NEI Nuclear Notes

Australia has decided to put a price on carbon in the hope that it can kick-start its renewable energy i ndustry and reduce emissions .  The Australian government has unveiled plans to impose a tax on carbon emissions for the worst polluters.  Prime Minister Julia Gillard said carbon dioxide emissions would be taxed at A$23 ($25) per ton from 2012. The country's biggest economic reform in a generation will cover some 500 companies. In 2015, a market-based trading scheme will be introduced. Households are expected to see consumer prices rise by nearly 1%, and the move has been criticised by the opposition. The announcement by Gillard has led to a healthy debate about the plan, to put it mildly, as you can see on the comment section of this article . The greater question is: Will this lead to Australia to reconsider nuclear power ? "No one will build coal-fired power plants," he [Paul Breslin]said. "It is already sending a signal to prospe...

From NEI’s Japan Micro-site : No Problems at Fukushima From Weekend Quake July 12, 2011 Plant Status • An earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck northeast Japan Sunday morning, prompting tsunami warnings for the coast, including Fukushima prefecture. Tokyo Electric Power Co. ordered workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to move to higher ground and suspended the transfer of low-level contaminated water from the plant to a large steel storage barge. However, no problems at the plant were reported after only a small tsunami wave reached the coast. Cooling water injections into reactors 1, 2 and 3 and nitrogen injections into reactors 1 and 2 continued as normal. • TEPCO suspended operation of its water decontamination system for 12 hours Sunday to repair a leak in the system. The continued operation of the system is crucial to establish a circulatory cooling system for the reactors and to decontaminate and reduce the water accumulating in the reactor building basements. TEPCO has ...

From NEI’s Japan Micro-site Contaminated Water Levels Beginning to Drop at Fukushima Daiichi July 8, 2011 Plant Status • Tokyo Electric Power Co. is continuing preparations to stabilize Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor 3 primary containment vessel. The company is using a robot-mounted camera to check whether a penetration joint is suitable for nitrogen injection that will help stabilize conditions inside the reactor vessel. TEPCO is also checking radiation levels, which have decreased by up to half after installing steel plates on the floor of the working area inside the reactor building. However, radiation levels in the building are still high—up to 5 rem per hour. • TEPCO is making headway in reducing the volume of contaminated water on site. In the last week, the new water filtration system has treated more than 13,000 tons of water. Recycling the treated water into the plant cooling systems also began last week, and the rate of water accumulation is now being reversed. The com...

A couple of days ago, I expressed a little disappointment that Bahrain was not joining the nuclear family – well, maybe it will, but it doesn’t seem to be on its radar right now. So let’s replace that bit of grimness : Like many others, Jordan is not giving up on its nuclear program, which it considers an essential part of its energy plan. The country has plans to build two reactors in the next decade, and two additional reactors are planned for the next 25 years. Jordan is at the stage where it is scoping out vendors: The country’s atomic commission has pre-selected possible technologies from Atomic Energy of Canada, Russia’s ZAO Atomstroyexport and Atmea, a joint venture between France’s Areva and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Rolling right along. --- Bill Gates has been enough a fan of nuclear energy to invest money in it. Have events in Japan changed his mind? Wired thought it would find out : The good news about nuclear is that there’s hardly been ...

From NEI’s Japan micro-site Robot Tests Radiation in Fukushima Reactor Building Plant Status Work is continuing to reduce radiation levels at Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor 3 building. Tokyo Electric Power Co. has used robots to vacuum radioactive debris and place steel sheets on the floor to decrease the potential for radiation exposure. Pending a reduction in radiation levels,  workers are scheduled to enter the building housing the reactor on July 17 to begin installing new piping to inject nitrogen gas into the reactor containment vessel. The inert gas will reduce the possibility of a hydrogen explosion in the containment building. The company already is injecting nitrogen into the containments for reactors 1 and 2. TEPCO said debris may have clogged a hose, temporarily reducing the flow of cooling water into reactor 1 at Fukushima Daiichi by about one-quarter of normal volume. Normally, the cooling system injects 3.7 metric tons of water an hour into the reactors, ...

Earlier today Congressman Ed Markey sought to score political points for renewables by referencing a monthly report on energy use (pdf) by the Energy Information Administration. Here’s Markey: Buried in a report issued by the U.S. Energy Information Administration are these facts: domestic production of renewable energy has now surpassed nuclear energy, and is swiftly gaining on oil. In their “Monthly Energy Review” released last week, the EIA said that in the first quarter of 2011, total domestic production of renewable energy (2.245 quadrillion BTUs of wind, solar, water, geothermal, biomass/biofuels) outpaced domestic production of nuclear energy (2.125 quadrillion BTUs). While words and numbers can explain a lot, below is the applicable chart that shows trends in U.S. energy production since 1973. Nuclear energy surpassed renewable energy in the early 1990s and has been ahead for most of the last 20 years. Primary Energy Production (Quadrillion Btu) p. 4 There’s ...

The Des Moines Register sees the nuclear energy facilities over in Nebraska surrounded by flood water and that people are fretting about them: People worry because just the phrase "nuclear power plant" conjures thoughts of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. People worry because the world is still watching as Japan deals with the Fukushima nuclear power plant from both a human health and economic perspective. Iowans worry because the Nebraska plants are separated from us by only a river rather than the Pacific Ocean. Actually, I’d be surprised if people needed to project back 25 or more years to find fear buttons to push. Any such button, fairly or not, is now labeled Fukushima. (And remember: not downplaying the seriousness of the accident, of course, but the health and economic issues resulting from the earthquake and tsunami were fantastically large.) Yet the public's concern should not be irrational or used to feed an anti-nuclear energy agenda or imply...