AP IMPACT: NRC and industry rewrite nuke history

Our Nuclear industry just like ALL big business before has a hold on our society, our Gov. who licenses them are either corrupt or blind only helping to further endanger the people while they profit.

These Nuclear plants look like time bombs more and more every day, the unsafe conditions that are impossible to cover up with tents or in pools of water.
everyone knows steel rusts. bearings and pumps go bad. copper wiring gets corroded. all of these things have a constant use life of about 40years except for concrete. that is why they put a 40yr life expectancy on these plants.

but now all of the sudden these materials can last much longer safely enough for use in containing Nuclear material.

under the new Re-licensing rules wear and tear, aging are not accounted for and very little visual inspection is done if any at all by the U.S. NRC.
So it has become much easier to keep these plants running making money, that is the main goal more profit. which these plants are for these big businesses and the Government that supports them. once they are through with their first Lic. they operate at 100% profit yet they cannot protect the public who is paying for it, with money and soon our children will be picking up the cost of our laziness and greed.

When commercial nuclear power was getting its start in the 1960s and 1970s, industry and regulators stated unequivocally that reactors were designed only to operate for 40 years. Now they tell another story _ insisting that the units were built with no inherent life span, and can run for up to a century, an Associated Press investigation shows.

By rewriting history, plant owners are making it easier to extend the lives of dozens of reactors in a relicensing process that resembles nothing more than an elaborate rubber stamp.

As part of a yearlong investigation of aging issues at the nation's nuclear power plants, the AP found that the relicensing process often lacks fully independent safety reviews. Records show that paperwork of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission sometimes matches word-for-word the language used in a plant operator's application.

Also, the relicensing process relies heavily on such paperwork, with very little onsite inspection and verification.

And under relicensing rules, tighter standards are not required to compensate for decades of wear and tear.

So now the NRC is saying the 40yr limit was for economic purposes and Anti0trust concerns..
the only Anti-trust going on here is the growing Anti-trust of the Gov. and Big business by the People who are in danger because of this.

But an AP review of historical records, along with interviews with engineers who helped develop nuclear power, shows just the opposite: Reactors were made to last only 40 years. Period.

The record also shows that a design limitation on operating life was an accepted truism.

In 1982, D. Clark Gibbs, chairman of the licensing and safety committee of an early industry group, wrote to the NRC that "most nuclear power plants, including those operating, under construction or planned for the future, are designed for a duty cycle which corresponds to a 40-year life."

And three years later, when Illinois Power Co. sought a license for its Clinton station, utility official D.W. Wilson told the NRC on behalf of his company's nuclear licensing department that "all safety margins were established with the understanding of the limitations that are imposed by a 40-year design life."

One person who should know the real story is engineering professor Richard T. Lahey Jr., at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Lahey once served in the nuclear Navy. Later, in the early 1970s, he helped design reactors for General Electric Co.; he oversaw safety research and development.

Lahey dismisses claims that reactors were made with no particular life span. "These reactors were really designed for a certain lifetime," he said. "What they're saying is really a fabrication."

Source

We are such a Banana Republic...

Soon they'll be telling us that radioactive contamination is a necessary additive- much like fluoride- designed to improve the environment and human health.