Hey Chuck, speak of the devil... Dennis Claxton
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Yes, it's ridiculous. They had to shutdown last December because a plague of jelly fish clogged the intakes. They were also cited for leaks in ground water and on and on.
In another article I was reading on the AEC history, the AEC denied responsibility for nuking a Japanese fishing boat with their H bomb test in Bikini. That stunt sparked the whole anti-nuke protest movement in Japan in the 1950s. The US state dept thought the Japanese were just paranoid to be against nuclear weapons...
And there is the Obama's appointment of GE's CEO:
``Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and CEO of GE and a big friend of Obama's (he was named to an unpaid post as `jobs czar' by the president earlier this year, despite the company's long record of exporting US jobs to places like China and India), says it's `too soon' to assess the impact on the company's nuclear business prospects of the nuclear `accidents' in northern Japan.''
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03152011.html
``There is a worse problem though. Probably in an effort to keep the problem of nuclear waste hidden from the public, these plants feature huge pools of water up in the higher level of the containment building above the reactors, which hold and store the spent fuel rods from the reactor.''
This is an interesting article for all sorts of little tid bits.
I was looking at the same plan at the UCS page and thought why the hell did they put the pond up there? I think the reason was the convenience of moving the fuel rods out of the reactor with an overhead crane to the storage pond. This implies they were not thinking about the big picture safety, but efficient use of space and compact structural design.
CG