At
the end of April, former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez
sounded the alarm about the safety of the spent fuel pool at Fukushima
Daiichi Unit #4 (click
here for his piece from the Huffington Post). Here at NEI, we've long been familiar with Alvarez's position on the disposition of
used nuclear fuel, and it's safe to say that not only do we disagree with his assessment, we also believe that it is needlessly alarmist.
We're
not the only ones who have said that, something that's become
abundantly clear in recent weeks as independent bloggers have decided to
take on Alvarez on their own initiative. The first to step to the plate
was
Dan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat:
One
of his (Alvarez's) favorite rhetorical strategies is to total up the
mass of material at a nuclear site and then make the assumption that all
of it will blow up through some mysterious and unspecified mechanism
spewing its contents far and wide. This is a great stuff for a B- movie
on the SciFi channel, like an imaginative idea for a script of
Mega-Shark meets Atomic Octopus, but it doesn't match reality.
Yurman was quickly followed by
Rod Adams over at Atomic Insights. Rod even went so far as to record his own video rebuttal:
Popout But the crescendo came earlier this week on Wednesday when a group of bloggers, headed by Will Davis at
Atomic Power Review, debunked Alvarez's claims very thoroughly over at the
ANS Nuclear Cafe:
These
articles are highly deceptive. The occurrence of a cataclysmic release
of radioactive material as surmised is hinged upon the occurrence of so
many statistically impossible events that it is certain to be a
practical impossibility. Since the assertions continue to gain a wider
audience, however, it is necessary to examine them and make a realistic
assessment of their likelihood.
Please take the time to
read the rest right now. Once you finish that, be sure to stop by
The Neutron Economy for a great followup piece.
Three
major US nuclear utilities have joined an alliance formed by
Westinghouse and Ameren to support the licensing and deployment of
Westinghouse small modular reactor (SMR) technology.
