Wednesday Update

From the new NEI Japan site.

Plant Status

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has repaired faulty hoses and restarted the new cooling system for the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy facility. The system resumed operations after the repair. The system, which on June 27 began circulating decontaminated water through reactors 1, 2 and 3, had developed leaks in pipes and hoses shortly after it was activated.
Work has started to build a giant polyester cover over reactor building 1 to contain the spread of radioactive materials. A crane that can lift up to 750 tons is at the Fukushima Daiichi site removing debris from the top of the building, which was damaged in a hydrogen explosion March 12. Later, the crane will be used to install the 175-foot-tall cover, which is expected to be complete by late September.
TEPCO has begun injecting inert nitrogen gas into the containment vessel of reactor 2 at Fukushima Daiichi to prevent the possibility of hydrogen ignition. Workers have been pumping nitrogen into the reactor 1 containment for several weeks. TEPCO is scheduled to begin injecting nitrogen into the reactor 3 containment by mid-July.

Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues

TEPCO has released the English translation of a timeline covering its responses to the earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi during the first five days after the accident.
The mayor of Genkai town in western Japan has said he will approve resumption of the nuclear energy facility there by early next month. Mayor Hideo Kishimoto and Banri Kaieda, minister of economy and industry, both said they believe the Genkai nuclear plant is prepared to ensure safety in the event of a serious accident including earthquakes and tsunamis.
Toshio Nishizawa became TEPCO’s president on Tuesday, taking over from Masataka Shimizu, who resigned last month. Nishizawa said he would do “everything he can to control the crisis” at Fukushima Daiichi.
TEPCO has won institutional shareholder backing to keep its reactors in service. Opponents failed to win enough support for a motion to decommission all reactors and stop building new ones. Chugoku Electric Power Co. shareholders voted to continue the utility's plans to build a second nuclear plant.

Media Highlights

Some 34,000 children in Kawamata, Fukushima prefecture, will receive dosimeters to measure their radiation exposure, CBC News reports.
The flooding at the Fort Calhoun nuclear energy facility in Nebraska “is not another Fukushima,” Gary Gates, president and CEO of the Omaha Public Power District, told CNN. Gates said water has not breached the buildings housing the reactor core and used fuel, and he’s confident it won't. The plant has been off-line for refueling since early April.

New Products

NEI’s new website provides up-to-date information on the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy facility and the U.S. nuclear industry’s response to events in Japan.

Upcoming Events

The task force reviewing U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission processes and regulations in light of the accident at Fukushima is expected to release its report on July 12. The task force will brief the commissioners on the report at a public meeting on July 19. The briefing will be webcast.

How Nanomaterials Can Make Nuclear Reactors Safer and More Efficient

The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …

Missing the Point about Pennsylvania’s Nuclear Plants

A group that includes oil and gas companies in Pennsylvania released a study on Monday that argues that twenty years ago, planners underestimated the value of nuclear plants in the electricity market. According to the group, that means the state should now let the plants close.

Huh?

The question confronting the state now isn’t what the companies that owned the reactors at the time of de-regulation got or didn’t get. It’s not a question of whether they were profitable in the '80s, '90s and '00s. It’s about now. Business works by looking at the present and making projections about the future.

Is losing the nuclear plants what’s best for the state going forward?

Pennsylvania needs clean air. It needs jobs. And it needs protection against over-reliance on a single fuel source.

What the reactors need is recognition of all the value they provide. The electricity market is depressed, and if electricity is treated as a simple commodity, with no regard for its benefit to clean air o…

Why America Needs the MOX Facility

If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.

The project is a massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.

Carrying Isaiah’s “swords into plowshares” vision into the nuclear field did not originate with plutonium. In 1993, the United States and Russia began a 20-year program to take weapons-grade uranium out of the Russian inventory, dilute it to levels appropriate for civilian power plants, and then use it to produce…

NEI Nuclear Notes

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