Last night I got a chance to go to the meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the Health Physics Society. It was pretty cool. We heard a presentation about Exelon's plans to build a new nuclear power plant in Texas, and what's involved in the prep and planning, as well as the timeline for construction. It's been 25 years since a nuclear power plant has been built in the US, so the technology has changed greatly, as well as there being very few people with experience left in this country. They're hoping to bring a plant on line in about 2015, and this is considered a very aggressive timeline! Wow. After the presentation (and a fantastic dinner) we were given the opportunity to visit their Emergency Operations Facility. This is where everything is coordinated if there is any kind of emergency at any of the nuclear power plants in the midwest. The setup is pretty impressive, with everything right at hand including maps of the area, plant diagrams, flow charts, feeds from instrumentation, and at least three layers of communication redundancy. They told us that when they have drills, they actually assign staff to act as the "media" and that those staff member can be as aggressive as the real thing (including following people into the bathrooms).

Today, on CNN.com there was an article on Nuclear Power and how bad people are sneakily building Nuclear Power plants in order to kill us all. It has a byline of "By Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash & Harvey Wasserman" Now, three of these people are musicians, I own albums featuring two of the three, and respect the third greatly. The fourth author is someone who seems to write about these sorts of issues regularly.

Some quotes:

If these subsidies pass, scores of new radioactive terror targets, thousands of tons of radioactive waste and untold billions in bad debt could haunt us and our children for a long time to come.

But these nuclear industry loan guarantees could make that all but impossible. These "new" reactors are the same as the old ones, with a few bells and whistles, and a proven 50-year track record of catastrophic failure.

Could we see some documentation please? Especially about the "track record of catastrophic failure". To my knowledge, there has been one catastrophic failure at a nuclear power facility... ever. And that was caused by willful negligence, and a reactor design that is not used anywhere now, and has never been in the US.

I'll make a deal with Bonnie Raitt publicly. You promise not to write "scientific" articles, and I won't release any "music". I think that's fair.