River Bend and the Gumbo of Gloom
Louisiana's heat is not always measured in Scovilles.
Chapter 1: A Gumbo of Gloom
Well, sir, let me tell you, that naught-minus-twenty ice storm in Louisiana was a doozy. A real humdinger, as my dear departed Mama used to say. It clung to the state like a bad relative at a family reunion, refusing to budge for a good five days. Now, at the River Bend Nuclear Power Station, things were usually as smooth as a freshly peeled crawfish. But this storm, oh this storm, threw a monkey wrench into the whole operation.
Louise Thornton, our plant manager, a woman who could usually out-argue a Cajun swamp tour guide, was starting to sweat. Not the good kind of sweat you get from a plate of filé gumbo sprinkled with Crystal on a sweltering day, mind you. This was a cold sweat, the kind that trickles down your spine and makes your shirt feel like a damp dishcloth. See, the storm had done a number on the intake pipes. Burst clean in two, they were about as useful as a chocolate teapot in a blizzard.
Chapter 2: A Symphony of Sputters
With the intake pipes kaput, the whole cooling system was on the fritz. Now, a nuclear power plant is a bit like a fussy old aunt – needs its cooling just right. So, Louise flipped the switch on the backup diesel. But this here diesel, well, it had a mind of its own. Sputtered and coughed like a winded dachshund after a crawfish boil. John Ramierez, our young engineer, a good lad with a nervous twitch in his right eye, tinkered and toiled, but the darn thing wouldn't budge.
News of the River Bend predicament trickled out like molasses in January. Governor Richardson, a man with a booming voice and a temper to match, got himself in quite a state. Bellowed into the phone like a bullfrog with a sore throat. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, Mayor Durant, a fellow with a penchant for flamboyant hats and even more flamboyant speeches, addressed the city with a face as long as the Mississippi itself.
Another problem associated with extremely cold temperatures representing a substantial threat for the energy sector is freezing rain. This is liquid, supercooled precipitation that freezes when coming into contact with solid objects, forming a coating of ice. Freezing rain represents a threat for the power transmission lines as it could lead them to fail. Several examples are listed in the literature and they include blackouts affecting up to 80% of the population in some countries, and more than 200 km of power lines and major cities such as Moscow. Again, climate change may have an impact on this meteorological phenomenon: it has been found that for eastern Canada the intra-annual distribution of freezing rain events will change as they will be more frequent from December-February…. —Añel et al, 2017
Chapter 3: A Delicate Dance with Disaster
Hours stretched into an eternity, each tick of the clock a hammer blow to Louise's already frayed nerves. John finally managed to coax the backup diesel back to life, but the poor thing sounded like a one-legged rooster in a rooster fight. It was a delicate dance, you see, this business of keeping a meltdown at bay. One wrong step and the whole kit and caboodle could go up in a mushroom cloud that would make Mardi Gras fireworks look like a sparkler fight.
On February 15, 2021, the South Texas Project experienced an automatic reactor shutdown when a 5-foot section of uninsulated water line froze, causing the failure of a feed water pump. The facility shut down safely, but the licensee failed to implement a required Freezing Weather Plan to insulate the line. According to one NRC official, a cold weather event nearly rendered another plant’s diesel generators inoperable when the air intake temperature dipped to -50 degrees Fahrenheit. Following 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved a new standard, effective October 2024, that will require certain owners of certain electricity generating units, including nuclear power reactors, to implement freeze protection measures to operate for at least 12 continuous hours at the unit’s lowest recorded extreme cold weather temperature. — GAO Inspector General, April 2024
Chapter 4: A Desperate Gamble and a Ghastly Geyser
Louise, bless her heart, had to make a decision that would make Solomon himself scratch his head. A controlled release of pressure, that's what it was called. A fancy way of saying they were letting off a little steam before the whole pot boiled over. It was a risky gambit, like trying to ride a gator with a bad case of indigestion.
But there you have it, up she went, a geyser of radioactive steam spewing from the reactor building like a disgruntled catfish. John, his face the color of a boiled crawfish, muttered something about a "worst-case scenario." Outside, the storm, finally abating, decided to play its own nasty trick. It took that radioactive plume and whisked it southwards, a silent harbinger of doom for the unsuspecting towns below.
Chapter 5: The Big Easy Becomes the Big Empty
Down in New Orleans, the first tendrils of the plume arrived with a disconcerting stillness. The air hung heavy, a metallic tang replacing the usual scent of beignets and jazz. Mayor Durant, his flamboyant hat looking decidedly out of place, addressed the city again. This time, there was no bravado, just a grim acceptance of their fate. Sheltering in place, that was the new reality. The city that thrived on parades and revelry became a ghost town, its vibrant spirit choked by an unseen hand.
Chapter 6: A Legacy of Lead and Longing
Days bled into weeks, then months. The radioactive cloud became a permanent fixture in the Louisiana sky. Crops withered, livestock died, and a silence as heavy as a gator's hide descended upon the land. Two hundred thousand souls perished and nary a slow jazz parade. River Bend became a monument to human folly, a desolate hulk haunted by the ghosts of what used to be. Louise, a shadow of her former self, roamed the empty halls, the weight of her decision a constant companion.
This, my dear reader, is the story of the River Bend meltdown. A cautionary tale about the delicate dance between human ambition and the raw power of nature. A dance where one wrong step can leave you with a legacy of lead caskets and a longing for the days when the only thing you had to worry about was a rogue crawfish pinching your toes.
References
Añel, Juan A., Manuel Fernández-González, Xavier Labandeira, Xiral López-Otero, and Laura De la Torre. "Impact of cold waves and heat waves on the energy production sector." Atmosphere 8, no. 11 (2017): 209.
USGAO, Report to Congressional Requesters, Nuclear Power Plants, NRC Should Take Actions to Fully Consider the Potential Effects of Climate Change, GAO-24-106326, April 2024
Special thanks to Gemini and Perplexity for helping to craft this narrative and images, to Senator Joe Manchin for requesting the GAO investigation, for whatever nefarious reasons, and to the General Accounting Office for making the neglect of this discussion so apparent. An NRC spokesman said agency officials will respond to the report's findings in greater detail in the coming months.
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