A Certain Logic in Russia

Kiriyenko said the impact from the Fukushima plant disaster would not only increase safety concerns but also quicken demand for new reactors to replace the industry's ageing plants.

"There will be a need to build new plants more quickly to more swiftly replace previous-generation plants," he said.

He added that Russia may speed the retirement of its older generation plants in the wake of Japan's nuclear accident.

I can’t decide if what Kiriyenko is asking here is, essentially, why let Fukushima go to waste? If the accident there allows new plants to be built in Russia whether or not they are needed, that seems rather too cynical. Because the corollary would be to say that the older plants need replacing and that would be irresponsible.

Maybe Kiriyenko is just musing out loud. He does say this:

Russia has said it has no intention of curbing its drive for more nuclear power at home and for export.

Russia here presumably being Kiriyenko. Russia being Russia, he can say whatever he feels is true, but that can also change rather rapidly. For now, though, it looks like the lumbering eastern bear will continue apace.

---

Let’s sincerely hope this is true:

A senior official at the U.N. nuclear agency is suggesting the worst may be over as far as radiation leaks at Japan's stricken reactor complex are concerned.

Denis Flory says he expects the total amount of radiation releases to be only a "small increase from what it is today" if "things go as foreseen." But Flory, a deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasized Tuesday that he was estimating final radiation releases.

The story doesn’t identify him more specifically, but Denis Florey is the IAEA’s safety chief.

---

Let’s wish this weren’t true:

One person has died after police in western India clashed with locals protesting against the planned construction of a nuclear power plant.

Police said they were forced to open fire after protesters attacked a police station close to the proposed site in Jaitapur, in the state of Maharashtra.

Sadly, this means one more person has been killed protesting nuclear energy than has been killed by nuclear energy in India. Still, that’s one too many.

---

The U.N.’s Summit on the Safe and Innovative Use of Nuclear Energy, held in Kiev, Ukraine, had a keynote speech by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. There may be more to say about the summit, but Ban’s speech seemed judicious and careful. This, though, was striking:

“[W]e must put a sharper focus on the new nexus between natural disasters and nuclear safety,” he stated. “The challenge of climate change is bringing with it greater extremes of weather. Nuclear power plants must be prepared to withstand everything from earthquakes to tsunamis, from fires to floods.”

According to the IAEA, 64 new reactors are under construction. Today, 443 are operating in 29 countries worldwide, some located in areas of seismic activity.

Ban is completely right as long as we acknowledge that planning virtually any power plant takes account of weather and natural disasters and at a level that surpasses anything seen at a prospective site.

But more interesting here is the intermingling of weather and natural disaster. Fukushima Daiichi was struck by an earthquake and tsunami. Not severe weather, not anything that could be counted as a result of climate change.

I’m not sure it is wise to conflate the two – weather can be predicted to an extent, natural disasters not as much. It behooves us to recognize that one thing is not exactly like the other.

It’d also be worthwhile to recognize that the earthquake does not appear to have been the cause of problems at Fukushima – we can’t know this for sure until the government accounts for the accident – but the tsunami afterward. One could say reasonably – for now – that the combination proved determinative.

But that makes the media worry about siting nuclear plants in “areas of seismic activity,” as reflected in this story, seem a little off base. Other plants in Japan were struck by the same earthquake – and some harder than Fukushima – but suffered minor if any damage.

Sergei Kiriyenko

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