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Workers who relocated the material fell ill simply from inhaling the fumes, Carpenter said. Department of Energy officials said none of the material has leaked outside the outer steel wall or the concrete casing that surrounds the structure, and there is no present hazard to workers or groundwater. They said they were trying to determine whether the material leaked from the inner tank or oozed from a nearby pit into the space between the two walls, known as the annulus. "There's no evidence of it leaking the liquid from the inner shell right now," Gamache said. The material – a mound 2 feet by 3 feet by 8 inches -- is dry and doesn't appear to be growing. It was discovered during a routine video inspection of the annulus conducted last month from a viewpoint not normally used. The possibility that it could have come as overflow from a nearby pit arises because a pipe runs into the annulus from the pit, Gamache said.

But Carpenter, who has talked extensively with workers at Hanford and was briefed Tuesday by one of the Department of Energy's senior officials at the tank farm, said he believed the evidence was strong that there was a leak. "I know Hanford would like it not to be so. But the people I'm talking to at the Hanford site say, no, it really does look like a leak," he said.

"From what I'm being told and looking at the pictures, it appears it's coming from under the tank and going up. Which is a far cry from it coming from the pit." Gamache said an initial sample of the material revealed that "the contamination levels were higher than expected" and it definitely contained radioactive waste. "There wasn't enough material to fully characterize the material, so we're preparing to pull another sample. That will probably happen around the mid-September time frame," she said. Carpenter said that if the inner tank leaked, it would probably prompt the need to reevaluate expectations that the tanks could safely act as interim storage vessels for several decades.

It's 40 microsieverts [per hour]," we were told when the bus arrived near the coast, about 10 meters above sea level

There were several large trailers stuck in the ground near the No. 3 and No. 4 turbine buildings, and a nearby cafeteria building's first floor was destroyed. The lower part of the turbine buildings, on the other hand, showed almost no damage as they were sturdy enough to withstand the power of the tsunami, but could not prevent the water from leaking in through small openings. Had the emergency generators not been in the basements of the turbine buildings, they would not have been submerged and could have prevented the nuclear crisis from developing.

But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s report does not call for moving more of the fuel.When the commission received an oral report from a six-member “task force” it appointed to study the safety implications of Fukushima, one commissioner, William C. Ostendorff, said he had received letters from members of Congress asking for wider use of the casks, however.But Charles L. Miller, who led the task force, replied that removing the fuel would not do much to reduce the basic problem, which is that fuel rods remain in the pool, and if cooling is knocked out, the water that provides protection against melting and the release of radioactive materials will boil away.

“Before you can take it out of the pool, it has to be at least five years old, and by that time, we call it, for lack of a better word, cold fuel,’’ Mr. Miller said.At the briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Fertel mentioned other recommendations from the task force, including better instruments for altering operators to how much water is in the pools and new ways of adding water in an emergency. Pulling more fuel out, he said, would provide certain advantages but is also certain to expose workers to radiation in the course of the transfer.

Fukushima used dry casks as well, and those appear to have survived without damage, Mr. Fertel said, although they have not been thoroughly inspected. “They’re fine, but so are the pools,’’ he said.

They were not unscathed, however; debris flew into the pools after the buildings surrounding them blew up in hydrogen explosions.

The task force also refrained from recommending changes in emergency planning zones, despite the embassy’s recommendation during the crisis for Americans to stay 50 miles away from Fukushima. In the United States, emergency evacuation planning is required within 10 miles of any reactor.

Mr. Fertel said the recommendation to evacuate to 50 miles “was based not on information, but on the lack thereof.’’

Opponents of nuclear power have argued that the commission should cease all extensions of reactors’ operating licenses until it has digested the lessons of the accident in Japan. But Mr. Fertel noted that since March 11, the commission has issued 20-year license extensions for the Vermont Yankee, Palo Verde, Prairie Island, Salem and Hope Creek reactors, and allowed higher power outputs for Limerick and Point Beach.

I worked at Hamaoka nuclear plant for a little over 5 years, but it was not the only time I’d worked at a power plant. Before Hamaoka, I spent my 30s working at a nearby nuclear plant for about 10 years in the 1980’s. At that time, I did not work at just one site but was moving from one plant to another to do regular maintenance work. Recently, that kind of people are called “Nuclear gypsies” with a bit of contempt and in that period I was living as one of those. Two years after I began the wandering life of a gypsy, I entered for the first time the core container of a steam generator. At the time I was working at the Genkai Nuclear Power Plant in Saga Prefecture. [Editor's note: In brief, there is a containment building within the plant. This houses the core and the steam generator.] The core is the part of the reactor where uranium fuel undergoes nuclear fission. It generates heat which is then passed to The steam generator which produces the steam to power the turbines which turn the generators elsewhere in the plant . The level of radioactivity in the containment building is very high compared to elsewhere [in the plant]. My job involved entering [the generator] and installing a robot monitor that would enable examination of whether there was any damage in the steam generator.

Actually what happened on the day was that another person replaced me and entered the steam generator to install the robot. After the installation was completed, there was a problem in that the robot wouldn’t respond and thus could not be operated from outside. There are many small holes in the walls of the central part of the steam generator and the six (I believe there were six) ‘legs’ of a robot, operated via a remote control, should be able to survey it through those holes. The employees in charge of supervising the installation concluded that there had been a problem in properly positioning the robot’s legs.

If the ‘legs’ are not completely inserted and the robot is left in that position, it could fall down at any time. If that happens, it spells the loss of a precision machine that's said to be worth several hundred million yen. That’s why I was sent in to enter the generator, on very short notice, to replace the robot back to its correct operating position before that happened. I started putting on the gear to enter the housing at a spot near the steam generator. Two workers helped me put it on. I was already wearing two layers of work clothes, and on top of those, I put on Tyvek protective gear made of paper and vinyl, and an airline respirator. Plus, I wrapped a lot of vinyl tape around my neck, my wrists and my ankles, to block even the slightest opening.

Once I finished putting on the protective gear — which honestly looks like an astronaut suit — I headed toward the housing. When I arrived at the area near the housing, two workers were waiting. They were employees of a company called the Japanese Society for Non-Destructive Inspection [JSNDI] and, to my surprise, despite the area being highly radioactive, they were wearing nothing but plain working clothes. They weren’t even wearing masks. The person who appeared to be in charge invited me over and, after a look at my eyes inside the mask, nodded his head a few times. I guess just looking into my eyes he was able to determine that I’d be able to handle working in the core.

He and I went to the steam generator together.

The base of the steam generator more or less reached my shoulder, at slightly less than 1.5m. At the bottom, there was a manhole. The manhole was open, and I immediately realized I would have to climb up into it.

The JSNDI employee in charge put his arm around me and together we approached the manhole. We looked over the edge and peered in. Inside was dark, and the air was dense and stagnant. It felt as though something sinister was living inside. My expression glazed over. A slight sensation of dread came over me. As I approached the manhole, I noticed a ringing in my ears and felt reluctant to go in. When I looked inside, I saw that the robot was attached to the wall indicated by the [JSNDI] employee. It was not properly attached, which is why I had been sent in.

The robot was square-shaped, 40 cm on each side and 20 cm deep. It was called a ‘spider robot’. The JSNDI employee put his face at the edge of the manhole, a third of his face peering in, and diligently explained what I had to do. There was little awareness at the time of the dangers to workers of radiation exposure, but even so I was concerned about the bold act of the employee, who looked inside the housing with me. He continued looking inside, unfazed, and I remember wondering why he wasn’t scared. I was almost completely covered while he wasn’t even wearing a mask. […]

I stood up, climbed the ladder, and pushed my upper body through the manhole. In that second, something grabbed at my head and squeezed hard. A pounding in my ear started right away.

One worker said that right after he entered a nuclear reactor he heard a noise like a moving crab. “zawa,zawa,zawa…” He said that he could still hear this noise after he finished the work. Even after the inspection work, when he went back home, he couldn’t forget that noise. The man ended up having a nervous breakdown. A writer who heard this story spoke to this man and wrote a mystery novel based on that experience. The title of the book is “The crab of the nuclear reactor”. It was published in 1981 and was very popular among us.

I never heard such a crab-like noise but I had the feeling that my head was being tightly constricted and deep in my ears I heard very high-tempo echoes like a sutra “gan, gan, gan”. When I entered the steam generator I stood up all of a sudden and my helmet hit the ceiling. So I had to bend my neck and hold both the arms of the robot in the darkish room. “OK” I screamed. So the robot was unlocked and its feet jumped out of the hole. The entire robot was not as heavy as I had thought. After I matched its feet position in the holes I gave them another OK sign and so it was positioned in the hole. In the dark, when I verified that all the feet had entered into the holes I gave them another OK and jumped out of the manhole. […]

Once outside,] I was almost in shock but looked at the alarm meter and saw that it had recorded a value equal to 180, when the maximum it can record is 200. In only 15 seconds, I was exposed to an unbelievably high level of radiation, 180 millirem. At that time the unit ‘millirem' was used while now it’s different. Now everybody uses sievert. That time I was in charge of an inspection work that lasted about 1 month. After that I worked in another nuclear reactor but even on the second time I couldn’t get through the fear and experienced the same creepy noise.

Upcoming Events A July 28 public Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting will focus on the agency’s near-term task force recommendations for safety enhancements at U.S. nuclear energy facilities after the Fukushima accident. The Foundation for Nuclear Studies will host a July 29 briefing and discussion on the status of Fukushima Daiichi for congressional staff in Washington, D.C. The briefing will be conducted by Lake Barrett, former NRC site director for Three Mile Island and former acting director of the DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

According to the WSJ, the Saudi government said the former ambassador does not speak for it in an official capacity. Al-Faisal, however, is widely believed to be on a short list to be the next foreign minister of KSA. How credible his claim is about the potential for a regional arms race remains to be seen. Swapping nukes for oil drums

The main driver for KSA’s plans to build reactors is that at the rate that it is burning its own oil, it may have substantially less to export in just a decade or so. At a minimum, it may lose the excess capacity the rest of the world relies on when there are disruptions in supplies from other countries. One scenario suggested by energy analysts that follow oil markets is that within two decades most of the KSA output would be used for domestic consumption. Total Saudi reserves are estimated at 267 billion barrels. Debates rage in the news media over so-called peak oil, but energy experts discount them as speculative at best, and fantastic or worse on the downside.

Current production estimates put total KSA production capacity at 12.5 million barrels a day with a maximum output of 15 million barrels a day. The Wall Street Journal reported in April 2011 that production was running at 8 million-9 million barrels a day compared to 11 million barrels a day in 2010 reported by the Energy Information Administration. The difference is the global economic downturn has reduced demand. What’s got the attention of energy planners is that domestic use in KSA could grow from 3.4 million barrels of oil a day in 2009 to 8.3 million barrels a day by 2028.

The official Saudi press agency said in April 2010 that it was “alarmed” by increasing oil and gas consumption for domestic use and the resulting impact on export revenues. Reduction of consumption, which pushes up use of fossil fuel to produce electricity, is not an option for both economic and political reasons. In 2011, the Saudi government has increased its subsidies of energy supplies by $100 million for domestic use, in part to dampen any possibilities of social unrest like that which toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.

Like other Arab countries, KSA has a large population of unemployed young people who have better than average educations.  This is a volatile mix and the arch conservatives that run KSA have defused it with lavish subsidies.

Electricity demand is predicted to increase from 75 GWe by 2018 to more than 120 Gwe by 2030. This growth can’t be sustained by fossil fuel alone and also maintain the income stream the nation depends on from oil exports. Nuclear reactors are an obvious choice to intervene in an unsustainable growth scenario.

This outlook is sending the Saudi government down a path to develop nuclear energy. In April, it announced that it was setting up the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA-CARE) to pursue this objective. Saudi Arabia is building up its transmission and distribution grids to interconnect with the UAE on the east and Oman to the south.  It is developing its so-called empty quarter which Middle East experts point out isn’t as empty as it sounds.

The new city’s charter states that nuclear and renewable energies, especially solar, would be developed to ensure continued supplies of drinking water and electricity to its growing population and save hydrocarbon resources such as petroleum and gas for use by future generations. The objective is to make them a source of income for a much longer period.