Skip to main content

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site:

Fukushima City to Decontaminate 110,000 Residences

September 28, 2011

Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues

  • Fukushima City plans to remove radioactive materials from private houses, parks and meeting venues in the city. The plan includes decontamination of all 110,000 residences in the city over two years, with emphasis on households with children. Cleaners will scrub roofs, remove concrete and decontaminate ditches.
  • Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission is resuming its discussions on revisions to the country’s nuclear policy, which were started last year and interrupted by the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy facility. The commission has added new members with expertise in safety. The country’s policy on nuclear energy was developed in 1956 and has been revised roughly every five years since.
  • The Makinohara City Assembly has called for the permanent shutdown of a local nuclear energy facility unless its safety can be guaranteed. The city is within 6.5 miles of Chubu Electric’s Hamaoka nuclear power station. Three of the facility’s five reactors were shut down following the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. The other two had already been taken off line for decommissioning.

New Products

  • The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry nuclear energy facility withstood a historic spate of tornadoes earlier this year, shutting off external electricity to the plant. Managers at the facility talk about safety measures in a new report on NEI’s Safety First website.

Media Highlights

  • Japan’s government will have to remove and store as much as 29 million cubic meters of contaminated soil as cleanup progresses after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, Reuters reports.
  • Radiation levels approaching the government-set safety limit have been detected in rice harvested In Nihonmatsu, a city near Fukushima Daiichi, the Yomiuri Shimbun reports. Rice grown in the city will be subjected to additional testing.

Upcoming Events

  • The NRC commissioners will be briefed on prioritization of long-term recommendations from its Japan task force in a public meeting Oct. 11. The briefing will be webcast.
  • NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko will participate in an Oct. 4 American Nuclear Society/NRC live online webinar for nuclear bloggers. Participants may submit questions in advance to BlogMtg1.Resource@nrc.gov.
  • Jaczko also will speak on the global implications of the Fukushima accident Oct. 5 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. More information is at the National Journal’s event website.

Comments

Anonymous said…
A dumm question: does the area that the Japanese ministry is estimating they will have to remove seem correct to you, given that they are limiting to 5 milliSieverts per year above background, and that they are estimating average background as 2.4 milliSieverts per year? Based on their radiation map & the MEXT monitoring readings, I can't get this to work. When you allow for buildings and roads (which have to be washed, but no soil removal is required), the estimate of tons to be removed also seems out of line? Furthermore, the article says that soil is only to be removed in towns. If they decontaminated the entire 30 km exclusion zone, which is roughly semicircular, it would be 1400 km2. 7.4 milliSieverts per year, is about 0.85 microSieverts per hour, if I am doing this correctly. Granted, there is a large spike extending up to Fukushima City outside the 30 km ring that is contaminated, but also there are a lot of areas inside the ring that are below 0.85 microSieverts per hour at this point?

Do you think their figures are correct?



I'd love to see the basis of their calculations spelled out.
jimwg said…
>> Fukushima City plans to remove
>> radioactive materials from private
>> houses, parks and meeting venues
>> in the city.

In lieu life long doing just okay in high radiation background locales far in excess of Fukushima, is this fanaticism really necessary? Really?

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin