Nuclear fail-safe

[unixronin]

Xcel Energy Inc.'s nuclear plant at Monticello [Minnesota] has been shut down indefinitely while experts investigate why a large component broke loose and triggered the plant's automatic safety systems.

Hey, it failed safe, exactly as it's supposed to.  But have you heard anything about this on the news?  The only reason I knew about it was because yndy er, suzilem posted this Hungarian information-service site showing alert events in the US.  You can find it on Google News, if you search on Monticello, but it doesn't make the headline page.  CNN doesn't appear to have it at all.

Apparently a synergistic side-effect of the shutdown was a fish kill in the Mississippi river:

A side-effect of the shutdown was that it killed over 3,000 fish in the Mississippi River near the plant.

Nonradioactive water used to cool the plant is normally discharged into the river, Datu said, creating warm spots.  When the discharge stopped, she said, the river water quickly cooled, and the fish died of thermal shock.  A planned shutdown typically kills around 100 fish, she said.

Does this mean the fish have evolved dependence on the nuclear power plant...?

Comments

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

The Minneapolis newspaper had a story that appeared last night shortly before midnight.

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/940767.html

I'm also surprised that it hasn't made national news.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

Probably not evolution, just normal fish sensitivity to sudden temperature changes. If the transition had been slow, they probably would have been fine.

[yndy.livejournal.com]

I posted that?

Much as I'd like to think I was being that smart... are you sure it was me?
Because I don't remember it at all...

Still, thanks for the heads up!

And honestly, the way our media is these days, it doesn't surprise me that it hasn't made a blip.

Sad.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Uh ... complete thinko. I meant suzilem. (Fixed.)

[yndy.livejournal.com]

phew...
;)

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

I wanna hear a Greenie outcry demanding more nuclear power to keep the fishies warm and cozy.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It'd be amusing. Though much of the Green movement has come around to the realization that, overall, nuclear fission may actually be the least polluting/environmentally damaging means of large-scale power generation currently available to us (coal-fired steam being the most polluting, followed by oil-fired; hydro is nice and clean, of course, but has other undesirable environmental impacts and there's a limited choice of places where you can put a hydro plant).

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Does this mean the fish have evolved dependence on the nuclear power plant...?

Nuclear power plants are generally speaking the most eco-friendly form of electrical generation available: the only things they put into the general environment are heat and some steam. Heating a river slightly tends to increase the ability of fish to live in its waters.

They do produce radioactive wastes, but these are concentrated and fairly easily (in engineering rather political terms) placed where they cannot interact with the atmosphere or hydrosphere; their interaction with the lithosphere is very long-term indeed.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I was really kidding about the dependence.

Recewnt developments seem to indicate that borosilicate vitrification of nuclear waste is far less secure than once thought. Rather than being good for 10,000 years, a recent article in New Scientist was observing that due to accelerated deterioration from knockouts by high-energy neutrons, high-level waste stored in borosilicate could be leaking in as little as 250 years.