The Fukushima Daiichi disaster has re-written our list of concerns about nuclear energy. The unthinkable is now the possible.
Lake Jocassee Dam and Oconee’s 3 Nuclear Reactors
“Meanwhile, the engineer is among several nuclear experts who
remain particularly concerned about the Oconee plant in South
Carolina, which sits on Lake Keowee, 11 miles downstream from the
Jocassee Reservoir. Among the redacted findings in the July 2011
report — and what has been known at the NRC for years, the
engineer said — is that the Oconee facility, which is operated
by Duke Energy, would suffer almost certain core damage if the
Jocassee dam were to fail. And the odds of it failing sometime
over the next 20 years, the engineer said, are far greater than
the odds of a freak tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear
plant in Japan.
“The probability of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is
hundreds of times greater than a 51 foot wall of water hitting
Fukushima Daiichi,” the engineer said. “And, like the tsunami in
Japan, the man made ‘tsunami’ resulting from the failure of the
Jocassee Dam will –- with absolute certainty –- result in
the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment
structures.
“Although it is not a given that Jocassee Dam will fail in the
next 20 years,” the engineer added, “it is a given that if it
does fail, the three reactor plants will melt down and release
their radionuclides into the environment.“
