Ontario’s long-awaited new nuclear emergency plan falls short, Greenpeace says Ontario has updated its plan for dealing with nuclear emergencies for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, The Star.com, By ROB FERGUSON Queen’s Park Bureau, Dec. 28, 2017 Ontario has updated its plan for dealing with potentially deadly emergencies at nuclear power plants for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster forced the evacuation of 70,000 people in Japan.
The 173-page effort follows criticisms from provincial auditor general Bonnie Lysyk earlier this month that the nuclear response blueprint has not been changed since 2009 to reflect lessons learned elsewhere.
“Ontario has three nuclear power facilities and 18 operating reactors, which makes it the largest nuclear jurisdiction in North America and one of the largest in the world,” she wrote in her annual report.
“Plans need to be regularly updated with current information and to reflect the best approach to respond to emergencies so they can be used as a step-by-step guide during a response,” Lysyk added.
The new plan takes into account radiation emergencies that could stem from reactor accidents, leaks during the transportation of radioactive material, explosions and even a satellite crashing on nuclear plants at Pickering and Darlington east of the heavily populated Greater Toronto Area or at the Bruce reactors near Kincardine on Lake Huron…….
The plan was released a week after the government put out a request for experts to conduct a technical study of it, making a mockery of the process, said the anti-nuclear group, Greenpeace.
“It’s ass backward and incompetent,” said Shawn-Patrick Stensil, senior energy analyst for Greenpeace, a vocal critic of the government’s nuclear energy program.
There is little in the updated nuclear response plan to prepare for a major disaster, he added, such as emergency zones that are too small given the potentially large scale of nuclear disasters.
“While other countries have strengthened public safety since Fukushima, it’s taken the Ontario government six years to maintain the status quo,” said Stensil.
“Other countries are preparing for bigger accidents.”……….
Toronto city council passed a motion in November calling on the province to prepare for more severe accidents and expand delivery of anti-radiation potassium iodide pills beyond the current 10-kilometre zone around nuclear power plants.
The city also requested a study on the potential impacts of a major nuclear accident on the Great Lakes, which are a source of drinking water for millions in Canada and the United States, awareness campaigns for Toronto residents on how to prepare for a nuclear accident at Pickering or Darlington, just east of Oshawa.https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2017/12/22/ontarios-long-awaited-new-nuclear-emergency-plan-falls-short-greenpeace-says.html
December 30, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Canada, safety |
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How Close Are We Really to Achieving Nuclear Fusion? Geek.com, 29 Dec 17 Nuclear fusion has been the practical Holy Grail for clean, sustainable power for decades. Based on the same process that powers the sun, a controlled, human made nuclear reactor could solve a lot of Earth’s biggest problems. One plant could power a significant percentage of the US, and a few more — each of which only need small pellets of cheap, plentiful fuel to operate — could run the planet. And all without any extra greenhouse gas emissions, or the risk of a catastrophic meltdown. So… what’s stopping us from putting these things everywhere? Well… unfortunately, the laws of physics.
That’s not to say that building a fusion reactor is impossible (though that may well be, at least for cheap power generation), just that it is very, very hard. Scientists have been working on this since the 50s and, at the time, they suspected the final breakthrough wasn’t too far off. But then, as now, the running joke is that fusion is still a staggering 50 years away. But is that even true? How could it be?
Because we aren’t working with stars, humans have some major hurdles in fusing atoms and creating the tremendous amounts of energy we see in the sun. Most of those come from the incredible heat involved. Hot gasses and plasmas expand, but to keep the reaction going, you need the atoms to keep smashing together. You can use magnets to force the material to stay contained, but that uses a lot of power. That’s the fundamental problem with fusion as it stands today.
Reactions can be started, but, thus far, they’ve all taken more energy to control than we get out of them. In fact, starting that initial fusion reaction is quite easy, but it can’t just be the spark. That spark has to stick and kick up a nuclear furnace that yields enough to operate what are, in essence, force fields to contain the reaction and send the excess to the mains.
December 30, 2017
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The new edition of the best-selling Japanese dictionary “Kojien” to go on sale next month will be the first with nuclear power generation terms selected by a dedicated editor in its 62-year history, according to its publisher.
The dictionary covering some 240,000 words was first published in 1955 and is revised every 10 years or so. Its publisher, Iwanami Shoten, decided to have a particular editor for nuclear terms for the upcoming 7th edition as people have become more familiar with such terms since the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Some of the terms have been frequently used in the media and become quite common, but many of those already included in the dictionary’s current edition are defined using technical jargon.
Toru Kawahara, 46, at Iwanami Shoten proposed at a meeting just months after the Fukushima disaster that the publisher appoint an editor dedicated to reviewing and selecting nuclear terms.
He remembers telling the meeting, “Issues regarding nuclear plants are no longer restricted to experts in the field and people living near the plants.”
The proposal was accepted unanimously and Kawahara himself became the first to take the post.
He added about 20 new words to the upcoming edition including “hairo” meaning decommissioning of a reactor and “anzen-shinwa” (safety myth), describing the view once held by the government and power companies that nuclear power is undoubtedly safe.
One of the key factors behind his choice of new terms was “whether they will continue to be used” in years to come, he says.
Kawahara came up with 200 candidate words, including those he saw in print media and came across on the internet. He was surprised to learn that hairo had not been included.
He realized that people only paid attention to the building and operating of nuclear plants and cared far less about the fact that the work of scrapping aged reactors safely is an important part of nuclear power.
“Everyone, including myself, was so indifferent (about nuclear power),” he says.
While also adding “The Great East Japan Earthquake” in 2011 which triggered the Fukushima crisis, Kawahara revised descriptions for some of the already listed terms, such as radiation and breeder reactor, using words easier to understand.
He knew that some of the terms he chose to add are not widely used. Among such terms were “youso” (iodine) and “bento” (venting).
Iodine pills help to reduce radiation buildup in the thyroid in the event of a nuclear accident. “I think it is good to tell people how they work and how they should take them in an emergency,” he said.
Venting is one of the terms which became widely known after the Fukushima disaster. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., the operator of the disaster-hit Fukushima Daiichi complex, came under fire for its failed venting operation to deal with the pressure buildup at the reactors and causing hydrogen explosions which severely damaged the structures.
Since venting could cause radioactive materials to reach the environment, “I thought it is a term we must have as long as it concerns life-and-death situations people may encounter during evacuation,” Kawahara said.
He contemplated adding “difficult-to-return-to zone” near the Fukushima plant where radiation levels remain high. But he dropped it, concluding the term would no longer be used once the designation is lifted.
“I felt compelled to help people remember the reality of residents there who cannot return to their way of life before the disaster. It was not an easy decision.”
The new edition will go on sale Jan. 12.
http://english.kyodonews.net/news/2017/12/ade339c19145-best-selling-japanese-dictionary-updated-with-more-nuclear-terms.html
December 30, 2017
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Levels of iodine-129 in capital of Shaanxi province peaked two days after hydrogen bomb test 2,000km away
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 30 December, 2017, 8:30am
UPDATED : Saturday, 30 December, 2017, 8:42am
Radiation levels in a Chinese city nearly 2,000km from a North Korean nuclear test site spiked following Pyongyang’s latest and most powerful nuclear weapons test in September, Chinese scientists say.
However, they say the spike in iodine-129 levels Xian was probably not related to the detonation of a 100-kilotonne hydrogen bomb in a tunnel at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site on September 3 and was more likely to have originated in Europe.
The spike was recently declassified by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, prompting heated discussion among researchers about its possible cause, with some disputing the Europe theory.
From September 3 to 11, levels of iodine-129 in Xian, the capital of Shaanxi province in central China, jumped to at least 4.5 times above average, according to readings picked up by instruments at the academy’s Institute of Earth Environment, which is based in the city.
Iodine-129 is an isotope of the element iodine that rarely occurs in nature. It is mostly produced by man-made fission and is closely monitored around the world as evidence of nuclear weapons tests or nuclear accidents.
The levels in Xian, nearly 2,000km west of Punggye-ri, peaked between September 5 and 6, when they were nine times as high as the day before the test.
Zhang Luyuan, a physicist at the institute who is leading the investigation of the incident, said she had goosebumps when she first saw the spikes on the chart.
“We thought we’d nailed it. The timing was almost perfect,” she said on Wednesday. “It could have been the first time fallout was recorded outside North Korea.”
But the matter turned out to be much more complicated than the researchers thought.
Zhang and her colleagues checked the data collected by devices set up along the Chinese-Korean border due to concerns in Beijing that the Punggye-ri test site, under a mountain near the border, might collapse and release a large amount of radioactive pollutants.
While some stations reported an increase in overall radioactivity, they did not detect trace elements such as iodine-129.
Zhang said the researchers pondered whether the radioactive particles might have been blown towards Xian but discovered winds had been blowing towards the east for most of the time in question.
The team also calculated that in order to generate enough fallout to boost the amount of iodine-129 in Xian by so much, the bomb detonated in North Korea would have had to have been “many, many times” larger than reported estimates, Zhang said.
The team now suspectedthe fallout might have come from western Europe, because two
of the world’s largest spent nuclear fuel recycling plants, in France and Britain, had released more than six tonnes of iodine-129 into the environment since the 1960s, more than 100 times the amount produced by all the nuclear weapons tests conducted in the atmosphere.
But that suggestion came under fire from many people in the research community, who pointed out that Xian was more than 8,000km from France and Britain.
Professor Guo Qiuju, a nuclear physicist leading the research programme on nuclear hazard monitoring at Peking University, said that if Europe was to blame, there must have been a very large, very serious accident that had not been disclosed.
“Europe has established maybe the world’s best network to monitor radioactivity in the environment,” she said. “If there was a cloud coming from there, it must have triggered alerts all along the way.”
But Guo, also a member of an expert panel that advises the Chinese government on dealing with North Korea’s nuclear threat, said the incident was unlikely to have been caused by the bomb test either.
“If a leak has indeed occurred, the stations on the high mountains at the border should have recorded similar or stronger signs,” she said. “The data is transparent. There is no cover-up.”
A nuclear safety expert who requested anonymity said Xian was home to a major research centre for China’s nuclear weapon programme.
The Northwest Nuclear Technology Research Institute, run by the People’s Liberation Army’s Equipment Development Department, operated a wide range of radioactive equipment in the city including a pulse reactor and powerful accelerators, the researcher said, adding “the possibility of a local accident cannot be ruled out.”
Zhang admitted the need to avoid public panic was one reason the information had been kept from the public until the end of November.
“Our investigation was not completed then,” she said.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2125448/what-caused-radiation-spike-xian-north-korean-blast-european
December 30, 2017
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