Skip to main content

Friday Update

By

From NEI’s Japan micro-site:

NRC Commissioners Deny Groups’ Petition to Suspend New Reactor Licensing

Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues

• Commissioners at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today denied a request by several groups to suspend licensing and standardized design certification decisions pending completion of the NRC Fukushima Task Force evaluation of the implications of the Fukushima accident. The commissioners also denied a petition to suspend hearings and opportunities for public comment on reactor or used fuel pool issues identified for investigation by the task force. The commissioners granted the groups’ request for a safety analysis of regulatory implications of the events in Japan, incorporating stakeholder input into the process.

• New Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda visited the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy facility on Thursday. He expressed gratitude to workers who are stabilizing the facility, according to a BBC report. Noda credited workers with reducing the levels of radiation in waste water inside the plant by a factor of 10 million since the accident. In talks later that day with the governor of Fukushima Prefecture, Noda pledged funding for decontaminating areas with high radiation.

Plant Status

• Japanese researchers have revised estimates of the radioactivity in seawater near Japan as a result of the accident, adding releases that initially were airborne but have since been deposited in the sea. The resulting number, 15,000 terabecquerels (405,000 curies), is three times TEPCO’s earlier estimate, which included only releases directly to water. The new estimates do not reflect any change in the total amount of radiation believed to have been released as a result of the accident. Throughout the event, the Japanese government has conducted ongoing monitoring of the ocean water and seafood near Fukushima Daiichi. When government action limits were exceeded in April, the government restricted fishing along the coast near Fukushima Daiichi, placing a specific restriction on the consumption of one type of fish (sand lance) that was found to have radiation levels in excess of the government action limit. Although levels of radioactivity in ocean water and fish are currently not detectable, the restrictions remain in place.

Upcoming Events

• The Nippon Foundation will hold an international symposium on radiation and health risks Sept. 11-12, 2011, at Fukushima Medical University. Participants will include radiation experts from 14 nations, the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The symposium will get under way at 9 a.m. Tokyo time on Sept. 11 and will be broadcast via Ustream.

• The NRC commissioners will be briefed on short-term actions recommended in its Japan task force report in a Sept. 14 public meeting. The meeting will be webcast.

• The NRC commissioners will be briefed on prioritization of recommendations from its Japan task force in an Oct. 11 public meeting. The briefing will be webcast.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
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...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
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...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
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...
6 comments
Read more