Nuclear Power: Who benefits? You decide.

Talk to your boss a bit more on this. Some of your facts are a bit off. This facility would depend on water (in part) from the Snake River which is already over allocated. The remainder of their (AEHI's) water shares would need to be purchased and obtaining enough shares will be very hard (for a well). In the AEHI file there is a letter from IDWR which states that AEHI has not provided enough info for IDWR to decide if this can even be done or not based on the situation with water in our area. There is also a wildlife habitat on that land as well (please see letter from Idaho Fish and Game) and IFG did not believe that a nuclear plant and wildlife would mix. Further, it will change the climate of that area and also the temperature of the Snake River which will change the ecology of the Snake forever.

As for TMI, there was a report posted on the BB regarding the health of the people that lived in that area at the time of the accident. It is not pretty. Pardon me if I do not want to rely on our broken government to watch this operation and be sure they run a safe plant. They have not done well in Ohio, New York or other areas as far as keeping things within standards.

As far as this being "cheap" power...you are not correct. The cost to build a plant is normally WAY over budget. This is passed on to the consumers. Nuclear power is never as cheap as they claim it will be and Idaho will NEVER see any of it. Transmission lines. Where will those be? Nobody can seem to say. Kind of an important detail. Which reactor(s) will be used? How many will there be total? What else will be located in the "nuclear corridor" as was stated at the meeting in GF?

Kim, with all due respect, you are a little off on your claims with this blog. Look beyond the claim of great jobs and see the plan for what it really is...more government tax dollars paid to the bottom feeders of society so they can become rich. We have enough of that right now, IMHO. Let Don go out and get a real job.

I agree that a good firm should build it. And I agree, as I have said before that it should be a vote. I am all for that.

I am all for wind power and would be very happy to see more, but environmentalist are blocking so many of it from being built. They say that it kills bats and makes the area look bad by blocking our views of the mountains. Also, wind power is great but does depend on wind! Though we have plenty of it, there will be times that there is not enough.

We have come a long way since the accident at TMI. No accidents that has exposed anyone like what happened there in 50 years. We have more accidents in regular plants and on highways and in the air yet we don't ban those activities. The safety and security of this plant will be as heavy if not more so than a military base. The system is very high tech that it will shut down long before there is any safety issue. It is called a SCRAM. According to the Assoc. of Nuclear Operators there has been less than .5 of 7,000 critical hours a year for the past 12 years. That is a pretty good record. And in those few times that the system shut down, there were no leaks into the environment nor were any people affected. Accoring to the World Assoc. of Nuclear Operators, there has been less than an average of between .18 to .13 accidents a year that resulted in lost or restricted work. How many companies have that impressive of an accident rate? If we looked at the number of injuries and deaths caused in the coal mines or the oil refineries, then we would have never used those fossil fuels. Yet we have continued to allow those plants to produce because we needed it. Regulations are very strict and human life is valued far more today therefore safety in those nuclear plants are the best anywhere.

I'm saying that nuclear power will be the energy of the future. Why let other states get this plant? Our state should benefit from it. Yes, there should be alot of monitoring and regulations and inspections, but all the others have been run quite well. They build the plants outside of towns yet everyone built closer and closer to it so that there are thriving communities surrounding it. Matter of fact, many have crops growing close by using the water that the plant doesn't use.

I'm still seeing more reasons to build it than reasons not to. (Time: 7:03am)

Kim,

I also choose to disagree with your assessment. Check out the methods used to obtain the fuels for this type of plant. How are the waste products disposed of? I don't understand how people can tout nuclear power as clean. The actual generation of the power is cleaner than fossil fuel plants, but the waste alone pollutes our earth for millions of years, it requires special storage that no one is willing to provide anymore. Nuclear waste disposal is becoming impossible to find, this will drive the cost up and up.

Why did AEHI choose this area to proposed facility? Is it the abundance of experts in this field, the adequate and stable water supply? I don't believe so. I think it is our willingness to work for next to nothing and the lack of union representation in Idaho. These two things make this area attractive to companies like AEHI. They can sell this power to areas outside of Idaho at premium prices while keeping their overhead low. Good business if you are on their end.

At the end of the day, I don't see the average resident of Mountain Home being any better off than they are currently. I see more traffic, more crime and higher taxes to fund the increased infrastructure required to support this facility. Just my opinion.

Jtrotter, you bring some good point in the second paragraph. Instead of building on to an existing reactor and saving enormous amounts of money, they chose this site so that they would not have to deal with unions, high wages, or established status quo's. It is highly unlikely that average citizens of the Treasure Valley will benefit from this other than ripple effects and higher tax revenue. Actual jobs that are stable and recession-proof will be few. The majority of jobs will be held by PhD's and scientists. This matters because these types are fewer in number. They are banking on citizens believing that 3785 average joes will be able to get jobs. The truth is that alot of this will be built off-site (Mr. Gillispie told me this personally). The resulting jobs will be recruited from elsewhere largely and only a small fraction will go to the average citizen. The ripple effects will be nice but that is not the selling point. We are not debating the benefits of hiring gas station clerks and bank tellers. People think that this development will equate to a cash windfall. This cash windfall supposedly come from high paying construction jobs and metal fabrication. Well to burst the bubble, the major tasks that pay so well will be done by workers from elsewhere.

Anyways, I dont think that nuclear is evil but I dont buy into this developer's claims. This is an infomercial meant to lure in types that are desparate for the pot of gold. They feel that by giving out all these superlatives that you will all buy into it without question. The economics that this company proposes are mostly true except the amounts.

Why is it that every time a pro nuclear argument is made based on factual science that you always have the nut cases show up spouting off generalities based on ignorance and fear? The short answer is fear mongering is all they got. None of their arguments are based on science. Take for example what jtrotter wrote:

"I don't understand how people can tout nuclear power as clean. The actual generation of the power is cleaner than fossil fuel plants, but the waste alone pollutes our earth for millions of years"

This is just wrong and has no basses in science. The fact is that over 99% of the nuclear rods will in 30,000 years be no more toxic than the Uranium which was mined at the start of the fuel cycle. Any of the current storage methods used in world today would handle this time frame times 10 and still not pollute the earth. France uses clay, Sweden granite, and we could easily use the salt mines in New Mexico that are the current depository for our military's nuclear waste. The nuclear industries current method of dry cast storage is more than adequate for 100 or so years. This is more than enough time to resolve storage issue. On the other hand the earth does not have this luxury. We as an earth will be cooked a lot sooner than hundred years.

Here is another example of fear mongering by OpinionMissy:

"As for TMI, there was a report posted on the BB regarding the health of the people that lived in that area at the time of the accident. It is not pretty."

What a bunch of hogwash. No one died prior, during, or after the TMI event. That is a fact. There is no scientific evidence that any one died due to the TMI meltdown. The secondary containment systems of the US nuclear plants have never failed. Since TMI the industry has worked prevent any such reoccurrences. Except for the David Besse incident they have succeeded in preventing any type of TMI event. And even though David Besse inspectors never should have singed off on the last couple inspections they did find the problem. The system of regulation and inspection prevented any breach of the core into David Besse's secondary vessel.

All I have to say about the nuclear cynics is they have nothing of factual science to offer the global warming debate. They keep bringing up generalities or outright lies. Why do they do this? I don't know. Though it does remind me of the crack addict who continues to hit the pipe even after they have lost everything.

Viva the Nuclear Renaissance

Jfarmer9

Why is it that every time a pro nuclear argument is made based on factual science that you always have the nut cases show up spouting off generalities based on ignorance and fear? The short answer is fear mongering is all they got. None of their arguments are based on science. Take for example what jtrotter wrote:

"I don't understand how people can tout nuclear power as clean. The actual generation of the power is cleaner than fossil fuel plants, but the waste alone pollutes our earth for millions of years"

This is just wrong and has no basses in science. The fact is that over 99% of the nuclear rods will in 30,000 years be no more toxic than the Uranium which was mined at the start of the fuel cycle. Any of the current storage methods used in world today would handle this time frame times 10 and still not pollute the earth. France uses clay, Sweden granite, and we could easily use the salt mines in New Mexico that are the current depository for our military's nuclear waste. The nuclear industries current method of dry cast storage is more than adequate for 100 or so years. This is more than enough time to resolve storage issue. On the other hand the earth does not have this luxury. We as an earth will be cooked a lot sooner than hundred years.

Here is another example of fear mongering by OpinionMissy:

"As for TMI, there was a report posted on the BB regarding the health of the people that lived in that area at the time of the accident. It is not pretty."

What a bunch of hogwash. No one died prior, during, or after the TMI event. That is a fact. There is no scientific evidence that any one died due to the TMI meltdown. The secondary containment systems of the US nuclear plants have never failed. Since TMI the industry has worked prevent any such reoccurrences. Except for the David Besse incident they have succeeded in preventing any type of TMI event. And even though David Besse inspectors never should have singed off on the last couple inspections they did find the problem. The system of regulation and inspection prevented any breach of the core into David Besse's secondary vessel.

All I have to say about the nuclear cynics is they have nothing of factual science to offer the global warming debate. They keep bringing up generalities or outright lies. Why do they do this? I don't know. Though it does remind me of the crack addict who continues to hit the pipe even after they have lost everything.

Viva the Nuclear Renaissance

Jfarmer9

jfarmer, your one post of hogwash was more than enough. Thanks for your comments. Do a bit more research on TMI and the results. People are sick, have been sick and have died. Have a nice day.

OppinionMissy,

Hey just saying it does not make it true. Find me scientific evidence on TMI and I will concede the point. But you can't can you. All you have are fear and lies.

Hey it is not late to admit you are wrong and help save the planet

I do not feel that I base my opinions on fear. I have done a lot of research and I am fairly educated. The story on TMI was posted on the BB---feel free to look it up. See, you called me the liar so you can prove your facts as I already posted the TMI info on the BB as well as a blog. Have a good one. Do you own stock in AEHI by any chance or do you sit on their board? They are normally the name callers on this forum.

More generalities and still no posted scientific facts, hey Missy

Sorry I am so harsh but there is the mater of saving the planet. The idea of saving the planet definitely gets me going.

Viva the nuclear renaissance

Jfarmer9

I am butting in here as a former Mt. Home resident, I spent 4 wonderful years there courtesy of the Air Force. I have since gone into the nuclear business, and was privileged to be able to represent the US in creating policy and safety documents for the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency. I have also done work with the European Commission's Research Directorate on methods for assessing nuclear facility safety.

So I am biased. But I think it is an informed bias.

My biases tell me this: no one was hurt by the very small amounts of gaseous releases from TMI. As another blog entry said, containment held. But I have seen the websites where the contrary is claimed. I interviewed several people who worked there on the regulatory side, and my version is the one they uphold. Good enough for me.

French reactors are purring along fine, thank you. Areva is a French company with a North American division, they are building reactors all over the world, and I expect they will build some in the U.S. too. There are other excelent builders as well. To be acceptable to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission you have to show you know what you are doing, your design has to be approved, and you will be watched as you build and start up. Operations are also routinely monitored. INPO will be watching you also, an industry safety consortium that was created to prevent future TMIs and is obviously very successful.

It is astonishing to see how many countries have nuclear plants and how few accidents there have been, especially over the last decades. Nuclear is a clean power source, and new plants are now built to house their own wastes until the government takes tham as the law says they should, at the power-plants' expense.

They do use water, and adequacy of water-supply is something to look into. But I have seen a large reactor take water out of a rather smallish stream, and saw no diminishing of that stream as I looked away from the reactor. But it is an issue, in a dry state.

Smoking delivers an astonishing amount of radiation, alpha particles mostly from polonium-210 (the material used to kill a spy not long ago) to the upper part of your respiratory system. If you are really afraid of radiation, don't smoke, or even breathe second-hand smoke.

Sorry to butt in. --abe--

Hi Kim, Abe, and all,

RE: TMI

Yes we are lucky the containment held, but 15 curies of radioactive Iodine escaped, and INL is stuck with the melted core for a few hundred thousand years. I usually don't make claims about the health effects of TMI, but yes jfarmer9, there is a peer-reviewed published science study from 1997 that does note increases in lung cancer, leukemia, and all cancers. It was published in the Nat'l Institute of Health's journal, and can be found at the NIH pubmed website at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9074881?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEnt...

"Results support the hypothesis that radiation doses are related to increased cancer incidence around TMI. The analysis avoids medical detection bias, but suffers from inaccurate dose classification; therefore, results may underestimate the magnitude of the association between radiation and cancer incidence. These associations would not be expected, based on previous estimates of near-background levels of radiation exposure following the accident."

But other studies, mainly focusing lamely on cancer "death rates", instead of cancer incidence rates, come to different conclusions, so I usually stick to ammo that is undisputable. Had to share though, since jfarmer, whoever he really is, claims the anti side has no science at all.

From the citizen downwinder "subjective" perspective of TMI, I share a recent article that interviews the real people, and all the "fun" they have had trying to get the gov't to admit there were problems at http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/04/post-4.html

Abe, Kim, and all, please visit my website at www.MyIdahoEnergy.com Lots of DOE & NRC documents on things you folks generally ignore, like the containment flaws that can lead to "catastrophic failure." Just quoting the latest DOE/NRC small print that Gillispie types deny. For example, at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/contract/cr6906/cr6906.pdf

Found at p 147 or p 166/206 on webpages

"4.7 Issues for Future Consideration

4.7.1 Leakage

A great deal has been learned about containment behavior and containment analysis methods in

the last two decades of containment research, but questions still remain. One of the most

important behavior questions is that it is not known with certainty whether a leakage failure will reach an equilibrium state or if it will lead to a catastrophic failure."

Abe, what do you think of the Alloy-600 stress crack problem, that nearly melted down Davis-Besse in 2002, and plagues half the US fleet of reactors? Here is an NRC statement of one of the dangers they are simply watching, hoping the stress cracks don't split in the next earthquake...Peter Found at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/prv.html

Primary Water Stress Corrosion Cracking of Upper Reactor Vessel Head Penetration Nozzles in PWRs

Control rod drive mechanism nozzles and other vessel head penetration nozzles welded to the upper reactor vessel head are subject to another phenomenon - primary water stress corrosion cracking. The issue is a potential safety concern because a nozzle with sufficient cracking could break off during operation. This would compromise the integrity of the reactor coolant system pressure boundary - one of three primary barriers that protect the public from exposure to radiation. The break may also result in the ejection of a control rod, which could damage nearby components.

On a separate issue Abe Van Luik mention how well the French build reactors, and not to worry about construction. IE, "French reactors are purring along fine, thank you. Areva is a French company with a North American division, they are building reactors all over the world, and I expect they will build some in the U.S.too."

Abe, there are a LOT of mistakes made in construction, but yes, the inspectors catch many flaws that adds greatly to the cost of nuclear power. No one is perfect, so it is fair to expect that all flaws may not be caught, and like at the Davis-Besse cover up deciding to ignore the football size acid hole that ate through the containment, leaving 1/4 inch, there is ALWAYS the human corruption factor. It is in ALL professions, including doctors.

Bad wind mill construction and bad doctors could kill somebody, but it won't cause forced evacuations, nor impound crops for hundreds of miles around. Kim's opening blog are talking points of nuclear power, but never mentioned is that geothermal and wind power can provide all the electricity the USA needs. See the DOE and Uni of Utah Geophysics Dept references at my website, but back to French construction problems Abe.

I'll toss in a couple references on construction flaws at EPR in Finland, and the years of delay they caused, and the cost overruns. Areva, the French Gov't company, is selling off some assets to keep afloat!

But don't worry US taxpayers, we are giving the French Gov't company an $800 million tax break in Blackfoot, and up to $2 Billion subsidy in loan guarantees, in case they can't pay their loans off in Blackfoot. In a nuclear menage a'tois, it is the taxpayer that will really get scr*wed! :-) Oregon is STILL paying off their WPPS (woops) loan guarantee subsidy for an unfinished nuke plant. As Bush would say, "Ahh, fool me once, umm, err, yah can't fool me.." ...Peter

Found at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc...

Power failure: What Britain should learn from Finland's nuclear saga

It was hailed as the template for all future reactors -- but then they tried to build it.

By Michael Savage

Wednesday, 16 January 2008

SNIP- Yet to say that Finland's experience bodes well would be optimistic to say the least. It was not long before Olkiluoto 3 was hit by a slew of safety concerns, building blunders, spiralling costs and chronic delays.

The new project was intended to deliver something altogether superior to Olkiluoto's two existing reactors, built in the 1970s. But a number of key components have already had to be remade after failing to meet safety standards. The consortium building the reactor found itself in trouble for selecting cheap and inexperienced sub-contractors. The delays have meant that the facility will contribute little to Finland's Kyoto commitments to reduce greenhouse gas omissions to 1990 levels by 2012.

The 1,600MW-capacity reactor, which was meant to be producing energy by 2009, is now around two years behind schedule. It is more than €1bn over budget, without taking into account the cost of the lost electricity production time which, rough estimates suggest, could run to €600m. After Finland's government rejected greener energy sources for being too expensive, that has angered many Finns. SNIP

The first major safety problem came with the first component to be built -- the concrete base, which was not mixed properly. Construction was set back two months as a result. Further problems occurred with an important new safety feature -- the steel container designed to house radioactive materials in case of an accident and to protect the reactor from outside threats. The finished container was found to have inadequate welding, an outdated design and was even damaged during storage. It emerged that it had been built by a Polish company more used to building fishing ships than nuclear power plant components. Those are just the most high-profile design flaws. At the last count, the Finnish nuclear regulator had detected 1,700 "listed quality deviations" on the project. SNIP

____________________________________________

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7838cf20-03a4-...

Areva concedes assets in return for backing

By Peggy Hollinger in Paris

Published: February 26 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 26 2009 02:00

Areva has been pushed to concede asset disposals in return for the government's eventual backing for a capital increase, after the group yesterday said it would incur a €1.7bn ($2.2bn) loss on its troubled Finnish nuclear reactor project.

The French state-owned nuclear group, which yesterday reported a sharp drop in net profit from €743m to €589m last year fuelled by extra charges on the Finnish reactor, will sell non-strategic assets and open up others to outside investment to help to meet its €2.7bn investment programme over the next year. Areva has also initiated a €600m cost-cutting programme and hopes to reduce working capital by €300m.

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."

-- Albert Einstein

Dr Peter Rickards,

Sir you as a man of science should know better. The cancer rate studies you showed to justify your point of TMI causing deaths is at best flimsy. The study itself states the sample group was to small. No legitimate physician would deduce a true cause and effect scenario based on this study. This is why the nuclear industry can legitimately claim that there has never been a death in the US due to the commercial production of nuclear power.

Here is a real cause and effect scenario. 20,000 US citizens die every year due to particulate air pollution caused by coal burning. Dr. here is a legitimate map of cause and effect put out by Clean Air Task Force:

http://www.catf.us/projects/power_sector/power_plant_emissions/pollution_locator...

Dr. I did like your second article it stated the obvious that the nuclear power industry at the time of TMI was to closed to peer review and legitimate scrutiny by the media. This culture has changed dramatically since TMI. In fact, there is no other industry I can think of that is more regulated and open to peer review than the nuclear industry. This includes the medical industry which you as a podiatrist should know deals with life and death issues every day.

Dr here is where I get harsh about your anti nuclear rhetoric and you may not want to read it but I hope you do. This is a fact Global Warming on its current course will kill billions. You sir are part of the propaganda that supports this outcome. You offer no real competitive solutions to energy needs of the US and thus fossil fuels will continue increase the planets CO2 levels and raise the acidity of the oceans to point where all ocean crustacean life will cease to exit.

Sir your arguments are no better than that of another Doctor in history that of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer. He of course was the Nazi Doctor who tried to justify the inferiority of the Jews. Sir you and your cohorts anti nuclear rhetoric will indeed have the same direct consequences as Dr. Otmar von Verschuer did. I hope for your sake that you are legitimately opposed to nuclear power and don't have a vested interest in wind power. For this is legitimately an issue of the planets survival. It is not an issue I would want to prosper from.

Viva the Nuclear Renaissance,

Jfarmer9

well said jfarmer9! Nuclear is the future. Nothing in this world is 100% safe, but Nuclear is our best bet right now and in the future. If it was up to these nay-sayers we would still be riding in a horse driven carriage. How long has this country used coal? Its time to move on people. The benefits out weigh the risks hands down. There are so many regulations in place for Nuclear power, and ALL eyes will be on this plant being built since its the first one built in 30 years!

On the Areva construction problems and cost overruns issue, I stand corrected. I just read Matt Wald's piece in the NY Times at

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html

Note how the regulators, both in Finland and France, are performing their roles, however. I would have full confidence that once completed these plants will be very safe. If there is a reasonable doubt, they simply do not get permission to operate!

I just hate eating crow. I am a vegetarian!

But I'll only eat half a crow.

I looked at the links provided on TMI, and noted this conclusion at the bottom of the study of nearby health effects: "Cancer near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant: radiation emissions."

Hatch MC, Beyea J, Nieves JW, Susser M., Div. of Epidemiology, Columbia U. School of Public Health, New York, NY10032.

"Overall, the pattern of results does not provide convincing evidence that

radiation releases from the Three Mile Island nuclear facility influenced

cancer risk during the limited period of follow-up."

So I'll have half a crow, well done and drowned in mild salsa, please?--abe--

Hi fakenames jfarmer9 & AFBADGER,

Nice job avoiding the Alloy-600 stress crack problem that plagues half the present US fleet, while continuing to trumpet how "safe" nuclear power is. Good job avoiding comment on the DOE/NRC document I provided about containment flaws that can lead to "catastrophic failure"! Your man Gillispie claims meltdowns can NEVER happen, and even if the impossible happened, the containment would always work! I use DOE/NRC documents to prove he is wrong, so you decide to call me a "nazi," BRILLIANT!

Jfarner claims "You offer no real competitive solutions to energy needs of the US and thus fossil fuels will continue increase the planets CO2 levels and raise the acidity of the oceans to point where all ocean crustacean life will cease to exit."

You actually should read ALL the words in my posts and at my website, because I do use DOE and Uni of Utah Geophysics documents to show wind and geothermal could safely produce more electricity than the country uses. And, no, I do not have stock in either source. I am just trying to protect future generations. Do you have stock in AEHI, or just employed by them?

Jfarmer previously claimed the anti's have "no science" on their side, so when will you admit you are wrong? Never, oh yah, so let's look at what you decided to attack.

Jfarmer claims "The study itself states the sample group was to small." I assume you meant "too small", but, well, no it does NOT say that. You must have misunderstood the statement in the abstract stating the 5 year cancer latency figures were based on a smaller number of cases than the 2 year latency figures. Both analysis showed increases in cancer. At NO POINT does this NIH peer-reviewed paper say what you claim. And dudes, I already stated there are other conflicting reports and I only mentioned the paper because jfarmer was harassing Opinion Missy, claiming there was "No science" showing TMI hurt anyone. Even the tobacco exec's are correct to claim no one can "prove" it was the tobacco that caused a lung cancer. Could have been radon, or some other factor in their diet, or pure coincidense. But ask any doctor how much extra man made radiation they would recommend for pregnant women, and the answer is ZERO.

While jfarmer chatised OM for "fear mongering," you seem to have no trouble fear mongering global warming claiming, "This is a fact Global Warming on its current course will kill billions."

Me, I fought hard to stop the coal plant in Jerome, mainly because of the mercury it spews that have poisoned fish world wide. God's most nutritious gift to pregnant women is fish, and now we must warn them not to eat too much. If we had pursued wind and geothermal back 21 years ago when I started my citizen activism, we would be energy independent by now, without poisoned fish, global warming, or any meltdowns. So feel free to label me a nazi since you have no science information to defend your position. You are left with name calling as your best weapon, but I am used to that by now :-) ...Peter

Hi Abe,

I was writing my previous post before you posted, so I'll respond to you separately. Glad to have your calm science background following the blog, especially when you are willing to eat a little crow! True scientists WILL admit when they are wrong, and I appreciate your candor.

But could you please respond to the serious Alloy-600 stress crack problem that plagues half the US fleet, and the containment flaw problems, that jfarmer avoided?

While I already admitted there are contradictory reports on TMI, so I rarely mention the subject, I just read the 1991 report you cited by Hatch et al. If you re-read the words before the general dismissal of the last statement you quoted, you will see even Hatch discovered some increased cancers. He just finished by stating "overall, the PATTERN of results" could not draw a firm conclusion, but he did find increases in cancer, didn't he? In context, he said "Trends for two types of cancer ran counter to expectation. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma showed raised risks relative to both accident and routine emissions; lung cancer (adjusted only indirectly for smoking) showed raised risks relative to accident emissions, routine emissions, and background gamma radiation. Overall, the pattern of results does not provide convincing evidence that radiation releases from the Three Mile Island nuclear facility influenced cancer risk during the limited period of follow-up." ...Peter

Doc,I have a question, what if this wasnt a Nuclear reactor? What if it was a New Tech that nobody has seen or heard of and they said it could produce as much power as a Nuclear reactor, and they wanted to build the power plant here? Lets say it could have some hazards but its benefits were great but it has never been put in service but has been tested. You can only get your information from the tests. Would you be for it? If it was up to you would you let them build it?

Hi AFBADGER,

Your question is too vague, and it seems like you are trying to bait me into approving the proposed generic first step vote on being open to switching the zoning to some unspecified industry.

I testified at the hearing that I thought that step would only work if they vote NO. If they hypothsize, "Gee, a lavender oil factory or an ice cream factory might be OK, they will set themselves up for a lawsuit from Gillispie. Once they say "We are open to switching zones to Industry, then the county can NOT discriminate against any legal business. So Gillispie and Deyuter could sue for the right to do business. The only protection for Elmore citizens is to stick to the comprehensive plan, and vote no rezone.

But as a general answer to your question it would depend on how risky and large impact the "hazards" of this hypothetical energy plant would be. Here is a url for the first algae biofuel plant. I'm not sure if it is the same one I saw on a news show. The one I saw was cool, that greatly increased the production surface area by open walls of plastic tubing with the algae. It maximized sun exposure over ponds by making open walls vertically in the open. I don't mention this as an energy source on my website, because I have not researched it enough, and the documents on geothermal and wind do the job for America. But, yah, after I checked the hazards, I'd be open to this kind of energy plant in my back yard. Gotta juice the computer one way or another...Peter

One algae plant at http://gas2.org/2008/03/29/first-algae-biodiesel-plant-goes-online-april-1-2008/

Dr. Rickards from Dr. Abe:

I am not a metallurgist but have worked with some who say this problem is now well under control. That is reflected in this from the NRC website:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/steam-gen.html

Tube Degradation

During the early-to-mid 1970s, when all plants, except one, had mill annealed Alloy 600 steam generator tubes, thinning of the mill annealed Alloy 600 steam generator tube walls due to the chemistry of the water flowing around them was the dominant cause of tube degradation. However, all plants have changed their water chemistry control programs since then, virtually eliminating the problem with tube thinning.

After tube thinning, tube denting became a primary concern in the mid to late-1970s. Denting results from the corrosion of the carbon steel support plates and the buildup of corrosion product in the crevices between tubes and the tube support plates. Measures have been taken to control denting, including changes in the chemistry of the secondary (i.e., non-radioactive) side of the plant. But other phenomena continue to cause tube cracking in plants with mill annealed Alloy 600 tubes.

The extensive tube degradation at pressurized-water reactors (PWRs) with mill annealed Alloy 600 steam generator tubes has resulted in tube leaks, tube ruptures, and midcycle steam generator tube inspections. This degradation also led to the replacement of mill annealed Alloy 600 steam generators at a number of plants and contributed to the permanent shutdown of other plants.

As mill annealed Alloy 600 steam generator tubes began exhibiting degradation in the early 1970s, the industry pursued improvements in the design of future steam generators to reduce the likelihood of corrosion. In the late 1970s, Alloy 600 tubes were subjected to a high temperature thermal treatment to improve the tubes' resistance to corrosion. This thermal treatment process was first used on tubes installed in replacement steam generators put into service in the early 1980s. Thermally treated Alloy 600 is presently used in the steam generators at 17 plants. Although no significant degradation problems have been observed in plants with thermally treated Alloy 600 steam generator tubes, plants which replaced their steam generators since 1989 have primarily used tubes fabricated from thermally treated Alloy 690, which is believed to be even more corrosion resistant than thermally treated Alloy 600. Thermally treated Alloy 690 is presently used in the steam generators at 27 plants.

Most of the newer steam generators, including all of the replacement steam generators, have features which make the tubes less susceptible to corrosion-related damage. These include using stainless steel tube support plates to minimize the likelihood of denting and new fabrication techniques to minimize mechanical stress on tubes.

______________________New topic_____________

There is an article by the Union of Concerned Scientists on another problem involving the sumps in containment buildings that is quite alarmist in tone:

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_risk/safety/regulatory-malprac...

However, I tend to not get so excited when the requirement is to show that there is containment integrity after every shutdown, such as for refueling, and a battery of inspections has to be done periodically. The Union of Concerned Scientists makes light of the NRCs approach to regulating, calling it malpractice when the enforcenment is risk-informed: the more risk, the more emphasis, less risk, less emphasis. To me that is common-sense, a good way to regulate. But I am prejudiced in favor of the industry as a whole.

________________________new topic__________

Davis-Besse has been brought around to every nuclear facility I know of as an object lesson in how not to run a plant. I believe the people problem has been corrected, it is in good hands now, it is being watched carefully. If you present the NRC with an indication that you are risk-tolerant, you will get lots more regulatory oversight. That is expensive, but it works.

Thanks for your answer Doc. I have another question. What is the date of the last Nuclear mishap in the U.S? How old was the reactor?

Hi Dr. Abe Vanluik,

I appreciate the calm scientific discussion. The references though, reveal the band-aid approach of the NRC to the Alloy-600 stress crack problem. Let's admit it, this was an UNFORESEEN SCIENTIFIC flaw, in what is trumpeted to be the wonderful improvements since TMI. As your alloy-600 reference says "The extensive tube degradation at pressurized-water reactors (PWRs) with mill annealed Alloy 600 steam generator tubes has resulted in tube leaks, tube ruptures, and midcycle steam generator tube inspections. This degradation also led to the replacement of mill annealed Alloy 600 steam generators at a number of plants and contributed to the permanent shutdown of other plants."

Glad they have replaced SOME of the impaired tubing, but, umm, there was not supposed to be any scientific flaws in the safety of this metal. As you know, at your old stomping grounds at INL, the rickety old ATR is supposed to test thoroughly the fatigue factor in these proposed metal components of these, and future reactors. The "idiots" at Jackson Hole Wyoming, lead by undefeated cowboy lawyer, Gerry Spence, have defeated the proposed plutonium incinerator for INL, and have a similiar lawsuit underway to stop the proposed plutonium -238 production at INL. This lawsuit revolves around the proposed clustering at the INL's ATR, because of the MANY severe safety flaws at this old reactor, that failed to detect the science flaws in the brittleness of alloy-600, when the ATR tested this very same alloy-600. Just like the infamous O-ring splattered astronaut teacher's blood "on the face of God" during the unfortunat spacelift Columbia, sometimes educated science with decades of experiencem makes deadly mistakes, doesn't it?

So we are watching known stress cracks at half the US fleet, the PWR's, while some components have been replaced. That band-aid is hardly what I would describe as you did, "under control," ie, "I am not a metallurgist but have worked with some who say this problem is now well under control."

These old metal fatiuged reactors are having their licenses renewes by your beloved NRC watchdogs as we type, to work decades beyond their initial life expectancy. The NRC is simply "watching" the alloy-600 stress cracks they discovered after the 2002 Davis-Besse cover up was thank God exposed.

What will be the next "unforeseen" science flaw in the new ggeneration reactors? If you answer, "We don't realy know because no one can be sure," then you are correct! So again, the common sense solution to our energy crisis is to maximize the most wind and geothermal power, that has less severe risks, and can documentably supply our energy neeeds...Peter

Meant to add that the ATR safety flaws from the ongoing lawsuit can be read at the Gerry Spence group's website at www.keepyellowstonenuclearfree.com ...Peter

Great! A foot doctor who is playing the foresight card in favor of WIND/GEO energy sources.

Keep in mind that those sources require batteries for storage and that technology is still far behind the times. Not to mention the truly hazardous waste it leads to.

At least NUCLEAR is an ON DEMAND resource!

Then there is the KNEECAPPING with the ALLOY 600 card, even though they have found solutions to it for several years now.

"Successful tests have confirmed the effectiveness of new repair options for Alloy 600 BMN nozzles that are susceptible to stress corrossion cracking (SCC)."

(www.us.framatome-anp.com 2005)

JFarmer is playing the NAZI card to stifle dissent. Liberals usually play another version of that, coming up with left field spin like the claim that people died from TMI. Even the experts claim most of the health effects were due to stress over the media hype and not anything factual.

And then there is poor ABE who thinks reason will change the ways of non-believers.

If he only knew that the behind the scenes politicians are running their own GAME AGENDA.

PELOSI, for example is anti NUKE because she is heavily invested in WIND POWER.

She supports Harry Reid who has his own financial agenda in Nevada.

Pelosi claims that drilling for oil off the California coast is not going to bring down oil prices for decades. Thats only one of her BIG LIES.

In reality, there are many wells off the coast that are ready to tap now.

Ive met some location managers in the Santa Barbara-Ventura area that told me they could have the wells putting out OIL by the end of summer, if they had to.

And, just the threat of new oil production alone would drop the price of GAS at the pump.

But, until Yucca Mtn becomes reality, the nuke industry is going to lay low.

Maybe in 2012 things will change where the PENDULUM swings.

In the meantime, dont let the anti-nuclear left lead you astray. After all, they brought us ETHANOL and you can see what its done to our grocery costs for anything even remotely related to CORN.

HARRUMPH!

I stand by my statement: Nuclear Power is happening and plants are going to be built so why not benefit from it instead of sending it off to another state? Our county would reap many rewards from allowing this plant to be built. More jobs, more revenue for better schools and better equip fire stations and police stations. Every community will benefit. Why send our grown children off to other areas in search of jobs when they will stay close to home and be able to work here? If the reasons for stopping the plant from being built are based on safety issues, then I say again that nuclear power is the only large-scale, non-emitting, affordable energy source. This is my opinion. And my support of building a nuclear plant has nothing to do with politics or where I work or what the opinions of those I work with are. As a free citizen of Elmore County with an eye on the future for my community, I am a supporter of nuclear energy. However, I also have supported other alternative energy sources.

Dr. Richard: Thanks for the post. I don't think that you are a Nazi and welcome your input. I wish that others wouldn't throw that word "Nazi" around. Blogs are an area that give each of us an opportunity to voice our opinions and give reasons that support it. Dr. Richard...You said: Kim's opening blog are talking points of nuclear power, but never mentioned is that geothermal and wind power can provide all the electricity the USA needs." My response: Well, I wasn't writing about geothermal and wind power at the time. I was giving points that are for nuclear power. Later, however, I do state that I am definitely for wind power. I would love to see a lot more of those beautiful white wind turbines . It amazes me that I have heard and read opposition to wind power by environmentalists and PETA. There have been objections because they think it mars the horizon. I haven't seen that as a problem. I think they look great. And the PETA people complain that the bats are attracted to the sound it makes and have been killed. Now I love bats. They are very important to us. They eat insects which is very beneficial as a biological control of pests. I want to build my own bat house and would love to see bat houses all over town. However, I'm sure that the problem of sound attraction can be solved. Wind power is a great alternative energy solution. I visited your site and applaud your efforts to make people look to wind as a viable energy solution. If I lived out of town, I would have wind and solar energy in order to be energy independent. However, for all of the people who live in towns, cities and metropolitan areas, it is not a choice to put up a wind generator. If many of the cities and towns close to the areas that have high winds would get together and build some wind farms, then we would all benefit.

Jfarmer9: you stated: "there is no other industry I can think of that is more regulated and open to peer review than the nuclear industry." Absolutely right! And AFBADGER said "The benefits out weigh the risks hands down. There are so many regulations in place for Nuclear power, and ALL eyes will be on this plant being built since its the first one built in 30 years!" I highly agree. Though I am a big supporter of small government, I am a big believer in the idea that there is a time and place for everything. Government regulations on nuclear power are highly restrictive. As it should be, every move that is made at a nuclear plant is watched closely. The security in this nuclear facility would be very tight.

Anti-nuclear protesters will always be here just as anti-anything will always be at the ready to oppose anything. Personally, I have looked at as much information as I can to come to my decision that nuclear power should be considered. Wind and solar energy should be an alternative as well. Let's get the next generation trained to service the wind generators and solar panel manufacturing as well as building the pool of nuclear technicians and scientist. Build those wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear plants for a future of clean air and dependable power. Everyone who posted comments: Thanks for the time and effort that you put into expressing yourself. Your opinions are appreciated and I look forward to hearing more from all of you.

(Time: 6:55am though not important since I've taken a personal day off from work)

To Alex Ogre,

Gosh, aren't you charming! Where are you from? Most Idahoans don't like to get there excersise jumping to conclusions. Let's look at your incorrect claim that geothermal power requires batteries and is not ready technologically, and creates hazardous waste. You claimed: "Great! A foot doctor who is playing the foresight card in favor of WIND/GEO energy sources. Keep in mind that those sources require batteries for storage and that technology is still far behind the times. Not to mention the truly hazardous waste it leads to."

Hmmm, how wrong can an ogre be? Geothermal runs 24/7, no batteries required. Idaho's Raft River is selling to Id Power for 5.25 cents/kw hour. Uni of Utah Geophysics Dept says the US can provide 5 times it's 1990 electric consumption with geothermal. Bush zeroed out the geothermal subsidy.

The 2007 Stanford report shows interlinking widespread wind farms provides as steady a baseload as coal, and cheaper, NO BATTERIES required! The DOE says Idaho can double our electric consumption by 2030 witrh wind power, and the US can provide 30% of it's electricity by then. References at my website. Will you admit you are wrong ogre, or will you just keep insulting everyone??

Hi Kim, glad you do not think I am a nazi, and that you also like wind power. But you excuse your lack of addressing geothermal solutions saying "Well, I wasn't writing about geothermal and wind power at the time. I was giving points that are for nuclear power." Well, not really, if you look at what you wrote. You originally talk and compare nukes to coal, and claim nuke power is "The most "eco-efficient" of all energy sources because it produces the most electricity in relation to its minimal environmental impact." So you originally do address "all energy sources" and trumpet the sales pitch only for nuclear power, don't you?

You further lament that since other states will jump at the chance to build a new nuke, why not have Idaho be the first eager beavers to benefit. Well, really Oregon and California both ban new nuclear power risks from their neighborhoods, to protect their children. As a merchant plant that sells to the highest bidder, Elmore folks would have to outbid Hollywood, that is willing to pay 16 cents/kwhour to heat their hot tubs. We take the risk, they buy the power. You decide!

Nukes do continually emit radioactive gases, so they are not "emission free" as you claim. And the uranium mining uses CO2 and emits lots of radon and uranium dust.

You also claim "Nuclear energy presents the most cost-effective solution, it has the lowest production cost and highest capacity factor." Well, that is what Gillispie's handout claims, that he could produce nuke power for under 3 cents/kwhour, but that is NOT what Areva says! At the Areva written Keystone report at my website, on page 11 you can see nuke power costs 8-11 cents/kwhour "delivered to the line." Add a few cents more for transportation, and a few cents more for Idacorp profit. Raft River geothermal sells at 5.25 cent/kwhr, and the DOE says wind power is produced for 7.5 cents/kwhr. If Butch had not let Id Power drag wind producers through court, we'd have 500 MW on line already in Idaho.

Lastly, since you are proud of your English heritage, Ms BBEB, please use the correct spelling of my British name with a K and an S, ie Rickards, or just call me Peter :-) ...Peter

I wont belabor the point but the anti-nuclear types tend to make this an ideological debate most of the time. I am not for nuclear power but facts are facts and trying to influence someone on an emotional level does not work.

Idaho Power archaic management has a lot to do with this. The Dr. could tell one all about this.

Overall, I think that this issue needs to thought out and all potential costs/benefits laid out on the table. The long term tends to get left out and then we are left squabbling like this.

Ok I am going to bow out of this discussion. We are focusing on the ongoing technical challenges of a technology that has proven itself challenging, but very productive and very safe in part because of the diligence of both regulators and operators.

A friend who recently died (of old age) did the first autopsies on the Alloy 600 problem and assured me that as long as there is diligence and replacements occur as problems arise, it is under control. When you have a tire blow out do you replace all 4? No you watch for signs of uneven wear and drive a bit more defensively.

Nuclear power is humming along at over 100 reactors in the US.

I have nothing against other energy sources mentioned except (though I hate to) I agree with Ogre, food should not be turned into fuel.

I wish you well in Elmore County. As to Idaho, I will continue to visit some of my favorite places when I can and bring just a few tourist dollars with me.

Since I began my website I have only been able to visit Eastern Idaho, but I hope to expand my pages to the west in the next year or so.

http://www.thoughtsandplaces.org/WorldMap/WhereintheWorld12.htm

Have a great life! You (we all) deserve it. --abe--

Hi Dr Abe,

Sorry to see you leave before we got into more of the specific safety flaws, but my best to you too.

But for the readers and innocent citizens of Elmore County, I must comment on your thoughts regarding the ongoing watching and patchwork repair/ replacement of the alloy-600 stress crack problem. You calmly said "When you have a tire blow out do you replace all 4? No you watch for signs of uneven wear and drive a bit more defensively.

Nuclear power is humming along at over 100 reactors in the US."

Well, Abe, if I get a tire blowout, they won't be impounding crops or forcing Idaho families from their homes for decades, and there in lies the difference, especially when we have abundant geothermal and wind power! The ATR, at your old stomping grounds INL, is supposed to be able to test alloys for fatigue correctly, see into the future by rapid bombardment of neutrons. They tested Alooy-600 and FAILED to predict the stress crack problems that nearly melted down Davis-Besse. We will see how well the patch welding withstands continual neutron bombardment, won't we? Even non-scientists understand stress cracks could rupture at any time, especially during the next earthquake. So the NRC is gambling that won't happen, and they renew expired licenses for aged reactors while they watch the stress cracks, as we both agree. Here is an NRC quote on one of their observations, "The weld orientation was found to have a profound effect on the magnitude of crack growth: cracking was found to propagate faster along the dendrites than across them." Swell! These know-it-alls of safety are willing to gamble everybodies farm daily. Gambling the family is not a "conservative value", but funny how many so-called conservatives parrot the pro-nuclear sales pitch.

Please read the ATR safety flaws reference I posted. They have a tin roof for containment, and after they planned to cluster plutonium-238 production there, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and found that the facility is so old and rickety, that earthquake support beams actually had bolts FALLING OUT onto the floor! There is MUCH more listed at www.keepyellowstonenuclearfree.com DOE documents state that an accident there could release 15 MILLION curies of radioactive iodine into Idaho children's air. Not so nice neighbors (Although ALL the people I have met there ARE nice people).

Concerning how well the US fleet is "humming along", well, here are 2 reviews of NRC documents that reveal "the rest of the story" as ol' Paul Harvey used to say. Best of luck to you Abe...Peter

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2007-12-11-nuclear-plant-safety_...

How risky is the new era of nuclear power?

By Paul Davidson, USA TODAY

Nearly two years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the operator of the Indian Point nuclear plant a year to add backup power supplies to the plant's emergency warning sirens. Entergy paid a $130,000 government fine in April -- but still hasn't done the work at the plant 24 miles north of New York City.

At the Peach Bottom nuclear plant south of Harrisburg, Pa., security guards often took 15-minute "power naps," according to a letter from a former security manager to the NRC last March. The NRC began investigating after CBS News aired video of the dozing guards in early September.

Neither of the incidents amounted to an "immediate" safety risk, the NRC says. But they -- and hundreds of other seemingly minor episodes at nuclear power plants in recent years -- are drawing increased scrutiny as the USA prepares to launch a new generation of nuclear reactors.

___________________________

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2007-12-12-nuclear-safety-proble...

A sampling of nuclear safety problems

Since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, there have been 18 "significant precursors," or equipment failures, at U.S. nuclear plants that sharply raise the chance of a reactor core meltdown, says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. There have been four since 1990. Since 1988, there have been 337 precursors that increase the risk of a meltdown more modestly.

Significant precursors

Problems that increase the risk of a core meltdown within a year from an average 1 in 17,000 to greater than 1 in 1,000.

1.) Plant: Davis-Besse

Location: Oak Harbor, Ohio

Date: February 2002

What happened: Leak through cracked nozzles wore away reactor vessel lid. Debris from the corrosion damaged emergency pumps. Loss of water from reactor core through lid could have led to meltdown within months.

2.) Plant: Catawba

Location: Rock Hill, S.C.

Date: February 1996

What happened: During storm, loss of power needed to run vital core cooling systems. Lines linking emergency generator to cooling systems disabled. Plant used alternative generator. No core damage.

3.) Plant: Wolf Creek

Location: Burlington, Kan.

Date: Septenber 1994

What happened: Misaligned valve prevented water from flowing into reactor core from storage tank. Core temperature rose 7 degrees. Workers realigned valve. No core damage.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Nuclear Regulatory Commission | Date | Plant | Location

4.) Plant: Harris

Location: New Hill, N.C.

Date: April 1991

What happened: Emergency system that injects water into reactor core would not have operated properly ebcause of a broken relief valve. Other water supply systems available. No core damage.

Less-serious precursors

Problems that increase the risk of a core meltdown from an average 1 in 17,000 to up to 1 in 1,000.

5.) Plant: Clinton

Location: Clinton, Ill.

Date: January 2006

What happened: System that notices when emergency tank water gets too low and instead pumps water from another source was set at too low a level. Water would have run out in event of core overheating. Found during test. No core damage.

6.) Plant: Callaway

Location: Callaway, Fulton Miss.

Date: March 2002

What happened: Debris from water tank's rubber lining floating in water. Could have caused failure of all emergency pumps that cool reactor in case of overheating. Found during test. No core damage.

7.) Plant: Columbia

Location: Richland, Wash.

Date: April 2002

What happened: Electrical breakers that operate both primary and backup pumps to cool the core in emergency were faulty, so all systems might have failed in crisis. Found during check. No core damage.

8.) Plant: Kewaunee

Location: Carlton, Wis.

Date: February 2001

What happened: Cables that operate both primary and backup core-cooling systems located in same area and too close to sprinkler systems. In case of fire that activated sprinklers, water likely would have shorted both primary and backup emergency systems needed to cool core. Found during check. No core damage.

Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission

DOES PETER WANT MORE OF MY FLAWED TOMATOES?~

"Gosh, aren't you charming! Where are you from?"

I-5 CORRIDOR! I was an indentured pipemover on a farm outside the Mtn Home Air Base in the 60s, and before that, a family slave in Boise forced to carefully peel decades of wallpaper from both sides of a wall that was knocked down after I returned back to LA; brother decided to enlarge the living room.

Always wanted to return, but work kept me along the Pacific Coast: Seattle to San Diego. ;-(

"Hmmm, how wrong can an ogre be? "

Careful, this is tomato growing season, you know!

But, its nice that you see positives for geothermal. Something I would prefer over solar and wind. Just dont quote all those superlatives and studies to support them.

Science has been a big disappointment to me over the years. Starting with the claims after Mt St Helens eruption in '80 that the area will now be devastated and sterile for 50-100 years.

Surprise! They found fish, insects, and plants within a week.

And science, since the media has gotten involved, cant even say anything nice about Global Climate Change. Increasing growing seasons and areas of the world that can start to contribute to reducing third world hunger, not to mention opening access for more energy resources to power an Energy Hungry World.

" Will you admit you are wrong ogre, or will you just keep insulting everyone??"

I would of used THREE question marks!

You are great at finding the little OOPS in nuclear, give it time and similar oops will surface in GEO energy sources as well.

If I were building nuke plants I would also build SENIOR tract homes for low income retirees. They would appreciate the quiet compared to windmills and geothermal ventings. And, not worry about the media-hype of illnesses.

Regrettably, between MEDIA-SCIENCE and our lack of Citizen Legislators without their own agenda, it all comes down to how much backdoor Campaign Gifts are given to area politicians.

So, fight on and keep believing what you do. I will stick to what Im confident is proven safe. After all, if Mexico, with all their problems, can have several nuke plants operating safely, no reason we cant as well.

Our weakest link was Trojan (Rainier OR) and its been turned OFF.

BLEAH!!!

Thanks for your bio Alex. I understand your anti-science anti-media feelings better now, and glad you still have a sense of humor under your anger.

You originally claimed geothermal required batterries and created hazardous waste though, and you really never admitted you were wrong. And if you continue to reject ALL science as fake, then you will not understand how important it is to push geothermal for US energy independence and National Security. Please consider using the Ron Regan approach to information, whether it is science, salesmen, preachers, or media, "Trust, but verify." Which really meant DON"t trust UNTIL you verify, but that wasn't as catchy a phrase.

But glad you really do like geothermal saying "But, its nice that you see positives for geothermal. Something I would prefer over solar and wind. Just dont quote all those superlatives and studies to support them."

Well, in 1988, when I jumped into this mess to stop the clustering of all nuclear weapons dirty work in Idaho, the politicians and INL (INEEL then) claimed no one had any scientific proof of any problem at INL, and there was nothing to clean up either. INL claimed the anti's had no science, but I went and talked about the buried dumped plutonium that is leaking into the water supply. Now we are on the Superfund clean up. So I have to keep quoting the DOE documents that the politicians and INL speech teams never mention in their shiny rosy speeches.

You are free to hang your hat on the claim Mexico has no problems with their nuclear power plants. Funny how you trust the Mexican government to tell the truth, but not scientists, but that is your priviledge, and I defend your right to that..Peter

I love Boise, but Mountain Home has nothing to offer(other than a good golf course) If it were not for the Air Force base this "city" would be a ghost town full of people living in the stone age. I heard all the hear say when I got orders here about how the local bussiness owners kept out all the chain stores, like Lowes or restaurants. Without wall mart this place would really suck, most Military spend their time/ money in Boise...why ? Because, here is a prime example of how a major bussiness could benefit this area, and you people want to stop it with faulty logic. You offer nothing and leach off the Military community. I will be glad to keep on supporting America with my service, its just a shame I have to spend some of the best years of my life here in Mountain Home. I have been around the world and have seen what people can do with given oppurtunity for over 16 years. Don't worry, I have put in for orders soon after arriving here. Good luck Mountain Home, cause thats all you could ask for...Luck.

Hi Paul Revere,

Well, you critisize the above blog as "faulty logic" without being specific as to what DOE document I provided that seems like "faulty logic" to you.

You say you put in for a transfer soon after arriving, but then seem to say if Elmore only had a nuclear plant you would stay. I guess that is your example of good logic.

If you are really in the military, then God Bless YOU, and thank you for your service. But all the military folks I know are not whiny vindictive cry babies, so I have to wonder if you are just Walmartgreeter from AEHI, with another easy-to-open yahoo email account, desparately trying to bring the stock you bought for a dollar back up to 20 cents...Peter

This whole nuclear thing has me tied up in knots. Instead of examining the issue it seems that there is ever shifting shell game based on opinions and thinly disguised factual data. Frankly we have no idea just what a nuclear power plant would be like in Idaho. Instead we're going to tear at each other like a rabid pack of mongrels.

Yaay!! Democracy at its finest!

It is really depressing that I've spent over 18 years of my life, here and overseas, to protect the rights of the "educated" to slander others. (And yes, I'm an Idaho native.) Many of us here on base feel that Mt. Home is a wasted opportunity that needs development. I'm personally offended that the Dr. has labeled us "whiny vindictive cry babies". Because of the verbal abuse I've fully slid into a pro-nuclear mindset. (DrPeter & OpinionMissy need not respond.)

LOL, I bought in at 5 cents but that is besides the point. I am in the Military and I can tell you from all the people I have come into contact with the majority don't like it here, but we still do our jobs and live life here with our famalies. I am not being a crybaby,thats the point of having an opinion, I am stating the obvious and letting you know that the men and women who get stationed here eventually leave. When they do, they take with them the story of Mountain Home. Their experiences and view of the city. What do you think that view is ? The great school system ? No, did West elementry I beleive ever get its accredidation back ? You don't even have a community college for adult education. Being a "Doctor", if you are one, you should appreciate an educated populace. But, over educated people like yourself are usually the reason problems and stagnation exist. Bringing jobs and opportunities is what we need. Everyone wants to be energy independent but at what costs ?

Not in my back yard right? I should have used the terms ignorance and fear instaed of faulty logic, sorry. So, why not put Mountain home and elmore on the map ? Why not let some common folk make a profit and get a leg up from a smart investment, instead of a Washington bail out from Obama ? And..The days of the city leaders of mountain home

hording the rewards of owning a bussiness while shutting out competition and progress will come to a end. I would rather see another community near here get the power plant anyways, Mountain Home dosent deserve it. Worried about pollution, please, ever go out to camp or hike and see the mess left from"sportsman" ? How many coal miners have been hurt/killed or gotten disease from minning coal ?. and to close...I hope, if your not to above it Dr., the next time you vist walmart, the greeter read this blog, recognizes you and flips you the bird. Cheers.

Howdy Spudn8tor and Paul,

Please note I appreciated politely the calm discussion of DOE documents with very pro-nuclear people like Abe Vanliun and NCSU NE. I have not labeled them whiny nor vindictive because they stuck to the facts and spoke honestly. It was a pleasant informative discussion.

But the nasty tone and total lack of details makes that an appropriate label for some bloggers, and I call'em like I see'em.

Spud, please detail what DOE or NRC document reference I provided that you call "ever shifting shell game based on opinions and thinly disguised factual data."

Paul, glad you admit you have bought stock in AEHI at a nickel, but again you refused to pinpoint what reference I provided that was "faulty logic." Your simply having an opinion does not make you a whiny crybaby, it's the nasty whining and crying that does...Peter

Right on Spud,

We sit inbetween two Reservoir's and countless outdoor rec oppurtunities. We have a need for apartments for young Airman and Jr. NCO's to rent from. What do we get ? more car lots and banks.

We have slum lords that take advantage of the Military housing situation. What ever happened to the racr track that was supposed to go in out on Simco rd ? Maybe that was just wishfull thinking.

This place has countless missed opurtunities because of self intrest of some manipulative individuals. Most probably live near Legacy park..LOL. Someday it will be very clear that Mountain Home missed the boat and future generations will have to suffer. If Mountain Home had samll town charm and was say like Idaho city for example, sure keep it small and original, but like it or not, your sustained from the Air Force and a speed bump for Boise and Twin Falls.

Hey Doc,

We have a term in the Military for guys like you.

Congrats, after reviwing all your posts on this topic, you have earned the title- TOOL.

Peter, I have an opinion and express it and you say I am a whinner ? You sound like a typical left winger. But anyways, I just get real dissapointed when the "Have's" take advantage of the "Have not's ", and I see my fellow man not take what they have in front of them and make it better than what they found it, regardless of what the topic may be. Mountain Home could be much better. This Nuclear power plant could be a major step in that end.

Hi Paul,

You still have refused to be specific on what document I provided is "faulty logic." I still defend your right to stick to name calling though. It is your priviledge and I defend your right, but I wish you'd stick to the facts.

Again, your simply having an opinion does not make you whiny just because we disagree. But to quote your original post "You offer nothing and leach off the Military community. I will be glad to keep on supporting America with my service, its just a shame I have to spend some of the best years of my life here in Mountain Home. I have been around the world and have seen what people can do with given oppurtunity for over 16 years. Don't worry, I have put in for orders soon after arriving here." Well Paul Revere, whatever your real name is, that is simply whining, isn't it? ...peter

No, there may be some venting involved due to living here going on three years. I will give you that. But you haven't given any solutions have you ? to Mountain Home's stagnation or Idaho's power solutions ? Hmmmm, maybe you have other motives, are you invested in something else ? Everyone is motivated by something. Whats your motives from ? are you an EX hippie trying to make up from wasted years of smoking dope ? Or maybe you could use the companionship of a woman ?

I really doubt you just in this stance to "help" all the rest of us under educated pleebs.

Anyone can pull up and manipulate stats on any topic to back up what ever they want. You offer nothing except why we shouldn't build it. What are the solutions ???? Thats your problem, your hung up on a term I used" Faulty Logic". Don't you think that since the last reactor was built in the us and worldwide we have the knowledge and science to make this work? Wind,solar and hydro don't get the job done at a cost that makes sense.

And I don't buy into the "Green" life style that is just a huge industry in sheeps clothing. IE AL Gore. Coal and oil..People are tired of the BS. I see Nuclear as an option that needs to be explored. We need to get off of the middle east nipple for oil. We need real options now. Don't pass this problem on to my Daughter.

Yo Paul,

Gee, you claimed to have read all my posts when you called me a tool. Now you are claiming I have offered no solutions, so obviously you lied about reading all my posts!

So for the third time this blog, I'll provide the solution. I'll repeat what I wrote to OGRE on June 10 at 10:23 AM, ie, "Hmmm, how wrong can an ogre be? Geothermal runs 24/7, no batteries required. Idaho's Raft River is selling to Id Power for 5.25 cents/kw hour. Uni of Utah Geophysics Dept says the US can provide 5 times it's 1990 electric consumption with geothermal. Bush zeroed out the geothermal subsidy.

The 2007 Stanford report shows interlinking widespread wind farms provides as steady a baseload as coal, and cheaper, NO BATTERIES required! The DOE says Idaho can double our electric consumption by 2030 witrh wind power, and the US can provide 30% of it's electricity by then. References at my website. Will you admit you are wrong ogre, or will you just keep insulting everyone??"

You can read the references and more at my website at www.MyIdahoEnergy.com You will see no shrine of glutten hypocrit Al Snore Gore there!

My motivation for 21 years has been told many times. I am selfishly protecting my children who are downwind of these nuclear nightmares. I also do it for the innocent children who know not what their fathers do, but no doubt, like any animal, my original motivation was protecting my kids as an instinctual reaction to threat. But I could have moved upwind and ignored the kids of Idaho long ago, but despite my selfish nature, it really gets under my skin how devastating the disaster these nuclear schemes can cause, so I stay to fight the right fight.

You now say you are a crusader for the have not's. Good for you, but in this situation you have bought stock in Gillispie's merchant nuke plant scheme. While California bans these potential disasters, Elmore folks will have to outbid Vegas and LA and those willing to pay more than 16 cents/kwhr to heat their Hollywood hot tubs! So who is exploiting the have not's here Paul. Isn't it you and Gillispie? Your man Donnie G has gone through most all the $8 million he took from stock suckers, and he drives around in his Mazerratti selling more pie in the sky promises of mad money profit. But feel free to keep calling me names...Peter

My question was never answered from you Doc. When was the last Nuclear power plant mishap in the U.S? I'm just curious..

OK, had to come back once more since I saw a minor slap at our southern neighbor, Mexico. Laguna Verde's 2 units are being run well, according to the Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris. To be a member of that agency requires you demonstrate that you are capable of runnign a system according to internationally agreed safety standards and protocols. Does that mean they never have problems? No, but they are capabale of detecting them and dealing with them just as we do here in the US.

A lot of countries run nuclear plants, and so so quite safely by and large. It is in their best interest to do so.

I spoke with one of the literal fathers of reactor probabilisitic risk assessment today and asked him, with the litany of problems at nuclear plants you can find on the internet, what he thought of nuclear plant safety generally. He said we hadsome surprisesalong the way but are coping just fine. He suggested putting the risk from operating plants into a societal context, and recommended reading a co-workers of his' book, "Technological Risk," which does just that. From that perspective, the risks which we accept daily, especially those asociated with obesity (the skinny old dude was looking right at me, wise guy!) the technological problems being addressed in nuclear power plants offer a negligible risk.

Sorry, but i still believe nuclear plants, and we have 104 online with one more in the process of coming back online here in the US, are SAFE, as that word is commonly used and understood!

It is a good thing Areva is learning all its lessons the hard way in Finland and France, so when they come and build the same type of reactor here they will not make the same mistakes. Our regulators learn from these other regulators and vice-versa, and won't miss a trick.

Peter Richards what is up with throwing around the DR. in a nuclear conversation? You're a foot doctor for gosh sakes. Everyone knows podiatrists are the failures of medical schools or at least lowest ranked students in their class. What are you going to tell me you always dreamed of working with hang nails? I imagine your professors said lets get this guy his degree so we can stop listen to his ridiculous blabbering.

You are the true definition of a nimby. You have been successful by yelling loader than anyone and by narrowing the debate over issues that have already been resolved. Why Dr. Abe spent any of his time talking to a wind bag like your self is beyond me.

You are an idiot who shames democracy by your fear mongering. Sure call me "fake name" this or that. Maybe there are just a lot of people who think you are an idiot.

I maybe a bit drunk but I will wake up sober. You on the other hand will wake up and still be the same unreasoning idiot you are. In sum you are a nimby of epic proportions and deserve all the planter warts you can treat.

Ta-Tah

Hi again Abe and AFBADGER,

AFB, I did indeed answer your question, and posted a list of mishaps and NRC violations above on June 10th, 9:27 PM. Here are 2 of them:

1.) Plant: Davis-Besse

Location: Oak Harbor, Ohio

Date: February 2002

What happened: Leak through cracked nozzles wore away reactor vessel lid. Debris from the corrosion damaged emergency pumps. Loss of water from reactor core through lid could have led to meltdown within months.

____________

5.) Plant: Clinton

Location: Clinton, Ill.

Date: January 2006

What happened: System that notices when emergency tank water gets too low and instead pumps water from another source was set at too low a level. Water would have run out in event of core overheating. Found during test. No core damage.

_________________________

So pro-nukers can brag, "yah, but they didn't melt down", but the list is hardly what I would describe as "safe," and "humming along" as Abe did. At Davis-Besse the trusted nuclear engineer covered up the football size acid erosion that left only 1/4 inch of containment to keep running for profit. When a fellow employee luckily found out, he blew the whistle in time to stop the meltdown, but he was persecuted and charged with crimes. After years of suffering he was finally exonerated. So we were LUCKY. No one knew to look for alloy-600 stress cracks, and the cover up guy was lucky to see it by accident, but then he lied about it. Wind mill inspectors can lie and cover up, but you don't impound crops and force families to leave there state for decades, do you? That is the difference in the risk personal risk of individuals from driving, drinking, obesity, smoking etc. That is the HUGE difference of safety risks of energy supplies. When the US can produce more than we need with steady geothermal, and widespread wind, that is the choice that is safest, and will also provide millions in job and tax money. At the Clayton reactor, before the inspectors found the main AND back up water was too low, if there had been an accident, the NRC admits it would meltdown. If we lie, cover up, and generally have equipment favor in the good ol' USA, I don't think it is preejudice to assume this hapens in Mexico too> I love Mexico and the great Mexican people, so it was no slap at Mexico Abe. But I found it ironic that Ogre's Limbaugh type rant against everybody hung his hat on the mere fact that since they have reactors in Mexico, then it MUST be safe. That's just funny, and laughter is good for you. No insult to Mexico intended.

Nice website though Abe, and great pictures of your travels. I have sat through 21 years of INL scientists trying to insist we compare risks of a meltdown to obesity and personal risks. I have an open challenge to debate any or all of them anytime, anywhere, but they refuse, after the first attempt. They prefer one sided Rotary Club speeches where no one has read the small print on nuclear safety flaws. You did not respond to my pointing out the TMI study you quoted also DID find an increase in 2 types of cancers, ie, "Trends for two types of cancer ran counter to expectation. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma showed raised risks relative to both accident and routine emissions; lung cancer (adjusted only indirectly for smoking) showed raised risks relative to accident emissions, routine emissions, and background gamma radiation."

And Abe, you have the right to blind faith in inspectors. you originally claimed Areva was building safely all over the world, then correctly ate a little crow when you read all the serious safety flaws they have been busted for. So now you restate your blind faith saying we will learn lessons from that fiasco and the inspectors "won't miss a trick." Really? You believe there are such things as perfect human beings? How did the beloved ATR miss the Alloy-600 stress crack problem during it's trusted testing? How did the Columbia spaceship blow up on lift off AFTER all the decades of lessons learned in spaceflight? The answer is simple. Humans make mistakes, sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. Every year an operating room full of dedicated doctors and nurses have accidents. More than once a patient has one diseased leg, but the medical team cuts off the good leg, instead off the bad one. That's a risk we HAVE to face, because the diseased leg would kill the patient with infection if the risk of surgery was not taken. (The odd advice is the patient should write in magic marker "This is the GOOD leg"!) But on energy supplies, we have a choice of much safer geothermal and wind. The INL speech teams and our politicians ALWAYS frame the discussion as coal vs nukes. That is just blatantly irresponsible and lobbyist driven. There is no need, and Elmore families do not deserve to be exploited to heat the hot tubs in Hollywood. Respectfully...Pter

Howdy jfarmer,

You posted while I was responding to Abe and AFB, so I missed your charming post. Everybody I know, from age 2-102, calls me Peter. I insist no one call me doctor. I do use it on my sign in, and clearly indicate I am a podiatrist. I listen to everyone with or without a degree, and usually learn more from those without. Most of us have learned the most from a carpenter, but I'll turn the other cheek, and you are free to call me names, and avoid specifics.

For da record, I did work my way through college at the age of 19, and podiatrists use the same texts and even professors as the local medical school. We have full DEA drug licenses, and full surgical privileges to do orthopedic surgery on feet, like joint replacements. But like I said to Abe and AFB above, doctors can be stupid too. So I share the documents in these public forums, so everyone gets a chance to hear "the rest of the story" that Gillispie never tells. Perhaps I misunderstood the DOE document on containment flaws that can lead to "catastrophic failure." I share the reference and keep asking you to try to correct the bottom line information. But you are free to keep drinking without thinking, but my guess is you won't be sober in the morning, and I will still be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Sleep it off...peter

Hey There Dr. Foot,

"Turn the other check" like your wimpy *** has ever had a choice. I can't wait till St. Peter talks to you. The flames are eternal and they burn worse than acid you use on planter warts. In the mean time inhale deeply when you're working on those bunions.

Ta-Tah there nimby

Hey jfarmer9,

You bet I have a choice to turn the other cheek or not. I work out daily, and keep my 6 pack on my flat belly, not in just in my refrigerator. Bet I can do more pull ups, sit ups, and push ups than you.

But I would never hurt anyone unless it was self defense, or helping a victim of a violent drunk like you. If you physicallly attacked me in your drunken rages, I bet you'd be knocked senseless in 60 seconds. Well, let's say knocked out in 60 seconds, because you are already senseless :-) ...Peter

Hey Abe,

Had to do a search for problems at the Mexican nuclear plant, and sure seems it has NOT been "humming along" safely afterall. The web page from this book does not allow a copy of the best snippet, but it provides a reference stating that by 2000, they have had 60 safety problems leading to emergency shutdowns. Some have lead to deaths, some to worker exposure of excess radiation. It also says explosions inside the plant have lead to seismic waves reaching 4.0 on the Richter scale. Please understand my website references have been checked well, often speaking to DOE authors of studies, but I have not vetted this reference. Just had to share since it appears legitimate and you have said they were safe and humming along well. The author is James JF Forest, Head of Terrorism Defense at West Point. His credentials and those of his co-authors is listed starting on page 511. Do you want to talk about terrorism & cyber-terrorism at nuclear power plants now? I have lots of good DOE and Homeland Security quotes on my website, but this one looks like ammo for my side. I always learn something from these blogs, so thanks to you and Ogre for claiming the Mexican reactor is so safe Elmore should have one! :-) ..Peter

This link should take you to page 116, with access to the full book. Found at http://books.google.com/books?id=oLISlVGPH-gC&pg=PA116&lpg=PA116&dq=%22Laguna+Ve...

NOW YOU HAVE BROUGHT OUT MY WRATHFUL SIDE!

Comparing my comments to Limbaugh; whom I havent listened to for decades!

So, for Peter I point out that its ironic how both DOCTORS misspell so much compared to us transient players on this stage.

As to Mexico and their NUKE PLANTS, I wouldnt worry about having a family living nearby. Sure there are things of HAPPENSTANCE, but anything done in life has bumps.

This post is primarily for the military based at MUO; funny how I still remember those letters.

Wishing that Mtn Home leaves the STONE AGE for progress is a young man's mistake.

In my travels Ive found some impressive small towns that I wish had remained small for my retirement. Among them are Mtn Home, Logan UT,and Moorpark, CA.

When you retire, you develop a strong desire to unburden stressors in your life and enjoy your latter days.

Do you know how annoying it is to go to a grocery store for advertised items and not have them there because they sell out the first day? And, you can get RAIN CHECKS, but the clerks no longer scribble them out at the checkstand and instead you have to wait for someone from Cust Service to show up.

Plus then, when you find out they are really out, its too late to get back in line with a substitute you dont really want because the lines are longer.

I try to cut my LIVING COSTS, and having to run errands more then once aweek is a pain.

Give me a nice garden to enjoy and a small town and send those pushing for PROGRESS to the big cities who foolishly think its a good thing.

As to my supporting GEOTHERMAL: until they put it under the same microscope as NUCLEAR, the hidden costs and losses to mankind wont be detailed.

(PS~ regarding those who parasite off the military in unfair ways, make better use of Craigslist! The power of the PEN, you know!)

Jeeze, people, there is no reason to attack people! Why demean the doctor? We can no longer debate an issue constructively when it becomes an insulting match of ignorant wit! Most people just want to get the opinions of others in order to make an informed decision. I value and validate everyone's comments. Everyone here has something to say that I may need to hear. Can we please keep it to the point and not insult people's livelyhood?

Peter: I apologize for getting your name wrong. I thought that I posted a comment the other day, but it never showed up so I will do it again. I think that you have every right to be proud of the hard work it took to have the honor of having Dr. in your name. I respect anyone who works for a degree. I am sorry that others have attacked you for that.

Paul you said something very important here. "Anyone can pull up and manipulate stats on any topic to back up what ever they want." I have always thought it funny how often people throw numbers and percentages around. It is the perfect tool to make a point because most people would never take the time to check it. (and even know how to check it) Seriously! Did you know that 43% of men will turn to insults when they have no real response? And 32% of women will defend that person who is being attacked even if they don't believe in their comments? Yea, it's a fact! I could say that 52.5% of the people in Mtn Home are level-headed common-sense folks and who could prove me wrong? Any stats used in an argument can be skewed in any way to make a point. And 78% of the people agree with that fact! 12% are still wondering what the heck I'm talking about and 7% are adding these numbers together and finding out that it doesn't come to 100% so what about the other 3%?

For me, all the numbers and percentages can cloud things! I have to try and look at things in the pro and con way. I look at what all the experts say. I try to read what other town's people have to say concerning their power plants. I read over all the information that was provided. I am still in the pro-nuke plant position. Rezone the area and if the plant is never completed, the zone reverts back to ag. (time:7:08am)

You're soo right Kim. Think about it, 52% of the people who voted in the last national election can't really all be that stupid?? My guess is sheep.

Same with the nuke plant. Scrutinize both sides of the argument and somewhere inbetween is the TRUTH. Leave emotions out of the equations and actually look for the FACT and then make a decision. Neither side in this argument will tell you the whole truth. It's not their nature. The state facts and polls and stats that will skew your support their direction. Is nuke power a good thing? YES. Is THIS nuke plant good for Elmore County? Probably not.

Peter, I do not buy into the hype from these people who make their living and stake their reputations on being experts on anti-terrorism.

It reminds me of reading stories by insane people. Everything is a threat, everything is a weapon, if society has members that turn evil and ugly enough there is nothing that is safe. If the world gets to that state here, I will simply check out of that world, why bother living if life is filled with dread and fear?

There could be more attention to security and safety at Laguna Verde, and there seems to be a problem with "nuclear culture" -- a culture that empowers workers at all levels to call management's attention to a safety concern and requires management to record and report every such instance and what was done in response. That is a cultural thing that needs continual work in all sectors of society, it is a challenge everywhere because it goes against the hierarchical way that companies and organizations and the military are usually set up. Nuclear utilities have to constantly work on this, but most do it right.

There was an interesting and fair discussion of this topic at Laguna Verde in 2006 (it never mentioned these deaths and irradiation incidents, but I have worked in government sponsored places where both occurred and there were investigations done and corrections made, then operations resumed, heavy industry has its worker risks, and the nuclear business is a heavy industry. There is constant effort in these plants to work at maintaining a safety-first 'nuclear culture,' but you'd be surprised at how many workers with experience think it 'manly' to skip a personal protective device or because they are lazy take some risk (leaning from rather than climbing down and moving a ladder is a common example).

This was a good article that told both sides of the story and I'll go with the two calmer voices.

http://www.allbusiness.com/operations/facilities/832399-1.html

The two calmer voices said there are plenty of problems at Laguna Verde, but it is not a source of either great risk or grave concern.

Life is just not as dangerous as these citations of problems found (and either being closely watched or corrected) make it seem. Life is more dangerous on the highways of your and everyone else's state.

You keep saying I am an INL type, actually I have worked at both ANL and PNL, and have recently sponsored work at INL, hence my visits to Eastern Idaho. My current employer is the federal government, but I do not make any statements representing a government position when I write from home under my own name of course. If I did the government would be choking on all the crow I seem to volunteer to eat from time to time.

As far as your being a podiatrist is concerned, I am no more qualified in these matters than you are, by training. My PhD was on the physical chemistry of the Great Salt Lake. But I have spent the last 3 decades in the nuclear business, and am very comfortable with the state of that business precisely because I see evidence of a nuclear culture at work when most of the detected flaws are self-identified, few are regulator-identified, and are being actively watched or addressed.

Sorry, but I can't get any more excited about lists of problems than I can about the list of things that need fixing everytime I take my car to the shop. We go down the list and fix safety-related items and stop when my money runs out. Usually way before the grage owner thinks I have covered myself adequately.

I trust the nuclear industry to do the same thing. Mesing around like was done at Davis Besses cost them many hundreds of millions of dollars. It is in these plants' best interest, their business interest, to self-identify and stay on top of safety issues.

I once asked the CEO of Southern Companies if they focused their research and inspection budgets only on what the regulator required or suggested, and he said that was a path to being on the regulator's "watch list," which is a very expensive way to run a nuclear plant.

He said his company is serious about being proactive, they stay on top of any issues they are constantly on the lookout for, they particiapte diligently in INPO which sends lessons learned from any plant to all plants, and by being this way the NRC trusts them and their costs for being regulated are reasonable.

I was hearted when a year or so ago this rich dude said he was going to buy an existing power plant and make a lot of money. He said he would make more than the previous owner, for just one example he would save a million a year by simply not being a member of the nuclear industry safety group INPO. The then Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission responded, as reported in a New York newspaper where I read about it, that NRC does not issue licesenses to non-INPO members. INPO membership is part and parcel of demonstrating a working nuclear safety culture. The rich dude did not buy that plant.

So catalogue all the problems you wish, I will still be a supporter of the industry because I look at their overall safety record, and it is better than that for most any heavy industry you can think of, including or especally mining and construction.

A pleasure chatting with you. Glad you liked the photos on my site. I try. --abe--

Hi Abe and all,

I have never asked anyone to believe me because I am a podiatrist. I quote THE experts, YOU decide! Elmore's choice...

RE: "I do not buy into the hype from these people who make their living and stake their reputations on being experts on anti-terrorism.It reminds me of reading stories by insane people. Everything is a threat, everything is a weapon, if society has members that turn evil and ugly enough there is nothing that is safe. If the world gets to that state here, I will simply check out of that world, why bother living if life is filled with dread and fear? "

I respect your right to refuse to believe terrorism is a fact of life now. You do lock your doors at night don't you? Preventive defense does not mean one lives in dread and fear, it's just wise, and we sleep well. You are free to say the author, who is head of the West Point Terrorism Defense department is only out for a buck, and just paranoid about nothing. But even the Pope stopped having blind faith and defends himself with a bullet proof Popemobile now. Defense from terrorism is important to our families, and to our country. Why else are our troops risking their lives daily in the Middle east? Should we tell them not to worry, and bring them all home now? 9/11 was a wake up call. The British subway bombing was a reminder, this will not go away. Creating a national energy plan that is the LEAST vulnerable to foreign terrorists AND disgruntled employees is key to protecting families and defending the country. Having widespread wind and geothermal is infinitely wiser than putting all our eggs in nuclear baskets. Having millions of people dependent one one nuclear plant is setting ourselves up for a disaster. You don't have to "check out" if it gets that bad. It already is that bad, but we don't have to live in "dread and fear." Calmly defending ourselves while we enjoy life and family can easily be done.

you and Kim are still missing the point on the huge devastation Chernobyl like disasters had. Yes, we have containment that Chernobyl did not, but I provided the latest DOE/NRC document that admits many scenarioes that could breach containment leadng to "catastrophic failure." This simply can not happen with wind, geothermal, nor solar. Those simple sources can over supply the whole country's energy needs, so why do you want to gamble nothing bad will happen with nuclear power?

Gillispie sells stock, and asks for permits, claiming meltdowns can never happen, and if the impossible did, the containment will never fail. Kim buys into the nuclear salespitch, and claims to have read all the information, but summed it up best when she admitted, "For me, all the numbers and percentages can cloud things!" Kim believes "Anyone can pull up and manipulate stats on any topic to back up what ever they want." While it is ALWAYS good to check everyone's sources, and SOME stats can be made up or irrelevant, most the statements I make are verifiable facts. Gillispie claims containment can never fail, but DOE/NRC admit it can have a "catastrophic failure." I provided the NRC website where you can verify I am telling the truth. Not everyone lies MHBouncer. Gillispie simply lied, and Kim is free to believe him, but Kim, I doubt you "read all the information" as you claimed. Thanks for trying to stop the name calling of my opponents, though, but I prefer they show their true colors, and represent Gillispie's backers as un-informed name-callers, because it reflects the truth. But I do appreciate factual discussion with folks like Dr Abe MUCH MORE, because more botton line information gets out in a polite all-American way. Where Gillispie denies problems, and calls me an "idiot" and a "communist", Abe admitted he was originaly wrong, and the French DO have construction problems. Abe said originally the present reactors are "humming along just fine". He has now admitted the NRC DOES admit to modern day real scenarios that could have lead to meltdowns if not discovered. This is progress way above the level of information Gillispie is pushing with DVD and handouts that lie about safety risks. So now we are discussing the true facts that Elmore should consider. If you read about sleeping sceurity guards, and faulty safety water readiness, and criminal cover up of acid leaks from alloy-600, you are free to agree with Abe that this risk is the same or less than driving a car, and good for Elmore County to risk to sell power to California. You are free to agree with Abe that since his friends mean well, and care about going to safety meetings, stuff like the Davis-Besse fiasco will NEVER happen, and inspectors will be honest and "never niss a trick." I think it is common sense that humans and scienctist all have flaws and we all make mistakes sometimes, and the consequences of failure are too big, when Idaho and the US have MUCH safer alternatives. The "conservative" approach is to gamble the least with your families health and the country's security. But at least we are discussing true facts now with Abe.

While Abe's nuclear friends are nice, disgruntled employees can happen at any time, and when nuclear workers "go postal" they can meltdown the plant, not just the post office. Windmill workers can go nuts too, but we won't impoubd crops, nor evacuate Idaho, will we? Why gamble it will never happen? Three New Years ago INL had an armed security guard flip out, and barricade himself in a no-go area. Lucky they finally talked him down, but a lover's triangle gone awry was the motivation for the 1961 SL-1 meltdown apparently. It's the old "If I can't have her, then no one can" syndrome. Sure we screen people, but remember the lady astronaught that went psycho last summer in a jilted lover's triangle. She was psychologically screened more than nuke employees, but the inspectors made a mistake, eh Abe? One disgruntled Caifornia nuke worker was caught with an anti-tank rocket launcher, (fortunately). But all you need is to hack the computer systems these days. When I was quoting the DOE and IAEA on nuclear cyber-terrorism one my only debate with Gillispie, Don shouted, "There are NO computers at a nuclear reactor you idiot!" I had to laugh and wondered how long he has been retired! Gillispie now refuses to debate me, and Doug McConnaughy refused to send me a tape of the show! Abe is free to think this is just another top officer scaring people for no reason, or to make a buck, or just to painful to think about in this sweet life. But at least we are discussing the facts, eh? As I said, I have never asked anyone to believe me because I am a podiatrist. I quote THE experts, YOU decide! Elmore's choice...Peter

Found at...

http://www.inl.gov/videos/sc/security_expo.pdf

"I think the important thing to keep in mind is the adversaries don't stand still when technologies are being developed," said Mike Sparks, director of the DOE Office of Technology. "The adversary has full use of the technology in advance to being made. And if we stand still and don't take the initiative to stay a step ahead on the technology, I think we're setting ourselves up for a disaster sometime down in the future."

Here is a snippet from the International equivalent of the NRC on cyber-terrorism at nuclear power plants at

http://entrac.iaea.org/I-and-C/WS_IAEA-E...

Attacks by outsiders

hackers gaining access through external data transmissions lines

denial of services attacks through a flooding of important communication channels

Attacks by insiders

switching off an important computer system

intentional release of computer viruses into the Intranet

modification of important parameters

installation of malevolent code into the systems

Attacks with a combination of actions from both insiders and outsiders

the largest hazard potential.

threats include all the threats above

a possibility that an attack is planned and implemented over a period of time

Oh Peter~

The harder you try to derail the inevitable, the more I wish I could change our society back to a REPUBLIC then a democracy.

The majority is too easily fooled! Best proof is the election of the OBAMA-ites from the Clinton-era. (Note that most companies in dire financial straits are simply selling new common shares to repay what they didnt really need to borrow in the first place?)

Its one thing to not support Yucca Mtn Project, but another to override the majority of the Congress who voted in favor of it for political reasons, rather then SCIENCE; and not media-science.

After all the bombs that ended WW2 werent voted on!

You are trying too hard to derail the future that will only help the region. Maybe not in the jobs that will keep those areas populated, but in a reliable resource far enough away from major cities where any of your SCARY SCENARIOS are easily handled.

If you think GEO is such a great resource, then find Venture Capitalists to fund it! If you can eventually create energy cheaper and better then NUCLEAR, that will take its place.

As to all your WHAT IFs, try relocating. I did when LA became a greater negative in my life then an asset.

Hi Alex,

RE: Your advice that nuclear power is "a reliable resource far enough away from major cities where any of your SCARY SCENARIOS are easily handled."

Your missing the point Alex. Lover's triangles gone awry happen anywhere, anytime, not just where the "important people" live in big cities. It already happened in Idaho in 1961 at the SL-1 meltdown. The psycho "Security" Guard that flipped out was at remote INL 3 years ago.

Faulty safety equipment listed on the NRC violations list can happen ANYWHERE. Why should Elmore families take the risk , to heat Hollywood hot tubs, when California refuses to allow any new nuclear plant risks in their neighborhoods, to protect their kids?

This is not just a "what if" stupid "scary scenario", as you claim. Cyber-hackers attack the Pentagon and DOE daily multiple times. Sometimes they have succeeded and stolen information. Malware was recently found in our transmission grid computer system, waiting for orders to attack. Davis-Besse had to shut down from a cyber attack. The DOE, the IAEA, and Homeland Security admit nuclear plants are vulnerable to disgruntled employees and foreign terrorists, so why can't you admit it. The "security" guards failed over half of the NRC test invasions by armed intruders.

Are you aware Bush cut the geothermal subsidies so he could offer billions in nuclear power loan subsidies? No Venture Capitalist, including Warren Buffet's withdrawn misadventure in Payette, Idaho, is willing to risk their money on expensive risky nuclear power. It is NOT cost effective without tax payer BILIIONS. Donnie G missed the deadline to apply, but keep on promoting him for Elmore County, Alex from California, it is your right to be wrong...Peter

Peter, I do believe I may have written my comments in such a way as to make it easy for you to mischaracterize my attitude as being head-in-the-sand. I am aware of vulnerability analyses on many sensitive facilities, and the real efforts being made to cope with the identified threats. But all of that material is at least OUO or has an even greater classification.

So when these types of analyses come out in books and articles, they are not the "official use only" documents I am aware of that are held very close. The last thing you want to do is identify vulnerabilities and attractive targets to your would be attackers! So I am always suspecting that the authors of such public discussions are doing this to serve themselves in some way.

I guess it is like my natural distrust of people I have heard who are now counter-spies on our side who, for money, tell and sell stories about the dangers from spies just like they used to be, full of bravado and heroics.

Vulnerability analyses are and should be done and acted on, but no one is well-served by suggesting that a specific reactor (in another country no less) would be a great target if you want to terrorize 10-million people in a huge city a few hundred miles away. That is self-serving fear- mongering, in my view.

But it is just fine with me if we disagree.

By the way, I love geothermal. I do. There is a plant I toured in Nevada (Whirlwind Valley I belive) that is producing at a steady-state rate now. When they stareted they overdid it and cooled their source. Then they got the clever idea, and it is clever, to send their hot water from the condesnation of the staem coming out of the ground into their turbines back to the depth from which they withdrew the water. This replaced water coming in from the sides, cold water, so now the natural thermal gradient at depth is able to bring it back up to the temperature needed so that when you depresurize it at the surface, it flashes into steam and turns the turbine. A valuable lesson was learned. Get greedy and you lose your power source. Put heat back and you ahve a very reliable source. I somehow discount the ultra-optimistic claims about how much sustainable geothermal there actually is. But am all in favor of exploiting it wherever it can be done, sustainably. Maybe Idaho has a few spots that will work like Whirlwind does. A nice, small but very reliable source of power.

Reading over my last posts and yours I see that the Ogre does have a point: the people who call themselves doctor, like you and me, ARE the worst spellers on this blog. But that is just because we have such momentous things to say and think so fast that our fingers can't keep up, or so I would probably think if I slowed down to think.

Have a nice weekend. --abe--

One issue with nuclear power that seems to never see the light of day is the reprocessing. It is used in France but is not everything that it is cracked up to be. I find it humorous that the developer's argument falls flatter than Vandal football when this is brought up. He claims that the rods will be destroyed and that this ash-like waste product will be completely non-toxic. Well, Billy Mays and his buddy need to conjure up better propaganda than that. Overall, reprocessing has been done but it is not perfect.

Reprocessing is done to remove fissionable materials for re-use in new fuel. It is done to get more power from the same fuel. That is maybe 5% of the fuel. The other 95% is typically diluted with sand and melted and thereby turned into glass, and that glass waste is called high-level waste (high radiation-level waste) and it is highly radioactive and needs to be shielded during storage and needs to be disposed of in a geologic repository.

You can re-enrich the non-fissile material and make more fuel that way. But that means stripping out the fission-products, which still creates a high level waste. Breeder reactors can do wonders, but their expense is such that no one is commercially using them. Maybe when the price of uranium reaches a certain point that will become commercially attractive again.

In the meantime there is much international cooperative work on new fuel cycles. There is an annual meeting in progress in this area sponsored by the Nuclear Energy Agency (Paris). Some of these new fuel cycles show definite promise, but there are huge costs involved. You can read the reports of the annual meetings here:

http://www.nea.fr/html/pt/welcome.html

A very good plain language discusion about nuclear power and waste is on this website:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf04.html

The US used to be the leader in all things nuclear. Thirty years of neglect have changed that. By actively participating in new fuel cycle research (and also my personal favorite, the ITER project on fusion now under construction in France, see it at http://www.iter.org/default.aspx ) --we can regain some form of leadership role again.

Hi Abe and all,

I have to agree with Abe that reprocessing is expensive, and still creates high level waste needing a geological repository (a dump). Gillispie claims falsely it will solve the waste problems. Beloved France does not even have a waste dump yet. Yucca Mt Nevada has proven flaws that allow water infiltration, so Bush tried to force it open anyway, claiming the barrels themselves will last 1 million years through water and earthquakes, and never leak. The Nevada defense team found a memo from the USGS fed team shockingly saying "I can't believe Nevada wants more safety data. If they want more, I'll be happy to make more up"! Even IFFF they force open Yucca, it will be overfilled with the waste we are presently stuck with at INL and plants around the nation. Gillispie's new generation waste has to find a whole new state to rape.

Abe, I am glad you now clarified that you really do agree, that nuclear plants are vulnerable to terrorism. But many like Ogre mock the thought like I am some Henny Penny, when it is a documented deadly serious risk that Gillispie denies even exists. You are free to trust that we will stay one cyber-step ahead of the daily onslaught of hacking attempts, but glad we agree this is a daily attack that has sometimes succeeded in stealing classified info from the Pentagon and DOE, and even shut down Davis-Besse. But let's be clear, I did not "mischaracterize" your attitude as "head in the sand." You are the one who said "I do not buy into the hype from these people who make their living and stake their reputations on being experts on anti-terrorism." I appreciate you backing off from your original position of scoffing, and saying you will "check out" if we need to worry about terrorists, but I ACCURATELY read your words and ACCURATELY characterized that common position of denial. I do agree though, you did "make it easy" for me :-) And I also agree I usually don't waste time spell checking, and even mispelled my name in one hasty scan of a post above! :-)

But on geothermal, Iceland is nearly totally powered by it. Here is a reference from our DOE team on geothermal. Tech challenges remain to tap it all, but Iceland and Idaho's Raft River are "humming along just fine." :-) ...Peter

"The Earth houses a vast energy supply in the form of geothermal resources. Domestic resources are equivalent to a 30,000-year energy supply at our current rate for the United States!" Found at http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/pdfs/40665.pdf

PETER~

Thank you for giving me reason to enjoy this quiet morning without the tv on. Though, some of the HD programs make me very happy I bought a HD Widescreen tv. ;-)))

"Your missing the point Alex. Lover's triangles, psycho "Security" Guard"

I learned something in arguing with manipulative LEFT!

I dont worry about such scenarios where many other ACTORS are in place to avert such really bad scenarios.

I worry more about MDs who create office romances and eventual revenges that affect patients lives, or I worry about someone not stopping the drunk who kills the child playing in the street.

"Faulty safety equipment listed on the NRC violations list can happen ANYWHERE. Why should Elmore families take the risk , to heat Hollywood hot tubs, when California refuses to allow any new nuclear plant risks in their neighborhoods, to protect their kids?"

See, there you go again! You are talking about plants IN their neighborhoods, rather then in the region. Manipulative to say the least, and typical of most of your scare tactics.

I find it ironic how the rich living on the coast are getting the rest of US to target Global Warming so that their beach homes arent flooded. And Im still annoyed that the FEDS are wasting tax dollars rebuilding what NATURE is claiming as her own domain, repeatedly.

Why isnt New Orleans under the same rules as those homes that were wiped out by a prior hurricane along the Carolina coast and not allowed to be rebuilt?

Just as OIL is a financial windfall to Alaska residents ($1k@yr per person) why not let Elmore's NUKE PLANT be similar benefit?

I know alot of Seniors that would retire for that alone in that county!

"Yucca Mt Nevada has proven flaws that allow water infiltration, so Bush tried to force it open anyway, claiming the barrels themselves will last 1 million years through water and earthquakes, and never leak. The Nevada defense team found a memo..."

They dont have to last ONE MILLION YEARS! More manipulative science? (Changing magnetic fields, or the collision with ANDROMEDA will override such things, if technology doesnt by then.)

And, what little water seeps through, wont make it to any drinking water resources.

Forget whatever SUSPECT memos that Nevada found or forged! Their ethics are even more questionable then some memo probably written in sarcasm cause its not factual!

" No Venture Capitalist, is willing to risk their money on expensive risky nuclear power."

You are miscomprehending: VC funding for your GEOthermal fantasies!

"Are you aware Bush cut the geothermal subsidies so he could offer billions in nuclear power loan subsidies?"

"The Earth houses a vast energy supply in the form of geothermal resources. Domestic resources are equivalent to..."

You are relying on MEDIA SCIENCE. The same wild numbers that one year says we have CENTURIES of oil left in the ground to a more finite number of less then a Century.

Technology is doing great things, including tapping oil so very deep in the GULF, and converting OIL SANDS in Canada.

Focus instead on FOOTnMOUTH diseases, and leave the science to real and trustable scientists like Abe. After all, he has family in the area and isnt worried about them!

Harrumph!

Howdy Alex "Harrumph" Ogre.

I respect your right to provide no references on your claims about Yucca Mt etc, and simply call me names and label me the "manipulative Left". The depth of your argument represents well the shallow confused support of the promoters of Gillispie's nuclear plant in Elmore. Your conspiracy theory seems to think I am telling the media and the DOE/NRC I quote how to make up Mediascience and feed it to Al Gore. I am not in charge of Pelosi nor Al "snore Gore dude! I'm just a dad on a 21 year mission to protect my kids, and innocent children down wind of these un-needed nuclear nightmares.

Why don't you ask Gillispie to write a contract offering an Alaskan oil kickback to Elmore County, instead of oddly blaming me? I have actually suggested that for my own and other local counties housing wind farms. I still advocate to build the wind farms in my own backyard, but we should get a contracted great price for harvesting our wind and view. That would entice businesses here for more jobs, with our large clean cheap power, just like the hydropower did. But our bribed politicians try to just build nuke plants, and don't want wind production in Idaho to cancel the claimed need for nuke power. DOE admits Idaho could double our present electric consumption, providing millin$$$ in jobs, bt 2030. That's the SAME Department of Energy that pushes the nukes you support Alex!! Why is it junk MediaScience when I quote the DOE, but trusted advice if Abe quotes his DOE friends on other issues? Come on dude, pull your head out of your, umm, conspiracy theory "logic", and take a deep relaxing breath of fresh air!

When I quote the head of West Point Terrorism, or the head of DOE terrorism Defense, you claim I am just the "manipulative left." Really Alex, you really are proud of this "logic" you spew? To quote from your post ""Your missing the point Alex.Lover'striangles,psycho "Security" Guard"

I learned something in arguing with manipulative LEFT! I dont worry about such scenarios where many other ACTORS are in place to avert such really bad scenarios."

How do you stop a lover's triangle revenge Alex? NASA would like to know too, after one of their trusted, pre-screened lady astronauts went psycho. Please share! Yes, we do try to stay one cyber-step ahead of the daily hackers, but like I said, they have NOT all been averted as you claim.

http://www.industryweek.com/articles/hac...

Hacking the Industrial Network

The expense of protection is a fraction of 1% of the IT budget.

By Frank Dickman, Engineering Consultant

April 17, 2009

The Issue

It was a Trojan program inserted into SCADA system software that caused a massive natural gas explosion along the Trans-Siberian pipeline. The Washington Post reported the resulting fireball yielded "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."

Malicious hackers have discovered SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and DCS (Distributed Control Systems) since reports of successful attacks began to emerge after 2001. A former hacker interviewed by PBS Frontline advised that "Penetrating a SCADA system that is running a Microsoft operating system takes less than two minutes." SNIP... Then he cites:

Jan 2003 Davis-Besse nuclear plant safety monitoring system knocked offline 5-hours by the Slammer worm.

Sep 2007 Hackers compromise Homeland Security computers, moving information to Chinese websites. - CNN

2003-2005 Undetected for 2 years, Chinese Army downloads 10-20 terabytes data from Pentagon, DOE, others."

When I contrast the ironic fact that California legally bans any new nuke plants from being built, but we will have to outbid them, you are free to claim that is manipulative. But it is what most folks call common sense, irony, and still on the subject of whether Elmore should take the risks that California bans. Gillispie tells his stock holders he will sell to the west coast market for profit, but tells Elmore audiences he will sell it to them for 3 cents. He won't put that in writen contract, of course, and Areva admits it will costs much more than that anyway. Do YOU have stock in this AEHI Alex? Is that why you bother to keep promoting this from your California retirement? Not that folks with fakenames on a blog will honestly admit they have stock, but that Paul Revere promoter poster did, so I ask you to come clean...Peter

Peter,

you are being Ogrish (of how I enjoyed that slam!) when you blame my unfavorite Pres of all time, Bush2 for Yucca Mountains approach to its engineered system. It is much more complicated than that. The enginnered system has been designed and tested over several Democrat as well as Republican administrations.

The USGS email was from a dude that thought he was above the rules of quality-assurance that applied to everyone else, he is gone and we spent about 20 million redoing his work. So that sorry chapter is closed and replaced.

Sweden is to use a 1-million year (to be conservative, they think it will last more than 3 million really), plus a million-year diffusion-barrier made of compacted bentonite (a clay) with some sand which swells when wetted. So their engineered system provides about 2 million years protection, at which time there has been considerable decay of the radioactive content of course. No one sneers at their design. In fact three other countries, at least, are imitating it, with help and permission from the Swedes.

I hope you never focus your laser-defect-finding talents on the boat, train, car or airplane industries or we will all die in mile-deep horse pucky on our way to work in a big city, or drown as our sailing ships get knocked about by storms on the high seas.

And I hope you know I am trying to be funny. Usually with no success.

Hi Abe,

I do appreciate your sense of humor and your communications! Glad you enjoyed my thoughts for Ogre too. But no, if I had my way we would not be knee deep in horse manure from banning cars! We would be driving Hydrogen-fuelcell or electric cars powered by wind, geothermal, and solar :-) I did suggest years ago that Airliners smoothly seal large parachutes on top that can pop out when those pesky flocks of birds crash them. Wouldn't cost much, but, hey, that last brave pilot landed safely in the river. I still fly though if the drive would be over 10 hours. :-) But let's review the Yucca Mt multi-Billion dollar hole, and Sweden's proposal of clay liners they theorize will contain plutonium for 3 million years.

Glad Dubya Bush2 was your least favorite Prez too, but I wasn't being "Ogrish" on him for breaking his promise not to force open Yucca Mt unless science proved it safe. Glad they fired the trusted USGS safety faker, but the official scientists still say since they can't prove water and earthquakes won't infiltrate Yucca, and in fact believe now it will, they will simply rely on the burial casks to withstand rusting that long. That change happened with Bush2, the same guy who ordered the official reports on global warming to delete parts of the report. I can dig up the references on that specific change, but let me provide a specific reference from your old stomping grounds at ANL in the DOE, that I have readily available. This ties directly to Sweden's hope that clay will contain plutonium, and ties to the buried plutonium dumped at INL, over our water supply, in a flood zone, and also ties to Yucca Mt. When I began my nuclear journey in 1988, the Physics textbook knowledge that INL quoted stated plutonium is an actinide that will bind to clay and never move, even with water flow. That is why INL claimed it did not have to clean up their acres of dumped plutonium, because science asys it binds to clay and never moves. I asked how then did this plutonium get through the clay dump, and get detected at 240 feet below the dump, if it never moves with water? Stupid me and my dumb podiatry based silly questions. THEN, in 1997 DOE scientist Annie Kersting discovered colloid plutonium transport at the Nevada test site, in their sluggish desert underground aquifer. The plutonium had binded to clay, but microscopic particles of clay broke off (colloids)and floated with the sluggish water over one mile! The INL's "expert" Jack Baraclough had claimed if it EVER did the imposssible and reach Idaho's water, since plutonium is a heavy metal, it would simply safely sink to the bottom and "never move." HMMM, the trusted rules of physics have now been forced to be re-written by DOE! I called Dr kersting personally and discussed the study to confirm I understood correctly. I get to call her Annie now! So last year ANL's Dr Lynda Soderholm made the next step break through on understanding plutonium nanoclusters and how they transport plutonium easily in water and INTO human bodies. OPPPSS!! I emailed Lynda instead of call her, but this waste problem dead serious, and is NOT JUST POLITICS, as Gillispie and his backers like Ogre claim! Here are 2 key quotes, with more at the bottom, that really make wind and geothermal wise choices.

"For almost half a century, scientists have struggled with plutonium contamination spreading further in groundwater than expected, increasing the risk of sickness in humans and animals." & "Our current understanding has been based on the free-plutonium ion, creating discrepancies between what is expected and what is reality."

Gee, when they tried to shove the nation's plutonium incinerator into Idaho in 1995, the INL said "inhaling plutonium was as safe as eating a banana"! Unfortunately, now the DOE refuses to spend the $13 billion it now admits it would cost to clean up ALL the billions of loose plutonium particles dump at INL in this flood zone above our water! They are faking the clean up that they originally denied was even needed, and Gillispie wants to produce more! Yucca Mt would be overfilled, even with expensive reprocessing and transmutation, just from the waste we are stuck with. Catch phrase like "Nuclear Renosoince" sound sweet, but what so-called conservative would drive their family down a dead end street, and then advize we push the accelerator and double our speed...Peter

Found at http://www.aps.anl.gov/Science/Highlights/Content/APS_SCIENCE_20080424B.php

Scientists Discover How Nanocluster Contaminants Increase Risk of Spreading

APRIL 24, 2008

For almost half a century, scientists have struggled with plutonium contamination spreading further in groundwater than expected, increasing the risk of sickness in humans and animals.

It was known that nanometer-size clusters of plutonium oxide were the culprit, but no one had been able to study its structure, nor find a way to separate it from the groundwater.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Notre Dame, used high-energy x-ray beams from the X-ray Operations and Research/BESSRC 11-ID-B beamline at the Argonne Advanced Photon Source to finally discover and study the structure of plutonium nanoclusters. Their research results were published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

"When plutonium forms into the clusters, its chemistry is completely different and no one has really been able to assess the clusters' composition, how to model them, or how to isolate them," said Argonne senior chemist Lynda Soderholm. "People have known about and tried to understand the nanoclusters, but it was modern analytical techniques and the APS that allowed us understand what it is."

The nanoclusters are made up of exactly 38 plutonium atoms and have almost no charge. Unlike stray plutonium ions, which carry a positive charge, they are not attracted to the electrons in plant life, minerals, etc., which stopped the ions' progression in ground water.

Our current understanding has been based on the free-plutonium ion, creating discrepancies between what is expected and what is reality. Soderholm said that with knowledge of the structure, scientists can now create better models to account for not only free-roaming plutonium ions, but also the nanoclusters.

The clusters also are a problem for plutonium remediation. The free ions are relatively easy to separate out from groundwater, but the clusters are difficult to remove.

"As we learn more, we will be able to model the nanoclusters and figure out how to break them apart," Soderholm said. "Once they are formed, they are very hard to get rid of."

Soderholm said other experiments have shown some clusters with different numbers of plutonium atoms and she--together with her collaborators S. Skanthakumar, Richard Wilson, and Peter Burns of Argonne's Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division--plans to examine the unique electric and magnetic properties of the clusters. -- Brock Cooper

See: L. Soderholm, Philip M. Almond, S. Skanthakumar, Richard E. Wilson, and Peter C. Burns, "The Structure of the Plutonium Oxide Nanocluster [Pu38O56Cl54(H2O)8]14-" Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 47, 298 (2008). DOI: 10.1002/anie.200704420

Peter, don't you think the people in the Yucca Mt Project are aware of the things you are bringing up?

I was part of a team under the Clinton Administration that addressed the DOE's inability to model Pu and we addressed the problem with several different solutions, one was to acknowledge true and pseudo-colloids in several cases. In one case the answer was surprisingly different, it was the chemistry of the effluent keeping Pu from glooming onto negatively charged surfaces by causing organo-complexes to form that were near neutral in charge. But the point is that what you said was true for a considerable time, but not anymore, each DOE site now has a very decent handle on its Pu effluent problems. Still work to be done, of course, but people are not as ignorant as they once were.

I was recently invited, as were some of my coworkers, to a continuation of these all-DOE workshops where we share lessons learned in modeling the behavior of radioactivity in the environment. We are actively looking to make sure we understand what we are dealing with across the whole complex. I think we are pretty good in terms of understanding our disfferent systems, and basically trustworthy --we want to do the right thing environmentally-- at this point in time.

The minute we heard about Annie's work at LANL we collaborated with that team to give us data for our modeling, and factor in these pseudo-colloids (colloids made up in part of a radioactive molecule and a mineral fragment in suspension in a liquid is a pseudo-colloid, in case someone doesn't know the nomenclature).

We also factor into our system-behavior projections the Pu fraction that may come off the waste form as a true colloid. As the ANL article said, we have known about these true colloids for quite a while, but ANL has now given us insights into their structure we did not have before.

The work that supports the longevity of the waste packages was never influenced by politicians. That is an absurd charge, sorry to be ogrish about this. It is painful enough that some of the data showing we can expect even better performance was inadmissable in licensing because of quality-assurance problems. And why should this longevity be surprising? We selected a material that forms a passive layer in an oxygen-rich environment, so it self-stifles general corrosion.

What breaks the packages is continued piling on of stresses from earthquakes over hundreds of thousands of years. This finally causes minuscule stress-corrosion cracks. An extremely unlikely volcanic event can cause more spectacular failures, but with a probability of about three in a hundred million per year, the risk is negligible, in my personal view. But now we are talking risk, and you focus on what can happen rather than where I focus, on what is likely to happen.

Where I was personally upset is in 2002 when we reported to Congress that we could meet a 10,000 year standard readily, but there would be some higher doses beyond that time. No one cared!

Then Nevada sued EPA and we got a million-year standard. Then we began to take the post-10K year period serious and the doses we now show in the very long times are more realistic than they were in 2002, and much lower.

Being familiar with the conservatisms in the 10K year calcualtions, I was not surprised, I expected much lower long-term dose umbers if we just lifted soem of that conservatism and got closer to what we really expected.

The Electric Power Research Institute did a system analysis for a million years and simply made less conservative assumptions and showed better engineered and natural system performance than DOE shows in their million-year calculations. They are the industry, sure, but their analysts were good, they hired some of the brightest and best that consulting companies have to offer.

In my view, YM is safe if implemented as currently described. Our license application says that. We await NRC's judgement.

Good Morning Abe,

How interesting that you worked for the Clinton administration on Yucca. Thanks for your post detailing how the science has changed, and how confident you are NOW, after Dr Kerstings work totally uprooted the "confidence" DOE had before 1997. So confident that you claim you can predict exactly what will happen in the next 10K to one million years. However, you do admit, "Still work to be done, of course, but people are not as ignorant as they once were." I love that admission Abe! Yes, DOE scientists that guaranteed plutonium would never move with water were "ignorant" before Kersting's 1997 discovery. Keep in mind I sat through a decade of lectures from DOE by 1997, as they repeatedly assured how confident and smart the "experts" were, as they mocked my podiatry background and my concerns to save our aquifer from plutonium contamination. But it is the "still work to be done" part of your statement though, that is the real bottom line, that should undermine citizen's blind faith in your renewed "confidence", isn't it?

Let me ask you "Is Dr Soderholm's discovery of the 38 atom plutonium nanocluster the ONLY particle and problem that your team will have to address to safely analize leakage from Yucca or the Idaho plutonium dump?"

I'll answer your question from above, ie "Peter, don't you think the people in the Yucca Mt Project are aware of the things you are bringing up?" Well, as Clinton might say, "It depends on what the definition of "are" and "aware" is! :-) But, yes, like in our new INL fraudulent "clean up" plans, I can see the subject being addressed, and unfortunately dismissed here in Idaho. I haven't read all the details of the Yucca Mt EIS though, like I have read the documents on INL (Idaho's Neverending Lie) :-) I do see them attempting to address the different water chemistries, just as you said they are. But here in Idaho the colloid transport scenario is "confidentally" dismissed as "unlikely" to happen, and they are "confident" that plutonium will bind to the clay and never move. HMMM, where have I heard that before? :-)

Here I have witnessed the full circle of double talk. In 21 years we have gone from, "There is nothing to clean up" to "We will remove ALL the plutonium as we promised in 1970. We are the clean up experts and will clean this up safely and remove the plutonium from Idaho." Now DOE is aware of their Kersting and Soderholm discoveries, yes indeed. Our politicians and DOE promoted Bush's "accelerated clean up" because they really care and want to speed up the process. Yah right! The Bush plan simply lowers the clean up standards from residential to industrial, a ten fold safety standard lowering. the new plan removes less than 10% of the scatteered ONE TON of raw loose plutonium particles, and places a dirt barrier cap over the dump. The dump is 40 feet below where the Big Lost River dives into the desert and startsour huge aquifer. It flooded twice in the 60's, but that ain't nothing compared to the 100 year and 500 year historical flooding that USGS documents! So yah, they "are aware" of the Kersting & Soderholm work, Abe. But it's the same old load of Clinton style BS. They actually now claim it will never leak, and these "clean up experts" actually claim it is too dangerous to workers to remove it! Hmm, it was safe for citizens to be ezposed to the plutonium incinerator, but now it is dangerous for the worker to deliver the removal of plutonium we were promised because they might inhale a little plutonium!! They are still planning to produce plutonium-238 here, and claim what might leak out of the HEPA filters is as safe as eating a banana! Yah, I know about natural radiation, and potassium has a high natural single disinigration, but these hypocrits blatantly manipulate what they call science, for 21 years straight now. Are you aware of the HEPA filter flaw called "alpha recoil" deeply buried in DOE documents since McDowell discovered it at DOE's Oak Ridge in 1970? The alpha emitters like plutonium actually knock themselves off HEPA filters and creep through 4 filters in a row!! I have talked to the experts here too Abe, but the DOE refuses to acknowledge their own documents in the Plutonium EIS's, that declare plutonium incineration and production "safe."

So time will tell if your prediction for Yucca that corrosion of the barrels will never leak Abe, ie, "We selected a material that forms a passive layer in an oxygen-rich environment, so it self-stifles general corrosion." I am not so confident after my 21 years at this Mad Hatter's Tea Party Theater of the Absurd! My proposal for nuclear waste is simple. I favor retrievable and inspectable bunker storage for 2 main reasons. 1) If the barrels do leak in 1,000 years or whatever, they can simply safely re-package the plutonium. 2) IFFF the breeder reactors and reprocessing ever become the scientific "safe" process they pretend it is now, then we will have this potentially great energy supply available, not sealed and buried deeply at Yucca Mt. Who knows what breakthroughs we may make in the next century? But when DOE lies to my face and in writing, for 21 years straight, and when "laws" of physics change upon new discoveries, the only thing I am "confident" about is not to truat "confidence" men like Gillispie and Clinton! :-) ...Peter

"I respect your right to provide no references on your claims about Yucca Mt etc, and simply call me names and label me the "manipulative Left"./Peter"

***...what you said was true for a considerable time, but not anymore...The work that supports the longevity of the waste packages was never influenced by politicians. That is an absurd charge/Abe***

OH PETER!~

Makes me wonder about all your other CLAIMS and FACTS that much more.

Which is why I dont bother throwing in FACTS and STATS, etc.

You obviously dont want to entrust SCIENCE and want to play the SCARE CARD to win your case.

As I said before, NUCLEAR is under a very fine SAFETY record microscope, whereas your GEO Energy production isnt.

There is a way to reverse our dependence on Middle East Oil with more NUKE PLANTS. Especially ones that can be multi-tasked to produce other alt fuels.

Keep in mind that a single Nuclear Power Plant can avoid major numbers of Windmills:

YAHOO Answers:

"So to generate an equivalent amount of energy would take 1200 windmills per thousand MW nuclear plant, plus some way to store the energy when it isn't needed, since you can't control when the wind will blow."

"you must also consider that a nuclear plant is available almost 24-7.

but a windmill, on average, is available only 20% of the time. Which means you would need an alternative generation unit 80% of the time."

And, the real flaw in GEOTHERMAL ENERGY:

"Geothermal fluids drawn from the deep earth may carry a mixture of gases with them, notably carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. When released to the environment, these pollutants contribute to global warming, acid rain, and noxious smells in the vicinity of the plant."/WIKI

SO THERE!!! (grin)

Hi Alex Ogre,

Gee, you forgot to confess or deny whether you hav stock in AEHI! But you were able to cut and paste part of two statements Abe made out of context, and you looked up something on the unreliable edited-by-anyone-anytime wikipedia, so you must be proud! :-)

Your geothermal reference from wiki is SO OLD and outdated it is as laughable as your "logic." The old style geothermal was even much worse than yout reference because it pumped up and evaporated radioactive radon spewing it along with the Co2 and sulpher. Not only that, but by removing mass quantity of water, it caused more earthquakes. But the modern geothermal I am pushing is used at Idaho's Raft River 24/7 and sells for 5.25 cents/kwhr, much cheaper than risky nuclear power. It uses a CLOSED LOOP cycle that returns the water for re-heating, and never emits a molecule of water, nor sulpher, nor radon.

Here is a reference at http://www.geodynamics.com.au/IRM/Company/ShowPage.aspx?CPID=1271

I quoted and provided the meticulous 2007 Stanford study that documented exact weather data that states connecting widespread wind farms provides a STEADY BASELOAD AS RELIABLE AS COAL< AND CHEAPER. You are free to quote your "Yahoo answers" that claim batteries are needed, if you don't want to admit you are wrong.

You can keep ignoring my quotes of West Point and DOE terrorist experts, and keep mislabelling me as unfairly playing the "SCARE CARD." Do you remember the great Ron Regan ads that mocked the pacifist disarmament approach of the Democrats toward the threat of Russia? It wisely stated "Some people believe there are no bears in the woods, but Ronald Regan is not afraid to tell you the truth." My warning my fellow Idahoans about the bear in the woods at INL and Gillispie's plans is what I consider my duty. You are free to call me names and claim your buddy Gillispie is a sweetheart.

So let's put Abe's 2 quotes you took out of context in proper perspectivbe. Abe said "But the point is that what you said was true for a considerable time, but not anymore, each DOE site now has a very decent handle on its Pu effluent problems. Still work to be done, of course, but people are not as ignorant as they once were."

Abe IS admitting the DOE was ignorant in the first decade of denial about plutonium leakage, and we will see how he responds to how the INL site does NOT really have "a very decent handle on it's pu effluent" in the details I provided above. I do believe Abe is doing an honest job at Yucca, but he really can't guarantee 100% waste isolation, and admits that. Why do all the republicans and democrats in Nevada like gambling, but don't want to gamble a new Kersting type discovery could once again change what was once consider an irrefutable "Law of Physics"? Seems they have more common sense than I thought Nevada folks had.

Originally there were 3 states geologists chose to study for this waste dump back in the 80's. Washington, Texas, and Nevada. In 1988 our Congressman Stallings told me the politicians from Washington and Texas combined forces to remove their states from fair review, and evry Congressman now called it "The Screw Nevada Bill." So I find it laughable for that and as DOE kept re-writing the standards for Yucca when science flaws were revealed, that "no politics" has been involved with Yucca Mt. But like I said, I respect Abe's honesty so far, and so I bet he did find it absurd to think a politician could influence his personal work. I bet that is true! And if you look at what I really said I did NOT say anyone faked the work on the longevity of the waste containers. What I said was they had tried to prove the site was water proof and earthquake proof, and failed, so Bush decided to ONLY rely on the longevity of the barrels, instead of the geology of the site being perfect. Now they have a "drip shield" they have faith in. But let's put Abe's comment in full perspective, ie "The work that supports the longevity of the waste packages was never influenced by politicians. That is an absurd charge, sorry to be ogrish about this." Gee, you snipped off Abe's ogrish comment. How ogrish of you :-) ...Peter

Peter, so ogrish a posting! Lighten up, your health is threatened by anger more than it is by Pu underground at the INL sprawl where the contamination is pretty light compared to other places.

When I looked at documents on risk from INL some years ago, putting it into its overal geological and hydrological context, it is not something I would lose sleep over even if I were on a farm using the Lost River aquifer. In fact if someone wants to give me such a farm I'll take it.

But that is my personal take on it, and everyone has a different take, and is entitled to it.

Nevertheless, let me address two points. Kersting did not totally upset the science. I was in meetings years before on the colloid transport issue and we already were well aware of European work suggesting it takes very little mineral or even organic colloidal material in groundwater to allow strong sorbers like Pu to glom onto them and move with water underground. But since we were not talking about Pu dust sprinkled underground, but Pu as part of a ceramic or glass matrix, we felt that the slow release rate would give time to sorbing the Pu inside the waste package and nearby rock.

But then Kersting came along and voila, that 2 whole millirem per year we expect at 1 million years has a Pu component, which it did not have before. But the important point is that it presents a negligible risk to human health. Like eating bananas or sleeping with a person with bones. I tell my wife she ought to appreciate that I am sacrificing by being fat and thus shielding her from my bones' potassium-4o dose. Of course she says "stay fat and keep paying your life-insurance premium, bozo, and I will have the last laugh." OK, enough of the funny stuff.

When I said there is more work to be done, I meant in understanding the nitty gritty mechanisms underlying what we observe. The ANL work did not, as you seem to be suggesting, identify a particle we did not know existed, it just described its structure. We already had true colloids, with neutral charge, in our model because they have been known for years. It is how many Pu's it took to make such a particle and how they were bonded that ANL has added to our knowledge base, but that does not change the way we model neutral true Pu colloids. Kersting's work did change our model.

I am optimisitic. By nature. But also because for the DOE sites with Pu issues we have measurements we can now mimic pretty well with our models. We have come a long way, and know enough to proceed with ways to lower risk. But that doesn't mean we know it all. Nature is complex, and models are less complex than nature, they are mathematical analogs of nature, simplifications. But if they now can genrally predict, from starting information, what we see has developed in the field today, that is good enough as a working tool to make cleanup or protective cover plans. But it is not claiming to represent scientifically complete knowledge. No society can afford that approach before they take any action.

One cleanup project I worked on involved an unanmed busy ship channel next to an unnamed big city with a bottom that was polluted with spilled toxic chemicals. The channel was dredged every year to remove the sediment coming in, to keep the ship channel deep enough for heavy freighters and tankers. Trouble is that this material taken out every year was hazardous waste! Disposing of it was a nightmare.

So instead of cleaning it up they decided to restrict tanker loads and place more restrictions on allowable leakege from ships plying this waterway. As new sidiment comes in it is less polluted, and covers the old hazardous material. Over time this channel will be closed, and will be in essence a hazardous waste burial site. This is how industrial and civic concerns over risks can be managed. And their waste does not decay, so forever there will be a risk of digging into this toxic material. But since it is not nuclear waste, just hazardous waste, a whole new and less protective standard applies since it is material we know and love and use daily: petrochemicals and distallates thereof.

The only country I know that regulates chemical risks the same as radioactive risks is Germany, which has mandated geologic disposal of chemical toxic materials for many decades. We have a double standard, by compariosn to the Germans, although I am not suggesting we are generally unsafe.

In the matter of radwaste cleanup, there must be a balance struck between the hypothetical future risk to a hypothetical person and the very real risk to a worker in the present that is digging deep for a small amount of dispersed material. It is not right to use up this generation's resources to protect a hypothetical future generation from a very small risk. Cost has to be dealt with realistically in terms of risk avoided. I am not all that aware of what is going on at INL, but I do know they invited us in to model the facility you are speaking of in order to gain additional insight into their situation. Our models of their likely flow scenarios came up with comparable results. I am under the impression they are doing exactly what is reasonable to do. It is all about risk, not whether or not there is some tiny amount of Pu that comes out of some location dispersed over a long time.

What is germane and addressed in plans for covering and cleanup is the risk that underground material represents. By covering, they raise the surface to prevent ponding of flood water and the resulting infiltration, or so I presume. Good strategy.

Your idea of long-term monitored storage is one that turns me ogrish. What is much less predictable than geologic stability? Societal stability! Just look at our mood swings as a society from administartion to administration, but also look at the last century of history.

The USSR disappeared and it is only now that the infrastructure to control nuclear materials is being resurrected. We (US) had to help the former Eastern Block countries locate many radioactive sources since they were stolen. Infrastructure in place to keep them safe disappeared almost overnight. They were heat sources, so were taken home and put into stoves, and when everyone got sick in the house they were buried in the woods, or, more often, thrown into lakes and rivers. We spent years detecting and recovering most of them.

There is no guaranteee that this could not happen in the US at some future time. So rad waste facilities have to be built so they are passively safe, not requiring human monitoring or intervention to remain safe. That is the whole philosophy behind geologic disposal, deep or intermediate depth. It is only low-level waste that you can bury in a shallow facility. A few hundred years of decay and its risk goes down very low. Not to zero, just very low.

So your scheme is way too optimisitic about the survival of societal infrastructures. Rely on nature, it has been around a lot longer than our social institutions, and will be here a lot longer than out current institutions will be, unless somehow we have stopped history and there will be no more change forever!

Two world wars just in the last century. And there was no guarantee we would be on the winning side until the battles were fought and won. Betting on that trend continuing forever is what ... foolish?

I have foolish ideas too. Many, I am told regularly. Might have something to do with being human, although even that has been questioned.

One of my foolish ideas? Let's offer to take care of Mexico's spent fuel. With almost 105 reactors, what is two more, and we can guarantee that there will be safe disposal for Mexican spent fuel. They'll just pay their fair share for our repository. Wouldn't that be a nice thing to do for a southern neighbor on whom we depend for almost all our routine and hard labor but whom we seem to love to vilify?

We as a world pay way too much attention to making these artificial lines we draw on maps into fortress walls. Let's show the world how to properly love a neighbor! Maybe it will lead to regional repositores around the world rather than all these tiny national repositories currently planned. Pay attention to safety for Elmore County, of course, but let's step onto the world stage as exemplars rather than ogres!

Am I totally unaware of the threats lying in wait for us if we lightened up on our borders? I told you I would give you an example of one of my foolish ideas. One I like, I like my rose-colored glasses. Maybe if we cooperated more diligently with our neighbors and friends around the world, perhaps we can have it my way and still stop the threats from materializing. Building walls is not how you make yourself more secure. Respecting, and helping your neighbors gain their own (internal) security, that is how you create mutual security. Would we have a continuing influx of generally honest, hard working, family-oriented people across that border? Not for long, not the way we are managing our economy. Flow is all about gradients, and the gradient is already greatly reduced from what it was.

Having now shown myself to be a total fool in way more than half of Elmore County's eyes, I am now signing off. I will continue to read but will not respond again, no matter how provoked I may be. I have to get back to work.

Hi and Bye Abe,

Thanks for posting. I have to agree with you that your idea for opening our borders totally is "foolish" as you admit.

RE: "Peter, so ogrish a posting! Lighten up, your health is threatened by anger more than it is by Pu underground at the INL sprawl where the contamination is pretty light compared to other places."

You can't see the grin on my chin as I type, Abe. Even though getting lied to about plutonium waste does anger me, I am a smiling laughing optimistic guy. One of my sons is in town today, and we're playing racquetball, grilling steaks, then we'll kick back some brews hoping the Lakers get beat. I have fun everyday. But when you call the raw ton of dumped plutonium at INL "pretty light" contamination, it reveals why Nevada folks don't really trust your assurances of how great Yucca Mt is! Billions of cancer causing particles loose from every pound of pu in that supposed ton. INL used to claim it was 800 pounds, then years later admitted it was over a ton. In my 7 year stint on the Citizen Advisory panel for the CDC historical dose study of INL accidents, it was revealed during the strikes management ran the dump without records and we don't really know how much Rocky Flats plutonium fire debris was dumped during that period. So after decades of broken promises to remove it ALL, and bragging "all MEANS ALL", why not settle for a dirt cap in a flood zone, while we open NEW plutonium dumps, and promote "safe" plutonium production and incineration. Great advice that Ogre will love!

While I respect your right to believe you can predict the leakage of plutonium accurately for a million years, I will leave you with the most important point ANL's Dr Soderholm made in her nanocluster discovery, ie, "Our current understanding has been based on the free-plutonium ion, creating discrepancies between what is expected and what is reality." I love when solid scientists admit when they have had misplaced confidence in predictions, and reality turned out different. A lesson for Elmore to learn that Gillispie will never admit...Peter

This is not me responding, but I have now already said several times that we have had neutral Pu specieis in our models a long time, not justthe ionic species that do bind. Soderholm's comment was not a universal truth.

Sorry, truly sorry, but the Lakers will win again. Ever analyzed that brew? Scary stuff.

Inhaling Pu is a big deal and requires nasty irrigation therapy to wash it back out of your respiratory system. But ingesting an atom or so in your drinking water? It doesn't saty very long. If it got there attached to a coilloid it may stay attached to that colloid as it passes through your body. Don't forget that colloids (clay susoensions basically) are used for therapeutically removing Pu from a person's body if they accidentally ingest some.

My rose colored world is full of sincere people trying to do the right thing in my branch of the government. That applies to me and my coworkers and to the people I have worked with from INL as well. Were lies told back in the old days when everything was "national security" related? Yes. But your local world is not in danger as a consequence. Your nation is paying to make sure it stays safe. I do trust that will be so, in part, I must admit, because of people exactly like you continually pushing them to do what is right and reach a little farther. Humans need oversight, you have provided it, and still are i presume.

Bye for real.

Howdy Abe,

Nice to not hear from you again! :-) But you are a little behind the times saying the DOE uses clay to remove workers nasty inhaled plutonium. Reference below. It TRIES to remove the plutonium with chelation therapy though, and can remove most of it. At the modern accidents in 2000 at the Los Alomos plutonium-238 production facility Idaho is getting forced to take, they use DTPA injection, but the workers still exceed their annual limit of exposure, exceeding 5,000 mrem before the therapy is done. Funny how your trusty DOE buddies claim inhaling plutonium is as safe as eating a banana's K-40 when they shove this into Idaho as "safe", but we don't get chelation therapy from eating banana's do we? I have DOE worker dosimetry papers admitting inhaling any pu-238 will exceed workers limits, but DOE claims the public won't exceed their 10 mrem limit by inhaling the same plutonium! The EIS claims the dose will be 0.0000001 mrem! Sweet people for sure.

But you DO admit "Inhaling Pu is a big deal and requires nasty irrigation therapy to wash it back out of your respiratory system. But ingesting an atom or so in your drinking water? It doesn't stay very long." Ahh yes, but you sort of just admitted what the INL clean up plan to LEAVE the plutonium buried intentionally denies! Drinking does permanently absorb a small percent of plutonium, more for iron deficient meunstrating women, but no man made plutonium absorbtion is good for you. But yes, inhalation is THE main pathway of absorbtion. Our aquifer is not only our drinking water, but we pump most of it up for irrigation. That brings the plutonium to the surface where the wind can easily resuspend it in our Idaho brown out windy days. Did you miss that pathway on your consult to INL?

I have the documents on all this, but the original DOE analysis totally left out the inhalation pathway! Their dog & pony show had an analysis of showering with plutonium water thoguh! The claim was, the plutonium will never leak, but if the impossible happened, look, scientist prove you can shower in it safely! For newbies, alpha emitters like plutonium can't penetrate your skinn like an x-ray, but deliver a HIGH DNA destructive dose to soft internal tissues like your lungs. So one more intentionally irrelevant science trick by DOE to mislead the public. When I brought that up in public comment the DOE spokesman denied inhalation was a problem FOUR times before the EPA guy sheepishly admitted I was correct. So they finally put some calculations in, but ignored my DOE worker dosimetry paper, and faked their analysis, screening out analizing pu-238 inhalation! So regarding your comment "Were lies told back in the old days when everything was "national security" related? Yes." Abe, I keep hearing about the new truthful DOE every time they switch companies to run INL, but can document continued lying like this. Fool me once, shame on me, but this still goes on and on today, at the "clean up" and for the new plutonium production cluster and dumps. But you are right the Lakers will probably win! :-) I'll let you argue with Dr Soderholm over who knew what when, but BTW, the 38 atom nanocluster is only one size of many she discovered. How well they ALL absorb from drinking water is really unknown, since the testing was done on more chunky plutonium, before we discovered the "almost no charge" nanoclusters...Peter

The DOE used to use EDTA chelation, not clay, before they switched to DTPA. The DTPA reference: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Health, Safety and Security

Office of Worker Safety and Health Policy

Page 14 of text, or webpage 44/145, states the 2007 update approval of the chelation

protocol for plutonium accident exposure chelation.

http://www.hss.energy.gov/NuclearSafety/techstds/standard/hdbk1145/DOE-HDBK-1145...

Hey Abe,

My boys still ut running his 10 miles, but at least Orlando still has fight in their eyes so far tonight. So I had to post the DOE worker dosimetry paper on plutonium-238 inhalation FYPerusal just to legitimize and reference what I said above is the ongoing cover up in the present "clean up" analysis. Pu-238 is the minority element in the dump, no doubt. It came from Rocky Flats where this paper was written for the DOE workers. Importantly though, pu-238 is 275 times MORE radioactive and damaging than it's majority sister element, weapons grade plutonium-239. The DOE paper states "intake of only a few highly radioactive PuO2 particles such as 238PuO2, could greatly exceed the annual limit on intake (ALI) used to control worker exposure." & "Although 238Pu is thought to be present in relatively small amounts there, intake via inhalation of only a few 238PuO2 particles could greatly exceed the ALI." The Annual Limit of Intake for workers is 5,000 mrem. So inhaling just a "few" or 3 particles goes over that dose. I did double check all this with Dr Scott himself to be sure 3 was accurate etc. So inhaling just ONE lone particle that leaks gives a citizen well over 1,300 mrem! To protect pregnant womenn and children more vulnerable than workers, the legal limit to the public is 10mrem! 10 mrem is a tad more dose than a chest x-ray, which doctors won't give a pregnant women unless it is a life or death must have x-ray diagnosis. So despite being the minority element at the INL dump, there are billions of these particles dumped across 35 acres at INL they are leaving. The new pu-238 production facility uses HEPA filters to TRY to contain the airborn pu-238. While they won't talk about their alpha recoil leaking probl;em, they do admit .03% leaks from the building normally. That is thousands more loose particles in our air to breath. Each one exceeds the legal limit greatly, so how do your friends at INL claim any exposure would equal only 0.0000001 mrem? How does the dump analysis decide to screen out pu-238 analysis because the dose is too low to bother? I actually can show you the math and analysis tricks they use.

I also wanted to clarify your apparent misconception of absorbing an "atom" of plutonium vs the reality of these leaking plutonium particle, and the break off nanoclusters of Dr Soderholm. The waste dump colloids and the particles escaping the HEPA filters at the plant contain thousands of atoms, not just one atom of plutonium. That's extremely important and why it is not the same as an atom of K-40 in a banana. Your body has a fair chance to repair a single radioactive strike, but these particles are like a perpetual point of radiation when inhaled and lodged. You can get another destructive disinegration before the first repair is done. Alpha particles can break both strands of DNA, which makes the repair harder than a single strand K-40 gamma strike.

The 38 atom nanocluster that the body absorbs easily is another "gift that keeps giving". Dr Soderholm, "so far" has found nanocluster up to 90 atoms. Just a few thoughts to share. Back to da game...Peter

Radiation Protection Dosimetry 83:221-232 (1999)

© 1999 Oxford University Press

Variability in PuO2 Intake by Inhalation: Implications for Worker Protection at the US Department of Energy

B.R. Scott and A.F. Fencl

This paper describes the stochastic exposure (SE) paradigm where, at most, small numbers of airborne toxic particles are presented for inhalation. The focus is on alpha-emitting plutonium dioxide (PuO2) particles that may be inhaled by Department of Energy (DOE) workers. Consideration of the SE paradigm is important because intake of only a few highly radioactive PuO2 particles such as 238PuO2, could greatly exceed the annual limit on intake (ALI) used to control worker exposure. For the SE paradigm, credible intake distributions evaluated over the population at risk are needed, rather than unreliable point estimates of intake. Credible distributions of radiation doses and health risks are also needed. Because there are limited data on humans who inhaled PuO2, these distributions must be calculated. Calculated distributions are presented that relate to the intake of radioactivity via inhaling polydisperse PuO2 particles. The results indicate that a large variability in radioactivity intake is expected when relatively small numbers of PuO2 particles are inhaled. For the SE paradigm, one cannot know how many PuO2 particles were inhaled by an individual involved in a given inhalation exposure scenario. Thus, rather than addressing questions such as 'Did the calculated worker's intake of 238PuO2 exceed the ALI?', it is better to address questions such as 'What is the probability that 238PuO2 intake by a given worker occurred and exceeded the ALI?' Mathematical tools for addressing the latter question are presented, and examples of their applications are provided, with emphasis on possible DOE worker exposures at the Rocky Flats facility near Denver, Colorado. The alpha-emitting isotopes 238Pu, 239Pu, 240Pu and 242Pu are found at Rocky Flats. Although 238Pu is thought to be present in relatively small amounts there, intake via inhalation of only a few 238PuO2 particles could greatly exceed the ALI.

"you forgot to confess or deny whether you hav stock in AEHI!"

OH PETER the real OGRE of these comment pages....

The only investments I make are in the players going bankrupt! Its more rewarding to buy in at 25c and have them bounce upwards in short order.

"... the modern geothermal I am pushing "

And yet, you keep focussing on past nuclear problems and trying to keep hidden the much improved nuclear industry.

" I quoted and provided the meticulous 2007 Stanford study that documented exact weather data that states connecting widespread wind farms provides a STEADY BASELOAD..."

Another example of misusing statistics and studies! They cant even accurately predict WEATHER 3 days into the future. Plus, no one yet understands the GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGES, due in great part from increased volcanic activity and plate tectonics under the sea which is releasing mass amounts of CO2.

" My warning my fellow Idahoans about the bear in the woods at INL and Gillispie's plans is what I consider my duty."

You do know what happened to Chicken Little dont you? Ended up hanging on Tysons Fryer Line!

"DOE was ignorant in the first decade of denial about plutonium leakage..."

Wow, what you call DENIAL I call a learning curve.

There are more serious current toxins to worry about in the Snake River and others. Perchlorate comes to mind, for one.

Since ABE was smart enough to move on, I will as well and not return.

/Sancho Panza (Ogre)

Buh-Bye Ogre,

But a few thoughts before you go-go.

RE:"And yet, you keep focussing on past nuclear problems and trying to keep hidden the much improved nuclear industry."

Not really Ogre. The contaiment flaw DOE document is their LATEST study, done in 2006, and admits to many scenarioes that could lead to "catastrophic failure." That is not a history they corrected, it is the present day flaws that your 25 cent stock man Gillispie has repeatedly denied can ever ever happen. The history of geothermal DID get corrected, but in NO SCENARIO ever carries the risk of a Cherboyl type meltdown, does it?

RE: ""DOE was ignorant in the first decade of denial about plutonium leakage..."(Peter)

Ogre: Wow, what you call DENIAL I call a learning curve."

If you actually read my post and references on leaving the buried plutonium to leak, while we invite more production and waste in, that again is a PRESENT DAY problem at INL. What you call a "learnng curve" most of us call 39 years of broken promises to remove the cancer causing plutonium that is leaking into our water supply. The only thing INL and the paid off politicians learned, was how to lie better.

And call me Chicken Little all you like. And Regan was a Chicken Little about the Russian threat too I suppose to you. When the fallout from Nevada test site floated into Idaho, and when the Chernobyl fallout caused thousands of kids thyroid cancers 80 miles away, indeed, the sky was falling, in a way God never intended. There was no man made plutonium in our water when God blessed Idaho. We have the chance to contain it, and create $13 billion worth of jobs here. That is what we were promised in 1970, and again in the infamous 1995 "Get the Waste OUT" nuclear deal. We imported tons of world wide spent fuel high level waste in exchange for that broken promise, that we are still stuck with. Yah, silly me for caring. Have a nice retirement in Ogreland...Peter

This is not a response to anyone in particular because I am no longer responding.

Instead, I am apologizing to Kim, the nice, intelligent, and very patient lady who started this discussion.

This thread has been interesting but it is way off base because I allowed myself to get into a discussion of Pu at INL instead of a power plant in Elmore County. INL issues, and whether they are being addressed correctly or not, have absolutely nothing to do with the original question.

The two questions are about as related as the railroads and the airlines are. The latter have a word in common: transportation, but everything else is a real stretch. Same with INL and a power plant: nuclear, but everything after that is a real stretch.

The original question was: should Elmore County allow a nuclear power plant to be built? If I lived there my answer would be: yes. But I happen to like the nuclear power industry, and although it needs continual diligence and discipline and regulatory oversight to keep it safe, that is being accomplished around the world and it would be so in Elmore County as well.

All this other stuff about DOE's misdeeds of the past and Pu particles somehow being sucked up out of an aquifer, blown out of irrigation systems, drying on the soil, and being breathed in with dust by iron-deficient pregnant women when the wind blows is spectacularly unrelated to this original question. It is a very interesting scenario, but whether it is credible or not depends on the source term, the aquifer, and a whole lot more.

The bottom line is that it has nothing to do with a power plant in Elmore County. Nothing.

It has been fun watching the Ogre and Peter tangle, and I enjoyed tangling with Peter myself, and taking an occasional indirect poke at the Ogre as well. Peter forced me to learn a few new things. Good for me.

But we have really strayed from the central question to be answered by Elmorians about this power plant.

So, my final words here are: if I lived there I would say yes, but I would also encourage the county leaders to insist on a clause in a contract between Elmore County and the operator of the plant that no matter who they sell their power to on the grid, and their main customer may well be far away, they will sell a percentage to the local utility at a deeply cut rate, and thus the local people will get a hefty reduction in their power bills. That would be mighty neighborly, would it not? It is only right.

Hey Abe,

Nice not to hear from you again, de'ja vue all over agian!!! :-) You try to quit, but something "pulls you back in!"

RE: "Peter forced me to learn a few new things. Good for me."

God bless your honesty, and . umm. how un-Ogrish of you!

RE: "All this other stuff about DOE's misdeeds of the past and Pu particles somehow being sucked up out of an aquifer, blown out of irrigation systems, drying on the soil, and being breathed in with dust by iron-deficient pregnant women when the wind blows is spectacularly unrelated to this original question. It is a very interesting scenario, but whether it is credible or not depends on the source term, the aquifer, and a whole lot more."

Well, that scenario is straight out of present official dose assessment protocol, and after I forced the INL/EPA to admit it, that clearly obvious "scenario" is NOW used in the "final" analysis. But the INL/EPA "screened out" pu-238 analysis, but did include many other elements in that very scenario, that give much lower doses when inhaling diluted single particles of stray nuclear waste.

I am glad you agree with me that locals should get a guaranteed WRITTEN contract for a low local energy price. to promote jobs and growth, no matter if wind or nuclear power. But I have to respectfully disagree that the present lying ongoing after 39 years of broken promises on buried leaking plutonium is unrelated to the promises of safety, recycling, and "safe" nuclear power Gillispie is promising Elmore County Yucca is over-filled with promised burial, and this new generation needs a whole new dump. Promises promises... Are you really OK with Gillispie claiming he can use only 100,000 gallons of precious water per day, and promises in word only to sell it to Elmore for 3 cents/kwhr, when Areva itself says that is not true, what we dumb podiatrists call a lie? When Idaho can double it's electric use for growth with our "accessible" wind power, why does our Governor claim, "We have 3 N's in our energy future, Natural ga, Nuclear, or Nothing?" Why does Butch's "energy Czar" repeat that ignorant phrase for $60,000 per year?

As you say Abe, "The original question was: should Elmore County allow a nuclear power plant to be built?" Like the old joke question, "Do you swear?" HELL NO! :-) Respectfully...Peter

Thanks Abe I appreciate the re-focusing of this blog. I have enjoyed the comments back and forth.Thanks to everyone else for your views. I appreciate that everyone has their opinions and facts and viewpoints that they are not afriad to voice. That is what makes this blogging stuff so entertaining as well as informative. I really must say that through out all the facts and B.S. that has been written, I am still at the same point. I believe that the plant should be built and that nuclear power is the way to go for our energy needs. I do agree that wind power should also be promoted and more turbines should be put up. And lastly, I continue to support the idea that a decision as important as this should be put to the people for a vote instead of being placed on the shoulders of a few. Keep the comments coming because I read them all.

(Time: 7:30am)

So, I see alot of you say your pro nuclear, yet say its not good for Elmore ? Why ? because its not centered around cow's or sugar beets ? I think this is just the "not in my back yard" stance. What we have in America is not working, in regards to Energy. As an example, Look at the US automotive industry. GM refused to compete with foreign auto makers and now look at where they are. We are getting in too deep with the middle east and China. We as Americans need to come together and solve this important issue. I stated before, a small few run things around here,(mtn. hm) and my faith in them is minimal, let us all vote on it after much needed education for both sides of the issue have been presented.

privatize the whole process if you want results.

You want Yucca mountain done right-Privatize it.

Hey Doc,

The web site links and cut and paste facts and figures are great, but can you tell me where there is a functioning proven Geothermal operation that can sustain the energy needs of a community the size of Mountain Home at the same time reducing that communities energy expenses and also has created thousands of long term jobs and brought in other industry jobs and bussinesses ? Thanks.

This proposed nuclear operation can only be expected to produce around 2000 jobs and not 3785. That changes the landscape. I will not flood this blog with the data behind that. The wages have a high probability of only being around 43,000 per year and not the 50,000 reported by AEHI. Of those 2000 jobs, 500 to 750 will be Ph.D's and scientists which contrary to public opinion will not be locally supplied. The overall job creation impact is going to be about 1250 which then shrinks all of the other numbers proposed by them. False expectations by the public and contractors can have negative effects.

I wont argue science but economically their scenario is flawed and needs some tempering. They are salesman and so will advertise the highest possible values. When current market conditions and past history and common sense are factored in, this is not as rosy as once thought.

You said it Twilcox, Economic growth, without new bussiness, you have none. So is the case with Mountain home. Your last paragraph is just opinion, but your entitled to it. Cheers.

This operation will create jobs and all that jazz. My goal is to give the public unbiased and relevant data that will better help them make decisions.

I think that we have better alternatives available to us than nuclear. Nuclear brings with it, a degree of predictability. It is a controlled experiment after all. Wind, solar, geo, etc. have degrees of uncertainty built into them. Billy Mays (errr.. Don Gillispie) advertises this because he feels that Idahoans will latch onto this without question. He is a salesman and not going to give an impartial, reasoned perspective. If you have ever worked in customer service, you know about always accentuating the pro's and forgetting the cons.

Overall, if the public can handle the truth about this and still wants it well then lets move forward. If 1250 jobs and not 3785 still sounds as rosy as ever then lets stop squabbling and move on.

EVERYONE is selling something. Remember that. Thats why were not socialist (yet) 1200 plus jobs is the start, once the area has something to offer, IE more power, then you may see other industry and bussiness' taking up residence here.

What are your better alternatives ? lets hear them.

there is considerable data that states that simply upgrading the grid to a smart grid would more than compensate for the increased demand. Yes, this would not have the same job creation dynamic as nuclear. People dont want to hear that though. They want to hear that this pot of gold will appear at the end of the rainbow. They want to hear that jobs will appear and that they will be so plentiful that no sacrifices will have to be made. No one wants their standard of living to decrease even though that standard was made from borrowing.

Upgrading the grid and some moderate increases in Geo/wind/solar would be more than enough. That would not create the jobs nor spark the indirect effects like nuclear would though. This strategy would simply crank up power rates for the short term. The benefits would be that it would actually affect Idaho and not be sent to Nevada or California. The myth that this plant would lower our rates is bunk. A smart grid would use our power more efficiently and any subsequent developments could operate efficiently.

Ok, well i have to get going but there are pros and cons to this like all things.

I agree 100 % with a smart grid. Before I go without air conditioning, buy a hybird car or buy new "green" light bulbs to save the earth, the gids need to be the most energy effecient as possible. That starts at the top with the big boys, wich is why its not getting done. I also support drilling for oil here, and building a few more refineries in an alternate location from current ones. But as of now Geo/wind/solar might supplement but the cost is not feasible.

Also, now that the US Gov. owns 60 % of GM, maybe we can get cars that get 40 plus MPG. LOL...just thinking

Hi Kim,

You surely can keep on cheerleading for Gillispie, but you don't seem to acknowledge some of the mistakes you claimed in your original post. To be specific:

Kim:"Nuclear energy presents the most cost-effective solution, it has the lowest production cost" Peter- Not according to the Areva written Keystone report on page 11 that I referenced above, and not according to Warren "it's too expensive to build in Payette" Buffet! You are quoting Gillispie's lie about 3 cent/kwhr that Areva says it not true.

Kim:"Not subject to unreliable weather or climate conditions, unpredictable cost fluctuations" Peter- Well actually 2 reactors have been forced to shut down during the peak hot summer demand because their effluent was way overhaeting the fish in the river. As we get hotter this will happen more.

Hey Paul Revere, why are you repeating question already answered? Like "What are your better alternatives ? lets hear them." Do you have ADD? Asked and answered above repeatedly...Peter

Hey dill hole,

I was talking to twilcox1978, if you followed the posts in order.

However, Peter the Doctor, you didn't answer my post that concerned you, how convienient.

So you DO have ADD then Paul. Demanding the answers separately from twilcox on alternatives, that I have already answered repeatedly, is just wasting my time...

And to be honsest with you pete, your ranting cut and paste,run on postings are not really helping your cause. I find you an Idealist and caustic in your approach. You might try and get a personality.

As I said fake-name Paul Revere, the DOE reference I provided says Idaho can double our present electric use with accessible wind power at 7.5 cents/kwhr, while providing thousands of jobs that pay well. One tech inspector is needed for every 5 windmills for maintenence too, and it still is cheaper than nuke power. That covers the WHOLE state's elctric growth Paul, including windy Elmore. Raft River geothermal is a 10 MW plant selling at 5.25 cents/kwhr. Not sure if that will cover Elmore or not, but that is irrelevant, and not worth me researching just because your knickers are in a knot. The DOE quotes on geothermal cover the whole US electric supply, which covers Elmore too. If wind and geothermal can outproduce the whole country's needs, I have to laugh at your hissy fit and demands for repeat answers...Peter

Well, my screen name really gets you huh? Most people would agree that to post your real name on the internet is plain stupid. Not you though huh ?

Wind huh ? Well your good at blowing wind..LOL..hot air. I would rather look at one Nuke plant here or there than the thousands of wind mills that would take up so much space. And your still dependent on wind arn't you.

Ok pete,

I took a look at your web site on the raft river site. Sounds intresting although not as a sure thing as your indicating, from what I have read .

First its still a "Project" and I find it funny at the top of the menu bar is a icon for "Investors", you a share holder pete ?

Do it for the kids right pete ?

Looks like the nuclear is proven and established, and the geothermal is still in the stages of full development and still needs real world use. Which I am sure can supplement just like solar/wind etc.

So, then I checked out the DOE. Now I understand you. You beleive everything they tell you ! LOL, I have been a DOD employee for 17+ years and can tell you from first hand experience that when the Fed Gov. is involved you are in for a real treat.

You want Uncle sugar to fix your problems huh ? Well hw won't, he will regulate and tax you. He will tell you what kind of lightbulbs to use and what kind of Energy star appliances to upgrade to. ( it all cost's the consumer dosen't it ? ) and how much power you can consume. Is big bussiness, and your taking in their ideals hook, line and sinker.

Hi Paul whatever name,

Gee, you don't even understand what the words "projects" mean on the Raft River website! I'll explain it to you, but for da record, NO, I do not have stock in them, nor any wind power companies. It's like the doctors ethics oath and bylaws. You are not supposed to profit on products you recommend, like snake oil salesmen. Some docs do, but I don't.

So let's be clear, Raft River IS RIGHT NOW producing 10 MW of power and RIGHT NOW selling it to Idaho Power for 5.25 cents/kwhr. That is NOT a theory that needs work. It is a real LEAN power plant working right now, for over one year!

Yes, this company IS working on other projects to develope more power. It IS a growing dynamic company that has REAL "projects", unlike your boy Gillispie, who only puts out perpetual press releases promising projects that never pan out. Like Gillispie's "Lightning Harvest" power project, his disgraced Yemen project with PowerEd fakers etc.

Please re-read the Raft River website, and you will see they plan on expanding RR to a full 110 MW power plant, plus develope 2 other sites in other states...Peter

There homepage is at http://www.usgeothermal.com/Index.aspx

This snippet is on their Raft River "project" page at http://www.usgeothermal.com/RaftRiverProject.aspx

"The Company currently owns and/or leases approximately 8.2 square miles of land with a proven geothermal reservoir which may be capable of producing up to 110 megawatts of power based on estimates from GeothermEx Inc.

US Geothermal acquired the project in 2002 and have a 20 year contract with the Idaho Power company to sell 10 megawatts of electricity from the Raft River Unit 1 power plant. The Raft River Unit 1 began commercial operations in January 2008."

To be realistic, there are reasons that there are not windmills lining I-84. No, it is not because everyone is ignorant and doesn't want to pony up the money for it. One of them is that they do not pay themselves off as quickly as most would like and have limits. I support wind power but we have to look at all sides of the story.

For over one YEAR !!!! wow, I am buying stock now.

I respect and trust western doctors as much as Politicians...but you want to be one of those too don't you ? Baby can't get his way...become a politician today ! LOL...stay in Twin and visit the bridge...see all that water down there...go get it. Bye Peter, your wasting my life. Murdering me with each post. Sucker.

Buh-Bye Paul Revere,

You refuse to admit you were DEAD WRONG about Raft River, totally misunderstanding the simple word "projects." So, yes, you are left to oddly ridicule the FACT that it has hummed along nicely for one year instead of admit you were wrong to claim it was not a functioning technology.

Dr Abe admitted "Peter forced me to learn a few new things. Good for me." But while you lash your tongue, then lick your wounds, I am glad you understand the word "projects" now.

You do admit I was "Murdering me with each post." Yah, I communicate politely with opponents unless they dwell on name calling like you did. It's not sportsman like for me to shoot you like a fish in a barrel, but YOU picked the harsh tone, and I don't mind a battle of wits with unarmed opponents that start the fight with me.

My guess is Gillispie's crew will obtain yet another fake name yahoo account, and you will come back ranting like Walmartgreeter and nailpounder wanting "great job" from Gillispie's scheme. Perhaps your name can be MinimumRage next time...Peter

Once again the conversation has turned from a civic discussion into verbal abuse. Honestly, its time to pull out the arterial hemostat, Vicryl ties, and a bone saw because the limb is long dead. It just might be better if everyone had a time out.

"Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society."

Benjamin Franklin

By the way in response to: "Spud, please detail what DOE or NRC document reference I provided that you call "ever shifting shell game based on opinions and thinly disguised factual data." All I have to say that I never pointed a finger in any one direction. Just by your immediate response of "you're attacking me / I'm not guilty" makes me question the soundness of any argument you forward. I expected more...

Hi Spun8tor,

Love the Ben Franklin quote. That's how I raised my boys, and that IS what I am doing here. I again must remind you when communicating with opponents like Dr Abe and Kim, there was no verbal abuse nor name calling, just polite challenges to specific documented issues revealing nuclear safety flaws and high costs. Even while teasing Paul Revere after HIS ATTACKING ME, I stuck to the facts with an "upright and reasoning will," just like Ben F and you advize. We got into the SPECIFICS of the geothermal power at Raft River, and it revealed Paul was dead wrong, and I was right.

Now you AGAIN label me a verbal abuser as the "logic" for why you now favor the nuclear plant! You now claim, that in your June 11th post that you "never pointed a finger in any one direction." Well, I re-posted it below, and YES you DID point your finger at me, and then point later Opinion Missy! I paste my response for convenience, where I politely turn the other cheek, and simply ask you to be specific about what you labeled as "thinly disguised factual data." And since your original response falsely claimed I labeled all opponents "whiny and vindictive" I will paste the quote in context, because I said, ONLY in response to Paul's attack and whining about how backwards MH people are: "If you are really in the military, then God Bless YOU, and thank you for your service. But all the military folks I know are not whiny vindictive cry babies."

Hope this original post of yours refreshes your memory Spudn8tor. Respectfully...Peter

This whole nuclear thing has me tied up in knots. Instead of examining the issue it seems that there is ever shifting shell game based on opinions and thinly disguised factual data. Frankly we have no idea just what a nuclear power plant would be like in Idaho. Instead we're going to tear at each other like a rabid pack of mongrels.

Yaay!! Democracy at its finest!

It is really depressing that I've spent over 18 years of my life, here and overseas, to protect the rights of the "educated" to slander others. (And yes, I'm an Idaho native.) Many of us here on base feel that Mt. Home is a wasted opportunity that needs development. I'm personally offended that the Dr. has labeled us "whiny vindictive cry babies". Because of the verbal abuse I've fully slid into a pro-nuclear mindset. (DrPeter & OpinionMissy need not respond.)

-- Posted by Spudn8tor on Thu, Jun 11, 2009, at 2:59 PM

______________________________

Howdy Spudn8tor and Paul,

Please note I appreciated politely the calm discussion of DOE documents with very pro-nuclear people like Abe Vanliun and NCSU NE. I have not labeled them whiny nor vindictive because they stuck to the facts and spoke honestly. It was a pleasant informative discussion.

But the nasty tone and total lack of details makes that an appropriate label for some bloggers, and I call'em like I see'em.

Spud, please detail what DOE or NRC document reference I provided that you call "ever shifting shell game based on opinions and thinly disguised factual data."

Paul, glad you admit you have bought stock in AEHI at a nickel, but again you refused to pinpoint what reference I provided that was "faulty logic." Your simply having an opinion does not make you a whiny crybaby, it's the nasty whining and crying that does...Peter

-- Posted by DrPeterRickardsDPM on Thu, Jun 11, 2009, at 3:28 PM

Gee, I got outta here just in time! It has not gotten any nicer since I left, and I was hoping it would.

Come to think of it Peter, the whole repertoire of scenarios always includes the inhaled dust after irrigation one unless you can show that it is not a significant player. I believe there are good reasons for INL not to expect Pu to be among the radionuclides that are contributing to that particular sub-scenario (irrigation is the major scenario, and it has several subs). Those large neutral particles of Pu are not stable in the environment, I believe, but I am just taking the word of a person in this business whom I respect and trust on that one. I am known to do that.

It is always the drinking water scenario that dominates when you have this concept of an irrigated farmstead with permanent residents. Crops, livestock, dust and taking showers come in way behind just drinking the water. Using swamp coolers is also a sub-scenario, also coming in behind drinking water.

I'll let you guys get back to it, but please wear gloves puffed up with totally undue and undeserved politeness!

Geothermal is wonderful, solar is intermittent but OK, wind is intermittent, ugly, and kills lots of birds. But if it does the job I guess no one cares about our non-voting/non-consuming/non-furry feathered fellow planetary inhabitants or about our aesthetic experience driving across the country.

For large scale baseload, nuclear is the best option. That is my opinion.

Please be nice to one another, after all this is just a friendly debate over an idea, a plan for a power plant, one likely to be safer (new passive safety-systems are the rage now) than the 105 others already operating in this country.

It is not an evil conspiracy to install some ticking time-bomb in Elmore County. It is an All-American true-blue conspiracy for investors to make money through creating lots of a product in ever greater demand. Elmore ought to get a share of that money, and even if there are few locals hired as nuclear engineers (not many PhDs in power plants, lots of operators, electricians, pipefitters, mechanics, and engineers though), the great news is that once they settle in, they become locals! Its a win win! Yea!

Living with disagreement is something I do continually at home, so meeting it elsewhere just reminds me of home! Losing it at home is never an option, learning to be polite and seeking middle ground is an art, and my wife is the artist, I am her canvas. Isn't she doing a wonderful job?!

Bye for real this time. I am taking bets on my PayPal account.

Hi Abe,

Nice to "not" hear from you yet again! :-) Like Sugar Ray Leonard, your retirements are always short! Glad you chimed back in to share some thoughts. I am betting you will be back again, despite your promise to retire!

There seems to be contradiction within what you are saying tonight. On my complaints about the fake "clean up" of buried leaking plutonium over our water, which originally omitted any wind resuspended plutonium inhalation from irrigation water, and then after I forced them, did add the inhalation scenario. I complained they incorrectly screened out high dosing plutonium-238 as too low a dose, in favor of only analysing less radioactive elements. So tonight you say you "talked to a friend" in the business, and "believe" INL was correct, saying "I believe there are good reasons for INL not to expect Pu to be among the radionuclides that are contributing to that particular sub-scenario (irrigation is the major scenario, and it has several subs)."

Well, Abe, I provided the publish peer-reviewed DOE worker dosimetry paper on pu-238 inhalation written by Dr Scott. This paper shows inhaling ONE pu-238 particle would illegally give a pregnant women 1,300 mrem, or about 130 chest x-rays. The legal limit is 10 mrem. Did your "friend" have a specific contradiction to Dr Scott's paper? Dr Scott is actually pro-nuclear BTW. It was just an honest report on how high the dose of ONE pu-238 particle REALLY is. Does your "friend know that they FINALLY included analysis of inhaling one plutonium-239 particle downstream from irrigation & resuspension??? Like I said above pu-238 is 275 times MORE radioactively destructive to DNA than the analized pu-239. So WHY did they avoid the analysis of inhaling pu-238? WHY does the pu-238 production cluster plans for Idaho claim inhaling a single pu-238 particle give the lowly dose of 0.000001 mrem, when Dr Scott proves the dose is over 1,300 mrem, Abe? Ask your "friend" for some documents PLEASE.

Then your next sentence seems to contradict the pooh-poohing of plutonium inhalation stating "Those large neutral particles of Pu are not stable in the environment, I believe, but I am just taking the word of a person in this business whom I respect and trust on that one." Well, this time your friend is right! The dumped leaking plutonium IS NOT STABLE IN THE ENVIRONMENT, but the INL claims it will bind to clay and never leak, ten years after the Kersting report that shows that is not true!

Then your next 2 sentences contradict the common knowledge that inhalation of plutonium is the major pathway of concern over drinking water! Tonight you claim, "It is always the drinking water scenario that dominates when you have this concept of an irrigated farmstead with permanent residents. Crops, livestock, dust and taking showers come in way behind just drinking the water." Abe, you have worked on Yucca Mt, but you are WAY wrong about this!!! Check ANY source you like, but let me share a snippet from our Depat of Health website that I paste below. Keep in mind as the downplay absorbtion from drinking water, presently assumed to be only 0.05%, you all really have not tested how easily these newly discover nanoclusters absorb into our bodies from drinking, HAVE YOU?..Peter

"What Is the Primary Health Effect? Plutonium poses a health hazard only if it is taken into the body because all isotopes but plutonium-241 decay by emitting an alpha particle, and the beta particle emitted by plutonium-241 is of low energy. Minimal gamma radiation is associated with any of these radioactive decays. Inhaling airborne plutonium is the primary concern for all isotopes, and cancer resulting from the ionizing radiation is the health effect of concern. The ingestion hazard associated with common forms of plutonium is much lower than the inhalation hazard because absorption into the body after ingestion is quite low."

Peter, just for da record, first-I don't even know this Gillespie guy. I've never been introduced or shook his hand. And secondly-though every man seems to have cheerleader fantasies, I don't wish to be in yours. The outfit just wouldn't fit and it would make my thighs look fat.

The facts that I wrote about don't come from these AEHI, because I'm certain that they would only write the positive. I agree that anyone would fluff things in order to sell their company. Though I am blonde and do suffer from bonde-moments occasionally, don't let the hair color fool ya! I search the web and read until I feel satisfied of what my position should be.

I am not a tree-hugger or environmental freak either. However, even those enthusiastic groups have been quoted to support nuclear power as the clean environmentally sound solution. (No pom-poms were used in the writing of that supportive statement)

Time: 7:05am

Well, true colors prevail don't they pete. No matter who gets on here, you think your above them. You must be a douche. These types of people are never satisfied and want us to sit around eating tofu and wheat grass. And the poor farmers ! No nukes because of the poor farmers. Yeah, I remember all the years when uncle sugar paid you not to grow crops, now we get screwed at the grocery store because these tree huggers want to put corn in gas. You ever see a volcano ? Tornado ? Lightining? Mother earth can take care of herself, how bold to think we humans can alone "save" the earth by turning back my thermostat (Snake River Alliance and the like)Get over yourselves, get a life.

Nice one Kim, that was quite humorous. Thats not to be patronizing or anything like that, it was just genuinely amusing.

Safety records aside, this is like building a dam. Do we want the boomtown that was Rock Springs during the construction of the Bridger Plant or not. If society can deal with those consequences then let them have it. Nuclear waste is an issue that wont go away but neither side has come up with a viable solution. Mr. Gillispie is a salesman and so he will only parade the positives and inflate numbers to do that. We need to sift through the fluff and find the most probable consequences and find if we can deal with them or not.

As long as I don't have to smell any more Cow Dung Waffing thru the air.

Howdy Kim,

Yes, I was amused by your recent post too, just like Tim. I appreciated the chuckle.

But you still have not corrected your claims. Please provide what reference you claim to be citing, since you are not quoting Gillispie's lie about how cheap he can produce muke power at 3 cents/kwhr. I paste my specific questions to you, including the cheerleading phrase below. I provided my reference, the very Areva company that Gillispie wants to build. Please provide your reference.

Please note nowhere do I say I fantasize about you, nor call you a dumb blond! I have teased our Congressmen for being cheerleaders for the nuclear industry, while they avoid the deadly details of the documented safety flaws. I teased Bush2 for being an actual cheerleader in college, but at no point have I fantasized about Bush, Larry "toe-tepping Craig, nor you! I was just pointing out you have not been specific, yet keep on praising (cheering) for nuclear power. Repeating the Greenpeac co-founder Patrick Moore has sold out to be a highly paid cheerleader for nuke power is NOT a reference on the true cost of nuclear power, is it?

And the so-called Paul Revere. You vowed never to return, but there you are spewing hate and stereotypes again, and not a single specific issue. You still have not acknowledged you were DEAD WRONG about Raft River. Does it take TWO typewriters to "stereotype" everyone in your rants?

Still waiting to hear from Abe on his incorrect insistence that drinking water with plutonium is much worse than inhalation, in his "belief" that INL did a correct dismisal.

So Kim, here were the specific questions you mistook as me having a crush on you. (No pom-pom were "injured" during this episode!) Respectfully...Peter

From June 12th

Hi Kim,

You surely can keep on cheerleading for Gillispie, but you don't seem to acknowledge some of the mistakes you claimed in your original post. To be specific:

Kim:"Nuclear energy presents the most cost-effective solution, it has the lowest production cost" Peter- Not according to the Areva written Keystone report on page 11 that I referenced above, and not according to Warren "it's too expensive to build in Payette" Buffet! You are quoting Gillispie's lie about 3 cent/kwhr that Areva says it not true.

Kim:"Not subject to unreliable weather or climate conditions, unpredictable cost fluctuations" Peter- Well actually 2 reactors have been forced to shut down during the peak hot summer demand because their effluent was way overhaeting the fish in the river. As we get hotter this will happen more.

This guy can be found at sear's between the rakes and shovels. What a TOOL !

Peter,

None of this Pu inhalation for workers has anything to do with a farmer irrigating a crop a long way away from the source. There would perhaps be some Pu (of an isotopic number determined by its abundance in the source term, as decayed over transport time) but a very tiny fraction would be mobile in the forms (true colloid or pseudo-colloid) that we both agree exist.

But their existence does not make them dominant, nor stable for a long time, as during the time of transport over a long distance.

If you compare the same amount of 238 inhaled versus ingested, you are correct. But we are not talking about the same amount, we are talking about what resides in groundwater far away from the source, in a hypothetical calculation involving a hypothetical person, and the Pu isotopes would represent a minuscule fraction of the total contaminant loading in that water, which would itself already be very low.

That water would no doubt pass a city's water- quality analyses which, by EPA's rules, look for total alpha, beta and gamma and must have them below certain limits!

When you do calcualtions like this, and divide the water between drinking and irrigation, and then into the primary and secondary effects of irrigation, the resuspension is a very small fraction. It is only when you assume equal amounts in all sub-scenarios that you get the answer you like, but that is just not how nature works and thus it is not how models work that try to mimic nature.

And all of this has nothing at all to do with a power plant which will nor release any Pu at all!

I'd rather fatasize about cheerleaders in their cute little outfits than maintain this dialogue, Peter. The fun factor is wearing away quickly.

Build the power plant already! If you hurry you may live to say I told you so, but i seriously doubt it. I won't live to say I told you so, but only because I'm too old, not because I'm wrong.

I like the fact that Areva has the French government behind it, that means French pride is on the line and they will fix whatever the NRC says to fix. They need operating reactors, success stories, to point to as part of their business model for being a major player in the world-wide nuclear renaissance.

Just do it, it will be just fine just as it is at 105 other locations in the US already. That is my very personal opinion.

All of you who sent money to PayPal betting i would not be back, thank you for your donations.

Hi Abe,

You owe me money now since I bet above that you would indeed return. Send one month's salary to Box 5022, Twin Falls, Id 83301!

Tonight you claim "None of this Pu inhalation for workers has anything to do with a farmer irrigating a crop a long way away from the source." Say what? I think you must have been fantasizing about cheerleaders when you wrote this! :-) Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?

I can show you the math tricks they use in detail, but I'd like to hear your explanation please. This dose discrepancy applies to 2 present day problems at the trusted INL. 1) in the broken promise to remove ALL the plutonium, instead of put a dirt cap on 90% of it, and 2) the fake safety analysis EIS for the planned plutonium-238 production being forced into Idaho.

At the new plant, where pu-238 leaks out into the air, there is no time delay decay to lessen the dose, is there? These are the same math games that the NRC will use to declare the new and present nuclear power plants "safe."

For the buried leaking plutonium in this flood zone over our water, no doubt there is a time delay for water transport before it is pumped up for sprinkle irrigation and wind resuspension for innocent citizens to inhale. The INL "experts believe it takes 100 years for the water under the INL to come out of the walls in Hagerman at 1000 Springs, and into the Snake River. But farmers also pump lots of it up before Hagerman. This great aquifer feeda all the farmland from INL to Hagerman.

Despite all your sub-scenarios above, favoring focusing on drinking water instead of inhalation, you are in denial of the high dose inhaling ONE pu-238 particle, even after 50-100 years Abe. The half-life of pu-238 is 87 years. So a microscopic particle with a thousand atons of pu-238 will still have 500 nasty atoms to cause lung cancer after the first 87 years, as you well know. That is still WAY above the legal limit of public exposure of 10 mrem these reports swear wil never happen, isn't it? Despite the obsfucation of your explanation why inhalation is not as important as pu in drinking water above, you do realize the INL DID finally include inhalation from irrigation analysis. The problem is the neglected the high dose pu-238 in favor of ONLY looking at lower dose pu-239. Why is this, if not to hide the highest dose, to legitimize leaving a TON of loose leaking plutonium??

Then you claim "And all of this has nothing at all to do with a power plant which will nor release any Pu at all!" Come on Abe, Chernobyl release PLENTY of plutonium from the used fuel meltdown! If a USA reactor meltdown, and the containment fails, the plutonium will coat Elmore farmfields and far beyond. It is this spent fuel plutonium that has US demanding Iran and North Korea halt their nuclear power programs! Let's not forget the not-so lovely strontium-90 in the nuclear power meltdown fallout.

So while you cheerlead for Gillispie and recommend "Build the power plant already!" I am curious if you or your family has bought stock in this plan? It is certainly your right to do so, but you have made me now wonder how you even found this isolated blog if not for a personal stake in this. I DO appreciate calmly talking the details of the documents with, so no offense intended, just curious. I am interested in your science answers more, but had to ask. Respectfully...Peter

Peter, you are so suspicious! How did I find this blog? I regulalarly go the State of Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency website's "What's New" page. That page daily scours the world for nuclear news. There is a lot of bad news in that list every day, you might like it.

One day I happened to look and there was something from a place I once lived: Mountain Home! So I entered in and opined.

I have liked our exchanges, but we are at an impasse and I ought to leave it alone from now on as I promised. But I am a man, promises are tools, not committments.

I found your last posting to be rather strange. Just because very large particles of Pu can exist does not mean they either do in a given situation or that they are particularly stable. And what are the chances of one of those microscopic huge particles finding a nostril a hundred miles away? This is where probability comes into play, and probability is real, and consequence times probability is risk, and the risk of this scenario is minuscule.

If you do not allow any probability to be brought into the risk equation at all, don't be born because the first year of life is a high-risk period of time. Don't have babies, it is still somewhat dangerous to give birth. There is risk in all we do.

Bringing up Chernobyl is comparing a graphite plutonium-production reactor to a civilian power plant. N-reactor at Hanford was the last similar reactor we ran in the US, for both electricity and plutonium production. N-reactor had redundant cooling systems, something the Russians thought showed inferiority in the US engineering and engineers. Chernobyl was operator error, they heard the warnings and turned the indicators off since they thought the indicators had to be wrong.

This is an absurd comparison, and you ought to apologize to the proposers of this power plant for making this smear.

Also, repeatedly making a nonexistent link between a waste management facility and a power plant is tantamount to a smear.

There is simply no connection between the two.

You are spreading fear with no real basis except a few scientific facts strung together in a way that does not fit the more likely version of reality that is addressed through risk-assessments.

Every risk assessment I have been associated with has been attacked on an ad-hoc basis addressing one or more specific assumptions with wild what-ifs like these huge Pu particles of yours. In an ideal sitiuation I am sure they exist, but as Pu is dissolved away from a source term it is not at all certain that they would appear at the sizes you contemplate or if they did that they would last, as they enter the groundwater and its different chemistry.

You are spreading a poorly founded fear that has nothing, zero, zip to do with the proposed power plant.

Picture me as a cheerleader [with an ugly gut hanging out of a cute little oufit] for your new power plant. If you can eat within a month after picturing that, you ought to become a doctor! Oops, you already are one. (My apologies to the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders whose calendar I had for more years than it was valid. Great cheerleaders never expire . . . until you get married, of course, then they are recycled with all your past loves' letters --- now there is a new topic for a blog!)

Howdy Abe,

So now you owe me double for again breaking your vow to never return! :-)

RE: Comparing a Chernobyl -type disaster to a US meltdown and containment failure is "absurd."

Well, Abe, I quoted the NRC & DOE's latest documents on meltdown scenarios and containment flaws that could lead to "catastrophic failure." You are free to call that "absurd", but what part of "catastrophic failure" don't you understand? Yah, containment is like a condem, but when the radiation leaks, you'll know that you've been truly screwed!!! When they ask Elmore County citizens to bend over, while they force in this nuclear plant, there is no condom big enough to protect our kids. As Larry the Cable Guy would say, "Lord, I"m sorry 'bout that, but dat's the truth..." Do you have a specific scientific flaw in the DOE/NRC containment flaw document Abe?

RE: "Also, repeatedly making a nonexistent link between a waste management facility and a power plant is tantamount to a smear."

Oh really Abe??? Are you SURE the nuclear power plant proposed has NOTHING to do with the high-level nuclear waste it will create, and leave in Elmore, until some TWO new dump beyond Yucca Mt that will be forced open? Yucca Mt would be filled to the MAX, even with reprocessing, as documented above. But Yucca funds were just cut, because EVERY Republican and Democrat Nevada fed delegation opposes Yucca Mt, as does Obama, even though Obama takes money from his Illinois nukers Exelon (see NY & LA Times for his BS).

RE: "And what are the chances of one of those microscopic huge particles finding a nostril a hundred miles away? This is where probability comes into play, and probability is real, and consequence times probability is risk, and the risk of this scenario is minuscule."

Umm, Abe, "microscopic huge particles" is a new phrase you have made up, so please explain this contradictory cheer to dismiss my DOE documents, that you have created! Are they "microscopic" or "HUGE"??? I have been asking particle size details over 21 years, on the unanswered HEPA filter flaws etc. I have communicated with Dr Kersting, Soderholm, and Scott, and a Dr Liu I have not even mentioned on this blog, and the dismissive phrase "microscopic huge particles" has never been written. I can even document where the National Academy of Sciences called for "emission free" plutonium facilities AFTER I testified and shared theDOE documents on particle size problems. Why did the NAS call for "emission free" plutonium treatment, Abe, if your "microscopic huge particles" are an absurd concern??? I'll post that NAS reference, and my testimony to them in Idaho Falls, if you honestly answer the problems I cited in your post, but the post is too long already. Respectfully...Peter

DrPeterRickardsDPM: I wasn't thinking you had a crush, just trying to be amusing. I thought we needed a good chuckle for a change. Hey, that's a great line! Chuckle for Change! I could use that as a motto! I'll file that for later use. For now, just go to my most recent blog for answers to the questions Peter requested me to answer. Thanks again for reading. Now get back to work! I'm taking a personal day off so eat your heart out, those slaving away at your job.

Cool Kim,

Sign me up for Chuckle For Change! :-) ...Peter

Peter, while I am waiting for your apologies to several entities for smearing them, I'd like to add the Laguna Verde power plants in Mexico to the list. I have searched sites by international and other agencies and see nothing to suggest it is not purring along in full compliance with applicable international safety standards.

They are doing so well with nuclear that now they are thinking of adding a new reactor to their system, a 1500MW size reactor like is being proposed for Elmore County.

I like Kim's intro to her new/continuation blog and wholeheartedly agree with her. But I am not going to ruin that one for her, so this is good bye #4, I think. For real? This time I'm pretty sure.

By the way, I really enjoyed the Lakers' cheerleaders and their cute outfits. Oh to be young again. But with the bad karma I have built up pushing nuclear power, no doubt I will be sent back again. Maybe I'll get a job at the Elmore nuclear station then?

Several people say they will hire from outside. So what? As soon as they are on board, they are locals! Kim is right, keeping the local economy where it is forces young people away. Give some a local opportunity. Send them away to get a nuclear engineering degree and then they can come back and work and become leaders in their home communities!

Hi again Abe,

I just corrected Kim's answers over on her new blog, but, yah the Laker cheerleaders were the only good thing about that series! But I already explained where you were wrong and refusing to answer questions directly. For example, you never admitted the Three Mile Island Hatch et al study you quoted DID actually find elevated rates of TWO types of cancer. You can demand an appology for me documenting an American reactor can meltdown and breach the containment, but it is you refusing to acknowledge what the NRC/DOE admit way in the documents they never share when making rosy speeches. To be specific, you refused to respond to these 2 documented questions...Peter

Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?

________________________________________

RE: Comparing a Chernobyl -type disaster to a US meltdown and containment failure is "absurd."

Well, Abe, I quoted the NRC & DOE's latest documents on meltdown scenarios and containment flaws that could lead to "catastrophic failure." You are free to call that "absurd", but what part of "catastrophic failure" don't you understand?

Peter, here we go again!

The TMI document you cite says there were two types of cancers with an increase, but their conclusion is not that these increases were from the TMI accident, their conclusions were that these results were not definitive as to cause.

About this Soderholm business, I am glad you forced me to look into it some

more. Thank you.

First, Argonne National Laboratories, when it announced the Soderholm work, stated:

http://www.cmt.anl.gov/Nuclear_and_Environmental_Processes/Pu_Nanoclusters.shtml

"For almost half a century, scientists have struggled with plutonium contamination spreading further in groundwater than expected, increasing

the risk of sickness in humans and animals.

It was known that nanometer-size clusters of plutonium oxide were the culprit, but no one had been able to study its structure, nor find a way to separate it from the groundwater."

The rest of the announcement says now we know, in essence. But the overall thrust of this news release is very misleading! It doesn't put a caveat on these results about what isotope it pertains to, a caveat that is in the technical paper by Soderholm.

There is an interesting chemistry blog that explains what this all-important caveat means to a discussion like we are having:

http://www.chemistry-blog.com/tag/lynda-soderholm/

"The one caveat with this work is that it was performed with the more stable plutonium-242 (t1/2=3.7 x 105 y) and not the typical reactor

plutonium-239 (t1/2=2.4 x 104 y). Perhaps in the presence of the >10x more radioactive Pu-239 the nanoclusters would become either too structurally

damaged to resolve nice crystalline structures, or more chemically reactive towards hydrous oxide formation or oxyhydroxide formation."

The two plutonium isotopes of interest at INL are Pu-238 and Pu-239. Pu-238 has a half life of about 88 years, and is thus almost 10,000 times

more radioactive than Pu-239, which probably is already too unstable to form these neat polymers!

POP go your huge Pu particles!

The waste at INL that will remain in the waste management facility after cleanup removed what can be removed has several constituents but the Pu in that material is predominately Pu-239.

Pu-238 is being used in very small quantities (~5 kg per year) to make space batteries, and the wastes generated are continually packed up and being shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent disposal.

No wonder they do not want to analyze your scenario for Pu-238, there will not be any significant amount of it in the residual material left underground that your scenario addresses!

Finally, this Idaho DEQ website says several interesting things about plutonium at INL, and includes this conclusion:

http://www.deq.state.id.us/inl_oversight/contamination/plutonium/overview.cfm

"There is no evidence plutonium or other contamination from the INL poses a risk to human health, the environment, our agricultural products, or livestock."

I buy that, hook, line and sinker. I think we are done with this discussion.

Build that reactor, improve your lives.

Hi AGAIN Abe,

Nice job ducking the two specific questions above. AGAIN, WHAT part of "catastrophic failure" do you NOT understand. Please don't avoid the subject, then claim the discussion is done. Are you still denying that US reactors can melt down, and denying the containment can fail leading to "catastrophic failure"? I provided the LATEST DOE/NRC documents that say I am correct.

At LEAST you admit "About this Soderholm business, I am glad you forced me to look into it some more. Thank you."

Yuo ARE welcome, but for the folks following along, the dumb podiatrist that has been scolded to stick to corns has helped improve the knowledge base of a specialist in that field, who has worked on Yucca Mt "safety". But Abe, you are STILL missing the point, and deeply misunderstanding the particle size issues. You claim above "POP go your huge Pu particles!" What "huge" pu particles have I ever mentioned Abe? These terms you make up totally misunderstand the nanometer size particles I have DOE documents on. None are "huge", but all have many "atoms" of plutonium within the inhalable sized microscopic particles that can easily be resuspended by the wind.

Yes, the caveat of Soderholm's use of pu-242 is interesting. But it only reveals how LITTLE you experts know about the destiny of this plutonium you are dumping in Idaho. The KEY word in your caveat above is "PERHAPS", isn't it, when the guy you cite says "Perhaps in the presence of the >10x more radioactive Pu-239 the nanoclusters would become either too structurally damaged to resolve nice crystalline structures, or more chemically reactive towards hydrous oxide formation or oxyhydroxide formation."

Y'all are STILL learning as you smile and ASSURE citizens this plutonium waste will NEVER leak or move with our water.

But let's be clear, you seemed before to admit that Dr Kersting's DOE report in 1997 was profound, defying your present belief plutonium bound to clay and NEVR moved with water. This was the good old weapons grade plutonium-239 that INL is stuck with that traveled over one mile in Nevada's underground sluggish aquifer, right? So no caveat applies here, right Abe? These particles are nanometer size that can be inhaled, with hundreds to thousands of individual atoms of plutonium, that repeatedly destruct the DNA in your kids lung if inhaled and lodeged. They are not "huge" particles, but especially if they are plutonium-238, the radiation dose is indeed HUGE.

The DOE worker dosimetry paper of Dr Scott is from Rocky Flats where our Idaho dumpsite plutonium came from, as I said before. You now dismiss the dose from nasty pu-238 at INL waste because it is a minority isotope. When I shared Dr Scotts paper I highlighted that very point quoting him, stating "Although 238Pu is thought to be present in relatively small amounts there, intake via inhalation of only a few 238PuO2 particles could greatly exceed the ALI."

I really hope you re-read this, and amke your DOE friends you are consulting correct this fatal flaw in their approach Abe. So I must ask again "Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?"

Just respond to that part please, but I'll share a one more important paper y'all should really understand to grasp part of the particle size issues. This one is hard to find. It's from your old stomping grounds PNL, and seems suppressed, but you can get it through their archives. But I got my paper copy from INL back in 1988, when I started asking "experts" particle size questions. They were trying to show me the particles were all large and chunky, and all over 10 microns,and the HEPA filters will capture them all.. They pointed to the uranium size particle part of the paper, which did say that. They said plutonium is a heavy metal and rarely floats or gets resuspended in the air. But then I read the part on plutnium in criticalities, or meltdowns. So here is your zen question of the day, Abe. Be honest now. They replicated a plutonium criticality inside a closed cell, without any blustering Idaho wind. HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT TOOK THE PARTICLES OF THIS HEAVY METAL PLUTONIUM TO FALL TO THE FLOOR AFTER THE CRITICALITY STOPPED MELTING DOWN?

Here is the answer, in a snippet of the testimony I gave to NAS that lead to their call for "emission free plutonium treatments" that DOE ignores to this day...Peter

"I have a great DOE paper from an PNL's FL Horn, replicating a criticality with plutonium. On day one, the particles were between 0.1 micron down to less than 0.005 micron. Plutonium is a heavy metal, and often a wind resuspension factor of 1 per million particles is assigned in the EIS.

In this FL Horn experiment, the plutonium particles were so light, that in this windless closed cell, they floated for 3 days , bouncing around on the brownian motion of the air molecules! They slowly aggregated and

precipitated, but that was in this closed cell."

Peter, I can't believe how this conversation is going. Did I say that a core meltdown is impossible? No, it is very, very unlikely. The risk is not something to worry over. There have been about 8 or 10 partial fuel melting occurrences in cores, and one catastrophic one in a reactor type not used anymore. Russia is a reactor seller, and their new reactors stack up well against anyone else's for safety, with dual cooling systems, etc.

Except for Chernobyl, there have been no serious consequences except financial ones for the reactor owners. I include TMI as one without serious health consequences, but we have already disagreed over that one and always will disagree I'm sure.

Research reactors in the past were a different story, there have been accidents with bad consequences for workers, but that is because these were research tools and we were learning.

But the commercial reactor fleet around the world , way over 400 of them, meet IAEA safety standards and here at home they meet NRC standards. And in the US they all belong to INPO, the industry's own watchdog organization started after TMI to make sure something like that does not happen again.

A typical way to attack any kind of technology is to say that a catastrophe is not impossible, which is what you are doing. A catastrophe is highly improbable, not impossible. Nuclear plants are safe, the way we normally think of something as safe. They are great places to work and to have as neighbors. It is one of the few heavy industries that contains its wastes instead of letting them slide into a river or into the ground.

By contrast, when I worked on farms in Idaho we had occasional injuries from accidents with equipment, I have heard of fatalities in the region but luckily did not work on a farm where one occurred. Breathing during a sandstorm was necessary but could have caused silicosis and shortened my life. The most peaceful pursuit known, agriculture, is a risk-laden business. But we think of it as safe, generally.

In the other blog you mentioned criticality. Reactor cores are critical, meaning they sustain a chain reaction. But you were mentioning criticality to prove there were extremely fine particles at INL. But wastes at INL are not critical. Neither are they exposed to the environment. The DEQ of Idaho is correct when they say these wastes do not pose a hazard.

In the other blog you took me to task over my calling multi-Pu-atom particles large. They are very large compared to what we usually see, which is a colloid made of a single ion of Pu (an atom with a positive charge) attached to a very small clay or other mineral particle with a slightly negative charge. The particles with many tens of Pu atoms that you keep mentioning as such a health threat, by comparison, are large. Plus they are so far only observed when made of Pu-242 which is quite stable, not very radioactive. The PU isotopes to watch out for are unstable, and their alpha particles would destroy that nice lattice, so we would not expect to see them polymerize like 242 can. By the way, that polmer requires Lithium to form, and it is an artefact of keeping Pu in a laboratory. Spent nuclear fuel by contract is a ceramic and has no relation whatever to these particles. The Argonne news release did a bad thing suggesting these particles were what was observed when Pu moved in the nvironment. That is certainly not what was observed at the Nevada test Site, where tiny mineral fragments had some Pu stuck onto them. That Pu came from what is called a "prompt-injection," it came from a nuclear bomb that went off underground. That may well explain some of the distance traveled!

Real risks are on our highways and in our lungs if we smoke or hang around smokers. Polonium-210 is in the lungs of persons breathing tobacco smoke. Tobacco is fertilized with phosphate fertilizer which naturally has uranium in it, and that decays to polonium 210 among other things. The polonium sits and pings alpha particles all over your epithelium. Not a good thing. But no one takes it seriously enough to ban the use of the things. We tolerate a lot of risk, daily. A nuclear power plant nearby, one that is well built and well run, is not a significant contributor to that daily risk.

I haven't a clue how much water a power plant the size of the one being pondered for Elmore County sucks up. But it puts most of it back. That is where the thermal problem comes in, putting warmer water back into the river. The plant will have to live by rules established for it, taking into account the type of life in that river and how it reacts to a couple more degrees. In many places the fish seems to prefer the warmer water and tend to congregate by power plants. Easier fishing, perhaps? Not as scenic though.

But this is a really tiresome discusion. Build it already. You very, very likely will not be sorry. (Trying to stay away from absolute pronouncements.)

A nuclear power plant loses (approx.) 85% of its water through evaporation. To say that "it puts most of it back" (water) is less than factual. Further, there will be climate changes in that area as a result of all of the moisture and it is fairly obvious the temp. of the river will change as well which will change the ecology of the river as well.

As far as how much water this is going to suck up, that should probably be determined on a factual level BEFORE anyone says yes to a thing. We should also know how many reactors AEHI will have as water consumption will obviously be even higher if there is more than 1. The multiple reactor theory is public record...maybe figure out the details first before a decision is made. How can you say "yes" to something when you do not know what the plan is? The problem with this entire plan, other than AEHI and their board, is the lack of details in all of this. All MHO only of course.

What good are jobs and money if the environment/area are polluted and trashed and the largest source for water in this area is polluted with nuclear waste? Not like it does not happen in other places in the US on a fairly regular basis (on the NRC web).

Abe: I want to thank you for your patience and very great responses. It is obvious that all the points that we have made in favor of the plant have been said. I don't think that there is anywhere else that we can go at this time. You have been level-headed against the stubborn ill-rational spewing fear-monger Peter. He is dead-set against it and will take as many people that he can with him.(That is his right) I wanted to express my reasons for coming to my conclusion as you have stated as well. I think it is time to leave this discussion and let him beat his head against the brick wall that he has walled himself into. I have been blessed by your involvement as I have from others. Thanks again.

OpinionMissy has a point. Studies need to be done, and will be done, to set the parameters for allowable water use from and allowable temperature increase in the Snake. That will be addressed as part of the state permitting and NRC licensing. They have to show that their water source is reliable for cooling as part of their safety case. There is a good e-reference on this:

http://mydocs.epri.com/docs/public/000000000001006786.pdf

It does say that most withdrawn water is returned in a once-through cooling system, but evaporation takes about 1% away, and the interesting thing is the warmer water going downstream evaporates quicker until it cools off downstream, so there is additional delayed water loss. The kinds of calculations done generically in this report will be done specifically for any new power plant of any type, and I'm sure Idaho DEQ will set the limits, and Peter is right about those limits, if they are going to be exceeded the plant either slows down or shuts off temporarily. But those instances are quite rare and are rather meaningless if you have a good mix of power sources and an efficient grid. (France has nuclear and hydro, and both are affected by drought and high heat, hence they had to buy from their neighbors who were less affected. But so what? It shows the European grid works!)

Speaking of the European grid, France sends/sells a lot of power into Germany, Switzerland and England. This is making both Germany and the UK reconsider its policy on new reactors. Why let the French make a very nice profit selling something they can make themselves? This is like the Idaho reactor selling power to surrounding states, at a handsome profit, you can become the France of the west!

But they do need to give a break to local power users, like those in Elmore, IMHO.

By the way, the grounds and waters around modern nuclear power plants are clean, not polluted. Go visit one and see! But don't go visit a coal-fired power plant, their surroundings tend to be sooty and messy, and they release radiation from the U and its daughter products in the coal. A nasty business, but we get most of our power from coal-burners so it is a necessary nastiness. Would we could replace them all with nuclear plants. Maybe in my next life.

Actually, in my next life I would like to grow up next to a fusion plant. The projections for ITER, the international experiment on fusion being built in France, is that it WILL be able to make power! That is exciting. Too bad I probably won't live to see it succeed.

You would like fusion, it has activation products for a radioactive waste stream, wait a few hundred years and it is all gone and the activated metals can be re-used! It mimics the internal working of the sun on a very small scale. E-read all about it here:

http://www.iter.org/default.aspx

Au revoir!

Hi Abe,

You are dead wrong believing colloids contain JUST one atom of plutonium Abe!!! This is KEY for you to understand BEFORE declaring INL's plutonium dump or Yucca Mt safe! You incorrectly claim above:

"They are very large compared to what we usually see, which is a colloid made of a single ion of Pu (an atom with a positive charge) attached to a very small clay or other mineral particle with a slightly negative charge."

Whether the colloid carried a single aton of plutonium or a multi-atom submicron particle of plutonium was the FIRST questiuon I asked Dr Kersting in 1997! You are dead wrong Abe, and you need to correct your safety evaluations if you are a true scientist. Here is a paper from Dr Kersting herself proving me correct. At http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6714/abs/397056a0.html

"Nature 397, 56-59 (7 January 1999) | doi:10.1038/16231; Received 24 February 1998; Accepted 6 October 1998

Migration of plutonium in ground water at the Nevada Test Site

A. B. Kersting1, D. W. Efurd2, D. L. Finnegan2, D. J. Rokop2, D. K. Smith1 & J. L. Thompson2

Isotope Sciences Division, PO Box 808, L-231, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550, USA

Chemical Science and Technology Division, MS J514, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA

Mobile colloids--suspended particles in the submicrometre size range--are known to occur naturally in ground water(1, 2) and have the potential to enhance transport of non-soluble contaminants through sorption(3).

Don't forget she identified the exact bomb test they came from by the specifc ratio of the pu-239 to pu-240 ATOMSSSSS(PLURAL)within these inhalable size particles. The particles have many atoms that keep destructing DNA in your lungs Abe, not just one atom like you claim! Can you please man-up and help me get your friends at DOE to understand and correct this fatal flaw in your present assumptions??? I have DOE papers on how larger particles keep fragmenting off smaller particles too Abe. Please let me help you understand these KEY points ...Peter

Of course my conceptual description of a typical colloid was just that, a conceptual description. Here is a paper suggesting, based on experiments, that our colloid-transport modeling is too conservative:

http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-15285.pdf

Kersting was reporting the mix of Pu seen on multiple colloids, she did not have the tools, neither do we, to see any one individual colloid and what is attached to it. She also saw Europeum and other nuclides, but additional work at U Mich has suggested that Pu has an affinity for manganese-oxide mineral particles, it gloms onto others like clays but then lets go again (as seen in the PNNL experiments too), but with managese oxides they bond strongly.

The PNNL report suggests a two-site model works well to interpret most of the data. Meaning if there are on averyage two sorption sites per colloid particle, each with a slightly different attraction force (if one is filled, some charge has been neutralized and the next one becomes slightly less attractive) the model is good enough. But it is still a model, a mathematical interpreatation of reality, and whether there are one, two, six, or a hundred sites, the point I was trying to make (but I did so inaccuratey, and you caught me on it, thank you) is that these are anionic surfaces that sorb positively charged dissolved species, cations.

Your large clusters of Pu are neutral, are themselves already colloids, and would not sorb onto a negatively charged surface. So they have nothing to do with what Kersting found. Nothing.

Also, as we already discussed, your multi-Pu particles can likely only be made with the less radioactive isotopes (the very long half-life ones), not the ones of interest to dose and safety/health assessments.

So OK, by characterizing it as a single atom on a single shard of clay I was being too simple. Maybe it is two atoms, maybe 10, but it still doesn't make any difference since the big point you were truying to make is that the Pu clusters found in lab beakers are what is moving toward some preganat woman's nostril somewhere to deliver a whopping dose. That whopping dose would require 238, and that does not make these nice super-clusters. It is too unstable. Whew! Catastrophe avoided!

None of this discussion calls into question Idaho DEQs declaration, which I subscribe to, that INL's Pu is being safely managed. There is no significant external environmental threat from their waste management facilities.

Kim, thanks for the kind words. Your suggestion to leave this discussion because everything has been said is one I agree with and will act on now, but I did feel compelled to give Peter his due, I oversimplified something and he called me on it.

But I will now, for sure, really really try to leave this thread alone, although I have obviously enjoyed it.

I fully agree with your attitude, obviously: let's get on with it and do the environmental and other studies needed to allow an informed decision by all the parties involved!

Hi Abe,

I offer a few corrections, but you are getting closer to understanding your specialty ;-)

RE"the point I was trying to make (but I did so inaccuratey, and you caught me on it, thank you) is that these are anionic surfaces that sorb positively charged dissolved species, cations." & "So OK, by characterizing it as a single atom on a single shard of clay I was being too simple. Maybe it is two atoms, maybe 10,..."

Thank you for admitting you were wrong Abe, and I was right. Not bad for an "ill-rational spewing" idiot podiatrist, eh Kim? You are welcome, Abe, but you are still wrong on key important points I will detail. But you are again proving how uncertain the DOE claims of permanent safe waste isolation are. As Soderholm admitted about how uncertain your present understanding is, there has always been "discrepancies between what is expected and what is reality." If we simply contain the waste in inspectable barrels, in retrievable bunkers, these unknowns about the ease of plutonium transport in water would be moot, and our water would be safe.

So now Abe claims "but it still doesn't make any difference since the big point you were truying to make is that the Pu clusters found in lab beakers are what is moving toward some preganat woman's nostril somewhere to deliver a whopping dose. That whopping dose would require 238, and that does not make these nice super-clusters. It is too unstable. Whew! Catastrophe avoided!"

You are confusing the new discovery of nanoclusters with the pu-238 that will come directly leaking from the new pu-238 production plant, and from the buried Rocky Flats waste, Abe. The Rocky Flats waste particles are multi-atom particles, light enough to float in the wind. When the flourescent lights were turned off at night the "heavy metal" plutonium floating, that had clung by electrostatic pull of the lights, would gently fall off to the floor. This is typical of the particle size. These submicron particles have between a hundred and a thousand atoms. The gift that keeps on giving a high dose to the lungs when inhaled. "Size matters" Abe! I am tired of the DOE ignoring this and pretending they are just one lone atom, or so chunky only one in a million will resuspend in the air. Science should be self correcting, and the EIS analysis just keeps repeating what you are repeating.

RE: "Kersting was reporting the mix of Pu seen on multiple colloids, she did not have the tools, neither do we, to see any one individual colloid and what is attached to it."

I'll let you argue that out with the particle size experts at DOE Livermore lab, like Dr Ken Moody & Schwartz that Dr Kersting used to identify the exact bomb test tht the colloid particle came from...Peter See http://www.llnl.gov/str/Terminello.html

"Schwartz also cites the recent acquisition of advanced instruments such as a transmission electron microscope capable of nearly perfect resolution at the atomic scale. Additionally, Livermore experts are taking advantage of one-of-a-kind facilities at Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and other DOE sites to more completely characterize the electronic and atomic structure of plutonium alloys and compounds.

One line of research is studying the evolution of damage to plutonium metal's crystalline structure on scales as small as a billionth of a meter. This so-called microstructure is always changing because when plutonium-239 decays, it emits a 4-megaelectronvolt alpha particle (a helium nucleus consisting of two protons and two neutrons) and an 85-kiloelectronvolt recoiling atom of uranium-235. The resulting buildup of gaseous helium atoms and displaced plutonium atoms from the recoiling uranium could produce unacceptable changes in the plutonium metal. Fluss notes that after 10 years, every plutonium atom has been displaced at least once from its lattice site, but most atoms eventually return there."

Peter, the stuff from Moody and Schwartz is about metallic plutonium, not plutonium ions in solution and on colloids. In metals they drop out of the lattice and return there eventually. No relationship to the polymer studies you have cited before. A polymer is very different from a metal.

The Kersting stuff on this same site says they analyzed the mix of Pu from the bulk colloidal mass, not a single colloid which no one, I belive, can do. She also says there is such a small concentration that it does not pose a health risk. So Kersting says that at very small concentrations Pu is not a health hazerd. That is also true for the INL site's Pu.

The work of these people has been incorporated into our work. There is neither a conflict nor a problem.

I really have to stop my side of this exchange, although it has been fun at times, frustrating at others. So, good bye, good luck, and enjoy your new power plant's extending the swimming season!

Bye again Abe,

I know it must be embarassing to be continually corrected by a dumb ol' podiatrist like me. I do appreciate the few times you admitted you were wrong and I was right. But you really have made so many mis-statements on particle size, and your firm belief the DOE knows everything there is to know about how plutonium moves with water, and leaks from HEPA filters, I am disappointed you are unwilling to help me save Idaho's water and citizens from plutonium contamination. When God blessed Idaho there was no man-made plutonium in our water, or our children's bodies. The way the DOE calculates the solution to plutonium pollution is dilution in the aquifer, they could take all the waste and dump it in the Big Lost River that dives into the desert at INL 40 altitude feet above the plutonium waste dump. How much man-made plutonium would you recommend for pregnant women and children? If you said "Zero", then you agree with the National Academy of Sciences and the medical professions, so stop double talking and get to work!

RE: Your dismissal of the atomic size particle identification you denied, ie, "Peter, the stuff from Moody and Schwartz is about metallic plutonium, not plutonium ions in solution and on colloids." Dude, all plutonium is metallic, ions and colloids alike. The DOE has the tools to determine how much plutonium-238 leaks from the HEPA filters, but what little they do admit leaks can cause huge doses to innocent Idahoans, as can the pu-238 in the plutonium particle dumps they are leaving, and the new ones they are opening thanks to you and your collegues.

Dr Kersting's statement on diluted plutonium-239 not being that harmful again avoids the achilles heel of the HUGE dosing lone multi-atom particles of pu-236. There are BILLIONS of them dumped at INL, and the new pu-238 production plant will dump billions more, labeled as "low level waste" by their dilution solution! Thanks, but no thanks! As you avoided before, I must re-ask via the DOE worker dosimetry paper of Dr Scott's I referenced before: "Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?" Please reconsider helping...Peter

Peter,

you seem to be writing a conclusion statement that sums up what we have learned from each other. Only in your version it is only I that have learned anything and you were right about everything you intially said. Huh?

You are going too far. Sodium is a metal too, but in table-salt bonded with chloride it is a salt. Pu in aquifers tends to be an oxide or oxyhydroxide, with a net charge, that is not a metallic form. That is the form that gloms onto a colloidal particle.

Your multi-atom clusters, your favorite particle, is not made of the more radioactive forms of plutonium, only the least radioactive isotope! It is not in a metallic form either.

There is plutonium everywhere thanks to atmospheric testing, so you have it in your body now, so do I, yet we seem to be healthy. Look at that Idaho DEQ website, it explains that Pu is not the most dangerous substance known to man. It can be managed so as to be safe. And it is being managed safely at INL, says the State.

I cannot speak for DOE when I am home answering your postings. But it is my personal conviction that we know enough about how Pu moves in nature that our predictions are fit for the purpose at hand, which is to conservatively evaluate system safety into the very distant future, a future with many uncertainties so it is by necessity a stylized calculation. We have made, in my opinion, a comprehensive case for safety, fully informed by Kersting's work, and as suggested in the PNNL work I referred to, it is probably overly cautious in its assumptions about the mobility of Pu.

But there are those like you who do not think so. Fine, you and they are entitled to your opinions. So am I.

I appreciate the few facts you caused me to look up and that led to my either correcting myself or at least explaining things better. BUT that doesn't mean the whole enterprise I am part of is fatally flawed. I am not the expert on everything I have been discussing with you, and neither are you.

You are simply wrong about your catastrophically-radioactive-many-atom-Pu particles that rise into the air of their own volition. A (simulated) criticality is a physically disturbed condition, and has nothing to do with small concentrations of plutonium in the environment. A critical mass of plutonium also is not composed of the less radioactive isotope of Pu that can form these large multi-atom molecules. And they are large though still microscopic.

So please don't suggest I now stand corrected on everything and you have been vindicated with respect to your every pronouncement. That is not how I see it.

But we are repeating the same things over and over to each other, so it is time to stop.

I think it is important to always be respectful in exchanges. After all, we are both human beings, children of the universe, made up of matter coalesced into a planet, matter that was created by nuclear processes in stars that were born and died and exploded their heavy elements into space billions of years ago. (So how did we get so dang afeared of nuclear processes? Nuclear processes R Us!)

I appreciate that you have been civil and respectful to me. (Compared with some of the other exchanges, ours was down-home friendly!)

Good bye.

Buh-Bye Abe, umm, again,

Nice job avoiding "Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?" Really Abe, 4th time I have asked, and 4th time you have ducked into a diversion of double talk, though friendly talk at least. So let's double check the most blatant double talk from you this time.

RE: "You are simply wrong about your catastrophically-radioactive-many-atom-Pu particles that rise into the air of their own volition. "

Come on Abe! NOWHERE did I say plutonium particle waste will "rise into the air of their own volition. " Water transport and wind resuspension of plutonium waste are official documented pathways of citizen exposure, so what the heack are you trying to put this BS past people for? I didn't spend 7 years with the CDC citizen advisory panel for the INL radiation dose historical study just twiddling my thumbs. You are simply making this up now, aren't you? Please show people where I made the ridiculous statement you claim I support!!! You know I never said "plutonium particle waste will "rise into the air of their own volition," so why do you say that now???

RE: "Your multi-atom clusters, your favorite particle, is not made of the more radioactive forms of plutonium, only the least radioactive isotope! It is not in a metallic form either."

Come on Abe, I am quoting the Dr Scott pu-238 DOE worker dosimetry paper on inhaling multi-atom pu-238 particles from Rocky Flats!!! It is a peer-reviewed published paper. I confirmed with Dr Scott, who consults with the NAS and is very pro-nuclear, that I was interpreting his paper correctly. So why do you keep ducking the documented question: "Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?" Please reconsider helping...Peter

Good grief, Peter, you dramatized the airborne potential by saying that in a simulated criticality the dust stayed in the air for days! So I made fun of you by calling them the self-rising airborne particles. I'm sorry, should not have made fun of you/them.

And you are talking about inhaling a particle in a Pu processing plant. Basically a chunk of metal, very hot stuff radiologically I agree. 1,300 millirem sounds reasonable since a 2-pack smokers is getting 20,000 millirem to the epithelium from polonium-210. Luckily polonium stays put and doesn't migrate all over the body as plutonium eventually would unless you irrigate it out. That is why workers there wore full suits with respirators!

When I worked at Hanford there were problems with air-suspended Pu dust in the Pu finishing plant, the solution was full suits and breathing masks for the workers, very uncomfortable. But that is in a finsishing plant, where they are shaping the Pu metal like you shape any metal, with high speed abrasive tools. You simply cannot compare that with what will be dissolved by water and moved out of a disposal site eventually and that is what you keep doing!

A disposal site that will have mostly Pu-239, not 238, at INL. The Pu plant workers were covered head to toe and showered and changed after each shift, plus went through pretty good detectors before leaving work.

I was outside the Hanford finishing plant drilling holes to find Pu in a "lost" waste stream from decades before, and found it, in the form I have been talking about, oxides and hydroxides, most of it stuck to the bottom of the former channel, some of it in a pond downsrea, and we had to kep the pond filled to stop wind-resuspension until it could all be cleaned up, which it was. But that cannot be compared with the INL situation. This was deliberatle runninga very dilute Pu slurryinto a ditch and filling a pond where, it was thought, it would evaporate and could be cleaned up occasionally. But dust and wind did not allow this easy cleanup, so a wholly different procesing step was created to capture the waste stream and evaporate it and make a disposable waste form that I presume has now all been sent to WIPP for disposal.

What is in the plant, and what it becomes in the environment, are two different things, different in terms of chemical form. The dose in the plant could be horrendous, but it was prevented. The dose from my working with Pu-contaminated sediment in the literal shadow of the plant when the sun was low? I got caught by the radiation monitors having had my dosimetry badge with me on a cross-country flight. That was my first real detectable reading, and they called right away and asked me how I got it (I confessed of course, but i had been curious so took it with me).

The risk you fear from the long distance groundwater pathways from a disposal site is simply not going to materialize, Peter.

I'm sorry I caricatured your concern.

Lets' shift the conversation to my all-time favorite Rumi poem translated by Star and Shiva, pp. 148-149 in their book "A Garden Beyond Paradise":

Everything you see has its roots in the Unseen world.

The forms may change,

yet the essence remains the same.

Every wondrous sight will vanish,

Every sweet word will fade.

But do not be disheartened,

The Source they come from is eternal -

Growing, branching out, giving new life and new joy.

Why do you weep? -

That Source is within you,

And this whole world

is springing up from it.

The Source is full,

Its waters are ever-flowing;

Do not grieve, drink your fill!

Don't think it will ever run dry -

This is the endless Ocean!

From the moment you came into this world

A ladder was placed in front of you that you might escape.

From earth you became plant,

From plant you became animal.

Afterwards you became a human being,

Endowed with knowledge, intellect, and faith.

Behold the body, born of dust - how perfect it has become!

Why should you fear its end?

When were you ever made less by dying?

When you pass beyond this human form,

No doubt you will become an angel

And soar through the heavens!

But don't stop there.

Even heavenly bodies grow old.

Pass again from the heavenly realm

and plunge into the vast ocean of Consciousness.

Let the drop of water that is in you become a hundred mighty seas.

But do not think that the drop alone

Becomes the Ocean -

the Ocean, too, becomes the drop!

Remember that in a relatively few more years neither one of us will be here anymore. And it will not be radiation that killed us. Instead it is the planned obsolescence of the human body that gets us, we have a lousy, limited warranty!That is what gets almost all of us unless we are in an accident, get a rare disease, or meet with foul play. Pu is not in this picture because it is being managed well.

Hi Abe,

RE: Your incomplete appology for quoting me intentionally incorrectly, in way exagerated words when you originally dismissed my documented points claiming "You are simply wrong about your catastrophically-radioactive-many-atom-Pu particles that rise into the air of their own volition." Innocent folks like Kim believe your dismissals Abe. Trying to put idiotic words in my mouth was a low blow for a man of science. But most importantly you are still not understanding the inhalable particle size problem. I REALLY want and need you to understand this in your work, so I will gladly continue this exchange of information. But the best lead into the basic information is why I call your appology incomplete. You now say: "I'm sorry I caricatured your concern." But you misunderstood the plutonium criticality study I shared on particle size, qualifying your appology saying "Good grief, Peter, you dramatized the airborne potential by saying that in a simulated criticality the dust stayed in the air for days! So I made fun of you by calling them the self-rising airborne particles. I'm sorry, should not have made fun of you/them. "

Please let me explain the points you are missing by refocusing on the unanswered question "Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?" Really Abe, 4th time I have asked, and 4th time you have ducked into a diversion of double talk, though friendly talk at least. So let's double check the most blatant double talk from you this time."

You at least agree above that a single multi-atom submicron size particle of plutonium-238 DOES give a worker in a plutonium plant a high dose of 1,300 mrem, just like the Dr Scott DOE paper I shared. Inhaling that single particle of pu-238 is like 130 chest x-rays, and WAY above the legal limit of public exposure. Let's just focus on the new pu-238 production plant scheduled for Idaho, and what your colleugues claim in the EIS safety analysis. We can get to the billions of buried pu-238 in our dump later please, because that is VERY important and VERY related to colloid size. But like the Dr Scott paper from the Rocky flats plutonium plant, the particles need the workers to protect themselves with suits etc as you say.

But what happens to these same pu-238 particles that leak from the plant, into our air Abe? Under normal operations the DOE admits many .3 micron size pu-238 particles will escape the multiple HEPA filters. They only admit .03% escape, but that is hundreds to thousands per year, for 40 years. These are the small inhalable sizes, with a hundred to a thousand atoms in each particle. The gift that keeps on giving high DNA destructive doses in your kids lungs. They float out of the plant, and we agree wind resuspension can lift them up again if they are not inhaled by drivers out on Rt 20 on their first floatation. They float IN the plant and OUTSIDE the plant, don't they Abe??? If inhaled and it sticks to your soft lungs of a worker DOE admits a 1,300 mrem dose, but claims in writing the maximum dose a citizen could ever get from inhaling a pu-238 particle is .0000001 mrem. Can you please answer me that Abe, before we get into the deeper details of the colloid transport in water from the dump?

Keep in mind I have great DOE documents on how MUCH more than .03% of the plutonium escapes multiple filters because the alpha recoil actually knocks the plutonium loose from the filters and the creep through 4 filters in a row MUCH more than admitted. I also have lots on fire problems for filters during emergencies, including the moisture flaws IF the fire sprinklers do work. Then there is real problems when the filters get subtly out of alignment and the pu flows around them, ahh, but I digress from the question that we should focus on for now please. Thanks for sharing the poem, for sure Abe!I look forward to a clear discussion ...Peter

I see that the Idaho anti-nuclear crowd is citing a DOE (ERDA actually) sponsored document that shows Pu creep (because of alpha recoil) through four successive HEPA filters.

Read the whole document, available at:

http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/7354855-UcDgfA/7354855.pdf

It says that this means filters have to be changed or washed relatively frequently. It also says there is continuous downstream air monitoring. In very fact the little stream of plutonium-carrying solution that I mentioned I found going to an evaporation pond for a little while at Hanford was from the HEPA-filter washing-station! We kept them HEPAs cleaned up, and the study you like to cite showed that it was only with some accumulation over time that there was a downstream release problem due to alpha recoil.

I just saw another online paper at http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/82/1/25 that measured the dispersion rate of Pu dust from the first filter that said: "Plutonium aerosols with an activity median aerodynamic diameter of 0.45 ΅m and a geometric standard deviation of 2.0 were used. Dispersion rate per hour, which is defined as activity ratio on the sampling filter downstream to that on the source filter, under forward flow, was measured as less than 2.3 x 10-7 h-1."

That is a stupendously effective filter!

I felt perfectly safe working outside that facility. Why? Because I was perfectly safe.

As will Idaohoans be several tens of miles from that Pu-238 facility at INL whose wastes will be collected, packed up, and sent to WIPP for burial in salt.

I keep hinting there are more important things to worry about, and someone just reminded me of one of them I promised to do this weekend, so I have to go now and do some yuckie, but needed, household chore. I will not mix ammonia and chlorine of course, that being a good way to kill ones lung-capacity forever, if one survives. Homes are dangerous places, but awareness and management of the risks makes it a sweet place to hang out and blog from. Same with DOE facilities. OK, they are not sweet places to hang out, and you can't blog from them, but they are safe places to work.

There are some things the DOE I know does well nowadays. Taking the right measures to assure worker and public protection from radioactive materials belongs on that list.

Bye.

Hey Abe,

You ducked the simple question again so I actually will answer the question for you on how the DOE uses physics tricks to claim the max dose to any citizen from inhaling pu-238 would be .000001 mrem, instead of the DOE workers true dose of 1,300 mrem.

I will check the 2 references you sent, but the one using .45 um size particles already is using chunkier particles than the .3 micron particles DOE says are the HARDEST to filter. More on why "size matters" later on alpha creep. We can just talk about the small percentage that ABE and DOE admit will leak through into our air. That is a good percentage filtered reported Abe, but we do agree some particles do leak from the plant in normal operations.

So "If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?" Here's how...

The DOE worker study actually looks at the dose of an actual submicron particle of pu-238 inside an actual lung. BUT to analize it as safe and under the legal limit of 10 mrem to a citizen, here is basically some of what they do.

They take the total tiny amount they admit will leak from the HEPA filters, that .03%. Perhaps just a gram or 2, but realistically thousands of inhalable multi-atom particles, each with a high dose inside a lung. But instead of analizing that, they take the square footage of a 50 mile radius where they study it may fall. So they divide the gram of pu-238 by all those sqare feet where a person may be standing to inhale it. The particle size dose problem just disappeared! They have spread the weight of the leaked gram so much, they are now studying the dose from just one ATOM of pu-238, not the dose of a multi-atom particle that is really what leaked! But they are NOT done dividing yet! Then they assign a resuspension factor claiming only 1 in 1 million of plutonium particles will resuspend when the wind blows in brown out Idaho. I can write more detail on how this is oddly based on more chunky bomb testing chunks that were so heavy they fell on the Nev Test Site, while 99% or so of the plutonium floated world wide.

But the real particles at Rocky Flats plutonium plant are light, high dosing, and float in the work space, and out of the filters. Not just one in one million, most all of them. These are the same particles dumped at INL in this flood zone. All the plutonium particles that the Rocky Flats HEPA filters did trap, are dumped at INL! While most will easily blow in the wind the DOE analysis divides the remaining dose to a citizen by 1 million by this calculation!

Then is what Abe calls above the important "probability" calculations. True, if you inhale a particle of anything, it might blow right back out and not stick to your soft lung. True, you might get lucky and cough it back out on some flem. So the smiling DOE safety experts divide the calculation again, for their estimate of the probability it won't stick. And all of a sudden the DOE can "ASSURE THE SAFETY" of this lovely opportunity for wonderful high paying jobs! :-) For details on the ongoing lawsuit by Gerry Spence to stop this insanity see www.yellowstonenuclearfree.com Lots of documented safety flaws at rickety ATR where they will cluster this plutonium. I found the first one when a INL worker gave me a tip during the hearings while the INL officials told us what great safe shape the ATR was in! "State of the ART!" they bragged. I filed a FOIA for the safety "occurence reports" and sure enough, just the month before workers found 3 bolts on the floor that fell right OUT of the earthquake support beam!!! The Yellowstone folks sued and stopped the idiots from building the plutonium incinerator our politicians volunteered us for, THANK GOD! The INL use their "calculations" and claimed "inhaling a little plutonium from the incinerator would just give the same dose as an organic banana."!!! I understand organic bananas have unescapable natural background radiation, but it AIN"T the same when you do the math honestly, like the DOE worker paper does. Gotta go enjoy a banana now :-) ...peter

Peter (picture me with cleanser all over my hands) that is how probability works. Take your particle and assume it escapes and then where does it go? Does it look out of its noneyesand ask "Where is there a nostrilbreathing in right when I come across the front of it?" No it is taken up into the air and becomes a random particle floating with other particles in the wind.

If you breathe in half the time, the chance of inhaling it has just been cut in half, and the chance of it finding you downwind a few miles is already infinitessimal. Focus on the "risk" of a consequence, not on the consequence assuming a risk of one (1).

The chance for that particle to be there at just the right place and time when you breathe in is vanishingly small. Of course you do these calcualtions by concentration, not for individual particles, but concentrations will also be vanishingly small downwind of a faciltity that hass a good HEPA system and maintains it well.

So the risk is extremely small even close to a facility. The farther from the source the greater the dispersion, the mixing with other dust particles in air. Hence the farther form the source, the less the risk.

Eastern Idaho is very safe.

Lawsuits? Oh great. Lawyers are not technicaly astute, most of them think like you do and make arguments that dwell exclusively on the potential consequence of a highly improbable event. It scares the jury or judge, also not technically astute. And then the hapless DOE lawyer comes in with statistics, and everybody knows that liars use statistics. But so do scientists, to judge risks. It is a legitimate part of the scientific enterprise. Nuclear physics would not be predictable without statistics. But nuclear physics is very predicatble.

I have to fly coast to coast this week and back. The statistics arew with me. The risk is very small. But the consequence in unacceptable. So do I fly anyway? Yes. It is a quality of life choice. Fear can kill your life's quality by contracting it.

So you may live a little longer, or maybe not, genes and random diseases are at play too, not just our choices. But why make life into a fearful journey? Don't overly worry, just be cautious and be happy.

Back to scouring, i have just earned a dereliction-of-duty demerit!

Hi Abe,

You appear to agree with my analysis, and defend the use of dividing factors that obscure the actual high dose an Idaho kid gets if he inhales just ONE of the leaked pu-238 particles. You even add another usual dividing factor saying "If you breathe in half the time, the chance of inhaling it has just been cut in half..." Yes, indeed I said I only shared "some" of the fuzzy math DOE uses.

So IF the kid gets a pu-238 particle in his lung, he DOES get the same high 1,300 mrem dose as the DOE amits for workers. BUTTTT, the DOE analysis uses all the dividing factors to claim THE "MAXIMUM DOSE POSSIBLE TO A CITIZEN IS .000001 mrem. Can you see why that is actually a lie now? The DOE impact statement does NOT say, "A child could get 1,300 mrem, the equivalent of 130 x-rays, if they inhale a single particle of pu-238 that leaks" , do they?? That would be the truth, and legally deny the permit legal limit of 10 mrem! The DOE does NOT say "Although inhaling a single particle would exceed public safety limits, we are going to gamble that no one will ever inhale one of the thousands of pu-238 particles that we admit will leak." That would be the truth, y'all are gambling that will never happen.

During the pu-238 hearing part of my testimony. that DOE ignored, was the autopsy data from the Los Alamos area, where this pu-238 production plant has had 2 accidents since modern time year 2000. Citizens who had never worked at the wonderful pu-238 plant had pu-238 from the plant in their dead bodies! Despite DOE types like you singing Mathis's "Chances are" you'll never inhale what leaks, the official autopsies said, opps, guess it did creep out of the building and creep into the bodies of innocent citizens. Your still singing "Chances are" while Idaho is forced to take this deadly plant that New Mexico kicked out. You assure people on this blog that dividing the REAL particle dose by the land mass it will spread over into lone atom low doses is appropriate, and all the other dividers is the best way to breath easy!

But we are closer to revealing the truth then when on Friday at 12:57 PM you dismissed my concern claiming "the big point you were truying to make is that the Pu clusters found in lab beakers are what is moving toward some preganat woman's nostril somewhere to deliver a whopping dose. That whopping dose would require 238, and that does not make these nice super-clusters. It is too unstable. Whew! Catastrophe avoided!"

Now we are agreeing that pu-238 can be inhaled in a multi-atom particle size, and CAN give a "whopping dose". Now it is clear you and your DOE colleagues are simply calculating "chances are" that will never happen. Umm, that's a LOT different, isn't it.

Let's talk about the BILLIONS of inhalable size pu-238 particles you advocate leaving dumped in the flood zone now! They could be dug up by rodents and brought intact to the surface for wind resuspension, but we need to discuss your belief pu-238 can't transport with water. Please explain!

You say above "Eastern Idaho is very safe." Well, in some ways, but the 6 counties surrounding INL DO have an elevated brain cancer rate, but the officials assure us it has NOTHING to do with INL. It is on the State website, as are a few of the details why they dismiss any connection to INL, if ya wanna check it out.

But I was there forcing what little they finally admitted, on that citizen advisory panel for the CDC historical dose study of INL accidents and intentional releases. An Elaine McNair called me from Moreland, near Blackfoot. She had seen me on TV, and asked for my help. The State Health officials at DEQ you quote for assurances above, had told her Moreland was one of the healthiest places in America. She had asked them to investigate the cancer cluster in her tiny town of 700 clean living Idaho families. SHe had noted 4 people had glioblastoma brain tumors, from age 14 to 70. That's the worst brain cancer, and folks are usually dead in 6 months. The usual rate is one in every 100,000 people, and tiny Moreland had 4 now. The State officials went in and drew a wide circle to review on the map, which diluted the town by including 2,000 people, not the town's 700. They claimed they could only use cancers diagnosed before the last census, so knocked the most recent diagnosed citizen off the list of 4. One guy had flown to Japan for an experimental treatment, with nothing to lose in his last 6 months of life. Although born and raised in Moreland, the DEQ knocked him off the list for being in Japan. Down to 2 folks now. They then profiled other diseases like heart problems etc, which Moreland was clean on, and voila, declared it a healthy place to be.

I helped raise hell for Elaine, on the radio and papers, and on the CDC panel demanding the DEQ come explain their methods. They cancelled their first meeting. When DEQ came the month later they had decided to , umm, re-visit their analysis! Lo and behold they not only found Moreland had an elevated brain cancer rate, but so did the 6 counties around INL! One step forward, but that's when the real DOE/DEQ dancing began! I suggested we should use the INL's random garden soil testing in the yards of the victims, to see if their was elevated radionuclides. NO WAY said the officials. That was too direct and might find something. They decided to send out a survey to surviving family and ask about victims habits and where they had worked. They got about 60 % of the questionaires back. Only 10 % of the people had worked at INL, so with a straight face they declared "that proves there was no connection to INL"!!! I said, "But they are all downwind of INL releases. Let's check their actual houses and gardens." NO WAY said the confident scientists, this concludes the study! I have transcripts of all this BS. After I caught the CDC claiming "pregnant women who ate ducks that had nested on the radioactive waste ponds would not dose the fetus because the 25 mrem dose of cesium-131 the mother would get from the duck WOULD NOT CROSS THE PLACENTA!" Holy official liars Batman, their gonna ruin Gotham City! Their swore 3 times on transcript "cesium-131 would not cross the placenta"! It took me 6 months of media hounding to get them to correct this. The doctor appologized on transcript, and said it was an "honest mistake." The 6 months it took shades the honesty factor. Then the CDC cut funding for the study and had no money to finish the duck study! MMMKAYYY! You guys are "taking Care of BUSINESS" all the way to our graves with these projects you promote Abe.

i look forward to the pu-238 water transport discussion. So back to you Abe. Why do you believe you know EVERYTHING about the pu-238 and don't believe it can move with the water. Remember as Soderholm admitted about how uncertain your present understanding is, there has always been "discrepancies between what is expected and what is reality." Respectfully enjoying the progress in our communication...Peter

Just finished lawn and kittylitter and find this major piece of response! Yikes! No wonder DOE ignored all your facts, many are simply not factual.

OK, so there is an extremely small chance that someone can get a dose that is about a tenth of the dose they get from smoking 2 packs a day. Don't forget that below 500,000 millirem (committed effective dose per year) there is no data for health effects, none have been observed although some random melanomas have been loosely linked at about that dose level --no one dies from such a dose).

But all of the argument is in the value of that chance, not in the value of that unlikely consequence. When you multiply that chance times the dose, which is how risk is calculated, then you get an extremely low risk-of-a-dose number. That is risk-informed decision-making, your country uses it everywhere, as do your insurance companies, and it is a sound basis for making public policy.

I am done with this exchange. Thanks for all the enlightenment. All dead bodies have some Pu in them, all living things do, and I am not about to spend more time on every past misdeed of DOE's that you want to bring up. DOE is doing a good job protecting its own people and the public in every place I have worked, which includes 2 federal nuclear research/weapons sites, and two national laboratories doing nuclear research.

Do I know everything about everything that has gone wrong at those places in the past? No. There have been problems, I have acknowledged and mentioned that before, but every one of them has been learned from to prevent recurrence. Now the culture is a safety culture more than ever before, the mission priority to "break eggs to make omelets" (=weapons) is gone. That is what led to some past problems that are now being cleaned up. Since the culture has changed from production to safety, the DOE's facilities are very safe places to work and to have as neighbors.

If there is a next life, let's be sure and compare our cumulative lifetime committed effective doses. Until that next life --abe--

Abe,

Had to share the Nat'l Academy of Sciences advice I created that calls for plutonium treatment that is "emission free". Please don't take another cheap shot and leave declaring me wrong without detailing what you believe I said was wrong! NAS agrees I am right! Please be specific when you claim "No wonder DOE ignored all your facts, many are simply not factual." You listed no specifics and went on a risk lecture about cigarettes! We are talking about the present pu-238 plant coming to INL after 2 accidents after year 2000 in modern Los Alamos! Why try to divert attention from those threats by claiming " Since the culture has changed from production to safety, the DOE's facilities are very safe places to work and to have as neighbors."?? This is a "PRODUCTION" facility for pu-238 they plan to build at INL!

You scoffed at the lawsuit from great Gerry Spence that stopped the crazy plutonium incinerator planned in 1997. Yah, I laugh at lawyers to, but cowboy Gerry Spence is the guy who defended the dead nuclear whistle blower Karen Silkwood, who got drove off the road on her way to tesify against another plutonium plant. The safety documents on ATR they are suing on come from INL files. It is atrocious. Please read them.

But the lawsuit brought together 2 panels of experts to look for alternatives. I was the only one to testify on HEPA filter flaws, including alpha creep, and particle size info I have not shared but a part of here.

Here is your question to ponder: Why does the NAS call for "emission free" treament plants for plutonium if the filters work so well, and inhaling what plutonium particles that leak is no danger, as you and DOE claim???

If the documented flaws were of no scientific importance, the NAS would simply say so. If I asked them to declare 2 + 2= 7, I doubt they would have agreed, eh? I ask the VERY same points at every official EIS scoping hearing to the DOE projects. After spending $5 million to write the EIS, they only put in a paragraph that says "HEPA filters" are great RAH RAH RAH! Anyway, the NAS said:

Public concern about air emissions from incineration has created incentives for applied research toward large-volume, robust alternatives that are emission free, as well as to smaller-scale, portable devices that may have specialized applications.

Here is the NAS recommendation for emission free treatments (page 7 of the report)

http://books.nap.edu/books/0309084717/html/7.html

They also adized the very approach I suggested to them for clean up that greatly minimizes the air borne plutonium from the present DOE approach to use a backhoe! For 21 years I have been advocating simply solidifying the buried waste with liquid cement in the ground, then removing it in solid form into a barrel. All under the same HEPA tent INL backhoes in tiny photo-ops now. Take the infamous Pit 9 they promised to clean up in 1991. We were told it was the worst Pit. Lots of bragging clean up is underway, so let's bring in the next new project. I said clean up first because you are faking. Years later not one shovel was lifted! The Lockheed subsidiary with the contract complained they weren't told how bad it was, nor how unknown the contents were, but still sued for payment of the millions from their Lockheed Sisters running INL!

Now Bush renamed clean up as "Accelerated Clean up" because Idaho just can't wait. But they just lowered the standards 10 fold to allow analysis to call it clean, and claimed it would bind to the clay blah blah. But they have to put on a little excavation show, so Pit 9 acre will have a 10 ft square backhoed. Super, but most gets put right back in if it isn't a HEPA filter. 88 acres promised removed "ALL means ALL" they bragged. Butch still calls this less than 10 % removal the great victory they all promised. Sorta like the Mad hatter Teaparty watching these guys, but at least I like Theater of the Absurd humor! :-) Anyway, here is where they recommend stabilization before removal on page 7. DOE has refused there advice of course..Peter

"In the stabilization area, research should address new approaches to stabilizing buried waste prior to or in the early stages of excavation, smart materials that react with waste constituents, and very long term barriers against contaminant migration and methods to prove their longevity."

After reading all this mind numbing stuff..I've come to a realization. If the off chance that someone would inhale a pu238 nodule, then they would have the dose of 130 X-rays. This would statsitically mean they would have a higher chance at cancer. Correct? Abe you said that if you breathe out half the time then your chances would be cut in half. Correct. This means that all those left wing subjects that live in this state and do things such as go to the gym every day, run several miles every day, bicycle up Galena Summit outside Ketchum every day, they would statistically have a better chance of breathing in this nodule because they are outside doing strenuous activites that require heavier, deeper breathing. Correct?

And here I was all worried about the radical left taking over this country when all I had to do was sit back on my couch in front of Fox News and watch as they sucked in a cancer causing spore while they thought they were getting healthy. This is the greatest news I heard all day. Thanks guys.

(I truly hope someone saw this humor in this post)

That actually DID make me laugh mhb! You did connect some funny dots there!

But since you bothered to read (thank you!) may I please clarify some key points. To make the good joke, I can see you read it. Abe did admit inhaling just ONE, of the thousands of plutonium-238 particles that DOE admits will leak from the plant, will give a high dose of about 1,300 mrem, or about 130 chest x-rays to your child. Most important is he also admitted I was correct about the lie DOE/INL claim, that "the MAXIMUM dose a citizen can get is .0000001 mrem"!! Abe also agreed with my revelation of how they use math tricks to divide that particle dose by land mass into atom size tiny doses, then Abe added they further divide that by 2 for the half the time you breath out! The lung cancer your kid can get from inhaling just one particle never gets divided by 2, or by the million DOE divides by, and that is no joke.

You actually understand the high dose of one particle that Abe then compares to smoking cigarettes. I bet you don't let your 3 year old smoke a pack a day! Kids and pregnant women are much more vulnerable to radiation than DOE worker adults. I only correct it is NOT an "off chance" that innocent kids will eventually inhale some of the thousands of plutonium particles the DOE admits will leak. What goes around comes around, and pollution gets into someone's body eventually. Plutonium-238 from the New Mexico pu-238 plant being forced into Idaho DID show up in citizens autopsies. It crept out of the filters and into kids bodies. It will happen in Idaho. The buried plutonium dump they are leaving has BILLIONS of these pu-238 particles in this flood zone too. The way Abe and INL calculate risk, they can take all the plutonium waste for the next 20 years and dump it straight into the aquifer, like they actually injected other nuke waste until us stupid citizens forced a shut down of the INL injection well in 1989. As the old song goes, "This ain't no joke. This ain't no disco. This ain't no fooling around." This IS dead serious, but with that said, all jokes along the journey ARE appreciated. Hope you liked the one I told above, "When they ask Idaho to bend over while they shove in these nuclear plants, there is NO condom big enough to make them safe!"

:-) ...peter

Actually Doc I've got him weened down to just a pack.....thinking of switching him over to chew instead...

Speculation aside, the ones who will benefit the most from this being built will not be the average people of Elmore County. I wont go on a tirade (you would fall asleep anyways...) but it will mostly be financial types, input suppliers, and those at the top of management who will get their pipe dreams to come true. In the meantime, after construction life will largely go back to normal (like it is right now) and those not at the top of the food chain are going to forget about this and move on.

Yes Tim, you are correct. Hey...I like your posts and they do not put me to sleep. I find that you provide some very good info and it is very clear and easy to understand (right to the point). So, you do not plan to get rich off this plan I take it? You are not going to build a hotel or anything like that?

You bet Gillispie exaggerates the jobs and money, as you well researched Tim. But even if it were all true, as someone once said, It's easier to squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle than for a richman to get into heaven. Can't remember who said that right now. Probably just some loudmouth liberal with long hair and sandals, but it made sense to me...

I AGREED WITH WHAT???

Did I agree that DOE admittted to your fantasy particles coming out of a new plant and giving thr dose you stipulate?

NO! I agreed that dose seemed like about the right order of magnitude for this particle you fantasized. BUT I never agreed that DOE admitted these particles would leak from anything. That is the result of your taking a number from a DOE report or person like me and multiplying it times your own assumptions and putting it in a wholly new and inexplicable context.

DID I agree that DOE/INL played "mathematical tricks" to get a lower dose number than you hypothesize?

I NEVER AGRRED TO ANY SUCH THING!!

What I said was that you make public policy decisions based on risk, and risk brings these "chance" factors into the equation. I made up the breathing thing just to illustrate that if the particle you fantasize actually comes to your nostril during the half of the time you are exhaling instead of inhaling, it will get pushed away and go somewhere else. So the risk of inhaling a particle, one right in front of your nostril, is ~0.5!

I said that just to illustrate how nature works, how probability works, and the way that risk assessment works. It is the right way to assess risk.

So let's assume this particle finds a nostril that is breathing in, and it goes in. Let's just assume that to humor you.

Now what are the chances that nostril is (a) human, (b) adult, (c) child in a certain age range, (d) male, (e) female, and (f) female and

pregnant? In Idaho, are there as many cow nostrils as people nostrils? Or is that Texas?

But you get the picture, even assuming it is breathed in, it takes population-statistics to determine the chance that the breather is someone from the more vulnerable part of the population!

Next, there is the problem of whether it gets into the lungs or not. We see with polonium

from cigarettes that it stays in the epithelium pretty well, little dives into the actual lung below. That could also be true for plutonium to some extent, so you assign a probability for where it lodges for the next period of time.

If the recipient is a kid with a snooty nose, however, it may get lodged in snot and come out on the next Kleenex, which is properly disposed

of in a landfill so the particle is out of the air.

But let's say for the sake of argument that one particle delivers the dose of which you speak, to a susceptible member of the populace. This is a

committed effective annual dose, and will repeat itself for as long as this particle of Pu stays in the body. But it does not stay in forever even if inhaled, the lungs are ever cleaning themselves, and there is data to support an

estimate for how long it stays.

People with many, many multiples of that dose, added to every year for decades rather than only a few years, are walking around you every day. They are heavy smokers. Maybe none are 3-year olds but some are preganant. Do all heavy

smokers die of smoking-related diseases? No.

This shows that in real life, in every step in this chain of events there is an uncertainty, it could go one way, or some other way, at each of these decision points or calcualtional nodes.

Assigning an informed probability at each of these decision-nodes is how a proper risk assessment is done. These are NOT "math tricks." YOUR approach is a math trick. You multiply every decision by a likelihood of 1

in the worst possible case's direction. That makes it simple to calculate but does not represent what is likely to be the outcome.

There is no "truth" in your approach. It is worst-case fantasy. Nature is not simple.

Please let me rest in peace. Say anything you want, but DON'T cite me as if I have agreed with whatever you are saying. You mix fact and fancy, and call it all fact. But you are simply WRONG about risk. Informed risk is what public policy ought to be based on, not worst case, incredible or implausible scenarios.

The world has real issues and risks to deal with. Ask anyone in the military.

Well howdy Abe,

I see you are back on the blog, from your home State, the State of denial. It is important to understand, Abe, that at least for kids inhaling plutonium particles, "Size Matters"! :-) But before we get into the details of your Clinton-esque denial, please realize AEHI supporter mhbouncer came to the conclusions of his in depth joke above, from actually reading what YOU & I both wrote, or as he said at 12:15 "After reading all this mind numbing stuff..I've come to a realization."

I did NOT misrepresent anything, as I will detail below. You never did say if you or relatives bought stock in AEHI, did you Abe? You just claimed to have come across Kim's isolated blog elsewhere and chimed in. MMM'kay, but let's just get to separating facts from what you now call my "fantasy particles" of plutonium-238 please.

HMMM, where to begin...

Well, you actually HAVE admitted I was right many times above. First you said French Areva construction and reactors were "humming along just fine." When I posted the Areva debt and construction problems with serious safety violations, and later heatwaves making France inport electricty from shut downs, you admitted I was correct both times, and thanked me for forcing you to learn.

TWO separate times later I forced you to admit you DID misunderstand, then misrepresent, the actual size of what you now call my fantasy particles. These are the multi-atom submicron particles of plutonium, which you had claimed they were ONLY ONE ATOM of plutonium!! It's your specialty when at Yucca Mt for Clinton, Abe! Now you are starting to sound like Clinton. You finally agreed, yet now deny again, the real particles of plutonium in the facories and waste are submicron size, a PARTCLE that has about 100-1,000 atoms that keep shredding the DNA in lungs. That's the "gift that keeps on giving" in your lung! The difference between a 1,000 atom particle, and the single ATOM of plutonium is HUGE, in both dose and destruction. Let me quote you directly with the times you originally admitted you were wrong on particle size, so anyone can check.

From me on Fri 6/19 12:09 PM in response to your one atom claim at 11:59 AM "You are dead wrong believing colloids contain JUST one atom of plutonium Abe!!! This is KEY for you to understand BEFORE declaring INL's plutonium dump or Yucca Mt safe! You incorrectly claim above: "what we usually see, which is a colloid made of a single ion of Pu (an atom with a positive charge) attached to a very small clay or other mineral particle with a slightly negative charge."

Whether the colloid carried a single aton of plutonium or a multi-atom submicron particle of plutonium was the FIRST questiuon I asked Dr Kersting in 1997! You are dead wrong Abe, and you need to correct your safety evaluations if you are a true scientist. Here is a paper from Dr Kersting herself proving me correct. At http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v39...

From your Fri 6/19 letter at 1:05 PM, and my reply at 1:47:

ABE:"the point I was trying to make (but I did so inaccuratey, and you caught me on it, thank you) is that these are anionic surfaces that sorb positively charged dissolved species, cations." & "So OK, by characterizing it as a single atom on a single shard of clay I was being too simple."

Peter :"Thank you for admitting you were wrong Abe, and I was right. Not bad for an "ill-rational spewing" idiot podiatrist, eh Kim? You are welcome, Abe, but you are still wrong on key important points I will detail. But you are again proving how uncertain the DOE claims of permanent safe waste isolation are. As Soderholm admitted about how uncertain your present understanding is, there has always been "discrepancies between what is expected and what is reality."

______________________________

Then you got all Clinton-esque again on me Abe on Saturday. By the time it got to 6/20 at 12:59 AM you wree putting absurd words in my mouth, specifically "You are simply wrong about your catastrophically-radioactive-many-atom-Pu particles that rise into the air of their own volition."

You later admit you made that up, but as Ronnie Regan would say "There you go again"! Above you are back to denial which brought me back to the stock ownership question.

When I explained the math trick of dividing factors DOE uses to dilute the high dose a SINGLE particle of pu-238 to a worker, to pretend inhaling the same particle, you only added another dividing factor! You divide by 2 since we exhale half the time. The calculations I stated are exactly what is in the DOE analysis.

So on to your denial .3 micron PARTICLES leak out of plutonium plants through HEPA filters at a rate of .03% leakage for that size during NORMAL operations> Here is the statement from every DOE EIS. This one is from the DOE impact statement for the 1995 Idaho plutonium incinerator (that the Wyoming lawsuit stopped despite our politicians desire to have this plant) at http://www.gc.energy.gov/NEPA/nepa_documents/EIS/eis0290/app_e/e3/AppxE3.HTML

"The HEPA filters would all have a manufacturer's specified minimum removal efficiency of 99.97% for particles of 0.3 microns (which is the most difficult size for particulate removal)."

That is NOT 100% containment Abe. Why are you calling this a fantasy now??? ...peter

OK..wait a minute...I NEVER not in ANY of my posts did I say I supported AEHI...far from it. I support the research and developement of clean alternative ways to produce electricity. These invlove clean coal, wind, geothermal AND nuclear. I personally beleive that fossil fuel are a finite resource and when it's gone then what do we do? As for AEHI, I think they lie and distort their facts just as much as the opposing side does. I beleive people claim whatever they want but it doesn't make it FACT. Apparently you missed the sarcasm dripping at the seams of my humorus post. The realization I made was the fact that likleyhood of any of the worse case scenarios listed above have the same statistical chance of happeneing as the AEHI plant running at full tilt without some sort of emergency happeneing in it's lifetime. Does the term possible but not probable mean anything.

Hey MHBouncer,

RE: "I NEVER not in ANY of my posts did I say I supported AEHI...far from it. "

Great! Dang dude, it sure seemed as if you were reaming those who opposed AEHI moving into Elmore. All the talk about "needing 200 more customers coming through the doors" and how AEHI building a reactor won't hurt the schools, sure seemed like a supporter of AEHI to me!

I don't think I missed the "sarcasm dripping" off of any of your posts, but can't really see where you opposed AEHI, so I sorta think your just putting me down for fun now.

Please show me a lie I told above aside from my belief you support AEHI building in Elmore. I am only a liar if I repeat what I know is false. I thought it was clear you support building a nuke plant here.

On possibility vs probability, yah, I think it does mean something. But in your joke you at least seemed to understand these high dosing plutonium particles are real, even though you scoff at the possibility anyone will inhale one, and hope it is a Ketchem health nut exercising if they do. Did I miss anything MHB?

I have DOE documents on the particle size, and spoke to the doctors to confirm I understood the particle size. Abe above admits he was wrong on claiming they are just one atom, then flip flops like a fish on a hook. Now he calls them fantasy particles I made up. Are you gonna go all Clinton on me too mhb?

Did the alloy-600 stress cracks happen in 2002, or were the NRC reports I provided just lies I made up that "probably" never happened?

How did the excess pu-238 show up in citizen autopsies near the New Mexico pu-238 plant being shoved into Idaho, if the "probablity" is so little as Abe says, and you believe. You seem to at least understand the particles were real. Can't tell what ya think now really.

But here was the simple question Abe avoided 4 times. When I shared the DOE math trick of dividing factors straight of of the texts, Abe only added they also divide by 2 because people breath out half the time. Now Abe is back to claiming I am making up fantasy particles, just like above when he claimed I insisted they rise and defy gravity all by themselves. This is classic DOE double talk...peter

"Simple question: If inhaling a SINGLE multi-atom particle of plutonium gives a worker about 1,300 mrem, or 130 chest x-rays, how does the DOE claim it only gives a citizen 0.000001 mrem?"

AMEN Bazooka! No socialist in the White House...cannot imagine why not.

I HAVE said that I support the idea of nuclear power. Never did I say I wanted AEHI...matter of fact a few of my posts have said I didn't think they were the right company to do this job. I DO support new business to come to town. I Do support the idea of our community growing out of farming and ranching and into the 21st century! Bazooka is right. There is a good way to use nuclear for power. It's been done and done right for decades. I think wind and geothermal are good ideas as well, but they all come with an environmentalist tagging along with their "Anti" sign. As for the pu238 particle, Doc, you have to admit along with the chance of pu238 we have the same of not greater chance to inhale or ingest lead, mercury and other cancer causing agents. I was poking fun at the fact the the statistical chance of inhaling a pu238 particle this side of astronomical. I was poking fun at the fact that those who do healthy things might tend to be statistically higher than it was for me.

Is THIS nuke plant good for Elmore County? Probably not.

-- Posted by mhbouncer on Fri, Jun 12, 2009, at 10:13 AM

Is THIS nuke plant good for Elmore County? Probably not.

-- Posted by mhbouncer on Fri, Jun 12, 2009, at 10:13 AM

Hi mhb,

Thank you for the follow through dialogue! I see now I mistook your AEHI support! I actually thought with your follow through posts to that 6/12 statement above, that your "Is THIS nuke plant good for Elmore County? Probably not." meant you were still willing to gamble on them since the probability of problems would be astronomical. I stand clarified and corrected, and will be happy to NOT count you as a supporter of AEHI!

But RE: "As for the pu238 particle, Doc, you have to admit along with the chance of pu238 we have the same of not greater chance to inhale or ingest lead, mercury and other cancer causing agents. I was poking fun at the fact the the statistical chance of inhaling a pu238 particle this side of astronomical. I was poking fun at the fact that those who do healthy things might tend to be statistically higher than it was for me."

That IS how I enjoyed your original joke, ie, scoffing at the probability of a problem, and hoping it would thus have the higher chance of hitting a Ketchum exercise health nut. It IS a good joke! And it did mean to me you understood the actual particle size dose, that Abe had denied, then admitted he was wrong, then flip-flopped again twice more, and now calls my "fantasy particles.

But just like after enjoying your joke, I asked you to reconsider this is in no way an "astronomical" low chance of inhaling. Abe claims it is "astronomical" for sure, but you misunderstand me if you think I said that somewhere above that I say it is an astronomical chance, when you said, "As for the pu238 particle, Doc, you have to admit along with the chance of pu238 we have the same of not greater chance to inhale or ingest lead, mercury and other cancer causing agents."

I offered the New Mexico citizen autopsie data showing "excess" pu-238, as proof it has already happened. Abe mocked how many nostrils were out there from cows, and joked that pu-238 particles don't have eyes, and how we breathe out half the time anyway. We actually all have lead and mercury in our bodies from gas and coal plants, even if you don't live anywhere near a coal plant on that mercury. What goes around, comes around. "It's a small world after all" as Mickey and scientists know. Most the fish in Idaho now have mercury restrictions for pregnant women and children for mercury from coal and the Nevada gold mines. But a single pu-238 particle is a beast of another nature in your lung, than is the problem of fish with mercury. Pregnant women should still eat one serving a week of fish, but we'd take out the nasty mercury if we could. But if they eat too much fish, what once was "brain food" and one of God's greatest gifts, then you provably can damage your fetuses nerves and brain. The dose of one particle of pu-238 is documentably higher than a particle of lead.

Comparing the adult Navy personal immune system of nuclear ships is not comparible to children's sensitivity to radiation. That is a medical fact even DOE admits. That is why pregnant women don't get an x-ray, unless it is a life and death diagnosis that must be made.

It is hard for me to look at the childhood leukemia study from the German nuke plant and the nuke waste problem INL is stuck with, and see people call nuke power "clean." But glad you and bazooka man oppose AEHI...Peter

Peter, you get emotional over the poor kids with leukemia near a German power plant, which is very sad I agree. Then you suggest this is an indication of nuclear power not being clean. You accuse me of misreading scientific studies, but here you do exactly what you accuse me of!

The very same website from which you cite that German study has several other equally scientific study results that suggest (1) this is an observation only cooorborated for one UK and one German location, not for all UK and German power plants or other nuclear facilities. (2) Childhood leukemia clusters are not observed around French nuclear sites at all. And (3) there may be a completely non-radiological explanation, since similar clusters of childhood leukemia are seen in other, non-nuclear-plant locations where there is a lot of transience in the population.

A cluster in Nevada by Fallon has been investigated for over a decade with no cause having been determined. No nuclear plant nearby.

The readers of this column deserve a more even-handed treatment of the evidence than you are giving them.

[Is the earth shaking? Just me turning over in my virtual grave.]

Hi again Abe,

Like we teach our kids to clean up their first mess before starting another, you owe an explanation for your last blast denying everything I documented, and calling the REAL pu-238 particles that escape HEPA filters , my "fantasy particles." Come clean first Abe, before you lecture me on being "even handed"! At one point above you had tried to claim I believed pu-238 particles defy gravity and rise all by themselves! Innocent bystanders like Kim believe your arrogant dismissals, making her claim I am too "ill-rational" to admit good ol' Uncle Abe is right. You eventually apologized for that BS, but then later returned to denial, calling real high dosing pu-238 just a "fantasy" I was making up.

So are you ever going to admit that the .3 micron size pu-238 particles that DOE admits escape the multiple HEPA filters easiest are NOT a single atom, but over a hundred atoms that keep shredding lung DNA when inhaled?

But I will respond to your complaints today anyway before heading to work. Indeed there was childhood leukemia before nuke power, and the Fallon Nevada cluster has found elevated tungsten and cobalt, but still can't say 100% that is the cause. There is often more than one way to get a disease, and radioactive radon, and electromagnetic fields from high power lines are some of the ongoing suspects.

So today Abe is claiming "Childhood leukemia clusters are not observed around French nuclear sites at all", and only one German plant has this problem.

From my original leukemia post on Kim's other Cheering blog 6/22 1:44 AM where I CLEARLY admit it all could be a coincidence and they can NOT 100% blame it on nuke power. I WAS "even handed" and honest. But this study DID cover more than one nuke power plant Abe, even though I refer to the singular. Here is what I said.

"Here is the peer-reviewed medical journal on the childhood leukemia problem at a well regulated German nuclear power plant that Gillispie never mentions. For sure, they admit they can't say for sure it is the fault of the nuke plant, just like you can't really ever 100% prove tobacco causes cancer. Could be other unseen factors or just a big coincidence. Could be the "negligible" radioactive gases released 24/7 during a normal nuke plant operations, or maybe the Electromagnetic field. It is from a plant that never had an accident, and is much smaller than Gillispie's plant size. But the closer to the plant the kids lived, the higher the rate of childhood leukemia."

And actually the French reprocessing plant for nuke power has reported elevated childhood leukemia, even though the nuke power plants there have so far not reported that. As the pubmed NIH website shows..,

J Epidemiol Community Health. 2001 Jul;55(7):469-74.

The incidence of childhood leukaemia around the La Hague nuclear waste reprocessing plant (France): a survey for the years 1978-1998.

Guizard AV, Boutou O,

Registre des cancers de La Manche (ARKM), hτpital Louis Pasteur, Cherbourg, France.

CONCLUSION: This study indicates an increased incidence of leukaemia in the area situated at less than 10 km from the plant. Monitoring and further investigations should be targeted at acute lymphoblastic leukaemia occurring during the childhood incidence peak (before 10 years) in children living near the La Hague site and may be other nuclear reprocessing plants.

All the US studies I have seen do not focus on childhood "disease rates", but tend to focus on "death" certificates searches of all ages, ignoring those who survive the horrible cancer diseases, and ignore how erroneous death certificate labeling can documentably be. Then they lump it all together and dismiss any conclusion if a virtual elephant type footprint doesn't smash all categories of death. Please note in this other German study below how they admit their better stats on the kid leukemia rates actually lose their footprint if you clump all kids up to age 14. They notice the elevated rate when focusing on the youngest (and medically mst sensitive to radiation) those kids under 5. I have seen no US studies on this. The Germans admit "little is known about radiation effects from pre- or postnatal exposures on the leukaemia risk for ages up to 4 y." Yep, but that fetal vulnerability to radiation is why doc's do NOT x-ray pregnant women unless it's a life or death diagnosis needed, isn't it Abe? That younger age focus may be why France has not reported any problems at nuke power plants, but I gotta head to work instead of check that out...Peter

At http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18936089?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEn...

Radiat Prot Dosimetry. 2008;132(2):198-201. Epub 2008 Oct 20.

The 'Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von Kernkraftwerken' study: results put into perspective. Grosche B.

A German case-control study on leukaemia in children below 5 y of age near nuclear installations showed a trend of increasing risk with decreasing distance of place of residence from the sites. The radiation exposure from the sites is considered as being too low by a factor of at least 1000 to explain the observed effect, but little is known about radiation effects from pre- or postnatal exposures on the leukaemia risk for ages up to 4 y. Within the study, it was shown that the observed trend in risk decreases over time. That could be indicative of some agent being involved for which the prevalence is reduced over time. Previous ecological studies showed increased risks among the youngest age groups in the closest vicinity of the sites, but no elevated risks for children of all ages (0-14). This could implicate a shift towards an earlier onset of the disease.

Peter, I'm sorry, but I cracked my face with a great big grin when you called Kim an "innocent bystander." That crack doubled to painful dimensions when you suggested she was easily swayed by the likes of me.

Kim is not easily swayed, but does go to sources many people feel to be more objective than you and your (seletive)sources. Nuclear power is just not as dangerous as you believe it is.

Plus, INL has nothing to do with a power plant. By the way, just yesterday spoke with an AREVA person who has beed in several Congressional hearings on nuclear power recently. He says they are doing fine, will overcome and have learned from their recent setbacks, and are desperate to hire qualified nuclear engineers worldwide. They have orders for new reactors, on several continents, and they need people to make those orders into power-producing realities.

But it does take water. That needs to be carefully looked at, and always is before a reactor-building project begins. --abe--

[I am now gone, for good, but I know my word is worthless on this point.]

Hi again Abe,

Glad you at least admit, and don't duck, the water crisis with nuclear power. Gillispie is outright lying he will only use 100,000 gallons per day. Lucky I enjoy duck hunting since you duck all the important errors you have made above on meltdown threats and high-dosing particle size problems!

Like your last duck above, when you incorrectly claim only one German nuke plant shows a childhood leukemia problem, and your denial of any problem at a French nuke facility. Instead of admit you were wrong, you claim my quoting medical journals, and the DOE & NRC is not as fair as Kim's independent minded sources. Abe: "Kim is not easily swayed, but does go to sources many people feel to be more objective than you and your (seletive)sources."

Well, Kim's only identified "source" of info so far is quoting the ancient cost of nuke power from The Nuclear Energy Institute. They are the paid lobbyists! Sort of like quoting The Tobacco Institute pro-smoking lobbyists on tobacco safety!

So when above good ol' Abe gets pinned down by my quotes of the OFFICIAL DOE & NRC documents on alloy-600 stress crack problems and containment flaws, you go all Clinton-esque into denial, and claim I believe plutonium defies gravity and the nasty particles have eyes and fly by themselves into pregnant women's nostrils! You now claim that does not influence Kim, but it's hard to read her praise of your mish-mosh I paste below and think your ducking denials have not influenced her NEI based beliefs...Peter

Kim: "Abe: I want to thank you for your patience and very great responses.You have been level-headed against the stubborn ill-rational spewing fear-monger Peter. He is dead-set against it and will take as many people that he can with him.I have been blessed by your involvement as I have from others. Thanks again.-- Posted by kimkovac on Fri, Jun 19, 2009, at 8:05 AM

I'm sorry, Peter for calling you "stubborn ill-rational spewing fear-monger" It was not very kind of me. Though you are stubborn in your views, I can appreciate that cause I am too. Remember that even though we don't see eye to eye on nuclear power, we do agreed on many things such as solar and wind power. WE do agree that America needs to be self-sustaining and independent. We agree that foreign oil has caused too great a price for us to logically continue that course. We do agree that cleaner renewable energy should be our new course of action. I respectfully disagree with your tactics to discredit nuclear power. (Time is...who cares it's Sunday)

Hi Kim,

Well, my "tactics" on nuclear power is to quote official DOE & NRC documents, and medical journals that admit the problems in safety, that Gilispie and our delegation never mention, and incorrectly deny.

Just like your appropriate warnings on the ongoing North Korean nuclear weapon threat, it is not made-up "fear-mongering" if we tell the truth. Your concerns on Obama's so-called Health Care reforms, that fear the feds will make your life/death decisions, are good smart concerns to me, too, not fear-mongering madeup falsehoods.

Please reconsider my nuclear tactics are simply to tell the truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth! So I'll stand by my words and tactics above.

Glad we see eye to eye on many other things though, like wind, solar, and geo! And in any other context, besides "irrational fear-mongering", calling me stubborn is I term I would proudly use to describe myself! Like Ron Regan was too stubborn to give into high tax & spend democrats, and too stubborn to give into the dems pacifist disarmament approach to Russia. Being stubborn is good if you are right! Glad to count you as a self-confessed stubborn person too! Ain't nothing wrong with that!

:-) ...Peter

"I'm sorry, Peter for calling you "stubborn ill-rational spewing fear-monger"...(KK)

What a dissappointment. I was hoping this thread would end with more honesty, especially about the one person who SPINS the facts to his agenda.

"You accuse me of misreading scientific studies, but here you do exactly what you accuse me of!"(Abe)

"I NEVER AGRRED TO ANY SUCH THING!!" (Abe, complete with standard misspelling)

Here we had the one SCIENTIST with facts, and he is foolish enough to continue to give FOOT MD fodder and a continuing dialogue platform. And, even more foolish to use his real name. (G)

I will stick to my position that we need to totally overhaul CONGRESS who has their own financial benefit agenda ahead of what the nation needs. You only have to look at the history of allowing Congress to fail to push for better MPG from Detroit: CAFE Standards.

And then we need to start teaching out children the original 3R's and Science. But,until then, a Science Advisory Board for Congress would serve US well.

Cause its very obvious that the voters are easily misled. Just look at the last election when Hillary and Biden warned US that Obama was too inexperienced.

I herewith declare this the final epitaph for this thread! So, dont make me drive out to MUO this summer before the Great Cooling:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/weather_pr.html

HARRUMPH!!!

Thank you for the comic relief Ogre! Sorry about your stock in AEHI. (Not really- you deserve to be ripped off by Gillispie!)

You seem to overlook that Abe earlier had to apologize for his exagerated claims that I believed plutonoum-238 flew by it's own will! You must have "had the TV on" as you admitted before, when you missed that confession by good ol' Uncle Abe.

Maybe you were dreaming of younger days when Abe had to admit he was wrong about particle size, too, but let me refresh your memory...

From your Fri 6/19 letter at 1:05 PM, and my reply at 1:47:

ABE:"the point I was trying to make (but I did so inaccuratey, and you caught me on it, thank you) is that these are anionic surfaces that sorb positively charged dissolved species, cations." & "So OK, by characterizing it as a single atom on a single shard of clay I was being too simple."

Peter :"Thank you for admitting you were wrong Abe, and I was right. Not bad for an "ill-rational spewing" idiot podiatrist, eh Kim? You are welcome, Abe, but you are still wrong on key important points I will detail. But you are again proving how uncertain the DOE claims of permanent safe waste isolation are. As Soderholm admitted about how uncertain your present understanding is, there has always been "discrepancies between what is expected and what is reality."

____________________________________

But you must feel proud above when you quote his later flip-flops, that Abe actually had to swallow, again with his pride.

You are free to preach your advise it is all an Al Gore/Obama conspiracy, and recommend such unprofound redundant advice like "And then we need to start teaching out children the original 3R's and Science. But,until then, a Science Advisory Board for Congress would serve US well."

Uh-oh Alex, commies like Obama want to teach the 3'r's to children, too! Better watch out being on their side! And the National Academy of Sciences is already the Science Advisory Boards to Congress. You are over a century late in your advice. But hang on to your stock in AEHI, Ogre! Obama plans to run you out of toilet paper and you better be ready for when you finally pull your head out of your, umm, conspiracy theory...Peter

"...commies like Obama want to teach the 3'r's to children, too! Obama plans to run you out of toilet paper..."

HEY HOOF n MOUTH MD~

Guess you havent read the history books used in high school lately. So much is about how bad US is and how much we owe its former owners. Totally ignoring that they were stealing from one another throughout history, as well.

And, Obama has done much worse to me, which has put me on a fatal pathway. I was told that when OBAMA gets elected he will make it his first priority to fix Soc Sec and Medicare. Instead, they raised the LINES IN THE SAND even higher so there is no chance I can get help with my meds, which cost me, in the BLACK Donut Hole, $$$ more then I get on disability.

Plus, his tampering with the economy has decimated my stock investments. Going to Caterpillar and telling them they will be able to rehire their workers shortly, and then shortly CAT ends up having to lay off more workers; look at their stock prices post Obama speeches.

Now they are conspiring to use the repaid STIMULUS/TARP funds for other projects, so that the future taxpayers will find a heavier burden. A common agenda among DEMS in office to appease their backers.

Even Acorn was, in the original bailout, supposed to get 10% of the repaid funds, which is why McCain derailed it.

My $$$ blanket investment funds are being used up quickly because of Congress failing to fix what BUSH, et al, have created. And, Pelosi and Reid and Franks are more interested in funding things that financially benefit themselves downstream.

The RIGHT maybe flawed, but they arent as corrupt as the Dems in charge of Congress.

And, considering how you rewrite what others say, its no wonder you want to play in the political landscape.

Now, STEP AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD or I will tell your parents that you have strayed from serving the public good.

HARRUMPH+

Hi Ogre,

Please do not mistake me as an Obama supporter! See Kim's cap and trade comments for SOME of my thoughts on Obama. I was just teasing you for your gibberish rambling rant that seems to dwell on conspiracy theory, and totally lacks logic. If you want to join the scientific discussion on childhood leukemia near nuclear power plants, please do jump in where Abe got stumped, in my 6/25 11AM post where I documented the US avoids the German focus on fetal radiation vulnerability stating "Please note in this other German study below how they admit their better stats on the kid leukemia rates actually lose their footprint if you clump all kids up to age 14. They notice the elevated rate when focusing on the youngest (and medically mst sensitive to radiation) those kids under 5. I have seen no US studies on this. The Germans admit "little is known about radiation effects from pre- or postnatal exposures on the leukaemia risk for ages up to 4 y." Yep, but that fetal vulnerability to radiation is why doc's do NOT x-ray pregnant women unless it's a life or death diagnosis needed, isn't it Abe? That younger age focus may be why France has not reported any problems at nuke power plants, but I gotta head to work instead of check that out...Peter"

But I see from your comment that Obama is to blame for the "BLACK doughnut hole" in Bush's and the Dem's fake medicare prescription plan that was written by the drug companies.

We do totally agree that corrupt money and bought off politicians are to blame for most our problems Ogre. I keep telling you though, I am not part of the Gore/Obama/Pelosi media conspiracy you rant about!

Sorry you can't afford your meds Ogre. Maybe that is why you are rambling on and on. You definitly need help, but don't blame me please...peter

Ogre, "I was told that when OBAMA gets elected he will make it his first priority to fix Soc Sec and Medicare. Instead, they raised the LINES IN THE SAND even higher so there is no chance I can get help with my meds, which cost me, in the BLACK Donut Hole, $$$ more then I get on disability."

I will leave the leukemia debate alone. Another issue that seems to be ignored is how this company is going to justify some of the social consequences. These would be increased traffic on main roads, increased hospital visits, greater need for police, etc. I realize that it's difficult to estimate these things ahead of time but their attempts so far have been laughable.

Amen...

Okay, here is some pretty funny stuff from a couple of AEHI documents done or at least approved by good old Don himself!

From AEHI's Form 10K at page 6 (bottom of the page) he states the following (this is a directly from HIS document):

"The Site for this Project has passed preliminary evaluations by ENERCON, an engineering firm that grants pre-approval of nuclear plant sites

and assists with filing the NRC application. IEC's rezone application was recently accepted in the first quarter of 2008 by Elmore County

planning and zoning officials. Approval from the NRC is necessary, and once granted, it will take three years to begin construction of the plant."

Funny, I missed the part where this proposed re-zone was "accepted" by the Elmore County P & Z. Can someone please help me out on this, Retired Exec. perhaps or maybe Ms. Ireland?

It gets better...

From AEHI's Annual Report of 3/31/2009, which was filed with the SEC--- AEHI plans to build UP TO 6 advanced reactors at the proposed location (IEC/Idaho Energy Complex) here in Elmore County. Sounds like more than 100,000 gallons of water will be used per day. Sounds like we have been lied to yet again and some of these documents are far less than truthful.

Have a great day everyone and enjoy the sun! This is the end of my public service announcement for the day as I must get to work.

I would have to do extensive research again to validate this but as far as I know when one starts the application process with the NRC, that also makes one eligible for subsidies. That is fine but this developer claims that this will be a completely privately funded operation. They would be foolish to turn that away. I would take it gladly if I were in their shoes. The future is uncertain and any extra insurance that one can get is always going to help. The point is that some black-and-white plain wholesome truth would go a long way.

Hey OM,

Is one of the topics that you posted on your Blog missing? I could swear that I saw a topic on your blog that included something about the homosexual AF Officer. Now I can not find it.

??????????

-- Posted by Beau on Mon, Jun 29, 2009, at 2:16 AM

??????????

Beau:

Do you ever sleep? Oh, you and the dog must be into the popcorn again huh with the hot sauce! Yes, I had a blog regarding (in part) the pilot. It is now off the air. I guess you got to read it. Have a safe and happy 4th.

This whole debate centers on the acceptable time frame for people. Nuclear caters to short term instant-rewards scenarios. In the long term, humans will run out of petroleum and uranium prices are going to make it non-competitive. That could be awhile, I realize. Those who support nuclear seem to fearful of the future and crave a solution that has a known input-output ratio. One knows what they are getting when they operate a nuke plant. It is after all a controlled experiment. Wind/solar/geo are not so definite and have uncertainties built into them.

Those who dont support nuclear seem to think things will be ok and that without nuclear we will still be able to navigate the maze. i get the feeling that they feel that it is simply a lack of willingness to move forward that is behind pro-nuke types. IMO, the anti-nuke types feel that the initial economic difficulties will be paltry compared to the gains in the future. That justifies the high capital cost and uncertainties of alternative sources. I dont know where I sit on that frame of mind. I would say that a mix of old and new sources would be optimal.

OM,

I sleep, but not very much & for the past few years .....not very well. Besides sleep is overrated. Why waste a third of your life sleeping?

If this thread continues for much longer, I will have a use for my flawed tomatoes for sure.

The LEFT who oppose Nuclear Energy do so on less then scientific information. They will accept anything anti-nuke as per the flawed science of Dr Peter.

And, they go eagerly chasing to support the LIES, **** Lies, and Flawed Statistics of GORE who will have you worrying that those poor people living in mansions on the California coast will get flooded out, thus ending their Liberal $Contributions$. ;-0

In the PNWest they even want to oust Boeing and create organic farms. Ignoring the need for Boeing taxes to pay for schools and roads.

Best of all is they want buses, but derail MONORAILS that could connect all the major cities in the PNWest. Plus, transport personal cars on freight rails to cut the gas usage.

Their lack of foresight and intelligence is more then obvious on the ETHANOL conundrum. Just look at the increase in Type 2 Diabetes due to corn replacing sucrose as a sweetener. Not to mention the cost of food: 2qt ice cream used to be $2.25. Now, if its on sale, you get 1.45qts for $4. All because the cost of corn sweeteners.

Today Im back due to finding an interesting anti-Wind Power article in Aviation Week:

US NORTHERN COMMAND Air Force Gen. Victor Renuart Jr tells the Senate that WIND-Farm interference from DOPPLER signals generated by radar returns from rotating wind-turbine blades is causing the loss of aircraft tracking ability in the ground clutter that looks like an aircraft.

In our busy skies, this is not a good thing!

SIGH

Beau, sleep is overrated! I would rather be up watching a good movie with my dogs on my lap.

Alex, we "anti" do not listen to Gore. You "pros" latch on to all of your ill-found "facts" and try to jam those down our throats. The NRC reports only what they find and sometimes years after the original problem which creates its own set of problems. Think of all the things they do not find or all of the things that go unreported. I am sorry that you have to live with all of us idiots. How do you survive?

"How do you survive?"/OpinionMisfire

I survive by isolation from the maddening crowds, lots of old movies from when govt could be trusted, and a casual Scullery Maid as needed; no upstairs duties for her!

At one time I had dreams of retiring here:

http://www.library.csuci.edu/history/images/history_csuci_ff.jpg

But alas, they felt I wasnt worthy of such a residence or they figured out I had plans for the commercial strawberry fields across the road in the hours of darkness ;-)))

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/5602073/2/istockphoto_5602073-...