Topic: Nuclear Energy

[The China Fox]

Hmm. I'll state my position; I'm a postgrad Chem/Energy Eng student doing research into hydrogen fuels. In my view anyone who says nuclear doesn't have a very big part to play in future energy production is ignoring the facts. The world population is growing. People want to move away from fossil fuel burning, as it is unsustainable and polluting. Renewables are currently not cost effective, which is why people like me are working on making them more viable. The argument about running out of food before we run out of energy makes no sense, as I will expand on later. Nuclear is the only real viable option we have in the interim between renewables not being cost effective and new methods of energy generation, such as fusion, not being commercially viable.

'Salting' the earth through radiation wastes could be part of that though it would be nice if we didn't leave a legacy, for our future generations of mutation through genetic damage  The Nuclear power issue is a side issue: Population growth will stop eventually but we might not like the consequences that bring this to pass. Nuclear power (assuming it does all you say) will delay the inevitable.

The problem is literally millions of years into the future. A football field, in terms of the total surface area of the world, is ridiculously small. Humans inhabit 0.05% of the total surface area of the world, although 12% of the total surface area (41% of land area) is used for agriculture. The world will reach its natural capacity far before that percentage is greatly increased; even using a very dystopic projection of 20 billion (most say 9 billion is peak world population), we will not occupy very much of the world's surface at all, meaning that the actual amounts of nuclear wastes produced are insignificant in the extreme when considering the sheer size of the world's surface available for disposal (without wanting to sound too much like a callous anti-environmental c*nt; the actual area really is tiny).

We use oil/coal/gas electricity to power and petrol to move all of the equipment, machinery and facilitate the logistical movements. And we will require energy to deal with the waste. Pretty much forever, from a human point of view.
You will agree that fossil fuels are required (and in great volume).

The headline volume figures may be great, from a layman's perspective. But that is to ignore the colossal amounts of fuels produced every single day. World production is c. 80 million barrels of oil per day, and has been since since 2005 (2011, BP). 80 million barrels, per day. A standard stream for nuclear fuel production (from uranium mining/transport to electricity produced) requires a very, very tiny proportion of that, per year. Any problem we encounter here will be very far into the future, and the rate of technological advancement in such areas as hydrogen fuels means that the probability is that it won't be a problem by the time fossil fuels are even close to running out. Thus this is not a strong argument to use.


Something which is often ignored with relation to oil production is that we are unlikely to ever actually run out of oil. It doesn't work like that. There isn't a big underground tank of oil which will eventually be empty. New oil is being produced all the time by the same natural processes which made the old oil. The problem is that a lot of oil is more expensive to extract than current reserves, due to more expensive techniques required to free it (when an oil field is 'retired', it probably still contains up to 30% of its original oil; the pressure has just dropped so much that it is difficult to extract the remainder, though there are techniques such as using pumped solvents in order to extract more if it becomes commercially viable to do so).

Thus, the following;

The 4 million is estimated at enough for 60 years at current usage rates. And if you make that 20 million in the earth's crust (to make the arithmetic easier  ) then, that would be 0.000005% of the optimistic (I like optimism though) 40 trillion figure you suggested.

is also a weak argument. Estimates for remaining gas reserves, coal reserves, oil reserves, have been continually pushed up, as new commercially viable fields are discovered or used. The same will apply to uranium production.

If you are spending more oil (equivalent) then you are wasting energy to create energy. That's why Nuclear is costly. You tot up all the extraction, maintenance and post-waste stewardship then you have an energy source that is more costly than the fossil equivalent.

Sorry, but this is absolute bollocks. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, that's a fundamental law of thermodynamics. You don't ''waste'' energy to create energy, otherwise there would be no commercial point in making any nuclear fuel. If there was no commercial point, it would not happen, because noone would pay for it. Simple as that. You may say they are subsidised. They are not, at least nowhere near as much as renewables are.

Besides, it's not a simple choice between the two. There needs to be a mix. Fossil fuels are good in power plants because unlike nuclear, energy production can easily be ramped up in peak times (e.g., half time during a World Cup Final). Renewables cannot do this at all; energy can't be easily stored, other than in huge hydroelectric projects which can't be implemented in flat lands, for example, and as such every renewable field needs a fossil backup for times when the wind is not strong, when it's night time, etc. Yet nuclear contributes far less headline pollution (excepting the obvious problem of nuclear waste) than fossil fuels, and as such we won't rely entirely on fossil fuels despite their convenience.

Those great big generators of “cheap” power that cannot provide their own electricity. They need a centralised power grid. They cannot be powered down safely without generator backups, etc. When the sit hits the fan, those big pampered (and heavily subsidized) contraptions threaten to have lethal tantrums with multi-decade, maybe multi-century consequences.

They're the very opposite of “robust” technology. Ultra-fragile and lethal.

With that in mind, that and Cameron has tried to 'Easter' the british isles by cutting down all the trees, I'm certain that it's just a matter of time.

This was quite amusing. Picturing Cameron, much as I may dislike him, sat in a big digger razing the old forests of England to the ground. What an evil twat. All in just over a year as well. Cameron may have made many mistakes but this is just ludicrous.
All of the problems you list in the above quote also apply to renewables at the moment. What are we supposed to do? Stop producing all energy and kill the poor. Great solution.


On a serious note. Garrett Hardin's ''The Tragedy of the Commons'' is a good paper relating to the population problem. I agree that a change in morals is needed; a limiting to population is ultimately needed. But naturally as societies reach maturity this is happening anyway. Most first world countries are actually experiencing population declines, especially when immigration is discounted; in such places as Italy and Japan it's a major problem, the ageing of the population. As technology increases in places such as India, China, and Africa, the world population will naturally peak.

Ultimately I think you have a problem with conceiving the sheer scale of current industrial production relative to such areas as fuel production, and also the sheer scale of the Earth in comparison to current industrial production. We won't have too much of a problem for a very, very long time, if at all, and the purpose of research such as that I carry out is to ensure that there won't be a problem. Assuming, of course, that the fickle public doesn't cause riots or similar and forces the world to abandon the only real short term solution that is nuclear power.

[Slave]

So what's happening at Fort Calhoun? I've read it's a Level 4 emergency, is that right? Is there anything to worry about or is it manageable?

[BIGdavalad]

So what's happening at Fort Calhoun? I've read it's a Level 4 emergency, is that right? Is there anything to worry about or is it manageable?

Nothing, apparently

[RojoLeón]

Nothing, apparently

as yet

[RojoLeón]

It’s very kind of you to take the time to reply to me. I can only bask in the glow of praise in which you shower me by attributing the publications of the IAEA and the NEA (those anti-nuclear naysayers!!) as being mine own. Of course, I’m happy for you that you exhibit the confidence to call their research and publication ‘a weak argument’ but this is surely due to your esteem as a Chemical Engineering student.

That the problem of dealing with nuclear waste lies millions of years into the future is in a sense correct. Of course, that it requires the attention of the custodians of such waste, for every single minute of every day during the intervening millions of years hopefully won’t have escaped you. That these wastes are not held in a few football fields but spread across the world in varying situations of care, might also be mentioned. And, that the problem for how they are stored now has not been resolved is perhaps a minor concern?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/may/14/energy.greenpolitics

You also make use of, and more than once, of the ‘future tech will resolve these issues’ idea, in support of your argument:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8810

The problem is literally millions of years into the future.

Any problem we encounter here will be very far into the future, and the rate of technological advancement in such areas as hydrogen fuels means that the probability is that it won't be a problem by the time fossil fuels are even close to running out. Thus this is not a strong argument to use.

How very apt

We won't have too much of a problem for a very, very long time, if at all, and the purpose of research such as that I carry out is to ensure that there won't be a problem.

Do your professors give you grades based on the quality of assignments you might submit in the future? Mine might find the idea rather droll, but still refuse to grade anything other than the assignment I give them.


Now for simplifications sake, you might use a barrel of oil and its relative ability to produce heat energy through burning as a bench mark, or unit of equivalency when measuring the efficiency of other things that boil water to make electricity.
Hence why I said that you are wasting energy if the equivalent production was less than that if you were to just burn it and boil the water. (onto which you used some very unscientific language to highlight your disagreement)

I have a link for you to illustrate something you stated was ludicrous:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/27/government-england-forest-sell-off
Really? Now, I was being tongue in cheek, but based in satire of actual policy (not something they might do in the future: Thankfully they dropped the plans but for how long).

I have read (and written a couple of papers on) The Tragedy of the Commons. Not a perfect piece but one with many illustrative components that support the convincing, central argument. You won’t have missed the section that deals with pollution. That it is a problem that is a consequence of population. Nuclear pollution is already beyond are means to process or deal with appropriately: And, increases in its creation will certainly compound the issue. You can see the population is increasing. I strongly advise you to watch these video lectures. 8 parts, 80mins ish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY (ignore the somewhat hyperbolic youtube-title)

I myself, have little issue with the textbook, ‘everything runs smoothly ideal’ of nuclear energy. I have a deep-set suspicion of politicians and their motivations in general and also, what some business leaders are prepared to sacrifice in the pursuit of personal wealth: The reality of the world is that corners will be cut, safety concerns/breaches ignored and human operators will make mistakes. Add in the sometimes volatile weather/planet itself and we have a dangerous mix.

One of the murky issues is the radiation damage is insidious: Headline cases of direct radiation poisoning such as Litvinenko are few and far between.
However, a cancer of the thyroid, lungs or kidneys, will not come with a receipt stating the direct cause. A birth defect or irreversible, genetic damage to pass through the generations may not be easily attributable to a radiation leak.h
As risk increases with increased exposure then I think that you’ll agree there are increased risks with increasing our planets use of nuclear power.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/23/ukraine.theobserver
 
Can you cite a single instance of a nuclear power plant that is insured against catastrophic failure? (Insurance companies will insure anything, right?)

How about security? John Adams of University College London wrote a report called: Transport planning (Vision and Practice) Published in 1981 http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/Transport%20Planning-1.pdf
Read the section on nuclear energy 75-80. A lot of the paper is fascinating with the benefit of hindsight but, the questions posed by him about nuclear security are the same today: Perhaps even more pertinent. Nuclear power goes hand in hand with the security state. Secrecy and cover-ups are normal working practice of the industry when dealing with near-accidents and actual accidents at nuclear facilities. There is a risk to democratic institutions when you empower secret agencies to manage their energy requirements without independent and public scrutiny.

What we know (or have found out later: Soviet Russia particularly)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents


We have a technology that is very dependent on a number of factors relating to stability: Economic (investment and maintenance are required forever effectively; thus, making it very difficult to accurately measure the actual cost of any nuclear enterprise); weather/planetary (some places are safer than others. Can we be sure of that for everywhere with nuclear power: Japan is a stark example); social-local (would anyone want nuclear reactors in Zimbabwe?); social-world (what if we have a big series of international disagreements resulting in another world war? Nuclear weapons notwistanding, a missile/terrorist attack on an enemy’s domestic reactor could be a permanent cause of damage to that country: And, maybe a lot of people not in that country).
It’s a very, ‘first world’ technology.  It requires all of the above together with a stable supply of some of the best minds our universities produce to keep it ticking over.
Shouldn’t we look to solutions that are just a little bit less dependent on 'everything going well in the future'? I find that outlook rather fanciful and one that is closed to reality.
This oil wave we’re riding on has probably crested and the ride down may be choppy.


Anyhow, I would like to wish you the very best with your studies and I hope you find the future tech answers we all need. 
 

[The China Fox]

Any need for the condescension? Bloody hell. As someone who is involved in this sort of thing for a living I spend some time reading around it, that is all. I apologise if the tone of my original post was misinterpreted in this way. While I'm not particularly bothered about being called clueless/some gobshite spouting crap etc, it would be logically incorrect to imply students have less of a clue than other people just by virtue of being students.

Anyway...

But the SDC only arrived at its recommendation by a single vote, with eight of its governing commissioners voting against nuclear power and seven voting in favour. It had drawn up eight detailed studies covering safety, waste, economics and climate change.

There is no ultimate consensus on the issue, as your article clearly shows. It's my opinion there is little to worry about. Others may, and do, take the opposite view.


The publications of the IAEA and NEA provide estimations of future reserves. Estimations being the key word. They are generally consistently revised upwards as new reserves are discovered, in a similar manner to oil. They say themselves that the estimations should not be taken as binding, and no estimation ever can, because noone knows exactly how much fuel remains in the ground at any given point, they can only make an educated guess.

Of course the storage of nuclear waste is a concern, I merely took it as read. The point I was trying to make is that the problem, in scale to the size of the world, is relatively small in that it's not going to kill us all any time soon. There is a major problem relative to the state of care of waste in certain other countries, but I have faith that solutions will be found in the future; on the immediate level, there's not a lot we in this country can do about it. Yet there are problems related to eg. the reentombment of Chernobyl which we can help with, and in these cases I think we can and should be doing more to help.

Hence why I said that you are wasting energy if the equivalent production was less than that if you were to just burn it and boil the water. (onto which you used some very unscientific language to highlight your disagreement)

OK, I misunderstood this. But I severly doubt that what you say would be the case; 1g uranium has the same energy potential as 3 tonnes of coal; I'm aware efficiency is far from 100% but there would still be a significant difference, even when production fuel costs are taken into account. Even if production costs were that high, people would seem to feel, with the pressure to reduce carbon emissions, that the posited tradeoff is worth it.

I myself, have little issue with the textbook, ‘everything runs smoothly ideal’ of nuclear energy. I have a deep-set suspicion of politicians and their motivations in general and also, what some business leaders are prepared to sacrifice in the pursuit of personal wealth: The reality of the world is that corners will be cut, safety concerns/breaches ignored and human operators will make mistakes. Add in the sometimes volatile weather/planet itself and we have a dangerous mix.

Fair enough. I agree in the most part. Safety procedures, very stringent in the case of nuclear, have been successful in the past when they haven't been wilfully ignored/disabled. It is our task for the future to ensure that human stupidity doesn't lead to catastrophic error in any more cases.

Which leads on to:

Can you cite a single instance of a nuclear power plant that is insured against catastrophic failure? (Insurance companies will insure anything, right?)

The checks at Fukushima were successful if the criteria is to prevent catastrophic failure, considering the circumstances. There are multiple safety barriers for each level of operation. These were successful in preventing full-scale disaster. Various lessons will have to be learned from what happened, but the safety checks were good enough, just about, to take a full scale earthquake and tsunami double-whammy.

How about security? John Adams of University College London wrote a report called: Transport planning (Vision and Practice) Published in 1981 http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/Transport%20Planning-1.pdf
Read the section on nuclear energy 75-80. A lot of the paper is fascinating with the benefit of hindsight but, the questions posed by him about nuclear security are the same today: Perhaps even more pertinent. Nuclear power goes hand in hand with the security state. Secrecy and cover-ups are normal working practice of the industry when dealing with near-accidents and actual accidents at nuclear facilities. There is a risk to democratic institutions when you empower secret agencies to manage their energy requirements without independent and public scrutiny.

The whole paper is an interesting read, thanks for linking it. I do disagree with his conclusions on this section, though. Drawing large generalised conclusions such as the whole nuclear power industry having "inherent totalitarian tendencies" from the response to one report, made at the height of the Cold War, is a bit of a leap in logic. Circumstances have changed. They could change again in the future, but it's the job of people today to ensure mistakes are not repeated.
Soviet Russia was a notoriously inefficient autocratic bureaucracy. Society has changed since then. There are still problems with unaccounted fuels in ex-Soviet states. All we can do is make sure, again, that this does not happen again; we can't change the past in this regard.

We have a technology that is very dependent on a number of factors relating to stability: Economic (investment and maintenance are required forever effectively; thus, making it very difficult to accurately measure the actual cost of any nuclear enterprise); weather/planetary (some places are safer than others. Can we be sure of that for everywhere with nuclear power: Japan is a stark example); social-local (would anyone want nuclear reactors in Zimbabwe?); social-world (what if we have a big series of international disagreements resulting in another world war? Nuclear weapons notwistanding, a missile/terrorist attack on an enemy’s domestic reactor could be a permanent cause of damage to that country: And, maybe a lot of people not in that country).
It’s a very, ‘first world’ technology.  It requires all of the above together with a stable supply of some of the best minds our universities produce to keep it ticking over.
Shouldn’t we look to solutions that are just a little bit less dependent on 'everything going well in the future'? I find that outlook rather fanciful and one that is closed to reality.
This oil wave we’re riding on has probably crested and the ride down may be choppy.

The reason the IAEA exists is to maintain a global 'first world' standard for nuclear activity. Safety checks are rigourous. Fukushima proved this. The doctrine of multiple layers of protection has served us well in the past. I agree we should look to solutions that aren't dependent on everything going well in the future; that is the central thrust of my argument/research. I too have doubts about the long term feasibility of maintaining nuclear power stations. But in the short term the alternatives are not as palatable. We have to look at Rafa's old chestnut, the fachts. Renewables need back up, and are not efficient or cost effective yet. Fossil fuels pollute and there are pressures to reduce various emissions.
Nuclear power is one of the only viable short term solutions to the energy gap. People are working on fusion and other future potential sources of energy. I will be as happy as anyone when such alternative energy sources are commercially viable; but if you say that we cannot have nuclear as a short term carbon-efficient method of supplying people with electricity in the interim, as part of a mix of electric generation sources, then it would have to be said that yours is the view which is closed to reality.

Cheers for reading. It's an interesting argument.

[RojoLeón]

Cheers for reading. It's an interesting argument.

No problem, glad to have helped.

I personally think that there are too many long term problems associated with nuclear power (combined with the implicit collusion between regulatory bodies/industry) to honestly assess them as being a short term solution. Add in Fukishima (where TEPCO was colluding with the regulators and cutting corners); a debacle that occured in spite of safety measures and one that ranks as one of the most disasterous we have seen, and we have a volatile energy suply future. Energy at a potentially big cost.

You may find the following both interesting and chilling (I do anyway as am in the US). This is the 'first world' in action.

AP IMPACT: US nuke regulators weaken safety rules



LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.

The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety — and inching the reactors closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the United States.

Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes — all of these and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in the AP's yearlong investigation. And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident.

Yet despite the many problems linked to aging, not a single official body in government or industry has studied the overall frequency and potential impact on safety of such breakdowns in recent years, even as the NRC has extended the licenses of dozens of reactors.

Industry and government officials defend their actions, and insist that no chances are being taken. But the AP investigation found that with billions of dollars and 19 percent of America's electricity supply at stake, a cozy relationship prevails between the industry and its regulator, the NRC.

Records show a recurring pattern: Reactor parts or systems fall out of compliance with the rules. Studies are conducted by the industry and government, and all agree that existing standards are "unnecessarily conservative."

Regulations are loosened, and the reactors are back in compliance.

"That's what they say for everything, whether that's the case or not," said Demetrios Basdekas, an engineer retired from the NRC. "Every time you turn around, they say `We have all this built-in conservatism.'"

The ongoing crisis at the stricken, decades-old Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility in Japan has focused attention on the safety of plants elsewhere in the world; it prompted the NRC to look at U.S. reactors, and a report is due in July.

But the factor of aging goes far beyond the issues posed by the disaster at Fukushima.

Commercial nuclear reactors in the United States were designed and licensed for 40 years. When the first ones were being built in the 1960s and 1970s, it was expected that they would be replaced with improved models long before those licenses expired.

But that never happened. The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, massive cost overruns, crushing debt and high interest rates ended new construction proposals for several decades.

Instead, 66 of the 104 operating units have been relicensed for 20 more years, mostly with scant public attention. Renewal applications are under review for 16 other reactors.

By the standards in place when they were built, these reactors are old and getting older. As of today, 82 reactors are more than 25 years old.

The AP found proof that aging reactors have been allowed to run less safely to prolong operations. As equipment has approached or violated safety limits, regulators and reactor operators have loosened or bent the rules.

Last year, the NRC weakened the safety margin for acceptable radiation damage to reactor vessels — for a second time. The standard is based on a measurement known as a reactor vessel's "reference temperature," which predicts when it will become dangerously brittle and vulnerable to failure. Over the years, many plants have violated or come close to violating the standard.

As a result, the minimum standard was relaxed first by raising the reference temperature 50 percent, and then 78 percent above the original — even though a broken vessel could spill its radioactive contents into the environment.

"We've seen the pattern," said nuclear safety scientist Dana Powers, who works for Sandia National Laboratories and also sits on an NRC advisory committee. "They're ... trying to get more and more out of these plants."

___

SHARPENING THE PENCIL

The AP collected and analyzed government and industry documents — including some never-before released. The examination looked at both types of reactor designs: pressurized water units that keep radioactivity confined to the reactor building and the less common boiling water types like those at Fukushima, which send radioactive water away from the reactor to drive electricity-generating turbines.

Tens of thousands of pages of government and industry studies were examined, along with test results, inspection reports and regulatory policy statements filed over four decades. Interviews were conducted with scores of managers, regulators, engineers, scientists, whistleblowers, activists, and residents living near the reactors, which are located at 65 sites, mostly in the East and Midwest.

AP reporting teams toured some of the oldest reactors — the unit here at Oyster Creek, near the Atlantic coast 50 miles east of Philadelphia, and two units at Indian Point, 25 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River.

Called "Oyster Creak" by some critics because of its aging problems, this boiling water reactor began running in 1969 and ranks as the country's oldest operating commercial nuclear power plant. Its license was extended in 2009 until 2029, though utility officials announced in December that they'll shut the reactor 10 years earlier rather than build state-ordered cooling towers. Applications to extend the lives of pressurized water units 2 and 3 at Indian Point, each more than 36 years old, are under review by the NRC.

Unprompted, several nuclear engineers and former regulators used nearly identical terminology to describe how industry and government research has frequently justified loosening safety standards to keep aging reactors within operating rules. They call the approach "sharpening the pencil" or "pencil engineering" — the fudging of calculations and assumptions to yield answers that enable plants with deteriorating conditions to remain in compliance.

"Many utilities are doing that sort of thing," said engineer Richard T. Lahey Jr., who used to design nuclear safety systems for General Electric Co., which makes boiling water reactors. "I think we need nuclear power, but we can't compromise on safety. I think the vulnerability is on these older plants."

Added Paul Blanch, an engineer who left the industry over safety issues but later returned to work on solving them: "It's a philosophical position that (federal regulators) take that's driven by the industry and by the economics: What do we need to do to let those plants continue to operate? They somehow sharpen their pencil to either modify their interpretation of the regulations, or they modify their assumptions in the risk assessment."

In public pronouncements, industry and government say aging is well under control. "I see an effort on the part of this agency to always make sure that we're doing the right things for safety. I'm not sure that I see a pattern of staff simply doing things because there's an interest to reduce requirements — that's certainly not the case," NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko said in an interview at agency headquarters in Rockville, Md.

Neil Wilmshurst, director of plant technology for the industry's Electric Power Research Institute, acknowledged that the industry and NRC often collaborate on research that supports rule changes. But he maintained that there's "no kind of misplaced alliance ... to get the right answer."

Yet agency staff, plant operators, and consultants paint a different picture in little-known reports, where evidence of industry-wide problems is striking:

_The AP reviewed 226 preliminary notifications — alerts on emerging safety problems — issued by the NRC since 2005. Wear and tear in the form of clogged lines, cracked parts, leaky seals, rust and other deterioration contributed to at least 26 alerts over the past six years. Other notifications lack detail, but aging also was a probable factor in 113 additional alerts. That would constitute up to 62 percent in all. For example, the 39-year-old Palisades reactor in Michigan shut Jan. 22 when an electrical cable failed, a fuse blew, and a valve stuck shut, expelling steam with low levels of radioactive tritium into the air outside. And a one-inch crack in a valve weld aborted a restart in February at the LaSalle site west of Chicago.

_One 2008 NRC report blamed 70 percent of potentially serious safety problems on "degraded conditions." Some involve human factors, but many stem from equipment wear, including cracked nozzles, loose paint, electrical problems, or offline cooling components.

_Confronted with worn parts that need maintenance, the industry has repeatedly requested — and regulators have often allowed — inspections and repairs to be delayed for months until scheduled refueling outages. Again and again, problems worsened before they were fixed. Postponed inspections inside a steam generator at Indian Point allowed tubing to burst, leading to a radioactive release in 2000. Two years later, cracking was allowed to grow so bad in nozzles on the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, that it came within two months of a possible breach, the NRC acknowledged in a report. A hole in the vessel could release radiation into the environment, yet inspections failed to catch the same problem on the replacement vessel head until more nozzles were found to be cracked last year.

___

TIME CRUMBLES THINGS

Nuclear plants are fundamentally no more immune to the incremental abuses of time than our cars or homes: Metals grow weak and rusty, concrete crumbles, paint peels, crud accumulates. Big components like 17-story-tall concrete containment buildings or 800-ton reactor vessels are all but impossible to replace. Smaller parts and systems can be swapped, but still pose risks as a result of weak maintenance and lax regulation or hard-to-predict failures. Even when things are fixed or replaced, the same parts or others nearby often fail later.

Even mundane deterioration at a reactor can carry harsh consequences.

For example, peeling paint and debris can be swept toward pumps that circulate cooling water in a reactor accident. A properly functioning containment building is needed to create air pressure that helps clear those pumps. The fact is, a containment building could fail in a severe accident. Yet the NRC has allowed operators to make safety calculations that assume containment buildings will hold.

In a 2009 letter, Mario V. Bonaca, then-chairman of the NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, warned that this approach represents "a decrease in the safety margin" and makes a fuel-melting accident more likely. At Fukushima, hydrogen explosions blew apart two of six containment buildings, allowing radiation to escape from overheated fuel in storage pools.

Many photos in NRC archives — some released in response to AP requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act — show rust accumulated in a thick crust or paint peeling in long sheets on untended equipment at nuclear plants. Other breakdowns can't be observed or predicted, even with sophisticated analytic methods — especially for buried, hidden or hard-to-reach parts.

Industry and government reports are packed with troubling evidence of unrelenting wear — and repeated regulatory compromises.

Four areas stand out:

BRITTLE VESSELS: For years, operators have rearranged fuel rods to limit gradual radiation damage to the steel vessels protecting the core and to keep them strong enough to meet safety standards.

It hasn't worked well enough.

Even with last year's weakening of the safety margins, engineers and metal scientists say some plants may be forced to close over these concerns before their licenses run out — unless, of course, new compromises with regulations are made. But the stakes are high: A vessel damaged by radiation becomes brittle and prone to cracking in certain accidents at pressurized water reactors, potentially releasing its radioactive contents into the environment.

LEAKY VALVES: Operators have repeatedly violated leakage standards for valves designed to bottle up radioactive steam in the event of earthquakes and other accidents at boiling water reactors.

Many plants have found they could not adhere to the general standard allowing each of these parts — known as main steam isolation valves — to leak at a rate of no more than 11.5 cubic feet per hour. In 1999, the NRC decided to permit individual plants to seek amendments of up to 200 cubic feet per hour for all four steam valves combined.

But plants keep violating even those higher limits. For example, in 2007, Hatch Unit 2, in Baxley, Ga., reported combined leakage of 574 cubic feet per hour.

CRACKED TUBING: The industry has long known of cracking in steel alloy tubing originally used in the steam generators of pressurized water reactors. Ruptures were rampant in these tubes containing radioactive coolant; in 1993 alone, there were seven. Even today, as many as 18 reactors are still running on old generators.

Problems can arise even in a newer metal alloy, according to a report of a 2008 industry-government workshop.

CORRODED PIPING: Nuclear operators have failed to stop an epidemic of leaks in pipes and other underground equipment in damp settings. The country's nuclear sites have suffered more than 400 accidental radioactive leaks during their history, the activist Union of Concerned Scientists reported in September.

Plant operators have been drilling monitoring wells and patching hidden or buried piping and other equipment for several years to control an escalating outbreak.

Here, too, they have failed. Between 2000 and 2009, the annual number of leaks from underground piping shot up fivefold, according to an internal industry document obtained and analyzed by the AP.

___

CONCERNS OF LONG STANDING

Even as they reassured the public, regulators have been worrying about aging reactors since at least the 1980s, when the first ones were entering only their second decade of operation. A 1984 report for the NRC blamed wear, corrosion, crud and fatigue for more than a third of 3,098 failures of parts or systems within the first 12 years of industry operations; the authors believed the number was actually much higher.

A decade later, in 1994, the NRC reported to Congress that the critical shrouds lining reactor cores were cracked at a minimum of 11 units, including five with extensive damage. The NRC ordered more aggressive maintenance, but an agency report last year said cracking of internal core components — spurred by radiation — remains "a major concern" in boiling water reactors.

A 1995 study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory covering a seven-year period found that aging contributed to 19 percent of scenarios that could have ended in severe accidents.

In 2001, the Union of Concerned Scientists, which does not oppose nuclear power, told Congress that aging problems had shut reactors eight times within 13 months.

And an NRC presentation for an international workshop that same year warned of escalating wear at reactor buildings meant to bottle up radiation during accidents. A total of 66 cases of damage were cited in the presentation, with corrosion reported at a quarter of all containment buildings. In at least two cases — at the two-reactor North Anna site 40 miles northwest of Richmond, Va., and the two-unit Brunswick facility near Wilmington, N.C. — steel containment liners designed to shield the public had rusted through.

And in 2009, a one-third-inch hole was discovered in a liner at Beaver Valley Unit 1 in Shippingport, Pa.

Long-standing, unresolved problems persist with electrical cables, too.

In a 1993 report labeled "official use only," an NRC staffer warned that electrical parts throughout plants were subject to dangerous age-related breakdowns unforeseen by the agency. Almost a fifth of cables failed in testing that simulated the effects of 40 years of wear. The report warned that as a result, reactor core damage could occur much more often than expected.

Fifteen years later, the problem appeared to have worsened. An NRC report warned in 2008 that rising numbers of electrical cables are failing with age, prompting temporary shutdowns and degrading safety. Agency staff tallied 269 known failures over the life of the industry.

Two industry-funded reports obtained by the AP said that managers and regulators have worried increasingly about the reliability of sometimes wet, hard-to-reach underground cables over the past five-to-10 years. One of the reports last year acknowledged many electrical-related aging failures at plants around the country.

"Multiple cable circuits may fail when called on to perform functions affecting safety," the report warned.

___

EATEN AWAY FROM WITHIN

Few aging problems have been more challenging than chemical corrosion from within.

In one of the industry's worst accidents, a corroded pipe burst at Virginia's Surry 2 reactor in 1986 and showered workers with scalding steam, killing four.

In summer 2001, the NRC was confronted with a new problem: Corrosive chemicals were cracking nozzles on reactors. But the NRC let operators delay inspections to coincide with scheduled outages. Inspection finally took place in February 2002 at the Davis-Besse unit in Ohio.

What workers found shocked the industry.

They discovered extensive cracking and a place where acidic boron had spurted from the reactor and eaten a gouge as big as a football. When the problem was found, just a fraction of an inch of inner lining remained. An NRC analysis determined that the vessel head could have burst within two months — what former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford has called a "near rupture" which could have released large amounts of radiation into the environment.

In 2001-3 alone, at least 10 plants developed these cracks, according to an NRC analysis.

Industry defenders blame human failings at Davis-Besse. Owner FirstEnergy Corp. paid a $28 million fine, and courts convicted two plant employees of hiding the deterioration. NRC spokesman Scott Burnell declared that the agency "learned from the incident and improved resident inspector training and knowledge-sharing to ensure that such a situation is never repeated."

Yet on the same March day last year that Burnell's comments were released, Davis-Besse workers again found dried boron on the nozzles of a replacement vessel head, indicating more leaks. Inspecting further, they again found cracks in 24 of 69 nozzles.

"We were not expecting this issue," said plant spokesman Todd Schneider.

In August, the operator applied for a 20-year license extension. Under pressure from the NRC, the company has agreed to replace the replacement head in October.

As far back as the 1990s, the industry and NRC also were well aware that the steel-alloy tubing in many steam generators was subject to chemical corrosion. It could crack over time, releasing radioactive gases that can bypass the containment building. If too much spurts out, there may be too little water to cool down the reactor, prompting a core melt.

In 1993, NRC personnel reported seven outright ruptures inside the generators, several forced outages per year, and some complete replacements. Personnel at the Catawba plant near Charlotte, N.C., found more than 8,000 corroded tubes — more than half its total.

For plants with their original generators, "there is no end in sight to the steam generator tube degradation problems," a top agency manager declared. NRC staffers warned: "Crack depth is difficult to measure reliably and the crack growth rate is difficult to determine."

Yet no broad order was issued for shutdowns to inspect generators.

Instead, the staff began to talk to operators about how to deal with the standard that no cracks could go deeper than 40 percent through the tube wall.

In 1995, the NRC staff put out alternative criteria that let reactors keep running if they could reach positive results with remote checks known as "eddy-currents tests." The new test standard gave more breathing room to reactors.

According to a 2001 report by the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, the staff "acknowledged that there would be some possibility that cracks of objectionable depth might be overlooked and left in the steam generator for an additional operating cycle." The alternative, the report said, would be to repair or remove potentially many tubes from service.

NRC engineer Joe Hopenfeld, who had worked previously in the industry, challenged this approach at the time from within the agency. He warned that multiple ruptures in corroded tubing could release radiation. The NRC said radiation would be confined.

Hopenfeld now says this conclusion wasn't based on solid analysis but "wishful thinking" and research meant to reach a certain conclusion — another instance of "sharpening the pencil."

"It was a hard problem to solve, and they did not want to say it was a problem, because if they really said it was a problem, they would have to shut down a lot of reactors."

___

AGE IS NO ISSUE, SAYS INDUSTRY

With financial pressures mounting in the 1990s to extend the life of aging reactors, new NRC calculations using something called the "Master Curve" put questionable reactor vessels back into the safe zone.

A 1999 NRC review of the Master Curve, used to analyze metal toughness, noted that energy deregulation had put financial pressure on nuclear plants. It went on: "So utility executives are considering new operational scenarios, some of which were unheard of as little as five years ago: extending the licensed life of the plant beyond 40 years." As a result, it said, the industry and the NRC were considering "refinements" of embrittlement calculations "with an eye to reducing known over-conservatisms."

Asked about references to economic pressures, NRC spokesman Burnell said motivations are irrelevant if a technology works.

Former NRC commissioner Peter Lyons said, "There certainly is plenty of research ... to support a relaxation of the conservativisms that had been built in before. I don't see that as decreasing safety. I see that as an appropriate standard."

Though some parts are too big and too expensive to replace, industry defenders also point out that many others are routinely replaced over the years.

Tony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute, acknowledges that you'd expect to see a growing failure rate at some point — "if we didn't replace and do consistent maintenance."

In a sense, then, supporters of aging nukes say an old reactor is essentially a collection of new parts.

"When a plant gets to be 40 years old, about the only thing that's 40 years old is the ink on the license," said NRC chief spokesman Eliot Brenner. "Most, if not all of the major components, will have been changed out."

Oyster Creek spokesman David Benson said the reactor "is as safe today as when it was built."

Yet plant officials have been trying to arrest rust on its 100-foot-high, radiation-blocking steel drywell for decades. The problem was declared solved long ago, but a rust patch was found again in late 2008. Benson said the new rust was only the size of a dime, but acknowledged there was "some indication of water getting in."

In an effort to meet safety standards, aging reactors have been forced to come up with backfit on top of backfit.

As Ivan Selin, a retired NRC chairman, put it: "It's as if we were all driving Model T's today and trying to bring them up to current mileage standards."

For example, the state of New Jersey — not the NRC — had ordered Oyster Creek to build cooling towers to protect sea life in nearby Barnegat Bay. Owner Exelon Corp. said that would cost about $750 million and force it to close the reactor — 20-year license extension notwithstanding. Even with the announcement to close in 2019, Oyster Creek will have been in operation for 50 years.

Many of the safety changes have been justified by something called "risk-informed" analysis, which the industry has employed widely since the 1990s: Regulators set aside a strict check list applied to all systems and focus instead on features deemed to carry the highest risk.

But one flaw of risk-informed analysis is that it doesn't explicitly account for age. An older reactor is not viewed as inherently more unpredictable than a younger one. Ed Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says risk-informed analysis has usually served "to weaken regulations, rather than strengthen them."

Even without the right research, the NRC has long reserved legal wiggle room to enforce procedures, rules and standards as it sees fit. A 2008 position paper by the industry group EPRI said the approach has brought "a more tractable enforcement process and a significant reduction in the number of cited violations."

But some safety experts call it "tombstone regulation," implying that problems fester until something goes very wrong. "Until there are tombstones, they don't regulate," said Blanch, the longtime industry engineer who became a whistleblower.

Barry Bendar, a database administrator who lives one mile from Oyster Creek, said representatives of Exelon were asked at a public meeting in 2009 if the plant had a specific life span.

"Their answer was, `No, we can fix it, we can replace, we can patch,'" said Bendar. "To me, everything reaches an end of its life span."

[Slave]

Has anybody seen the documentary Into Eternity? It's about the Finnish government's noble effort to solve the problem of storing nuclear waste, by building a repository which they hope will remain untouched for the next 100,000 years. The film shows how near futile it is to try to safeguard a catacomb that far into the future as what happens if/when the knowledge of Onkalo's function is forgotten? I thought it was well worth a watch and in it's own charmingly modest way showed just how awesome the magnitude of the project and the problem is.

[RojoLeón]

I've not seen it but will have a look.

It's a big problem in the US. They still don't have a suitable site but do have one at the planning stage (70 odd years after the first detonations of atomic weapons).

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/sr1614/v2/part1/#_1_9

I've read that the best geological locations are in Vermont due to the particular subterranean rock formations and relative unlikelihood of earthquakes but that the state banned nuclear waste from being stored there. So it has to be stored onsite for the most part.

[RojoLeón]

75 percent of nuke sites have leaked tritium
BRACEVILLE, Ill. (AP) - Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.

Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of the AP's yearlong examination of safety issues at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard - sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.

While most leaks have been found within plant boundaries, some have migrated offsite. But none is known to have reached public water supplies.

At three sites - two in Illinois and one in Minnesota - leaks have contaminated drinking wells of nearby homes, the records show, but not at levels violating the drinking water standard. At a fourth site, in New Jersey, tritium has leaked into an aquifer and a discharge canal feeding picturesque Barnegat Bay off the Atlantic Ocean.

Any exposure to radioactivity, no matter how slight, boosts cancer risk, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Federal regulators set a limit for how much tritium is allowed in drinking water, where this contaminant poses its main health risk. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says tritium should measure no more than 20,000 picocuries per liter in drinking water. The agency estimates seven of 200,000 people who drink such water for decades would develop cancer.

The tritium leaks also have spurred doubts among independent engineers about the reliability of emergency safety systems at the 104 nuclear reactors situated on the 65 sites. That's partly because some of the leaky underground pipes carry water meant to cool a reactor in an emergency shutdown and to prevent a meltdown. Fast moving, tritium can indicate the presence of more powerful radioactive isotopes, like cesium-137 and strontium-90.

So far, federal and industry officials say, the tritium leaks pose no health or safety threat. Tony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute, said impacts are "next to zero."

---

LEAKS ARE PROLIFIC

Like rust under a car, corrosion has propagated for decades along the hard-to-reach, wet underbellies of the reactors - generally built in a burst of construction during the 1960s and 1970s.

There were 38 leaks from underground piping between 2000 and 2009, according to an industry document presented at a tritium conference. Nearly two-thirds of the leaks were reported over the latest five years.

For example, at the three-unit Browns Ferry complex in Alabama, a valve was mistakenly left open in a storage tank during modifications over the years. When the tank was filled in April 2010, about 1,000 gallons of tritium-laden water poured onto the ground at a concentration of 2 million picocuries per liter. In drinking water, that would be 100 times higher than the EPA health standard.

And in 2008, 7.5 million picocuries per liter leaked from underground piping at Quad Cities in western Illinois - 375 times the EPA limit.

Subsurface water not only rusts underground pipes, it attacks other buried components, including electrical cables that carry signals to control operations.

A 2008 NRC staff memo reported industry data showing 83 failed cables between 21 and 30 years of service - but only 40 within their first 10 years of service. Underground cabling set in concrete can be extraordinarily difficult to replace.

Under NRC rules, tiny concentrations of tritium and other contaminants are routinely released in monitored increments from nuclear plants; leaks from corroded pipes are not permitted.

The leaks sometimes go undiscovered for years, the AP found. Many of the pipes or tanks have been patched, and contaminated soil and water have been removed in some places. But leaks are often discovered later from other nearby piping, tanks or vaults. Mistakes and defective material have contributed to some leaks. However, corrosion - from decades of use and deterioration - is the main cause. And, safety engineers say, the rash of leaks suggest nuclear operators are hard put to maintain the decades-old systems.

Over the history of the U.S. industry, more than 400 known radioactive leaks of all kinds of substances have occurred, the activist Union of Concerned Scientists reported in September.

Nuclear engineer Bill Corcoran, an industry consultant who has taught NRC personnel how to analyze the cause of accidents, said that since much of the piping is inaccessible and carries cooling water, the worry is if the pipes leak there could be a meltdown.

"Any leak is a problem because you have the leak itself - but it also says something about the piping," said Mario V. Bonaca, a former member of the NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. "Evidently something has to be done."

However, even with the best probes, it is hard to pinpoint partial cracks or damage in skinny pipes or bends. The industry tends to inspect piping when it must be dug up for some other reason. Even when leaks are detected, repairs may be postponed for up to two years with the NRC's blessing.

"You got pipes that have been buried underground for 30 or 40 years, and they've never been inspected, and the NRC is looking the other way," said engineer Paul Blanch, who has worked for the industry and later became a whistleblower. "They could have corrosion all over the place."

---

EAST COAST ISSUES

One of the highest known tritium readings was discovered in 2002 at the Salem nuclear plant in Lower Alloways Creek Township, N.J. Tritium leaks from the spent fuel pool contaminated groundwater under the facility - located on an island in Delaware Bay - at a concentration of 15 million picocuries per liter. That's 750 times the EPA drinking water limit. According to NRC records, the tritium readings last year still exceeded EPA drinking water standards.

And tritium found separately in an onsite storm drain system measured 1 million picocuries per liter in April 2010.

Also last year, the operator, PSEG Nuclear, discovered 680 feet of corroded, buried pipe that is supposed to carry cooling water to Salem Unit 1 in an accident, according to an NRC report. Some had worn down to a quarter of its minimum required thickness, though no leaks were found. The piping was dug up and replaced.

The operator had not visually inspected the piping - the surest way to find corrosion- since the reactor went on line in 1977, according to the NRC. PSEG Nuclear was found to be in violation of NRC rules because it hadn't even tested the piping since 1988.

Last year, the Vermont Senate was so troubled by tritium leaks as high as 2.5 million picocuries per liter at the Vermont Yankee reactor in southern Vermont (125 times the EPA drinking-water standard) that it voted to block relicensing - a power that the Legislature holds in that state.

In March, the NRC granted the plant a 20-year license extension, despite the state opposition. Weeks ago, operator Entergy sued Vermont in federal court, challenging its authority to force the plant to close.

At 41-year-old Oyster Creek in southern New Jersey, the country's oldest operating reactor, the latest tritium troubles started in April 2009, a week after it was relicensed for 20 more years. That's when plant workers discovered tritium by chance in about 3,000 gallons of water that had leaked into a concrete vault housing electrical lines.

Since then, workers have found leaking tritium three more times at concentrations up to 10.8 million picocuries per liter - 540 times the EPA's drinking water limit - according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. None has been directly measured in drinking water, but it has been found in an aquifer and in a canal discharging into nearby Barnegat Bay, a popular spot for swimming, boating and fishing.

---

EXELON'S PIPING PROBLEMS

To Oyster Creek owner Exelon - the country's biggest nuclear operator, with 17 units - piping problems are just a fact of life. At a meeting with regulators in 2009, representatives of Exelon acknowledged that "100 percent verification of piping integrity is not practical," according to a copy of its presentation.

Of course, the company could dig up the pipes and check them out. But that would be costly.

"Excavations have significant impact on plant operations," the company said.

Exelon has had some major leaks. At the company's two-reactor Dresden site west of Chicago, tritium has leaked into the ground at up to 9 million picocuries per liter - 450 times the federal limit for drinking water. Leaks from Dresden also have contaminated offsite drinking water wells, but below the EPA drinking water limit.

There's also been contamination of offsite drinking water wells near the two-unit Prairie Island plant southeast of Minneapolis, then operated by Nuclear Management Co. and now by Xcel Energy, and at Exelon's two-unit Braidwood nuclear facility, 10 miles from Dresden. The offsite tritium concentrations from both facilities also were below the EPA level.

The Prairie Island leak was found in the well of a nearby home in 1989. It was traced to a canal where radioactive waste was discharged.

Braidwood has leaked more than six million gallons of tritium-laden water in repeated leaks dating back to the 1990s - but not publicly reported until 2005. The leaks were traced to pipes that carried limited, monitored discharges of tritium into the river.

"They weren't properly maintained, and some of them had corrosion," said Exelon spokeswoman Krista Lopykinski.

Last year, Exelon, which has acknowledged violating Illinois state groundwater standards, agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle state and county complaints over the tritium leaks at Braidwood and nearby Dresden and Byron sites. The NRC also sanctioned Exelon.

Tritium measuring 1,500 picocuries per liter turned up in an offsite drinking well at a home near Braidwood. Though company and industry officials did not view any of the Braidwood concentrations as dangerous, unnerved residents took to bottled water and sued over feared loss of property value. A consolidated lawsuit was dismissed, but Exelon ultimately bought some homes so residents could leave.

---

PUBLIC RELATIONS EFFORT

An NRC task force on tritium leaks last year dismissed the danger to public health. Instead, its report called the leaks "a challenging issue from the perspective of communications around environmental protection." The task force noted ruefully that the rampant leaking had "impacted public confidence."

For sure, the industry also is trying to stop the leaks. For several years now, plant owners around the country have been drilling more monitoring wells and taking a more aggressive approach in replacing old piping when leaks are suspected or discovered.

But such measures have yet to stop widespread leaking.

Meantime, the reactors keep getting older - 66 have been approved for 20-year extensions to their original 40-year licenses, with 16 more extensions pending. And, as the AP has been reporting in its ongoing series, Aging Nukes, regulators and industry have worked in concert to loosen safety standards to keep the plants operating.

In an initiative started last year, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko asked his staff to examine regulations on buried piping to evaluate if stricter standards or more inspections were needed.

The staff report, issued in June, openly acknowledged that the NRC "has not placed an emphasis on preventing" the leaks.

And they predicted even more.

[RojoLeón]

Sanders to NRC: Stay Out of Vt. Yankee Fight

Video from link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gJENyRLOitI

June 16, 2011

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday blasted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during an appearance before a Senate panel for asking the Department of Justice to intervene in an Entergy Corp. lawsuit against the state of Vermont over the future of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. "I was deeply disturbed that the commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today refused to make public what, as I understand it, was a 3-to-2 vote recommending that the Department of Justice take Entergy's side in their lawsuit against Vermont," Sanders said after the hearing.

"In my view, the federal government should not intervene in the lawsuit that Entergy has filed against the state of Vermont.  Federal law is very clear that states have the authority to reject nuclear power for economic reasons and that is what the Vermont state Senate did last year by a strong 26-to-4 bipartisan vote," the senator added.

"If the state of Vermont chooses energy efficiency and sustainable energy for its future, instead of an aging and trouble-ridden nuclear power plant, it is not the place of the NRC to prevent us from doing that.  The NRC's mandate is very clear. Its concerns begin and end with safety. It is not supposed to be the arbiter of political or legal disputes between a $14 billion dollar energy company and the people of Vermont."

Sanders questioned commissioners during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Vermont wants to shut down the reactor after its 40-year license expires next March. Entergy has sued the state in a bid to keep the reactor running.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko previously said the agency would remain neutral in the legal battle. He declined to discuss the deliberations, but under questioning by Sanders Jaczko acknowledged that Entergy officials had met with NRC staff. The company also wanted representatives to meet with Jaczko and other commissioners, but they all said they declined.

In Vermont, the state Senate last year voted to end the plant's authority to operate when the current license expires in 2012. "Entergy should respect Vermont law," Sanders said at the hearing.

In a separate regulatory proceeding in Washington, the NRC earlier this year granted a 20-year extension from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"The NRC regulates safety. That's what your job is," Sanders told the commissioners. "Many people in Vermont think you're not doing that job very well," the senator added. He cited the collapse of a cooling towers and leaks of radioactive tritium. He also noted that Vermont Yankee is one of 23 plants in the United States with the same design as the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

[RojoLeón]

Gov't: No quick fix for leaky nuclear reactors

(AP)

U.S. nuclear power plant operators haven't figured out how to quickly detect leaks of radioactive water from aging pipes that snake underneath the sites — and the leaks, often undetected for years, are not going to stop, according to a new report by congressional investigators.

The report by the Government Accountability Office was released by two congressmen Tuesday in response to an Associated Press investigation that shows three-quarters of America's 65 nuclear plant sites have leaked radioactive tritium, sometimes into groundwater.

Separately, two senators asked the GAO, the auditing and watchdog arm of Congress, to investigate the findings of the ongoing AP series Aging Nukes, which concludes that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear power industry have worked closely to keep old reactors operating within safety standards by weakening them, or not enforcing the rules.

A third senator, independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said the AP series has raised disturbing allegations about safety at aging plants and reiterated his demand that the Vermont Yankee plant be shut.

In the report released Tuesday by Democratic Reps. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Peter Welch of Vermont, the GAO concluded that while a voluntary initiative that industry recently adopted is supposed to identify leaks, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't know how fast problems are detected.

"Absent such an assessment, we continue to believe that NRC has no assurance that the Groundwater Protection Initiative will lead to prompt detection of underground piping system leaks as nuclear power plants age," the report's authors concluded.

No leak is known to have reached aquifers that hold the drinking water supplies of public utilities, though tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, has contaminated residential drinking wells near at least three nuclear power plants. The tritium in those wells did not surpass the federal health standard. Though mildly radioactive, tritium poses the greatest risk of causing cancer when it ends up in drinking water.

Markey's spokeswoman said his office received the GAO report in early June after requesting it in 2009 following reports of a tritium leak at the Indian Point nuclear plant north of New York City. Typically congressional offices hold reports for 30 days, but Markey released it in response AP's tritium story, part of an ongoing investigative series.

In a written statement, he compared the ongoing nuclear crisis at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant to the kind of meltdown he said could happen in the U.S. if a pipe that is supposed to carry water to cool a reactor's core fails.

"There would be no warning because no one ever checks the integrity of these underground pipes," Markey said.

The industry's Nuclear Energy Institute cited its "underground piping integrity initiative policy," launched voluntarily in 2009, as proof that it takes tritium leaks seriously.

"The initiative commits the industry to a series of actions to establish more frequent inspection and enhance dependability of underground piping with a goal of protecting structural integrity and preventing leaks," the institute said in a statement.

The institute also criticized AP's overall findings and "selective, misleading reporting in a series of new articles on U.S. nuclear power plant safety."

Previously, the AP reported that regulators and industry have weakened safety standards for decades to keep the nation's commercial nuclear reactors operating. While NRC officials and plant operators argue that safety margins can be eased without compromising safety, critics say these accommodations are inching the reactors closer to an accident.

In response to those findings, New Jersey's two Democratic senators asked the GAO for a new investigation based on "the serious allegations" documented by the AP.

"It would be of grave concern to us if, in fact, aging power stations have achieved compliance with operating rules because of weakened NRC rules, rather than demonstrated compliance with existing standards," Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez wrote.

In a Senate speech Tuesday, Sanders said the NRC and Vermont Yankee operator Entergy have ignored the will of Vermonters. The Vermont state Senate recently voted to close the plant once its license expires next year.

He also called for a GAO investigation into the safety issues raised in the AP series. "These allegations by the AP are incredibly disturbing," Sanders said. "Safety at our nuclear plants should be the top priority at the NRC, particularly after what we saw happen in Japan. They should not answer to the nuclear industry, the NRC must answer to the public."

Sanders said the investigation should determine whether the NRC is systematically working with industry to undermine safety standards to keep aging plants operating.

California Democrat Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, said she is supporting Sanders.

Late Tuesday, the NRC said it disagreed with AP's conclusions in the stories, but welcomed the attention to nuclear plant safety the stories have generated. The agency defended its standards and approach to safety.

"The NRC never wavers from its primary mission — ensuring that the public remains safe during the civilian use of radioactive materials in the United States," the statement said.

Addressing the main issue of the AP series regarding weakening of standards, the NRC said it "only endorses changes when they maintain acceptable levels of public safety; this can include adding or strengthening requirements."
(Ha!)

[RojoLeón]

UPDATE 3-Los Alamos scurries to protect nuclear lab from fire

Nuclear weapons lab closes due to fire danger

* Fire has potential to double or triple in size (Updates the number of firefighters, paragraph 12)

By Zelie Pollon

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 28 (Reuters) - New Mexico fire managers scrambled on Tuesday to reinforce crews battling a third day against an out-of-control blaze at the edge of one of the top U.S. nuclear weapons production centers.

The fire's leading edge burned to within a few miles of a dump site where some 20,000 barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste, including clothing and equipment, is stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, fire officials said.

Officials for the government-run lab said the stored waste is considered low-level radioactive material and remains a safe distance from the fire in an area cleared of trees and other vegetation.

Carl Beard, director of operations for the lab, said there has been no release of radioactive or hazardous materials into the environment and there was no immediate threat to public safety, "even in these extreme conditions."

Established during World War Two as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, the lab remains one of the leading nuclear arms manufacturing facilities in the United States.

Authorities have suspended routine removal of the waste drums for shipment to a permanent underground disposal site in southern New Mexico, said Los Alamos County Fire Chief Douglas Tucker.

"Because of the fire, they are not moving any of that. It is safer where it is," he said.

The fire, believed to have been ignited on Sunday by a fallen power line, has consumed nearly 61,000 acres (25,000 hectares) of thick pine woodlands in the Santa Fe National Forest, which surrounds the lab complex and adjacent town of Los Alamos on three sides.

Tucker said he feared the so-called Las Conchas Fire, whipped by high, rapidly shifting winds, could soon double or triple in size. The blaze remained listed as at zero percent containment and burning largely unchecked in its third day.

"I seriously believe it could go to 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares)," Tucker told reporters at a news briefing on Tuesday. "We have fire all around the lab. It's a road away." (!!)

A small offshoot of the blaze jumped State Highway 4 onto the lab grounds on Monday, burning about an acre (0.4 hectare) of property before it was extinguished about two hours later.

Between 800 and 1,000 firefighters, backed up by several water-dropping helicopters, were battling the blaze on Tuesday evening.

MORE FIREFIGHTERS

"We've been putting in orders to get as many firefighters here as we can," fire information officer Vanessa Delgado said. "We're trying to get them in as fast as we can."

Lab officials also called in teams late on Monday to monitor air quality, with high-volume air samplers ready to deploy. Hundreds of National Guard troops have been dispatched to back up law enforcement in the area.

Both the town of Los Alamos, home to about 10,000 residents, and the laboratory, with a work force of about 12,000 people, were evacuated on Monday, and the lab will remain closed at least through Wednesday, officials said.

Situated on a hilltop 35 miles (55 km) northwest of Santa Fe, the lab property covers 23,000 acres (9,300 hectares) and includes about 2,000 buildings, none of which has yet burned.

John Witham, a spokesman for the anti-nuclear group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said it is the only place in the country that produces plutonium pits that are carried in the core of nuclear bombs.

Three metric tons of highly radioactive weapons-grade plutonium is stored in concrete and steel vaults in the basement floor of a building near the center of the complex, with an air-containment system surrounding it, Witham said.

Lab officials said the storage structures were fire safe.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico said on its website its greatest concern was for the 20,000 55-gallon (200-litre) sealed drums of plutonium-tainted waste stored at one corner of the complex, some stacked in the open on asphalt, some in tents, some buried underground.

Fire officials say they would use fire-retardant foam to douse the flames if the blaze reached the area.

[RojoLeón]

Salem Unit 2 nuclear reactor shuts down after cooling pump failure

LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK TWP. — The Salem Unit 2 nuclear plant remained shut down this afternoon following a problem with a reactor coolant pump, according to a spokesman for the plant’s operator.

Salem 2 automatically went offline Sunday at 6:01 p.m. when the coolant pump tripped, said Joe Delmar, spokesman for PSEG Nuclear.

When the pump shut down, the auxiliary pump system automatically started to provide water to cool the reactor.

The cause of the pump failure is still being investigated, according to Delmar. The plant functioned as designed, he said.

The plant remained in “hot shutdown” mode this afternoon.

(more at link)


Temporary levee protecting Nebraska nuclear plant from flood waters fails

A concerning situation near Omaha, Neb. took a new twist early Sunday when a temporary levee protecting the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station failed, forcing the facility to turn briefly to emergency generated power.

Two Nebraska nuclear stations — Cooper near Brownville and Calhoun near Blair (19 miles north of Omaha) — are coping with ongoing Missouri River flooding. Although Cooper was built above the flood plain, Calhoun was not. As a result, Cooper continues to operate, while Calhoun, which shut down for refueling in April, remains offline.

(more at link, inc photos)

Flood berm bursts at Nebraska nuclear plant

(edit to include further link)

[xerxes1]

I would simply like to thank you for one of the most clear, cogent and sensible tracts of writing that I have seen on Nuclear Power for several years. I am an interested layman, not a scientist, and feel immeasurably better informed.

My eldest son has recently transferred from Wind Power to Nuclear Power projects. He made an interesting observation. The company he works for is German owned. The view is that Germany are being very clever. Their focus on renewables over the next ten years will put them in the vanguard of renewable science, whilst their overseas interests, including the UK, build the next generation Nuclear Power Stations -  win/win.

[RojoLeón]

2 UK reactors shut down for jellyfish

LONDON - Both reactors at a nuclear power plant in Scotland have been shut down after large numbers of jellyfish clogged its seawater filters.

EDF Energy, which operates the plant, says the reactors at Torness on the Scottish coast were shut down Tuesday while jellyfish were cleared from the waters around the station.

The company said yesterday that it had planned for such eventualities, stressing that both reactors were shut safely and that there had been no environmental impact.

The company did not say when the reactors would be restarted.

EDF Energy’s website says that the Torness power station is capable of producing enough energy to power more than 2.5 million homes.

Seawater is used by the plant to help cool its steam systems

[BIGdavalad]

Couldn't all of the last four stories you've posted be put simpler as 'safety systems and procedures at nuclear power plants work as planned'?

[RojoLeón]

Couldn't all of the last four stories you've posted be put simpler as 'safety systems and procedures at nuclear power plants work as planned'?

Just for you, I think you'll like this (as an atomic optimist):

Ann Coulter: ..'radiation in excess of what the governments say are the minimum amount you should be exposed to, is good for you'..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXFUUGeV1DI

Of course, as much as I trust the Fox delivered reassurance, that radiation is in fact beneficial, I'm still a little bit skeptical.

Likewise, that the safety systems have not yet been exceeded at Los Alamos or Ft. Calhoon is reassuring to me: That they are pushed to their limits by excess water and fire, hardly as unique an occurrence as a earthquake/tsunami double whammy, is slightly worrying.

Tie to the facts (as my prior few postings confirmed; that the industry safeguards had been deliberately eroded through regulatory malfeasance and deteriorating hardware systems through profit driven cost cutting and human error) and you have my skeptisism that it's all going to be all right.

So you might say, 'On the brink of disaster; weakened safety systems struggle to cope with anticipated, seasonal weather conditions. Out of our hands now: worsening conditions will result in catastrophe'.


Oh, and jellyfish: Is that the nuclear equivalent of 'the wrong kind of snow'?

[RojoLeón]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/11/nuclear-leukaemia-france-idUSL6E8CB5QY20120111

Child leukaemia doubles near French nuclear plants-study

Jan 11 (Reuters) - The incidence of leukaemia is twice as high in children living close to French nuclear power plants as in those living elsewhere in the country, a study by French health and nuclear safety experts has found.

But the study, to be published soon in the International Journal of Cancer, fell short of establishing a causal link between the higher incidence of leukaemia, a type of blood cancer, and living near nuclear power plants.

France has used nuclear power for three decades and is the most nuclear-reliant country in the world, with 75 percent of its electricity produced by 58 reactors.

The study, conducted by the French health research body INSERM, found that between 2002 and 2007, 14 children under the age of 15 living in a 5-kilometre radius of France's 19 nuclear power plants had been diagnosed with leukaemia.

This is double the rate of the rest of the country, where a total of 2,753 cases were diagnosed in the same period.

"This is a result which has been checked thoroughly and which is statistically significant," said Dominique Laurier, head of the epidemiology research laboratory at France's nuclear safety research body (IRSN).

INSERM has carried out similar research with the IRSN since 1990, but has never before found a higher incidence of leukaemia in children living near nuclear power plants.

"But we are working on numbers which are very small and results have to be analysed with a lot of care," said Laurier, one of the authors of the study.

Laurier said the findings indicated no difference in risk between sites located by the sea or by rivers, nor according to the power capacity of the plant.

The IRSN said it recommended a more thorough study of the causes of the leukaemia cases found near nuclear power stations and hoped to set up international research collaboration.

"It's a rare disease and working on a bigger scale would allow more stable results," said Laurier.

A 35-year British study published last year found no evidence that young children living near nuclear power plants had an increased risk of developing leukaemia.

The research, conducted by scientists on the Committee of the Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE), found only 20 cases of childhood leukaemia within 5 km (3.1 miles) of nuclear power stations between 1969 and 2004.

The scientists said the rate was virtually the same as in areas where there were no nuclear plants.

Studies have been conducted around the world into possible links between the risk of childhood blood cancers and living near nuclear plants.

A study on Germany, published in 2007, did find a significantly increased risk, but the COMARE team said these findings were probably influenced by an unexplained leukaemia cluster near a nuclear plant in Krummel, north Germany, that lasted from 1990 to 2005.

Excluding Krummel, evidence for an increased leukaemia risk among young children living close to German nuclear power plants was "extremely weak", it said.

(Reporting By Muriel Boselli, Editing by Alexandria Sage and Tim Pearce)


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2011/12/a-new-study-released-today-said-that-theregulatory-fallout-from-the-fukushima-power-plantdisaster-in-japan-last-marchwill-pro.html

Report: U.S. nuclear renaissance unlikely after Fukushima
December 28, 2011 |  2:37 pm

A new study released Wednesday said that the regulatory fallout from the Fukushima power plant disaster in Japan in March will short-circuit the U.S. nuclear renaissance of new power plant construction.

The report, "Nuclear Safety and Nuclear Economics," was written and presented by Mark Cooper, a frequent critic of the nuclear power industry. The report can be found here. Cooper is a senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law School.

Cooper said that past nuclear disasters, such as the one at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, have tended to greatly raise regulatory barriers and have also severely multiplied the cost of reactor construction. After Three Mile Island, for example, the report said, the cost of nuclear power plant construction doubled in most cases and trebled or quadrupled in some rare instances.

"This is an important moment to compare what is really likely to happen over the next 10 years with the industry’s expectations" of a nuclear renaissance, said Peter Bradford, an adjunct professor specializing in nuclear power and public policy at the Vermont Law School and a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member.

"When that comparison is performed properly, it becomes clear that we are witnessing not a revival but a collapse in expectations for new reactor construction," Bradford added.

The report comes just days after a panel appointed by the Japanese government released a scathing assessment of the reponse to the disaster, which was caused when a huge earthquake generated a tsunami that struck the facility.

The investigative panel blamed the central government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co., saying both seemed incapable of making decisions to stem radiation leaks as the situation at the coastal plant worsened in the days and weeks after the disaster.

A recently updated online report by the World Nuclear Assn. said that as few as four of the 26 new nuclear facilities that have been proposed or planned in the U.S. will be finished by 2020. But it did not mention Fukushima and instead said the primary reason was the fact that a boom in domestic natural gas production has "put the economic viability of some of these projects in doubt."

[RojoLeón]

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/features/news/20120125p2a00m0na020000c.html

Nuclear power boosters used climate change to ride to energy supremacy

In 1997, in the midst of the international negotiations that would eventually result in the Kyoto Protocol, the Japanese delegation was pondering whether it could realistically accept the protocol's main point: a commitment to a 6 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels. They were also grappling with what such a commitment would mean for Japan's energy supplies.

Strangely enough, though the Japanese delegation was grappling with issues of carbon emissions and energy needs, there was not a single representative of the then Environment Agency on hand. Osamu Watanabe, vice minister at the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry at the time of the talks and now president of Japan Petroleum Exploration Co., sums up Japan's thinking like this:

"Taking nuclear power into account was a prerequisite for accepting the 6 percent reduction. Speaking for the industry ministry, we thought that the more nuclear power we had, the more we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Meanwhile, at the Environment Agency -- which became the Environment Ministry in 2001 -- there were many staff who took a more cautious attitude to the promotion of nuclear power. Their skepticism did not, however, often find effective expression.

"The industry ministry put up a lot of resistance to the Environment Agency getting involved in energy policy," a senior agency official from the time says. "We just couldn't get a word in."

The threat of climate change gained traction in the global imagination after the end of the Cold War. And as warming worries grew, nuclear power became an anti-emissions trump card in the eyes of many, fueling a reactor building spree. Another former Environment Ministry official with long experience in climate change policy told the Mainichi, "Government policy came to incorporate promotion of nuclear power. It was taboo for us to even make an issue of it."

Even after the Kyoto Protocol was agreed on, the Environment Agency and its successor ministry had a very rough road trying to defend climate change policies. The agency tried to organize domestic support for the protocol's ratification, but was met with fierce opposition from the governing party and business world figures who worried about the effects on industry and condemned the protocol as an "unequal treaty."

"We thought getting the protocol ratified was the greatest environmental policy measure we could take, but drawing on nuclear power never entered our minds," the former senior Environment Ministry official says. It was, however, on the minds of some people in government. When the government finalized its basic principles for climate change policy in March 2002, the document included a provision for "promotion of nuclear power," and set a goal of increasing nuclear power output by 30 percent by 2010.

The Environment Agency also came under direct pressure to fall in line behind nuclear power even before the rumblings around the Kyoto Protocol. Just after the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, as the agency was undertaking revisions to laws providing capital to environmental NGOs, it was forced by the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to insert provisions banning funding to groups that were opposed to nuclear power. Many senior officials were also cornered by governing party lawmakers demanding the agency back nuclear power.

The push for nuclear power deepened when the Democratic Party of Japan came into power in 2009. In September that year, then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama declared to the world that Japan would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020. Just after that announcement, speaking on the environmental assessment for the construction of a third reactor at Kyushu Electric Power Co.'s Sendai nuclear power plant, the environment minister stated that "to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to guarantee safety, steady promotion of nuclear power is necessary." This was the first time official pronouncements in favor of nuclear power were made over an environmental assessment.

Even leading Japanese climate scientists were given a part to play in nuclear power promotion. University of Tokyo professor emeritus Ryoichi Yamamoto -- a climate change policy advisor to both the Abe and Fukuda administrations -- put together a 2008 report calling for the expansion of nuclear power as a vital part of global warming strategy when he was chairman of an Atomic Energy Commission panel.

"I thought nuclear power would be a powerful tool," Yamamoto says of the report. "But it can't be controlled when there's an accident, so it can't really be called a 'technology.' I've come to understand that there are ethical considerations with destroying the lives of local residents. I regret that I could not point out those issues when I wrote the report."

Furthermore, "I think the government, which seemed to be blocked and drifting on how to get reactor construction moving and the problems of radioactive waste disposal, just latched onto the global warming issue when climate change countermeasures reached a critical juncture. We thought that the risks of global warming were far greater than those of nuclear power, but in this earthquake-prone nation of Japan, the opposite is true."



http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20120128p2a00m0na013000c.html

Japan's plutonium stockpile builds as nuke fuel cycle policy hits dead end

Japan's stockpile of plutonium had reached 45 metric tons by the end of 2010, inviting suspicion from the international community about what Japan intended to do with the fissile material. As a result, much hope has been pinned on a MOX fuel reactor being built in northern Japan to eventually consume that excess plutonium.

MOX fuel is a mix of plutonium and different uranium oxides produced as waste by conventional reactors, and the Japanese government had hopes that plants that can burn it -- like one now under construction by the firm J-Power in Oma, Aomori Prefecture -- would become the foundations of a new nuclear fuel cycle. That cycle, which would see the spent fuel from conventional nuclear plants used again in MOX-burning plants, has yet to come close to fruition. Meanwhile, reprocessing of spent fuel into plutonium has continued apace, making the entire program a symbol of policy inconsistency.

First of all, the only example of a functioning "full MOX" reactor -- one that burns MOX fuel exclusively -- has been an experimental reactor in France. Furthermore, a MOX fuel reactor core tends to have a smaller margin for error during shutdowns than a uranium-burning core. As such, MOX fuel reactor maker Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy has said it has increased the capacity of safety valves that bleed off reactor vessel pressure during an emergency by 5 percent and developed high-efficiency control rods -- measures that will allow improvements to existing light boiling water reactors.

"Reactors must be tested and meet minimum standards before they can be used, which requires a certain amount of development funds," explains a Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy official.

Another MOX option is so-called "pluthermal" reactors, which burn some of the reprocessed fuel. However, the only countries in the world still pursuing the technology are France and Japan.

"Resource-wise, pluthermal reactors have nearly no merit," says former Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute lecturer Keiji Kobayashi.

Furthermore, spent MOX fuel contains many elements that can't be dissolved in the nitric acid used during fuel reprocessing. Disposing of the waste adds to the technology's costs, while a practical disposal method has yet to be developed.

Meanwhile, the chances of directly disposing of plutonium by burying it underground in Japan are just about zero. As such, if "full MOX" reactors don't get up and running, there will be no way for the country to consume the plutonium. On the other hand, if these reactors do go on line, Japan will end up with increasing amounts of spent MOX fuel it has no way of dealing with. In the background of this dilemma is the possible cancelation of the MOX-fueled Monju fast-breeder reactor in Fukui Prefecture.

All in all, Japan's nuclear fuel cycle policy has gone down a blind alley, and shows no signs of finding its way out.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/is-spent-nuclear-fuel-really-waste/

Is Spent Nuclear Fuel Really Waste?
By MATTHEW L. WALD

When the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future was established two years ago, after the Obama administration killed a proposed repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, one of the items on its agenda was to determine whether spent nuclear fuel was in fact waste.

Among advocates of nuclear power, considerable disagreement exists about whether the spent fuel can be considered waste, given that it contains unused uranium as well as plutonium, which is created in nuclear reactors and can be used as fuel.

France and Japan have factories that chop up the fuel and chemically remove the uranium and plutonium for reuse. And on paper, there are designs for reactors that could take some of the most long-lived, troublesome materials in the spent fuel and transmute them into elements that would be easier to handle because they break down in centuries rather than millenniums.

But such reprocessing is also a path to making materials for nuclear weapons, so the United States discourages it abroad. Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter banned the technology here; President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban, but so far it has not mattered, because it is commercially unattractive to American utilities.

On Thursday, the special commission on nuclear waste released its final report. It was not encouraging to advocates of reprocessing.

The report did not rule out reprocessing or a new class of reactors. But it said that “no currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments — including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies — have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenge this nation confronts over at least the next several decades.’’

Among other problems, it said, if there were some reprocessing, the country would still need a waste repository.

Most reactions to the report from the nuclear industry, utility groups and other related entities were positive. G.E. Hitachi Nuclear Energy, a manufacturer, was an exception. “G.E.H. does not believe that adequate consideration was afforded to advanced reactor and recycling technologies that could significantly improve the used fuel disposal process,’’ said the company, a partnership that makes many of the major components for G.E.-designed reactors.

The company said the country needed research on technologies “with the most potential to fundamentally alter our waste management challenges and achieve far more than storage of today’s used nuclear fuel.”

But Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist who is a frequent critic of the Energy Department’s work, said he was encouraged that the report recognized that any form of recycling would result in the separation of plutonium, a potential bomb fuel, and thus could allow the spread of nuclear weapons.

The reactors that would break up the most troublesome materials, called “fast” reactors because the neutrons that sustain the chain reactions move faster than the neutrons in today’s conventional reactors, have already absorbed $100 billion globally in research and development, he said, yet they are still nowhere near practical.

The commission did not close the door on new technologies. “Advanced nuclear energy systems could offer a range of benefits in terms of broadly held policy goals with respect to safety, cost, security, etc.,’’ the panel said.

“In a world facing rising energy demand and significant resource and environmental concerns, including the threat of climate change, preserving an improved nuclear energy option could be extremely valuable,’’ the commission wrote.

It called for continued research and development.

A warning that this youtube (video at link) film contains images that may be disturbing (effects of radiation damage in post soviet, post nuclear testing Kazakhstan)

http://www.aftertheapocalypsedoc.com/

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvbC-eqF9ec

[close]

[RojoLeón]

As Reactors Age, the Money to Close Them Lags

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/science/earth/as-nuclear-reactors-age-funds-to-close-them-lag.html?_r=1

WASHINGTON — The operators of 20 of the nation’s aging nuclear reactors, including some whose licenses expire soon, have not saved nearly enough money for prompt and proper dismantling. If it turns out that they must close, the owners intend to let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while interest accrues in the reactors’ retirement accounts.

Decommissioning a reactor is a painstaking and expensive process that involves taking down huge structures and transporting the radioactive materials to the few sites around the country that can bury them. The cost is projected at $400 million to $1 billion per reactor, which in some cases is more than what it cost to build the plants in the 1960s and ’70s.

Mothballing the plants makes hundreds of acres of prime industrial land unavailable for decades and leaves open the possibility that radioactive contamination in the structures could spread. While the radioactivity levels decline over time, many communities worry about safe oversight.

Bills that once seemed far into the future may be coming due. The license for Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt., at 40 the nation’s oldest reactor, expires on Wednesday, for example. And while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted its owner, Entergy, a new 20-year permit, the State of Vermont is trying to close the plant.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has vowed to force the two operating reactors at another Entergy plant, Indian Point, 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, to shut down when their licenses expire in 2013 and 2015 by denying them state environmental permits.

Entergy is at least $90 million short of the projected $560 million cost of dismantling Vermont Yankee; the company is at least $500 million short of the $1.5 billion estimated cost of dismantling Indian Point 2 and 3.

The shortfall raises the possibility that Vermont could tend one sleeping reactor for decades while New York oversees three; Unit 1 , another reactor at Indian Point, shut down in 1974 and has yet to be dismantled.

Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s chairman is uneasy about the prospect of a 60-year wait.

“These facilities should be cleaned up, and their footprints reduced as much as possible so that these areas can be returned to other productive uses within the community,” the chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, said recently.

Gil C. Quiniones, the president and chief executive of the New York Power Authority, a state utility that sold Indian Point 3 to Entergy in 2000, called Entergy’s failure to plan for or finance the decommissioning of Indian Point in real time “stunningly irresponsible.”

“Delaying action for 60 years — when Entergy might no longer even exist — is offensive to the communities of Westchester County and the people of New York,” he said. James Steets, a spokesman for Entergy, said that financing would not be a problem because the company still expects to obtain new 20-year licenses for Units 2 and 3, which would allow time for savings to grow, and to prevail on the state permit issue.

Assuming that the plants remain open for two more decades, the company has promised Westchester County that it will decommission Indian Point in a “reasonable” period of time after the reactors close, probably in the 2030s.

Of the 20 reactors that lack the money for swift deconstruction, the owners hope that license renewals from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will make the problem go away. For the plants that are fighting with their host states, Indian Point and Vermont Yankee, the federal courts may have the final say on whether and how long they keep operating. (A large demonstration in favor of closing the plant is planned for Wednesday at Vermont Yankee.)

The remaining 84 active reactors have enough savings on hand to satisfy the commission’s minimum financing requirements for eventual dismantling, some of them because they won license extensions.

The nuclear industry had been counting on steady returns on the funds and did not anticipate the 2008 market crash. Altogether the nation’s 104 power reactors have about $40 billion on hand. “A lot of decommissioning funds did take a hit at the nadir of the economic crisis,” said Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the regulatory commission.

One plant, Palisades in western Michigan, had $597.6 million saved up at the end of 2006, but the account was down to $218.8 million two years later and was only $279.2 million by the end of 2010, the most recent figures show.

Bruce Biewald, an economist who specializes in electricity economics at Synapse Energy, a Boston consulting firm, said the mothball strategy carries risks that could outweigh benefits. Proponents say “it’s like magic — compound interest on the one hand and radioactive decay on the other,” he said. (Because radioactivity levels decline over time, deconstruction workers would ultimately be exposed to less contamination.) But future investment returns could prove bleak, Mr. Biewald warns, and anticipated deconstruction costs could easily rise.

Responding to a petition from Sherwood Martinelli, an antinuclear activist who lives near Indian Point, Dr. Jaczko, the regulatory commission chairman, sought a shorter period between closing and dismantling.

But in October, Dr. Jaczko was outvoted 4 to 1 by his fellow commissioners. And the commission’s staff said that even 60 years was not a hard-and-fast outer time limit for suspending a reactor’s operations.

In the industry, this status is known as Safstor and it usually involves putting the spent nuclear fuel into storage casks on site, draining many of the plant’s fluids, making security arrangements and maintaining the reactor so it looks like a decent neighbor.

Environmental experts say the plants can be dangerous when they are not running. In a letter, the three members of Vermont’s Congressional delegation pointed out that 55,000 gallons of contaminated water spilled out of a mothballed plant in Illinois after a pipe froze. An attentive night watchman was credited with catching the spill in time to contain it.

Indian Point 1 has leaked a variety of radioactive materials into the soil on the banks of the Hudson in the 38 years since it closed, a point acknowledged by Entergy, which responded by emptying a spent fuel pool that was the source of the problem. The environmental group Riverkeeper argues that this is a harbinger of further trouble if Units 2 and 3 enter Safstor.

Compounding the worries about radioactive materials, the nation still lacks a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel after decades of jockeying by politicians who sought to bar it from their backyards. So the fuel at the sleeping reactors will remain on site.

Twelve reactors across the country have been retired in the last three decades, all on short notice, because of a design or safety flaw that the economics did not justify fixing. The low price of natural gas, a competing fuel, makes the economic lifetime of existing reactors uncertain.

Some have been decommissioned in a few years, like Connecticut Yankee, whose owners, a group of New England utilities, footed the cost. Decommissioning started two years after its 1996 shutdown and was completed in 2005 at a cost of $871 million.

In Haddam, Conn., officials are still advertising for a new industrial tenant for its former site on the east bank of the Connecticut River.

Asked if tearing it down had been the right call, Paul J. DeStefano, the town’s first selectman and top official, said, “I’m a little hesitant, from a layman’s standpoint, of having something sitting around for 60 years. It just doesn’t sound right.”


http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/decommissioning.html

[kesey]

I think the fact you are all having this discussion tells you the answer.

[RojoLeón]

I think the fact you are all having this discussion tells you the answer.

Hi kesey 

What do you think?

[RojoLeón]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/152816/nuclear_disaster_in_the_us%3A_how_bechtel_is_botching_the_world%27s_costliest_environmental_cleanup?page=entire

Nuclear Disaster in the US: How Bechtel Is Botching the World's Costliest Environmental Cleanup
Department of Energy scientists are alleging catastrophic mismanagement of massive cleanup efforts at Hanford, the former nuclear weapons outpost.
October 21, 2011 

Razor wire surrounds Hanford’s makeshift borders while tattered signs warn of potential contamination and fines for those daring enough to trespass. This vast stretch of eastern Washington, covering more than 580 square miles of high desert plains, is rural Washington at its most serene. But it’s inaccessible for good reason: It is, by all accounts, a nuclear wasteland.

During World War II, the Hanford Reservation was chosen by the federal government as a location to carry out the covert Manhattan Project. Later, plutonium produced at Hanford provided fuel for the "Fat Man" bomb that President Truman ordered to be dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, killing upward of 80,000 Japanese. In all, nine nuclear reactors were built at Hanford, the last of which ceased operation in 1987. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now estimates that as a result of the nuclear work done at Hanford's facilities, 43 million cubic yards of radioactive waste were produced and more than 130 million cubic yards of soil ultimately were contaminated.

During Hanford's lifespan, 475 billion gallons of radioactive wastewater were released into the ground. Radioactive isotopes have made their way up the food chain in the Hanford ecosystem at an alarming rate. Coyote excrement frequently lights up Geigers, as these scavengers feast on varmints that live beneath the earth's surface. Deer also have nuclear radiation accumulating in their bones as a result of consuming local shrubbery and water. The EPA has deemed Hanford the most contaminated site in North America—a jarring fact, as the Columbia River, lifeline for more than 10,000 farmers and dozens of commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, surges along Hanford's eastern boundary.

In 1989 Hanford changed from a nuclear-weapons outpost to a massive cleanup project. Since then, the site has become the largest and most costly environmental remediation the world has ever seen.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the agency that oversees energy and the safety of handling nuclear material, supervises the cleanup efforts, which are currently undertaken by Bechtel National Inc.—infamous for its mishandling of Iraq reconstruction efforts—and a handful of other companies like URS and CH2M HILL. But despite more than two decades of cleanup efforts and billions of dollars spent, only a tiny fraction of Hanford's radioactivity has been safely contained. And the final costs for the Hanford cleanup process could exceed $120 billion—higher even than the $100 billion tab for the International Space Station.

Now outrage is brewing at Hanford. Some prominent employees working on the project are blowing the whistle over what they believe to be dismissals of internal scientific assessments, as well as alleged abuses of managerial power that have been called to the attention of the Obama Administration, to no avail. These staffers point to institutional failures within the DOE and Bechtel as toxic as the nuclear waste they're tasked to clean up, asserting that the DOE lacks critical experts on staff to oversee the project and Bechtel rushed through shoddy design plans in order to pocket some quick cash. The consequences are not only jeopardizing safety and putting the project at risk of failure, they are also likely to cost taxpayers even more money should fatally flawed construction ultimately require a complete overhaul.

"We need alternatives to the current plan right now," Dr. Donald Alexander, a high-level DOE physical chemist working at Hanford, says in distress. "We need a different design and more options on the table. This appears to be a hard thing for [DOE and Bechtel] management to accept. They have spent years of time and money on a bad design, and it will delay the project even more."

 

It's the tail end of summer, and Alexander is about to head off on a weekend camping trip with his son in northern Idaho. While his spirits are high at the thought of his upcoming retreat, Alexander somberly assesses the Hanford situation from his vantage point.

"One of the main problems at Hanford is that DOE is understaffed and overtasked," Alexander explains. "As such, we cannot conduct in-depth reviews of each of the individual systems in the facilities. Therefore there is a high likelihood that several systems will be found to be inoperable or not perform to expectations."

Alexander knows his nuclear disasters well, as he led one of the DOE's first scientific delegations to Russia's Mayak nuclear facility in 1990. Mayak, one of the largest nuclear production plants in the former Soviet Union, suffered a deadly accident in 1957 when a tank containing nuclear materials exploded. The Mayak facilities are comparable to the plutonium production units built at Hanford, which is considered a "sister facility." Since they are so close in design and makeup, Mayak is often seen as an example of what can go wrong with the production of plutonium and the storage of nuclear waste at Hanford. Alexander's team negotiated the transfer of data collected by the Soviets on the health effects of Mayak's radioactive release, establishing a program that allows Russian and U.S. scientists to share nuclear cleanup technologies and research.

Currently, federal employees at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., are evaluating whether Bechtel's construction designs at the site have violated federal law under the Price-Anderson Amendments Act (PAAA). An amendment to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the PAAA governs liability issues for all non-military nuclear-facility construction in the United States, which includes Hanford.

These concerns are triggering other investigations, some of which have yet to be publicized. Last month, the DOE's Office of Health, Safety, and Security headed to Hanford to conduct a follow-up investigation about safety-culture issues. Their findings could be released as soon as the end of the year. This visit comes on the heels of a June investigation by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), an independent organization tasked by the executive branch to oversee public health and safety issues at the DOE's nuclear facilities. In a report addressed to Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, DNFSB investigators wrote that "both DOE and contractor project management behaviors reinforce a subculture . . . that deters the timely reporting, acknowledgement, and ultimate resolution of technical safety concerns."

After reviewing 30,000 documents and interviewing 45 staffers, the DNFSB reported that those who went against the grain and raised concerns about safety issues associated with construction design "were discouraged, if not opposed or rejected without review." In fact, according to the DNFSB, one of these scientists, Dr. Walter Tamosaitis, was actually removed from his position as a result of speaking up about design problems.

It's not just the DNFSB that is concerned with the safety culture and management at Hanford. Seattle Weekly has obtained official documents revealing that the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Congressional arm in charge of investigating matters relating to contractors and other public fund recipients, visited the Hanford site last month. In an outline sent to DOE personnel in advance of their visit, the GAO wrote that it will look into how contractors are addressing concerns over what they call "relatively lax attitudes toward safety procedures," "inadequacies in identifying and addressing safety problems," and a "weak safety culture, including employees' reluctance to report problems." Their findings likely will be made public in early 2012.

This wasn't the first time the GAO investigated DOE contracts with Bechtel. In 2004, the agency released a report critical of the DOE and Bechtel's clean-up plans, warning of faulty design and construction of the Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), a structure at the heart of the clean-up effort. The WTP building was not designed to withstand a strong earthquake, but only after prodding from the DNFSB did the DOE force Bechtel to go back to the drawing board to ensure the plant could withstand one. As a result, Bechtel's design and cost estimates to finish construction skyrocketed from $4.3 billion to more than $10 billion. And in 2006, GAO released another paper critical of Bechtel's timeline and cost estimates, which seemed to change annually, saying that they have "continuing concerns about the current strategy for going forward on the project."

These flawed plans flew under the radar because the DOE does not have enough staff to thoroughly review every design piece put forth by Bechtel, says Alexander. As a result, expensive mistakes like these could occur again. The lack of key staff to oversee Bechtel's work continues to plague the WTP project to this day.

The concerns of the GAO, the DNFSB, and Alexander all point to a flawed relationship between the DOE and Bechtel, which is both the design and construction authority on WTP. Once operable, the plant will turn the millions of gallons of radioactive sediment currently in the site's waste tanks into glass rods by combining the toxic gunk with glass-forming material at a blistering 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit—a process called vitrification. The rods will then be shipped to an offsite location to be stored indefinitely.

Bechtel's contract is what is known in contractor parlance as "cost and schedule performance based." Such contracts, standard in the defense world, reward contractors like Bechtel for "meeting milestones" within their proposed budget—in some instances, even if plans and construction turn out to be critically flawed. Despite certain mistakes, including those made during the first three years of building the WTP with seismic deficiencies, Bechtel boasted in 2004 that they had received 100 percent of the available milestone fees available to the company through their Hanford contract with DOE.

The DOE is tasked with overseeing the project and signing off on their recommended procedures, but Alexander argues that the agency is incapable of proper oversight. "In the past 45 years, about 400,000 people . . . have been irradiated [because of the Mayak disaster]," reflects Alexander. "It's quite possible that a similar accident could happen here. That's why it is so important that we get the Hanford cleanup facilities up and running properly, as soon as possible."

 

There is something ominous about Hanford, and it's not just the radioactivity.

The Wanapum Tribe, which survived here for centuries, feasting on the once-mighty Columbia River salmon runs, was evicted less than 70 years ago by the federal government so the feds could manufacture fuel for the A-bomb. It was certainly a marvelous scientific achievement when the first plutonium rolled out of Hanford's B Reactor, which is now just one of the many structures that haunt this dry landscape. But cleaning up Hanford's aftermath may prove even more of an accomplishment than it took to create the nuclear reservation in the first place.

Richland, population 48,000, is the city closest to Hanford. Local bars on the weekends overflow with Hanford contractors, and the cash they put down for shots and rounds of cold beer is abundant. The local watering hole, aptly named the Atomic Ale Brewpub, is decorated with Hanford artifacts and memorabilia, and serves beer like Plutonium Porter and Jim's Radioactive Rye. Richland High School's mascot is the Bombers. Despite its toxicity, locals have evidently embraced Richland's nuclear lore.

Richland's economy has long been sustained by the nuclear industry. Before the current cleanup of Hanford began to bring money into the community, the development of nuclear technologies ruled the town for decades. Just outside a more upscale neighborhood is a sprawling industrial park that serves as the district office for Hanford contractors and DOE employees. Without Hanford contracts employing thousands, Richland certainly would be struggling.

During the Cold War, while Hanford was operating at full capacity, Richland received the brunt of the site's radioactive pollution. As plutonium production reached its peak in the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, plant operators at Hanford were told to ignore wind patterns, and released toxic debris into the air throughout the day. As a result, the cities of Richland, Pasco, Kennewick, and Benton City all exceeded acceptable levels of radioactive contamination.

During a more devastating period, such as the December 1949 "Green Run" when raw uranium fuel was being processed, a winter storm struck the region, causing heavy radioactive deposits to snow down on Richland and other rural farm communities. Samples of radioactivity taken during the Green Run incident were 1,000 times the government's recommended level, potentially impacting tens of thousands of people.

For years, the government kept documentation of potentially lethal amounts of radiation in the area classified. Not until 1986, after public demand mounted, did it release almost 20,000 pages of historical data showing how much nuclear pollution had plagued the entire region, affecting literally millions of people. As a result, a class-action suit was filed in 1991 by 2,400 individuals—"downwinders"— who claimed they had developed thyroid cancer after being exposed to radioactive iodine-131 emissions from Hanford. A jury deadlocked on the issue, which led to a 2005 mistrial. The plaintiffs appealed in 2006, and in 2008 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that downwinders are now allowed to sue the contractors that operated Hanford at the time. In July, 139 of these downwinders settled for a meager $5,683 per victim.

Yet the majority of people affected by Hanford pollution have not received compensation of any kind.

 

Today there are a total of 177 underground storage waste tanks at Hanford, 149 of which are single-shelled and considered leak-prone by the EPA. All together, these holding containers house 53 million gallons of scorching-hot radioactive goop—nearly two-thirds of the country's high-level, defense-related radioactive waste.

Many of these tanks are already leaking, and have been for some time; according to the Washington Department of Ecology's estimate, one million gallons of nuclear waste have already poisoned groundwater as it continues to seep toward the Columbia River. However, it is not only leaks that haunt Hanford's scientists and engineers. The longer the waste stays put, the more dangerous it becomes.

"In the extreme," says Alexander, "this could lead to a serious condition that remains undiscovered until it is too late and another Mayak-scale incident occurs."

Alexander is openly concerned that such an event could release dangerous amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, contaminating nearby towns and destroying much of Washington's vital agricultural economy. And despite Hanford's already seething radioactivity, the DOE is eyeing the site as a potential waste repository for additional radioactive garbage produced from medical procedures, including cancer treatments, as well as waste associated with oil and gas exploration.

Bechtel has held the rights to build WTP since 2000. The plant, like Bechtel's Hanford contract, is gargantuan. The equivalent of constructing two full-scale nuclear power plants, WTP is to one day span 65 acres and include four major nuclear facilities: Pretreatment, Low-Activity Waste Vitrification, High-Level Waste Vitrification, and an Analytical Laboratory. It's currently the largest single construction operation taking place anywhere in the United States. Not only is the proposed WTP immense, it also comes with a staggering price tag of $12.2 billion, funded solely by the public trust, part of which comes out of the annual DOE budget.

Before Bechtel, the DOE's WTP contract was with British Nuclear Fuel Ltd. (BNFL). But in May 2000, after the company had spent more than $14 billion—despite an earlier cost estimate of $7 billion—the DOE ended the contract. Bechtel was then awarded the job through a competitive contract bid, receiving a $4.3 billion deal when it assured the DOE it could do the work for less than British Nuclear Fuel's price.

Since then, however, the company's cost estimates, start dates, and deadlines have changed on numerous occasions. Bechtel has also swapped project presidents on four separate occasions, most recently installing Frank Russo as director in January 2010.

Originally, WTP was to begin turning Hanford's radioactive materials into glass by 2011, with all vitrification to be completed by 2028. But in 2007 Bechtel pushed up their original cost estimates to $12.2 billion and their deadlines to start the vitrification process to 2019. Even if they meet this goal, the job will not be finished until 2047. The timeline and cost projections have constantly changed because of poor management decisions and a rush to fast-track completion, say critics, as was the case with the redesign of WTP based on its seismic preparedness.

"Bechtel, by all accounts and purposes, has done an absolutely miserable job," says Tom Carpenter, the professorial executive director of Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based nonprofit watchdog group that keeps a close eye on all things Hanford. "They [the DOE] simply don't have enough [personnel] to deal with all the technical challenges, so Bechtel is getting away with whatever they want out there."

In fact, Bechtel has hundreds of engineers and scientists on the project, compared to less than a dozen for the DOE at Hanford.

"There are only a few [technical staff] in the Engineering Division," Alexander says. "And there are about seven of us in the Nuclear Safety Division where I work."

Furthermore, an internal DOE document published in August by the Construction Project Review (CPR) states that the current $12.2 billion estimate, which increased in 2007 after the DOE revised their WTP goals, is likely to climb yet again. "Funding uncertainty is the major project risk," the document notes. These increases, says Carpenter, are directly related to the DOE's inability to manage Bechtel.

Rick McNulty, who has worked at Hanford for 17 years and currently holds the position of Organizational Property Management Officer, adds that running out of money is but one of many risks. On August 4, McNulty—also a lawyer and president of Local 788 of the American Federation of Government Employees, largely made up of Hanford scientists and engineers—requested a dual stop-work order to Bechtel and the DOE to force them to halt immediately the welding of tops on so-called "non-Newtonian vessels" at WTP. These five large containers hold "pulse jet mixers" designed to mix radioactive waste within the vessels when the plant becomes operable. Alexander explains that if these materials cannot stay consistently mixed, WTP will not be able to turn the radioactive waste into glass rods.

McNulty is concerned that Bechtel and DOE management are ignoring sound science, moving forward with a project that has failed small-scale testing on numerous occasions. These tests have shown that solids end up accumulating into small piles, causing the mixers to malfunction. The substances that build up during the mixing process, these studies note, are far more dense and cohesive than originally thought. Consequently, the mixers will likely fail. If these small-scale studies are correct, and the pulse jet mixers start mixing waste, this could cause a radioactive accident.

Perhaps even more frightening, as Alexander points out, is that these same tests show that erosion will likely occur in the so-called "black cells"—the areas around the vessels that house the pulse jet mixers. These areas will become off-limits to maintenance crews once the vessels begin to operate.

"[A] significant risk [is] that the vessel bottoms could be eroded through," says Alexander. "If the [pulse jet mixers] erode the vessel floor, then the [radioactive] contents of the vessel will drain into the black cell that they are entombed in. Because there is no access for men or equipment into black cells, there is no way of providing maintenance within them. The black cell itself would likely have to be abandoned."

Like Alexander, McNulty is worried that there will be no turning back once the vessels become operable because the radioactivity within them will be too high for workers to enter the black cells—meaning that all mechanisms' interiors, from the vessels to the piping, will have to last the lifetime of the machine. Any malfunction of any part would end the vessel operation altogether, creating a potentially deadly nuclear accident.

"We're talking about dealing with nuclear waste here, so we have to make sure everything is functioning properly," adds McNulty. "This whole thing will be shot if these well heads are sealed with a faulty design inside. We need this thing to work; it's not worth rushing."

McNulty's complaint and subsequent request to halt construction came as a result of the aforementioned small-scale studies conducted by Alexander. In an internal "differing opinion" report circulated among DOE management and contractor staff, which challenged Bechtel's notion that the pulse jet mixers would work, Alexander wrote in June 2011: "The Contractor Reports [which are submitted to DOE for review] are neither conservative nor do they provide a realistic portrayal of vessel physics and therefore there is no justification for continued design, procurement, and installation. Contractor Decision Papers are not technically sound and therefore do not Support a Decision to Weld Heads . . . The Design is not Licensable and management should STOP WORK."

 

Alexander's tests of the pulse jet mixer design plans showed that the model was faulty, yet his pleas to stop construction have gone unheeded by his DOE Project Director, Dale Knutson. In early August, the DOE announced that it was moving forward with welding the tops on the vessels, much to Alexander's dismay.

"We took Dr. Alexander's report into consideration and determined there was no imminent risk to safety if the heads were welded on [the non-Newtonian vessels]," says DOE spokesperson Carrie Meyer. "In the end we looked at the bottom line of the project, and it was a business decision to move forward."

In an internal e-mail obtained by Seattle Weekly, dated August 4, Alexander addressed his concerns directly to the DOE's Chief of Nuclear Safety, Richard Lagdon, writing: "Unfortunately the Decision to Weld the Non-Newtonian Vessels was made a day too soon. Based on the testing yesterday evening and the recent testing results it is clear that the Decision to Weld will require rework and place unacceptable liability upon the government . . . I was the only scientist present to observe these tests. I guess the project doesn't really care about the test results. Testing over the last two weeks demonstrates that we are now at the point where a very expensive contingency option will have to be exercised. This involves either the implementation of design and fabrication of a new vessel or significant modification of the existing vessel. Either option will be extremely costly . . . This could have been avoided if the DOE technical staff recommendations and those of the DNFSB (among numerous others) had been fairly considered."

On September 1, Knutson and Bechtel WTP Project Director Russo released a joint statement asserting they would sidestep further small-scale testing and instead conduct large-scale analysis in the future, once the units are sealed with the pulse jet mixers inside. "Testing is performed to validate the safety and quality of design and construction," Russo said. "We are confident, based on the results of our small-scale testing, that the mixing design of the vessels meets the safety design basis."

"It's a classic case of management overriding technical staff," says McNulty, who speaks from years of experience at Hanford. "The DOE is in a state of absolute denial about this whole thing. They need to rein [Russo] in. They can't allow him to continue to misrepresent all the internal studies that show [the pulse jet mixers] are simply not going to work."

Last fall, the pulse jet mixers were welded inside the non-Newtonian vessels, but the tops were not sealed shut. Despite opposition from Alexander and other scientists, this portion of the project was pushed forward by Bechtel and DOE management. "I raised issues within DOE, but Bechtel was convinced these pulse jet mixers would work," Alexander says. "The result was that Bechtel was able to get DOE management to sign off on welding the mixers within the vessels."

Once the weld heads encapsulate what studies show to be defective pulse jet mixers, years of research and development will be wasted and billions more will have to be spent to fix what could have been prevented, contends McNulty.

Russo would not submit to an interview with Seattle Weekly. Instead, Bechtel spokesperson Suzanne Heaston sent the following statement via e-mail: "Assuming the vessel mixing systems work as designed, welding the heads on now will save taxpayers significant cost and avoid delays in treatment of the waste in the tank farm . . . If further testing associated with the mitigation actions determines that they will not perform adequately and operational controls are not adequate, design changes could be required. The timing of the welding of the heads on the vessels is a management decision to proceed . . . The potential costs of potential rework are less than the known costs of delay."

In other words, even though no small-scale tests have ever shown that the pulse jet mixers will work properly, Bechtel, with the DOE's blessing, will still move forward with welding the heads to the tops of the vessels.

Such illogic mystifies Tamosaitis, a systems engineer who has been employed for more than 40 years by Bechtel subcontractor URS. "So Bechtel charges ahead, welds the heads on [the non-Newtonian vessels], and then waits for the answers that will tell how the tanks need to be changed," he says in response to Bechtel's statement. "What then? Cut the heads off the tanks? Start over building new tanks? Wow. That sounds like a low-cost approach."

In an additional e-mail sent August 2, Alexander writes of how Bechtel management disregarded his early report that their design for the pulse jet mixers was flawed: "In the spring I raised a series of concerns with respect to the performance of the non-Newtonian vessels. Because I raised the issue, Frank Russo directed me to write my issues in a paper over the Easter weekend and deliver the paper on Monday April 5, 2010 . . . As a consequence the [Bechtel] manager labeled my issues as the 'non- Newtonian curve-ball.' Since when are DOE staff supposed to take direction from Contractor management? . . . Mr. Russo also directed Dr. Walter Tamosaitis to gather as many top flight PhDs as possible together to discredit my paper. I requested that my paper receive appropriate peer review but that request was denied. Walt had trouble even assembling a team. Walt knew that my issues were technically correct and he never submitted a counter paper."

Shortly after he refused to counter Alexander's internal paper warning about the problems with the pulse jet mixer design, Tamosaitis blew his own whistle, exposing what he saw as safety failures at WTP and citing concerns that the pulse jet mixer design issues would prohibit the plant from operating correctly. As a result, Tamosaitis says he was removed from the project; Bechtel and URS both deny that they removed Tamosaitis because he raised safety concerns.

"The drive to stay on schedule is putting the whole [WTP] project at risk," Tamosaitis contends. " 'Not on my watch' is a standard mantra among [DOE and Contract] management who like to intimidate naysayers like me. These guys would rather deal with major issues down the road than fix them up front . . . Cost and schedule performance trump sound science time and again."

On March 31, 2010, Tamosaitis e-mailed Bechtel managers Michael K. Robinson and Russo about concerns about pulse jet mixer failures raised by the DOE's Alexander, to which Russo replied, "Please keep this under control. The science is over." In an internal e-mail string dated April 14, 2010, Robinson writes to Russo that he will "just have to keep [Tamosaitis] in line."

"As soon as Russo came on board, the chain of command was altered," Tamosaitis says. "Before Russo, I had to report directly to Bill Gay, a URS employee, but Russo removed Gay from the command chain and [made me communicate] directly to Mike Robinson [of Bechtel]. I think Russo believed it was easier to drive ahead with his cost and schedule push if he didn't have two URS managers directly under him."

 

In an e-mail dated March 31, 2010, Russo updated President Obama appointee Inés Triay on the situation. Triay, who did not return calls seeking comment, served as Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management and oversaw the DOE's Hanford work until July, at which time she stepped down.

"It was like herding cats," Russo wrote Triay about a meeting he'd had with senior contract scientists and engineers regarding his quest to stay on schedule. "Scientists . . . were in lock step harmony when we told them the science is ending. They all hated it . . . I will send anyone on my team home if they demonstrate an unwillingness or inability to fulfill my direction."

"Walt is killing us," Russo later e-mailed Bill Gay of URS on July 1, 2010, who though removed from the chain of command still had to sign off on Tamosaitis' removal.

"Get him in your corporate office today."

"He will be gone tomorrow," Gay replied.

"This action [Tamosaitis' removal from the Hanford project] was initiated by Dale Knutson probably not knowing the sensitivity," Gay e-mailed to another employee in response to the decision to get rid of Tamosaitis.

Knutson would not respond to interview requests from Seattle Weekly. However, in a sworn statement sent to the Department of Labor, Knutson denied that he was in any way involved in the decision to demote Tamosaitis.

While no longer working on Hanford and WTP, Tamosaitis is still employed by URS, but is confined to a windowless basement office in Richland, where he says no management has spoken to him in over a year. His daily work routine isn't that of a normal URS scientist, and he is not even sure what official title he presently has. URS has recently shipped him around the country to work on various company projects as a sort of in-house consultant.

Tamosaitis is currently suing Bechtel in Washington state, as well as URS and the DOE at the federal level, over his ousting at Hanford. "It is my opinion that [Dale] Knutson and Frank Russo are in lockstep," he asserts. "Due to the constant managerial turnover [on the WTP project], these guys won't likely be there in a few years, so they'd rather have these problems happen on someone else's clock, even though it is always more expensive to fix something later then to do it right the first time."

Three sources working on the DOE's and Bechtel's Hanford vitrification project tell Seattle Weekly that "the WTP project is in total jeopardy" because of their employers' refusal to address technical and safety concerns raised by staffers like Tamosaitis and Alexander. These sources, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution by their employers, believe congressional hearings in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the issue are imminent. They also contend that the project could be temporarily shut down any day due to safety concerns.

If it comes to rebuilding these hundred-million-dollar vessels, the costs will skyrocket. As a result, Hanford Challenge's Carpenter and others note, the entire project could fall apart. That means taxpayers will again have to foot the bill for WTP's redesign and construction, postponing its operation indefinitely.

"Clearly, the management system or 'safety culture' is broken," writes Alexander in an August 2 e-mail to McNulty. "I have been under tremendous stress for more than a year. It seems to me that this is beyond a purely technical issue and is a whistleblower issue."

Research support for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

[kesey]

Hi kesey 

What do you think?

Explaing my quote.

If everybody deep down inside knew it was safe then we wouldnt be having this discussion.

They are not safe.  There is another way.

End off. 

Laters.

[RojoLeón]

Explaing my quote.

If everybody deep down inside knew it was safe then we wouldnt be having this discussion.

They are not safe.  There is another way.

End off. 

Laters.

There are dozens of threads about things here that get discussed and don't cause anyone any harm - veggie food for example. Discussion isn't a marker of underlying safety.

What is the other way/s you suggest?

[Hyypia headers]

Explaing my quote.

If everybody deep down inside knew it was safe then we wouldnt be having this discussion.

They are not safe.  There is another way.

End off. 

Laters.

Right now, there are no other ways. We need and and we will need it for the foreseeable future.

[RojoLeón]

Right now, there are no other ways. We need and and we will need it for the foreseeable future.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/apr/02/nuclear-dreams-economic-reality-blog?newsfeed=true

Nuclear industry dreams dashed by current economic reality

It was the financing model and rates of return that prompted German nuclear giants RWC and E.ON to pull out of UK energy plans


The news that nuclear giants RWE and E.ON are dropping plans to build any new UK reactors has sent a toxic cloud not only over Wales, but over the nuclear industry itself.

Of course, everyone knows nowadays, post-Chernobyl, post-Fukushima, that nuclear power plants are not really safe. Even if there are a few noisy die-hards, arguing that the resulting radiation is harmless, and that "hardly anyone" dies as a direct consequence of atomic meltdown, that old canard just won't wash any more.

Other nuclear myths, though, have lingered on. Atomic energy, unveiled by Her Majesty with grand aplomb at Calder Hall half a century ago, still has a hi-tech glamour, an aura of somehow being "the future". The reality that atomic plants are basically steam engines staffed by thousands of casual workers who would otherwise be picking strawberries or digging up roads somehow never impinges. Perhaps one of the most shocking images post-Fukushima, was of unskilled workers hosing sea water on to the smouldering wreckage. Not here the calm, fatherly figures in their white lab-coats in front of consoles worthy of the Starship Enterprise.

But there are solid, practical reasons why nuclear power relies on casual staff using dustpans and brushes to sweep up radioactive dust, or hoses to cool down spent fuel. Best of which is that it's cheaper. An enlightening fact about Fukushima, where the tsunami swept over the safety wall, was that at this point on the coast, the land is well above the level of any waves, tsunami or otherwise. It required considerable ingenuity to bulldoze the cliffs down to sea-level to construct a plant that was then potentially at risk. However, the plant operators knew that nuclear electricity is not actually "too cheap to meter", whatever Eisenhower may have said, and the additional cost of pumping seawater up to the top of the cliffs would have eaten into their bottom line. Hence, the small, if ever so slightly risky, strategy of situating the complex at sea-level.

So the torpedo that has just been launched at the majestic British nuclear ship by the sneaky German energy corporations has hit the most vulnerable part of the nuclear industry - its economic credibility. Among the wreckage, the unpalatable fact is that the electricity produced is not economic and that the scheme has only been kept going by increasingly exotic public subsidies and finance packages (read sub-prime crisis).

That's not even to mention other economic tricks the industry excels in, such as putting off decommissioning and waste disposal costs into a far distant future and hiving off its disaster and insurance liabilities by, er … basically, ignoring them.

The promise of nuclear was that if its plants were expensive, surely, over time, industry costs would drop, both due to economies of scale and new technology, and that sooner or later, the electricity it produced would become commercial, rather than merely a useful by-product of plutonium enrichment. (The military dimension that even the official programme for Calder Hall acknowledged.) But even as rival energy technologies have dropped steadily in price, nuclear has done the reverse.

Nowadays, a typical scheme involving multiple reactors on one site, puts you back $25bn!

The money was not to be produced up-front, of course, but created by complex financial packages based on debt, not equity. The sums involved, the "paper" floating on the underlying asset – the nuclear complex – run into the trillions. Even well-run German multinationals have trouble coping with that, unaided by the state. And evidently, RWE and E.ON are sceptical about the long-term ability of the UK's "here today, gone tomorrow" coalition government to prop up their nuclear plans.

[Hyypia headers]

In what sense do you agree or disagree with that article of the guardian mate?

When it comes to energy, I  trust the people who know a thing or two about it. Politicians or the everyday newspapers don 't fall into that category. That is the problem with nuclear energy. Most people haven't got an idea about what goes on inside a plant, but they come out with all sort of opinions.

Anyway, if the economics of it all will deside what energysource will be used in the future than I suggest Hydro. If that isn't possible, nuclear will still be the cheapest source per kWh.

By the way, you don't need thousands of people to run a plant. 25bn for a scheme with multiple reactors? Does multiple mean 4, 8 or 27 reactors? Belgium will start the build of a 1bn euros generation 4 plant in two years (The MYRRHA project). It will be finished around 2024. This is paid for by the same government that says it will close all the plants in 2015.

Tjernobyl was a crime, Fukushima a one off. Nuclear energy is safe. Politicians don 't know what they are talking about.

Good night.

[farawayred]

People need to remember that safety is NOT inherent for any technology, safety measures can be implemented. The same redundancy used in space programs would render the reactors virtually indestructible by human intervention (keep in mind that ALL disasters carry imprints of wrong human decisions). What is currently state-of-the-art in nuclear safety is a joke compared to that NASA (and probably ESA to a great extent) uses in space probes. The safety methods are there, but what limits their implementation is the cost. So it all comes down to how much dough one can make by cutting corners, and that has nothing to do with safety.

[RojoLeón]

In what sense do you agree or disagree with that article of the guardian mate?

I think it clearly highlights the economic falsities which are presented by some of the pro-nuclear crowd. In particular, the fact that decommissioning costs and contaminant remediation costs are deliberately ignored when estimating cost benefit ratios. The quoted costs per Kw-Hr are rarely accurate for this reason.   

By the way, you don't need thousands of people to run a plant.

Sellafield employs approx 10,000 staff. This may not be the case at all sites but I would say 'thousands' would be fairly typical.

Tjernobyl was a crime

There were many of them in Soviet Russia - this one is particularly galling due cover up and lies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
Our benevolent rulers in the west knew about, and kept secret their knowledge of this in a deliberate move to protect the Nuclear industry.

Politicians don 't know what they are talking about.

They generally do what is popular and in their personal best interests. The Nuclear industry is a powerful, deeply rooted and vested interest - often with ties to the governing military. Politicians are most often seen championing the cause of nuclear power. And I concur that they often don't know what they are talking about.

Fukushima a one off.

The thing is, Fukashima is still one piece of bad luck away from meaning that most of Northern Japan will have to evacuate 50+million people - The wrong kind of seismic event around the disaster site will result in the building collapse of unit 4. If that happens, then there will be a chain of events that could mean the enormous release of radioactivity due to spent fuel fires.

TEPCO, have mismanaged the whole thing and if it wasn't for a few of the plant's staff directly disobeying orders, the disaster would have been much worse. What is not reassuring is that this will take years to fix and they are not planning to start work on this (building 4) until December 2013.

Post disaster analysis seems to indicate that the cosy and intertwined relationships between the regulating authorities, the governing agencies and the power company, gave birth to a situation where corners were cut and safety systems deliberately bypassed - for profit.

If you had asked me 13months ago, to put in order the countries most likely to deal competently with a nuclear accident, Japan would have been high, if not first on my list. I'd have been wrong. TEPCO have been self serving and incompetent. The government has been indecisive and inept.

Japan is full of nuclear sites on fault-lines/high risk seismic regions. Lets pray that the gods are not so angry to have another earthquake under a site with lax regulatory oversight and insufficient safety precautions. 

People need to remember that safety is NOT inherent for any technology, safety measures can be implemented. The same redundancy used in space programs would render the reactors virtually indestructible by human intervention (keep in mind that ALL disasters carry imprints of wrong human decisions). What is currently state-of-the-art in nuclear safety is a joke compared to that NASA (and probably ESA to a great extent) uses in space probes. The safety methods are there, but what limits their implementation is the cost. So it all comes down to how much dough one can make by cutting corners, and that has nothing to do with safety.

Excellent post. In idealized scenarios, nuclear is as safe as the people involved and the quality of the holistic research, design and support structures. As you say, economic reasons (and downright corporate malfeasance) mean that there is a glass ceiling as to how high that safety factor can be.

The cynic in me thinks that the public moneys that would be much better spent on renewables and other non carbon/radionuclide pollution energy sources, are being funneled towards pro nuclear PR and subsidies.       

The best thing for us to do would be to dramatically improve energy efficiencies and damp down the rampant consumerism (kill it with fire). But there are no wealthy corporate interests (as yet) that lobby for a reduction in profits and growth. Something must eventually give

[RojoLeón]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/

Exelon's 'Nuclear Guy': No New Nukes

Nuclear power is no longer an economically viable source of new energy in the United States, the freshly-retired CEO of Exelon, America’s largest producer of nuclear power, said in Chicago Thursday.

And it won’t become economically viable, he said, for the forseeable future.

“Let me state unequivocably that I’ve never met a nuclear plant I didn’t like,” said John Rowe, who retired 17 days ago as chairman and CEO of Exelon Corporation, which operates 22 nuclear power plants, more than any other utility in the United States.

“Having said that, let me also state unequivocably that new ones don’t make any sense right now.”

Speaking to about 5o people at the University of Chicago‘s Harris School of Public Policy, Rowe presented a series of slides comparing the economic viability of various energy portfolios, including the “King Coal” scenario favored by Republicans, the “Big Wind” scenario favored by Democrats, and a “Playing Favorites” scenario that shuffles and selects from various energy sources.

All were trumped by a portfolio that relies heavily on America’s sudden abundance of natural gas, which has flooded the market since the boom in hydraulic fracturing of shale gas. Natural gas futures dropped to a 10-year low today—$2.15 for 1,000 cubic feet—on abundant supply, the Associated Press reported.

“I’m the nuclear guy,” Rowe said. “And you won’t get better results with nuclear. It just isn’t economic, and it’s not economic within a foreseeable time frame.”

Nuclear power remains a favorite of the Obama Administration, particularly in the form of small and modular new reactors. But Rowe’s pessimism about nuclear power reinforces statements made by other nuclear experts since the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan.

However, Rowe did not touch upon the political vulnerability of nuclear power since the Fukushima accident. His argument was economic and, he added, paints a picture that Exelon itself does not savor.

Former ComEd CEO Tom Ayers built Exelon’s reactor fleet because, Rowe said, he thought they were best for the environment. But Ayers was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease by the time the reactors broke even on their initial cost. He died in 2007.

“I’m not fond of investments that don’t pay off before I’m incapable of comprehending it,” said Rowe, who took over as chairman and CEO of Exelon in 2003.

Rowe also served on the president’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.

from a link at that article - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2011/04/22/safer-nuclear-reactors-impeded-by-marketplace-expert-says/

Safer Nuclear Reactors Impeded By Marketplace, Expert Says
Hussein Khalil of Argonne National Laboratory and Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists speak at a University of Chicago panel on "Lessons from Fukushima"

Hussein Khalil of Argonne National Laboratory and Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
University of Chicago Panel Doubts Future of Nuclear Power in U.S.

Safer nuclear reactors have been available for years, but the energy market prefers less expensive conventional designs, a nuclear energy expert from Argonne National Laboratory said Thursday.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/four-florida-lawmakers-join-lawsuit-against-nuclear-advance-fee/1223884

Four Florida lawmakers join lawsuit against nuclear advance fee

A group of four legislators say the Florida law that requires utility customers to pay in advance for new nuclear plants is unconstitutional and have joined a lawsuit asking the state Supreme Court to overturn it.

The two state representatives and two senators plan to submit their arguments to the court on Monday. The lawmakers state that the law is vague yet enables utilities to collect hundreds of millions from consumers with little framework for accountability.

[farawayred]

I just have to say, this guy is full of himself... If he needs to see how a nuclear plant can operate for profit AND at safety levels head and shoulders above any other nuclear plant in the US, and miles above Fukushima, he needs to check Diablo Canyon in California. San Onofre may be crap, but Diablo Canyon is the model of a nuclear plant. And they operate at a hefty profit.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.pottsmerc.com/article/20120412/NEWS01/120419797/nrc-reveals-radioactive-water-spill-at-limerick-nuke-plant&pager=full_story

NRC reveals radioactive water spill at Limerick nuke plant

    LIMERICK — “Several thousand gallons” of water containing as much as five-times the government’s “safe” level of radioactive tritium was accidentally released at Exelon Nuclear’s Limerick Generating Station last month and then flushed into the Schuylkill River, The Mercury learned Thursday.

    However the concentrations of contamination in the water were considered so low that they presented “no immediate health and safety concerns,” according to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, which is why the incident was not reported publicly until 23 days after it happened.
    It was 3 a.m. Monday, March 19 when “a manhole cover overflowed during a scheduled and permitted radiological release,” according to an incident report posted on the NRC web site.
    “As a result, several thousand gallons of water overflowed briefly, formed puddles in the area, and was discharged” through a permitted discharge to Possum Hollow Creek, which flows from the plant grounds into the Schuylkill River,” according to information from the NRC.
    The notification issued to the NRC by Exelon stated “several (water) samples showed increased levels of tritium that were well below permitted Commonwealth and Federal effluent limits.”
    NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan wrote in an e-mail that the “maximum level of radioactivity detected in Possum Hollow Creek . . . on the day of the event was 495 picocuries per liter of tritium.”
    He noted that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “safe drinking limit for tritium per liter is 20,000 picocuries per liter.”
    However, Sheehan also noted that one water sample collected from a puddle near the manhole from which the water first emerged, had a tritium concentration of 113,000 picocuries per liter, more than five times the safe drinking water level.
    “Of course the water leaked out onto the ground on the plant grounds would not be used for” drinking, Sheehan said.
    However all that water, which Exelon estimated something less than 15,000 gallons, was legally dumped into the Schuylkill River, which is a drinking water source for several downstream communities, including Phoenixville and Philadelphia.
    But because the contaminated water would be diluted when it hit the Schuylkill, and the concentration of tritium spread out, “calculations indicate that the dose to a member of the public exposed to the contamination would have been a small fraction of the allowable levels,” Sheehan wrote.
    He said state and county emergency officials were notified, as were township officials.
    “Composite samples were collected from downstream water companies and no radioactivity attributable to the release was identified,” Sheehan wrote.
    “It’s important to note that the Limerick and other nuclear power plants routinely release slightly radioactive water to the river, but the releases must be controlled and any levels of radioactivity well within allowable limits,” Sheehan wrote.
    Because the release was not considered dangerous, Exelon informed the NRC but did not immediately do so in writing.
    “When formal notifications are made to the state, we expect to receive a written notification to us,” Sheehan explained. “The company initially said it wasn’t clear whether such a submittal was needed (under the reporting requirements of NEI voluntary Groundwater Protection Initiative),” Sheehan wrote. “But we insisted that it was needed, and the company ultimately agreed.”
    “Because the water release was small and temporary, limited to station property and posed no environmental or public health risks, our initial review concluded that it did not meet NRC criteria for an emergency notification,” Dana Melia, communications manager for the Limerick Generating Station wrote in response to a Mercury inquiry.
    “Regardless, we made the courtesy notifications because we like to keep stakeholders and community members informed,” she wrote.
    Melia further noted that “the water that exited the pipe was part of a planned and permitted release, well within state and federal effluent limits.”
    She further wrote that “most of the spilled water travelled quickly on the surface to its intended destination — the river, and we see no indication from our network of groundwater monitoring wells that it will ever reach a drinking water source.”
    “Limerick is committed to a comprehensive and proactive environmental monitoring program, which includes routine tests of air, water, soil and agricultural products and we continue to operate well within all state and federal regulations,” Melia concluded.
    Sheehan wrote that the company “is continuing its investigation as to the causes and long-term corrective actions.”
    He added that “we had an inspector walking the grounds on the day of the event and have continued to evaluate the details, the company’s actions and any potential impact on public health and safety.”
    The news comes seven days before the NRC holds its annual “open house” review of the plant’s operation in 2011.
    The meeting will take place Wednesday, April 18, at the Limerick Township Building, 646 West Ridge Pike, from 6 to 8 p.m. and is open to the public.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/04/more-problems-found-at-san-onofre-nuclear-power-plant.html

More problems found at San Onofre nuclear power plant
April 12, 2012 |  7:02 am
increase text size decrease text size

Southern California Edison officials said Wednesday that they are now seeing the same unusual type of wear on steam generator tubes at both of the San Onofre nuclear plant's reactor units.

In recent months, officials have found unexpected wear on more than 300 tubes that were installed as part of the $671-million replacement of the plant's four steam generators. The new steam generators were installed within the last two years, which made that rate of wear unexpected.

What was even more unusual was the type of wear at Unit 3, which has now also been discovered at Unit 2. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said the tubes in Unit 3 were vibrating excessively and rubbing against each other. Initially, they said that the wear occurring at Unit 2 appeared to be different.

But in a statement Wednesday, Edison said it had found "additional minor tube wear" in Unit 2 of a type that is "similar to the type of wear that was seen in Unit 3, but at a very low level." The power company, which operates San Onofre, is conducting additional inspections at Unit 2. San Onofre has been out of commission since Jan. 31, when a tube in Unit 3 sprung a leak, releasing a small amount of radioactive steam.

The event led to discovery of wear on more tubes, and the NRC dispatched a special inspection team to the plant. The NRC has prohibited the plant from firing up again until the cause of the wear is understood. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko toured the plant last week along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista).

Jaczko assured reporters, anti-nuclear activists and local elected officials that the plant would remain shut down until the problems are thoroughly investigated and fixed, although Issa expressed hope that the plant would be up and running again before summer.

Edison and NRC officials have not said what they believe is causing the wear. A report commissioned by the advocacy group Friends of the Earth contended that design changes in the new generators — including a different alloy used to make the tubes, a change in the flow rate, the addition of more tubes and changes in the support structures that hold the tubes in place — probably caused the issues.

[RojoLeón]

I just have to say, this guy is full of himself... If he needs to see how a nuclear plant can operate for profit AND at safety levels head and shoulders above any other nuclear plant in the US, and miles above Fukushima, he needs to check Diablo Canyon in California. San Onofre may be crap, but Diablo Canyon is the model of a nuclear plant. And they operate at a hefty profit.

San Onofre appears to be on it's last legs. There doesn't seem to be much public support for the extensive and very expensive repairs needed.

Diablo Canyon is a funny one - as you say it has a much better image but has many of it's own problems, and is deeply unpopular in the bay area (who are all liberal commies to be fair).

Many of the problems seem to be related to lax regulatory oversight and poor management safety practices. It is also very close to a fault line and I trust that people will be a lot more switched on to this kind of hazard post fukishima but it is a little bit concerning. California hasn't had a serious earthquake for a while (lots of little ones to be fair).

 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/03/report-outlines-problems-at-diablo-canyon-nuclear-power-plant.html

The reactor at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo operated for a year and a half with some emergency systems disabled, according to a 2010 safety review by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The incident was one of 14 “near-misses” the NRC uncovered in its inspections of nuclear power plants where problems had been occurring. An analysis by the group Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that “many of these significant events occurred because reactor owners, and often the NRC, tolerated known safety problems.”

The NRC found a range of problems at the 14 plants, including poor design, equipment failure, poor training and human error.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/17/BUA01IDTUO.

For 18 months, operators at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo didn't realize that a system to pump water into one of their reactors during an emergency wasn't working.

It had been accidentally disabled by the plant's own engineers, according to a report issued Thursday on the safety of nuclear reactors in the United States.

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2011/05/17/why-diablo-canyon-unsafe

And now a new report shows that PG&E's Diablo Canyon plant has the same problem: Lots of smaller things are messed up, and they could lead to problems in, say, the inevitable earthquake. A fence could block a fire hose from reaching a burning or overheated reactor. The building that houses fire equipment could collapse. And, according to the Bay Citizen:

The plant’s back-up generators might not be usable during a disaster, because PG&E had not considered how to turn them on under adverse conditions. The generators are all stored in the same spot, which could make them “susceptible to a common made failure because of the similarities in design and location."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance

The Diablo Canyon reactors were originally estimated to cost just over $300 million when PG&E was first given permission to construct the facility. When finally opened in 1985, construction costs were $5.8 billion and financing costs nearly an additional $7 billion. After the 1981 blueprint mirror image mistake was discovered, the reactor's construction costs stood at $2.1 billion. PG&E permission to go ahead with operation was reversed by the NRC and the company was required to go through a major review and rebuild. PG&E was unable to find further financing from any source to continue construction, until president Ronald Reagan ordered the United States Environmental Protection Agency to give the company nearly $2.5 billion in loans.[citation needed]

The controversy did not come to a close until December 1988 when the California Public Utilities Commission gave PG&E a $54 billion 30-year, cost plus rate contract to operate Diablo Canyon Power Plant. It has been considered[by whom?] the most controversial nuclear power plant in U.S. history because of its location 2½ miles offshore from the Hosgri Fault.]

[farawayred]

San Onofre appears to be on it's last legs. There doesn't seem to be much public support for the extensive and very expensive repairs needed.

Diablo Canyon is a funny one - as you say it has a much better image but has many of it's own problems, and is deeply unpopular in the bay area (who are all liberal commies to be fair).

Many of the problems seem to be related to lax regulatory oversight and poor management safety practices. It is also very close to a fault line and I trust that people will be a lot more switched on to this kind of hazard post fukishima but it is a little bit concerning. California hasn't had a serious earthquake for a while (lots of little ones to be fair).

Major, major problem that bid in bold. As I was eluding to earlier, if space era fail-safe technology is implemented at nuclear reactors, combined with proper local management and independent oversight, the nuclear technology would suddenly become extremely appealing. Then, a nuclear reactor would practically be vulnerable to a direct asteroid hit, but then we won't be too worried about the nuclear plant anyway... The problem now is that major accidents happen only once per generation, and people tend to forget or just ignore the need for safety. The next generation will think "those dumb old farts didn't know how to run it, we know a lot better" and will make the same mistakes...

In fact, a cooperation between the nuclear energy and space exploration sectors can be mutually beneficial. We are yet to build a space mission to the Jovian environment mostly because electronics don't survive radiation. Galileo and Cassini only encountered the Jovian environment for a day every 3 months, so that isn't our goal, but a Europa mission will have to work in a very high radiation environment for many days. We can learn a lot from integrating more electronic monitoring at nuclear plants.

[RojoLeón]

Major, major problem that bid in bold. As I was eluding to earlier, if space era fail-safe technology is implemented at nuclear reactors, combined with proper local management and independent oversight, the nuclear technology would suddenly become extremely appealing. Then, a nuclear reactor would practically be vulnerable to a direct asteroid hit, but then we won't be too worried about the nuclear plant anyway... The problem now is that major accidents happen only once per generation, and people tend to forget or just ignore the need for safety. The next generation will think "those dumb old farts didn't know how to run it, we know a lot better" and will make the same mistakes...

In fact, a cooperation between the nuclear energy and space exploration sectors can be mutually beneficial. We are yet to build a space mission to the Jovian environment mostly because electronics don't survive radiation. Galileo and Cassini only encountered the Jovian environment for a day every 3 months, so that isn't our goal, but a Europa mission will have to work in a very high radiation environment for many days. We can learn a lot from integrating more electronic monitoring at nuclear plants.

Related to your asteroid example: a major earthquake in/near the bay area might cause damage at Diablo Canyon but would almost certainly kill the state water project at a stroke. 90% of the water used to irrigate the central valley agriculture would be gone for up to six months. 24.5 million people in SoCal would lose 25-40% of their potable water. The SWP canals, levees and water channels through the bay delta have much lower engineered design life compared to nuclear power plants.

http://www.swc.org/issues/bay-delta-conservation-plan

Nuclear design safety is just one of many engineering problems facing the country (and the world). This article illustrates some of the current nuclear design issues and projected costs.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/16/nuclear-titanics/print

The first analysis of the consequences of a nuclear plant accident was done in 1957 by

Brookhaven National Laboratory, established a decade before by the since disbanded U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to develop civilian uses of nuclear technology. Its “WASH-740” report said a major nuclear plant accident could result in “3,400 killed and about 43,000 injured” and property damage “could be about 7 billion dollars.” However, this analysis was based on nuclear power plants a fifth to a tenth of the size of those being constructed in the 1960s.

So Brookhaven National Laboratory conducted a second study in the mid-60s, “WASH-740-update.” It stated repeatedly that for a major nuclear plant accident, “the possible size of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”  It increased the number of deaths to 45,000, injuries to 100,000 and property damage up to $280 billion.

Then, in 1982, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories did a study they titled “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” that analyzed the accident consequences for every nuclear plant in the U.S. It projected, for example, for a meltdown with a breach of containment at the Indian Point 2 plant just north of New York City: 50,000 “peak early fatalities; 167,000 “peak early injuries;” 14,000 “peak cancer deaths;” and $314 billion in “scaled costs” of property damage in, it noted, “1980 dollars.”

As to likelihood, in 1985 there was a formal written exchange between U.S. Congressman Edward Markey’s House Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations and the NRC in which the panel asked: “What does the commission and NRC staff believe the likelihood of a severe core melt accident to be in the next twenty years for those reactors now operating and those expected to operate during that time?”

The NRC response: “In a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative probability of such an accident would be 45%.” But then it went on that this might be off by “a factor of about 10 above and below.” Thus, the chances of a meltdown during a 20-year period among 100 U.S. nuclear plant plants (there are 104 today) would be about 50-50.

These are not good odds for disaster.

Steven Starr, a board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, speaks further of the “fatal and deadly flaw” of nuclear power “that cannot be remedied by any technological fix or redesign. Nuclear power plants manufacture poisons thousands and millions of times more deadly to life than any other industrial process, and some of these poisons last for hundreds of millennia, and thus have great potential to become ubiquitous in the global environment.” And the “clear evidence” is that it is “beyond the means of the nuclear industry to keep these poisons contained during even the average lifespan of a nuclear reactor. It is beyond belief that anyone can promise that we can contain them for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”

The current issue of Popular Mechanics features an article “Why Titanic Still Matters” by Jim Meigs, the magazine’s editor and chief, which states: “In one respect, little has changed. As the recent loss of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia demonstrates, bad decision making can overcome even robust engineering. Virtually all man-made disasters—including the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and the BP oil spill—can  be traced to the same human failings that doomed Titanic. After 100 years, we must still remember—and, too often, relearn—the grim lessons of that night.”

Just at a tangent: Regarding the potential for martian exploration. These NASA artices ask as many questions as they answer but give a facinating insight into the problems to be overcome.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/27sep_shieldsup/

Shields Up!

A breeze of interstellar helium atoms is blowing through the solar system.

NASA

September 27, 2004: If you've ever watched Star Trek, you know the importance of shields. When a star explodes or a Klingon death ray lances out of the darkness, the captain yells two words, "Shields up!", and all is well. Deflector shields: Don't leave home without one.

The solar system, believe it or not, has got one.

The solar system's deflector shield is a giant magnetic bubble called "the heliosphere." It's part of the sun's magnetic field. No one knows the precise dimensions of the heliosphere, but it's bigger than the orbit of Pluto. All nine planets are inside it.

The heliosphere is important to life on our planet. A few million years ago, for instance, a cluster of massive stars drifted through our part of the Milky Way and exploded, one after another, like popcorn. Cosmic rays from the blasts were mostly deflected by the heliosphere, sparing early humanoids a radiation bath.

But the bubble isn't perfect. The fact is, "it's leaky," says space scientist Eberhard Moebius of the University of New Hampshire. "Some things do get through." (This happens on Star Trek, too. If the ship's shields were impenetrable, there would never be any drama.)

Take cosmic rays for example. They are fragments of atoms shattered and accelerated to light speed by supernova blasts. The heliosphere deflects about 90% of them; the rest, the most powerful 10%, penetrate the inner solar system.

The bubble is even more vulnerable to particles with no electric charge. Magnetic fields can deflect charged particles like cosmic rays, but not neutral atoms and molecules or bits of dust and rock. The bubble is an open door to these.

To wit: a stream of neutral helium atoms--"an interstellar breeze," says Moebius--is flowing into the solar system right now. "It's coming from the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. Because the atoms in the stream are uncharged, the magnetic bubble does nothing to stop them."

Studying this stream is important because it can teach us a great deal about the heliosphere--How big is it? How leaky is it? It can also teach us about the interstellar "stuff" lurking just outside, says Moebius.

see captionThe stream, discovered 30 years ago, is actively monitored by a flotilla of NASA and European Space Agency spacecraft: SOHO, EUVE, ACE and, especially, Ulysses. Each measures something different. EUVE, for instance, can sense ultraviolet sunlight scattered from the stream, while Ulysses samples the stream itself, snatching atoms directly from the flow.

For many years the physical characteristics of the stream were only vaguely known. "But the ability we have now to take a close-up look at the stream using these modern spacecraft has made a difference," says Moebius. He recently led a research team at the International Space Science Institute in Switzerland; using data from the spacecraft they were able to pinpoint the stream's temperature, density and velocity:

Its temperature, 6000 C, is about the same as the surface temperature of the sun. A spacecraft flying through the stream won't melt, though, or even notice the heat. The gas in the stream is too wispy-thin, explains Moebius. "There are only 0.015 helium atoms per cubic centimeter." Earth's atmosphere at sea level, for comparison, is a thousand billion billion (1021) times denser. And, finally, the velocity of the stream is 26 km/s or 58,000 mph.

These numbers confirm what astronomers have long suspected. The solar system is colliding with a vast interstellar cloud.

Most people think space is empty, but it's not. The "void" between the stars is crowded with clouds of gas. Clouds on Earth are miles wide. Clouds in space are light years across. They range in character from inky-black and cold to colorful and glowing-hot. Stars are born in clouds, and they hurl even more clouds into space when they die. Interstellar clouds are everywhere, so it's no surprise that the solar system is running into one.

The question is, what kind of cloud?

This cloud, like most things in the Universe, consists mainly of hydrogen. We know this because the hydrogen absorbs telltale colors from the light of nearby stars. Astronomers use this absorption effect to trace the cloud's general outline: it is several light years wide and ragged-edged.

The cloud's abundant hydrogen doesn't easily penetrate the heliosphere because hydrogen atoms in the cloud are ionized by interstellar ultraviolet radiation. Like cosmic rays the hydrogen atoms are charged and, thus, held at bay. Helium atoms, on the other hand, are mostly neutral, so they slip into the solar system.

Although helium is only a minor ingredient of the cloud, it tells the researchers what the whole is like. The cloud's temperature is 6000 C, the same as the helium stream. Its velocity, 26 km/s, is the same, too. If the cloud contains a standard cosmic mix of hydrogen and helium--a reasonable assumption--then its overall density must be 0.264 atoms per cubic centimeter.

Arcania? Not at all.
These numbers are important. They are vital to the size and "leakiness" of the heliosphere. The bubble is inflated from the inside by the solar wind and compressed on the outside by the cloud. It's a balancing act. If the pressure of the cloud (a function of temperature, density and velocity) is high, it defeats the solar wind and makes the bubble smaller, lowering our defenses against cosmic rays.

Thousands of years from now, some researchers believe, the solar system will pass completely through this cloud and emerge in a low-pressure cavity blown by those supernovas a few million years ago. The heliosphere will expand, providing improved protection against cosmic rays.

After that who knows? Another cloud might come along compress the bubble again. The ISSI team's research, eventually, could tell us how the heliosphere will react.

Shields up? Shields down? It's not science fiction any more.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/10aug_crackling/

Crackling Planets
Astronauts on the Moon and Mars are going to have to cope with an uncommon amount of static electricity.

August 10, 2005: Have you ever walked across a wool carpet in leather-soled shoes on a dry winter day, and then reached out toward a doorknob? ZAP! A stinging spark leaps between your fingers and the metal knob.

That's static discharge--lightning writ small.

Static discharge is merely annoying to anyone on Earth living where winters have exceptionally low humidity. But to astronauts on the Moon or on Mars, static discharge could be real trouble.

"On Mars, we think the soil is so dry and insulating that if an astronaut were out walking, once he or she returned to the habitat and reached out to open the airlock, a little lightning bolt might zap critical electronics," explains Geoffrey A. Landis, a physicist with the Photovoltaics and Space Environmental Effects Branch at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

This phenomenon is called triboelectric charging.

The prefix "tribo" (pronounced TRY-bo) means "rubbing." When certain pairs of unlike materials, such as wool and hard shoe-sole leather, rub together, one material gives up some of its electrons to the other material. The separation of charge can create a strong electric field.

Here on Earth, the air around us and the clothes we wear usually have enough humidity to be decent electrical conductors, so any charges separated by walking or rubbing have a ready path to ground. Electrons bleed off into the ground instead of accumulating on your body.

But when air and materials are extraordinarily dry, such as on a dry winter's day, they are excellent insulators, so there is no ready pathway to ground. Your body can accumulate negative charges, possibly up to an amazing 20 thousand volts. If you touch a conductor, such as a metal doorknob, then--ZAP!--all the accumulated electrons discharge at once.

On the Moon and on Mars, conditions are ideal for triboelectric charging. The soil is drier than desert sand on Earth. That makes it an excellent electrical insulator. Moreover, the soil and most materials used in spacesuits and spacecraft (e.g., aluminized mylar, neoprene-coated nylon, Dacron, urethane-coated nylon, tricot, and stainless steel) are completely unlike each other. When astronauts walk or rovers roll across the ground, their boots or wheels gather electrons as they rub through the gravel and dust. Because the soil is insulating, providing no path to ground, a space suit or rover can build up tremendous triboelectric charge, whose magnitude is yet unknown. And when the astronaut or vehicle gets back to base and touches metal--ZAP! The lights in the base may go out, or worse.

Physicist Joseph Kolecki and colleagues at NASA Glenn first noticed this problem in the late 1990s before Mars Pathfinder was launched. "When we ran a prototype wheel of the Sojourner rover over simulated Martian dust in a simulated Martian atmosphere, we found it charged up to hundreds of volts," he recalls.

That discovery so concerned the scientists that they modified Pathfinder's rover design, adding needles half an inch long, made of ultrathin (0.0001-inch diameter) tungsten wire sharpened to a point, at the base of antennas. The needles would allow any electric charge that built up on the rover to bleed off into the thin Martian atmosphere, "like a miniature lightning rod operating in reverse," explains Carlos Calle, lead scientist at NASA's Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Similar protective needles were also installed on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

On the Moon, "Apollo astronauts never reported being zapped by electrostatic discharges," notes Calle. "However, future lunar missions using large excavation equipment to move lots of dry dirt and dust could produce electrostatic fields. Because there's no atmosphere on the Moon, the fields could grow quite strong. Eventually, discharges could occur in vacuum."

"On Mars," he continues, "discharges can happen at no more than a few hundred volts. It's likely that these will take the form of coronal glows rather than lightning bolts. As such, they may not be life threatening for the astronauts, but they could be harmful to electronic equipment."

So what's the solution to this problem?

Here on Earth, it's simple: we minimize static discharge by grounding electrical systems. Grounding them means literally connecting them to Earth--pounding copper rods deep into the ground. Ground rods work well in most places on Earth because several feet deep the soil is damp, and is thus a good conductor. The Earth itself provides a "sea of electrons," which neutralizes everything connected to it, explains Calle.

There's no moisture, though, in the soil of the Moon or Mars. Even the ice believed to permeate Martian soil wouldn't help, as "frozen water is not a terribly good conductor," says Landis. So ground rods would be ineffective in establishing a neutral "common ground" for a lunar or Martian colony.

On Mars, the best ground might be, ironically, the air. A tiny radioactive source "such as that used in smoke detectors," could be attached to each spacesuit and to the habitat, suggests Landis. Low-energy alpha particles would fly off into the rarefied atmosphere, hitting molecules and ionizing them (removing electrons). Thus, the atmosphere right around the habitat or astronaut would become conductive, neutralizing any excess charge.

Achieving a common ground on the Moon would be trickier, where there's not even a rarefied atmosphere to help bleed off the charge. Instead, a common ground might be provided by burying a huge sheet of foil or mesh of fine wires, possibly made of aluminum (which is highly conductive and could be extracted from lunar soil), underneath the entire work area. Then all the habitat's walls and apparatus would be electrically connected to the aluminum.

Research is still preliminary. So ideas differ amongst the physicists who are seeking, well, some common ground.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/22apr_dontinhale/

Don't Breathe the Moondust

When humans return to the Moon and travel to Mars, they'll have to be careful of what they inhale.

NASA
April 22, 2005: This is a true story.

In 1972, Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt sniffed the air in his Lunar Module, the Challenger. "[It] smells like gunpowder in here," he said. His commander Gene Cernan agreed. "Oh, it does, doesn't it?"

The two astronauts had just returned from a long moonwalk around the Taurus-Littrow valley, near the Sea of Serenity. Dusty footprints marked their entry into the spaceship. That dust became airborne--and smelly.

Later, Schmitt felt congested and complained of "lunar dust hay fever." His symptoms went away the next day; no harm done. He soon returned to Earth and the anecdote faded into history.

But Russell Kerschmann never forgot. He's a pathologist at the NASA Ames Research Center studying the effects of mineral dust on human health. NASA is now planning to send people back to the Moon and on to Mars. Both are dusty worlds, extremely dusty. Inhaling that dust, says Kerschmann, could be bad for astronauts.

"The real problem is the lungs," he explains. "In some ways, lunar dust resembles the silica dust on Earth that causes silicosis, a serious disease." Silicosis, which used to be called "stone-grinder's disease," first came to widespread public attention during the Great Depression when hundreds of miners drilling the Hawk's Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia died within half a decade of breathing fine quartz dust kicked into the air by dry drilling--even though they had been exposed for only a few months. "It was one of the biggest occupational-health disasters in U.S. history," Kerschmann says.

This won't necessarily happen to astronauts, he assures, but it's a problem we need to be aware of--and to guard against.

Quartz, the main cause of silicosis, is not chemically poisonous: "You could eat it and not get sick," he continues. "But when quartz is freshly ground into dust particles smaller than 10 microns (for comparison, a human hair is 50+ microns wide) and breathed into the lungs, they can embed themselves deeply into the tiny alveolar sacs and ducts where oxygen and carbon dioxide gases are exchanged." There, the lungs cannot clear out the dust by mucous or coughing. Moreover, the immune system's white blood cells commit suicide when they try to engulf the sharp-edged particles to carry them away in the bloodstream. In the acute form of silicosis, the lungs can fill with proteins from the blood, "and it's as if the victim slowly suffocates" from a pneumonia-like condition.

Lunar dust, being a compound of silicon as is quartz, is (to our current knowledge) also not poisonous. But like the quartz dust in the Hawk's Nest Tunnel, it is extremely fine and abrasive, almost like powdered glass. Astronauts on several Apollo missions found that it clung to everything and was almost impossible to remove; once tracked inside the Lunar Module, some of it easily became airborne, irritating lungs and eyes.

Martian dust could be even worse. It's not only a mechanical irritant but also perhaps a chemical poison. Mars is red because its surface is largely composed of iron oxide (rust) and oxides of other minerals. Some scientists suspect that the dusty soil on Mars may be such a strong oxidizer that it burns any organic compound such as plastics, rubber or human skin as viciously as undiluted lye or laundry bleach.

"If you get Martian soil on your skin, it will leave burn marks," believes University of Colorado engineering professor Stein Sture, who studies granular materials like Moon- and Mars-dirt for NASA. Because no soil samples have ever been returned from Mars, "we don't know for sure how strong it is, but it could be pretty vicious."

Moreover, according to data from the Pathfinder mission, Martian dust may also contain trace amounts of toxic metals, including arsenic and hexavalent chromium--a carcinogenic toxic waste featured in the docudrama movie Erin Brockovich (Universal Studios, 2000). That was a surprising finding of a 2002 National Research Council report called Safe on Mars: Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human Operations on the Martian Surface.

The dust challenge would be especially acute during windstorms that occasionally envelop Mars from poles to equator. Dust whips through the air, scouring every exposed surface and sifting into every crevice. There's no place to hide.


To find ways of mitigating these hazards, NASA is soon to begin funding Project Dust, a four-year study headed by Masami Nakagawa, associate professor in the mining engineering department of the Colorado School of Mines. Project Dust will study such technologies as thin-film coatings that repel dust from tools and other surfaces, and electrostatic techniques for shaking or otherwise removing dust from spacesuits.

These technologies, so crucial on the Moon and Mars, might help on Earth, too, by protecting people from sharp-edged or toxic dust on our own planet. Examples include alkaline dust blown from dry lakes in North American deserts, wood dust from sawmills and logging operations, and, of course, abrasive quartz dust in mines.

The road to the stars is surprisingly dusty. But, says Kerschmann, "I strongly believe it's a problem that can be controlled."

[Red Crown]

People need to remember that safety is NOT inherent for any technology, safety measures can be implemented. The same redundancy used in space programs would render the reactors virtually indestructible by human intervention (keep in mind that ALL disasters carry imprints of wrong human decisions). What is currently state-of-the-art in nuclear safety is a joke compared to that NASA (and probably ESA to a great extent) uses in space probes. The safety methods are there, but what limits their implementation is the cost. So it all comes down to how much dough one can make by cutting corners, and that has nothing to do with safety.

This is very true;  the majority of the fuck ups we're seeing now are due to political decisions that were made decades ago relating to reactor design that were based on other considerations than just safety.

For example, the CANDU reactors which have some of the most foolproof safety features (on of them is gravity, think about that for a second) faced massive opposition from the US government due to political concerns than anything else.

[RojoLeón]

This is very true;  the majority of the fuck ups we're seeing now are due to political decisions that were made decades ago relating to reactor design that were based on other considerations than just safety.

For example, the CANDU reactors which have some of the most foolproof safety features (on of them is gravity, think about that for a second) faced massive opposition from the US government due to political concerns than anything else.

I love the industry optimism/Neurolinguistic propaganda/orwellian double think.

New-Clear!

Can-Do!

[Red Crown]

I love the industry optimism/Neurolinguistic propaganda/orwellian double think.

New-Clear!

Can-Do!

Only if you ignore the point of origin of the CANDU reactor; Canada.