Skip to main content

Monday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site:

Japan Prime Minister Noda to Address United Nations

Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues

• Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda this week will address the United Nations’ general assembly in New York on the continuing need for safe and reliable nuclear energy in Japan. As part of the assembly, a meeting on nuclear safety and security will be held Sept. 22, during which lessons learned from the Fukushima accident will be discussed.

• Delegates to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s general conference are expected to endorse a voluntary action plan to enhance safety and emergency preparedness as a response to the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. The plan, adopted by the agency’s board last week, calls for IAEA inspectors to periodically review the safety of reactors worldwide at the request of their operators. Goshi Hosono, Japan’s minister for nuclear crisis management, told the conference today that the Fukushima reactors will be brought to cold shutdown by year’s end, a precondition for the return of evacuees from the restricted zone around the plant. Also, the International Nuclear Safety Group, chaired by Richard Meserve, is to hold a Sept. 19 roundtable discussion on nuclear energy safety issues and on actions needed to strengthen safety.

Media Highlights

• The country’s seismic safety standards should be revised for all nuclear reactors to withstand a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a 50-foot tsunami, the chairman of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission told The Wall Street Journal.

• The Associated Press reported on a large anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo on Monday.

Upcoming Events

• NEI and industry representatives will meet with NRC staff Sept. 21 to discuss actions related to the NRC’s Japan task force recommendations. The meeting will be webcast.

• Lessons learned from the Fukushima accident will be discussed in a Sept. 22 meeting on nuclear safety and security that will convene as part of the United Nations’ general assembly.

Comments

gunter said…
More corporate fallout from the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe as Seimens pulls out of the nuclear business...

Popular posts from this blog

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...