*** Fukushima *** and other nuclear-----updates and links

MAC commends federal government on finalizing nuclear agreement with India

Agreement opens up Canadian uranium exports to critical market

OTTAWA, April 9, 2013 /CNW/ - The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) supports the finalization of the Appropriate Arrangement for Nuclear Cooperation, signed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and India's Department of Atomic Energy yesterday, as it puts the Canadian uranium industry one important step closer to trading with India.

"This is tremendous news for Canada's uranium mining industry, which is the second largest in the world," said MAC's President and CEO, Pierre Gratton. "This puts Canada in position to capitalize on growing global demand for nuclear energy and opens up the uranium sector to India, which is a large and strategic emerging market for the commodity as a key source of power."
[link to www.nuclearpowerdaily.com]
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Over 20 % of Nuclear Plants in US Currently Shutdown

According to the Current Power Reactor Status Report for April 10, 2013, over 20% of the U.S. nuclear plants are shutdown.

[link to www.nrc.gov]
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Key Part for Nuclear Reactors Still at Port

It's called a nuclear pressure vessel and some opponents of the nuclear reactors project at Plant Vogtle say it's been "stranded" at the Port of Savannah since December. Whatever term one uses, the reactor vessel is still at the Port. Westinghouse, which is charge of making parts for the nuclear reactor project told me that in December there was an attempt to move the vessel (which came from Korea) to Plant Vogtle. But there was a problem and the rail car was damaged.

"It's 300 tons and Georgia Power and Westinghouse haven't demonstrated they can actually carry it to the Plant Vogtle site," says Tom Clements from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. "It is just confusing that they can't move this stranded reactor out of the port, it's just still there on this specialized rail car."

Clements says it's unclear if there are costs for shipping and storage, but wonders if there are, if rate payers will pay the price.
[link to www.wsav.com]
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Obama budget hints sale of largest public utility
[link to www.google.com]

[snip]

The Obama administration's 2014 budget is calling for a strategic review of the Tennessee Valley Authority, opening the possibility that the largest U.S. public utility could be sold.

TVA officials seemed to have been caught off guard by the budget proposal released Wednesday. Board Chairman Bill Sansom and President and CEO Bill Johnson said the proposal was unexpected.

"At this point we don't know what the strategic review might include or what options might be explored," Sansom says in a statement. "In the meantime, we will continue operating TVA in a sound financial manner in support of the people of the Tennessee Valley and the interests of the Federal Government."

Although TVA does not receive taxpayer appropriations, the utility's expenditure of borrowed funds does count in the federal deficit.

NRC to assess troubled Watts Bar project
[link to www.knoxnews.com]

[snip]

Environmental advocates will be listening closely next week to what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says about TVA’s troubled Watts Bar Nuclear Plant project.

“I will be interested in hearing their assessment of the (non-nuclear grade materials) and any other surprises or reports,” Don Safer, chairman of the Nashville-based Tennessee Environmental Council, said Tuesday.

The NRC is reviewing possible violations involving TVA’s purchase of thousands of parts not documented as nuclear grade for Watts Bar Unit 2, although the agency has concluded that construction work was done in a manner that met requirements.

Aside from concerns about the safety of the Watts Bar reactors, the group believes the over-budget and behind schedule project is a bad investment, Safer said. The environmental council also has questioned TVA plans for spending $1 billion to upgrade its Gallatin Fossil Plant.

Obama budget slashes funding for SC MOX plant
[link to www.ledger-enquirer.com]

[snip]

The Obama administration's budget released Wednesday slashes funding for a plutonium reprocessing project in South Carolina and questions the viability of the multi-billion-dollar effort.

The budget request sent to Congress is seeking $503 million for safety programs with most of the money going to the mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX, plant now under construction. That's $200 million less than funding provided in last year's continuing resolution, passed when Congress failed to agree on a budget.

Alert to Congress: Nuclear evacuation may bog down
[link to www.google.com]

[snip]

Regulators and congressional investigators clashed Wednesday over a new report warning that in the event of an accident at a nuclear plant, panicking residents from outside the official evacuation zone might jam the roads and prevent others from escaping.

Population growth up 350 percent within 10 miles of nuclear sites between 1980 and 2010. About 120 million Americans — almost 40 percent — live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, according to the AP's analysis of Census data. The series also reported shortcomings in readiness exercises for simulated accidents, including the failure to deploy emergency personnel around the community, reroute traffic, or practice any real evacuations.

The series further documented how federal regulators have relaxed safety standards inside aging plants to keep them within the rules and avoid the need for shutdowns.

Asked about the GAO study, Paul Blanch, a retired engineer who has worked on nuclear safety for the industry, questioned whether it's even possible to plan for an effective, managed evacuation of residents in a very populated area. "I absolutely believe they would panic, and they'd clog the roads," he said.

Nuclear safety? Depends on who you ask
[link to www.greenpeace.org]

[snip]

Canada’s approach to nuclear safety isn’t one to emulate. In Canada, the nuclear regulator is a promotional agency first and a safety watchdog second.
In 2008, Canada’s federal government fired Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) president Linda Keen. Behind her firing was Keen’s imposition of more modern international reactor safety standards on Canada’s nuclear industry.
[ [link to www.cleanbreak.ca]

After investigating the disaster, the Japanese government's Independent Investigation Commission conclude Fukushima was not the result of a freak act of nature and was instead due to collusion between the government, the regulator and plant operator TEPCO.
[ [link to www.nirs.org]

Last week, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Gregory Jaczko said that the existing fleet of reactors should be shut down because of the accident risks.

Jaczko has full liberty of expression on reactor risk since he was forced to resign as chairman of the NRC last year. Some say Jaczko was forced to resign because he was pushing US reactor operators to carry out expensive reactor upgrades in light of Fukushima. Sound familiar?
[ [link to www.csmonitor.com]

Keen and Jaczko lost their jobs because their definition of “safety” was different than that of their national governments. For them, safety meant safeguarding health, property and livelihood.

But for their governments and most of the regulators gathered in Ottawa this week “nuclear safety” means something entirely different: protecting the profits of nuclear companies.

Maybe our IEAE thread infiltrator, AB, will answer these questions...


Uncomfortable Questions in the Wake of Nuclear Accidents at Fukushima and Chernobyl via Japan Focus
[link to lucian.uchicago.edu]

[snip]

Question 1: Why are nuclear reactorsfrequently clustered making problems much greater in case of emergencies? How to get to the other reactors if one melts down completely? Nuclear reactors are clustered with pairs, quadruplets or even planned clusters with six reactors located at a single site.[...]
Question 2: Why are many reactors built on tectonic fault lines, making them highly susceptible to effects of earthquakes?[...]
Question 3: Why were the back-up generators at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP located below ground level so they could be reached directly by seawater, causing malfunction and thereby preventing cooling of the reactors? [...]
Question 4: Why are used fuel rods from the nuclear reactors stored at the reactor site, preventing cooling in a case of emergency, thereby compromising security? [...]
Question 5: Why did the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) approve nuclear reactors with such poor locations and poorly designed emergency generators? [...]
Question 6: Why were pregnant women and children not evacuated earlier and for longer distances to avoid the well-known problems of effects of radiation on early development?[...]
Question 7: Why were Japanese people evacuated from an area with a radius of 30 km, when French and US citizens were advised to stay 50 km away, and airplanes owned by Air France, Alitalia and Lufthansa were re-directed from Tokyo to Osaka? [...]
Question 8: Why was the level of radioactivity in Fukushima said by the Japanese prime minister to be low, when in fact it was, and continues to be, higher than the most contaminated areas around Chernobyl, from where people are still evacuated 27 years after that accident? [...]
Question 9: Why did the chairman of the IAEA (a Japanese) first travel to Japan four days after the first accident happened in Fukushima? [...]
Question 10: Why is Tokyo Electric (Tepco) unwilling to provide information about the identity of the rescue workers and their radiation exposure?

As I said...


Precarious Japan nuke plant raises safety concerns
[link to www.google.com]

[snip]

The regulatory watchdog said Wednesday that it was increasing the number of inspectors from eight to nine to better oversee the plant.

Just over the past three weeks, there have been at least eight accidents or problems at the plant, the nuclear watchdog said.

"The contaminated water situation is on the verge of collapse," Tanaka said. But he said there was no choice but to keep adding water, while trying to seek ways to minimize the leaks and their risks.

The underground tanks, all built by Maeda Corp., come in different sizes, including one the size of an Olympic-size swimming pool and similar to an industrial waste dump. They are dug into the ground and protected by two layers of polyethylene linings inside the outermost clay-based lining, with a felt padding in between each layer.

Regulators suspect a design problem with the underground tanks, which TEPCO allegedly chose over steel tanks as a cheaper option.

Not really a public hearing, now is it..?


TEPCO sent employees to 2005 public hearing on nuclear power.
[link to www.power-eng.com]

[snip]

Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the disaster-hit Fukushima Daiichi power plant, sent 35 of its employees and related officials to a public hearing on nuclear power in the city of Fukushima in August 2005 sponsored by the government's Japan Atomic Energy Commission, sources familiar with the matter said Friday.

Six of the 23 people who spoke at the hearing in the capital of Fukushima Prefecture had links to Tokyo Electric, known as TEPCO, allof whom supported nuclear power generation, the sources said.

The Japan Atomic Energy Commission held a series of public hearings on nuclear power generation at five locations nationwide in 2005,including Fukushima, before working out the country's nuclear powerpolicy platform in October 2005.

Express “Potential missile attack would make Fukushima contamination nothing”
[link to fukushima-diary.com]

i imagine it'll be in the from of a personal attack. or another one of those -'look over there at that'...
they really need to sack him or send back training... trouble is even the best manipulators cant stop the Truth bearing witness to itself,
rgds rawpaul

Maybe you should look what i am really writing,
stupid Troll u r!

@ Buggy-Chan,
i guess all your Questions are already answered,
not only by me but from other People!

But the questions are not really "that important"
because they are not hot or didn't touch the real Core-Problematic,
i would say they are Peanuts!

Btw. do you read that we don't need to save Energy
in this coming Summer?

It is nice that we do not need Nuclear Power
even when we need to burn fossil Stuff!

Too bad they didn't realize that nuclear power was not needed before 3.11.11, fossil fuel or not.
Profit was needed, not safety.
Tepco is safety-challenged and profit-hungry.
So are the rest of the for-profit plants.
Tepco is the goat because the world's worst nuclear catastrophe is happening there.

The corruption, criminal negligence and ineptitude, before and after the meltdowns.. is on them..

Map of JP food rads......

[link to fukushimaemergencywhatcanwedo.blogspot.com.au]

Bloomberg: Radioactive water from Fukushima reactors to be dumped in Pacific? “It’s obvious they can’t keep storing it forever”
[link to enenews.com]

NYTimes: Fukushima plant unstable says official, concern another accident can’t be prevented — “Vulnerable… Very dangerous”
[link to enenews.com]

[snip]

“It’s become obvious that Tepco is not at all capable of leading the cleanup. It just doesn’t have the expertise, and because Fukushima Daiichi is never going to generate electricity again, every yen it spends on the decommissioning is thrown away. That creates an incentive to cut corners, which is very dangerous. The government needs to step in, take charge and assemble experts and technology from around the world to handle the decommissioning instead.” -Muneo Morokuzu, a nuclear safety expert at the Tokyo University Graduate School of Public Policy

Fukushima schoolchildren clear of cesium

Schoolchildren living near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have come up clear of radioactive cesium in internal-exposure screenings.

Researchers led by the University of Tokyo examined roughly 1,400 elementary and junior high school children in Miharumachi, 50 kilometers from the crippled plant.

They carried out the tests from September to November last year.

Researchers said levels of cesium 137 in all tested children were below the detectable amount of 300 becquerels.

The same researchers implemented similar tests between November 2011 and February 2012. They found then up to 1,300 becquerels of cesium 137 in 54 children.

Researchers say the new results show that checks on food products have generally prevented children from ingesting radioactive material.
[link to www3.nhk.or.jp]
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Water, rats, outages add to list of Fukushima plant woes

TOKYO — A rat causing a power outage by short-circuiting a temporary switchboard. Another blackout occurring as workers install anti-rat nets. Holes in the linings of huge underground tanks leaking radioactive water.

Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has run into multiple problems recently that highlight its precarious state more than two years after its reactors melted down in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

A makeshift system of pipes, tanks and power cables meant to carry cooling water into the melted reactors and spent fuel pools inside shattered buildings remains highly vulnerable, Nuclear Regulation Authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka acknowledged.

“Fukushima Daiichi is still in an extremely unstable condition, there is no mistake about that,” Tanaka said at a weekly meeting of the regulatory body’s leaders on Wednesday. “We cannot rule out the possibility that similar problems might occur again. Whenever a problem occurs, it halts the plant’s operations and delays the primary goal of decommissioning the plant.”
[link to www.japantoday.com]
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Yet another leak...

TEPCO reports another water leak

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says more radioactive water has leaked at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The trouble occurred on Thursday during work to transfer contaminated water.

TEPCO said about 22 liters of water leaked through a pipe joint and seeped into soil covering an underground storage pool but did not flow into the nearby sea.

The firm estimated that substances with more than 6.3 billion becquerels of radioactivity leaked with the water.
[link to www3.nhk.or.jp]
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New highly radioactive leak from pipe at Fukushima plant — Oceanographer: Nuclear material may be flowing from “damaged pipes or drains” into Pacific
[link to enenews.com]

Surprise, surprise...

Radioactive water leak from pipe confirmed at Fukushima plant

Another radioactive leak was detected at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Thursday while workers were pumping out contaminated water from one of the troubled underground tanks, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

Around 22 liters of radioactive water has leaked from a junction of the piping for transferring liquid, not from the tanks themselves. The water seeped into the soil covering the upper part of the tank, but has not spread outside the site, TEPCO said.

The incident occurred only a day after the utility announced a plan to remove all the highly radioactive water stored in the underground tanks to more reliable containers by the end of June to address the risk of further leaks from the tanks.
[link to english.kyodonews.jp]

Feds sound alarm on nuclear evacuations

Regulators and congressional investigators clashed today over a new report warning that in the event of an accident at a nuclear plant, panicking residents from outside the official evacuation zone might jam the roads and prevent others from escaping.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, which acts as the investigative arm of Congress, challenges a three-decade-old fundamental of emergency planning around American nuclear power plants: that preparations for evacuation should focus on people who live within 10 miles of the site.

The GAO found that people living beyond the official 10-mile evacuation zone might be so frightened by the prospect of spreading radiation that they would flee of their own accord, clog roads, and delay the escape of others. The investigators said regulators have never properly studied how many people beyond 10 miles would make their own decisions to take flight, prompting what is called a "shadow evacuation."

As a result, the GAO report says, "evacuation time estimates may not accurately consider the impact of shadow evacuations."
[link to www.nj.com]
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Slovakia signals ready to work with Rosatom on nuclear power

Slovakia signalled Wednesday it is ready to team up with Russia's Rosatom if Czech energy giant CEZ walks out of a deal on the construction of a new nuclear reactor.

"CEZ is considering selling its stake in a joint project with Slovakia to Rosatom," the leftist government led Prime Minister Robert Fico, a staunch supporter of nuclear energy, said on its website.
[link to www.nuclearpowerdaily.com]
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Fukushima may delay nuclear energy growth

Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster may delay the growth of the world nuclear energy market by a decade but will not reverse it, a nuclear power expert says.

Alan McDonald, program coordinator of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made the prediction Wednesday at the World Nuclear Fuel Cycle conference in Singapore, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

The Fukushima accident "has effectively delayed projected growth by 10 years, with the capacity that was projected for 2020 before the accident now being projected for 2030," he said.

Despite the revised forecast, the installed capacity is still projected to grow by 25 percent to 100 percent by 2030, he added.
[link to www.nuclearpowerdaily.com]
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Staff at federal agency signals ‘no hazard’ with California nuclear plant run at lower power

LOS ANGELES — Federal regulators signaled Wednesday that running California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant at reduced power would not pose a significant safety risk — a key step toward a possible restart of one of the idled reactors.

The preliminary ruling from Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff represents a victory for operator Southern California Edison, which is pushing for a restart by June and has argued for months that the Unit 2 reactor is safe to run at lower power.

But Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., called plans to restart the plant before an investigation is complete “dangerous and premature.”

“It makes absolutely no sense to even consider taking any steps to reopen San Onofre until these investigations look at every aspect of reopening the plant,” Boxer said in a statement.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in a statement issued jointly with Boxer’s that the commission was showing “blatant disregard for the safety of tens of millions of people.”
[link to www.washingtonpost.com]
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NRC increasing oversight of nuke plant

SALEM TWP. - Although PPL's Susquehanna Steam power plant operated safely in 2012, the federal nuclear oversight agency is keeping a more watchful eye on the facility.

Members of Susquehanna Steam management told a group of officials from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during a public meeting Wednesday they are cooperating with the corrective actions they're supposed to implement.

The NRC determined in its annual performance review that the Unit 1 reactor only needs normal oversight, but the Unit 2 reactor needs more scrutiny due to two unplanned shutdowns, one on Nov. 9 and the other on Dec. 19.

The Nov. 9 shutdown was due to a malfunction of the computer that controls the reactor's water level, and the Dec. 19 shutdown resulted from the failure of a valve which feeds water to the reactor to produce steam. A third shutdown occurred on Dec. 16 during routine testing of a valve on the main turbine system of Unit 2.

More than three unplanned shutdowns in 7,000 hours of operation lead to more oversight by the NRC, the agency's spokesman Neil Sheehan said.
[link to citizensvoice.com]
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Business, as usual.
It seems we are on an unintelligent rush to our own Fukushima..
I told you so will not be a consolation.

Fukushima plant abandoning leaky underground pools

TOKYO — The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant said Wednesday it will abandon seven underground reservoirs storing radioactive water after three of them sprang leaks.

The contaminated water will be transferred to more reliable containers on the ground, possibly by early June, to avoid risks of further leaks, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) President Naomi Hirose told a news conference.

“We have yet to grasp the cause of the leaks. But we will strengthen monitoring activities so as to prevent the water from flowing into the sea,” he said. “We want to transfer the contaminated water from the underground reservoirs as soon as possible.”
[link to www.japantoday.com]
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