….Testing of a filter positioned before the HEPA system and removed several hours after the alarm showed 1,365 becquerels per cubic meter of americium and 672 Bq/m3 of plutonium. By Feb. 21, those levels fell substantially to 0.65 Bq/m3 of americium and 0.06 Bq/m3 of plutonium per day…..(For context, the Environmental Protection Agency’s actionable level of airborne contamination is 37 Bq/m3.)
Newly released lab tests of air filters from the Department of Energy’s waste repository in New Mexico documented a significant spike in radiation during an incident last month, although contamination in air that actually reached the environment was well below EPA standards.
The Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center measured radionuclides in samples taken following a radiation alarm at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant on Feb. 14. The cause of the alarm remains under investigation, and testing recently revealed small internal doses among 13 people working there at the time. The alarm caused the ventilation system to immediately direct air through a bank of high efficiency particulate absorption filters. Testing of a filter positioned before the HEPA system and removed several hours after the alarm showed 1,365 becquerels per cubic meter of americium and 672 Bq/m3 of plutonium. By Feb. 21, those levels fell substantially to 0.65 Bq/m3 of americium and 0.06 Bq/m3 of plutonium per day.
The lab also tested filters on the other side of the HEPA system that provide an estimate of the amount of radiation that actually entered the atmosphere. A filter installed on the day of the alarm and removed four days later found levels of americium at 1.81 Bq/m3 and levels of plutonium at 0.224 Bq/m3. (For context, the Environmental Protection Agency’s actionable level of airborne contamination is 37 Bq/m3.) Scientists, who are continuing to sample air from WIPP, reported that contamination levels in the post-HEPA-filter air decreased exponentially over the following days.
A frank speech from 27 December 2013 that discusses the experience and lessons of Chernobyl not being accepted by the Japanese Government and organizations such as the IAEA in the crucial early stage of the nuclear disaster.
Mr Sugenoya breaks down the health mistakes that were made and the decisions that continue to be made.
The mistakes and lies of Chernobyl have caused children in Belarus etc to have increasing health problems and congenital defects even though the children are living in the supposed “Low level” contaminated areas.
Mr Sugenoya asks for support for the Fukushima childrens respite project from less contaminated Japanese municipalities.
Dr. Jerry Brown, director of the Safe Energy Project for the Santa Barbara-based World Business Academy, talks about the new study commissioned from esteemed epidemiologist Joseph Mangano. It reveals shocking cancer statistics in counties adjacent to the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. Link to a free pdf of the study: www.WorldBusiness.org
Don Hancock of Southwest Research and Information Center provides an update on the Valentine’s Day radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Thirteen above ground workers now know to have been exposed to Plutonium, Americium. How big was the release and how far did it go? And when will we know? www.sric.org for updates.
How France is disposing of its nuclear waste, 4 March By Rob Broomby British Affairs Correspondent, BBC World ServiceHalf a kilometre below ground in the Champagne-Ardenne region of eastern France, near the village of Bure, a network of tunnels and galleries is being hacked out of the 160 million-year-old compacted clay rocks.
Half a kilometre below ground in the Champagne-Ardenne region of eastern France, near the village of Bure, a network of tunnels and galleries is being hacked out of the 160 million-year-old compacted clay rocks.
The dusty subterranean science laboratory built by the French nuclear waste agency Andra is designed to find out whether this could be the final resting place for most of France’s highly radioactive waste, the deadly remains of more than half a century of nuclear energy.
Emerging from the industrial lift there are a series of passageways about the size of an underground rail tunnel.
The walls are reinforced with steel ribs and sprayed with grey concrete and there are huge bore holes drilled 100m into the rock walls which would hold the capsules of radioactive waste. If the scheme gets the final approval, the first waste could be inserted here in around 10 years.
France generates around three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power but despite decades of activity it is no nearer a solution to the perils of nuclear waste.
Many countries agree the hazardous material – some of it at temperatures of 90C – has to be disposed of deep below ground where it can be isolated from all living things for tens of thousands of years whilst the radiation slowly reduces.
Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository.
“What we did first was to demonstrate that safety can be achieved through a repository in this clay formation,” says Gerald Ouzounian, the head of international affairs for Andra, told Costing the Earth on BBC Radio 4.
Technical test
Since 2006, they have been developing experiments to prove they can do it technically. Equipment has been set up to simulate the heat the waste will generate and to monitor the impact on the clay.
“There are still risks of water ingress especially from the shafts and the top,” says Mr Ouzounian, so they are testing ways to seal the waste using a bentonite clay plug.
French law requires companies to build a retrievable scheme, meaning that for the first few hundred years at least, they can remove the waste again should future generations find a better way to get rid of it.
Fukushima Three Years On. Devastating Environmental and Health Impacts By Dr. Janette ShermanGlobal Research, March 04, 201 Counterpunchby Janette Sherman M.D and Joseph Mangano
The third anniversary of the Fukushima meltdown will occur on March 11th. The news is that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and major Japanese corporations want to re-open the 50 other nuclear power plants that closed when Fukushima blew up, calling them a friendly economic source of cheap power.
Will this end up with business as usual? We were recently asked if we thought that Fukushima could ever be cleaned up. We have to say “no,” based upon what we know of the biology, chemistry and physics of nuclear power and isotopes and the history of nuclear development. Chernobyl melted down in 1986 and is still releasing radioisotopes.
Not all life systems were examined around Chernobyl, but of those that were – wild and domestic animals, birds, insects, plants, fungi, fish, trees, and humans, all were damaged, many permanently, thus what happens to animals and plants with short-term life spans is predictive of those with longer ones.
Worldwide, some 985,000 “excess” deaths resulted from the Chernobyl fallout in the first 19 years after the meltdown. In Belarus, north of Chernobyl, which received concentrated fallout; only 20% of children are deemed to be “healthy” although previously 80% were considered well. How can a country function without healthy and productive citizens? Notable in the U. S. is the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State, built some 70+ years ago by 60,000 laborers, and currently leaching radioisotopes into the Columbia River. DuPont was the original contractor, but since, multiple corporations, each paid mllions of dollars and have yet to contain the leaking radioactivity.
Every nuclear site is also a major industrial operation, contaminated not only with radioactive materials, but multiple toxic chemicals, such as solvents and heavy metals……..
Fukushima is still leaking large quantities of Cs-137 and Sr-90 into the Pacific Ocean, where all forms of marine life will absorb them – from algae to seaweed, to fish, to sea mammals and ultimately to humans who consume the contaminated sea life. Our recently released peer-reviewed paper confirms hypothyroidism in newborns in California, whose mothers were pregnant during the early releases from Fukushima. Thyroid abnormalities were detected early in Marshall Islanders and in Belarus residents of Gomel located near Chernobyl.
Radioactive iodine, known to interfere with thyroid function entered the U. S. from Fukushima in late March, shortly after the meltdowns, and was carried by dairy products resulting in damage to the unborn. It takes ten half-lives for an isotope to decay. Sr-90 and Cs-137 have half-lives of approximately 30 years, which means three centuries will occur before the initial releases are gone, and the releases have not stopped. There are some 26 nuclear reactors in the United States with the same design as those at Fukushima, and they pose a significant risk to people and the environment……..
The Indian Point Nuclear Power Reactors are located some 35 miles from mid-town Manhattan, with 18 million people living within 50 miles of the site.What would be the environmental, human and economic costs if the Indian Point reactors were to fail? The current estimated price tag to “clean up” the TEPCO mess at Fukushima is $500 billion (that’s billion, with a “B.”
For us who have trouble thinking of such numbers, it will take 96,451 years to spend $10.00 per minute. Unless we close the existing nuclear power plants and build no new ones, we are destined to repeat the on-going stories of Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and the myriad other sites that have already caused untold environmental, health, social, and economic costs. So will it be sanity or business as usual? Perhaps it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
We must choose a sane path away from nuclear energy. Business as usual is insane.
Janette D. Sherman, M. D. is the author of Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer and Chemical Exposure and Disease, and is a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology. She edited the book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, written by A. V. Yablokov, V. B., Nesterenko and A. V. Nesterenko, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Her primary interest is the prevention of illness through public education. She can be reached at: toxdoc.js@verizon.net and www.janettesherman.com
NRA’s Tanaka pledges radiation information The Yomiuri Shimbun, 4 Mar 14,Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, has promised to provide local governments situated near certain nuclear plants with information concerning the possible diffusion of radioactive substances in the event of a nuclear accident. The plants are those to which priority will be given in carrying out safety checks aimed at reactivation.
In a recent interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun, ahead of the third anniversary of the start of the nuclear crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, Tanaka said: “Discussing plans for evacuating residents on the premise of an infinitely large-scale accident is impossible. We’ll offer a database to help residents make their own decisions more easily.”
The policy is to aid local governments in compiling comprehensive disaster-prevention plans.
The central government’s Nuclear Emergency Response Guidelines oblige local governments within a 30-kilometer radius of a nuclear power plant to draft disaster plans…..http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001087254
that they should stop making the stuff How France is disposing of its nuclear wastes, 4 March By Rob Broomby British Affairs Correspondent, BBC World Service“…..Repository plans have foundered in Britain and America due to local democratic opposition.
Britain copied the Scandinavian model based on voluntarism which allowed local communities to opt in but also built confidence by giving them a right to say no.
The British scheme was set to explore an underground laboratory in Cumbria near the Sellafield nuclear site. The local district council approved the scheme but the strategic authority – the council in Carlisle – blocked it in January 2013, sending the nuclear planners back to the drawing board.
A UK Government white paper to be published in the summer is widely expected to tweak the approval process to curb a county council’s influence. The hunt is now on for a new location.
In France, the cash was the answer. They are already spending £50m ($80m / 60m euros) every year to support local community projects and massage consent in what is a sparsely populated and neglected area.
They even arranged the underground laboratory to ensure its two entrances were in different communities so they could pay them both off and ensure wider approval.
“I supported the laboratory from the start and I won’t go back on that now,” says the local mayor Francois Henri. But he admits that if his community had wanted to block the project there would be little they could do to stop it.
“It is a project which is of national interest. Nobody has the power to stop or to block it,” says Gerald Ouzounian………
In France, the cash was the answer. They are already spending £50m ($80m / 60m euros) every year to support local community projects and massage consent in what is a sparsely populated and neglected area.
They even arranged the underground laboratory to ensure its two entrances were in different communities so they could pay them both off and ensure wider approval.
“I supported the laboratory from the start and I won’t go back on that now,” says the local mayor Francois Henri. But he admits that if his community had wanted to block the project there would be little they could do to stop it.
WIPP officials say they have yet to determine what caused the leak. The results of more air, soil, vegetation and water samples are expected in the coming days.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – A union representing some 200 workers at the nation’s only underground nuclear waste dump said Tuesday its wants to be sure employees are safe when the repository reopens after a radiation leak that exposed at least 13 people.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad has been off-limits to most workers for nearly three weeks. Only essential workers have been called to duty and others have been using the down time to keep current with regular training requirements at an off-site training center, said officials from United Steelworkers of America.
“What we’re trying to understand is what happened, where this contamination came from and then understand how to correct this problem and make certain that something similar is not going to happen again,” said Jim Frederick, assistant director of the union’s health, safety and environment department.
Some of the 13 workers who were exposed during the Feb. 14 night shift were union members. Another 140 employees showed up for work the following day, and union officials say if there’s any doubt about whether they were exposed, more tests should be done.
Paris, 5 March 2014 – This morning, across Europe, 240 Greenpeace activists have taken part in protests to highlight the risks of Europe’s ageing nuclear power stock. In a total of 6 countries; France, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland and the activists have carried out a series of different activities at nuclear facilities demanding that their governments stop extending the life-time of these old and decrepit nuclear reactors and instead invest in the clean and safe alternatives and support a 45% renewable target for Europe to 2030.
Today’s actions coincide with the launch of a major new independent report (1) commissioned by Greenpeace that exposes the scale of Europe’s ageing nuclear stock. The report found that out of 151 operational nuclear reactors in Europe (excluding Russia), 67 are more than 30 years old, 25 more than 35 years and seven of them over 40 years.
Analysis in the report shows that 44% of European nuclear reactors are over thirty years old. The average age across Europe is now 29 years, while a typical design lifespan of a reactor is 30 or 40 years. These findings raise the prospect of a new era of nuclear risk across Europe unless governments resist calls for reactors to be operated beyond their intended lifetimes.
Commenting of the report’s findings, one of the co-authors Jan Haverkamp said:
By asking to extend the lifetimes of their old and deteriorating nuclear power plants, the big European electricity companies are simply hoping to extract more profit from their nuclear cash cows, while leaving Europe’s citizens facing greater risks and enormous consequences in the event of an accident.’
‘The lifetime extension of European nuclear reactors would lock us into an old and dangerous energy source for decades. When they meet to discuss energy policy at a summit in late March in Brussels, European leaders must seize the opportunity to end the age of risk and pollution and support a binding renewables target to hasten the age of clean energy.’
The new report looks at the technical risks of ageing nuclear reactors and considers the economic and political factors relevant to reactor lifetime extension. It makes clear that in spite of upgrades and repairs, the overall condition of nuclear reactors deteriorates in the long term, not least because components key to safety such as the reactor pressure vessel and containment cannot be replaced. The likelihood of an accident and the number of potential complications therefore increase over time. However, decisions whether to extend the lifetimes of old reactors may be swayed by economic and political arguments, since old reactors have already paid back on their capital costs.
A brief description of my tweeting experience – Short and sweet! But here is a little breakdown on the issues discussed/tweet linked.
OK! I am grey haired and get my phone hacked a lot so tweeting came a bit late in the day and my interest was stirred after my boss (The dear sweet little old lady blogger who allows me to create mayhem on her blog) was wearing her fingers out tweeting
The subject of all these tweets concerned possible future of dainty little Thorium reactors replacing the nasty big ogre like uranium reactors.
Of course the reason I believe that the push is for thorium
is that the corporations want to keep the nuclear fuel cycle going even if the uranium based reactors get switched off.
The Oslo Fjord has been polluted from time to time from this reactor with mainly Beta bearing radionucldes according to the EURDEP radiation mapping. But the pollution doesnt begin there for the type of fuel that is actually being burnt.
The nuclear waste that is burnt in this reactor starts out as spent fuel rods as well as “hot” nuclear materials. These spent fuel rods are melted in nitric acid and the useful radionuclides are removed.
This spent fuel processing takes place at limited locations and Sellafield in the UK is one such place as well as La Hague in France. NO2 pollution levels are the highest in the UK with the European Union berating the UK for this pollutant that has been increasing over recent years. This pollution has caused real deaths and is a matter of public record.
Of course, the emissions from Sellafield and La Hague comes to some some 4000 T/Bq (admitted) if memory serves me right. Bottom line, it is a lot of liquid and air emissions.
Whilst in London in 2011 and 2012 I found myself with a Gieger counter and during the course of measuring for radioactivity in the air I happened to notice that the NO2 air pollution increased with the radiation readings that I got.
I was able to track this pollution as well as others during 2012 using pollution maps and EURDEP as well as my trusty gieger counter and looking at other gieger readings throughout Europe. These pollutants seem to travel together.
The Fennovoima consortium’s application for the planned Hanhikivi nuclear power plant will be reconsidered by Parliament. The municipality of Pyhäjoki will also re-evalute the plan.
Minister of Economic Affairs Jan Vapaavuori announced that the Fennovoima consortium on Tuesday filed revisions to its application for a decision-in-principle. These reflect significant changes to the size and ownership of the project since the legislature originally gave the green light to the project in 2010.
Since then, the German utility E.ON has dropped out, being replaced by the Russian state firm Rosatom. A number of smaller stakeholders have also pulled out. The plan now calls for a smaller facility of a different type than that specified in the original application.
Vapaavuori said he expected the cabinet to take a stand on the issue in June so that MPs can consider it when Parliament reconvenes in September.
The Greens have suggested they could leave the government if it approves the revision, which they consider a fundamentally new project. The government agenda agreed in 2011 stipulates that it will not propose any new nuclear ventures to Parliament.
After choosing a site, researchers must study the density, porosity and heat conductance of the rock there, and characterize any fractures and groundwater movement. Modeling and experiments help to determine how the rock will respond to the heat generated by the nuclear waste.
A radiation leak has raised questions about the safety of the United States’ only deep nuclear-waste repository, and has given fresh voice to scientists calling for more research into underground waste storage.
On 14 February, radioactive plutonium and americium leaked out of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, where thousands of drums of contaminated material from the US nuclear-weapons program are stored in salt beds more than half a kilometer below the surface. The health and environmental impacts seem to be minor, but 13 employees have tested positive for low-level contamination. The Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors are still working on a plan to re-enter the WIPP and find out what caused the leak.
The incident also brings renewed attention to a problem that policy-makers have been avoiding: what to do with a mounting stockpile of spent fuel from commercial reactors, which is currently stored at reactor sites. In 2010, the DOE mothballed plans to develop Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which since 1987 had been designated as the future site of an underground repository (see Nature473, 266–267; 2011). Researchers at the DOE and universities want to explore a variety of alternatives. But they say that they have been hobbled by small budgets and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which prevents the DOE from investigating any specific site apart from Yucca Mountain.
“Basically, all of the old ideas have come back out of the woodwork,” says Michael Driscoll, a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “But the first thing we need is Congress to wrestle with this and revise the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.”
For now, researchers are pursuing generic repository science that does not conflict with the law. In one large proposed experiment, DOE scientists wanted to assess whether salt beds at the WIPP could store radioactive waste that is hotter than the material they currently hold. In 2011, the team began developing a $31-million experiment that would have tested how the salt deforms when it is heated, and how water moves through it.
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