//AW
Nuclear power plants are complex systems with multiple backups; many things must go wrong for an accident to occur. But maintaining safety margins requires constant vigilance: inspectors and tests must identify faulty equipment, and accurate procedures must guide workers so that they do not make errors. Unfortunately, safety margins are continually challenged. Equipment can wear out faster than expected. And pressure to remain competitive under electric utility deregulation can result in cost cutting, which can in turn lead to poor safety monitoring or slow response to known problems. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is responsible for tracking performance and enforcing safety regulations at nuclear power plants. But many observers (most recently the US General Accounting Office) have criticized the NRC's assessment program for failing to detect declining performance in a timely manner. UCS decided that we could not rely on the NRC, so we developed our own monitoring program. We are interested in determining how effectively plant owners identify and respond to safety problems. Assessing such performance is key to determining whether safety margins are being maintained or eroded as nuclear power plants age and come under pressure to compete. However, our focus is not on performance at individual plants but on the pattern of response across plants and what that suggests about safety throughout the industry The UCS Monitoring Program UCS monitors safety margins at 10 nuclear plants. To be certain that our focus group represents the industry as a whole, we chose plants from each category of reactor type and containment design. We also sought diversity in geographic location, utility size, ownership (private or public), and configuration (single or multiple reactors). This representative approach allows us to determine whether a problem at a focus group plant might affect a larger population--perhaps all the plants in the same category, all the plants operated by the same owner, or even all operating plants. To examine safety margins, we review publicly available documents, including both plant and NRC reports. We try to determine what these reports indicate about how plant owners responded to the reported incidents--in particular, whether their performance met, exceeded, or failed to meet federal regulations. We use a standard set of questions (see left) to evaluate safety incidents. The Good Some of the individual results from our monitoring program were encouraging. In a number of cases, plant owners took proactive measures such as conducting inspections for or training staff to prevent problems experienced at other plants. In other cases, plant owners looked beyond single problems to seek out and correct related problems. Not only were problems resolved completely, but the likelihood of future problems was greatly reduced. The actions reflect a healthy--and necessary--attitude toward nuclear safety. In addition, most problems at the best-performing plants (Oconee, Oyster Creek, and Surry) were minor. They were discovered quickly and fixed properly, suggesting a healthy regard for the importance of safety at all levels. Such actions demonstrate that safe performance levels can be achieved.
a2 Tech Fails/Thorium Good
New technologies like thorium solve all of your offense
The Week 11 (Major news corporation associated with Yahoo and RealClearPolitics, citing Michael Anissimov, science and technology writer for the Singularity Institute. “Could thorium make nuclear power safe?” March 23, 2011. http://theweek.com/article/index/213611/could-thorium-make-nuclear-power-safe) AK
Why are fans so excited about it? Thorium-fueled reactors are supposed to be much safer than uranium-powered ones, use far less material (1 metric ton of thorium gets as much bang as 200 metric tons of uranium, or 3.5 million metric tons of coal), produce waste that is toxic for a shorter period of time (300 years vs. uranium's tens of thousands of years), and is hard to weaponize. In fact, thorium can even feed off of toxic plutonium waste to produce energy. And because the biggest cost in nuclear power is safety, and thorium reactors can't melt down, argues Michael Anissimov in Accelerating Future, they will eventually be much cheaper, too. How cheap would it be? If a town of 1,000 bought a 1-megawatt thorium reactor for $250,000, using 20 kilograms of thorium a year with almost no oversight, every family could pay as little as $0.40 a year for all their electricity, Anissimov predicts. And small reactors like that aren't just potentially cost-effective, he says; they're much safer, too. Where can we get thorium? Lots of places. The U.S. has an estimated 440,000 metric tons, Australia and India have about 300,000 metric tons, and Canada has 100,000 metric tons. Until recently, U.S. and Australian mining companies threw it away as a useless byproduct. There is enough thorium to power the earth for about 1,000 years, boosters say, versus an estimated 80 years' worth of uranium. If thorium's so great, why do we use uranium? To make a "long story very short and simple," says The Star's Antonia Zerbisias, weapons and nuclear subs. U.S. researchers were developing both uranium-based and thorium-based reactors in the Cold War 1950s, but thorium doesn't create weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. Plus, nuclear submarines could be designed more easily and quickly around uranium-based light-water reactors.
New technology will be developed – solves every reason squo nuke power fails
Zerbisias 11 (Antonia Zerbisias, writer, Toronto Star, citing nuclearinsider.org and World-Nuclear.org. “Thorium touted as The Answer to our energy needs” March 25, 2011 http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/960564--thorium-touted-as-the-answer-to-our-energy-needs) AK
Coal’s too dirty, hydro can’t meet all our needs, power from wind and solar is intermittent, and oil? Well, the world just keeps going to war over that. Which is why the idea of thorium-based reactors has exploded into the nuclear debate. This radioactive metal is increasingly being touted as The Answer. “Here’s a solution that’s in front of us that can solve multiple problems,” says retired physicist and IT specialist Robert Hargraves. “It can tackle global warming. To the extent that we can make fuel, we can reduce our dependency on the Mideast.” Brief chemistry refresher course: atomic number 90, symbol Th, just two protons fewer than uranium, and four fewer than plutonium, shiny, silvery-white — and almost as common as dirt. The metal was discovered in 1828 and named for Thor, the Norse god of thunder. Thorium’s fans — nuclear scientists and engineers, chemists and physicists, even some environmentalists — have become almost cult-like in their promotion of thorium as the solution to most of the world’s energy problems. They say that, among other things, a well-designed thorium-fuelled plant beats the uranium-based system on all fronts. For one thing, there’s enough easily mined thorium in the ground to power the world for a thousand years. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the United States has an estimated 440,000 tonnes, Australia and India about 300,000 tonnes each, and Canada about 100,000 tonnes. It’s supposedly safer and produces much less waste. The waste it does produce loses its radiotoxicity in about 300 years, as opposed to tens or hundreds of thousands for conventional uranium waste. Plus, get this, it actually feeds on radioactive plutonium waste, one of the nastiest substances on earth, as part of its power-generating process. That’s important because the disposal of plutonium is probably the nuclear industry’s most vexing problem. Although there are no thorium reactors currently in operation, they have worked in the past, in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Right now China and India are developing them. According to their proponents, liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) would be much smaller in scale than the nuclear plants in Pickering and Darlington, and would be resistant to what scientists refer to as proliferation — the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Interest in thorium has intensified so much that a previously esoteric website called Energy From Thorium ( http://energyfromthorium.com/) has been crashing. Its host and creator, Kirk Sorenson, an Alabama-based NASA veteran, nuclear technologist and aerospace engineer, has had to apologize to his growing number of Facebook followers for server crashes. So besieged is he with requests for interviews about thorium — whose cult-like following says one tonne of it produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal — that he emails his regrets to the Toronto Star that he can’t talk before this story’s deadline. But he does tell the forward-looking U.S. magazine Fast Company that, had Japan built LFTRs or molten salt reactors (MSRs) with thorium instead of the more common and conventional uranium-based light water reactors (LWRs), nobody would be looking at their Japanese-sourced foodstuffs suspiciously today. “A major problem at Fukushima was that the tsunami knocked out the emergency power system that was supposed to pump water through the plant to keep it cool,” Sorensen said. He says LFTR designs automatically shut themselves down, even if emergency power is lost. What’s more, they probably never would have reached a dangerous melting point — at least 1,400 degrees Celsius — to begin with. Explains Ottawa-based physicist David Leblanc, whose company Ottawa Valley Research Associates is developing a new generation of MSRs: “We have nothing to push the radioactive material out. We’ve got nothing that explodes. We’ve got no pressure. We’ve got no steam. We’ve got no water that could turn into hydrogen that could then explode. “There’s nothing to go boom, so to speak.” All of which helps explain why thorium has gone nuclear this month. From a few Twitter mentions a week to several thousand a day. Coverage on every major scientific website, as well as pieces in London’s Daily Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal. All of them singing the praises of this humble and largely anonymous element. Hargraves is author of the booklet “AIM High,” which attempts to demonstrate that not only can LFTRs be cleaner and greener, they probably could be built on assembly lines, one a day, like Boeing airliners, and sited in places where electricity is currently unaffordable. “My motivation is years of frustration listening to people complain about high energy prices, or wars in the Mideast, our energy dependence and now global warming — and not taking action with an effective solution,” he says on the phone from his home in Hanover, Maine. Is there really no risk of meltdown with thorium? “Meltdown just doesn’t happen,” insists Leblanc. “All of us, especially since Japan, have been doing a lot of what ifs? What if we had a tsunami? What if we had floods? What if we had a meteor strike? It’s just really hard for any of us to imagine any kind of danger to the public. It’s really hard to imagine any mess getting beyond the plant gate.”
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