Skip to main content

Wednesday Update

By

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 recovering from an accident.

• Japan’s prime minister, in a major policy speech Tuesday, pledged his administration to “redouble its concerted efforts to bring the nuclear accident to a conclusion.” Speaking to Japan’s Diet, Yoshihiko Noda said, “To ensure that there is no recurrence of such a nuclear accident, we will work tenaciously to identify the causes of the accident based on international perspectives and will provide comprehensive information on such causes and prevention measures.” Noda said that nuclear energy facilities undergoing safety inspections will be restarted, but he added that the country must reduce its use of nuclear energy.

Plant Status

• Tokyo Electric Power Co. reports that contaminated water levels at the plant continue to decline. Since June, TEPCO has been using a system that decontaminates radioactive water from the site and recycles it as coolant for the reactors. The company says accumulated contaminated water is contained in the basements of the turbine buildings.

• A magnitude 6.0 earthquake, centered off shore, occurred near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in the early morning hours of Sept. 12. One of two temporary air control compressors for reactor 1 malfunctioned after the earthquake and was replaced with a backup diesel compressor. No other damage was reported.

New Products

• A question in the “Ask the Experts” section on NEI’s Safety First website asks how nuclear plants ensure they have sufficient funds to cover decommissioning costs in the event of an accident. The answer: Facility operators must make ongoing contributions to a decommissioning fund. Here is the response.

Media Highlights

• Some areas near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may remain off-limits for years, National Public Radio reports.

Upcoming Events

• The NRC commissioners will be briefed in a public meeting Oct. 11 on prioritization of long-term recommendations from its Japan task force. The briefing will be webcast.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
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...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
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...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
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...
6 comments
Read more