The map above is a mash-up of the NNSA aerial monitoring map, the Google Maps location of Iitate and the Google Maps location of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Rachel wanted to know if Iitate Village is near the Daiichi plant radiation plume, so I took the NNSA map and overlayed the Google Maps point of Iitate, paired with the location of the Daiichi plant, and aligned the coast, Lake Inawashiro, and other landmarks like that long vertical road.
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I applaud the journalism on the secret invasion of Libya but this discussion is a major security breech that borders on treason for the person that leaked the information if true.
We are very lucky that President Obama is not the kind of person that would call in the jack booted government thugs to shut down TRMS for reporting this.
Nixon almost threw one of my friends in jail for this stunt.
Covert actions are supposed to be kept secret.
Public discussion of secret information could get people killed.
That is the point of secrecy.
I am profoundly concerned about the mentality of the people that hate Obama so much that they would leak this kind of information to the public.
President Obama should not inform congress about any military action before the fact if there is even the slightest concern that elected politicians would violate national security laws.
So, you are saying that Obama should be more like Bush? The UN resolution that "thinking people" say gives Obama permission to violate the constitution specifically prohibits feet on the ground. By authorizing thes operations he violated both the US constitution AND the UN Resolution. Now I understand why he refused to prosecute Dubbya; he was planning on having to break the law too. Obama destroyed my trust in him completely. I voted for him. I will not make the same mistake in 2012. Here's hoping Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich decide to make a run!
Ben
Congress has only officallydelacred war six times. Thoses wars were:
War of 1812
Mexican American War
Civil War
Spanish American War
WWI
WWII
By your standards all other wars America has thought were unconstitutional and illegal. That would be
All the Indian Wars
The War in the Philippines
The Boxer Rebellion
the Korean War
The Vietnam War
The Invasion of Grenada
The Balkans
Am I getting that right? That would make a lot of Presidents criminals. What Obama has done is not unconstitutional. It has been done by many US Presidents.
How about George Washington putting down the Whiskey Rebellion? Rather little consultation with congress in that one.
Thanks Jacob I forgot the Whiskey Rebellion. That Constitution violating Presdient George Washington.
Oops! Also the two Barbary Wars, Darn Jefferson!(Barbary War I) Darn that Madison! (Barabry War II) Ben did you know that Congress was never consulted about the Lewis & Clark Expedition? It was Jefferson's secret recon mission to gather intel about unknown a land & people. I think it also consisted of about two dozen people.
Urgghhh !
Can't those guys at NNSA use proper units, Sieverts and Gray rather than those non-standard, non-SI, non-nothing rem and roentgens ?
Nobody has mentioned much about the fact that water was used as a drilling fluid instead of mud in the Deep Water Horizon.
Special purpose heavy mud is used when drilling for petroleum products.
The mud helps to prevent the sediment from rising back up the bore hole against the drill bit and bending the drill pipe when the oil dome is breached. This is supposed to give the blowout preventer time to work.
There is a great deal of pressure in most oil bearing sediments, and the normal outcome is to open up the pressure in the oil dome.
Bentonite is much heavier than sea water and there most likely would have been sufficient head pressure to hold down the blowout to a small flare if mud had been used as a drilling fluid instead of ordinary sea water.
You haven't talked much about another problem with nuclear power plants - decommissioning. See Wiki article for overview. See article on first decommissioning at Small reactor was barged from Pennsylvania through Panama Canal and up to Hanford, Washington for burial. Since Hanford area is hopelessly radioactive, what was the harm? One problem is that most power plants are too large for this "solution". Also remember a great documentary on problems with fixing Hanford. Wish I had reference - might have been 60 Minutes, or Frontline. If you're interested, I'm sure your crack research staff can find it.
Professor Emeritus, University of Nevada, Reno
P.S. Damn, I was teaching environmental policy before you were born. Damn again, I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago when Obama was born. On the other hand, I'm still here.
So it started with us preventing a mass slaughter.
Then we decided to start backing the toy gun wielding rebels.
Then we handed most of the operation over to NATO
Then Qadaffi "Had to go."
Now we've got CIA boots on the ground.
And people say we're confused... where do they get this stuff?
Actually the order seems to be more like this -
We had CIA shoes on the ground. (really now, boots are a bit too loud. they're spies not special ops. in terms of effectiveness and ability they fall somewhere between Richard Engel and Lawrence of Arabia; given availible critiques on our human intelligence networks though this is optimistic) Note that I'm not making fun of Richard Engel. I'm saying that optimistically many of our CIA operatives might be as effective as he is at gathering intelligence. He has likely reported and seen things that our operatives had not at that point - this is also not unusual for us to get some of our intelligence from the news before our multi-billion dollar information gathering apparatus is able to sniff it out.
Then they started to debate whether or not to support toy-wielding rebels and how much they might support them and when. Obviously at this point there had either not been a decision or much action on such a decision since, as we saw, they still had to rely on toy guns weeks later.
Then Qadaffi "Had to go." (that statement came long before intervention)
us preventing a mass slaughter. (with a resolution that does not particularly seem to advance the policy stated above) It is possible that the success of the early French air-strikes and meager remaining defenders of Bengazi was related to foreign intelligence agencies assisting in providing some direction to those strikes. It is unclear if those might have been our operatives, french operatives, or British operatives, or any at all. We do know that the UK had sent in commando units to attempt to contact the rebels prior to this point (and had botched at least some earlier attempts).
Then we said we were starting to start to hand most of the operation over to NATO (not exactly like flipping a switch when you have 70%+ of the military power in-theater). How much this will materialize and how quickly does remain to be seen.
Now they're still trying to figure out how much to support the rebels, how to support the rebels, and if we can do it before they expend themselves against the better trained armies of the crazy guy with the big sun glasses. This would be why the rebels were quickly routed after overextending themselves following the initial air strikes.
At least that's what I've managed to gather from the news so far. Not sure how accurate that is but it seems to be how things have played out - which is not to say that awareness of each event proceeded chronologically. Following this story has been somewhat like watching pulp fiction - and so far its like we've only been allowed to watch the first 30 minutes.
Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Dubbya, and now Obomb'em have all said Khadaffi hasta go. They all bought oil from him though.
Not one of them ever mentions all the OIL in Libya. It's only the largest oil reserve in Africa. We used to buy 3% of their oil. China bought 10%. Now we can divvy up that low fruit the Chinese forsook when they refused to back the French and Italian led coalition. They are the two largest recipients of Libyan oil... coincidence?
The BP Horizon spill, leak or disaster whatever you want to call it, was a major disaster for mankind and the environment. Water is the basis of life. Mankind has his way of affecting all means of life. The Earth, the air, the water all for the love of money and greed. But yet we all have to live upon and live from the same Earth. Now that I blew off steam so I don't explode.
Government and the MMS gave the approval at the time of the Horizon disaster to drill so called relief wells to relieve pressure at that time according to their words. Three if I recall right, which they were syphoning oil off , but in my eyes it looked like BP got the approval of the U.S. to replentish some of their loss. But the world lost the most. Our prayers went out to those who lost their lives and their families.
President Obama , after the Horizon was plugged and the MMS and the government found BP responsible to pay for cleanup, Obama appointed Ken Feinburg in charge of distributing funds to victims out of this money issued from BP. Also Ken Feinburg, at that time and until the case is done with which could take ten years or longer, is supposed to be receiving his payment out of this money. And stated that he was hurrying to insure that all the businesses and people affected at the Gulf coast, would be receiving payment within weeks. To my understanding this was almost a year ago and now BP has lost a laptop with 13,000 victims names, addresses, etc. and wanting to retrieve this laptop so they can assure that these victims receive their payment for their losses. Let's go back a little way. Wasn't Ken Feinburg in charge of this list of victims and handling the distribution of funds? I watched like millions of others, President Obama appointing Ken Feinburg in charge of these matters. These poor victims still have not received payment? BP had no problems in paying for any damages, cleanups and victims losses, and was writting out checks to the U.S. at that time. Who is paying for the commercials that are airing on TV now promoting "our beaches are clean, come on down and have some seafood" ? BP? U.S.? MMS?
Did we also know that this well was also supposed to be capped so that after they drilled others at a later point in time, they could move in a portable refinery to siphon all wells, cutting costs. This is a practice that all offshore drilling companies have used for years with MMS approval. Some wells that have been capped, years ago, are not being checked on to date 2011. Maybe President Obama and all others should look into this matter, before we go drilling any more offshore wells. It's MY earth too, and I do love my seafood and my coastlines.
Thank you Rachel, for allowing me to blow off some steam and bring maybe some knowledge to peoples eyesight.
On Libya.
The 'precedent' that we set for military intervention on grounds of 'humanitarian mission', 'saving lives', 'freedom & democracy' in this N.African Muslim country would not be followed in places in that region with far worse massacres of civilians and humanitarian disasters, like Ivory Coast, Congo or Darfur.
Nor would it be followed in the M.East where oppressive regimes kept propped up by us face uprisings.
There are other aspects of Libyan 'war' that somehow are not being scrutinized by the Media or seen by the public.
How much do we know about the rebels we decided to support by this massive effort?
Much as we would not like to admit, there are Libyans who support Ghaddafi, tribal loylties and all, besides his military. Would we bomb & kill these civilians too?
With the fiscal, economic and financial crisis that we are facing can we afford a third protracted war of our making?
Can our European allies? with their own economic woes and discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain spilling out into the streets.
Or all this is just to divert attention from core issues facing us and coalition partners like France & Britain, the architects of this intervention?
Folks another news item, a bit unrelated but somehow fitting into the scenario this country faces.
Our very own clown & intellectually short changed politico, fighting his personal demons and pandering to all phobics bitten by paranoia Mr. Newt Gingrich has again spoken & dropped pearls of wisdom
Says he that our grandchildren would face an atheist secular America dominated by radical Islam. Now how would that happen is a matter of mental gymnastics? Only a person in need of serious counselling can perform. An atheist secular America dominated by radical Islam - lol.
Now the latest statistics reveal that our friends the Latinos now number 50 million and counting & that in a couple of decades they would be a majority. They are predominantly devout catholics/christians. Then down the rung come African Americanswho are also predominantly christians then the Asians belonging to different faiths & philosophies there are Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Budhists. The rest of the population of mixed but mainly white races are christians.
so the likes of Newt Gingrich & others fanning flames of Islamophobia would have us believe that somehow radical Muslims would over run this country , usurp our constitution subjugate the population to follow a religion which is secular atheist and radical Islamist???
The EPA declares "safe" limits of radiation found in milk in Ca. and Wa. states. They, the EPA, say that the radiation gets on grass, cows eat the grass, etc. I think we all are aware of milk production. And they, the U.S. EPA, were able to trace the isotopes back to Japan. According to the EPA radiation reached the U.S. over a week ago and at that time they, the EPA, were stating miniscule amounts. No concern to human safety.
Let me run something by you and see what you think of it and maybe we can all come up with an answer. Radiation comes from Japan, miniscule amounts, no human health hazard. According to EPA cow grazes on grass in Ca. and Wa., also drink the water from holding bins in pastures. Cows get milked, milk gets bottled and sold. EPA is testing the milk, air and water at the same time. Milk now, in Ca. and Wa., that has been sold showing "minute" traces of radiation. No safety concerns according to EPA. Minute amounts. Would not one think that if radiation traveling across the open seas in the air would be lessening as it approaches the west coast, according the EPA, so after a cow consumes minute traces of radiation in feed and water, wouldn't you think that some of that "minute" radiation remains in that animal? Wouldn't there be radiation expelled during the processing, bottling and shipping, plus detected by the EPA at that time? Wouldn't that reduce the amount of radiation in said milk? How "minute" is "minute"? How safe is "safe"?
Some forms of radiation Iodine, Cessium, etc., accumulate in human and animal bodies, and that is from past testings from Chernobyl and others, etc. I believe that the minute amounts of radiation detected by EPA is the radioactive iodine, along with other radioactive elements expelled from the nuclear reactor process that is being detected in the milk and in the water as far across the U.S. as the east coast. Milk in the west, water in the east. EPA says don't panic. Doesn't make me panic, it has already happened. But doesn't make me happy .
Minute amounts of radiation detected by EPA on the west coast, same minute amount detected in the east. How can this be? EPA reported in the beginning that we would likely not even see minute radiation on the west coast. It's not only in the east coast but in the water and in the soil.
Brings a lot of questions to mind. Questioning standards by the EPA, FDA, because of feces and hair in my food claimed safe amounts. Now radiation. Now we cannot even raise and grow our own food to escape contamination from all sources, nuclear and chemical, to by pass standard "safety" for our own families because of the contaminations of decades of mankinds involvement and regulations of what is acceptable. Once upon a time, my ancestors and myself raised and provided for our families over 80% of what is being regulated "safe" by EPA, FDA, to date by their standards. I do not accept their standards but am forced to live with it now! What are we to do? What is our future and our childrens future leading too?
Let us go green, build another nuclear reactor, have nuclear bomb testings and drill in the basis of life, in our waters and our soil. So we can rewrite our standards and propose it to be safe for all. Who makes that decision for you? For all of us? I ask of the people that want this to do it on their world, not on mine when it affects my loved ones!
It's a good thing that the EPA doesn't have to worry about funding cuts or anythin... oh, whoops, never mind.
I think there was some question as to how far Iitate is from Daiichi power plant. Using the gps coordinates on google and airaya path calculator it says it's about 23.75 miles away (Power Plant to Iitate village office).
That seems about right. The map puts it inside the 25 mile ring. News reports are calling it 40km away, which is also pretty close.
I don't understand this whole "drill baby drill" in America since the oil doesn't belong to us and is part of the global markets? So why all the Arab country invasions to protect oil over there when it isn't theirs and belongs to the global market? Do they have different rules? If so, what is wrong with this country trading globally if they aren't. I'm confused...apu Why don't we just keep all the oil drilled on American property in America?
Here is another example of how the Fascists control grammar (information).
Just today Tamron had a guy on explaining how we get more radiation from flying than drinking contaminated milk.
I might buy that except for one thing.
I drink milk, water, juice, and whatever everyday. Most times I drink it several times a day.
I don't fly everyday! Besides the elite, who among us fly every single day?
They are controlling grammar (information) in the media. Radiation is cumulative. If I drink or eat contaminated products every day then that is bad.
I haven't flown since 9/11. I'm sure a lot of folks haven't flown since 9/11. But I drink a lot of milk and water several times a day. Just like everyone else on the planet does.
I think the idea is that since the nuclides of concern are very easy to detect even at extremely low levels that you could prevent most items contaminated to the point where your long term consumption could conceivably add up to a even a single cross-country flight from ever being sold or picked. The evacuation and food banning has been less proactive in the Japan than I would have advocated - and the Japanese recognition of this may explain why people have been reluctant to eat perfectly uncontaminated seafood imported from well outside the accident area.
This is of course problematic in situations where your food supplies are challenged by other pressures. It is particularly challenging for significantly contaminated municipal drinking water. Disaster response plans should probably better address both of these concerns. Of course, anyone who saw the response to Katrina would agree that the ability to provide safe food and especially safe drinking water after a major disaster probably needs to be addressed anyways. Many of the types of disasters which could potentially cause such a significant failure at a nuclear plant are also disasters which have traditionally been shown to contaminate municipal water supplies or otherwise render them unusable in the United States.
IT is pretty common practice in the nuclear industry to obfuscate the truth behind statements that,while technically true, actually mean quite the opposite thing. For example, when asked about the spent fuel pools at VT Yankee in light of Fuklushima, a Yankee spokesman answered that the plant meets all current safety regulations. Great! Except the NRC records show that the spent fuel pool could begin to boil in less than 11 1/2 hours if it loses power to the cooling system. And that the pool is currently holding more fuel than it was designed to.... The list goes on and on, but clearly, while VT yankee may meet safety regs, the safety regs certainly don't insure the spent fuel pools safety.
Oh yeah the arbitrary minimum backup power duration for station blackout scenarios is stupidly short. I would advocate both longer battery backup times and requiring a gas turbine generator in flood resistant housing rather than just longer battery backup times. With a station blackout (failure of offsite power and diesel generators) we are often looking at scenarios where the defense of depth strategy is defeated by common modes of failure. The way you strengthen such a strategy against those common modes of failures is by including diversity of defense to some degree.
That is not to say it would make sense to have a 3rd alternate system for each pair of redundant systems (alternate meaning sufficiently different component system that is capable of performing the same task) but that for such potentially catastrophic scenarios that might cause a station blackout there is added value in diversity of backup systems compared to simple redundancy.
Additionally, pairing specially housed gas turbine generators with larger battery banks does not simply provide 2 different potential power sources in those scenarios, but the possibility of complimentary power sources. The reason that diesel generators are used as the first choice for backup power is not merely because of their reliability but also because they can be refueled. As we have seen as the Fukushima disaster has unfolded, getting vehicles to the site did not take particularly long compared to deploying and attempting to connect large portable backup generators (only to find they were not compatible.)
I suggest then that we consider the most probable common failure modes for the existing primary backup electrical power systems (generally diesel) and create housings and placements for gas turbine (or even separately housed diesel) generators that are specifically and significantly resistant to those common failure modes. They should be able to work in concert with expanded battery banks if needed - though this should require manual connection to some degree so as not to introduce additional common failure modes. It may even be that this would best be accomplished by stationing mobile generators fitting those descriptions nearby but off site - particularly if one considers an "attack" to be a possible common failure mode. Obviously these generators would need to be sufficient in output as well as known to be compatible.
Imagine if flatbed loaded gas turbine generators that were actually compatible and designed to connect to these plants had been kept in a water-resistant housing even just a mile inland from the Fukushima reactors. Instead of wasting time trucking in generators that they couldn't connect, they could have relatively quickly rolled them into place after the tsunami and connected them; by the time the incompatible generators had been delivered they could have instead been delivering additional fuel for the generators.
The NRC recently concluded a study on the potential value of combining such "diversification of defense" strategies with existing "defense of depth" strategies in ways that would not compromise their integrity (you don't want to create new common failure modes or new failure modes for existing systems at all.) Unfortunately I couldn't find the actual report - only the summary of what the report intended to investigate.
www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/research/digital/res-activities/diversity-defense.html
After 9/11 the NRC changed the regulations to meet the new threat of terrorism. Unfortunately for the public, this also included classifying a lot of plant information that we really need to know in order to make informed choices about nuclear energy.
Good thing the EPR isn't an American design?
I was actually referring to specific details at current plants, such as how many spent fuel rods are currently in the pool, etc. As to the information that is available on the NRC site, and there is lots of it: User friendlyness is beyond design basis.
Hah yeah. I wonder how many of the materials we had available for study in college a few years back are now almost completely impossible to get. That kind of worries me - some of those things were actually fairly crucial to understanding the point of some of the lectures.
Areva still has a way to go on the EPR, but it is a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see if they actually get one built any time soon, eh?
Yeah the lack of factories capable of producing the pressure vessels for almost any large scale reactor is a huge hinderence - to the construction of any new reactors at all. There's only a few proven steel works out there capable of it and most of them are overbooked. It's also why construction of the two plants in China is cheaper and faster - because it's the only case where they didn't have to wait in line at over-booked factories to get pressure vessels made AND they don't have to ship it half way around the world.
The welding work is particularly specialized and, as seen in one of construction projects in Europe, can result in wasted time and money if a company contracted to produce the vessel overestimate their actual capabilities. It's funny though, some of the delays are actually a good sign (to me, not for Areva) because they've had to do with a refusal to compromise at all on the quality control for those components.
BayouBo deleted for being wrong and rude to boot.
I want to take your criticism seriously, but honestly it's hard to know where to begin.
If you have a problem with the mashup, you're saying I put the town in the wrong place. I didn't. Even if you think spherical aberration somehow makes google maps inaccurate, I put the town in the right place.
If you have a problem with the mapping of the plume, that's direct from the NNSA and it comes from them literally flying a plane back and forth over the area. It's already two dimensional when they take it because the plane flies at the same altitude.
If you think that path changes over time, it doesn't. We checked subsequent mappings of that radiation pattern.
Hi
I would love it if every time you talk about the cost of any of our wars you would compare the cost to building Alternative Energy. Like, "today we spent 50,000 solar panels or 25,000 wind turbines in Libya today. I would also love it if someone, like you, would tell people how many wind turbines or solar panels could be up and running for the money Obama wants to spend on new nuke plants. Oh and by the way the Sp and WT could be on line YEARS before the nuke plants even get built and will be producing power all the time the nuks are down for the constant maintenance they require. Also I have never heard of a WT or SP melting down and killing people miles away.
Thanks
Love the show
Dennis
Yeah if even 1 percent of our military budget were to be diverted to some other effort the results would be staggering. That would be the equivalent of a 40% increase in say... NASA's budget. If that were diverted into something like green energy that would be the equivalent of a 300% increase to our current expenditure on renewables and efficiency combined.
I'm sure everyone has seen this before (past years' versions) but here's the 2011 Death and Taxes graphical representation of discretionary budget expenditures.
www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
I'd love to compare the green energy list to Bernie Sanders tax list. I wonder how many offshore wind turbines could be funded on the corporate welfare that these companies have snuffled off from the american people? How many nuclear reactors could we replace if we gave sustainable energy projects the money instead.
While we're at it, why doesn't the senate return a budget of their own. I am sure they could quickly come up with a budget that would fund all the social projects if they just cut the right programs. Cutting funding for future nukes would lower the budget by billions. Replace the current wacky cuts with responsible ones and watch the tighty rightys try to defend the pork. A couple joint strike fighters here, a few oil, coal and nuke subsidies there and we'll have a hundred billion before ya know it. A spending bill that both Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich could agree on!
Not quite what you were talking about but you might be interested in seeing how little (in proportion to power generated especially) nuclear itself actually gets. It's on the same order of magnitude as any of the itemized green power sources on that chart. Yes its larger, but I was kind of underwhelmed by how much larger it was compared to what I had presumed.
If you taxed the top 10 most profitable companies that did not pay income tax last year 1 percent of their profits you could double each of them (nuclear, wind, hydro, and biomass). Before you ask "why double nuclear" first ask "how do you get better backup power solutions in place at key nuclear power stations and fast."
Thanks for the exceptional piece on VT Yankee. This plant is truly frightening. Until the events at Fukushima I lived in blissful ignorance at the full extent of the dangers it poses to the public.
Since seeing the first horrifying images in Fukushima, I have gone to the NRC website and actually read the VT Yankee license. I also looked at the performance history and safety issues. VT Yankee has dropped a fully loaded spent fuel cask, they lost nuclear fuel for 25 years, they have had fires, the cooling tower has collapsed, they store more fuel in the spent fuel then the plant was originally designed built and licensed to safely store. There have been problems with corroded pipes, radioactive leaks, and lied about these pipes during testimony.
VT Yankee is the exact design as Fukushima, and subject to the same risks, but with roughly twice the fuel in the pool as the #4 reactor in fukushima.
The truth is, all American nuclear power plants are susceptible to cooling issues. The default in every design is for the plants to overheat catch fire and explode if they lose power and cooling cannot be restored. The MK1 containment is particularly dangerous because it does not protect the fuel pool with any sort of reinforced containment.
MK1 type units must be shut down immediately, like the old AEC considered doing when these problems were noted back in the 70's.
I share your concerns. For the last I knew we only have one Earth. We are supposed to be the caretakers not the undertakers of it.
Rachel Maddow discussed the safety violations at nuclear power plants over the years to make the point that Three Mile Island was not the only accident that the industry ever had. Unfortunately she did so completely in the absence of any context, which is not her style. She should have mentioned the number of fatalities resulting from those accidents (zero) and she should have also discussed the safety violations in coal fired plants over the same period (of which there have been hundreds). Rachel is almost always a very careful, thoughtful, and thorough commentator, and it surprised me to see her present a story without context. She seemed alarmist without the context and that's not her style of presenting the news.
I disagree, in fact Rachel and the MSNBC crew have been if anything soft on the safety issues surrounding the Nuclear Power plants designed by GE, which she has dutifully notes is one of the parent companies.
Of the 10 reactors in Fukishima that suffered power outages, only 3 of them were able to restore power in time to prevent a nuclear incident. Of the 7 nuclear events, 3 of them were TMI level accidents. If a car was unable to come to a complete stop safely after the engine quits 70% of the time there would be no question it would be recalled.
In fact, VW just recalled Jettas because of a ridiculously improbable course of events that could cause it to stall.
http://benecoyote.newsvine.com/_news/2011/04/01/6392338-vw-recalls-2011-jettas-in-which-honking-horn-can-make-engine-stall-nytimescom
With the clearly defined problem that every nuclear plant in the US shares with the stricken Fukushima plants, it is clear that there needs to be a major recall.
I'm a little surprised there haven't been serious suggestions beyond "MOAR batteries!!!" like -
Requiring something a compatible gas turbine generator on flatbeds stored in "event-resistant" housing on or near the site but not co-located with the main plant facility.
When I say "event resistant" I mean that in flood planes you put them in an elevated flood-resistant bunker and fit them with snorkel kits (similar to what you can get for a real Hummer.) In an earthquake zone you'd also want to make sure the housing could collapse on the generator and probably use simple dampening systems to protect the mobile generator itself.
The reason you'd want such additional backup generators on or near site but separated from the main facility is because while you wouldn't want it to be difficult to move into place and hook up, you also want to reduce the chance for common modes of failure. In scenarios involving earthquakes or attacks, physical separation from likely points of impact and from things that can fall and crush your generators is a good way to accomplish this. So far enough away to isolate it from some of those common failure modes but close enough that you don't have to presume roads would be intact.
Batteries are pretty good ideas and probably need to be increased quite a bit in terms of capacity, but they are not sufficiently immune to simultaneous failure and face greter difficulty being extended/recharged if you can't get other power back up before they run out. The addition of nearby mobile generators (that you've already determined are actually compatible) could significantly enhance the ability of a plant to provide cooling in extended station blackout conditions. Fuel is easier to refill than batteries are to recharge in such situations for one. Also they're not necessarily an either or proposition. You don't have to start burning your fuel unless your batteries are dead or simply non-operational. Once they are, you can recharge them with the generator if it has enough capacity to do so while powering the pumps. Then if you run out of fuel... hey what do you know you have batteries that can go until you can fly, drive, or boat in some gas.
From what I hear, the US is pretty good at getting fuel to hard to reach places and dangerous situations. Our military kind of has to be able to do that to operate. What we're not so good at is repairing infrastructure and restoring grid power after major disasters. Seems like it makes sense to take advantage of one capability and not overly depend on a single means of medium power generation/delivery for pump operation in catastrophic beyond design basis scenarios.
The problem with relying on backup generators is it requires alot of human intervention to even get up and running, let alone monitor and maintain once it's up. If you were faced with a situation where the area was too hazardous to work in, say if you had a catastrophic containment failure and radiation levels were too high to send humans in, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to manage the spent fuel pool. If the spent fuel pool were to catch fire it could potentially spew many times more radioactive particles than what is in the reactor core itself, and it is just one good steam burst away from having direct exposure to the environment.
Dry casking could help, as at least dry casks don't require any human intervention under most circumstances, even if they become damaged. If they do have an issue, you are dealing with a much lower number of assemblies per cask than the who kit and kaboodle in the pool... The NRC's about face on dry casking is dumbfounding and unfortunate. It is the one thaing that may save the nuclear industry. As it stands now it is unsafe.
Well that's why you wouldn't necessarily put the terminals for such a system right up against the containment building. And no it doesn't require people to be near the backup generator once it's hooked up either. You run hoses for refueling and coolant needs for the generator and interface cables from it when you deploy it and can be quite a distance away if you wanted. While this would ideally be from the control room, you could set it up so it could be monitored on laptops over 100base-sx fibre connections which could let you control at least the generator and monitor it from as far as you wanted if you couldn't get to the control room.
Also I did suggest this be done alongside increasing battery capacity. That gives you more time to deploy or connect a backup generator - days instead of hours. Sure there are still scenarios where you would be unable approach a plant sufficiently close for even that - but that's getting into scenarios involving ordnance comparable to a bunker buster immediately and thoroughly contaminating a large area near the reactor. Or you're talking about scenarios where a natural disaster physically breaks the pressure vessel or shatters a large section of the concrete holding the spent fuel pool. The way you mitigate the threat posed by extremely large bombs is site security and monitor air space.
A natural disaster that could rupture a pressure vessel so that core damage and release of material would happen relatively soon after the accident would be a disaster on apocalyptic scale already. Consider the fukushima incident - there is suspected/probably cracking in one containment vessel but conditions would not have precluded deployment of a system like the one I describe - in fact the only reason they were unsuccessful in their attempts to do something similar is they didn't truck in generators that were actually connectible. To render an attempt like that impossible though, the scale of devastation caused by the triggering natural event would have had to have been an order of magnitude greater. Those aren't impossible, but my suggestion would at least greatly increase reduce the probabilistic risk of core damage from prolonged station blackout scenarios.
The last scenario is harder to address though and is not solved by dry casking either. If you step up dry casking and your ability to put water back into those pools though you would be able to prevent release of material from those pools for longer after the initial disaster at least. It might be worth, not from a risk analysis standpoint maybe but in terms of addressing public concern, examining possible ways to improve existing secondary or pool storage containment structures in general as well as addressing power during station blackout and reducing the cooling burdens presented by your pool storage through offloading to cask storage in a more timely and consistent manner.
To be clear - what I am suggesting is not some sort of fool proof means of providing backup power merely one that would be able to provide backup power in greatly increased variety of scenarios across a significantly increased range of severity. It was basically one of the first things tried at Fukushima when they realized they were going to be running out of battery power- they just didn't have compatible generators available and by the time the non-compatible ones arrived is longer than I would suggest you aim for. Those are something you'd probably have to manufacture to fit the need; they wouldn't be cheap of course but they would not be technologically complex or new just bigger and made compatible with the requirements of the backup A/C systems.
To a degree and only with regard to spent fuel storage. I mean if all you care about is the spent fuel storage during station blackout and you're fine core melting then sure. Electric power to pumps helps with both.
Of course they need to offload older rods from the crowded pool storage though. They'll still need pool storage for two things - storing the most recent batch of spent fuel until it can go into cask storage and also for use during some refueling or fuel load change operations. Also you would only be putting fuel into cask storage each time you performed refueling- 18 months give or take depending on the plant. But yeah - would be nice to uncrowd the pool a bit.