Skip to main content

Monday Update

From NEI’s Safety First web site:

TEPCO Begins Purifying, Desalinating Fukushima Daiichi Used Fuel Pools

November 7, 2011

Plant Status

  • Tokyo Electric Power Co. reported Sunday that it has begun removing radioactive cesium from the used fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi reactor 2. TEPCO said this is a preparatory step to desalinating the pool water to avert corrosion of metallic components. After the March 11 accident, TEPCO used seawater to cool the fuel in the reactors and the pools. The company has been purifying and recycling water since July to cool the reactors, but it has now begun to purify the water in the used fuel pools. TEPCO reported that it has already begun desalinating reactor 4’s pool.

Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues

  • The Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization, which conducts nuclear facility inspections for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, is to establish an independent committee to investigate whether its inspection procedures have relied excessively on guidance documents provided by the industry itself. The investigation was ordered by Yukio Edano, the minister for economy, trade and industry.

New Products

  • The last in a five-part series on how the U.S. nuclear industry is responding to lessons learned from the Fukushima accident is now available on NEI’s Safety First website.

Media Highlights

  • According to Reuters, a draft of the International Energy Agency's 2011 World Energy Outlook forecasts global nuclear generation capacity increasing 60 percent by 2035. The report’s most pessimistic scenario has nuclear capacity falling 15 percent as a result of slowed growth due to the Fukushima Daiichi accident.

Comments

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