Japan to Tennessee

McCollum Terrific article at Bloomberg that takes a first try at crafting a minute by minute account of what happened at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11. Full of interesting details I did not know, including this bit about the number of workers at the plant that day:

The Fukushima Dai-Ichi station had 6,415 people on site that day. More than 5,500, like Matsumoto and Imamura, were subcontractors who reported to their clusters of offices in the plant for a head count.

It’s a big plant, but that’s a gigantic number. Then, this, following the earthquake:

After the head counts, thousands of subcontractors left to check if families were safe…

Before the tsunami struck.

Almost 1,500 town residents were killed or are listed as missing, out of a national toll exceeding 26,000.

After the tsunami.

I doubt Tepco knows for sure how many of its contractors were caught by the tsunami and the story doesn’t hazard a guess. Let’s hope all made it away safely.

It’s a long, detailed story and worth reading complete. Since so much of it is told by workers and others who went through the ordeal, verifiable truth takes second seat to impressions of the day. But it’s true enough – an emotional truth. A full accounting of that day and its impact on Japan Fukushima Prefecture will wait.

I’m not sure why, but Bloomberg does not credit a writer or team of writers. Hopefully, it will rectify that.

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After the events at Fukushima Daiichi, TVA felt the heat from (one of) its local newspapers, The Nashville Tennesseean. So Bill McCollum, TVA’s COO, took a shot at responding:

Upon hearing about damage at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, the Tennessee Valley Authority assembled a team of nuclear experts to assess the situation and begin evaluating how lessons learned from Japan could help make TVA plants safer and more reliable.

And the result?

Our initial review indicates TVA's plants can withstand earthquakes, tornadoes and floods that are far more severe than any recorded in our area. Our plants also have redundant backup power and emergency systems — beyond those the Fukushima plant is believed to have — to keep our reactors, fuel pools and other facilities secure if something were to go wrong.

But he is the COO of TVA. Cynics will doubt:

Based on what we learn from Japan, the U.S. probably will develop modifications to provide nuclear plants in this country with even greater margins of safety. But looking for ways to make nuclear plants safer and more reliable is nothing new. It's part of our daily business at TVA and at nuclear plants across America.

You can read the whole thing for more. McCollum does a great job with keeping his statements clear and direct and he tries to forestall cynicism by noting that you don’t really have to trust him. Others have open eyes, too.

TVA’s Bill McCollum

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

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