nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Hinkley Point’s first impact will be to add to consumers’ bills

http://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2013/oct/18/hinkley-point-nuclear-power-plant-consumer-bills

…The UK would be agreeing to buy electricity from Hinkley Point at £93 per megawatt hour – roughly twice the current market rate….

 

The deal is still to be signed, but already some extraordinary claims are being made about Hinkley Point in Somerset, which will be the first nuclear plant to be built in the UK since 1995.

Here’s chancellor George Osborne‘s take: “If it wasn’t Chinese investment or French investment, it would have to be the British taxpayer. I would rather British taxpayers were spending their money on our schools and hospitals and those things, and let’s get the rest of the world investing in our energy.”

Put like that, you might assume UK taxpayers have hit the jackpot, that EDF of France and China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC) will bear all the financial risks and that energy bills in the UK are bound to fall sometime around 2020 as cheap nuclear energy comes on stream.

Forget it. The UK will be agreeing to buy electricity from Hinkley Point for 35-40 years at £93 per megawatt hour or thereabouts, according to the whisper from Westminster.

That is roughly twice the current market rate for electricity, and far in excess of the £40 per megawatt hour that was airily waved around by the Department of Energy only half a decade ago.

Nuclear power, it seems, can only be bought at a cost roughly equivalent to on-shore wind, complete with its subsidies to landowners. Maybe that is the price that has to be paid for secure low-carbon supplies, but at current energy prices, the first impact of Hinkley Point will be to add to consumers’ bills, just as wind does today.

“In the long term,” the chancellor continued, new nuclear should lead to “lower and more stable energy bills.”

The key phrase there is “long term”. The claim rests on the assumption that the costs of other sources of energy will continue to rise and make £93 appear a bargain sometime in the future. That assumption may or may not prove correct – but coming from a government that supposedly thinks fracking will revolutionise the energy market, it’s a strange argument to hear.

But is £93 the real cost anyway? The devil will be in the detail of this contract – specifically, in the indexation formula for the strike price. If Hinkley Point’s entire output is tied to the rate of inflation for 40 years, we could be staring at a truly astronomical cost by the end of the contract.

“The government surely can’t be that dumb,” comments one City analyst. One assumes not. But what proportion of Hinkley Point’s operating costs and uranium purchases will inflate automatically? The answer is critical to any assessment of value for money.

So, too, is the size of the loan guarantees given to EDF and the Chinese. If they amount to 70% of the debt raised to fund the £14bn construction costs of two reactors, the UK taxpayer is firmly on the hook. And, given that EDF’s recent construction experience in France is massive cost over-runs, is the UK backstopping that risk as well?

The Department of Energy and Climate Change refuses to comment until the talks are completed, but Steve Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich, has a blunt assessment of where negotiating power lies: EDF has the government “over a barrel” and the contract may be an “absolute disaster” for taxpayers.

Strictly speaking, judgment must be reserved until the contract is signed and published. But Osborne’s Chinese spin should make us nervous.

How is it meant to be good news that, among all the possible sources of capital to partner EDF at Hinkley Point, we have ended up with a company controlled by the Chinese Communist party?

Remember the history here. Centrica, the UK’s supposed energy champion, dropped out of the EDF-led consortium, preferring to take a £200m hit than continue down a nuclear path where the costs and risks only ever seem to increase.

In the face of homegrown scepticism, guarantees from the UK taxpayer have now persuaded Beijing to climb aboard. This does not sound like a triumph in the making. It sounds instead like the latest instalment in the 30-year saga of the UK’s shambolic and short-termist energy policy.

October 19, 2013 Posted by | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Tiny Bit Of Spent Nuclear Fuel Found Near Chernobyl Is Still Shockingly Radioactive (VIDEO)

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/chernobyl-still-radioactive-fuel-video_n_4118198.html?ir=Green

By Posted: 10/18/2013

It has been nearly 27 years since the meltdown at Chernobyl, the world’s largest nuclear accident, yet the area still has pockets of surprising radioactivity.

There may be no better evidence of this than a YouTube video produced by Carl Willis, a nuclear engineer with a delightfully disconcerting hobby: poking around radioactive sites with a Geiger counter and documenting his encounters. In a video from 2011, Willis explores Chernobyl’s Number 5 reactor, eventually finding a “hot spot” he traces down to a tiny speck no larger than a grain of salt.

After some rudimentary tests, Willis concludes the small particle is a fragment of spent nuclear fuel, likely ejected in 1986 when the Number 4 reactor exploded.

In an email to The Huffington Post, Willis said that, despite its radioactivity, the particle didn’t present an immediate health hazard, so long as he kept a distance from it. “You would not want to eat or breathe this particle,” he cautioned. “Outside your body, it’s a non-issue though.”

“Most people don’t get to fool around with spent nuclear fuel,” he added.

How well does this radioactivity represent the ongoing crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi, the world’s second-largest nuclear disaster? According to Willis, not all that well.

Put simply, he says, “the Fukushima accident happened in a very different way from Chernobyl. … [Y]ou will not find chunks of fuel around Fukushima.” Additionally, he notes, “Understanding of Fukushima is still evolving. Indeed, the situation there itself is still evolving.”

October 19, 2013 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

How Accurate Are The Instruments in Nuclear Reactors?

MsMilkytheclown1

Published on 17 Oct 2013

Fairewinds

How Accurate Are The Instruments in Nuclear Reactors? About This Podcast

Accurately measuring the reactor water level in a nuclear power plant is critical to safe operation, yet nuclear power reactor water monitoring systems do not work correctly. What would happen today if your car’s speedometer read 60 miles per hour, but in actuality, you might be driving at 40-mph or even 95-mph? Listen to today’s Fairewinds Energy Education podcast as Dave Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists and researcher Lucas Hixson discuss the dangerous dilemma reactor operators face when a reactor has an emergency shutdown and operators simply do not know if the reactor has enough water to keep it cool! http://fairewinds.org/podcast/flat-so…
Today we’re doing a special show about reactor water level monitoring. We have as our guests nuclear researcher Lucas Hixson and Dave Lochbaum, nuclear expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists. This is not one of our typical podcasts in that this is a very technical podcast, but it’s for you geeks out there. A lot of people have written in to us and asked for this kind of material, and even if you’re a layperson I think that you will really, really find this interesting and it’ll give you insight into how difficult it is to operate a nuclear power reactor.

we’re going to be speaking about what is called the Reactor Water Level Monitoring System at nuclear power plants. Water is used in the nuclear reactor as a critical neutron moderator and coolant. Water levels in a nuclear reactor are not monitored directly, but rather through an indirect monitoring system, which incorporates a reserve tank which is termed a reference leg. There have been some reported flaws with this cooling system throughout the years, some of the most notable being brought forth by Paul Blanche in the early 1990’s.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

DL: Yes. Paul found some problems with the level instrumentation used in boiling water reactors like Fukushima in Japan and Pilgrim and Browns Ferry here in the United States. As you mentioned, in that type of reactor, the water boils right in the reactor vessel. It’s difficult to measure the level of water that’s vigorously boiling. If you imagine a pot of boiling water on the stove, you see all that froth level at the top, what is the level of water in the pot? So what boiling water reactors do is use the reference leg, which is just a non-boiling column of water, and compare the pressure or the weight of that water to the weight of water in the reactor. And we can judge the density of the water in the reactor vessel easier than we can determine its actual height. And we can use that differential pressure between what the weight of the water in the reactor is versus the weight of the water in that reference column to determine what the level of the water in the reactor vessel is. If you look at a bottle of soda pop and you shake it up and then crack the top, the water level — the beverage level jumps from a nice low level to spewing out the open top. Because the non-condensable gases inside that soda have become freed by the agitation. Likewise, what Paul noted was that if the pressure of a reactor vessel were suddenly to drop, as it could happen during an accident, the non-condensable gases inside the water can cause the water in the reference column to all of a sudden change dramatically as bubbles come out of that water due to the pressure drop, which is similar to cracking a soda pop. Its pressure drops and the bubbles form. We hadn’t accounted for that in the water level instrumentation. As those bubbles formed under that situation, the indications of level to the operator could become vastly wrong — several feet, dozens of feet wrong. And the reactor core is only 12 feet tall and if the level instrumentation is off by 20 feet, you’ve got a big problem.

LH: Is there any other method for operators to determine the water level if the reactor water level monitoring system is not providing accurate data?

DL: The operators are provided about five sets of water level instrumentation for boiling water reactors. They’re calibrated at hot conditions, high pressure, high temperature, as well as cold conditions where the reactor is shut down and the reactor vessel’s head is off, the water is less than 212 degrees. The problem is that during an accident, you go from high temperature, high pressure to high temperature, low pressure as this pipe breaks and water flows out. The operators must choose amongst these five sets of instrumentation to figure out which one is most accurately monitoring the conditions at that moment; and that indication will shift from instrument to instrument, and it’s the operator’s guess as to which one’s providing the most accurate indication. And when you have 100 tons of reactor core to deal with… a wrong guess comes at a high cost.
continued http://tinyurl.com/monv35o

October 19, 2013 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear Testing in China’s Western Territory – Exclusive interview with a Chinese military veteran

“The CCP treated us like non-humans during nuclear tests. Three minutes after detonation, 30,000 soldiers were sent to the field. Tank forces, armored troops, and cavalry had to drive to the bombing site for training. Of course the high-ranking leaders were not there. Each time we carried out a mission at the bombing site, we had to live there for months,” Liu said.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/nuclear-testing-in-chinas-western-territory-204617.html

By Xia Mozhu
Epoch Times Staff

Last Updated: March 18, 2012

Chinese soldiers watch a Hydrogen Bomb test at Lop Nor, Xinjiang Autonomous Region in 1973. The Chinese military detonated 45 nuclear bombs at the site between 1964 and 1996, and an unknown number after signing a UN test ban in 1996, according to a veteran who served there. (Courtesy of Liu Qing)

Lop Nor was once a 1.3 million acre lake in the Taklamakan desert of Xinjiang Autonomous Region until the Chinese military set up a secret nuclear test site in June 1959, detonating 45 nuclear bombs between 1964 and 1996. A Chinese military veteran, using the alias Liu Qing, told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview about his experiences while serving in the nuclear unit and being sent for prolonged military exercises at ground zero.

Liu is from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and now lives in Australia. He said for 32 years approximately 100,000 soldiers participated in nuclear tests without any sort of protective gear, and the radiation they were exposed to has turned their lives into a nightmare.

But while taking sample radiation measurements from exposed soldiers, and keeping secret files, the Chinese government never acknowledged the soldiers’ health problems, and few of them have received any compensation.

Exposure

In 1979, the then 18-year-old Liu was enlisted and served in the “Nuclear 8023” unit that was designated to test nuclear weapons. During the following 10 years, Liu went five times to the explosion field where nuclear weapons were tested. He lived at the site for about six months and walked around at the center of the site where a nuclear bomb had just been detonated.

Liu said he touched the remains of the iron tower that held China’s first atomic bomb in 1964. The only protection he had during these encounters was his military uniform. When soldiers left the bombing site, no one conducted any tests or measurements on them, Liu said.

“We did not have any protection measures at that time. Our military uniforms were our only protection. We did not know the dangers of exposure to nuclear radiation. The damage is invisible and the victims could not feel it right away. The destruction is especially serious to the brain. I did not know of the permanent, lifelong adversities until later. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) policy of withholding information from the public entrapped and hurt a lot of people during the decades of nuclear testing. During the ten years I was in the military, I was never taught about the extreme dangers of nuclear radiation.

Continue reading →

October 19, 2013 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment