Skip to main content

IAEA Gives Japan Passing Grades, But Not an A

Not so very long ago, we mentioned that Japan invited in the International Atomic Energy Agency to review its stress tests at its nuclear energy facilities. Now, there’s news of how that went:

The team began its work on 23 January and delivered a Preliminary Summary Report to Japanese officials today and plans to finish the final report by the end of February.

So what’d it say? Here’s the good news:

  • Based on NISA instructions and commitments of the utilities, emergency safety measures were promptly addressed in Japanese NPPs following the accident on 11 March 2011;
  • NISA's practice of conducting an independent walkdown of emergency measures implemented at nuclear power plants enhances confidence that plants and operators can respond effectively during an emergency; and
  • By observing European stress tests, NISA is demonstrating its commitment to improving Japanese nuclear safety by gaining experience from other countries.

NISA is Japan’s NRC. NISA has been severely criticized for its coziness with the industry and the Japanese have decided they will replace (or supplement) it with a more independent NRC-like organization.

And here are the areas where there could be improvement:

  • Although NISA has demonstrated a notable level of transparency and interested party consultation related to the Comprehensive Safety Assessment and its review process, NISA should conduct additional meetings with interested parties near nuclear facilities that are subject to Comprehensive Safety Assessment;
  • NISA should use the experience it gains from the first few reviews to clarify its guidance for how nuclear power plants should conduct their Comprehensive Safety Assessments and for how NISA should review those assessments;
  • In the Secondary Assessment, there are areas that NISA could address more thoroughly, such as seismic safety margins and severe accident management; and
  • NISA should ensure that the Secondary Assessments are completed, evaluated and confirmed by regulatory review within an appropriate timeframe.

That’s not bad, though it sounds as though it’s the IAEA that really wants a secondary assessment and perhaps Japan’s version of it is not fully implemented. But no: these assessments belong to NISA’s procedures, so IAEA is commenting on the gap between NISA’s definition of a secondary assessment and its implementation.

In its report, the IAEA defines these assessments thusly:

The Primary Assessment will inform the decision whether to restart operations at suspended NPPs [nuclear power plants] and the Secondary Assessment will inform whether to continue or halt operations at operating NPPs. The Secondary Assessment is explained as being based on the stress tests in Europe and the deliberations of the Investigation and Verification Committee on the Accidents at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station (TEPCO).

So they are something the Japanese are adopting from the Europeans.It sounds like NISA did an okay but not great job of it. Hopefully, this means that the secondary assessments will be done again and in much more detail.

---

As mentioned in the last post on this subject, the idea behind all this is to reassure the public that the facilities can reopen safely. Let’s leave aside whether or how the public relations goal dovetails into the safety issues. To put it another way, plants not impacted by the earthquake are being shuttered by fear, not safety concerns, so really, public relations is all they need – the specific plant the IAEA visited, Oi, was not affect by the earthquake.

No word on whether the Japanese believe they accomplished this goal to their satisfaction, but Reuters seems to think so:

U.N. nuclear experts on Tuesday gave their backing to stress tests aimed at showing Japan's nuclear plants can withstand the sort of disasters that devastated the Fukushima plant last year, potentially bolstering a government campaign to restart idled reactors and avoid a summer power crunch.

But still, there’s this:

Local governments hosting nuclear plants, however, have said the stress tests were not sufficient to allow them to give their approval, with some requesting that findings from the Fukushima disaster be considered in drafting new safety standards as well.

The story goes on to explain that the government could switch on all the plants without local approval, but that custom dictates it not do so until the local officials sign off.

This story could be going on for awhile, but I notice that talk of Japan exiting the nuclear energy field seem to have tamped down. It really needs the electricity to get through the sweltering summer months.

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