The explosion that ripped through an EDF plant at Flamanville last week, injuring five workers, was in a “non-nuclear area”. Thank goodness for that. But the damage it has inflicted on the reputation of France’s nuclear industry is radioactive enough and it could not have come at a more sensitive time. Across the Channel, an army of engineers is starting work on EDF’s new £18 billion nuclear station at Hinkley Point.
Questions persist over the enormous cost of the Hinkley scheme. EDF, the world’s biggest nuclear generator, has brushed aside criticism of the cost and subsidies lavished on the project by pointing to its engineering prowess and record of building and operating nuclear plants. That reputation appears to be unravelling amid a catalogue of problems…….
Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear. Almost 6 years after a massive meltdown – radiation levels at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan are as dangerously high as ever. So is nuclear power ever worth the risk?
….A number of commentators, Arnie Gundersen at Fairwinds, Kendra Ulrich at Greenpeace International, Nancy Foust at Simply Info, have pointed out that the levels of radioactivity that are being talked about by Tokyo Electric (TEPCO), 53,000 rem per hour levels that were documented just a week ago have probably been there this whole time since March 2011 since the meltdown happened because what they are doing is they are getting closer where the melted core is at, they still don’t know where they ‘re at but what they are doing they are getting closer to that dangerous place and so sure enough it stands to reason that they would find these levels….
A flaw in Russia’s flagship nuclear reactor line, which was originally hushed up by officials, could affect three plants Russian state corporation Rosatom is building at home and in Europe
A generator much like the one that burned out tat the AES-2006 at the Novovoronzezh plant. (Photo: power-m.ru)
A flaw in Russia’s flagship nuclear reactor line, which was originally hushed up by officials, could affect three plants Russian state corporation Rosatom is building at home and in Europe.
The flaw originally caused a short circuit in a generator at the AES-2006 reactor at the Novovoronezh plant, which took the reactor off the grid for two and a half months while the plant worked to repair it.
Rosenergoatom, Russia’s nuclear utility, originally kept the flaw under wraps until anonymous sources fed dire reports to a local newspaper, prompting the utility to go public on its website with the cause of the malfunction.
Even that cover up involved a cover up: The short circuit scrammed the reactor on November 10, but Rosenergoatom didn’t come clean about it until November 16.
The utility later backdated that report to make it look like it was published on the day of the incident apparently to stem media speculation that a serious accident had taken place.
A view of the Novovoronezh reactor AES=2006 reactor’s machine hall. (Credit: novnpp.rosenergoatom.ru)
The muddy shell game of hushing the defect then obfuscating when the problem was identified makes one thing clear: The reactor is a key offering on Russia’s markets abroad and a valuable foreign policy tool to boot.
The AES-2006 reactor, also known as the VVER-1200, is under construction at the Belarus Nuclear Power Plant and the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant II. Further afield, Finland is building one. Turkey has ordered four and Bangladesh and Hungary are in line to build two each.
The problem at the AES-2006 at Novovoronezh turned out to be a defect in the so-called stator winding mechanism, which plays a role in cooling the reactor. Initially presented by a Rosenergoatom spokesman as a relatively minor fix, it was serious enough for technicians to altogether replace the part in the plant’s second AES-2006 reactor.
The company that makes the generator, St. Petersburg’s Power Machines, said it had done the repairs at the Novovoronezh AES-2006 reactors, and further added it would undertake “modernization” of the same generator line installed in the AES-2006 reactors at the Belarus Nuclear Power Plant, as well as at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station II.
The rush to get the AES-2006 out the door – and gag any screw-ups along the way – was predictable. With fluctuating oil and gas prices, nuclear energy, specifically the new reactor, is another foothold for Moscow in the European energy market.
Lateral moves between president Vladimir Putin’s administration and Rosatom brass make clear the role nuclear energy plays in state policy.
In October, Sergei Kiriyenko moved from Rosatom to the become deputy head of Putin’s administration. He was replaced by Aleskei Likhachev, an economics minster. Likhachev has since made it his business to promote the AES -2006 reactor.
Earlier this month, Putin himself went to Hungary to push Rosatom’s controversial deal to build two AES-2006 reactors at the country’s €12 billion PAKS II Nuclear Power Plant. The European Union, thanks to lobbying by France and the United Kingdom, seems ready to green light the reactor construction, nudging the door to Europe’s nuclear market open for Rosatom.
Russia has a habit of conducting foreign policy by choking, then reviving, natural gas supplies to the EU. Disputes between Russia and Ukraine, which remain bitter, led to cuts in Europe’s gas supply from Russia in 2006 and 2009. This drove Europe to diversify just whom it was depending on for its winter heat.
But locking into Russia’s start-to-finish nuclear deals, beginning with Finland and with Hungary, is a big step back toward dependence on Moscow.
To build its two AES-2006s Hungary would take a loan from Russia to finance 80 percent of the project and putting it in hock to Moscow for decades. Rosatom would also effectively operate the plant for 50 years, supplying it with all of its fuel and much of its technical know-how.
Such dependence has had scary side effects when a country finds itself on Moscow’s bad side.
In 2014, at the height of EU-Russia tensions over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, Kremlin officials threatened to cut nuclear fuel supplies to Ukraine’s Soviet built reactors, raising the specter of Moscow forcing a calamitous nuclear accident.
Kiriyenko eventually walked that back, but the lurid message in Moscow’s head-fake at a second Chernobyl was clear: Russian-built reactors are a useful form of post-Cold War nuclear blackmail.
It is, of course, unlikely that the Kremlin wants a meltdown so close to its own borders. It’s dealt with such hassles before.
But the EU might want to think about how much it wants to depend on Moscow to keep it safe. The AES-2006 has only been in commercial operation for a year and the generator short circuit might be only the first of its problems.
If the EU finds itself in another tense argument with Moscow over Crimea – or anything else – it could find the AES-2006 repair hotline temporarily disconnected.
Taipei, Feb. 13 (CNA) Nuclear-free advocates around Taiwan have organized three parades through the online “Nuclear Go Zero” action platform, in a national protest action set for March 11 in Taipei, Kaohsiung and Taitung simultaneously.
The parades will take place on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei, the Labor Park in Kaohsiung, and the Tiehua Pedestrian Zone in Taitung, with the theme of “Zero Nuclear, Low Carbon, Sustainable Energy,” the organizers said Monday.
The government will be urged to accelerate efforts to realize its campaign promise to replace existing energy sources with green ones, to decommission three operating nuclear power plants as scheduled, and to find the best solution for the disposal of nuclear waste, the organizers said.
This year, they will also demand that the government resolve problems relating to carbon emissions and air pollution. “The government should accelerate its steps, and come up with concrete plans and schedules for the implementation of its nuclear-free policy,” the organizers said.
Transforming Taiwan into a nuclear-free country was one of the major political platforms presented by Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in her race for the presidency in 2016.
Tsai won the presidential election on Jan. 16 last year, the same day that her party, the DPP, defeated the then-ruling Kuomintang in the legislative elections, giving it a legislative majority.
As soon as it was inaugurated, the Tsai administration announced that it will make the country nuclear-free by 2025.
The “Nuclear Go Zero Action” action platform was established by more than 100 civil anti-nuclear groups around Taiwan in 2013, after some 220,000 people took to the streets on March 9 that year to take part in protest marches in northern, central, southern and eastern Taiwan, demanding that the fourth nuclear power plant project should be scrapped.
In April 2014, then-Premier Jiang Yi-hua (江宜樺) announced that the nearly completed power plant, located in New Taipei, was to be mothballed. The plant entered mothball status in July of the following year.
Sometime today, Japan’s Toshiba, owner of Pennsylvania-based nuclear power icon Westinghouse Electric, will reveal an impairment charge to Westinghouse, Kallanish Energy learns.
More than a month ago, Toshiba told shareholders to expect a multi-billion-dollar writedown charged to Westinghouse – expected to be roughly $6 billion – due to the nuclear company’s purchase of Chicago Bridge & Iron’s (CB&I’s) Stone & Webster nuclear construction company two years ago.
Last month, Toshiba CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa told reporters Toshiba is likely to exit the nuclear construction business outside of Japan, which would make Westinghouse a technology designer and service provider – not a nuclear plant builder.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s head of nuclear research, Chris Gadomski, said he thinks the company might be better off with a narrowed business philosophy, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper reported.
“There’s a big difference between building equipment for nuclear power plants and managing the process,” Gadomski said. “If Westinghouse says, ‘Hey, we’re just going to build components’ — that’s fine. Actually, that simplifies the process completely.”
But the uncertainty over the company’s future is rattling markets and customers. On a recent visit to South Carolina, where Westinghouse is building two AP1000 nuclear reactors for the utility South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. — multi-billion-dollar projects — Gadomski said the anxiety was palpable.
“They were kind of really scared and concerned what the implications of this whole unraveling is going to be,” he said.
The South Carolina project and a similar project in Georgia are currently under construction.
Westinghouse employees are similarly uncertain of what awaits them. The company employs 12,000 worldwide.
More than 70 years after the detonation of the first atomic bomb, residents of Southern New Mexico who were unwittingly exposed to the fallout, as well as their descendants and advocates, have released a new report that details the decades of illnesses and deaths they believe were caused by the Trinity Site test, and other detrimental effects to their communities.
The health impact assessment, titled “Unwilling, Unknowing and Uncompensated,” focuses on four main ways that families have been affected by the Manhattan Project blast in 1945: generations of illnesses and deaths, lack of access to health care, economic struggles and fears of severe health problems for future generations.
The document was commissioned by the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, an organization that for years has been advocating for these residents. It was paid for with a $35,000 grant from the Santa Fe Community Foundation, with help from the Kellogg Foundation. The overriding purpose of the assessment, said consortium co-founder Tina Cordova, is to present a case for why the downwinders should be included in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, a law that provides benefits to many people exposed to nuclear fallout during bomb testing but excludes those living near Trinity.
The downwinders report examines the results of 800 health surveys conducted in Otero, Socorro, Lincoln and Sierra counties, and the comments of people who participated in several community forums. It offers personal accounts of their experiences.
One 16-year-old girl quoted in the report said she is afraid to have children in the future because she fears passing on radiation-mutated genes, leading to more sickness and death. The girl’s mother said her daughter had been robbed of her childhood because she is terrified of not if but when “she or her other family members will develop cancer.”
Emphasizing the personal experiences of the Tularosa Basin residents “creates a significantly different story than the historical narrative of a deserted and uninhabited region surrounding the bombsite,” the report says.
One man who grew up in Tularosa spoke of the many illnesses that his family members suffered: breast cancer, gout, blood disorders, prostate cancer, thyroid disease, throat cancer, stomach problems and kidney disease. The man said he has three siblings living on one kidney each.
The report includes information from a 10-year study of historical records by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which calls for further investigation of health and environmental issues in the areas surrounding Trinity Site, as well as areas near Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was built.
The CDC says residents were never warned before or after the Trinity blast and never advised to avoid ingesting radiation-contaminated water and food, or to avoid exposure to the fallout.
The downwinders health assessment, largely written by Myrriah Gómez of Pojoaque, an assistant professor in The University of New Mexico’s Honors College, will be rolled out in public gatherings in Tularosa and Socorro this weekend and in Albuquerque on Wednesday.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, passed by Congress in 1990, provides up to $150,000 in payouts and other health benefits to military personnel and scientists present at the Trinity test in July 1945, as well as those living downwind from the 1950s nuclear tests in Nevada and the Pacific islands. The measure also allows payouts to surviving loved ones of those who have died from illnesses related to the blasts.
But the law doesn’t provide compensation for the people who were living on Southern New Mexico ranches, in villages and in the Mescalero Apache community not far from Trinity Site — some within 15 miles of the detonation — and it doesn’t include their descendants.
New Mexico’s Democratic U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich recently introduced legislation that would include the Trinity downwinders in the law.
Similar measures have been offered up over the past few years by New Mexico’s congressional delegates and other lawmakers, but they have all gone nowhere. There has never been a hearing on any of the proposals.
Cordova said the new report shows that federal compensation would improve the health of Southern New Mexico residents, many who travel long distances for medical care. It is demeaning and tragic, she said, for families to have to hold bake sales to buy painkillers for their sick and dying parents, spouses and children.
The U.S. also owes an apology to the downwinders for what some consider a surprise nuclear attack on their neighborhoods, Cordova said.
“After the Trinity bomb detonated,” the report says of one family, “their chickens died. The family dog died. The … mother hung bed sheets on the windows and wet them to keep the dust out of the house.”
Descendants of people living downwind and downstream of the Trinity blast can trace the health problems of later generations back to the cultural practices and agrarian lifestyle of the 1940s, the report says. As farmers, ranchers, fishermen and hunters, the downwinders relied on the environment for their survival.
One woman spoke at a community forum about how, as a child, she and her siblings “drank the milk from the cows and skimmed the fat (cream) off the milk,” the report says. “They played in the acequias (ditches). They butchered cows and hunted deer.
“Now,” the woman said, “families who engaged in those practices and were contaminated by radiation are ‘wiped out.’
Uranium market conditions in 2016 were the toughest that Cameco Corp. CEO Tim Gitzel has seen in his 30 years in the business, but he says he remains cautiously optimistic about the long-term picture.
“We’ve been saying for some time that uranium prices are neither rational nor sustainable,” Gitzel told investors during a conference call Friday to discuss its dismal 2016 earnings. “Current prices are failing to incent the investment decisions required to ensure reliable supply is available to meet growing demand out into the future.”
Cameco reported a fourth-quarter net loss attributable to shareholders of $144 million, or 36 cents per share, which was more than 10 times larger than the loss of $10 million, or three cents per share, reported in the year-earlier period. The fourth quarter of 2016 included an impairment charge of $238 million. The company booked a $210 million impairment charge in the 2015 quarter.
Revenues fell nine per cent to $887 million during the quarter. The company’s full-year loss was $62 million.
Still, Cameco said it is encouraged by Kazakhstan’s announcement that it will cut 2017 production by 10 per cent, bolstering optimism about long-term fundamentals of uranium. Spot prices have increased by 40 per cent and term prices are up about eight per cent since a low in December.
“But let me be clear, our optimism is best described as cautious optimism — we are far from a true incentive price for sustainable production” and further cuts might be needed, unless term contracts return in meaningful quantities, Gitzel said.
“Optimistic because it appears that the pain of low uranium prices is driving meaningful supply discipline and this discipline is provoking a strengthening uranium price. Cautious because market challenges continue, challenges that might frustrate recent increases in the uranium price.”
The entire nuclear industry is still feeling the aftershock of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, with prices in the doldrums and customers re-evaluating contracts as they eye prices much lower than those in deals previously struck with Cameco.
Cameco said earlier this month it has rejected Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s attempt to cancel its contract — a move that would mean $1.3 billion in lost revenue — as the Saskatoon-based uranium giant works to protect deals signed with customers before the market tanked. Cameco said it is pursuing legal action.
This is the second article on Nara Visa residents’ concerns over a nuclear waste research project taking place in their backyards. The first article can be found here.
Strong public opposition to Atlanta based ENERCON and DOSECC Exploration Services’ efforts to drill a three mile deep borehole in Nara Visa to research nuclear waste storage continues, as the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority (“CRMWA”) has expressed strong concerns. In a letter obtained by the New Mexico Politico, dated February 10, 2017, the CRMWA addressed Quay County Commissioners, stating in part:
The Canadian River Municipal Water Authority supplies over ½ million people with water that comes from the Canadian River. Needless to say, we are VERY concerned about the prospect of high level nuclear waste being disposed of in our water shed…. [a]lso, the Canadian River is a tributary to the Arkansas River, then the Mississippi, and finally the Gulf of Mexico. The magnitude of this issue is obvious.
Not only is our water shed and the Canadian River a concern for us, but the Ogallala Aquifer is as well. It is the dominate aquifer in this area. The wrong combination of events could conceivably contaminate it also.
DOE, by its own admission, has billions of dollars of infrastructure maintenance backlogs because of the lack of planning and funding for life cycle costs. Many government agencies, such as the DOE, are not adequately funded. This means corners must and will be cut and with a project like this, a cut corner could be catastrophic for a long, long, time.
The CRMWA closed their letter by giving their recommendation to Commission:
We believe this project should go back to Yucca Mountain where the science has been completed and is on government owned and controlled land. In closing, the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority strongly opposes this project and would be happy to supply a more in depth response on this issue if needed.”
Quay County residents are also disputing the over-all economic and educational benefits touted by Peter Mast, President of Enercon Federal Services. According to the recorded minutes of an October 2016 Quay County Commission meeting, Mast anticipated “the project to require 20 employees off and on with the possibility of 6-12 permanent positions.” ENERCON representatives have also mentioned the overall benefits of bringing a 40 million dollar contract to the area.
During last week’s Nara Visa informational meeting hosted by ENERCON, Quay county resident Bart Wyatt voiced his skepticism, stating in a letter handed out to attendees:
“Virtually no materials or equipment is going to come from Quay County so no tax revenue from sales. Income tax from any jobs will go to the state, not county. Gross receipts taxes, after giving the state their cut, would give the county a tax income of $100,000 per year over 5 years. Worth a nuclear dump?”
Regarding Mast’s jobs claims, Wyatt offered the following observation:
“These contractors have all the management position filled by out of state professionals taking their wealth with them when they go.”
After reviewing Wyatt’s claims, I reviewed ENERCON’s website regarding its construction of nuclear site characterization and the work appears to be highly specialized, meaning local job creation is unlikely.
Ranch owner Patty Hughs also offered a major concern shared by the agricultural community:
“How is trading Quay county’s base economy of farming, ranching, and real estate for a polluting economy going to benefit this community long term?”
Patty Hughs’ concerns are worth noting when looking at agriculture statistics from the USDA and New Mexico Department of Agriculture. In 2012, the market value of agricultural products sold out of Quay County topped $36,700,000.
In 2015, the total value of cattle in the county was estimated at $56,615,000.
The total value of farms, land, buildings, and overall agricultural land use was a staggering $508,402,000.
To be sure, many legitimate questions arise on what would happen to farm and ranch land values, and to the agricultural community’s ability to protect their way of lives if nuclear waste storage becomes a reality.
Would banks change lending practices to farmers and ranchers because of the attendant risks of nuclear waste storage? Would real estate values be decimated? Would insurance companies even cover agricultural operations where radiation exposure would render the land unusable for a thousand years?
In the short term, its conceivable that restaurants and other local businesses could see a small bump in revenue from out-of-state drillers. But long term? They may stand to lose the base economy that has kept their doors open for years.
One thing is for certain, an all important meeting for residents will take place with the Quay County Commission in Tucumcari February 13th, 2017 at 9 a.m. to potentially decide the fate of ENERCON’s drilling operation. The majority of residents that have spoken with the New Mexico Politico are hoping and praying the Commission will rescind Resolution No. 27.
The New Mexico Politico will report on the Commission’s decision tomorrow.
Disclosure: My wife is related to the owners and operators of the Hat T Ranch in Nara Visa. The white church image used in the story is courtesy of Connie Payne.
NEW DELHI: Downplaying Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ‘s adviser on foreign affairs Sartaj Aziz’s comments where he held India responsible for the ‘nuclearisation’ of the Indian Ocean, Defence experts have opined that Islamabad is perturbed because New Delhi is getting equipped.
Asserting that Pakistan had no issue with ‘nuclearisation’ until India was not active, Defence expert P.K Sehgal said, “Pakistan never got intimidated when China got equipped but now they are raising this issue because India also possesses nuclear power. And we will increase in our nuclear power.”
Treading the same path, another defence expert Qamar Agha said that India has always been committed in maintaining tranquility in the Indian Ocean and that Aziz’s comments were unwarranted. “Pakistan and China are responsible for ‘nuclearisation’ in Indian ocean. They are increasing their presence there.
Whatever India is doing in this regard is for defence. We got nuclear weapons because China and Pakistan were developing in the same path. Indian Ocean is India’s part and India maintains peace and decorum in its boundaries and is still doing it. Sartaz Aziz’s comments are totally wrong,” said Agha.
Pakistan would go all out to contain grave threats to peace and security in the Indian Ocean primarily due to nuclearisation started by India, said Aziz, while speaking at the International Maritime Conference in Karachi.
Aziz asserted that ‘nuclearisation’ of the Indian Ocean had adversely affected the stability in the region and that the threats were likely to intensify in future.
13 February 2017, 00:03 GMT 13 Updated February 2017, 00:40 GMT
If you want to understand why Toshiba Corp. is about to report a multi-billion dollar write-down on its nuclear reactor business, the story begins and ends with a one-time pipe manufacturer with roots in the swamp country of Louisiana.
The Shaw Group Inc., based in Baton Rouge, looms large in the complex tale of blown deadlines and budgets at four nuclear reactor projects in Georgia and South Carolina overseen by Westinghouse Electric Co., a Toshiba subsidiary.
On Tuesday, Toshiba is expected to announce a massive write-down, perhaps as big as $6.1 billion, to cover cost overruns at Westinghouse, which now owns most of Shaw’s assets. The loss may actually eclipse the $5.4 billion that Toshiba paid for Westinghouse in 2006 and has forced the Japanese industrial conglomerate to put up for sale a significant stake in its prized flash-memory business. Toshiba had to sell off other assets last year following a 2015 accounting scandal.
Toshiba made a big bet on a nuclear renaissance that never materialized, in part because it couldn’t build reactors within the timelines and budgets it had promised. The company had anticipated that Westinghouse’s next-generation AP1000 modular reactor design would be easier and faster to execute — just the opposite of what happened. Now the Japanese company may exit the nuclear reactor construction business altogether and focus exclusively on design and maintenance.
“There’s billions and billions of dollars at stake here,” says Gregory Jaczko, former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). “This could take down Toshiba and it certainly means the end of new nuclear construction in the U.S.”
Toshiba confirmed it will unveil a “huge loss” on Tuesday; a spokeswoman declined further comment. In January, Satoshi Tsunakawa, Toshiba’s president, said the company may sell shareholdings, real estate or other assets if needed to strengthen its balance sheet. “We will keep considering all options as needed and promptly, and take all necessary steps,” he said at a briefing in Tokyo.
New Start
When Toshiba bought Westinghouse a decade ago, the U.S. Congress had just started dangling loan guarantees and other incentives aimed at restarting a dormant nuclear industry. In 2008, Westinghouse signed deals to build four new reactors for utilities Southern Co. and Scana Corp., the first U.S. nuclear plants since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island to be approved for construction by regulators.
In a 2015 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Southern Chief Executive Officer Thomas Fanning said his utility’s two reactor projects at Plant Vogtle in Georgia were “going to be one of the most successful mega-projects in modern American industrial history.”
To build that mega-project, Westinghouse turned to Shaw, a newcomer to nuclear work. Shaw was founded in 1987 by James Bernhard Jr., who distinguished himself through his deal-making acumen. He got his start paying $50,000 for the assets of a bankrupt pipe fabricator, and grew via one acquisition after another. In 2000, Bernhard swooped in at a bankruptcy auction and, during an 18-hour bidding war, bought Stone & Webster Inc., a once-venerable engineering firm that had already agreed to a deal with a much bigger rival.
Stone & Webster had built the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus and many of the country’s nuclear plants from the 1950s to the 1970s, but it was a shell of its old self when Bernhard bought it. Still, the name gave Shaw new credibility in the nuclear field, which it capitalized on to win all of Westinghouse’s contracts. “They weren’t necessarily qualified, but they had the heart and the go-get-them to take it on,’’ says Jeffrey Keller, a retired construction project controller who worked for Shaw at its nuclear sites.
Bernhard declined to comment for this story.
Building nuclear reactors is a tall order, given the regulatory complexity and consortium of contractors required to get the job done. And in fairness to Westinghouse and Shaw, plenty of other companies have missed deadlines. “Nuclear construction on-time and on-budget? It’s essentially never happened,’’ said Andrew J. Wittmann, an analyst who covers the industry for Robert W. Baird & Co.
Modular Design
It’s easy to see why Shaw wanted Toshiba’s business, but harder to understand why Toshiba chose Shaw. More established contractors simply may not have wanted the work, but Bernhard also used his deal-making skills to sweeten the agreement by taking on a chunk of Toshiba’s debts temporarily. “If you want to have a business, you have to get plants up and running, so they went forward even if it wasn’t a perfect match– that was the calculation for Toshiba,” says David Silver, an analyst at Morningstar in Chicago.
Westinghouse executives hoped its AP1000 reactors’ main components, or modules, could be built efficiently at specialized work yards, then shipped to a plant site and snapped together like enormous steel-and-concrete Legos.
On top of that, the U.S. government in 2005 gave nuclear developers a package of tax credits, cost-overrun backstops, and federal loan guarantees. In the next few years, U.S. utilities filed dozens of applications to build new reactors.
After Westinghouse hired Shaw to handle construction in 2008, it wasn’t long before the company’s work came under scrutiny. By early 2012, NRC inspectors found steel in the foundation of one reactor had been installed improperly. A 300-ton reactor vessel nearly fell off a rail car. The wrong welds were used on nuclear modules and had to be redone. Shaw “clearly lacked experience in the nuclear power industry and was not prepared for the rigor and attention to detail required,’’ Bill Jacobs, who had been selected as the state’s monitor for the project, told the Georgia Public Service Commission in late 2012.
The troubles were only starting. At Southern’s two new reactors in Georgia — a massive construction site on the edge of the Savannah River– thousands of workers have logged more than 25 million man-hours, yet the project is years behind schedule.
0riginally planned to open in 2016 and 2017, they’re now slated for 2019 and 2020–and that may be a stretch. To hit the new targets, Westinghouse would have to accelerate the pace of work to “over three times the amount that has ever been achieved to date,” Jacobs, the state’s project monitor, told the utility commission last year.
In November, Westinghouse said 33.4 percent of the construction was complete, but a utility supervisor with Southern who asked not to be identified said he’s skeptical. The hardest part of the project – the reactor’s center – has just started, he said.
Shaw Acquisition
Just as problems began to surface, in July 2012 Shaw agreed to sell itself for $3.3 billion to Chicago Bridge & Iron Co., a much larger engineering firm that wanted in on the envisioned nuclear renaissance. But three years later, with little progress to show for itself, CB&I decided to cut its losses. It sold the bulk of Shaw’s assets to Toshiba for $229 million, accepting the significantly lowered price in exchange for shedding liabilities related to the projects.
But in April 2016, four months after the deal closed, Toshiba concluded it had miscalculated and accused CB&I of inflating Shaw’s assets by $2.2 billion, and asked to renegotiate. CB&I balked and sued Toshiba for breach of contract last July. A preliminary decision in December ruled in favor of Toshiba’s request to renegotiate. CB&I has appealed that ruling. “We remain confident this issue will come to a resolution favorable to CB&I,” said Gentry Brann, a spokeswoman for the company. CB&I has argued that at least some of the reactor problems have been because of Westinghouse and its AP1000 designs.
Westinghouse has turned to another construction contractor, Fluor Corp., to help get its projects back on track, but it’s too early to say how much progress they’re making. Meanwhile, the NRC continues to press Westinghouse about problems with its AP1000 design after a neutron shield block, which contains radiation, failed during testing. Regulators will hold a hearing this week at which Westinghouse is expected to explain its work on the issue; Toshiba meanwhile declined to comment.
Those troubled projects in the American South are now threatening the Japanese icon’s foundations. The value of Toshiba shares has been cut in half over the last six weeks, wiping out more than $7 billion in market value.
And what of the U.S. nuclear renaissance? Westinghouse’s projects for Southern in Georgia and Scana in South Carolina had once been viewed as part of a rebirth of the U.S. atomic power industry. However, stumbles with those projects, the nuclear disaster in Fukushima and a flood of cheap natural gas that lowered U.S. power prices made new reactors increasingly expensive and risky. Of the 30-odd applications for new reactors that started in the mid-2000s, only the four Westinghouse units have gone forward.
One figure who seems to have come out of the Westinghouse mess pretty much unscathed is Shaw founder Bernhard. He completed the sale of his firm to CB&I in 2013, pulling in $3.3 billion for himself and other shareholders. Bernhard, whose stake was worth about $50 million at the time of the sale, now runs a private equity firm in Baton Rouge.
“They got out whole and then some,” said Silver, the analyst with Morningstar. “It was a good deal for them but only because they were able to unload the hot potato.”
“It is difficult to see how any safety case presented from now on that relies in any way upon the UKVPF, whether on the roads, the railways or in the nuclear industry, such as the new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point C in Somerset, could stand up to test in court. More modern and accurate methods exist, but the regulators are not using them.”
Published 13 February 2017
New research has shown that the benchmark used by the U.K. Office for Nuclear Regulation for judging how much should be spent on nuclear safety has no basis in evidence and places insufficient value on human life. The review suggests it may need to be ten times higher — between £16 million and £22 million per life saved.
New research has shown that the benchmark used by the U.K. Office for Nuclear Regulation for judging how much should be spent on nuclear safety has no basis in evidence and places insufficient value on human life. The review suggests it may need to be ten times higher — between £16 million and £22 million per life saved.
The research review led by Professor Philip Thomas from the University of Bristol and Dr. Ian Waddington and published in the journal Nuclear Future, examined the evidence for the “value of a prevented fatality” (VPF) currently used as a safety guideline by the Office of Nuclear Regulation, the Health and Safety Executive and numerous government departments.
Bristol U says that the VPF figure of £1.83 million (published in July 2016) emerged from a 20-year-old small-scale opinion survey of 167 people and its interpretation method has recently been shown to be too flawed to be credible.
The VPF study team came up with the current U.K. figure after setting aside the results of their first opinion survey, but a recent re-analysis has shown that the discarded valuations were actually entirely rational and understandable and the VPF study team rejected the wrong survey. An up-to-date interpretation of the first opinion survey would suggest that the VPF should be set about ten times higher than at present, at between £16 million and £22 million per life saved.
The Judgement- or J-value, a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment that has recently been validated against pan-national data, would value life about four times higher, closer to the value used by the US Department of Transportation ($9.1 million in 2012).
Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering, said: “The Office of Nuclear Regulation and other national bodies clearly have a problem with how they should assess the right level of expenditure to protect people from nuclear and other accidents.
“It is difficult to see how any safety case presented from now on that relies in any way upon the UKVPF, whether on the roads, the railways or in the nuclear industry, such as the new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point C in Somerset, could stand up to test in court. More modern and accurate methods exist, but the regulators are not using them.”
Bristol U notes that in the past, the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) asked some members of the VPF team to investigate how much people wanted to spend to counter railway accidents with multiple fatalities. The team reported their opinion surveys as showing no appetite for extra expenditure to guard against rail accidents causing many deaths. However, the methods used by the RSSB study team were recently proved to be systematically biased against anyone wanting more to be spent against deaths in large accidents, and so they should not have been used. Consequently RSSB’s recommendation to cut expenditure against big rail accidents by 66 per cent has not been justified.
— Read more in Philip Thomas and Ian Waddington, “What is the value of life? A review of the value of a prevented fatality used by regulators and others in the U.K.,” Nuclear Future (forthcoming)
Nuclear weapons are the only devices ever created with the capacity to destroy all complex life forms on Earth within a relatively short period.
In addition to causing tens of millions of immediate deaths, a regional nuclear war involving around 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that more than a billion people would be at risk of famine, according to research by IPPNW.
The smoke and dust from a limited nuclear war would cause an abrupt drop in global temperatures and rainfall by blocking up to 10 per cent of sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface. Sudden global cooling would shorten growing seasons, threatening agriculture worldwide.
Increases in food prices would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the poorest people in the world. For those who are already chronically malnourished, just a 10 per cent decline in food consumption would result in starvation. Infectious disease epidemics and conflict over scarce resources would be rife.
For more on the climate and agricultural effects of nuclear detonations, see Dr Ira Helfand in Unspeakable Suffering: Nuclear famine: A billion people at risk
Danger zones in the air where radiation levels surge could pose an unrecognised health hazard. Airliners may have to avoid these in future, just as they do with volcanic ash clouds, to minimise any risk to travellers and crew.
We have long known that high-altitude flight exposes us to cosmic rays. The radiation dose on a flight from London to Tokyo is roughly equivalent to a chest X-ray.
Now research flights have revealed the existence of “clouds” where radiation levels can be at least double the usual level. They were discovered as a result of the NASA-funded Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS) programme, which aims to develop new methods of measuring and monitoring high-altitude radiation.
In 265 flights, radiation levels detected generally followed the expected pattern, but in at least six instances they surged, as though the aircraft was flying through a radiation cloud.
“We have seen several cases where the exposure is doubled while flying through the cloud,” says ARMAS principal investigator W. Kent Tobiska, of Los Angeles firm Space Environment Technologies. “It is quite variable and can easily be more or less than that.”
Even higher levels have been recorded in some cases, but those results remain unpublished while the team considers alternative explanations for the data.
Tobiska says the two main sources of radiation, cosmic rays and the solar wind, can’t account for the surges. “Our new measurements show a third component.”
Freed electrons
The surges coincided with geomagnetic storms. This points the finger at energetic electrons being lost from the outer Van Allen radiation belts, where charged particles mostly from the solar wind are trapped by Earth’s magnetic field.
Tobiska believes that such a storm can liberate electrons trapped in the Van Allen belts. “Those electrons are driven into the upper atmosphere, collide with nitrogen and oxygen atoms and molecules, and then create a spray of secondary and tertiary radiation, likely in the form of gamma rays.” This radiation, he thinks, is what the ARMAS flights are detecting across a wide area.
Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics says this mechanism seems feasible. “It is plausible that the ARMAS results are related to enhanced loss of radiation belt particles from the magnetosphere into the middle and lower atmosphere.”
There are no set standards for radiation safety in US aviation at present, but Tobiska says that regulations are likely in the next few years.
The absolute risk may be low, as a chest X-ray only increases the risk of a fatal cancer by 1 in 200,000, but these must be balanced against the large number of flights and whether risk is avoidable.
“This is mainly for crew members,” says Tobiska, “but would certainly benefit frequent flyers and even fetuses in their first trimester.”
ARMAS work using satellite data and airborne sensors may allow the radiation “clouds” to be tracked. Tobiska says that in future, flights may be diverted or directed to a lower altitude to avoid them.
Journal reference: Space Weather, DOI: 10.1002/2016SW001419
“Freshwater pandas”. Good idea but what about the “pandas” who have lived for over a century on the area now being proposed for three nuclear reactors!? Does anyone really think that the diverse habitats within this 1400 acres site can be “mitigated”? Creation of “alternative habitat” is being suggested by the financially torpedoing developers Toshiba, and to our shame those who are supposed to be looking out for wildlife in Cumbria are going along with this insanity. Where will the freshwater pearl mussels live if this goes ahead? Rivers, Sea and Coasts cannot be “created.” Where will we And the wildlife live, what will we drink?
“Here is what many people are saying:—–This Jewish state ,Israel, what do they want from you?.you are not a Jew any more, they rejected your message against Nuclear Weapons,they make you a traitor, they punished you in 18 years of Isolation, with cruel barbaric treatments, they try to break you for 30 years without success ,What do they want? Let Vanunu go Now.1986-2017.
Enough is enough!
All the world watching this case.and want the only answer,Let vanunu go ,now.“
A generator much like the one that burned out tat the AES-2006 at the Novovoronzezh plant. (Photo: power-m.ru) 
A view of the Novovoronezh reactor AES=2006 reactor’s machine hall. (Credit: novnpp.rosenergoatom.ru) 
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