Great Lakes nuke shipment plan stirs fear
September 17, 2010 at 7:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. Environmentalists and some local government officials are protesting a Canadian power company’s proposal to haul 16 scrapped generators with radioactive components across three of the Great Lakes on their way to a recycling plant in Sweden.
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Very poor writing in this article. “Generators” means nothing in this story. Assuming these are from nuke power plants, the generators in question could be steam generators – analogous to boilers in a conventional power plant. Steam generators have radioactive primary coolant flowing through them during operation plus the steel vessels themselves could possibly become activated by neutron absorption. The primary coolant deposits radioactive corrosion products in various places inside the coolant tubes within the steam generators.
The term, generator, by itself would usually mean an electrical machine which produces electricity and would not be radioactive.
How large, physically, are these “generators”? What is the particular nature of the radioactivity, and just what are the “radioactive components”?
This story is just enough to get people wound up, but not enough to really tell them anything useful or meaningful. sheesh!
tom koehler
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