The Leak at Fukushima

No two ways about it:

Some 45 tons of highly radioactive water leaked Sunday from desalination equipment used to decontaminate the radioactive water in Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and it is unclear if any made it to the sea, a Tepco official said Monday.

This isn’t good. No radioactive anything should be flowing anywhere at this point and no excuse mitigates it.

Having said that, the threat seems low:

"Even if all 300 liters reached the sea, the radiation would be diluted, and the amount that escaped is tiny compared with what has already leaked into the sea (on earlier occasions)," said Genichiro Wakabayashi, a radiology professor at Kinki University, playing down the potential danger of the leak. "The leak (even if to the sea or to the groundwater) would not be enough to increase radiation levels in marine or agricultural products in the Tohoku region," he said.

He may be “playing down the potential danger” because that’s all the potential danger there is. But at least as of now, it is not known whether any of the water went into the ocean, if it contains radioactive strontium, and if it does, how much.

"We currently believe the leak will have no effect on the water circulation system or our judgment on whether we've achieved a cold shutdown of the reactors," said TEPCO plant location headquarters representative Junichi Matsumoto.

That’s not much of a response. The story still has too many “may haves” to be certain about it. The international media has been on the job, but details have been widely divergent. Check back on our Japan Updates this week for more on this.

You can check out the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum report about this here.

---

An interesting story about nuclear energy in Indonesia – it’s planning two plants – contains some tidbits that aroused further curiosity. For example:

The cost of building a nuclear reactor, using the example of Vietnam, may reach Rp 20 trillion (US$2.1 billion). While initial investment is expensive, nuclear plants are cheaper to operate than oil-fueled power plants.

I don’t think most stories from elsewhere would use oil-fueled plants as a reference point, but that’s where Indonesia gets a lot (29 percent, with brown coal at 44 percent) of its electricity from. That’s rather – awful.

And consider this estimation of future electricity needs (form the World Nuclear Organization):

With an industrial production growth rate of 10.5%, electricity demand is estimated to reach 175 TWh in 2013 and 450 billion kWh in 2026. At present a low reserve margin with poor power plant availability results in frequent blackouts.

The nuclear facilities promise to generate a lot of electricity all at once.

Batan then looked for other possible locations for a nuclear power plant, eventually choosing Bangka-Belitung. The government currently plans to build a 10,000-MW reactor West Bangka and an 8,000-MW reactor South Bangka with a launch date of 2021 or 2022.

Batan is the National Nuclear Energy Agency (Batan is an acronym for the agency in Indonesian – Badan Tenaga Nuklir Nasional – I like the spelling for nuclear – you can visit it here). Frankly, Batan could probably learn to get buy-in from an area’s residents before setting down a plant, but there you are.

In the future, Taswanda [Taryo, Batan’s research chief] said, Batan wanted to “improve communication” with the residents of Muria and Bangka and share with them how a nuclear power plant might improve their well being.

“Electricity from a nuclear power plant is very important for industries to expand their businesses, which in the end can absorb more workers,” he said.

So – live and learn. The story points out that Batan will not build any plant, just select a location. And no vendor to build a plant has been solicited much less chosen. So we’ll see if the country has a facility up and running by 2022.

In Bangka Indonesia. I volunteer to – do – anything there. To help the facility. Of course.

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...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog