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Jan Wyllie

BP struggles to recruit engineers [14Aug11] - 0 views

  • A shortage of skilled engineers is threatening to hamper efforts by BP to boost production in the North Sea, a senior executive has said. The oil giant is expected to recruit between 150 and 300 jobs a year but admits that one of its biggest problems is finding the right people with the right skills. The comments, reported in the Sunday Telegraph, come a month after BP and its partners announced plans to invest £3 billion in redeveloping two oil fields off the Shetland Islands. The move should create hundreds of new jobs but Trevor Garlick, head of the company's North Sea operations, said BP would struggle to attract enough engineers for the available roles. He said
  • "Getting hold of the right people is a real issue for us. We are hiring a lot of people, but we are also an exporter of a couple of hundred people to other regions. We are a centre for recruiting elsewhere.
D'coda Dcoda

Nuclear Island opens to UK students [16Jun11] - 0 views

  • 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."
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Report: Concern work not being done at Reactors 1-3 - Perhaps much longer than 50 years... - 0 views

  • astel Yamada is 73 years old. He seems a little tired after weeks on the road in the United States. He is trying to save Japan. One of the first people I have met who can tell the inside story of the Fukushima accident, Yamada is concerned that work is not being done on the three nuclear reactors that melted down last year because the high radiation levels are still keeping TEPCO workers away. The crippled buildings are unstable, still contain nuclear assemblies, and present a long term threat to the people in the area. The cooling systems especially are a cause for concern. Mr. Yamada, founder and president of the Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima (Fukushima Genpatsu Kodotai), along with 700 members, want to help clean up the site.
  • Beyond cleanup of the site, Mr. Yamada doesn’t believe TEPCO has the technological capabilities to deal with the long term issues. TEPCO, he says, doesn’t believe this either. TEPCO’s plan, according to Yamada, is to contain the radiation in the next 40 years. He estimates they will need 50 years or perhaps much longer
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Japanese Split on Fukushima Radiation Cleanup [07Dec11] - 0 views

  • Futaba is a modern-day ghost town — not a boomtown gone bust, not even entirely a victim of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that leveled other parts of Japan’s northeast coast.
  • Its traditional wooden homes have begun to sag and collapse since they were abandoned in March by residents fleeing the nuclear plant on the edge of town that began spiraling toward disaster. Roofs possibly damaged by the earth’s shaking have let rain seep in, starting the rot that is eating at the houses from the inside.
  • The roadway arch at the entrance to the empty town almost seems a taunt. It reads: “Nuclear energy: a correct understanding brings a prosperous lifestyle.”
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  • Now, Japan is drawing up plans for a cleanup that is both monumental and unprecedented, in the hopes that those displaced can go home. The debate over whether to repopulate the area, if trial cleanups prove effective, has become a proxy for a larger battle over the future of Japan. Supporters see rehabilitating the area as a chance to showcase the country’s formidable determination and superior technical skills — proof that Japan is still a great power. For them, the cleanup is a perfect metaphor for Japan’s rebirth.
  • Critics counter that the effort to clean Fukushima Prefecture could end up as perhaps the biggest of Japan’s white-elephant public works projects — and yet another example of post-disaster Japan reverting to the wasteful ways that have crippled economic growth for two decades. So far, the government is following a pattern set since the nuclear accident, dismissing dangers, often prematurely, and laboring to minimize the scope of the catastrophe. Already, the trial cleanups have stalled: the government failed to anticipate communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil to be scraped from contaminated yards and fields.
  • And a radiation specialist who tested the results of an extensive local cleanup in a nearby city found that exposure levels remained above international safety standards for long-term habitation. Even a vocal supporter of repatriation suggests that the government has not yet leveled with its people about the seriousness of their predicament.
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Nuclear Engineer shares concerns about Brunswick Nuclear Leak [19Nov11] - 0 views

  • The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission will begin a special inspection at Progress Energy‘s Brunswick-2 unit in North Carolina after the utility said Friday the reactor pressure vessel’s lid was not adequately tightened when it restarted earlier this week.  Most of us are also paying close attention to the events at Brunswick Nuclear Power Plant, and today I talked with a former nuclear engineer  Chris Harris about the recent developments.
  • Refueling procedures are elaborate and well documented procedures, and one of the biggest questions is why the proper procedures were not followed, or were carried out incorrectly. The bolts need to be tensioned in a specific Torque Pattern, which generally includes multiple passes.  Refueling procedures require a crew of  at least 6 engineers, and additional Quality Control inspectors.
  • The unit had been in a maintenance outage, was in the process of restarting and was operating at 7% power when workers discovered the leak in the reactor coolant system, Progress said in an event report filed Wednesday with NRC. When the leak exceeded 10 gal/minute, the unit was shut, Progress said.
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  • The Brunswick Nuclear Plant has two boiling-water reactors that generate 1,875 megawatts of electricity. Each of the Brunswick reactors is refueled once every 24 months, usually in the spring when the demand for electricity is relatively low. At the Brunswick Plant, 1 million gallons of water per minute are pumped from the Cape Fear River where it passes through the plant’s cooling system and then drops approximately  15 feet to the head of the outflow canal.
  • The unit shut Wednesday morning after the reactor leaked. An investigation showed the inadequately tightened reactor vessel head was a potentially “significant” safety issue, Progress said in a report filed Friday with the NRC. Workers seeking the source of the leak found that at least 10 of the 64 bolts that secure the reactor vessel head to the pressure vessel were not fully tightened, Progress spokesman Ryan Mosier said in an email Friday.
  • The Tensioning Tool is inspected and maintained, and is also part of the QC checklist.  This is not a simple situation where someone didn’t torque down the bolts correctly, as multiple personnel would have had to check and confirm the status prior to restart. In fact, according to Progress Energy’s 35 day outage schedule, the reassembly and reactor test are the 9th, and 10th steps of the process, and one can’t help but wonder why this was not detected before the reactor was re-pressurized. Chris had some very good questions regarding the Brunswick event, that I felt were worth sharing.
  • What testing was performed to determine that the RPV Head was Tensioned properly? What caused the improper Tensioning ? Procedure, Skill of the Craft? Aggressive Schedule? What are the Acceptance Criteria in the procedure for a properly tensioned head” How do you know that you meet the Acceptance Criteria?
  • Not only are the procedures and QC process in question, but the event also impacts operations and reliability of reactor components.  Chris highlighted a few questions that he felt were critical to ensure safe restart and operation.
  • Could there have been Foreign Material on the RPV Head Flange? What damage to surrounding equipment in the Drywell was sustained by the Steam/Water Leak? What is the condition of the Refueling Seal, now that it has been sprayed with Steamy/Hot Water? Did Hot/Steamy water find its way on the Outside of the Containment such that Corrosion in the future will be a problem? Did the steam leakage affect the Reactor Vessel Head Studs and their Threaded Holes (in the Reactor Vessel Flange) such that they will fail at a future date? At this point, Progress Energy is keeping fairly quiet about the specifics, and initially only revealed information of a “possible leak at the top of the reactor vessel”.  Monday morning should prove eventful not only for the Utility, but also for regulators.
D'coda Dcoda

Japan's Nukes Following Earthquake - 1 views

  • TEPCO has just released "diaries" from early in the accident giving us a better view of the sequence of events from the operators point of view.
  • The bulk of the materials, distributed on discs with digital files, show reams of raw numerical data. They include photos of broadsheet computer printouts and other formatted charts with thousands of data points for measurements of reactor heat, pressure, water levels, fuel rod positions and the status of cooling pumps, among other functions. Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, also released a smaller batch of more recent documents highlighting its various efforts to restore electric power to each of the reactors, a task that was achieved on April 26. But a series of what Tepco terms reactor "diaries" from the first 48 hours after the quake include the most visually arresting materials. These feature snapshots of whiteboards on which plant employees—11 of whom remained in each of the plant's three control rooms—jotted down status updates on the progress of the reactor shutdowns and steadily increasing radiation levels around the facility.
  • Using red, black or blue ink markers, the plant operators appear to have scribbled down the notes quickly. Many are smudged or illegible. Others depict complex diagrams and are peppered with technical jargon or acronyms such as SBO for "station blackout." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281504576329011846064194.html
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  • The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) on June 6 revised the level of radioactivity of materials emitted from the crisis hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant from 370,000 terabecquerels to 850,000 terabecquerels. (from 10,000,000 curies to 22,972,972.97 curies)http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110606p2a00m0na009000c.html
  • Lots of interesting information in this paper from TEPCO:http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/images/handouts_110525_01-e.pdfUnits 1-4 did not have RCIC.  They had isolation condensers.  Not only that, the isolation condensers were water cooled with 8 hours of water in the condenser reservoir. 
  • HPCI required DC power to operate.  The turbine lube oil pump was DC; it didn't have a shaft oil pump.  I think this may be common here too, anyone willing to verify that?That's why they had trouble so quick:  8 hours later and without AC power they had no way to get water to the pressure vessel.  About the same time the instruments died from a lack of battery power is about the time they lost the isolation condenser from a lack of water.They also verify that they didn't have the hardened vent modification.
  • Fukushima may have a group that could tackle the nuclear crisis looming over Japan. The Skilled Veterans Corps, retired engineers and professionals, want to volunteer to work in the dangerous conditions instead of putting younger generations at risk. More than 200 Japanese retirees are seeking to replace younger workers at Fukushima while the plant is being stabilized. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/307378
  • So helpless were the plant's engineers that, as dusk fell after Japan's devastating March 11 quake and tsunami, they were forced to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes. They pulled batteries from cars not washed away by the tsunami in a desperate effort to revive reactor gauges that weren't working properly. The plant's complete power loss contributed to a failure of relief vents on a dangerously overheating reactor, forcing workers to open valves by hand.And in a significant miscalculation: At first, engineers weren't aware that the plant's emergency batteries were barely working, the investigation found—giving them a false impression that they had more time to make repairs. As a result, nuclear fuel began melting down hours earlier than previously assumed. This week Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, confirmed that one of the plant's six reactors suffered a substantial meltdown early in Day 1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322804576302553455643510.html
  • The following article focus's on US spent fuel storage safety, Several members of Congress are calling for the fuel to be moved from the pools into dry casks at a faster clip, noting that the casks are thought to be capable of withstanding an earthquake or a plane crash, they have no moving parts and they require no electricity. but there is a reference to Fukishima's dry storage casks farther into the article.But Robert Alvarez, a former senior adviser to the secretary of energy and expert on nuclear power, points out that unlike the fuel pools, dry casks survived the tsunami at Fukushima unscathed. “They don’t get much attention because they didn’t fail,” he said.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/business/energy-environment/06cask.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=science
  • In 1967, Tepco chopped 25 meters off the 35-meter natural seawall where the reactors were to be located, according to documents filed at the time with Japanese authorities. That little-noticed action was taken to make it easier to ferry equipment to the site and pump seawater to the reactors. It was also seen as an efficient way to build the complex atop the solid base of bedrock needed to better protect the plant from earthquakes.But the razing of the cliff also placed the reactors five meters below the level of 14- to 15-meter tsunami hitting the plant March 11, triggering a major nuclear disaster resulting in the meltdown of three reactor cores.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303982504576425312941820794.html
  • Toyota was a key executive who was involved in the Fukushima No. 1 plant construction.It is actually common practice to build primary nuclear plant facilities directly on bedrock because of the temblor factor.Toyota also cited two other reasons for Tepco clearing away the bluff — seawater pumps used to provide coolant water needed to be set up on the ground up to 10 meters from the sea, and extremely heavy equipment, including the 500-ton reator pressure vessels, were expected to be brought in by boat.In fact, Tepco decided to build the plant on low ground based on a cost-benefit calculation of the operating costs of the seawater pumps, according to two research papers separately written by senior Tepco engineers in the 1960s.
  • If the seawater pumps were placed on high ground, their operating costs would be accordingly higher."We decided to build the plant at ground level after comparing the ground construction costs and operating costs of the circulation water pumps," wrote Hiroshi Kaburaki, then deputy head of the Tepco's construction office at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, in the January 1969 edition of Hatsuden Suiryoku, a technical magazine on power plants.Still, Tepco believed ground level was "high enough to sufficiently secure safety against tsunami and typhoon waves," wrote Seiji Saeki, then civil engineering section head of Tepco's construction office, in his research paper published in October 1967.
  • Engineers at Tohoku Electric Power Co., on the other hand, had a different take on the tsunami threat when the Onagawa nuclear plant was built in Miyagi Prefecture in the 1980s.Like Fukushima, the plant was built along the Tohoku coast and was hit by tsunami as high as 13 meters on March 11.Before building the plant, Tohoku Electric, examining historic records of tsunami reported in the region, conducted computer simulations and concluded the local coast could face tsumani of up to 9.1 meters.Tohoku Electric had set the construction ground level at 14.8 meters above sea level — which barely spared the Onagawa plant from major damage from 13-meter-high tsunami that hit in March.
  • Former Tepco worker Naganuma said many locals now feel they have been duped by Tepco's long-running propaganda on the safety of its nuclear facilities, despite the huge economic benefits the plant brought to his hometown of Okuma, which hosts the Fukushima No. 1 plant.
  •  
    from a nuclear worker's forum so the dates run from May 20, 2011 to July 15, 2011...these are the points these nuclear workers thought important about Fukushima
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Is any job worth this risk? I speak to Fukushima clear-up workers [19Aug11] - 0 views

  • Why on earth would anyone choose to work at what’s left of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station? The job description probably goes something like this: - must spend day in full body suit, gloves, thick rubber boots and full-facial mask
  • - must endure extremely high temperatures in aforementioned suits - must work on badly damaged site containing the remains of 4 crippled nuclear reactors
  • Employees are under strict instructions not to speak to journalists – and supervisors from their various employers keep an active eye on them when they return to Iwaki in the evening. We were thrown out of one hotel when we had the audacity to approach a group of men employed to clear rubble from the site. Yet there were others who wanted to talk – albeit anonymously. Their working conditions I asked? Terrible, they said: “a burning-hell”, “terrifying” and “very troubling” – phrases I recorded in my notebook. But I wasn’t getting any closer to answering my question – why work there?
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  • This blindingly obvious question was firmly in my mind when we travelled to Iwaki City – a mid-sized, non-descript sort of place that now finds itself uncomfortably close to the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Many of its residents have now evacuated, fearing the radioactive leaks that continue to spew from the plant. Many of the 3,000 workers now employed in clean-up operations at the plant have taken their place, cramming the local hotels and renting otherwise deserted family homes.
  • These employment “opportunities” are an unfortunate by-product of Japan’s great earthquake and tsunami. The folks at the “Tokyo Electric Power Company” (TEPCO), built a 5.7m seawall to protect the complex from natural disasters – but the tsunami wave was 13.1 m high.
  • - must brave dangerously high levels of radiation (you may feel like you a suffocating in full-facial mask but no, you cannot take it off).
  • Money is certainly the big motivator. Japan has been mired in recession for decades and the country’s 54 nuclear power plants have long provided work to low or non-skilled, itinerant workers. Fukushima is no different – although it is much more dangerous.
  • A Channel 4 News researcher rang a number on a “jobs-available” poster that we found plastered on a wall in Iwaki. “What sort of experience do you have,” said the man on the phone to our researcher. “Well I’ve done some car maintenance,” said our researcher. “Good enough,” said the man, presumably one of the 600 “subcontractors” engaged by TEPCO. Our researcher asked about the daily rate. “Six-thousand yen (£50),” he said. That quickly went up to 8,500 yen (£67) as our researcher hummed and hawed a bit. But there was something special on offer said the subcontractor. “You can earn 40,000 yen (£315) an hour if you want, but what you have to do is dangerous.” We didn’t find out what that job entailed but it probably involved some sort of increased risk of radiation exposure.
  • One man told us he had come out of “a sense of duty” and there were others who were simply told by their employers that they had to work at Fukushima. “Could you refuse?” I asked one technician. “Well, that would put you in a very uncomfortable position,” he said before adding, “Japanese workers are very obedient.”
  • If they don’t challenge their superiors in the workplace, what do these men (and we didn’t meet any women working at the plant) tell their loved ones at home? Well, it turns out some of them don’t actually tell their wives and children what they’re up to. “Wives just get panicked,” said one. “It is better just to say that I’m working on the clean-up (of the coast) in Myagi,” he added.  Another employee described how his mother took the news. “She was totally shocked – but she didn’t stop me. (My family) are very worried about me – about the heat and my health and radiation exposure.”
  • It’s a long-term form of job security I suppose – the containment and maintenance of highly toxic materials that will take thousands of years to decompose. But is any job worth these sorts of risks? Workers told us they couldn’t afford to be choosey about where they take jobs – but I got the distinct impression the majority wished it was somewhere else.
D'coda Dcoda

The human element | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [01Sep11] - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • The wild card. Finally, human nature being what it is, there are always the wild cards: people who kill romantic rivals via nuclear meltdown, freelance experimenters, terrorists, operators who should never have made it through personnel screening, operators who are drunk on the job, operators whose performance has declined through laziness, depression, boredom, or any host of reasons.
  • Overwhelmed by speed and complexity. As Charles Perrow argues in his influential book Normal Accidents, which was inspired by the Three Mile Island accident, human operators function well in environments of routinized normality; but, when highly complex technical systems function in unpredicted ways -- especially if the jagged interactions between subsystems unfold very rapidly -- then the human capacity for cognitive processing is quickly overwhelmed. In other words, if a reactor is veering toward an accident caused by the failure of a single system in a way that operators have been trained to handle, then they are likely to retain control. But, if the accident-in-the-making involves unforeseen combinations of failures unfolding quickly and requires improvised responses rather than routinized ones, the outcome is far less hopeful.
  • The politics of oversight. Regulatory apparatuses tend to degrade over time -- especially in political systems such as America's, which tend to facilitate the corporate capture of government functions. Thanks to the leverage afforded by campaign donations and the revolving door between public and private employment, industries have become extremely skillful at inserting their former employees, future employees, and other allies into the very regulatory agencies that oversee them. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism on the Securities and Exchange Commission in the latest issue of Rolling Stone shows how this can reduce a regulatory agency to an empty husk. Whether it's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Food and Drug Administration, the story is the same: Government agencies that started off as aggressive watchdogs have become absorbed over time by those over whom they have titular oversight. Americans recently saw the dire consequences of this trend in the banking meltdown of 2008.
  • The bottom line: Nuclear safety is threatened by human as well as technical malfunctions, and the risk of disaster can only be attenuated through attention to the principles of social engineering as well as nuclear engineering. While human behavior can always overflow the bounds of our plans for its containment, there are measures that can at least lower the risk of a nuclear disaster caused by human factors: First, the nuclear industry needs to do more to both protect and reward whistle-blowers; and, second, the industry needs regulators with a genuine desire to exercise oversight -- rather than people hoping to increase their income by later going to work for the very companies that they were regulating. Unfortunately, this goes against the ethos of the contemporary United States, where the trend-lines are going in the wrong direction.
Jan Wyllie

NRC 'knowledge center' helps younger employees benefit from experts' experience [29Aug11] - 0 views

  • The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last fall began identifying hundreds of employees with expertise it deems too valuable to lose.It captures that expertise by a variety of means — recorded presentations and interviews, collected documents — for posting on the online NRC Knowledge Center. Veteran employees also connect with staff through mentor programs, job shadowing and brown-bag lunches."The workforce today doesn't have the 30 years of experience in licensing and inspecting nuclear power plants," said Patricia Eng, NRC's senior adviser for knowledge management. "In 2009, 50 percent of the NRC staff had been with us for less than five years," which created a "huge training issue," she said.
  • . There are virtual communities of practice, based on profession and skill set, where members can post questions and answers, documents and videos that are permanently stored and available for view.
  • soon be able to subscribe to RSS feeds.
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  • They identified about 285 experts nearing retirement and others with few experienced workers to someday replace them in such fields as power plant construction inspection and fire protection."That information that is in short supply that is walking out the door, we call this high-risk, high-value knowledge," Hudson said.NRC estimates it loses 4,000 work years of experience every year through attrition and retirement.
  • "You can put in place the tools [and] infrastructure that allows rapid capture and transfer of knowledge, but what it really comes down to is organization culture," and agency leaders must support development of knowledge management initiatives, said Andre, now a senior vice president for intelligence business strategies at CACI.Leaders must not only say they value knowledge sharing or continuous learning, they must reward behaviors that reflect those values, Andre said.
D'coda Dcoda

Oldbury 1 to shut down in early 2012 [23Oct11] - 0 views

  • After 44 years of operation, unit 1 of the UK's Oldbury nuclear power plant will be permanently shut down in February 2012, ten months earlier than expected, Magnox Ltd announced.
  • The company said that further operation of the 217 MWe Magnox reactor was "no longer economically viable." The decision to shut down the unit - the only operational reactor at the site - was taken "after careful consideration by operators Magnox and the site owners the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), in conjunction with independent regulators the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR)."   Built in the 1960s and among the first generation of UK reactors, both of the gas-cooled, graphite-moderated first generation reactors at Oldbury were originally scheduled to shut down at the end of 2008. However, the NDA requested permission from the regulator to operate beyond that date, earning revenue to help pay for decommissioning. While unit 2 was eventually shut down in June 2011, unit 1 was expected to close at the end of 2012. To date, the site has generated over 130 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity.  
  • Oldbury site director Phil Sprague said, "Oldbury's excellent generation history is a terrific success story, especially as the site was originally planned to close in 2008. As a result of excellent teamwork between Magnox, the NDA and ONR the site's operational life was extended until February 2012, and it is a testament to the skills and dedication of the workforce who have operated and maintained the reactors to such a high standard that it has been able to continue to generate safely."   Magnox Ltd noted that since their originally planned shut down date of 2008, the two units have generated an additional 7 TWh, worth an estimated £300 million ($478 million) to the British taxpayer. This extra generation, it added, also saved some six million tonnes of carbon from being released into the atmosphere.   NDA executive director for delivery Mark Lesinski commented: "The income from electricity sales has provided an important contribution to the funding for our decommissioning program. Magnox and NDA will now work with stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition into the next stage for the site which will involve defueling and subsequent decommissioning."
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  • Under current plans, the operation to remove the fuel from both units should be completed in 2013. After most of the structures at Oldbury have been removed, the site will enter the 'care and maintenance' stage of decommissioning around 2027, after which the reactor is left to cool. Final site clearance activities are scheduled between 2092 and 2101.   The last two remaining Magnox reactors currently in operation in the UK are at Wylfa site. The two 490 MWe units there are scheduled to shut down at the end of 2012.   Horizon Nuclear Power - a 50-50 joint venture between RWE nPower and EOn UK - plans to submit a planning application for a new nuclear power plant at Oldbury around 2014. According to the company, "Given the right market conditions, and subject to a final investment decision, preliminary works could begin in 2016, followed by main construction from 2019." Horizon is yet to decide which of the two available reactor designs - Areva's EPR or Westinghouse's AP1000 - it would like to build.
D'coda Dcoda

Decon Bubble in Fukushima: Contractors Charging US$13,000 Per House [18Oct11] - 0 views

  • Yet another fine example of how a government is so good at misallocating the resource. By pledging to pour hundreds of billions of yen (probably in trillions) into "decontaminating" Fukushima, the Japanese government has already spawned a brand-new industry of residential decontamination. Who are the industry participants? Cleaners, painters, just about anyone who has a high-pressure washer.Some are apparently charging 1 million yen (US$13,000) to hose down your house. As you can see in the video in the previous post, their idea of "decontamination" looks little more than year-end cleanup. Power washing seems to somehow turn cleanup into "decontamination".From Yomiuri Shinbun (10/19/2011):
  • As decontamination work gets underway in Fukushima Prefecture to remove radioactive materials from the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident, so do troubles with the decontamination contractors. Some are asking 1 million yen [US$13,000] to decontaminate a house.
  • Disputes over the cost may increase in the future, and there are some who point out that there should be a guideline specifying what constitutes the standard decontamination work and the cost associated with it.
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  • Regarding decontamination, some municipalities like Fukushima City have the city-wide decontamination plan and focus on particular areas to decontaminate. On the other hand, there are cases where the residents hire contractors for decontamination on their own. There are also active sales promotion by the contractors.
  • Disputes mostly rise from the latter cases. The Fukushima prefectural department in charge of decontamination has received a complaint from a resident who was presented with a bill for 1 million yen by the contractor who did the decontamination work for his residence. The department says it has received similar complaints.
  • Fukushima City has received inquiries from the residents about the cost of decontamination. One resident who hired the contractor to decontaminate for 200,000 yen [US$2,600] asked the city whether or not this cost would be paid by either the national government or TEPCO.
  • There were no contractors specialized in decontaminating residences, until now. Many cleaning companies and painters are entering the field. One building management company in Minami Soma City says, "If we calculate the same way as the cleaning of a personal residence, 200,000 to 300,000 yen per residence would be appropriate."Hmmm. Decontamination is not the same as cleaning, really. But from what I've heard directly from people who have witnessed the so-called "decontamination" in Fukushima and what I've seen on video, they are one and the same.
  • Blasting the roof and wall with power washer after more than 7 months may not even be enough to dislodge radioactive cesium, as Professor Yamauchi has analyzed. Even if it does, it simply moves cesium to somewhere else, like the neighbor's yard or onto the public road. Then, particularly in the case of Fukushima, the contaminated mountains and forests surrounding the cities and towns will supply radioactive cesium and other nuclides over time with rain and wind.But no matter. Money is there to be made, as near-endless supply of money flowing from the national government to "decontaminate" Fukushima and make people stay.If blasting with power washer does decontaminate, I am pretty sure Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians have done that long time ago.
  • Prime Minister Noda, whom you can see in the video in the previous post, won the leadership election thanks to his oratorical skills and NHK misreporting on the votes available for Banri Kaieda, looks absolutely clueless. Just as his predecessor, the whole thing looks way over his head.
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