Skip to main content

USA Today Errs on Condition of Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima

By Eric McErlain
We've seen a few recent instances of reporters incorrectly stating the fuel in the pools melted. That's incorrect, as the AP reported earlier this year. However, the misconception persists. USA Today included the following in a story published earlier today:
Spent nuclear fuel pools that burned during the crisis are now under control.
The spent nuclear fuel assemblies at Fukushima never burned or melted, and in fact, were always underwater. Here's a more accurate description of the accident from the consultants at Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. You can find this description on page 9 of the report:
Disablement of spent fuel pool cooling and the possibility of earthquake-induced damage to the pools were the cause of great concern, which spurred one-week-long unconventional cooling efforts with helicopters and water cannons. While it was later established that the fuel assemblies in the pools remained underwater throughout the accident, the Fukushima experience does underscore the importance of reliable long-term cooling and protection of the spent fuel pools at nuclear plants.
We're sending a note to USA Today asking for a correction. Stand by for updates.

UPDATE: USA Today has informed us that they'll run a clarification that the fuel rods didn't burn. The correction should be appended to the online version of the story and run on page 2A or 3A in the newspaper.
Labels:

Comments

Pete said…
The USA Today on-line version says: "The fires at the spent nuclear fuel pools, which ignited hydrogen, but did not burn the spent fuel rods, are now under control." This appears to be different than the original, but is still not correct, is it? There were no spent fuel pool fires. The Unit 4 explosion is now thought to be from H2 leakage from Unit 3.
September 22, 2011 at 3:05 PM
SteveK9 said…
Guess they just couldn't give up on the word 'fire'.
September 22, 2011 at 3:33 PM
Brian Mays said…
Good to see you back, Eric.
September 22, 2011 at 4:01 PM
gunter said…
Hey did you guys catch that the 2.5" fuel rod fragment found 1.5 miles away was core material ejected by a hydrogen explosion?

During early days, some folks though these fuel fragments laying around on site in between the units were from the fuel pools.

It wasn't until NRC's Gary Hollihan identified in one of those NRC Task Force public meetings that the iodine-131 signature on some of the fragments could only have come from a core ejection.

To get that kind of trajectory, it would seem that one of the reactor pressure vessel heads would have had to be dislodged by the explosion.
September 22, 2011 at 8:39 PM
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