A bad week for the nuclear power cabal

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the ongoing controversy over Southern California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant, a reminder that nuclear industry woes aren’t confined to California.

First, a report of the latest shutdown, this time on the East Coast. John Murawski of the Raleigh News & Observer reports:

Duke Energy Progress shut down the Shearon Harris nuclear plant in Wake County on Wednesday after the company discovered that the reactor vessel – which holds the plant’s nuclear fuel and contains the nuclear reaction – showed early indications of corrosion and cracking.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported Thursday morning that plant officials made the discovery earlier this week during a review of ultrasonic data that had been recorded in spring 2012.

The year-old data showed a one-quarter-inch flaw in the reactor vessel head, the term for the lid that is bolted on top of the vessel to maintain superheated water under high pressure.

Read the rest.

More from NBC News outlet WITN:

Duke Energy owns the Shearon Harris plant, which began operations in 1987.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the quarter inch crack was not all the way through the reactor wall and there’s no indication any radioactive material escaped.

The NRC says the plant was shut down so crews could repair the crack. It says there is no impact “to the health and safety of employees or the public.”

Read the rest.

And the problems aren’t confined to the coasts, either.

Problems in Michigan, cracks once again

From Henry Erb of NBC affiliate WOOD in Grand Rapids, Michigan:

Authorities say they’ve found the crack that led to “slightly radioactive water” spilling from the Palisades nuclear power plant into Lake Michigan.

The Covert Township plant was shut down May 5 after about 79 gallons of slightly radioactive spilled into a pond that flows into Lake Michigan. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said the water did not pose a public health risk. The leak was in a 300,000-gallon tank used to hold water that floods and cools the nuclear reactor during refueling and in the event of a problem.

The problem was a half-inch crack in the welding around one of nine nozzles in the tank, authorities said Monday. Three of those have been replaced and every weld and every nozzle is now being checked. The entire bottom of the tank is also being checked.

Read the rest.

And here’s a report from WOOD featuring an interview with Congressional Rep. Fred Upton [R-St. Joseph]:

Perhaps we’re getting a signal. . .

Conflicting reports cloud San Onofre’s fate

The latest news from Southern California’s aged and troubled nuclear plant complex is, to say the least, confusing.

There’s no doubt that the San Diego Gas & Electric complex is in troubled, as we’ve noted before. But the latest developments have added a new dimension of uncertainty for the plant, which has been plagued with leaking cooling pipes and a long history of other problems.

The first development, reported Monday by Reuters, raised the possibility of a public hearing before the utility could restart the plant:

An independent nuclear regulatory panel on Monday called for a full public hearing on the proposed restart of one of the two damaged San Onofre nuclear reactors, a move that will delay Southern California Edison’s plan to run the plant this summer.

The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruling favored petitioner Friends of the Earth, an anti-nuclear group that sought more public input of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) review of steam generator problems at the San Onofre nuclear power plant.

Read the rest.

More from the Associated Press:

The plant between San Diego and Los Angeles hasn’t produced electricity since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.

Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, argued that the federal process set up to consider a restart of the plant’s Unit 2 reactor was in fact a change to the plant’s operating license that would require a courtlike hearing. The three-member board concluded that the restart would allow operator Southern California Edison “to operate beyond the scope of its existing license.”

Read the rest.

And a critical detail from the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Morgan Lee:

Murray Jennex, a former systems engineer at San Onofre for nearly 20 years who now teaches at San Diego State University’s College of Business Administration, said the order likely pushes back a final decision on restarting the Unit 2 reactor until after summer.

“I won’t say this is a death blow to Unit 2, but it does make restart less likely,” Jennex said. “If approved, the additional downtime makes the Unit 2 restart more complex and costly due to corrosion issues from sitting.”

Any delays put additional financial pressure on Edison. CEO Ted Craver recently indicated that without a green light to restart by year’s end, the company might decide to permanently shut down one or both reactors, adding closure costs and a void in the region’s power grid.

Read the rest.

But there’s a catch. . .

As the Associated Press reports:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not decided whether it will hold a public hearing on a plan to restart the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant in California, the nation’s top nuclear regulator said Tuesday.

NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane told reporters in Washington, D.C., that she is aware of strong public interest in California and among some members of Congress for a public hearing, but added that a ruling this week by an NRC licensing panel does not require such a hearing be held.

“There are potential opportunities for public hearings,” Macfarlane told reporters after a speech to the nuclear industry. She called the situation at San Onofre complex with “multiple moving parts right now.”

Read the rest.

Dave Rice of the San Diego Reader offers some critical context:

Comments from Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Alison Macfarlane on the future of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station have generated media confusion and potentially put her at odds with environmental groups, Senator Barbara Boxer, and the NRC’s own Atomic Safety Licensing Board.

After speaking before a group representing nuclear industry business interests on Tuesday, Macfarlane said that a public hearing wasn’t necessarily required before changes to San Onofre’s license could be approved that would allow the plant to re-start. She did acknowledge public interest in such a procedure, however, saying the situation concerning the power plant’s shutdown had “multiple moving parts,” and that there existed “potential opportunities for public hearings.”

Read the rest.

Steve Chu, who served as Barack Obama’s Secretary of Energy through 22 April, is a physicist and an exuberant backer of nuclear power, as evidenced in his tenure as head of of UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Chu’s interim successor, Acting Secretary Daniel Poneman, is a lawyer and political scientist, and unlikely to make any controversial decisions.

Meanwhile,m a ticking time bomb sits on standby on the Southern California coast, separated from the mighty Pacific by a short seawall and located immediately adjacent to a fault capable of uncorking an earthquake vastly morfe powervful than the plant is designed to withstand.

Headlines of the day: Blood and greed edition

From The Independent:

BP and Shell price-fixing inquiry: Oil giants raided over allegations of collusion

From Australia’s News.com:

Charity calls to ban cancer-causing chemicals used by women

• Breast Cancer UK calls for total ban on BPA chemical

• BPA is “contributing to rapid increase in breast cancer”

• Chemical commonly used in food and beverage packaging

From a BBC story on the sex slavery comments of Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto, who also calls for a “restoration” of dictatorship:

Japan WWII ‘comfort women’ were ‘necessary’ — Hashimoto

From a BBC story about those “freedom fighters” the Obama administration supports in Syria:

Outrage at Syrian rebel shown ‘eating soldier’s heart’

Finally, from Mother Jones, a story about the folks who are smiling whilst the blood flows:

Contractors Raked in $385 Billion on Overseas Bases in 12 Years

Every year, US taxpayers send billions of dollars abroad to build and maintain our military presence.

Chart of the day: San Onofre, a question of faults

Okay, so it’s a map. But it shows the real reason lots of folks should be worried about Southern California’s ticking nuclear time bomb, especially now that San Onofre owner San Diego Gas & Electric is threatening to permanently close the plant unless the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives fast approval to a restart.

The chart was prepared by Dr. Nelson Mar, who served as  Senior Engineer during the design of two of the plant’s reactor units. The reactors, he told the Irvine City Council, were designed to withstand a maximum 7.0 earthquake and a thirty-foot-high tsunami, but after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Mar took a new look at updated seismic research and discovered that the plant lies adjacent to a fault capable of generating an 8.0 shocker. Such a quake would release thirty-two times more energy than the reactors are designed to withstand.

The two circles represent two different standards for areas to be evacuated in event of a disaster, with the smaller zone representing the current U.S. standard and the larger circle representing the safe distance from the Fukushima reactors recommended to Americans by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo after the disaster.

Click on the image to enlarge.

H/T to San Onofre Safety.

And for fun, here’s a video of powerful California Rep. Howard Berman, when he was confronted by activists Myla Reson and Roger Johnson about the corporate push for a fast restart at San Onofre:

Tales from San Onofre: Of nukes and nudes

We’ve written about Southern California’s San Onofre beach many times before, always in the context of nuclear power.

San Onofre’s located on the northern San Diego County coastline adjacent to the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, and it houses two nuclear reactors run by San Diego Gas and Electric.

The site is located directly on the beach and along an earthquake faultline, and the Fukushima earthquake-spawned nuclear disaster has sent some spines a-quivering, especially when word came out last year of leaks that forced a shutdown.

Now comes even more bad news, reported by Mitch Blacher of Channel 10 News in San Diego:

An inside source gave Team 10 a picture snapped inside the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) showing plastic bags, masking tape and broom sticks used to stem a massive leaky pipe.

San Onofre owner Southern California Edison (SCE), confirms the picture was taken inside Unit Three, but did not say when. The anonymous source said the picture was taken in December 2012.

Unit Three is the same unit that leaked radiation in January 2012.  SONGS has been shutdown since then as a precaution.

Read the rest.

Blacher’s report comes three days after after this Channel 10 report:

But then there’s another San Onofre controversy, this one reported by Fox 6 News in San Diego:

We guess the common thread is coverups involving catching some rays. . .

Comment of the day: An austerian roast?

Posted by commenter SWB2 to a Washington Post story headlined “Skeleton of teenage girl confirms cannibalism at Jamestown colony”:

It just goes to show that people will be innovative and industrious in supporting themselves if we can just get rid of this safety net.

Sincerely,

Paul Ryan

Chemo Chronicles: Last session today [maybe]

We’re scheduled for the final of our twelve chemo sessions today, with a last dose of gemcitabine hydrochloride to begin this morning at 10:30.

We’ve been nauseous the last couple of days, in part because we’re also taking two powerful antibiotics to combat a nasty subcutaneous cyst that’s sprouted up in our right forearm.

The drug’s we’re taking for that are sulfamethoxazl and cefadroxil, and when the doctor told us they could cause diarrhea, pour response was “That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.” [Seems the cisplatin has been binding up our bowels. . .]

UPDATE: Five hours on the IV and we’re done!!!!

Headlines of the day: Economics and illnesses

We open with Europe with this from the Irish Times:

IMF trims global growth forecast and warns of bumpy recovery

Warns Europe not to relax efforts to tackle debt crisis

From Spiegel:

Capital Study: Chinese Investment in Europe Hits Record High

From El País:

IMF sees Spain’s jobless rate climbing to 27 percent this year

Closer to home, there’s this From ProPublica:

FDA Let Drugs Approved on Fraudulent Research Stay on the Market

And finally this from the Sacramento Bee:

Nevada buses hundreds of mentally ill patients to cities around country

Headlines of the day: With a song in our heart?

From The Independent:

‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ closer to number one spot as it reaches midweek top ten following Margaret Thatcher’s death

From RT America:

‘Irreparable’ safety issues: All US nuclear reactors should be replaced, ‘Band-Aids’ won’t help

From ENENews:

TV: Gas release from U.S. nuclear site covered up? — Continued for several days — “Spontaneous, not controlled”

From McClatchy Newspapers:

Obama’s drone war kills ‘others,’ not just al Qaida leaders

From CNN:

Syria rebel group’s dangerous tie to al Qaeda

From Greek Reporter:

Labor Cost in Greece Drops Dramatically

From Spiegel:

Brain Drain: 120,000 Professionals Leave Greece Amid Crisis

Headlines of the day: Looking for patterns?

From Newswise:

Cigarette Relighting Tied to Tough Economy

From the Washington Post:

Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequester.

From Reuters:

U.S. considers less prison time for ex-Enron CEO Skilling

From The Guardian:

Mary Schapiro: the latest official through the regulatory revolving door

Former SEC chairman Schapiro, 57, to switch to the private sector in a move likely to anger critics of ‘regulatory capture’

Headlines of the day: Looking for patterns?

From the London Telegraph:

Europe’s leaders paralysed as EMU jobless rate hits record high

Eurozone unemployment reached a record 12pc in February and looks certain to ratchet higher as fiscal cuts deepen and manufacturing continues to struggle, raising the spectre of social explosion across southern Europe

From the London Daily Mail:

U.S. sees highest poverty spike since the 1960s, leaving 50 million Americans poor as government cuts billions in spending… so does that mean there’s no way out?

From The Independent:

Pregnant women ‘more likely to miscarry as result of cuts to Government spending’

From The Guardian:

Extreme poverty could be wiped out by 2030, World Bank estimates show

World Bank head speaks of ‘auspicious moment in history’ amid criticism rhetoric is not being matched with detailed policies

From the Irish Independent:

IMF wants faster home repossessions

From Ekathemerini:

Golden Dawn wants death penalty for violent migrants

From Keep Talking Greece:

German policemen at Greek airports to check travellers bound to Germany

Comment of the day: An austerian roast?

Posted by commenter SWB2 to a Washington Post story headlined “Skeleton of teenage girl confirms cannibalism at Jamestown colony”:

It just goes to show that people will be innovative and industrious in supporting themselves if we can just get rid of this safety net.

Sincerely,

Paul Ryan

Chemo Chronicles: Heading into the final round

Once upon a time, back when we’d finally got out little blog fired up and running, we posted anywhere from five to twenty-two items a day, seven days a week.

Then, five months ago, we discovered some blood and pus in our pee, then a couple of trips to the doctor’s office and a hospitalization later, we were without both bladder [to a very aggressive and relatively rare micropapillary carcinoma] and prostate [thanks to an early stage adenoma].

We also gained something, a new, small circular extrusion of moist pink tissue a few inches to the right of the ol’ bellybutton.

The extrusion, called a stoma, is the end of a section of gut hacked out during surgery and moved to a new location to serve as living plumbing to convey the output of our kidneys into a self-adhesive ostomy bag, an external plastic replacement bladder, complete with its own drain valve.

Unlike the real bladder, the bag-on-a-bod has no nerves to remind us when it’s full. That, in turn, can lead to accidents, as when the pressure of contents exerts sufficient hydraulic pressure to breach the seal twixt bod and bag. [Perhaps it’s just karma from all those leaks we so assiduously cultivate in our journalistic incarnation].

All of this is preamble to our last Double Whammy session.

During the surgery, the doctor also grabbed 20 lymph nodes adjacent to the bladder. Nineteen were pristine, but the twentieth was colonized by the very nasty little micropapillary cancer. Both the surgeon and the oncologist said that without chemo, the odds of metastasis were at least fifty percent — dropping to twenty percent with chemo.

Because it’s relatively rare, there’s no set chemotherapy regimen. The one we opted for consists of an initial Double Whammy session, with intravenous doses of both cisplatin and gemcitabine hydrochloride.

Then, a week later, comes the first of two weekly gemcitabine-only sessions.

Then comes a week off, followed by another three identical sessions. Then come two more repetitions of the cycle, for a total of twelve chemo sessions over a total of sixteen weeks.

It’s the initial Double Whammy session that hits hardest. Friends were present for our first two Double Whammys, but we did the last one alone. In addition to a one-liter cisplatin bag and a smaller gemcitabine bag, the session also includes at least a liter-and-a-half of saline.

Which brings us back to that other bag. . .

In our first two sessions, the presence of friends kept us awake — and thus conscious of the bag. But the last session, we were alone, since the friend who’d planned to accompany us had come down with a virus. Viruses, we learned, aren’t encouraged in chemo clinics.

So we did the session alone, falling asleep somewhere around the second hour of the five-hour treatment.

We awoke feeling pleasant warm in our southern exposure. No, wait. Damply warm.

We had just wet our pants for the first time since second grade.

It all went downhill from there.

Chemo’s been a drag. Each successive round has been more enervating, though we’ve been eased somewhat by our own doctor-approved cannabis-augmented anti-nausea regime, and by a blood transfusion and the addition this last cycle of two or three days of one-to-three-hour IV hydration infusion after each of the chemo sessions. We also seem to have a handle on the cisplatin-induced constipation that landed us in the emergency room nine days after our first Double Whammy.

But the sheer exhaustion has been overwhelming. And what’s worse, it’s hit hardest at our ability to write.

Hence the infrequent postings compared to our pre-surgical days.

There’s one round left and it starts Tuesday with the last Double Whammy, followed by two last rounds with gemcitabine. Plus hours in the clinic reclining chairs on days following to keep the fluids up.

And, for the occasional upchuck, we keep the plastic I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter tub on the bed beside us. [And if we use it, you really won’t believe it’s butter.]

While them chemo ends 16 April, we hear that the energy won’t come back for a couple of months more — perhaps fully by July, around the time a granddaughter is due.

Now there’s an effective anti-smoking ad!

Effectively hilarious, that is. From the Canadian Ministry of Health:

UPDATE: When we saw the words “social farting,” our first thought was this scene from Mel Brooks’ immortal Blazing Saddles:

Headlines of the day: Signs of the times

From UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian:

Berkeley Student Cooperative pushes for cuts to employee benefits

From Bloomberg:

Rising Student-Loan Delinquencies Hurt Young Homebuyers

And to close on a positive note, from Science 2.o:

Pessimists Live Longer And Healthier

Hugo Chavez is dead, respiratory infection cited

UPDATED: at the end.

A report from RT:

The government’s announcement, from Venezuelan TV via Britain’s Channel 4:

From the BBC:

An emotional Nicolas Maduro made the announcement on Tuesday evening, flanked by leading Venezuelan political and military leaders.Earlier, he said the 58-year-old Venezuelan leader had a new, severe respiratory infection and had entered “his most difficult hours”.

He also announced the government had expelled two US diplomats from the country for spying on Venezuela’s military.

>snip<

He said he had no doubt that Mr Chavez’s cancer, first diagnosed in 2011, had been induced by foul play by Venezuela’s enemies.

Read the rest.

Then consider this from the Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon of the Los Angeles Times:

Chavez won the lower classes’ support by redistributing the nation’s vast oil wealth through welfare programs called missions, which set up medical clinics and schools, operated a chain of cut-rate grocery stores, and divvied up nationalized farms and ranches among cooperatives of the impoverished.

Daniel Hellinger, a political science professor at Webster University in St. Louis, said the welfare programs reduced Venezuela’s poverty rate from close to 80% in the 1990s to about 20%, and wiped out illiteracy.

“To millions of poor Venezuelans excluded from meaningful participation in politics, Chavez offered hope for a new kind of democracy that would open doors of government to them,” Hellinger said. “However much the system fell short of that aspiration, it was Chavez who gave voice to it.”

Read the rest.

Headline of the day II: So you glow in the dark?

From the London Times:

Fukushima cancer risk ‘played down to aid nuclear industry’

Headline of the day: The other kind of drones

From Think Progress:

Caltech Physicist: If All Science Were Run Like Marijuana Research, Creationists Would Control Paleontology

The Truthseeker: US worst place to live?

Talk about getting kicked while you’re down. . .

From The Truthseeker, a new feature from Russia’s RT, a distinctly downbeat and flagrantly factual account of America’s sad transformation into the basket case of the industrial West:

From RT:

The greatest nation on earth (© US politicians & media) exposed as among the worst in the West… on all life indicators, why China steams ahead, plans for Land of the Tax Free + the proud record the States share with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Seek truth from facts with Belle Isle: Detroit’s Game Changer author Rod Lockwood, Chair of Chinese Intl. Affairs Barry Naughton, The Personality and Well-Being Lab Director Dr. Ryan Howell, Political Science Professor Joseph Cheng, and Fox host Bill O’Reilly.

Chemo Chronicles: We’re halfway through it

The one singular feature of our course of chemotherapy is mental fatigue.

Simply put, the one-two punch of cisplatin and gemcitabine hydrochloride deployed again the metatstatic and highly aggressive micropapillary carcinoma that’s cost us our bladder [and the prostate as well, along with its own breed of slower-growing adenoma] leaves with the our giddy-up-go got up and gone.

Our hemoglobin levels have been declining, which is typical for the Double Whammy regime we’re following, and may require blood transfusions down the line.

We’re also getting two days of IV hydration following our next two [final two] Double Whammy sessions, each followed by two gemcitabine-only sessions.

The regime is experimental in the sense that the rareness of the micropaillary breed is such that there’s no standard treatment. Both our surgeon and our oncologist say that the chemo can cut our chance of another malignant siege from fifty percent to twenty percent.

Sometimes we find ourself wondering if the misery is worth the effort, but we persevere. Besides, we’ve got a a grandchild, currently known as Shrimpy, due in July and a daughter hoping for a grampa who’ll indulge said Shrimpy — a role that seems to come naturally to us [infants and cats seem to find us okay].

With family and friends to cherish and that damn sense of obligation we can’t seem to shake, we’ll hang on, miserable though we may be.

The worst may be yet to come [including the possibility of transfusions if steadily declining hemoglobin levels pass a numerical Rubicon], but we’ve been learning how to handle the worst of it.

That damn problem with writing

One significant impact of the chemo has been that inability to bring ourselves into heretofore normal writing mode, and that peculiar frisson accompanying the exposition of insights in coherent and meaningful patterns and insights drawn from experiences dictated in part by curiosity and compulsion to understand the embodied encounter with the grist of a life as it evolves under a unique constellation of forces and environments.

When we’re up to par, we live to write and we write to live.

Journalism’s been our way of exploring the world and asking the questions we’re impelled to ask on behalf of anyone who’s curious to understand forces at play in the world around them.

With a passion to understand and a bone-deep sense of obligation, journalism was just the ticket. Talk about your professional student — and getting paid for it, too!

All of which is to say that stringing together words is at the core of our identity.

But as the chemo strikes at our basic energy level, we find we have little problem with reading [which comes easier than screen-watching] or with conversation [which, when done right, is itself energizing], when it comes to writing out thoughts, we’ve been stumped.

Hence the light blog postings, and the end of those comprehensive EuroWatch and GreeceWatch reports.

Cannabis seems to help, abating both the nausea and allowing a greater-than-chemo-typical ability to sling words.

One thing I never would’ve imagined back in the 1960′s: My first legal cannabis purchase came with a senior discount. . .