Texas A&M Takes on ABC News Report

Texas A&M University is taking issue with a number of assertions ABC News made in their report on the visit to the school's Nuclear Science Center (NSC):

Dan Reece, the director of the NSC, said there were many false accusations in ABC's report.

"You'll notice that they did not show any unlocked doors or backpacks at A&M," Reece said.

"We are allowed to give tours to the public by the federal government, and visitors are allowed to use cameras."

Reece said if small explosions were put into the reactor pool, the explosion would make a mess inside the NSC but do nothing beyond that. He said the walls of the pool are made of 5-foot-thick cement.

"If that happened, I might not have a very pretty place to work the next day, but the health and safety of the public and students are our main concern," he said.

"Primetime" reported that the reactor on A&M's campus is running on highly-enriched uranium or weapons-grade material, which is 90 percent enriched uranium; however, according to a fact sheet issued by the University, the fuel on which A&M's reactor runs is 60-percent enriched uranium.

The NSC is in the process of converting the fuel to 20-percent enriched uranium, according to the fact sheet.

Leslie Braby, an A&M nuclear engineering professor, said it would be extremely difficult to steal the fuel or create a dirty bomb. A dirty bomb is a weapon made of conventional explosives, such as dynamite, and radioactive material, which scatters radiation and contamination in the air, he said.

"Even if there were 12 people willing to use a suicide attack on (the reactor), there still wouldn't be enough time to do it before the police would respond," Braby said.

Braby said the reactor is located underneath 30 feet of water and that to get to the fuel would take a very long time.

More later from other schools. If you're reading, and you're at one of the institutions smeared by this report, please send your info our way.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Energy, Technology, Homeland Security, ABC News

Comments

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog