Why Nukes and Humans should not mix on the Home Planet

The real problem with nuclear is not so much the technology, its the cost to make it "safe enough" but then the stunning realization that if humans are involved that nuke can never be safe because humans are highly imperfect creatures.

 In human nature there will always be episodes of greed, denial, "hope", laziness, times when the operators personal life if way out of whack, substance abuse (like the Kewaunee worker who was busted pounding beers at lunch, in containment), economic hardship.

All these can lead to grave errors.

Then another factor of the human condition are unavoidable things like business cycles, companies that have financial problems and they start short cutting, political cycles, and just plain political stupidity causing issues like no place to put the spent waste. There is something like a Billion pounds of spent waste and no where to go, and no solution looming or even being built.

Then the human reaction to problems once they develop, and the reaction is always denial, hope it won't be that bad, and coverup. Coverup is standard. No government official wants to give the order to evacuate, the last thing a government official wants is for their people to be panicking, "out of control". So they will ignore clear evidence, and say nothing instead.

And of course, the whole process of regulation, a symbiotic necessity that for the regulators to exist they need the industry and in particular the plant in the location they live with their family to exist. And regulatory capture is commonplace these days, we see it everywhere, not just the nuke industry. The Chairman of the NRC was sacked after he cast some dissenting votes against Vogtle approval. That was just last year.

And let's not forget Mother Earth. She can really be the B word when she wants, you know what I mean? Earthquakes started the meltdown at Fukushima, and the Tsunami sealed their fate. Just by having some rivers to hot, these plants are designed so close to the edge of performance, that they have to shut the nuke plant down if the river goes up just one more degree

And finally -- Terrorism. The spent fuel pools are the obvious targets, We have them all over the place, many places there may just be a chain link fence and 1 guard, like the abandoned fuel pools that the buyer of Palisades got hoodwinked with. When they bought Palisades in Michigan, they got stuck with an abandoned spent fuel pool....there is the deal --take it or leave it. Do you think they really want to spent millions protected that pool for 60 years?

Manifesto of why to shut them down....at the Nuke Pro (not pro nuke)

http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/p/manifesto-why-shut-them-down.html