Work starts to decommission problem-plagued Monju reactor

“The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) on Aug. 30 started work to decommission the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in Fukui Prefecture…

The decommissioning work is scheduled to take 30 years and cost $ 3.33 billion.”

Staff members of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency operate equipment to remove nuclear fuel assemblies from a storage tank at the plant of the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, on Aug. 30.

August 30, 2018

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) on Aug. 30 started work to decommission the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in Fukui Prefecture, a once-promising project that struggled with problems, even in preparations for its dismantlement.

The work started a month later than scheduled because of a series of equipment trouble. The JAEA workers also face an enormous challenge because Japan has no experience in decommissioning a fast-breeder reactor.

The JAEA will use overseas experiences as a reference for the delicate process.

Before the start of the work, JAEA President Toshio Kodama told staff members in a speech at the plant in Tsuruga, “I want you to tackle this work by bracing yourselves.”

Monju had been a key facility in the government’s nuclear fuel recycling program.

Construction of the reactor started in 1985, but a series of accidents, including a sodium coolant leak in 1995, as well as cover-ups kept the reactor offline for most of its life.

In 2016, after 1 trillion yen ($9 billion) had been spent on the project, the government finally decided to abolish Monju.

The decommissioning work is scheduled to take 30 years and cost 375 billion yen.

One of the riskiest parts in the decommissioning process is handling the liquid sodium, which reacts strongly with water and air.

In the first of the four-stage decommissioning project, the JAEA will transfer 530 nuclear fuel assemblies, currently kept in the liquid sodium-filled nuclear reactor and storage tank, to a water-filled pool by fiscal 2022.

In the work that began on Aug. 30, the JAEA will remove 160 nuclear fuel assemblies from the storage tank, wash away the sodium, and place them in the pool.

From 2019, the agency will transfer nuclear fuel assemblies from the reactor to the storage tank and then to the pool.

In December this year, the JAEA will also start to transfer about 760 tons of sodium, which has not been exposed to radioactive substances, to its storage tank. Later, the agency will remove about 910 tons of radioactive sodium from the reactor and other equipment.

In the following stages, the agency will dismantle the nuclear reactor, the turbine and other facilities.

However, no decision has been made on how to dispose of the nuclear fuel removed from the reactor and the storage tank. Monju has used mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which contains plutonium and currently cannot be reprocessed in Japan.

“It’s realistic to ask an overseas company to reprocess it,” said Toyoshi Fuketa, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, the government’s nuclear watchdog.

If reprocessing expenses in a foreign country are added, the overall decommissioning costs will sharply increase.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201808300045.html

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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