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Coming in October
From Common Courage
Press
Today's
Stories
August 28, 2003
Tariq Ali
Occupied Iraq Will
Never Know Peace
Website of the Day
Pot TV
Recent
Stories
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little Deaths:
Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and
North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview
with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy
War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean
Deception
August 26,
2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the
Dead
David Lindorff
The Great Oil
Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is
Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush
Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with
Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective
Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints and a Palestinian
Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime
Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward,
Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush: a Modern Ahab
or a Toy Action Figure?
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws
in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor
Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to
Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an
Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the Iraq
Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics
of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed
Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A
Drug for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld Does
Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at
Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Insults to
Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss
Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War
on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest or Against
Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the
Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many
Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary of
9/11
Julie Hilden
A
Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy
Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and Free
Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and
FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts:
Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's
America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal
Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's
Notations
William Mandel
Five Great
Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American
Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney,
Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton
Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will:
the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation
Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity:
Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other
People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The
US Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling
Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the
Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and
Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps on the
Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting
Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de
Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media Double
Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The
Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now
No One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and
Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act
of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the
Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace is not an
Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the
NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A
Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster
of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at
Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's
Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts
Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch":
Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel
Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's
Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the
Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's
Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit
Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual
Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and
Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer
Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the
Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power
(Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California
Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush
Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A
Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's
War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy
of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire
Griles!
Congratulations to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC
Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille New
Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War
Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of
Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has
Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the
Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for
Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which Electric
System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's
Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid
Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual
Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline for August 14,
2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout
Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview
with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest
Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod
& Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay
by Sharon Beder
Hot Stories
Dardagan, Slobodo
and Williams
CounterPunch
Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison
Bitch
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use
of Propaganda in the Iraq War
Wendell Berry
Small Destructions
Add Up
CounterPunch Wire
WMD: Who Said What
When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day
Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental
Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim
Aftermath of War: What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush: A
Draft Resolution
Click Here for More Stories.
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August
28, 2003
Nukes in the Dark
Blackout Left
Emergency Diesels as Sole Protection at Nuclear Power Plants
By STAN GOFF
On
August 14th the largest electrical blackout in history caused sixteen
nuclear plants to automatically shut down in the U.S. and
Canada.
Nuclear power plants run on offsite power, not their
own reactors.
If the electrical grid fails, reactors are designed
to automatically close down. One or more diesel generators are supposed to
start up, with capacity to power basic safety equipment, including the
cooling system. If generators fail, the reactor cannot be restarted
without offsite power.
David Lochbaum of the Union of Conerned Scientists
compares this to a car without a battery, further explaining, "Nuclear
reactors will automatically trip upon detection that the electrical grid
is going down. Nuclear plants generate electricity by passing steam
through a turbine. The electrical grid going down is to a nuclear reactor
and its turbine/generator what  stepping on the clutch is to a manual transmission
car engine when traveling at 65 mph. To protect the turbine from spinning
too fast with its 'clutch depressed,' valves that admit steam to the
turbine close in seconds. Since the steam no longer has anyplace to go,
there's a pressure pulse racing back towards the reactor. To limit the
size of this pressure pulse, the reactor automatically trips. With the
reactor down, there's less steam with no place to go. As long as it is
available, offsite power is the preferred power source for the nuclear
plant. However, once the electrical grid fails, the emergency diesel
generator automatically starts and supplies power to safety equipment. The
emergency diesel generators cannot provide enough power to operate the
non-safety equipment at the plant."
Attacks, ice, or wind storms can also knock out
transmission lines to nuclear plants for extended periods. Nuclear plants
that lose all power can quickly be converted into giant "dirty bombs",
wind-driven clouds of radioactive isotopes.
Something has to continually pump circulating
cooling water to the reactor and to the giant, densely-packed waste fuel
pools, or those fuel rods, active and spent, will catch fire and reproduce
Chernobyl, or worse. Restoring off-site power to the 16 nuclear plants
during the blackout - long before reactors powered back up - was a high
priority in order to restore safety and security systems.
But back-up generators may have been strained and
some may have failed. Reporting will not be available to the public for
weeks, meaning there may have been close calls about which we know nothing
at this point. Many are concerned about what happens if the diesel
generators runout of gas. When asked about whether that presented a
potential danger, Lochbaum said, "The long-term threat to the EDGs
[emergency diesel generators] is not lack of fuel but lack of cool."
Emergency diesel generators are tested for one hour per year. Every five
years, testing is required for a full day, but not under conditions
encountered if the generators must run for hours in hot weather. Most
blackouts occur during hot weather when electricity demand is high. This
is also when the air-cooling of diesel generators is least effective, and
overheating is most likely.
LOOP, industry jargon for "loss of offsite power",
is considered the leading contributor to reactor core risk due to the
recognized unreliability of emergency diesel generators.
***
On April 26, 1986, a complex of four nuclear
reactors in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl ran a safety test. The Soviet
nuclear power program wanted to find out if it could bypass the cost of a
technologically complex system that would crank up emergency diesel
generators within seconds in the event of a loss of external power - a
loss like that which just shut down 16 nuclear reactors in the
northeastern United States and parts of Canada.
Just as those nuclear plants automatically shut down
during the blackout, Soviet nuclear plants were designed to automatically
shut down, because nuclear plants can become very unstable if they slow
down. At Chernobyl, they wanted to see if they could provide enough backup
cooling to the reactor with their own remaining nuclear-generated power as
the reactor wound down, at least for a few minutes, while they manually
brought the diesel back-up generators on line.
That experiment failed spectacularly and created the
biggest nuclear power disaster on record. The reactor quickly heated up
and exploded, contaminating over 6,000 square kilometers with dangerous
isotopes for centuries and triggering the forced resettlement of 415
towns. Again, the goal of this tragic experiment was to delay the use of
emergency diesel generators in the event of a grid
<shutdown.Operators> ran a test to see if they could wait a few
minutes before starting emergency diesel generators - in case of loss of
offsite power like that in the U.S. and Canada.
Many diesel generators have failed in the U.S., 138
between 1985 and 2000 by my reckoning.
In some cases, a reactor core might last up to eight
hours without backup generators - although deteriorating conditions could
damage safety systems and impair workers' ability to protect the
core.
At the Fermi plant near Detroit, all four backup
generators were found inoperable on February 1, 2003. Had the regional
blackout happened at that time, there could have been a full-scale
evacuation called for the Detroit area, further complicated because sirens
to alert citizens within ten miles would not have worked because the
electricity was off. Reportedly, the sirens at all 16 nuclear plants
affected by the blackout were rendered inoperable.
In June 1998 a tornado downed all external
transmission lines at Ohio's Davis-Besse plant. The diesel generators ran
for twenty-six hours until they overheated and failed. The outside air was
93 degrees. One of the outside transmission lines had been restored one
hour prior to the EDG failure.
According to Public Citizen, there have been 15
instances in the past 12 months in which emergency generators have either
malfunctioned or failed to operate at all, in certain cases leading to
plant shutdowns. On several occasions all backup generators failed at
once.
The Brunswick I unit in Southport, NC lost off-site
power for nine hours in March 2000, during which time both emergency
generators failed simultaneously. One was restarted in 18 minutes, after
water surrounding the core had risen several degrees.
Failures of emergency diesel generators (EDGs) occur
frequently - 138 have been recorded since 1985, the majority discovered
during tests when there was no emergency requiring their immediate use.
Fifty-nine of these failures were failures to start, and 79 were failures
to run. Causes of failure ranged from design error, to manufacturing
error, construction/installation error, design modification error,
accidental actions, incorrect procedure or failure to follow procedure,
inadequate training, inadequate maintenance, fire/smoke, humidity,
high/low temperature, electromagnetic disruption, radiation,
bio-organisms, dirt, bad weather, and calibration failures. This wide
spectrum of error-variables, for a system upon which the reactor core and
spent fuel pools depend during a blackout, create an incalculable number
of unforeseen consequences. This is comparable to having a vehicle, upon
which your life may depend, sitting unused in a parking lot for a year at
a time, then depending on it to take you out of harm's way at 100 miles
per hour.
The NRC regularly allows nuclear plant operators to
violate safety regulations.
Since 2000, the NRC has issued 106 Notices of
Enforcement Discretion (NOED), which allowed utilities to continue
operations even while in violation of regulations that require it to shut
down for safety purposes. This is like the police allowing drivers to skip
vision tests or drive while under the influence. NOEDs have been issued to
plants regarding their faulty diesel generators.
Due to industry and NRC secrecy, paradoxically
invoking security as a justification for that secrecy, the public may
never know the extent of problems experienced with diesel generators at
the 16 plants affected by the recent blackout.
The Bush administration wants to license a hundred
more of these things.
"The massive failure that knocked out power to the
Northeast and Midwest U.S. and Canada looks like the disastrous blackouts
of 1965 and 1977," said Lloyd Dumas, author of "Lethal Arrogance: Human
Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies". "Once again we are reminded of
our technological vulnerability and the impossibility of eliminating
failure. Electric systems were connected together to make blackouts a
thing of the past. In 1965, when part of the grid failed and the rest took
over, the strain caused more to fail. The system designed to prevent
blackouts triggered a progressive collapse that blacked out the entire
Northeast United States."
"Technology," however, as Dr. Alf Hornborg,
professor of Human Ecology at Lund University in Sweden says, "is a social
phenomenon." There is no way to understand how technological successes and
failures occur without looking at social relations, in particular public
policy.
Besides the technological response to the blackouts
of decades past, there was a policy response. Former US Secretary of
Energy Bill Richardson has said that "in the search for the source of [the
August 14] blackout, the underlying cause has been all but ignored:
deregulation. In principle, deregulation of the power industry was
supposed to use the discipline of free markets to generate just the right
amount of electricity at the right price. But electric power, it turns
out, is not like ordinary commodities. Electricity can't be stored in
large quantities, and the system needs a lot of spare generating and
transmission capacity for periods of peak demand like hot days in August.
The power system also requires a great deal of planning and coordination,
and it needs incentives for somebody to maintain and upgrade transmission
lines. Deregulation has failed on all these grounds. Yet it has few
critics. Evidently, even calamities like the Enron scandal and now the
most serious blackout in American history are not enough to shake faith in
the theory."
Nor the attendant faith in lethal technologies, it
would seem. Within the whole cascade of energy disorder that occurred on
August 14th, how near the brink of a radiological accident did we come?
"For our own good", we may never know.
Stan Goff is the
author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull
Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull
Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW!
coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the
father of an active duty soldier. Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
Weekend Edition
Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld Does
Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at
Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Insults to
Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss
Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War
on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest or Against
Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the
Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many
Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary of
9/11
Julie Hilden
A
Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy
Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and Free
Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and
FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts:
Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's
America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal
Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's
Notations
William Mandel
Five Great
Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American
Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney,
Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton
Inquiry
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