Doesn’t it look like they’ve put the nuclear plant a little too close to the shore? If my house were that close to the pounding surf during an El Nino winter, I’d be worried, or at least fully paid up on my cliffside- crumbling- into- the- sea- insurance. How often does Keyhole buy new data these days, anyway? It might be worth paying attention to the erosion.
Aside from all that, it’s the backyard that’s got me worried.
According to PG&E, the Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s used nuclear fuel goes not into the ocean but rather into the swimming pool. You can see the two storage ponds, which will be out of room by 2006.
It looks like wind and rain and birds and whatnot goes right in and out of the pools, but maybe there’s a cover or fence to keep the leaves out that you can’t see from this distance to keep the shmutz out.
The evaporation from the pools might be needed in order to keep them cool, because if the used nuclear fuel get too hot, that’s Really Bad, according to all the Hollywood movies I’ve seen. So hopefully they never drain the pool there. Eventually I suppose they will start trucking it to Nevada and put it under a mountain.
Holtec‘s new dry storage system looks pretty solid. It will presumably not be built right on the beach like the nuclear plant itself.
The pools used for storing spent nuclear fuel are enclosed in the containment domes and not outdoors.
My understanding is that yes, normally that is done but not in this case. Diablo is special for some reason and the New Times had an article about the insanity of out-in-the-open waste pools.
Moving it to the desert would be a treacherous trek indeed. They plan on putting it on a train–the one that goes right by my house…grrrrrr.
Actually, all three of you are incorrect. Those pools in the photo merely store water. The spent fuel pools are located in the fuel handling building, to the immediate right (in the picture above) of the two containment domes. It is the white-looking rectangular building that is partially obstructed by the domes.
The pools are for emergency core flooding (cooling). They are located above the plant so no pumps are needed. Gravity feed is pretty reliable, (as long as we have gravity).
The pools are full of Bononated water. They are used as a safety measure to shut down the reacto in the case of an emergency. The spent fuel *NOT WASTE* is stored inside the containment domes. I have personally stood next to these pools and there is absolutely no “Waste” or anything solid inside them. Just water treated with boron.