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« Apparently, Emperor Palpatine runs Michigan | Main | Oh, the Irony » Gee, Nobody Could Have Foreseen a Problem With the Spent Fuel RodsFnord12 tells me it's too late to invest in iodine tablets. Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants -- Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while Chinese nuclear reactors send them to a desert storage compound in western China's Gansu province. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the power plant. Tell me again why nuclear power's better. By min | March 17, 2011, 3:36 PM | Liberal Outrage & Science Comments"My father... was a mechanical engineer in the British nuclear power industry... I vividly recall his telling me decades ago that the thing that concerned him most about nuclear power was... the storage of spent fuel. This needed to be very carefully managed... What would happen to the spent fuel if an accident meant a site had to be evacuated? Insufficient attention was being paid to this, he said. The conversation passed through my mind as soon as the first reports of problems at Fukushima appeared. Where do they put the spent fuel? Today the New York Times tells us where: on 'the top level of the reactor buildings'. " http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/the-fog-of-nuclear-emergency/72505/ |