Group items tagged

Heavy rain brought by a tropical storm has increased the level of radioactive contaminated water at the basements of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Typhoon Ma-on moved east off the southern coast of Japan's main island of Honshu. 115 millimeters of precipitation was recorded in Namie Town, north of the plant, between Tuesday and Thursday. Rain has been gathering in the buildings housing the reactors because the roofs were severely damaged by hydrogen explosions that occurred after the initial March 11th disaster. Tokyo Electric Power Company or TEPCO, the plant's operator, says that at 7 AM local time on Thursday, the level of contaminated water pooled at the basement of the building of the No. 1 reactor was 44 centimeters up from the previous day. Officials at the utility say that there is no immediate danger of the contaminated water spilling out. But it is likely that the level of water will continue to rise for the time being. TEPCO says they are monitoring the situation.

Heavy rain brought by a tropical storm has increased the level of radioactive contaminated water at the basements of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Typhoon Ma-on moved east off the southern coast of Japan's main island of Honshu. 115 millimeters of precipitation was recorded in Namie Town, north of the plant, between Tuesday and Thursday. Rain has been gathering in the buildings housing the reactors because the roofs were severely damaged by hydrogen explosions that occurred after the initial March 11th disaster. Tokyo Electric Power Company or TEPCO, the plant's operator, says that at 7 AM local time on Thursday, the level of contaminated water pooled at the basement of the building of the No. 1 reactor was 44 centimeters up from the previous day. Officials at the utility say that there is no immediate danger of the contaminated water spilling out. But it is likely that the level of water will continue to rise for the time being. TEPCO says they are monitoring the situation.

Heavy rain brought by a tropical storm has increased the level of radioactive contaminated water at the basements of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Typhoon Ma-on moved east off the southern coast of Japan's main island of Honshu. 115 millimeters of precipitation was recorded in Namie Town, north of the plant, between Tuesday and Thursday.

UK science and engineering students will be able to experience building a scaled down nuclear power plant as part of a new training programme known as the Nuclear Island.   The programme was officially launched on 15 June, when a pilot week began with 25 engineering students from Imperial College London designing and constructing a scaled down nuclear power plant. They will be assessed in relation to real-life skills such as radiation protection, site licensing, budgetary control and project management. The pilot week is scheduled to end with a yet to be unveiled safety breach, which will test the students' ability to respond to a potential disaster scenario.

The Nuclear Island has been developed by a partnership of Imperial College London, Constructionarium, Cogent Sector Skills Council, the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) and Construction Skills. The partnership received funding to develop the project from the National Higher Education Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (HE STEM) Programme and the Royal Academy of Engineers.

The Nuclear Island will be a hands-on new build experience for students initially in engineering, but will be broadened out to other science, technology, engineering and mathematical areas as part of the pilot programme. According to Cogent, "For the first time, nuclear safety culture will be an essential part of construction engineering courses, embedding critical safety behaviours from day one."

Japanese Tsunami Flotsam Appearing In Kodiak Waters, KMXT by Jennifer Canfield, December 26, 2011:

Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer [...] says debris will continue to wash up on shores from Kodiak to Oregon for the next few years [...] Ebbesmeyer says scientists are already hypothesizing about the effects of mass amounts of debris traveling through the Pacific Ocean’s currents. He points to an unprecedented number of sea turtles washing up on Vancouver Island. Ebbesmeyer says people who find debris should be especially careful and respectful. Personal items and artifacts can still be reunited with people in Japan. He also suggests testing items for radiation, just to be prudent.  [...]

Nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania are preparing to cope with flooding, but none has declared a state of emergency, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan said Thursday. All the Pennsylvania nuclear plants that could potentially be affected by flooding are in close communication with NRC, and with state and local officials, and the agency has resident inspectors at each plant who are monitoring the situation, Sheehan said. The plants were all operating at full power early Thursday, according to NRC data, except for Exelon Nuclear's Peach Bottom-3, which was at 88% power and has been gradually reducing its output for several days ahead of refueling outage.

Emergency diesel generators and their fuel tanks at those plants are "located at a higher elevation, in buildings designed to keep them dry," Sheehan said. Exelon Nuclear's Three Mile Island-1, located along the Susquehanna River, 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, began its abnormal operating procedure for river flooding early Wednesday, Sheehan said. The river peaked at 291 feet above sea level Wednesday and was at 288 feet above sea level early Thursday. It is expected to crest Thursday at about 297 feet above sea level, he said.

If the river reaches 300 feet above sea level, then the plant would have to declare an unusual event, the least significant of NRC's four emergency levels, Sheehan said. If the river reaches 302 feet above sea level, the plant would need to shut and an alert, the next highest level of emergency, would need to be declared. "Important equipment" at Three Mile Island-1 is protected against flooding up to about 315 feet above sea level, Sheehan said.

Arnie Gundersen, who lives here in Burlington, is Chief Engineer of Fairewinds Associates is a well-known authority on the subject, someone who has figured prominently in recent accounts of Vermont Yankee circumstances.

I think he exaggerated his responsibilities for projects at NU, 1972-6.

There are several exaggerations in that brief statement. Because he has been an expert witness, Mr. Gundersen has been required to provide an accurate resume to public bodies; you can find one such document at the end of the testimony that he provided in March 2006 to oppose the Public Service of Vermont’s decision to allow Entergy to increase the power output from Vermont Yankee.

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa killed some 40,000 people, and for centuries Indonesians have lived under constant threat from the 400-plus volcanoes that dot the country’s 18,000-odd islands. Now a project by Chevron (CVX) in Java is taking advantage of those smoldering mountains. The U.S. oil major has drilled 84 wells to a depth of two miles beneath the rainforest to tap not crude or gas, but steam. The vapors, which reach 600F, spin turbines 24 hours a day, generating electricity for Jakarta, a city with a population of 9.6 million.

Chevron is about to get some competition. General Electric (GE), India’s Tata Group, and other companies are building geothermal projects in Indonesia, and the investment ultimately may add up to more than $30 billion. The companies are responding to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s promise in February to boost government subsidies for clean energy. Former Vice-President Al Gore has called Indonesia the first potential “geothermal superpower.”

Geothermal is central to Indonesia’s push for alternatives to fossil fuels such as oil, which the country once exported and now must import. Brownouts are frequent on the main island of Java, and 35 percent of the nation’s 245 million population lacks access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. Yudhoyono wants to eliminate energy shortages that threaten his target for as much as 6.6 percent annual economic growth through his term’s end in 2014. His government plans to add 9.5 gigawatts of geothermal capacity by 2025, equal to about 33 percent of Indonesia’s electricity demand from about 3.5 percent now, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Iceland, also a volcanic island, gets 27 percent of its power from geothermal.

No one wants to think about the massive aqueous deposition of radioactive materials into the Pacific Ocean, that much is now clear. By September estimates of released contamination had risen to over  3,500 terabecquerels of cesium-137 released into the sea directly from the plant between March 11 and the end of May. Another 10,000 terabecquerels of cesium fell into the ocean after escaping from the reactors in the form of steam.

Initially reports had quieted concerns by stating that the materials would be diluted so vastly that the radioactivity would not be able to accumulate, and would not affect the environment.  The experts claimed they would track the deposition and floating radioactive debris field making its way on a trans-Pacific trip to the United States. Apparently, the experts in Japan didn't get the message.  The Japanese regularly tested the seawater only for 'popular' Iodine and Cesium isotopes instead of all known fission-produced radioactive materials, for the first 3 months after the disaster.  By March 31st, radioactive contamination concentration was 4,385 times the legal limit, up from 3,355 times on Tuesday, according to Kyodo. In response, the government had pledged to increase radiation monitoring on land and by sea and to consider increasing the evacuation zone — however time has shown little action would follow these vows.

Experts Don't Fear A Radiation Graveyard Water was constantly required for the workers to be able to get any cooling into Reactors 1-4, when water went in, steam came out.  The ocean quickly became the radiation dumping ground, as untold tonnes of contaminated water has been confirmed to have directly flowed into the ocean, and TEPCO continually assured Japanese citizens that the majority of dispersal would occur over the Pacific.

Thyroid cancer cases have more than doubled since 1997 in the United States, while deadly industrial practices that contaminate groundwater with radiation and other carcinogens are also rising. New information released by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 56,460 people will develop thyroid cancer in 2012 and 1,780 will die from it.

From 1980 to 1996, thyroid cancer increased nearly 300%, while the population increased by (again) 18%. Most thyroid cancers don’t develop for 10-30 years after radiation exposure, but the monstrous spike in thyroid cancer from 1980-2012 is only partly the result of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 (TMI). Pennsylvania, with its nine nuclear reactors, does have the highest incidence of thyroid cancer across nearly all demographics among 45* states, reports epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, MPH MBA, of the Radiation and Public Health Project. In 2009, he analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control’s national survey of thyroid cancer incidence for the years 2001-2005 and compared it with proximity to nuclear power stations, finding:

M]ost U.S. counties with the highest thyroid cancer incidence are in a contiguous area of eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and southern New York. Exposure to radioactive iodine emissions from 16 nuclear power reactors within a 90 mile radius in this area … are likely a cause of rising incidence rates.

The largest items swept out to sea by the tsunami in Japan last March could be making landfill on Canada's west coast any day now, a U.S.-based oceanographer says. Oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer says his computer models have shown large debris from Japan – fishing vessels, houses – will be making landfall on Vancouver Island in November. Most of the debris has been predicted to make landfall in 2013, but the scientist says those predictions don't account for wind-pushed flotsam (floating trash). "When you look at what floats in the water . . . you will see find many objects travel three times faster than surface water," he said in a phone interview from Seattle.

Ebbesmeyer said a large object such can travel across the north Pacific at a speed of about 35 kilometres a day. "Those objects stick up so high out of the water they actually catch the wind and sail very fast," he said. A smaller object -- propelled only by the ocean current – travels at closer to 11 kilometres a day. The debris field from the March 11 tsunami is estimated to be about 1,500-kilometres long and weighing about 20-million tonnes. Ebbesmeyer likens it to the state of California flipped on its side floating north of Midway Island.

From the press release by Akita prefectural government on July 25:A resident in Akita Prefecture alerted the authorities when the bag of leaf compost that he purchased from a local garden/home center measured high in radiation with his portable survey meter. The authorities tested the content of the bag, and it had 11,000 becquerels/kg of cesium.

At the garden/home center (2 locations) the air radiation 1 meter from the pile of the leaf compost bags measured as high as 0.48 microsievert/hr.

The press release is somewhat misleading, as it says the air radiation 1 meter from one bag of the leaf compost is 0.06 microsievert/hr. If you measure in front of the pile of the same bags, the radiation is as high as 0.48 microsievert/hr. Akita's air radiation level (which the prefectural government measures only at 2 locations) is between 0.04 and 0.06 microsievert/hr.According to Yomiuri Shinbun (7/27/2011), these bags were packed in Tochigi Prefecture, and 20,000 bags have already been sold in Akita Prefecture alone.

The Ministry of Education and Science announced that it will conduct the aerial survey of 23 prefectures (out of total 47) to determine the level of soil contamination. For some reason, Hokkaido is excluded, but every prefecture from Aomori to Shiga, which is located about in the middle of the Honshu Island will be surveyed. It's all of Tohoku, Kanto, Chubu-Hokuriku.(In the map, Hokuriku is bundled with Chubu; Hokuriku includes prefectures facing the Japan Sea. For more details within the regions, go to the web-japan.org page.)If I were the official at the Ministry, I would test Hokkaido, too. I have seen too many radioactive plumes sweeping the island of Hokkaido in the simulation animations by several European meteorological institutions. (For the latest from the German Weather Bureau, go here. But even they will stop publishing the dispersion map on July 29... )

The March nuclear disaster in Fukushima in Japan led countries with nuclear power plants to revisit safety measures. The International Atomic Energy Agency constituted a global expert fact-finding mission to the island nation. The purpose of the mission was to ascertain facts and identify initial lessons to be learned for sharing with the nuclear community.

The mission submitted its report in June and the report stated in clear terms that “there were insufficient defence for tsunami hazards. Tsunami hazards that were considered in 2002 were underestimated. Additional protective measures were not reviewed and approved by the regulatory authority. Severe accident management provisions were not adequate to cope with multiple plant failures”.

Further, on the regulatory environment the report states: “Japan has a well organized emergency preparedness and response system as demonstrated by the handling of the Fukushima accident. Nevertheless, complicated structures and organizations can result in delays in urgent decision making.” The inability to foresee such extreme scenarios is a forewarning to countries that are expanding nuclear capacity at a frenzied pace.

Televisions, fridges and furniture pieces are heading for Hawaii, as a huge amount of debris from Japan’s earthquake sails across the Pacific.Up to 20 million tons of debris from the earthquake in March is traveling faster than expected and could reach the U.S. West Coast in three years.A Russian ship’s crew spotted the debris - which included a 20ft long fishing boat - last month after passing the Midway Islands.

We have a rough estimate of 5 to 20 million tons of debris coming from Japan,’ University of Hawaii researcher Jan Hafner told KITV.Experts have revised predictions to say the debris will now reach the Midway Islands by winter and Hawaii in less than two years.Crew members on the Russian training ship STS Pallada spotted the debris 2,000 miles from Japan, including a fishing boat from Fukushima, reported AFP.‘They saw some pieces of furniture, some appliances, anything that can float - and they picked up a fishing boat,’ Mr Hafner told KITV.A crew member told AFP: 'We keep sighting things like wooden boards, plastic bottles, buoys from fishing nets [small and big ones], an object resembling a wash basin, drums, boots, other wastes.'

His latest book, "Fukushima Meltdown: The World's First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster," has just become available online as a Kindle book in an excellent and fluid translation by a team under the guidance of American author and scholar, Douglas Lummis. Originally published as "Fukushima Genpatsu Merutodaun" by Asahi Shinsho on May 30, 2011, this is the book that Hirose had hoped he would never have to write. For three decades he has been warning Japanese people about the catastrophes that could been visited on their country — and now his worst nightmare has become a reality. "This is called the '3/11 Disaster' by many," he writes, "but it did not happen on 3/11, it began on 3/11 and it is continuing today. ... Nuclear power plants are a wildly dangerous way to get electricity and are unnecessary. The world needs to learn quickly from Japan's tragedy." Hirose points out that from day one of the disaster the situation in Fukushima had reached the highest level of nuclear accidents, namely level 7 — and from the outset, the government was keenly aware of this fact. But it chose to conceal the truth from the people.

"In past nuclear-plant disasters — those at Chernobyl (in present-day Ukraine, in 1986) and at Three Mile Island (in Pennsylvania in the United States, in 1979) — only one reactor was involved in each. However, at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, four reactors went critical at the same time." On March 13, two days after the tsunami that followed the magnitude-9 Great East Japan Earthquake, Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the operator of the stricken nuclear plant, said at a press conference: "The tsunami was beyond all previous imagination. In the sense that we took all measures that could be thought of for dealing with a tsunami, there was nothing wrong with our preparations." As Hirose and many other commentators have pointed out, Tepco executives and government planners knew perfectly well that tsunamis far exceeding 20 meters in height struck that very region in 1896 and again, 37 years later, in 1933. The 14-meter-high tsunami that inundated many of the Fukushima No. 1 plant's facilities was, in fact, well within the parameters of what could objectively be termed "expected" — and was simply not "beyond all previous imagination," as Shimizu claimed.

In fact, the willful absence of care by both industry and government comprises nothing less than a blatant act of savagery against the people of Japan. This book is full of enlightening technical explanations on every aspect of nuclear safety, from structural safeguards (and their clear inadequacy) to the nature of hydrogen explosions and meltdowns. Hirose warns us, with detailed descriptions of the lay of the land and the features of each reactor, about the nuclear power plants at Tomari in Hokkaido, Higashidori in Aomori Prefecture and Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture; about other plants in Ibaraki, Ishikawa, Shimane, Ehime, Saga and Kagoshima prefectures; and perhaps most dangerous of all, about the 14 reactors along the Wakasa Coast in Fukui Prefecture, constituting what I would call Hōshanō Yokochō (Radioactivity Alley). Many of the reactors at these plants are aging and plagued with serious structural problems.

A. Stohl1, P. Seibert2, G. Wotawa3, D. Arnold2,4, J. F. Burkhart1, S. Eckhardt1, C. Tapia5, A. Vargas4, and T. J. Yasunari61NILU – Norwegian Institute for Air Research, Kjeller, Norway2Institute of Meteorology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria3Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Vienna, Austria4Institute of Energy Technologies (INTE), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain5Department of Physics and Nucelar Engineering (FEN),Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain6Universities Space Research Association, Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology and Research, Columbia, MD 21044, USAAbstract. On 11 March 2011, an earthquake occurred about 130 km off the Pacific coast of Japan's main island Honshu, followed by a large tsunami. The resulting loss of electric power at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant (FD-NPP) developed into a disaster causing massive release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. In this study, we determine the emissions of two isotopes, the noble gas xenon-133 (133Xe) and the aerosol-bound caesium-137 (137Cs), which have very different release characteristics as well as behavior in the atmosphere. To determine radionuclide emissions as a function of height and time until 20 April, we made a first guess of release rates based on fuel inventories and documented accident events at the site.

This first guess was subsequently improved by inverse modeling, which combined the first guess with the results of an atmospheric transport model, FLEXPART, and measurement data from several dozen stations in Japan, North America and other regions. We used both atmospheric activity concentration measurements as well as, for 137Cs, measurements of bulk deposition. Regarding 133Xe, we find a total release of 16.7 (uncertainty range 13.4–20.0) EBq, which is the largest radioactive noble gas release in history not associated with nuclear bomb testing. There is strong evidence that the first strong 133Xe release started very early, possibly immediately after the earthquake and the emergency shutdown on 11 March at 06:00 UTC. The entire noble gas inventory of reactor units 1–3 was set free into the atmosphere between 11 and 15 March 2011. For 137Cs, the inversion results give a total emission of 35.8 (23.3–50.1) PBq, or about 42% of the estimated Chernobyl emission. Our results indicate that 137Cs emissions peaked on 14–15 March but were generally high from 12 until 19 March, when they suddenly dropped by orders of magnitude exactly when spraying of water on the spent-fuel pool of unit 4 started. This indicates that emissions were not only coming from the damaged reactor cores, but also from the spent-fuel pool of unit 4 and confirms that the spraying was an effective countermeasure. We also explore the main dispersion and deposition patterns of the radioactive cloud, both regionally for Japan as well as for the entire Northern Hemisphere. While at first sight it seemed fortunate that westerly winds prevailed most of the time during the accident, a different picture emerges from our detailed analysis

Exactly during and following the period of the strongest 137Cs emissions on 14 and 15 March as well as after another period with strong emissions on 19 March, the radioactive plume was advected over Eastern Honshu Island, where precipitation deposited a large fraction of 137Cs on land surfaces. The plume was also dispersed quickly over the entire Northern Hemisphere, first reaching North America on 15 March and Europe on 22 March. In general, simulated and observed concentrations of 133Xe and 137Cs both at Japanese as well as at remote sites were in good quantitative agreement with each other. Altogether, we estimate that 6.4 TBq of 137Cs, or 19% of the total fallout until 20 April, were deposited over Japanese land areas, while most of the rest fell over the North Pacific Ocean. Only 0.7 TBq, or 2% of the total fallout were deposited on land areas other than Japan.Discussion Paper (PDF, 6457 KB)   Supplement (13 KB)   Interactive Discussion (Open, 0 Comments)   Manuscript under review for ACP   

After 34 years, the United States is expected to resume construction of nuclear reactors by the end of the year, and Toshiba will export turbine equipment for the reactors to the U.S. early next month, it was learned Saturday. According to sources, construction will begin by year-end on the Nos. 3 and 4 reactors of the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia Georgia Country Georgia /ˈdʒɔrdʒə/ (Georgian: საქართველო, sak’art’velo IPA: [sɑkʰɑrtʰvɛlɔ] ( listen)) is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern E... View full Dossier Latest news and the Nos. 2 and 3 reactors of the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina South Carolina U.S. state South Carolina /ˌsaʊθ kærəˈlaɪnə/ is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally pa... View full Dossier Latest news .

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Nuclear Regulatory Commission Government Agency (United States of America) The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is an independent agency of the United States government that was established by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 from the United States Atomic Energy C... View full Dossier Latest news is expected to shortly approve the construction and operation of the reactors, which have been designed by Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Toshiba. The decision to resume construction of reactors is expected to pave the way for Japan Japan Country Japan /dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国  Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally, the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the... View full Dossier Latest news to export related equipment to the United States, observers said.

The reactors to be constructed are of the AP1000 type