(CNN) -- Former congressman Charlie Wilson of Texas died Wednesday at age 76, a Texas hospital said.
The 12-term Democratic congressman, who served Texas' 2nd Congressional district, was pronounced dead at 12:16 p.m. after suffering cardiopulmonary arrest in the emergency room of Memorial Health System of East Texas, the Lufkin hospital said in a news release.
Semi-on topic due to the amount of metal sent to Afghanistan during the Russian occupation?
Is this the Charlie Wilson of "Charlie Wilson's War"?
Wes
Yep.
sorta on topic, "core embrittlement". prolly if there's a failure the clean up will be at taxpayer expense, like what happend with wall street. corporations enjoy the benefits of risk taking but palm off the losses.
b.w.
-Obama's Nuclear Giveaway
Buried in the budget is a plan to underwrite the nuclear industry's revival.
by Harvey Wasserman
Like a decayed flotilla of rickety steamers, at least 27 of America's 104 aging atomic reactors are known to be leaking radioactive tritium, which is linked to cancer if inhaled or ingested through the throat or skin.
The fallout has been fiercest at Vermont Yankee, where a flood of cover-ups has infuriated and terrified near neighbors who say the reactor was never meant to operate more than 30 years, and must now shut.
In 2007 one of Yankee's 22 cooling towers simply collapsed due to rot.
Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed [1] tritium levels in a monitoring well at Vernon to be 3.5 times the federal safety standard. The leaks apparently came from underground pipes whose very existence was recently denied by VY officials in under-oath testimony at a public hearing. Vermont's pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas has termed the event "a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated."
Yankee is owned by Entergy, a Mississippi-based consortium that also owns New York's Indian Point reactor, which suffered an internal gusher of radioactive water in May, 2009. Another leak has just been found at Oconee in South Carolina. Illinois' Braidwood leaked so many millions of gallons of tritium-laced water that its owner, Exelon, was forced to buy a new municipal water system for a nearby town.
Entergy says none of Yankee's tritium has been found in local drinking water or in the Connecticut River, which supplies the plant's cooling water. Vernon sits near Vermont's southeast border with Massachusetts, across the river from New Hampshire. "The existence of tritium in such low levels does not present a risk to public health or safety whatsoever," says the company's Robert Williams.
But VY is just the latest of more than two dozen U.S. nuclear plants---many built in the 1960s and '70s---to be found with leaking tritium.
Last year at New Jersey's Oyster Creek, tritium was reported leaking a second time shortly after Exelon got it a 20-year license extension. Entergy's Pilgrim reactor, at Plymouth, Massachusetts, has recently leaked tritium into the ground.
The NRC's Neil Sheehan has confirmed leaks involving 27 of 104 licensed US reactors, and says that probably doesn't account for all of them. At Yankee, Oyster Creek and elsewhere, rotting pipes are the likeliest culprit, but no one is 100% certain.
The epidemic has escalated public dismay. Vermont state Representative Tony Klein, chair of House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, says that "when you have public officials that the public depends on for their health and welfare making casual statements that a radioactive substance is not harmful to you, I think that's ludicrous."
For decades the Encylopedia Britannica, National Academy of Sciences and other primary scientific bodies have confirmed that no dose of radiation, no matter how small, can ever be deemed perfectly safe. "There is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial," says Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Thus far the NRC has granted a series of license renewals to aging reactors. But by virtue of a long-standing agreement with Entergy, the Vermont Legislature can deny Yankee's request for a 20-year extension. In the 1990s local groups like the Citizen's Awareness Network
In Vermont, angry debate has also arisen over Entergy's dwindling decommissioning fund, which has been slashed by a declining stock market. Entergy has proposed spinning off plant ownership to a shell corporation whose assets may be even more dubious. But area residents also fear Entergy may be pushing Yankee operations in an attempt to find the source of its leaks.
With VY operating under duress, Katz and others report an increasing wave of concern among local citizens starting to think seriously about how they might evacuate if Entergy keeps pushing. "This plant appears to be leaking from its reactor piping, but they don't really know where," she says. "They don't want to shut down because they're afraid they'll never get back up. Entergy is choosing to protect its bottom line rather than the health and safety of our community."
Indeed, a desperate national industry now pushing for massive federal subsidies to build new reactors may not survive a flood of elderly clunkers being forced to close by the weight of their own contamination. "This is an industry trying to build a new fleet of Titanics while the old ones are sinking," says Katz.
Amidst the gusher of tritium leaks, Governor Douglas wants to postpone the legislature's vote on VY's license extension. But his term expires in November, and all five Democratic gubernatorial candidates are pledged to a Yankee shutdown.
What happens next will be defined by fierce grassroots activism crashing into a flood of corporate money in support of a rickety old reactor being operated with increasing recklessness.
The highly hyped "reactor renaissance"---and much more---may hang in the balance. Stay tuned.
Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Senior Editor of
Do not eat bananas.
Dan
On a similar vein I recall an argument that it was OK to sleep with one person but not with two.
"Either way it's OK to wake up with yourself." - Billy Joel
--Winston
The $30 billion dollars in the federal Nuclear Waste Trust Fund will take care of any problems. Decomissioning of nuclear power plants has already been paid for by tax payers.
Best Regards Tom.
Do not eat bananas.
Dan
god's fruit.
i bet almost everyone here is smarter than me. that's why i TRY to not post, post anything at all, but especially politically/emotionally charged issues. seriously, i do try. (and it doesn't seem possible to make outlook express to filter crossposted newsgroups) there often are posts that piss me off so much i can't help myself but respond somehow. i really do wish i could mind my own business and post VERY few messages and of those strictly adhere to metalworking topics, so, i apologize for posting this and all my other off topic posts. tom, your post makes me wonder. you seem to know a lot. can you explain to me why this is (article below) if what you said above is true?
b.w.
They are covered by insurance as part of thier licenseing agreement. The article author didnt do his reasearch...... Surety, insurance, or parent company guarantee: a guarantee of payment of decommissioning costs by a third party, which can be used in the event that the licensee defaults on its obligation to decommission the site.
Sarcasim/off.
Of course they are going to try to divert the cleanup cost elsewhere using
litigation. They might even go bankrupt.
Best Regards
Tom.
Yep - passed away here - a local good guy. Ask anyone in to the kitchen table and talk any subjects. His beloved was gracious as can be. Down to earth and never let it get to his head.
Mart> (CNN) -- Former congressman Charlie Wilson of Texas died Wednesday at
On Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:08:25 -0800, the infamous Winston scrawled the following:
Due to the timing, I was wondering "Is this the Left's reply to the skeptics' bringing out the CO2 scandals and ruining their Globular Swarming scam?" but it appears to be real. I can't help but wonder if they would have caught it far earlier if the Greenies hadn't nearly forced nukes out of existence.
In parts of Utah, it's "The more, the marry 'er!"
-- In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it. -- John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1850
I have a feeling that there is a lot of pressure to keep running old nuke plants due to the lack of new ones coming on line.
Wes
-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller
That is one of the reasons. Westinghouse has a nice design in a new unit. The problem is that the left has demonized nukes for so long and made it damn near impossible to build new ones that they have to wring the guts out of the existing units.
Now if some of the fools out there would repeal the ban on reprocessing fuel that Carter signed and get a few new plants started the energy problems (as far as electricity) would be taken care of in many areas, and be far cleaner than ANY other generation technology to boot.
Reprocess a lot of the current waste fuel in this country and the price of operation would drop considerably. By the time you actually processed it down to true waste the remainder from one reactor the end waste would fit into a 55 gallon drum and have less radiation than ambient background.
I love the folks who point out past spills and accidents as if they are based on current designs. Considering that the newest plant operating in the US is running a design that is almost 40 years old. (Watts Bar 1- Came on line in 1996 but construction began in 1973!!!)
Personally I would love one of the mini-vault design units that are on the drawing boards. A complete self controlled unit that is roughly the size of a mini-van that gets buried in the ground and runs 7-10 years without any human intervention. (Toshiba 4S and Hyperion)
They have on both sites about how the fact that they are buried and use VERY low grade fuel makes them poor terrorist targets. The anti-nukes say that a terrorist could dig one up and make a bomb. The easy solution to this is to install the unit in the middle of a neighbor hood of avid soap opera and reality show viewers and connect up a signal that says someone is tampering with the power for days of our lives, dallas, ricky lake, american idol or whatever the current shows are...
"Most of these were built by regulated utilities, often state-based, which meant that they put the capital cost (whatever it turned out to be after, for example, delays) into their rate base and amortised it against power sales. Their consumers bore the risk and paid the capital cost. (With electricity deregulation in some states, the shareholders bear any risk of capital overruns and power is sold into competitive markets.)"
"Almost all the US nuclear generating capacity comes from reactors built between 1967 and 1990. There have been no new construction starts since
1977, largely because for a number of years gas generation was considered more economically attractive and because construction schedules were frequently extended by opposition, compounded by heightened safety fears following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. A further PWR - Watts Bar 2 - is expected to start up by 2013 following Tennessee Valley Authority's decision in 2007 to complete the construction of the unit. "
Note the "There have been no new construction starts since 1977" item and then tell me how they can also state "Almost all the US nuclear generating capacity comes from reactors built between 1967 and 1990"
Sort of like saying that most people drive cars made in 1990 but that they stopped making cars in 1977....
There's a simple explanation for that - the normal long construction time for a nuke plant, and NIMBY's.
They might have started in 1977, and it would normally take them three or four years to complete. Then some environmentalist sues, and they have to stop for a few years while that all gets hashed out. Then another one comes up with a different angle and that suit buys another two years...
The plant is built and fueled and ready to split atoms for the first time - Then the NIMBY's sue because the emergency plan isn't good enough, and the guards aren't trained well enough...
And they finally go online in 1990.
-->--
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.