Learning to Live with the Climate Emergency
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By Arnie Gundersen
Thank you for your tremendous response to our Nuclear Spring Series so far! If you have missed reading Fairewinds’ blog posts or watching posted videos, you may find the list of the #NuclearSpringSeries here. As we all enjoy our budding spring weather, think about how great it is to get out and about. We know we want to be hiking, biking, walking the beach, swimming, and boating—all of these activities only work for us if we have a clean and safe area in which to play. For our 11th Nuclear Spring Series installment, we just learned this morning that our background weather data is changed every 10-years, and this year is the year.
According to the Washington Post:
“Now we’re seeing enough change from one decade to the next that we need to prepare managers differently. They need to understand these are not static, so the direction of change is as important, or more important, as the values of the normals themselves.”
This new data shows that the past ten years have been warmer than any decade in history. Other than running up your electric bills for air conditioning, why is this important? Based on a simple truth from Mother Nature, hot air holds a lot more moisture than cold air. A Lot More! For a mind-bending chart explaining this, check out this link to something called the Psychrometric Chart. Okay, forget about that chart, which was the basis for my Master of Engineering Thesis, by the way.
Take our word for it that hot air holds a lot more moisture. Holding extra moisture also means that more energy is trapped in the air. When there is a lot more moisture in the air, it rains more intensely, which makes floods and hurricanes more intense.
With that in mind, almost all nuclear plants were designed in the 1960s and 1970s, when the air was cooler and most floods and hurricanes were less intense. So, for those old nukes, the 100-year Design Basis Flood or the 100-year Design Basis Hurricane that the nukes were designed and constructed to withstand was based on data from a planet earth that was a lot cooler than it is today. The weather changes we see today show it is likely that those old nukes will experience natural phenomena that they were never designed to resist.
Actually, it is already happening. A year ago in August 2020, the Duane Arnold nuke near Cedar Rapids in Iowa exceeded its design basis wind speed from a Derecho Storm that tore the secondary radiation containment off the plant and destroyed the cooling towers. The NRC has calculated that the damage from the Derecho increased the probability of a meltdown at Duane Arnold by 10,000%!
August 10, 2020 Derecho. Photo Credit: National Weather Service
When that Derecho Storm blew through, Iowans were lucky, and the damaged plant shut down without a meltdown or major radiation release. Yet, the Duane Arnold atomic power reactor will never to be restarted again. Think about that, at some point, somewhere, some nuclear plant is going to roll snake eyes caused by our global climate emergency.
How cool is this: as a fitting end and last chapter in the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant story; the now-permanently closed facility is being replaced by fields of solar panels that will bring renewable energy to Iowans.
Fairewinds Will Keep You Informed!
Header Photo by Li-An Lim
