nuke.news

"Download: Palisades Recurring Leakage (07/16/10) The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) regulations (specifically Appendix B to 10 CFR Part 50) require that plant owners find and fix safety problems. At the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, there have been recurring leaks of reactor cooling water past the seals on the control rod drives. Such a leak forced operators to shut down the reactor on June 24, 2010, for yet another repair attempt. Workers have replaced the seals numerous times, trying different designs and materials. Workers have also modified and re-modified the ventilation system for the area where the control rod drive seals are located in attempts to prevent seal damage from high temperatures. As our brief describes, the Palisades' owner found it cannot fix this safety problem. This is where an effective regulator would step in. Safety regulations require safety problems to be found and fixed. The NRC must stop monitoring the repetitive failures at Palisades and take the steps necessary to ensue that the proper fix is finally found. "

"Over the last half century, the government has repeatedly kept information secret because it would be embarrassing. President Obama wants the federal bureaucracy to reform this harmful tradition. The Department of Energy website proclaims, "From his first day in office, President Obama has pushed to make the federal government more open and more accessible to the American people. The Department of Energy is proud to be doing our part." But DOE's definition of "doing our part" seems to entail subverting the President's directive. The agency is pulling a cloak of secrecy over complex government financial transactions already lacking in transparency. The federal government has offered taxpayer funded loan guarantees for new nuclear reactor construction. These guarantees mean that you and I will repay the lender if the project developers cannot. The first guarantee, for $8.3 billion, has been conditionally offered for two Georgia reactors. More guarantees are proposed -- at a total of $54.5 billion -- which would amount to more than $500 for every American family. Some in Congress want unlimited nuclear loan guarantees, which would translate to unlimited taxpayer exposure. But will those American families know the criteria for issuing these loan guarantees? Not on your life. They won't even be told what fee is being charged to compensate them for taking on the default risk."

"The Department of Energy officially announced Monday that it is looking for a way to dispose of 13 tons of surplus plutonium, enough for more than 1,600 nuclear weapons, that was not part of that destined to be turned into mixed oxide fuel at the MOX project being constructed at the Savannah River Site. DOE posted its intent in the federal register Monday, stating it planned to modify the scope of a previous Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and to conduct additional public scoping meetings in stakeholder communities - including the Central Savannah River Area. Locally, a scoping meeting will be held Aug. 17 at the North Augusta Municipal Center from 5:30 to 8 p.m. The notice proposes to analyze new alternatives including sealing processed plutonium in cans then placing them in canisters that would in turn be surrounded with vitrified high-level liquid waste (meaning turned into glass), as well as simply increasing the amount of plutonium headed to MOX. "

"Dr. Klein served as chairman of the NRC from July 2006 to May 2009 and as a commissioner until March 2010. Prior to his service on the NRC, he served as the assistant to the secretary of defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs from November 2001 to July 2006 Southern Company Chairman, President and CEO David M. Ratcliffe has announced the election of Dr. Dale E. Klein, 62, to the Southern Company board of directors. A former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Dr. Klein is currently the associate vice president of research and associate director of the Energy Institute at The University of Texas at Austin."

"Hill Air Force Base was one of the worst offenders in a list of nine military facilities that failed to properly account for nearly 1,000 nuclear-related items, according to an article in The Air Force Times. The Times article, based on an Air Force audit conducted last year, indicated none of the accounting errors compromised the safety or security of any weapons. The discrepancies came, however, in the wake of an international debacle in which contractors at Hill mistakenly sent sensitive components of ballistic missiles to Taiwan. The nuclear missile fuses had mistakenly been labeled as helicopter batteries."

"A new reactor vessel head, shrouded in a protective wrap, arrived at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant Monday morning. The equipment will be installed on the plant's Unit 1 reactor during a refueling shutdown in the fall. The large component was shipped via a 185-foot-long special transport vehicle from Mt. Vernon, Ind., that is the equivalent of three semitrucks. The reactor head itself is 17 feet in diameter, 8 feet tall and weighs 70 tons. As the name implies, the component sits on top of the reactor. The cost of replacing both vessel heads at the plant is $141 million. "

"President Obama is looking for help in collaring American nuclear power. On Friday, the Department of Energy asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reconsider its refusal to kill the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste storage project. In doing so, Mr. Obama continues his relentless quest to throttle this politically incorrect form of clean energy while pretending to sustain it. In June, a three-judge NRC panel said the Obama administration cannot halt the licensing of the facility without approval from Congress. Now the administration hopes the full five-member commission will overturn the earlier ruling and end the project once and for all. Americans should hope that doesn't happen."

"The subtext of this little explanation from French nuclear giants AREVA is that it is using the people of Finland as guinea pigs in an experiment: Yes, we have faced challenges with the construction of the first EPR™ reactor, Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. AREVA will be the first to admit that this project is behind its ambitious original schedule and has been open about the entire process … This experience means that when AREVA begins construction of its next reactor, which we hope will be a U.S. EPR™ reactor in the United States, AREVA and its project teams will have completed several others internationally, giving us the experience, insight, and workforce to put us ahead of the game. Poor Finland, if only they'd waited a little longer, someone else would have been the test subject. As it is, France and China are also lined up for experimentation. Using the project management experience and incorporating lessons learned in Finland, AREVA's EPR™ reactors in France and China are on a much tighter schedule than their respective predecessors."

"Words have precise meanings. The French word "renaissance" is made up of two parts -- "re" to repeat and "naissance" birth. It achieved wide use in the medieval times to describe Western Europe's rediscovery of Greek and Roman art, literature and architecture. Note the word involves three stages, a time of greatness, followed by a loss and then a revival. In no way can the word be used to describe things nuclear. Thanks to the diligence by the media, there never has been an initial time of nuclear greatness. Instead, we have an easy to remember list of disasters and dangers: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini atoll, Nevada desert, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Sellafield-Windscale, and Chalk River."

"The U.S. Senate is working on new comprehensive energy legislation. One element of such a plan would be a renewed push for more nuclear power, which advocates say is an underused clean energy source. Critics worry it could lead to environmental disaster."

"The memories of former workers from the radioactive material processing plant in East Huntington always comes with a preface that the shared information was formerly top secret. Some describe a high chain link fence with armed security guards. Others remember armed guards overseeing the loading and unloading of product by railcar. The Huntington, WV Department of Energy plant supplied items to three gaseous diffusion plants that enriched uranium to make atomic weapons. These plants were in Piketon, Ohio (Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion); Paducah , Ky. (Paducah Gaseous Diffusion) and Oak Ridge, Tenn. (Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant). These three plants enriched uranium in a mile-long system of pipes, ducts, chambers , motors and electrical lines. The sublimed crystalline gaseous and greenish uranium flowed through nickel filters which separated isotopes. This section of the diffusion plant has been called The Cascade. ( Description courtesy of " A Pigeon in Piketon," by Geoffrey Sea, January 1, 2004 American Scholar .) "

"There were demands last night for the release from prison of the man known as the Israeli nuclear whistleblower after it emerged he was being held in solitary confinement in the same section of prison as some of Israel's most notorious criminals. Mordechai Vanunu, who spent 18 years in jail for revealing details of Israel's nuclear arsenal in 1986, was sent back to prison for three months in May after being found guilty of unauthorised meetings with foreign nationals. Vanunu, who became a cause celebre for human rights activists around the world and was elected rector of the University of Glasgow in absentia, is being held in Ayalon Prison in central Israel. Amnesty International is calling for Vanunu's immediate release and his brother, Meir, contacted the Sunday Herald to express fears over Vanunu's wellbeing after being the first person to visit him in seven weeks. In an email, Meir Vanunu said: "I found him to be all right in general, but it was a depressing experience. The disturbing main fact is he is held in the hardest prison section there is in all Israeli prisons. It has the most notorious criminals in the country, well known hard murder cases and so on. Of course, there is no justification for doing this to Mordechai and it is only a continuous vindictiveness and harassment by the secret services and not serving any so-called 'security' interests.""

"Traces of uranium have been found in a large number of autistic children in India's northern state of Punjab. The metal, used for generating nuclear energy and to make nuclear bombs, is thought to be the reason behind their autism. Five-and-a-half-year-old Dashamveer Singh was born premature. It was one of the reasons behind his slow mental development. He is being treated at Baba Farid Centre For Special Children. "A normal kid would be active. He would start sitting up by six months of age and start reacting. My child did no such thing. After one year, he could neither sit nor stand. So, we sought treatment for him at the centre," said Satvinder Kaur, mother of Dashamvee. There are many children at the centre with similar symptoms - most of them are from a small town in India's northern state of Punjab. "

"Between 1946 and 1958 the United States tested 66 nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and Enewetak atolls, which had previously been evacuated. Populations living elsewhere in the Marshall Islands archipelago were exposed to measurable levels of radioactive fallout from 20 of these tests. In this carefully considered analysis, National Cancer Institute (NCI) experts estimate that as much as 1.6% of all cancers among those residents of the Marshall Islands alive between 1948 and 1970 might be attributable to radiation exposures resulting from nuclear testing fallout. Due to uncertainly inherent to these analyses, the authors calculated a 90% confidence interval of 0.4% to 3.6%. Why did the NCI investigate this exposure? In June 2004, the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources asked the NCI to provide its expert opinion on the baseline cancer risk and number of cancers expected among residents of the Marshall Islands as a result of exposures to radioactive fallout from U.S. nuclear weapons tests that were conducted there from 1946 through 1958. In September 2004, the NCI provided the Committee with preliminary cancer risk estimates and a discussion of their basis in a report titled Estimation of the Baseline Number of Cancers Among Marshallese and the Number of Cancers Attributable to Exposure to Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Testing Conducted in the Marshall Islands. That analysis was based on a number of conservative assumptions designed to avoid underestimating the actual cancer risks and used information that could be collected quickly to provide a timely response. "

"David Kay, former UN chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), contrasts expectations with results on Iraq and Iran. As sanctions on Iran rise, so does Iranian rhetoric. Sanctions aim to force Iran to submit to inspections. However, Mr. Kay finds inspection largely ineffective. Inspection cannot prevent a country from developing nuclear weapons, especially if the country is big, determined, and capable, like Iran. Inspectors would need access to all resources with which Iran could develop nuclear weapons and delivery methods. Iran would have to fully declare its nuclear components, uranium enrichment, plutonium activities, and missile testing, production, and deployment. Iran does not cooperate, it obstructs."

"Thirty years ago, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board selected Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the nation's only permanent storage site for the radioactive waste from our nuclear power plants. Work proceeded during this period to secure walls and ceilings from possible earthquakes, paving interior roads and installing more extensive infrastructure. All of this added up to expenditures of $10 billion. This past March, the U.S. Energy Department notified the board they intended to abandon the Yucca site because it was "too small." This must be government at its worst. An Energy Department spokeswoman said that the president was establishing a blue-ribbon commission to find a "safe, long term solution" within 18 months."

"One of my happiest memories as a young boy was going duck hunting with Dad. On the way to the hunt, even in the dark, by the moonlight you could see the beauty of the West Tennessee countryside. We would drive by small communities and through towns where business owners soon would be getting ready for a day of commerce. If you had told me then that the day would come that an outside company and nameless, faceless federal bureaucrats would threaten that beauty and our communities by trying to make West Tennessee a nuclear waste dump I would have thought you were crazy. Today, that nightmare is on the verge of reality as plans are being laid to move hundreds of jobs from Milan, Tenn., to Middletown, Iowa, and to convert the Milan facility to the demilitarization and storage of depleted uranium."

"R9bn taxpayer-funded nuclear energy plan finally grinds to halt The government has pulled the plug on its ambitious nuclear energy programme after pumping more than R9-billion into it over more than 11 years. Current Font Size: The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Company (PBMR), which was established in 1999 to build small nuclear power reactors, faces imminent closure. In a letter dated July 5, Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan told the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM): "The minister of finance has clearly stated that there will be no further funding for the company, and I would like to reiterate that this position has not changed. "

"Backed by the U.S. and France, Poland is set to tread the nuclear path and hopes to start generating atomic power by 2021. Presently, coal accounts for over 93 percent of the eastern European country's electricity, demand for which is expected to double by 2025. A four-stage plan announced by Hanna Trojanowska, the government's Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Energy, envisages appropriate legislation by the end of 2010; site, technology and construction arrangements between 2011 and 2013; technical plans and site works in 2014 and 2015; and construction from 2016 to 2020. An important step along the roadmap was taken on July 14, when the U.S. signed a joint declaration with the U.S. for cooperation in the field of nuclear energy. The signing of the agreement between Trojanowska and U.S. under secretary of commerce and international trade Francisco Sanchez followed a U.S. nuclear trade mission to Warsaw."

"Britain's new generation of nuclear power stations will not be built if the Government refuses them any more support, a KPMG report will say this week. The study, commissioned by RWE npower, says it is still uneconomic for utility companies to invest billions of pounds in nuclear power. The Government has offered to impose a minimum price on carbon permits - which would raise the cost of fossil fuel generation and make low-carbon nuclear more attractive. It has made a promise not to offer any direct subsidies. KPMG's report will say a carbon "floor price" is not enough for the big utilities to commit large capital investments to the nuclear sector. It will suggest that the Government ought to introduce a variable premium tariff for all low-carbon technologies - from nuclear to renewables - to make sure enough new power generation is built before Britain starts to run short on capacity in the second half of this decade. "