22 Fukushima-style reactors still operating in USA

Japan closing 5 reactors but U.S. still running its Fukushimas, Beyond Nuclear 17 Jan 15 The Japanese nuclear industry has announced it will permanently close five more of its remaining 48 “operable” nuclear reactors by March 2015, leaving the country with 43 reactors “operable” but still not actually “operating.” Two of the plants to be decommissioned are the same GE Mark I boiling water reactors identical to Fukushima. Despite the political landscape in Japan still promoting nuclear power, the anti-nuclear movement there continues to campaign to keep all of Japan’s reactors closed indeifinitely.

Public, political and economic pressure in the U.S. contributed to the recent permanent shutdown of Vermont Yankee, a Mark I, but the U.S. continues to operate 22 more of these Fukushima-style reactors (and eight similar Mark IIs.)

With the recent closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant here in the U.S., Beyond Nuclear continues to campaign for the prompt and permanently closure of the world’s remaining thirty operable GE Mark I and sixteen Mark II reactors.

Twenty-two GE Mark I and eight Mark II units are still operating in the United States. The remainder of the Mark I units are in Taiwan (2), India (2), Switzerland (1), Spain (1) and Japan (2). An additional two Mark II units are operating in Mexico and six “operable” but shutdown units in Japan.http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2015/1/15/japan-closing-5-reactors-but-us-still-running-its-fukushimas.html

January 17, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, safety, USA

1 Comment »

These old boiling water reactors are certainly old technology, now, their design days being somewhere around the late 50’s. But this does not necessarily imply that they are no longer safe reactors to continue to operate.

What comes out of the adverse comments is, of course, that two of the Fukushima BWRs being subjected to steam explosions following the unexpectedly high tsunami which put the diesel emergency generators out of action because, of all the possible stupidity, they were located in below-ground basement rooms!

The actual earthquake severed land electrical supplies to the Dai-Ichi power station site, and the DGs immediately came in and allowed the operating reactors to shut down in a perfectly normal way. But because of the great amount of heat being emitted from the core radioactivity at shutdown – perfectly normal – the cooling water flow had to be continued. But the arrival of the tsunami scuppered that possibility by inundating the emergency DGs, and hence there were eventually two steam explosions after the cooling failed. But, and this is a most important point, they were not nuclear explosions.

This unfortunate event demonstrates just how easy it is for nuclear power to be castigated for all the wrong reasons. There’s a natural fear of ionizing radiations – not exactly unjustifiably – but it’s all made so much worse because of people’s general ignorance of nuclear power and the effects, both short and long term, of ionizing radiations.

People seem to get fixated about the effects of very high exposure levels, which rarely occur with radioactive releases from nuclear power reactors. The Chernobyl RBMK disaster is invariably considered to be a typical reactor disaster scenario, but that opinion demonstrates the ignorance about the positive reactivity RBMK type of reactor in an appallingly disastrously mismanaged shutdown scenario. Modern reactors these days all have negative reactivity coefficients.

But what does reactor reactivity mean to the “man in the street”? And, of course, to typical anti-nuclear campaigners!

Comment by Mike Thurgood | January 18, 2015 | Reply