Nuclear meltdown
Mother Nature vs. US Nuclear Power Plants
Japan teeters on the brink of a nuclear meltdown following the 8.9 earthquake and the enormous tsunami. Meanwhile, many in the U.S. are pondering the state of our nuclear power plants if they ever faced a similar bout with mother nature. The U.S. is the home of 104 nuclear reactor sites, four of them along […]
Nuclear Meltdown Lessons Learned from Three Mile Island
In 1979 there was a partial core meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. Following a non-nuclear secondary system failure, a pilot-operated relief valve was stuck open allowing large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape. In the end, the reactor was controlled, but the image of nuclear power as the future energy […]
Japan Faces Possible Nuclear Meltdown
Nuclear reactors continue to fail at power plants in Japan and there is a risk of possible nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, with 80,000 people being evacuated from around the plant. The plant was built to withstand a tsunami and earthquake, with a system of plans to safeguard from a meltdown; however, the […]
Forgetting Chernobyl
To commemorate ten years since the Chernobyl nuclear plant core reactor meltdown and radiation release in the Ukraine, Living on Earth sent producer Bruce Gellerman to the site of the world’s most serious nuclear plant disaster. Narrator Gellerman describes the terrain and the fears he enounters as he visits the entombed sarcophagus of the reactor, […]
American Engineer opens the Door to Chernobyl
Host Steve Curwood talks to Alexander Sich, an American nuclear engineer who recently spent eighteen months in the Chernobyl area reconstructing events following the 1986 nuclear accident there. Sich believes radiation from the damaged nuclear power plant was several times greater than levels reported by the Soviet government. On the other hand, he says his […]