NEI Nuclear Notes

It’s been another contentious week on nuclear and the pro-nuclear blogging community has been right in the mix. This week we have the privilege of hosting the carnival for the fifth time that’s been on-going for more than a year. Nuclear Politics To start, Rod Adams at Atomic Insights has a piece describing what’s happening between the NRC, the AP1000 and Friends of the Earth. According to Rod, the NRC appears to be wavering in its commitment to its own established process because some believe that receiving 14,000 emails on the AP1000 design certification indicates a high level of general public opposition. Rod notes that the emails are mainly from a single group, the FOE, who have professionally opposed nuclear energy for 40 years. The group claims credit for orchestrating nearly every one of those emails as part of a campaign against nuclear energy in general, not against the AP1000 in particular. The FOE sources who have identified the cited "technical issues" have q...

From NEI’s Japan Earthquake launch page : Update as of 3:30 p.m. EDT, Friday, June 10 Plant Status Starting Friday, June 10, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) will begin a weeklong test run of the new water filtration system it intends to use to decontaminate and reuse the 105,000 tons of highly radioactive water that has flooded the facilities at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The system is expected to reduce concentrations of radioactive materials in the water by a factor of up to 1 million. Oil and salt will be also removed. Contaminated water is accumulating at a rate of 500 tons per day as cooling water is injected into the reactors. The system is expected to treat 1,200 tons of water a day and should aid TEPCO's efforts to control water management issues at the plant. There are growing fears that the contaminated water could otherwise start overflowing the plant basements by late June. TEPCO reports that two of its workers have received radiation dose...

Over the past week or so at Grist, it’s been hit-jobs galore against nuclear. A fellow by the name of Arne Jungjohann published four negative pieces loaded with jaded contentions to stir up discussion. Later in the campaign, another fellow by the name of Paul Gipe brought up a flawed study on nuclear costs and risks to add to Grist’s polemic. Here is the first of what will be a 3-part series of responses: Grist’s Part 1 - Why is the United States so obsessed with nuclear power? To begin, here’s Mr. Jungjohann’s dramatic start to his series : Fukushima provides enough grounds to take every single nuclear power plant on the face of the Earth off-line. Regardless of whether the cause is an earthquake, a tsunami, a flood, a plane crash, a terrorist attack, or simple human error, failure of the emergency power system leads to uncontrollable consequences. Enough grounds? Uncontrollable consequences? Although Fukushima Daiichi is still recovering, an historical tsunami is the th...

The Japanese government has released its report on the Fukushima accident, with the start of a timeline of events, a categorization and presentation of lessons learned, and, I thought, a proposed transformation of its regulatory structure to something far more rigorous (and a lot more like that in this country.) But there’s a lot to absorb here. Take a read and we’ll return to it in the days ahead. The report will be presented at IAEA’s Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety on June 20. --- The US House Science Committee in a report on Wednesday blasted the Obama administration for terminating the long-planned Yucca Mountain national nuclear-waste repository with no scientific or technical justification. The criticism is the latest to come from the Republican-led House, and is largely a reiteration of complaints heard from a House energy oversight committee last week. That’s from Platts and they’re right – Congress has had a lot to say about Yucca Mountain lately. H...

From NEI’s Japan Earthquake launch page : Update as of 3 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, June 8 Plant Status Highly radioactive debris and water continue to hamper recovery efforts at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy facility. TEPCO had removed about 280 containers of radioactive debris by Tuesday, which includes clearing the way for entry into the building for reactor 3. Now that workers can enter the building, TEPCO plans to inject nitrogen gas into the reactor 3 containment to stabilize the reactor. Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said fuel rods in reactors 1 and 2 at Fukushima Daiichi began to be exposed sooner after the accident began than previously estimated. NISA said cooling water levels fell below the top of uranium fuel inside reactor 1 two hours after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disabled the facility's cooling systems. In a separate estimate, NISA said that between 800 and 1,000 kilograms of hydrogen w...

From NEI’s Japan Earthquake launch page Update as of 4 P.M. EDT, Monday, June 6 Plant Status Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is testing a filtering system it will use to decontaminate highly radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi site. More than 105,000 metric tons (28 million gallons) of contaminated water has collected in the basements of the reactor and turbine buildings from reactor cooling operations and is accumulating at a rate of 500 tons per day, the company said. The filtering system, expected to begin operating June 15, will decontaminate this water, enabling storage in temporary tanks for reuse as cooling water. Two hundred and seventy tanks with a combined capacity of nearly 8 million gallons are to be installed at the facility. A newly installed gauge at Fukushima Daiichi reactor 1 shows pressure inside the reactor close to atmospheric, confirming that the pressure vessel has been damaged. Additionally, two robots detected high radiation levels (300...

While I enjoy a little alarmism as much as the next person, an article at CBS really ups the ante in the Mad Max sweepstake: The world faces an array of intractable energy problems that, if anything, have only worsened in recent weeks.  These problems are multiplying on either side of energy’s key geological divide: below ground , once-abundant reserves of easy-to-get “conventional” oil, natural gas, and coal are drying up; above ground , human miscalculation and geopolitics are limiting the production and availability of specific energy supplies. Nuclear energy plays into the above ground scenario and author Michael Klare sees one country after another abandoning nuclear energy. After surveying Germany and Japan, he continues: China also acted swiftly, announcing on March 16th that it would stop awarding permits for the construction of new reactors pending a review of safety procedures, though it did not rule out such investments altogether.  Other countries, ...