World’s largest nuclear plant catches on fire –
World’s largest nuclear plant catches on fire ABC News By North Asia correspondent
Mark Willacy 5 March 09A fire has broken out at the world’s largest nuclear plant in Japan, 200 kilometres north-west of Tokyo.
The operator of the facility says there is no threat of a radiation leak.
The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, says a small fire broke out at the facility but was extinguished after 90 minutes.
It says a worker was taken to hospital with minor facial injuries.
The fire started just weeks after the company was given the green light to re-start one of the seven reactors at the plant, which had been suspended since an earthquake two years ago caused a fire and a small radiation leak.
World’s largest nuclear plant catches on fire – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Nuclear waste clean-up drive still lacks leader
From The TimesMarch 6, 2009Nuclear waste clean-up drive still lacks leaderRobin Pagnamenta, Energy and Environment Editor
The Government’s handling of the nuclear power industry’s rebirth was attacked by MPs last night as it emerged that the executive responsible for the £73 billion clean-up operation has still not been replaced eight months after his departure.
Ian Roxburgh quit as chief executive of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a key organisation tasked with the clean-up of 19 toxic UK sites, including Sellafield, Harwell and Dounreay, last July.
But The Times has learnt that the NDA is still struggling to find a replacement, leaving a string of pressing issues building up in his successor’s in-tray, including questions over how the UK should handle waste created by new reactors……………………………. This year alone the NDA will spend £2.8 billion on decontamination, including £1.8 billion from taxpayers. It
Nuclear waste clean-up drive still lacks leader – Times Online
Nuclear power is still loaded with problems
Nuclear power is still loaded with problems StarTribune.com By Ken Bradley and Monique Sullivan- March 5, 2009 – “…………………….Shipping and storing one of the most dangerous substances ever created will continue be problem for a quarter of a million years. It isn’t responsible to leave this problem for future generations. It’s even worse to continue to add to existing stockpiles of nuclear waste.
In 2008, Bloomberg News reported that the most recent estimates for building a new nuclear power plant range from $6 billion to $12 billion. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, that cost has increased by 185 percent since 2000. Government subsidies are required for any new nuclear plant. These tax dollars could be invested more effectively in wind, solar, efficiency and other alternatives. The Congressional Budget Office assumes that half of all loans to nuclear power projects will default. Our state and nation cannot afford to take on this liability.
The cooling of nuclear power requires significant amounts of groundwater, and thermal energy production is one of the largest users of water in our state. Our present nuclear plants are located along the Mississippi River, where an accident would affect not only the local community but millions of people downstream. The location of plants and the storage of waste has been concentrated near low-income and native communities.
Nuclear waste dogs US energy policy
Nuclear waste dogs US energy policy The Christian Science Monitor Yucca Mountain was supposed to be where the highly toxic material was sent. But Obama’s energy budget leaves it out.By Gail Russell Chaddock Christian Science Monitor 6 March 09
Washington – President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2010 all but sinks prospects to store America’s nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
But it leaves wide open the role of nuclear power in building “a new economy powered by clean and secure energy” – and the question of what to do with existing, highly toxic nuclear waste.
“The nation has already accumulated 60,000 metric tons of spent nuclear waste, and the material is going to have to be isolated from the environment for hundreds and thousands of years,” says Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
“There’s no way to make the waste disappear. No matter what the French say, there’s no alternative to having a mined geological repository,” he says. The challenge is to find one that is technically and politically acceptable……………………….the budget document released by the White House last week makes no mention of nuclear power as an element in a transition to a low-carbon economy. Instead, it cites the need for increased support for solar, biomass, geothermal, wind, and low-carbon-emission coal power………………………….Since failing to complete a storage facility by 1998, as provided in the contract, the US Energy Department has faced open-ended court challenges over billions in liability payments to utilities now having to store toxic waste on site.
Israel mulling strike on Iran nuclear facilities
Israel mulling strike on Iran nuclear facilities – Washington, 5 March (IranVNC)—Israel is seriously considering taking unilateral military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, although the time frame for action is quickly fading, according to a report by top US political figures and experts released Wednesday.The nine-page report, entitled “Preventing a Cascade of Instability”, was put out by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.The bipartisan group, several of whose members met high-level Israeli officials to assess their perspective, said that Israeli leaders seem convinced that at least for now, they have a military option.
Vote now for Miss Nuclear Reactor 2009 | Technically Incorrect – CNET News
Vote now for Miss Nuclear Reactor 2009 cnet news
What would you do, in this age of green power and greener pastures, to improve the image of the nuclear power industry?
And what would you do if you happened to live in the country where the nuclear power industry brought you, um, Chernobyl?
Well, the Russians, traditionalists to the bitter end, have come up with a brainwave of a quite elevated frequency. Yes, an online beauty pageant.
Who, on this Thursday that seems surrounded only by woes, can resist logging on to this sumptuous contest to find the most beautiful woman working in the Russian nuclear power industry? n the interests of nuclear objectivity, I have taken it upon myself to observe some of the contestants with an artist’s eye and an espionage operative’s concern.
In all, there are 200 contestants. And all have the ambition to effect world peace and work with small children.
However, it is hard, merely by looking at these images, to know exactly what services these women perform to benefit the nuclear cause.
All the same, I am expecting voting to rival that of an average week of “American Idol”.
Vote now for Miss Nuclear Reactor 2009 | Technically Incorrect – CNET News
Evidence mounts of Syrian nuclear cover-up: U.S. | Reuters
Evidence mounts of Syrian nuclear cover-up: U.S.
By Mark Heinrich
VIENNA (Reuters) – The United States said on Wednesday that U.N. inspectors had found growing evidence of covert nuclear activity in Syria, and European allies said a lack of Syrian transparency demanded utmost scrutiny.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, is looking into U.S. intelligence reports that Syria had almost built a North Korean-designed, nuclear reactor meant to yield bomb-grade plutonium before Israel bombed it in 2007.
Uranium
Book Reviews
Uranium
From atomic bombs to cellphones, a history of uranium’s rise.
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR By Steve Weinberg | March 5, 2009 edition
“…………………………After Zoellner dispenses with World War II-related uranium lore, he covers the uranium saga from multiple angles. Some of the book’s latter half is organized geographically, as Zoellner demonstrates the moral and financial impacts of uranium fever in locales as diverse as Niger, Australia, and the state of Utah. Other portions of the book are organized by the product-yields of uranium – medical treatments, energy to power homes and businesses, and decorative uses (despite the danger.)
The perils are rarely far from the center of the discussion, even when everybody involved in a uranium enterprise is well intentioned.After all, Zoellner explains, uranium “cannot undergo fission in a reactor without producing a tiny residue of plutonium,” the form used in bombmaking. “A ‘peaceful’ nuclear reactor is no different in basic design from the complex at Hanford [Washington State] that manufactured the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.”Then, Zoellner comments sagely, “herein lies one of the damnable paradoxes of uranium: The apparatus that spins a turbine also happens to be a munitions plant. One is a coefficient of the other; the mineral cannot escape its own unstable essence.”…………………………
nuclear hazards
Geological hazards of nuclear plants
“………………………………………The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also very worried because loss of pool water could cause the zirconium alloy cladding of the most recently discharged spent fuel assemblies to combust spontaneously. The fire would then ignite adjacent fuel assemblies. Spraying the fire with water would make it worse because steam and zirconium react to produce even more heat.Just like a fire in a reactor core, one in a spent fuel storage pool would release huge volumes of radioactive gases to the atmosphere, including much Cesium-137, which is water-soluble and extremely toxic, even in minute quantities.Pool water could be lost in many ways such as pump valve or piping failures or a simple brownout. At Natib, an earthquake could simply slosh the water out of the pool. In an eruption, a pyroclastic flow could evaporate the water instantaneously…………………………”
Kelvin Rodolfo is concurrently professor emeritus with the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois in Chicago, and an adjunct professor with the National Institute of Geological Sciences, University of the Philippines-Diliman. He is currently a DOST Balik Scientist.
Bloomberg.com: Japan
Japanese Company Accused of Exporting Nuclear Enrichment Parts
By Shigeru Sato and Yuji Okada
March 4 (Bloomberg) — Horkos Corp., a Japanese machinery maker, is accused of violated national security laws for exporting devices that can be used for nuclear fuel enrichment plants to China and South Korea, Japan’s trade ministry said.
Horkos Corp., which was founded in 1940 and is based in Hiroshima, produced and exported the unspecified devices to China and South Korea since 2001 without permission from the ministry, it said in a statement.
Police arrested four Horkos employees………………Investigations, which started in July last year, are continuing, the trade ministry said.
The geological hazards of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant
The geological hazards of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (Third of a series)STAR SCIENCE By Kelvin S. Rodolfo, PhD Updated March 05, 2009
New earthquake data
Since 1973, many more earthquakes have occurred around and even under Mt. Natib; one on June 24, 1991 with a magnitude of 4.6 occurred directly under Napot Point. Since 1981, six have occurred within 25 kilometers of the BNPP. Note that the largest nuclear complex in the world, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, was shut down by a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in July 2007 only 19 kilometers away. It is still inactive today.
The Lubao lineament
In 1997, Prof. Fernando Siringan, his students and I began to study land subsidence in coastal Bataan, Pampanga, Bulacan and Camanava. Very early, we noticed a sharp lineament in Lubao, Pampanga that trends southwest to Mt. Natib, where it abruptly disappears. Many earthquake epicenters plot along the lineament which, if extended farther, trends to Napot Point. The possibility that the lineament is a fault, and the possibility that it extends under Mt. Natib need urgently to be explored by scientists of Phivolcs and other institutions.
Professor Mahar Lagmay has established genetic relationships between faults and volcanoes, including Mt. Pinatubo and the volcanoes in Bicol.
Spent fuel pools
No country in the world has yet solved the problem of how to store nuclear waste permanently and safely for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. In the meantime, spent fuel is stored next to the plants, in pools of water that absorb the radiation and disperse the heat. The need for huge volumes of water to absorb excess heat from the reactor and from spent fuel is why the BNPP was built on the coast.
Yucca Mountain Is Dead. Now What?
Yucca Mountain Is Dead. Now What? THE NEW REPUBLIC 4 March 09 So what does this mean for the future of nuclear power in the United States? Not much in the short run, says Allison MacFarlane, a George Mason University professor and author of Uncertainty Underground, a book on Yucca Mountain and the long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste. The nation’s nuclear power plants, MacFarlane told me, will continue storing their spent fuel rods onsite—first in cooling pools and then in slightly more permanent dry-cask storage containers. The Energy Department is still contractually obligated to remove that waste and store it in some sort of permanent repository eventually, so it’s not as if utility companies are worried they’ll be left holding the bag………………………It will be important to construct a permanent geological repository at some point in the next few decades, especially if nuclear power production expands further as part of the push to curb carbon emissions. What’s more, the oft-mentioned option of reprocessing high-level nuclear waste and using it as fuel for fast-breeder reactors won’t make building a storage site any easier. Reprocessing may reduce the volume of high-level nuclear waste that needs to be stored, but it won’t reduce the amount of heat that the remaining waste actually produces—and that’s the main concern in finding a suitably sized repository, since you don’t want to keep hot waste too close together…………………….even if it is situated in a closed basin, there are still people who drink the basin’s groundwater.
‘Keep out nuclear ships’:
‘Keep out nuclear ships’04/03/2009 News 24 (SA)
Cape Town – An anti-nuclear group has urged the South African government to make sure that two vessels carrying what is reportedly the biggest ever shipment of plutonium stay out of its waters.
“What we don’t want is an accident at sea where we as a country have to carry the consequences,” said Mike Kantey, chairman of the Coalition Against Nuclear Energy, on Tuesday.
The heavily armed Pacific Pintail and the Pacific Heron left Barrow-in-Furness in the north-west of England last week.
They will collect their freight – a load of MOX nuclear fuel containing what environmentalists say are 1800kg of plutonium – at Cherbourg in France, then head for Japan.
The route around the Cape is one of a number of possible routes the ships – which have been barred from the Suez Canal – may use.
In previous years the Pintail has used the Cape route when carrying nuclear materials……………………….The MOX on the two ships is intended for use at reactors of three Japanese power companies.
Greenpeace brings Nuclear lies, green truths speaking tour to Lindsay
Greenpeace brings Nuclear lies, green truths speaking tour to Lindsay |VIDEO mykawartha.com 2009-03-04
By Barbara-Ann MacEachern
The executive director of Greenpeace Canada, Bruce Cox, visited Fleming College in Lindsay Feb. 27 as part of the ‘Nuclear lies, green truths speaking tour.’
Mr. Cox spoke about climate change and possible alternatives to nuclear power in the Auk Lodge of the Albert Street campus.
“We need global agreements to battle a global problem,” Mr. Cox said.
A World Climate Conference is scheduled for Sept. 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, which will decide the immediate future of climate change, he predicted.
“We are either going to come out with a global, legally binding agreement, or we are in big trouble.”…………………..Nuclear power was a major topic in Mr. Cox’s climate change discussion. Its use takes money away from other potentially cleaner technology, including wind and solar. It is also expensive, unsafe, unreliable and, “we are left with a million years of nuclear waste,” said Mr. Cox.
“If you are in favour of nuclear power, are you willing to store the nuclear waste in your backyard?” Mr. Cox challenged…………………………….“The McGuinty government’s Green Energy Act is an exercise in green washing if they proceed with their nuclear expansion plans,” said Mr. Cox. “Tonnes of radioactive waste, that will be toxic for thousands of years are stockpiled now at the Pickering reactor site on the shores of Lake Ontario. What is green about that?”
He dropped off a list of 10 reasons why nuclear power should be replaced with green power sources.
When money is poured into nuclear power production, Mr. Cox argued, it puts a cap on funds available for the development of green energy, and scares off investment in this sector.
Greenpeace brings Nuclear lies, green truths speaking tour to Lindsay |VIDEO – myKawartha
Not yet clear what Belarus will do with waste from nuclear power plant, researcher says | BELARUS NEWS
Not yet clear what Belarus will do with waste from nuclear power plant, researcher says /naviny.by 4 March 09
It is not yet clear what will be done with nuclear waste from Belarus’ would-be nuclear power plant, Valyantsina Brylyova, a senior researcher at the Sosny nuclear research center, said at Wednesday’s meeting with local resident in Astravets, Hrodna region, where the plant is scheduled to be built.
There will be two options to deal with the waste if the plant is built by Russia, the researcher said.
“Either we will give nuclear waste to Russia for processing and storage or will store it in special containers at the plant’s site. The latter is the most common practice,” she said, adding that “modern technologies allowed storing waste in containers for up to 100 years.
1 This Month
10 June – Assessing Canada’s Investments in Small Modular Nuclear Reactors – https://zoom.us/meeting/register/IiqHA5feRhaEBycOLNTJlA#/registration
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
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