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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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