Nuclear Plant Story

I have long considered myself a supporter of the nuclear power industry, but this situation in Japan, along with other stories that I have heard, are making me increasingly skeptical about the use of these types of reactors. I am not going to blindly claim all things nuclear are bad - for example, there are some alternative designs (e.g. pebble bed reactors) that might work very well. For a pic today I'm showing a pic of a nuclear power plant - I don't even remember where this one is located. I do want to point out that the reactor itself is NOT located in the two big cooling towers at the right and left sides of the picture. It is more likely located in the smaller white-domed cylindrical building - containment buildings like that are designed to be pretty tough. I would like to share a more lighthearted story from someone who spent a summer pushing paperwork at a small nuclear power plant along Lake Michigan when he was in college about 20 years ago:

"When I was hired to work at the power plant I was quite impressed with the level of screening and background checking. When we had our orientation meetings, that impression of professionalism, safety, and education of the employees continued. One thing we were told was that in the event of an emergency that we were to leave the plant heading west out the main driveway, then turn right on the main road to head north to an assembly point - to do headcounts, etc. Lake Michigan was to the east of the plant.

As part of the safety consciousness at the plant there were occasional plant-wide drills. Sometime during that summer we had one of those drills. We were given announcements over the PA system 'Attention in the plant. Attention in the plant. This is a drill. This is drill...' and then the relevant info was repeated twice to us, like what was happening and what all of us non-essential personnel were supposed to do to in response. From the infomation that was given for that drill I gleaned that we were to pretend that there was a sizable earthquake that struck the area (HIGHLY unlikely in that part of the Midwest) and that there was pretend damage to the tubine deck and, more importantly, pretend damage to the pool of water where the spent fuel was stored. [NOTE: At this time there is a lot of attention being paid to spent fuel pools at the failing reactors in Japan.] This pretend-damaged pool released a pretend plume of radioactivity, but here is the kicker: the prevailing winds (at least in the drill) were blowing from east to west from the lake onto the land, across the main road and cutting us off from the assembly point. So we non-essential personnel were ordered to head to the parking lot to our cars and drive south along the main road, which we dutifully did, BUT we were not told where to assemble. As I walked out the complex I peeked over the shoulder of a co-worker who was involved in the drill and saw a map of a pretend plume cutting off that main road. Apparently after were out to the parking lot and evacuating and out of earshot of the PA system there was an announcement that were not really supposed to leave, but rather just pretend to do so.

So here I was driving south along this rural road without a clue of where to assemble. When I got to the nearest town I saw a bunch of coworkers at a Dairy Queen, so I stopped in and waited for news with them. Somebody tried to call the power plant via pay phone (this was before the days of cell phones) but it took quite a while to get through because many of the personnel had evacuated. When somebody did make contact with the power plant, we were informed that we really should not have left and that we should come back. We did, but we got some ice cream first."