The nuclear power plant in Braidwood Illinois narrowly avoided a direct hit from a tornado on Monday.
Braidwood provides electricity for much of Chicago. And even though it’s built to take a direct hit from a tornado - the plant did suffer damage to some of its power lines and utility poles.
Exelon, the owner of the Braidwood plant, claims that they’ve learned from the Fukushima disaster and have additional safety measures in place. But officials at Tepco - the Japanese private utility that owns Fukushima - had also claimed that their company had done everything possible to protect the Fukushima power plant from tsunamis - a claim that has now been seen to be less than true.
A recently disclosed document shows that company officials had been warned in 2008 that the plant needed greater coastal defenses to protect it from larger tsunamis than had been previously recorded in the area.
That prediction turned out to be disastrously true - but company officials never did upgrade the plant.
So the end result was a triple meltdown that sent radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean and into the wind currents that blow across the Ocean - and over 300,000 people had to flee the immediate area.
But with both of these cases, it’s not just about the potential disaster of radiation covering the planet, or even the fuel tanks somehow rupturing and leaking material into the groundwater. It’s about the vulnerability of our over-centralized electrical grids.
Nuclear power isn’t just dangerous - it’s a cornerstone of a centralized electrical grid system from the 19th century that’s both inefficient - and insanely vulnerable.
On June 29, 2012 a line of thunderstorms blowing across the US knocked out power for almost 4 million people ranging from Indiana to Delaware. That same year in India featured the largest blackout in the history of the world when over 320 million people - about 5% of the world’s population - were left without power when 32 gigawatts of generating capacity was taken offline.
The blackout across India was caused by extreme heat; consumers used more electricity and the demand spike caused a cascade of power failures that lasted for two days.
In India, power outages are so frequent that private companies often build their own off-grid power stations so that factories do not have to halt production when the national grid fails.
And that’s how we need to start thinking. We need to move towards a decentralized and community-based electrical system.
