Archive for the ‘Nukes’ Category

The UK Guardian

June 08, 2011

Fuel rods have probably breached containment vessels – a more serious scenario than core meltdown – according to report

Molten nuclear fuel in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is likely to have burned through pressure vessels, not just the cores, Japan has said in a report in which it also acknowledges it was unprepared for an accident of the severity of Fukushima.

It is the first time Japanese authorities have admitted the possibility that the fuel suffered “melt-through” – a more serious scenario than a core meltdown.

The report, which is to be submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said fuel rods in reactors No 1, 2 and 3 had probably not only melted, but also breached their inner containment vessels and accumulated in the outer steel containment vessels.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), says it believes the molten fuel is being cooled by water that has built up in the bottom of the three reactor buildings.
The report includes an apology to the international community for the nuclear crisis – the world’s worst since Chernobyl in 1986 – and expresses “remorse that this accident has raised concerns around the world about the safety of nuclear power generation”.

The prime minister, Naoto Kan, said: “Above all, it is most important to inform the international community with thorough transparency in order for us to regain its confidence in Japan.”

The report comes a day after Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the amount of radiation that leaked from Fukushima Daiichi in the first week of the accident may have been more than double that initially estimated by Tepco.

The 750-page report, compiled by Japan’s emergency nuclear task force, concedes that the country was wrongfooted by the severity of the accident, which occurred after the plant was struck by waves more than 14 metres high following the earthquake on 11 March.

“We are taking very seriously the fact that consistent preparation for severe accidents was insufficient,” the report said. “In light of the lessons learned from the accident, Japan has recognised that a fundamental revision of its nuclear safety preparedness and response is inevitable.”

The nuclear task force’s head, Goshi Hosono, said Tepco had failed to adequately protect plant workers early on in the crisis, and had provided inadequate information about radiation leaks.

About 7,800 workers had been involved in the battle to stabilise the plant as of late May, the report said. While their average exposure dose was well within safe limits, “a certain number” may have been exposed to more than 250 millisieverts per year, the maximum allowable dose under revised government guidelines for Fukushima workers.

The report acknowledged that bureaucratic red tape, and the division of responsibilities across several government agencies, had hampered the response to the accident.

It said the government would separate the country’s nuclear safety watchdog from the trade and industry ministry, a recommendation made earlier this month by a team of experts from the IAEA.

The trade and industry minister, Banri Kaieda, said Japan would share all available data and co-operate with the IAEA. “Our country bears a serious responsibility to provide data to the international community with maximum transparency, and to actively contribute to nuclear safety,” he said.

The most urgent problem facing workers at Fukushima Daiichi is how to deal with vast quantities of highly radioactive water that has accumulated in reactor buildings and basements and in ditches.

The estimated 100,000 tonnes of contaminated liquid – runoff from water used to douse overheating reactors – is hampering efforts to repair the plant’s cooling systems.

Tepco has said it hopes to have a system in place by the middle of the month to remove radioactive substances from the water, enabling it to be reused to cool reactors.

May 22, 2011

Nick Lawton
KWES NewsWest 9

ANDREWS – More and more truck traffic coming to Andrews has sparked the now controversial proposed truck reliever route debate there.

The project planning was started back in 2007 and is now poised to take off this year if the funding comes through.

The 13-mile route circling the city will have two lanes going opposite directions for large trucks to travel with a narrow turn lane in the middle.

It’s meant to keep them off of the main city streets.

"We’ve had a 60-80% increase in truck traffic in Andrews in the last five years," Andrews City Manager, Glen Hackler, said. "That means about 1,000-1,200 trucks a day on Main St."

Andrews officials said that can be a safety hazard to other cars just making their errands around town.

The project will cost $6 million and the city will have an election in May to raise the sales tax by a quarter to help pay it off.

If it’s approved, the city will issue $6 million dollars in bonds for a period not exceeding 20 years in the Fall and construction on the route will begin in January 2012.

But there’s a stretch of homes on the North side of town on County Road 2500, about a quarter-of-a-mile long, where the route is cutting too close.

One Andrews family in that area has the route coming within 14 feet of their front lawn and said it’s too unsafe for them.

"You’re gonna have those trucks passing by every day within 40 feet of my son’s room where he’s gonna be asleep," 15-year Andrews resident, Justin Johnson, said.

For the Johnson’s, they don’t want their children to be in danger just by playing out in the front yard but Andrews officials said there will be measures in place on that stretch to protect those homes.

"Putting curb and gutter that would help slow and calm the traffic in that area, a masonry decorative fence with some sound baffling, reducing the speed limit to 35 along that quarter-of-a-mile section," Hackler said.

The Johnson’s said they’ve yet to hear from a city official. They fear there won’t be a safe alternative, and if the sales tax is approved and the route built, they might have to move.

But officials said there wasn’t a better place to put the new route and now the wait is on to see if the funding will be voted in.

"There’s no perfect route," Hackler said. "What we’ve done is three or four years of study, evaluation and work and brought it to this point. Now it’s up to the voters to decide."

"Take a minute to put themselves in my shoes," Johnson said. "And how would they like 600-800 trucks a day passing within 40 feet of their home where their children play out in their yard."

MAY 19, 2011

Biologist estimates 900,000 deaths

By Geoff Olson
Vancouver Courier

What a beginning to 2011. For the past few month’s it’s been a stomach-churning roller coaster of victory and defeat, with a detour through Malcolm Gladwell’s Funhouse of Tipping Points. It began with the pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which emboldened other Arab states to try out dictator whack-a-mole. In contrast, 40 per cent of Canadians optimistically chose to reelect a secretive leader charged with contempt of Parliament.

For comic relief, we had Charlie Sheen’s camera-friendly meltdown, bundled with his "Torpedo of Truth" tour. Osama bin Laden, cornered, killed, and given a counterintuitive burial at sea, supplied some couch-potato catharsis south of the border. The Royal Wedding enchanted some of Her Majesty’s subjects in the North. Locally, we had Christy Clark’s byelection bonding with the people of Point Grey, consummated by her close-lipped campaign.

Yet the biggest story of all, which has all but spiralled down the media memory hole, is the ongoing disaster in Japan following the March 11 tsunami. The Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) are attempting desperate, finger-in-the-dike measures in the irradiated zone of Fukushima prefecture, after upgrading the crisis to a Chernobyl-level 7. This week, TEPCO admitted that reactor 1 experienced a meltdown within hours of the quake, and reactors 2 and 3 have likely melted down as well. Building number 4 threatens to collapse. Radioactive material is leaking into the Pacific, into the atmosphere and into Japan’s groundwater.

On top of this, there is the issue of the damaged cooling ponds with their spent nuclear fuel rods. In videos of the March 14 explosion at reactor 3, an immense amount of solid material is seen rising with the plume and falling to Earth. Fuel may have been ejected from the pool up to one mile from the plant, according to a leaked NRC report. The fuel rods were likely launched into the air out of their containment vessels "like the muzzle from a gun," believes Arnold Gundersen, a chief nuclear engineer with the energy consulting firm Fairwinds Associates. This would account for TEPCO’s discovery of plutonium in soil samples taken from outside the plant.

Plutonium is very nasty stuff. You may remember the protests leading up to the 1997 NASA launch of a probe containing 72.3 pounds of the lethal element. An accident would have been catastrophic, scientists argued. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku estimated up to 200,000 deaths from an accident. Other scientists predicted up to 40 million deaths in the event of a dispersal of plutonium from the Cassini probe in an Earth "flyby" accident. We’re talking about only 72 pounds of the material.

With the explosion of reactor 3, radioactive elements were "aerosolized" into a fine mist that can make its way across the Pacific, says Gundersen. Scientists have detected trace amounts of radioactive iodine, believed to be from Fukushima, as far away as Glasgow and Pennsylvania. So how much plutonium, the most toxic element of all, was in the Fukushima spent fuel? With an estimated 600,000 fuel rods in the entire complex, and six per cent of the fuel rods from reactor 3 containing a mix of uranium and plutonium, it’s certainly much more than that of the infamous Cassini probe. Who to believe? The estimates of nuclear health risks and fatalities are all over the map. In a recent debate on Democracy Now, Guardian columnist George Monbiot repeated the UN figures of 43 deaths in total from the Chernobyl disaster. Antinuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott responded with Russian biologists’ calculations of 900,000 deaths, with more to come due to the decades-plus half-life of nuclear isotopes, and the incubation period for cancers and other diseases. (A 2007 BBC documentary on Chernobyl quotes Russian military sources that of 500,000 emergency workers in the Chernobyl area, 20,000 have already died, and 200,000 are officially disabled. This doesn’t include other civilian numbers.)

I have to wonder, as the media flits from marrying royals to manic sitcom stars, why there isn’t more focus on what appears to be the worst ecological disaster in human history. The atmosphere doesn’t heed lines on a map, so how dangerous is the invisible threat issuing from Fukushima to the planet’s population? And how can Obama continue to endorse the much-hyped "nuclear renaissance" for atomic energy production in the U.S., with this nightmare-in-progress?

Has the unthinkable truly happened, and is there a global, institutional inability to address it properly?

www.geoffolson.com
© Copyright (c) Vancouver Courier

May 18, 2011

By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Five years before the crucial emergency vents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were disabled by an accident they were supposed to help handle, engineers at a reactor in Minnesota warned American regulators about that very problem.

One of the two engineers, Anthony Sarrack, notified staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the design of venting systems at his reactor and others in the United States, similar to the ones in Japan, was seriously flawed. He later left the industry in frustration because managers and regulators did not agree.

Mr. Sarrack said that the vents, which are supposed to relieve pressure at crippled plants and keep containment structures intact, should not be dependent on electric power and workers’ ability to operate critical valves because power might be cut in an emergency and workers might be incapacitated. Part of the reason the venting system in Japan failed — allowing disastrous hydrogen explosions — is that power to the plant was knocked out by a tsunami that followed a major earthquake.

Mr. Sarrack’s memo was found in the archives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by David Lochbaum, a boiling-water-reactor expert who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., that is generally hostile to nuclear power.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot claim ignorance about this one," he said.

Plant managers and nuclear regulators are warned about far more problems each year than actually occur, but in this case, the cautionary note was eerily prescient and could rekindle debate over whether automatic venting systems are safer alternatives.

While staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considered Mr. Sarrack’s suggestion, they decided against it.

On Wednesday, a commission spokesman, Scott Burnell, said the commission still believed that existing venting systems were a "reasonable and appropriate means" of dealing with a rise in pressure after an accident. But he has also said that the commission’s staff members are studying the events at Fukushima for "lessons learned," and that they had identified means of "reducing risk even further" by making the vents "more passive." He said the staff had not yet chosen a way to do that.

Read more at the New York Times website…

May 17, 2011

By HIROKO TABUCHI, KEITH BRADSHER and MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times

TOKYO — Emergency vents that American officials have said would prevent devastating hydrogen explosions at nuclear plants in the United States were put to the test in Japan — and failed to work, according to experts and officials with the company that operates the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The failure of the vents calls into question the safety of similar nuclear power plants in the United States and Japan. After the venting failed at the Fukushima plant, the hydrogen gas fueled explosions that spewed radioactive materials into the atmosphere, reaching levels about 10 percent of estimated emissions at Chernobyl, according to Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency.

Venting was critical to relieving pressure that was building up inside several reactors after the March 11 tsunami knocked out the plant’s crucial cooling systems. Without flowing water to cool the reactors’ cores, they had begun to dangerously overheat.

American officials had said early on that reactors in the United States would be safe from such disasters because they were equipped with new, stronger venting systems. But Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, now says that Fukushima Daiichi had installed the same vents years ago.

Read more at the New York Times website…