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Global energy advisory body, the International Energy Agency (IEA), says that India should not get influenced by countries that have announced changes in their nuclear energy plans in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. “India should go ahead and implement its civil

nuclear power plans,” Richard Jones, American diplomat and the deputy executive director of IEA told the Hindustan Times in an exclusive interview. “Of the countries like Germany, Italy and few others that have announced changes in their nuclear policy, we were not expecting them to do much in nuclear anyway.”

Jones said while India must “take a lesson from the Fukushima nuclear disaster and adequately address its security and safety concerns,” but should not slow down its nuclear capacity addition plans as switching to alternate fuels like gas for power generation.

Shaun O'Dwyer's Sept. 26 article, "Nuclear crisis lowers curtain on Japan's Confucian politics," is a highly recommended history lesson on how Confucianism helped to create a nation of overly trusting and obedient citizens in Japan. It offers an important understanding of how a nation that is naturally and culturally conservative could be led down the wrong road of nuclear power and take wild chances on tsunamis and earthquakes. Had it not been for the dependence on state benevolence, perhaps the population would have put up greater resistance at the start of the ill-fated "Atoms for Peace" project begun in the 1960s.

While the battle goes on to bring the Fukushima No. 1 plant under control, the government moved a step closer Friday to resuming exports of Japan's nuclear technology as a Lower House committee approved ratification of accords with four countries. The Democratic Party of Japan and Liberal Democratic Party both voted in favor of the bilateral agreements with Jordan, Vietnam, South Korea and Russia at the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee. The full chamber was to vote on the pacts later Friday, but at the request of opposition parties the action was postponed till Tuesday. Despite the delay, the treaties are expected to be approved by the Lower House and will likely clear the Upper House before the current Diet session closes Dec. 9.

"I think that above all, it is our duty to share our experience, the lessons, and knowledge of the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant with the world," Noda said. "I think it is meaningful to provide (nuclear technology) with high-level safety while grasping the situation of the other countries." Noda also suggested nuclear plants may be exported to countries other than those four in the future if more seek Japanese technology despite the March 11 accident. "For countries that say they need Japan's technology, we will deal with and decide each case individually," he said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the No. 2 reactor at its destroyed Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station isn’t in a critical state after the company detected signs of nuclear fission.

The discovery of xenon, announced yesterday, at the plant was caused by “natural” nuclear fission, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the company known as Tepco, said today at a press briefing in Tokyo.

The occurrence of the gas, which is associated with nuclear fission, was confirmed yesterday by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. No increase in radiation was found at the site and the situation is under control, officials said.

The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that it should decide within 90 days on how to address recommendations to be issued this week by a task force that examined the lessons of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan. Almost simultaneously, House Republicans and the industry’s trade association warned him not to rush.

The chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, speaking at the National Press Club, cast the March 11 earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi, which produced three meltdowns, as a serious challenge for the American nuclear industry. “The history of nuclear power has also been punctuated by several significant events that challenged old truths and upended our understanding of nuclear safety,’’ he said.

The task force’s recommendations are to be issued on Tuesday. Mr. Jaczko did not say that the five-member commission should complete its work in 90 days, only that it should give strong direction on each recommendation by then. The work should be finished within five years, he said.

The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently produced a list of safety improvements that might be undertaken at American nuclear plants in light of the Fukushima disaster in Japan. On Tuesday, the nuclear industry focused on two elements that were conspicuous by their absence.

In a presentation to Wall Street analysts, Marvin Fertel, the president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, emphasized that spent fuel pools at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had “survived the accident quite well.”Early in the crisis, which began with an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, American regulators feared that water in one of the pools had almost completely boiled off, and the American Embassy in Tokyo advised Americans to stay 50 miles away. But “the pools may turn out to be a much better story at Fukushima than people envisioned,’’ Mr. Fertel said.

Noting that fuel pools at American reactors have far more radioactive material in them than the ones at Fukushima, the accident focused new attention on the idea of moving spent fuel out of the pools and into dry casks, Something already done at most American reactors when they run out of space.That idea first came to prominence after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

At least two dozen countries around the globe get energy from nuclear power, yet not one has been able to pull off a permanent disposal site. Finding communities willing to live with such dangerous stuff has been a big sticking point. But in Sweden, two communities have stepped up, and are willing to take the country's waste. Like many countries, Sweden has had its share of political meltdowns over nuclear power. Protests stirred an uproar in the early 1980s when the Swedish nuclear industry simply decided where to begin testing for a possible geologic disposal site.

But today, instead of deflecting protesters, the nuclear industry shuttles visitors by the busloads for guided tours of facilities. More than 1,100 feet below the surface, exotic machinery and copper tubes wide enough to fit two men fill an underground cavern carved from crystalline bedrock. In this working lab in eastern Sweden, a private nuclear waste company tests methods for permanently storing used fuel. It plans to encase the fuel rods in copper capsules, then bury them 1,500 feet down in bedrock where it is supposed to sit for the next 100,000 years.

how did nuclear waste in Sweden go from a toxic topic to a field trip? People in the area said the industry needed to start over with things like public participation, a transparent, predictable process and trust. The industry took these lessons to heart. "We know that we have to meet people and communicate what we want to do, why we want to do it and how we will find a place for it," says Inger Nordholm, a spokeswoman for the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company, or SKB.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The head of the nuclear power industry's trade group on Tuesday said U.S. plants should move within five years to implement safety measures as a result of lessons learned from Japan's nuclear crisis. Marvin Fertel, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the five-year timeline put forward last week by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko was "reasonable."

An NRC staff task force this month recommended a host of changes to U.S. regulations based on observations of Japan's Fukuhsima Daiichi plant, which has struggled to safely shut down and control radiation after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami. In addition to saying any changes should be fully implemented within five years, Jaczko has also said the five-member commission should decide within 90 days whether it would support the staff recommendations. Fertel did not endorse Jaczko's 90-day proposal. He said acting too quickly could have unintended consequences. "We also don't want to divert operations to areas that maybe are important to safety but not as important as something else that needs to be done right now," he said.

In the first few days of Japan’s nuclear crisis this spring, the U.S. military wasn’t fully prepared to deal with possible radiation exposure to its troops and equipment, the top U.S. general in Japan said Wednesday.

U.S. Forces Japan commander Lt. Gen. Burton M. Field talked about the radiation risk to U.S. troops during a briefing on Operation Tomodachi for members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan on Wednesday.

“As the (Fukushima Dai-ichi) reactors exploded and they sent some of that radiation out, we had the issue with it being detected off shore by the Navy,” he said. “We had to start dealing with the kind of environment that the U.S. military had not really worked in, so we didn’t have the strictest guidelines on what kind of risk we would take in terms of radiation exposure for our (service) members.”

Those who think Japan's Fukushima disaster is today's headlines and tomorrow's history need to take a good look at the Chernobyl disaster, which to this day is a continuing threat to the people of Ukraine. It will be hundreds of years before the area around the destroyed reactor is inhabitable again and there are disputes over whether or not Chernobyl's nuclear fuel still poses a threat of causing another explosion. There is also a teetering reactor core cover and the deteriorating sarcophagus itself that may collapse and send plumes of radioactive dust in all directions.

The New York Times article "Lessons from Chernobyl for Japan," reflects on the Chernobyl disaster and how its legacy still looms over us today as a very real threat. Those who believe in a quick fix for the Fukushima disaster would be wise to remember Chernobyl's legacy

More importantly, with tens of millions of lives at stake, nation actors that have the ability to assist in mitigating this disaster now, but choose instead to squander their manpower and resources elsewhere (like in Libya), must remember that their actions today will be remembered and judged for centuries to come.

In January, two Italian scientists announced they had invented a reactor that fuses nickel and hydrogen nuclei at room temperature, producing copper and throwing off massive amounts of energy in the process. Sergio Focardi and Andrea Rossi demonstrated their tabletop device before a standing-room-only crowd in Bologna, purportedly using 400 watts of power to generate 12,400 watts with no hazardous waste. They told observers that their reactors, small enough to fit in a household closet are able to produce electricity for less than 1 cent per kilowatt hour.

The Italians’ reported 31-fold increase in energy from cheap and commonplace ingredients - if genuine - would rank as one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time, deposing oil as king of energy resources. Petroleum-producing regimes in the Middle East now using petro-dollars from the United States and other power-needy nations to fund Islamic extremism across the globe would be put out of business.

MUMBAI: India should move on to make nuclear energy as safe as possible by taking lessons from the recent Fukushima accident but its imperative to replace the old-era Land Acquisition Act with a more balanced one, to address the country's present huge infrastructure and energy needs, former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman M R Srinivasan said here.

Stating that the resettlement was equally significant in any infrastructure project, he said India's record of resettling project-affected people has been "pathetic". Srinivasan, currently a member of AEC, was delivering the first Homi Sethna Memorial lecture on 'Future of Nuclear Power after Fukushima,' at the Nehru Centre here last evening.

In Japan's most aggressive move to promote exports of nuclear technology since the Fukushima Daiichi accident in March, a Tokyo-based utility consortium signed a deal with Vietnam on Wednesday to conduct a feasibility study for two new reactors. The agreement comes as a lifeline to Japan's nuclear industry, which harbors ambitions of expanding abroad, even as its future is in doubt at home. Amid a post-disaster reassessment of energy policy, the government has vowed to reduce dependence on nuclear power for domestic electricity generation. But it has continued to push nuclear technology in overseas markets.

For Vietnam, where rapid economic growth has increased demand for electricity, the contract with Japan Atomic Power Co. offers a way to diversify its energy mix beyond two Russian nuclear reactors currently under construction. The Vietnamese government said last year it plans 13 nuclear reactors at eight separate plants with a combined capacity of 15,000 megawatts by 2030. "This important milestone ... shows Vietnam's determination to develop nuclear power plants, especially in the face of global economic difficulties and after the incident at Japan's Fukushima plant," Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Hoang Quoc Vuong said at the signing ceremony in Hanoi. He said he expects nuclear power to account for 7% of Vietnam's installed generation capacity by 2030.

Lessons from the Fukushima disaster will be taken into account in the Vietnamese project, according to officials from Japan Atomic Power, a consortium of Japan's nine nuclear utilities, including Fukushima Daiichi plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501.TO). "We pledge to work hard to ensure the nuclear power development of Vietnam," said Japan Atomic Power President Yasuo Hamada. Vietnamese officials said Japan will build advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR), a type of technology used by Hitachi Ltd. (6501.TO) and Toshiba Corp. (6502.TO). But Japan Atomic Power officials in Tokyo said no decision had been made on the type or contractor for construction and operation.

India has improved procedures to deal with a nuclear emergency in the wake of the Fukushima crisis in Japan, the country's atomic energy watchdog said Thursday, after criticism of its preparedness."After Fukushima, we have drawn lessons on all aspects of reactor safety and one positive development is the integrated disaster management plan," the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board chairman S.S. Bajaj said.

Earlier this year, Bajaj's predecessor at the AERB, A. Gopalkrishnan, criticised India's readiness to deal with emergencies of any kind and said that plans to tackle major nuclear incidents were largely a paper exercise.Drills were infrequent "half-hearted efforts which amount more to a sham", he said after an massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Japanese Fukushima plant in March, forcing a re-think on nuclear power around the world.A survey of nearly 10,000 Indians at the time also suggested that 77 percent of people had concerns about atomic safety while 69 percent believed the authorities could not handle a nuclear disaster on the scale of that in Japan.

Bajaj told AFP on the sidelines of a nuclear energy summit in the financial hub Mumbai that India's nuclear emergency plan "was not that positive" in the past but added: "These weaknesses have been plugged."M.C. Abani, a nuclear specialist at the National Disaster Management Authority, said that six emergency exercises had been conducted at Indian nuclear power plants since March and procedures strengthened."NDMA has raised 10 battalions of National Disaster Response Force. Each battalion has 1,150 soldiers and officers. They are trained in handling nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological incidents," he said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission may force the nation’s nuclear power plants to reevaluate their earthquake detection and safety systems and the manner in which they calculate their resistance to earthquakes as a result of unexpected damage to American and foreign reactor complexes caused by recent earthquakes.

The decision to send a formal Augmented Inspection Team followed the notification by Dominion Power, which owns and operates the North Anna plants that the ground motion of the Virginia earthquake, measured at 5.8 in magnitude, “may have exceeded the ground motion for which it was designed.”

All of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed in the 1950s and 1960s, were supposed to be able to handle the acceleration of the ground motion and shaking associated with the largest historically recorded earthquake within a 50 mile radius of the site. For North Anna, a ground motion of .12 of normal gravity is the “design basis” incorporated into the plant’s license. That was based on an earthquake of a magnitude 4.8, and the plant was designed to withstand the gravitational tug resulting from an earthquake of 5.1 in magnitude.

The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability has an answer, and it's anything but business as usual. By deploying a mix of renewables and energy efficiency technology, they argue, Japan's need for electricity could be met three years sooner than through nuclear and conventional fossil fuel power.

All told, Japan's earthquake and tsunami have knocked out at least 15,000 megawatts of electricity generating capacity -- that's greater than the total summer peak demand for all of New York City

Rebuilding with renewables would restore the country’s capacity more cleanly. The initial cost would be higher but spread across the lifetime of the initiatives, it would only amount to an additional 10 percent more per year. The study authors argue this would be more than justified by the positive economic impact of meeting Japan's power needs years before conventional plants could be brought on-line.

When dreadful events occur, reporters, readers, and interested citizens contact the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asking whether we will move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock. The alarming nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station on March 11 prompted e-mails and calls to our office seeking the Bulletin's reaction as well as accurate information about what was happening in Japan. The Bulletin responded by devoting its website to daily briefings from experts in Japan and to news from Bulletin writers on what they were hearing about this second-worst disaster in the history of the nuclear power industry. Additionally, the Bulletin will take deeper dives into the lessons and impacts of Fukushima in the September/October issue of its digital journal. Still, the larger question remains: Should we move the hand of the Doomsday Clock? What does the Fukushima event imply for humanity's future on the planet?

How do we determine the time? In annual Clock discussions, the Bulletin's Science and Security Board -- the keepers of the Clock -- reviews the trends and current events that reveal how well or how poorly humanity regulates the perilous forces unleashed by our own ingenuity and industry. Moving the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is a judgment, then, an assessment of the human capacity to control technologies that can lead to irreversible catastrophe -- to the end of civilization. With growing worldwide interest in nuclear energy for economic development, it's important to know how well firms and societies are handling this dangerous technology

Questions for a post-Fukushima world. The Bulletin's Board members are following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan very closely. Questions about the continuing disaster range from the detailed and technical to the societal and ethical; the answers will have implications for any long-term commitment to nuclear power.

Nuclear reactors are operated by fallible human beings, and at least two meltdowns have been caused by poor human decisions: the 1961 meltdown of an experimental military reactor in Idaho, which killed three operators when one of them withdrew a control rod six times as far as he was supposed to (carrying out a high-tech murder-suicide over a love triangle, according to some accounts), and the Chernobyl accident, which was caused by an ill-conceived experiment conducted outside approved protocols.

So, if nuclear safety is a matter of human behavior as well as sound technical infrastructure, we should look to the social sciences in addition to engineering to improve reactor safety. After all, the machines don't run themselves. The social sciences have five lessons for us here: The blind spot. In what we might call the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome, human cognition is such that, in the absence of a disaster, individuals often filter out accumulating indications of safety problems that look like obvious red flags in retrospect -- just as frogs do not jump out of a pot of water on a stove as long as the temperature goes up slowly. Diane Vaughan's award-winning book on the Challenger disaster demonstrates a clear pattern in earlier space shuttle launches of O-ring performance degrading in proportion to declining launch temperatures -- the problem that would ultimately kill Challenger's ill-fated crew. Some shuttle engineers had become concerned about this, but the organizational complex responsible for the space shuttle could not bring this problem into full cognitive focus as long as the missions were successful. Operational success created a blinding glow that made this safety issue hard to see.

The whistle-blower's dilemma. The space shuttle program provides another example of human fallibility, explored in William Langewische's account of the Columbia space shuttle accident: Large, technical organizations tend to be unfriendly to employees who harp on safety issues. The NASA engineers who warned senior management -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the Columbia shuttle was endangered by the foam it lost on takeoff were treated as pests. (The same is true of Roger Boisjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineer who was ostracized and punished for having warned correctly that the Challenger shuttle was likely to explode if launched at low temperature.) Large technical organizations prioritize meeting deadlines and fulfilling production targets, and their internal reward structures tend to reflect these priorities. This is especially true if the organizations operate in a market environment where revenue streams are at stake. In such organizations, bonuses tend not to go to those who cause the organization to miss targets and deadlines or spend extra money to prevent accidents that may seem hypothetical. It is not the safety engineers, after all, who become CEOs. Those with safety concerns report that they often censor themselves unless they are deeply convinced of the urgency of their cause. Indeed, there is -- sadly -- substantial literature on the various forms of mistreatment of engineers who do come forward with such concerns.

just how far did the radioactive plume travel? On the 27 March Romul Mărgineanu, from the Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH) in Romania, and colleagues, began to collect samples of rainwater from Braşov and Slănic-Prahova. And on 5 April they also started to collect samples of sheep and goat's milk from the same regions. The samples were all taken to the IFIN-HH's underground laboratory at the Unirea salt mine in Slănic-Prahova, for analysis. Inside this ultra-low radiation environment the levels of iodine131 and caesium137 were measured, using a high resolution gamma-ray spectrometer.

None of the samples contained caesium137 at detectable levels. However, iodine131 was present at up to 0.75 Bq per litre in rainwater, and up to 5.2 Bq per litre in milk. "The level of I-131 in sheep and goat milk was higher than in rain water due to bioaccumulation," explains Mărgineanu. "Bioaccumulation occurs when an organism absorbs a toxic substance – chemical or radioactive – at a rate greater than that at which the substance is lost."

Such levels were two to three orders of magnitude below any intervention limits, for example the limit set for drinking water in Japan was 300 Bq per litre for adults and children and 100 Bq per litre for infants. In this case weather conditions played a role in keeping the radiation levels low. In the weeks following the accident Romania only experienced very light rain; had the rain been heavier more radiation may have been precipitated out. The results are published in Environmental Research Letters.