terça-feira, maio 23, 2006

Trojan

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Trojan ... get the connection? Here is the visual symbol of the place going down, being the cooling tower at the Trojan Nuclear Facility near Rainier, Oregon - hey, that's Ken Kesey country.

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Going ... going ... going ... Gone! Well, not really 'gone'; there are 34 'concrete casks' full of fuel rods stored at a place called Hanford (I will post a map after a while), and I bet they are just about a full semi-trailer load each those 'casks', no more 45 gallon drums dumped in the ocean for this lot - they have learned something at least; and I doubt the half billion pricetag (below) takes that into account.

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This pretty much recapitulates my exact train of thought; from thinking globally to acting locally to The Simpsons to a 'boobage' tattoo (or magic-marker as the case may be, fingerpaint?) sent to me by a piper friend a while ago.

Trojan was built by Bechtel for Portland General Electric (PGE) in the late 60s and early 70s, came on-line in 1975; some toilet-training problems apparently, the discovery of a fault line running through the place, some bad valves, some bad concrete work, some lawsuits and what not, settled out of court like big boys. Enron has a piece of the puzzle, fitting.

A source of major inspiration for The Simpsons.

A long struggle by environmentalists, somebody called Lloyd Marbet among them; place closed in 1993 and has been being slowly de-commissioned since; 1999 the fuel went to Hanford, last week they blew down the cooling tower.

I can't find any conclusive evidence on the de-commissioning costs - 500 million or so looks like, half a billion, still seems low to me, I don't think the ultimate storage of the fuel is in there fr'instance but I can't find detailed info on it.

Sources:
Wikipedia.
MapQuest.
PGE Website.
The Willamette Week from 1975.
News from Centre for Energy.
News from The Olympian Online.
A Spreadsheet from Bonneville Power Administration on De-commissioning.
News from WTOP Radio - Bonneville International Corporation around Washington DC.
A bit from the Peak Oil discussion at Lutherans Online.

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Maps: Ranier & Portland, Ranier, Hanford.

Put aside the costs of decommissioning Trojan for a minute - what are the costs of cleaning up Hanford going to be? They have been dumping 'transuranic' things there since the 1940s - some of it has found its way into the soil and to the nearby Columbia River. There is a largish report on the risks: Risk/Impact Technical Report for the Hanford Groundwater/Vadose Zone Integration Project, Margaret MacDonell. Part of her recommended approach is to "develop reality checks"; I am not faulting her here by the way, there is no question this is a good idea. But it does let you know where they have been 'coming from' all these years.

Back to decommissioning; Potential Energy - The Cost of Nuclear, came up with 70 billion Euros for the plants in Great Britain; there are 23 of them according to The Eisenhower Institute, that would be ... rule of thumb ... roughly 3 billion a pop, Euros that is - at todays rate ... almost 4 billion US$ a pop, not chickenfeed.

Sorry, that was Pounds not Euros - comes out closer to 6 billion $US, 5.64 or something, but I checked the initial estimate, which came from the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and these numbers are understood to be soft.

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Posted maio 23, 2006 7:38 PM by Blogger Larissa Marques - LM@rq /  

Hi, I loved that's pictures.
Se vale dizer em portugês, ri muito!
Adorei sua visita, que pena que não entende, ia amar sua opinião!
Beijos, e volte sempre que puder e quiser!