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.

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

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