Skip to main content

No There There in NYT Story

nyt_logo The problem for news reporters is that they pitch a story that sounds promising, but it ends up a wash: there’s no news there. So what does one do? Kill the story or make as much of it as possible and, being fair, reveal that there really is no story.

---

Here’s the headline of a story that appeared on the New York Times Green blog: U.S. Dropped Nuclear Rule Meant to Avert Hydrogen Explosions.

Uh-oh. That sounds bad, given that Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors suffered a series of hydrogen explosions. Could it be that the NRC is too much in cahoots with the industry?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has allowed reactors to phase out some equipment that eliminates explosive hydrogen, the gas that blew up the outer containments of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi in Japan.

There’s that part.

“Post-Three Mile Island, they were considered very important to safety,’’ Mr. Blanch said. He accused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of having “gutted the rule’’ because the industry wanted to save money.

And there’s the other part. Looking pretty bad, I must say. Blanch is Paul Blanch, “who said that he had been involved in installing such equipment at Millstone 3, a nuclear reactor in Waterford, Conn.” I guess he didn’t say that he was also a consultant for Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear energy group, but maybe time was tight.

But Eliot Brenner, a spokesman for the commission, said that as the commission analyzed its rules to determine which ones actually improved safety and which did not, it had found the equipment was unnecessary.

Oh. Well, wait, is that justified or might Blanch be right?

Depending on the type of reactor, the commission now requires a variety of other precautions. General Electric models of the type used at Fukushima, which are also common in the United States, must pump their primary containments full of nitrogen gas instead of air, for example.

Because hydrogen requires that oxygen be in the air to detonate, this “inerting” of the primary containments is a way of preventing explosions. And some plants have to have “igniter systems” that would burn off hydrogen before it could build up.

So that’s that. There’s no there there. Spike that story!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey Mark, you should read another take on this story at Idaho Samizdat.

Popular posts from this blog

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin...

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...

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...