Three Mile Island

Well no one won the lottery.  Sue, Luke and Kyle are home today and decide to go shopping at stop and shop.  She played the lottery, so we have another chance.

Had defensive driving class tonight and got home late again.  No run today, so my running deficit keeps increasing.

Sue, Kyle, and Luke went to the track and each completed a mile.  Luke tried out his new running shoes. 

This day in history “At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar on Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises.
After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.”

With technology what it is today, there is no reason why we can’t gear up to have solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and other renewable clean resources producing enough power to close down or start to eliminate dirty forms of energy.

Does anyone know how old most of these nuclear power plants are or where the spent fuel rods are stored ?
The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year.^[7] In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year.^[12][13] Photosynthesis captures approximately 3,000 EJ per year in biomass.^[9] The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.^[14]

Photo of the day “Three Mile Island”