NEI Nuclear Notes

Tom Kauffman Last night, Fox News picked up a report from Russia Today concerning  a leak in the spent fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi Unit Five . Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was forced to switch off the cooling system at Reactor Unit 5, after engineers discovered it had been leaking water. If the system is not repaired within the next nine days, temperatures are expected to soar, Russian news site RT reported Sunday. As our readers might recall, our go to guy on Fukushima and spent fuel is Tom Kauffman, a former reactor operator from Three Mile Island. Here's what he wrote to me after I shared the Fox News link with him: The used fuel has cooled to the point that even if all the water was lost, radiation levels would increase due to a loss of shielding, but there’s no way the fuel produces enough heat to damage itself let alone incinerate. A good rule of thumb: Even in a densely packed fuel pool, 107 days after fresh used fuel is placed in the...

On Friday, the Tokyo Electric Power Company released the following statement: After nearly two years of discussions, the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) have reached an important agreement that will allow implementation of a plan to allow clean groundwater to bypass the Fukushima Daiichi plant and flow in a controlled manner into the sea, subject to stringent safety and environmental controls. [...] Once in operation, the groundwater bypass system will divert the flow of naturally occurring groundwater between the hilltop and the contaminated building basements built on lower ground. This will reduce the amount flowing into the building basements by a maximum of 100 tons from the current amount of around 400 tons/day to 300 tons/day. Diverting this groundwater will reduce the volume of water that becomes contaminated and then needs to be cleaned and stored on site. This, in turn, is expected t...

Steven Kraft The following is a guest post by Steven Kraft, senior technical advisor at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). Last September, Kraft traveled to Japan with U.S. chief nuclear officers to meet with their Japanese counterparts to discuss lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi accident. A nuclear industry veteran of over four decades, Kraft recently marked his 35 th anniversary working at NEI. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011 left over 16,000 people dead and 3,000 missing.  While none of these lives were lost due to the nuclear plant accident at Fukushima Daiichi caused by the tsunami, we mourn the loss of these lives to forces of nature that we are striving to better understand to better protect our facilities and avoid future accidents. Last September, it was sobering to see the towns ravaged by the earthquake and tsunami now suspended in time. The residents cannot return to recover and rebuild their homes and busine...

Tom Kauffman The following is a guest post written by NEI's Tom Kauffman. Though Tom works in NEI's media relations shop. He also spent 23 years working at  Three Mile Island , seven of those as a licensed reactor operator.  There has been a spate of online posts and articles claiming that the failure of the used fuel storage pool at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 could result in: “a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire,” that could have widespread health effects all over the world. These claims are false and irresponsible. Consider the facts: If for any reason there was a rapid loss of water from the Unit 4 storage pool exposing all of the used fuel to air, the used fuel can’t catch fire or melt because it has been cooled for more than two and-a-half years and no longer generates enough heat to damage itself. The used fuel in the pools at the other three damaged Fukushima units is even older and colder. By design, it is physically impossible for the fue...

For about the past hour we've been monitoring news that a 5.3 magnitude earthquake has struck Japan . According to an Associated Press report, the U.S. Geological Service has reported that the earthquake originated 13 miles beneath Fukushima Prefecture about 110 miles Northeast of Tokyo. The critical information now is the following: The Japanese news agency Kyodo News reported that the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., observed no abnormality in radiation or equipment after the quake. It's a little after 4:00 a.m. in Japan on Friday morning, so we can expect to see additional details being reported over the next few hours. If and when there are other details to report, we'll pass them along. FRIDAY UPDATE : No new concerns at nation's nuclear facilities according to House of Japan : A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck Fukushima in the northeast early Friday morning, the Japan Meteorological Agency said, but no abnormalities were observed at the reg...

While the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit has ended and the American delegation has returned home, we're still seeing reports come in from their time in Japan. The latest is this video diary from Peter Sena, President and Chief Nuclear Officer of First Energy . In this video vignette, Sena reflect on the lessons he learned after visiting Fukushima Daiichi and meeting face to face with TEPCO employees who are working to clean up the site: As always, please keep up to date with the latest content by following #CNOSummit on Twitter.

Maria Korsnick Constellation Energy Chief Nuclear Officer Maria Korsnick was in Japan last week touring the country’s nuclear facilities with a prominent group of U.S. chief nuclear officers.  This is the second in a series of travel logs that Maria recorded. You can read an earlier diary entry from Maria, here . Additional coverage of the CNO Summit is on Twitter at #CNOSummit . Earlier this week I toured Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini. The stations are only 7.5 miles apart but the contrast is remarkable. When approaching Daiichi, we were stopped at a village 12 miles from the station. The area was previously used as a training facility for Japan's soccer team, but today it serves as temporary housing for site workers and a plant access checkpoint. Each of us received a whole body count before boarding a bus to Daiichi. The view from the bus window will stay with me forever. It looked like a war zone. The earthquake and the force of the tsunami were evident ever...

Ed Halpin, SVP & CNO of PG&E Ed Halpin, Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer at PG&E , was in Japan this week with virtually all of his American colleagues as part of the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit. He shared this diary entry with us after reflecting on what he saw at Fukushima Daiichi earlier this week. Be sure to follow all the updates from Japan on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag. As nuclear operators, we have earned a special trust from the communities we serve. My time here reaffirms my belief that the U.S. nuclear industry must always maintain its strong focus on safe operations, intensive training programs, effective peer-review processes, and the continued sharing of lessons-learned across the nation and throughout the world. The U.S. industry has always relied on redundant layers of safety in operating its facilities and is making exceptional gains in implementing a program known as " FLEX " to further enhance safety in the face of ex...

Editor's Note: For the past week, NEI's John Keeley has been accompanying a delegation of American chief nuclear officers on a tour of Japan. This is his last blog entry he'll make before returning home to the U.S.  To find all of the content related to this week's trip from NEI Nuclear Notes, click here . And for all of the chatter about the trip on Twitter, check out the #CNOSummit hash tag. Thanks to John for a job well done.  (Tokyo, September 13) I won't miss jet-lag-induced risings at 3 a.m.each and every day -- and apparently I was joined in those by each and every American chief nuclear officer and communicator -- but just about everything else on this trip created a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. So I thought I'd share those moments that stood out most to me:  At every formal engagement between U.S. and Japanese nuclear officers this week our hosts started the proceedings with a formal apology "for the concern and difficulty and conf...

At one point Wednesday, while within a few hundred yards of the three melted down reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, I was outfitted in three layers of gloves (two rubber, one cotton), plastic covers over my shoes, a very hot and very insulating Tyvek jumpsuit, and a respirator mask. The interior of our tour bus was fantastically shielded in plastic, and when, while maneuvering on a road between the ocean that sent the monstrous March 2011 tsunami and Daiichi's turbine buildings, our driver dramatically increased our speed as we arrived in front of unit 3, where the dose rate was highest on the site, to limit our exposure. Storefront in an abandoned village. All week the chief nuclear officers on this trip have regularly referenced their collective need to experience, first-hand, conditions in Japan that all but only a few have only read about. Our bus' movements, and our in-person engagements with shift managers and control room operators on duty the afternoon of March 11, ...

The past two days in Japan, U.S. chief nuclear officers have toured Fukushima Daini and Daiichi, and with respect to the latter, left the experience appreciably changed. We've made a point each day of inviting the CNOs to the very back of our tour bus and asking them to share their experiences on camera with us. It's true that every CNO we spoke with identified the Daiichi visit as life-altering, but no reaction seemed better representative of the CNOs than that of Jeff Forbes , Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer for Entergy Nuclear . Just watch. Please remember to follow our updates on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag.

Maria Korsnick Maria Korsnick is Chief Nuclear Offiicer (CNO) of Constellation Energy . In the aftermath of Fukushima, Maria appeared in a series of videos for NEI explaining exactly what changes the industry was effecting in the wake of Fukushima .  She's in Japan this week as part of a delegation of American CNOs touring the country’s nuclear facilities as part of the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit. This is the first in a series of travel logs that Maria recorded to share her experiences. Please remember to follow our updates on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag. As I boarded the plane for Japan, I wondered what it was going to be like to experience our business in a completely different culture. Once I arrived, it didn’t take long to generate some first impressions. My hosts were welcoming and polite, surroundings were neat and orderly and properties were well-cared for. It’s abundantly clear that the Japanese people take pride in their surroundings. Japan has only one-thi...

The following post was sent to us via email by John Keeley, who is travelling with a delegation of American chief nuclear officers in Japan this week. You can follow John's observations on Twitter by following @nei_media and the #CNOSummit hash tag. In summer, in morning or early afternoon, when a traveler moves by air many thousands of miles from east to west, he never quite escapes the bright sun of day. My communicator colleagues here in Japan all noted the difficulty we had securing substantive rest on our flights over the Pacific during this novel journey. We were ever chasing the sun, they said. The American chief nuclear officers we're following with our cameras and electronica this week have been, ever since their arrival here, in perpetual motion in pursuit of safety lessons. In making the unprecedented and extraordinary commitment to "put eyes on the problem" created by the 3/11 Fukushima tragedy, our CNOs, it occurs to me, are following a global commit...

Following on John Keeley's message from earlier this morning , here's the first video message we've received out of Japan regarding the #CNOSummit that's taking place there this week. It's from Randy Edington, Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer of Arizona Public Service . Though the video is intended for Randy's team back in Arizona, we think the message about the trip is universal: Look for more content from the #CNOSummit all week both here at NEI Nuclear Notes and on Twitter.

Often, I travel most modestly on behalf of the U.S. nuclear industry -- like say up and back to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for public meetings, some 7 miles from NEI's offices in Northwest Washington. But about a month ago, as word began circulating in the office about a sizable contingent (almost all) of our nation's chief nuclear officers traveling to Japan to meet with their Japanese CNO counterparts, NEI communications leadership saw a clear role to try and capture the historic visit in words and images. And tweets, of course. My bosses picked me to tag along with the CNOs (almost 30 of them), as a bit of an embedded reporter. I've a daunting task in that regard.  To be sure, this is a historic visit; nothing of its kind has been undertaken before in the history of commercial nuclear operations in the U.S. For the first time, the chief nuclear officers from the U.S. and Japan will meet together to discuss lessons learned from a severe accident: specifically,...

“The central government’s policy on nuclear power generation will return to the pre-disaster one,” said Tatsuya Murakami, mayor of Tokai village in Ibaraki Prefecture, on July 21. “By postponing a solution to the problems resulting from the nuclear accident, the government will do what it wants to do. “It is disappointing that Japan will not be able to change itself despite the serious accident it caused,” he said. I know, it sounds like sour grapes. But Murakami has a grievance and maybe he’s letting off some steam. It’s really not true that the Japanese government has postponed solutions.  Last month, Japan Atomic Power began installing filter-attached vent equipment and erecting sea walls to meet the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s new safety rules on nuclear power generation that took effect on July 8. The reason Murakami is so unhappy is that the Liberal Democratic Party (the conservatives) took over the upper chamber in Japan’s diet, giving Prime Minis...

Official points to affected area on map. A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck Japan overnight , triggering tsunami warnings across the island nation, but fortunately the warnings were lifted soon after and the quakes caused very little damage. Of course, we've got out eyes on the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, and things there look quiet according to ABC News: No damage has been reported at monitoring posts and water treatment facilities at the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, the nuclear facility that was devastated by tsunami waters after the 2011 quake, according to the Tokyo Electric Power Company. All the workers were moved to higher ground on the site and told to stay inside after the tsunami warning. For a look at what the U.S. nuclear industry has done in the wake of Fukushima, please consult our Safety First microsite .

Last week, we alerted our readers to reports out of Japan that the temperatures inside Unit #2 at Fukushima Daiichi were rising . At the time, we noted that some of the reports of the news were, "rather breathless." That judgment has been borne out, as we received the following welcome news from Japan overnight: A faulty thermometer is likely to blame for rising temperatures inside a stricken nuclear reactor at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, authorities said Monday, as Japan prepares to mark one year since a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown. [...] A nuclear expert agreed that a faulty temperature gauge inside the Unit 2 reactor is the most likely cause for the higher heat reading. Tokyo mega-quake prediction Inside the Japan nuclear exclusion zone Japan considers restarting two reactors Japan exclusion zone's lone resident Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at U.S. nuclear power plants, told CNN that the prospect of another catas...

Over the past 24 hours we've seen a number of account concerning rising temperatures inside reactor #2 at Fukushima Daiichi. While we noted this item over at SafetyFirst.nei.org yesterday morning, some accounts of the news have been rather breathless . If you'd like a sober account of what's actually happening there right now, I'd suggest reading the following account from World Nuclear News . Here's the relevant passage: This stability of unit 2 was disturbed for a few days, however, when Tepco tried to improve cooling further by tuning the rates of water injection. [...] After making this change, Tepco noted a tendency for increasing temperature at the bottom of the reactor vessel. Within a matter of hours the company decided to reverse the change and restore the previous injection rates, but the temperature continued to slowly rise. Two of the three temperature sensors at the bottom of the reactor vessel edged up by about 2 degrees C. The third, however, rose b...

Power from thorium : This is [Bob] Greene's first time running [for President], and he's not sure if it's his last, but he certainly wants the world to know his position on thorium — a natural radioactive chemical element he hopes can change the nation's dependence on foreign oil. Why thorium? This energy source is used to create nuclear energy, much like uranium. However, he said it is safer to use and produces a waste product with a shorter radioactive life span. Like nuclear power, thorium would not create a huge carbon footprint, such as burning coal or oil, he said. The writer gets a little muddled about nuclear energy here, but Greene has his arguments for thorium down pat. But why a single issue candidacy revolving around thorium? He said he doesn't think President Barack Obama is taking advantage of the possibilities of thorium. "I see this as an issue of national security," he said. "We can stop oil wars if we do this...