Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Shut Down the South Texas Nuclear Power Plant Now!


The South Texas Nuclear Power Plant is in danger of severe flooding as rivers rise in the region. In particular, the plant is at risk from the rising Colorado River. Here is an image from Wikipedia:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Texas_Nuclear_Generating_Station

The information available suggests that the site can only withstand 10 feet of inland flooding, as opposed to its capacity to withstand an ocean surge of 41 feet.

You can read fears of a Texas Fukushima here:
Baxter Dmitry (2017, August 28). Flooding Crisis At Texas Nuclear Plant Sparks ‘New Fukushima’ Fears. Newspunch https://newspunch.com/texas-nuclear-fukushima/...The Colorado River at Bay City is forecast to surge 27 feet in the next two days!
And considering the river is currently 9 feet above what was forecast for this time, according to the graph, this is likely to surpass the all-time record crest of the Colorado River in the next few days. That “100 year flood” the plant spokesman talked about which happened in 1913 crested at a level of 56.1 feet. The highest crest of the Colorado River at Bay City since the STP nuclear plant began operating was 24.04 feet in 1991.


Enenews has another discussion forum up with some very interesting comments concerning the possibility for the Colorado river flooding to be increased as it merges with the flooded Brazos river (e.g., see http://enenews.com/warning-credible-threat-of-severe-accident-at-two-nuclear-reactors-due-to-hurricane-harvey-clear-potential-for-major-disaster-plant-could-be-overwhelmed-by-raging-flood-waters-of/comment-page-1#comment-864599)


As many commentators point out, the decision to keep the plant running is unreasonably risky given the potential hazards.

Keeping a nuclear plant running when at risk of imminent and major flooding is very poor risk management!

 

2 comments:

  1. Good article here:

    As Historic Flooding Grips Texas, Groups Demand Nuclear Plant Be Shut Down https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/08/29/historic-flooding-grips-texas-groups-demand-nuclear-plant-be-shut-down

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  2. 7
    Herr Donald, Sheriff Joe, Hurricane Harvey, and the Fate of the Republic
    by PAUL STREET


    Photo by Caravan 4 Peace | CC BY 2.0

    Good Timing

    Let history record that the leading climate change-denier and eco-exterminist, arch-authoritarian petro-capitalist United States President Donald Trump threatened to shut-down the federal government as the capitalogenically cooked waters in the Gulf of Mexico swirled on their path to an epic tropical storm that would epically flood Houston and much of southeast Texas in a matter of days.

    The president’s moronic threat came at the peak of the hurricane season. It was made at a white-nationalist campaign-style rally in Phoenix. There Trump heaped praise on a former and recently federally convicted county sheriff who tortured and murdered a moderate Mexican village’s worth of predominantly Latino jail inmates across a long reign of racist police-state terror in Arizona. At this noxious assembly, Trump strongly hinted that he would soon pardon the fascist sheriff. The Racist Dog Whistler-in-Chief also doubled down on his sickening defense of the frenzied racists who oppose the tearing down of statues honoring “heroes” of the Southern Confederacy (1861-1865), which waged a war on Washington – a war that killed 750,000 Americans in order to defend the system of Black chattel slavery. Meanwhile. high-tech storm troopers charged, shooting rubber bullets and “pepper balls” at liberal and left protesters outside in the sweltering heat.

    Trump’s threat to collapse the federal government is presumably on hold in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which has white Texas Republican congressman demanding massive federal assistance for their stricken regions. Some of these Congressmen were against special federal assistance for the victims of Hurricane Sandy five years ago. This was for a very simple and sociopathic reason: that also giant and not-so “natural disaster” (an earlier attempt by Mother Nature to wake America up to the grave dangers posed by “anthropogenic climate change”) befell the liberal New York City area – enemy territory in their world view.

    Republicans are not unaware that the openly moronic George W. Bush’s glaringly ham-fisted (non-) response to Hurricane Katrina (an earlier educational effort on Mother Nature’s part) was part of how even the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats swept into federal “power” in 2006 and 2008.

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