Arnie Gundersen Compares Fukushima & Pickering Nuclear Flaws
Channel: MsMilkytheclown1
Date: 2013-08-02

About This Podcast:
This week's podcast focuses on Arnie's testimony about Canada's Pickering Nuclear Plant on Lake Ontario, whose slogan is "40 years of being a good neighbor." As Arnie explains in this podcast, it is not a matter of whether the people operating nuclear plants are good or bad. It is about a dangerous energy source that no amount of good intentions can make completely safe.  It is about the forty good years that can end with one bad day.
40 Years of Being a Good Neighbor
http://fairewinds.org/podcast/40-years-of-being-a-good-neighbor
http://tinyurl.com/nfj2amd
AG:     Hi. I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds Energy Education. In the last year and a half, I've been around the world a couple of times. I've been to Japan twice for a period of two weeks; to Italy, and of course, repeatedly to Washington, D.C., to talk to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Most recently, I was invited to go right outside of Toronto in Canada and discuss the Canadian nuclear design. You know, you can have 40 good years and one bad day. And that's really what I was trying to tell the Canadian regulators when I was near Toronto. There's a couple takeaway's from the presentation that follows, which is my speech to the regulators, that I'd like you to think about. The first is, as I travel around the world I hear people say well, the people who run my nuclear plant are smarter or are nice people and an accident couldn't happen to mine because these people are so safety conscious. And really, what I was able to tell the Canadian regulators is that that's a false argument. I knew the operators at Three Mile Island. They were nice. They were safety conscious. They were smart. And still, an accident can happen. So as I've been saying, you can have 40 good years and one bad day with this technology. And it's not about having nice people running the nuclear reactor. It's a technology that can have that one bad day. And I hope that one bad day is not in your back yard.

The other things I was able to tell the Canadian regulators was the containment systems at Pickering are nowhere near as strong as the ones that blew up at Fukushima Daiichi. And the interesting thing in this dialogue was that they agreed. So we now know that the position of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Board is that the nuclear reactors are not as well contained as those that blew up at Fukushima Daiichi. And the last piece was the emergency planning. The reactors at Pickering are about 20 miles from the outskirts of Toronto. Toronto has got 4 million people and it's a two-hour drive down to Buffalo, New York. So we've got eight nuclear reactors within 20 miles of 4 million people. How are we ever going to do an emergency evacuation of 4 million people? So what follows is that presentation.

Bonus links Below:

Pickering Ont. Nuclear Plant Accident. 4.3 Earthquake in Southern Ontario Canada
http://youtu.be/wMaR0O4aP7Q
Uploaded on Mar 16, 2011
Pickering Ontario Canada had a nuclear power plant leak 73,000 liter of water into Lake Ontario today. Mar 16/2011. They call it negligible! Millions of people get their drinking water from that lake. Coincidentally Southern Ontario had a 4.3 richter scale earthquake today as well. Go figure.

Leak at Pickering Nuclear Reactor Canada March 16 2011
Canadian nuclear plant accident turns drinking water radioactive (3-14-2011)

This happened 14th March 2011. Ontario Power Generation has notified Canada's federal nuclear regulator about the release of 73,000 litres of demineralized water into Lake Ontario at the Pickering A nuclear generating station.

The leak occurred at 11:30 p.m. ET on Monday at the plant located about 35 kilometres east of Toronto and was caused by a pump seal failure.

"The radiological risk to the environment and people's health is negligible," the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission said in a statement.

The nuclear regulator and Environment Canada are monitoring the situation, the statement said.

Andrew Nichols of CBC News reported about the leak on Wednesday afternoon and said he spoke to an Ontario Power Generation spokesperson who told him the risk is minimal but that such leaks are not supposed to occur.

"In his words, 'What the hell is considered negligible?'" Nichols reported. "[Edwards] is concerned that it's the nuclear industry that is telling you and I and telling the public what is considered to be negligible but he's concerned that we don't have a proper sense of what negligible is," reported Nichols.

Nichols also reported that the leak could be a concern because Lake Ontario is the main source of drinking water for millions of people who live along the lake.

Pickering A is the first of four reactors at the nuclear plant just east of Toronto. It went into service in 1971 and continued to operate safely until 1997, when it was placed in voluntary lay-up as part of what was then Ontario Hydro's nuclear improvement program