You know me. There are lots of us around. We sit behind concrete walls and high fences, and most of us can boast of a killer view.

Note: be sure read Christina’s two most recent articles — “a day in the life of a Fukushima researcher” and “BYOG: Bring Your Own Geiger counter and Hazmat gear“

My outside is pretty plain, but inside I have 10,000 parts. As a nuke plant, you are lucky, because you almost always get waterfront property. This is so if my insides ever get too hot, or the power goes out (oops!) it’s easy to scoop up water and dump it on me.

If my emergency diesel generators go out, which happens a lot, they can sometimes use fire hoses to cool me off, too. I’m glad the NRC spokesman brought that up the other day when Hurricane Sandy happened. A lot of people were probably worried about that. This exact same thing happened to some of my friends in Japan! Fire hoses seemed to work OK for them, but I’m not sure, because no one really talks about it. I think there might have been some explosions or something. Man do they have a nice view from there though! And I heard Pacific sushi is really good!

Some us of are right next to big cities too, so we never get lonely. When people see you a lot, it makes you seem like you belong. Sometimes they paint pretty pictures on us, to make us look more friendly! I hope they paint some birds and butterflies on me, I don’t see too many of those around anymore.

Some days I look around me and I see all that wind, water, and sun and I wonder why people haven’t used those things to generate power, too. Maybe they are just lazy. After all, they use it like crazy in third-world countries like Morocco!

I wish I didn’t vent so much steam too, because it really obscures my view. Some days its really bad, especially if we have a hot shutdown. But people have to work inside of me so I can work properly and things don’t “melt down”. Radiation in the steam is pretty small, so unless you go outside a lot, you’re probably OK. I’m not sure why so many kids around here keep getting brain cancer though. Maybe they sit too close to the TV.

Continue reading at:  http://endthelie.com/2012/11/03/i-am-a-nuclear-reactor-and-this-is-...