Skip to main content

Tuesday Update

By

Government Recommends New Regulatory Oversight Agency for Japan Reactors

Plant Status

  • TEPCO is scheduled today to install a metal cover over the turbine building of reactor 3 before Typhoon Ma-on moves toward the Japanese coast on Tuesday. The 15-foot-by-50-foot structure is meant to cover a hole in the building.
  • TEPCO reported that the nitrogen injection into reactor 3 is not holding pressure. TEPCO is checking for leaks from the primary containment vessel. TEPCO said that it has injected more than 200 cubic meters of nitrogen into the containment vessel to stabilize the reactor, but there has been little increase in pressure within the secondary containment structure at reactor 3.

Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues

  • Goshi Hosono, Japan’s minister for nuclear crisis management, said he is drawing up plans for a new nuclear regulatory agency that is independent of the Economy and Industry Ministry. The new agency will incorporate some of the monitoring functions now being performed by the Science Ministry’s Nuclear Safety Commission. Hosono said he wants the new entity to be operational by next April.
  • Japanese reactors that are currently shut down should reopen once their safety is assured, Hosono said. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has developed two-stage computer-based stress tests to assess the resistance of the reactors to earthquakes, tsunamis, and loss of power and cooling capacity. The first-stage tests will apply to reactors that were shut down for regular inspections. The secondary tests are for all reactors and involve simulations for an earthquake accompanied by tsunami.
  • U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko spoke today on near-term lessons learned from Fukushima at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. NEI transmitted a letter to the commission on the NRC’s 90-day task force report and recommendations.  Jaczko is seeking a 90-day period for consideration of the task force recommendations, but the industry believes that more data is needed from Japan before many of the recommendations can be reviewed by the five NRC commissioners.
  • Reiterating the urgency of restarting shutdown nuclear reactors, the chairman of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives said the shortfall in electricity supply could cause more companies to shift manufacturing abroad and affect the global competitiveness of Japanese industry.

Media Highlights

Upcoming Events

  • The NRC’s near-term post-Fukushima task force will brief the commissioners on its report at a public meeting July 19. A public NRC meeting to discuss the report is scheduled for July 28.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Nanomaterials Can Make Nuclear Reactors Safer and More Efficient

By
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 …
1 comment
Read more

Why America Needs the MOX Facility

By
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…
Post a Comment
Read more

Nuclear Is a Long-Term Investment for Ohio that Will Pay Big

By
With 50 different state legislative calendars, more than half of them adjourn by June, and those still in session throughout the year usually take a recess in the summer. So springtime is prime time for state legislative activity. In the next few weeks, legislatures are hosting hearings and calling for votes on bills that have been battered back and forth in the capital halls.

On Tuesday, The Ohio Public Utilities Committee hosted its third round of hearings on the Zero Emissions Nuclear Resources Program, House Bill 178, and NEI’s Maria Korsnick testified before a jam-packed room of legislators.


Washingtonians parachuting into state debates can be a tricky platform, but in this case, Maria’s remarks provided national perspective that put the Ohio conundrum into context. At the heart of this debate is the impact nuclear plants have on local jobs and the local economy, and that nuclear assets should be viewed as “long-term investments” for the state. Of course, clean air and electrons …
Post a Comment
Read more