http://news.ie.msn.com/ireland/govt-nervous-about-british-nuclear-plans-and-wanted-cover-%E2%80%98if-anything-went-wrong%E2%80%99
Sunday, 29 December 2013
An internal memo from the Department of Foreign Affairs shows the government wanted to “cover themselves in the event of anything going wrong” at Windscale.
THE DEPARTMENT OF Industry and Energy was worried it had not done enough to deal with Britain’s nuclear power plans in the early 1980s.
In an internal memo released under the 30 Year Rule, an official recalled how the Industry and Energy department was “beginning to feel nervous about not having taken sufficient action vis-a-vis the British authorities on Windscale”.
“And want to cover themselves in the event of anything going wrong,” wrote an official.
First Secretary in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Joanna Betson, was writing an informal report of an interdepartmental meeting held on 17 November 1983 after media reports about the effects of levels of radioactivity in the Irish Sea.
She said there was a “general lack of knowledge on what level of radio activity we should agree to find acceptable at Windscale”.
The group, which included representatives from the Fisheries, Finance, Environment, Transport and Health departments and the Nuclear Energy Board (NEB), decided it was necessary to proceed with a bi-lateral agreement with the UK on the matter “as swiftly as possible”.
Earlier in the year, media reports suggested there were unacceptable levels of radioactivity in the Irish Sea.
One documentary linked the 1957 fire at Windscale (now Sellafield) to illnesses.
A junior minister in Ireland noted that these findings were limited to areas closer to the site than Ireland is.
According to the NEB’s independent tests, radioactivity levels reached their highest during 1974.
See also:
https://nuclear-news.net/2013/07/11/artificial-radionuclides-in-the-irish-sea-from-sellafield-increasing-levels-in-northern-ireland-and-scotland/
https://nuclear-news.net/2013/03/26/irish-bid-to-close-sellafield-sellafield-covering-something-up/
https://nuclear-news.net/2009/11/10/irish-sea-coast-areas-threatened-by-radiation-risks/
December 29, 2013
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Image source ; http://www.dianuke.org/nuclear-madness-at-delhis-doorsteps/
29 December 2013
New Delhi: A nuclear power plant proposed to be set up in Haryana is one step short of getting the green clearance with a high-level panel of the Environment Ministry giving conditional nod.
The decision to recommend green clearance to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) proposal for setting up a Rs 23,502 crore nuclear power plant in Fatehabad district was taken at a recent meeting of Expert Appraisal Committee on Environmental Appraisal of Nuclear Power Projects, official sources said.
Environment Minister is the final authority to grant the clearance to the project to be set up around 200 km away from the national capital. The NPCIL proposal seeks setting up a nuclear power park, known as Gorakhpur Haryana Anu Vidyut Pariyojna (4×700 MWe), at Fatehabad’s Gorakhpur village.
The project, for which the Ministry accorded Terms of References (ToR) three years ago, would be implemented in phases. The first phase would comprise two units of 700 MWe each.
The panel, which had sought details of the compensation paid and other measures as part of the project’s rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) plan for those affected, has insisted that the project proponent should consider the newly enacted Land Acquisition Act for providing relief for project affected persons including landless labourers.
The proposal has been recommended for green clearance subject to several specific conditions. The eight-member committee, chaired by A R Reddy, has
asked the NPCIL to obtain the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) clearance for the site for starting any construction work.
The panel has suggested that the project proponent should take necessary precautionary measures in and around the plant. It has recommended that regular monitoring of conventional gaseous pollutants, radioactive pollutants in the
air as well as in the discharged water should be monitored regularly as per the AERB standards and regular monitoring of ambient air quality should be carried out in and around the power plant and records maintained.
The high-level ministry panel has suggested that greenbelt should be developed in 35 per cent area around the project boundary with the native species of adequate density and width.
In addition, plantation should be raised in other vacant areas within the plant site, it said. According to it, water requirement for the project should
not exceed 320 cusecs as per the permission accorded by the state Irrigation Department and no groundwater should be used in the project either during construction phase or during operation phase.
The panel has also recommended testing of soil and groundwater samples to ascertain that there is no deterioration of groundwater quality by leaching heavy metals, radio nuclide and other toxic contaminants.
The non-radioactive waste water generated from the plant premises should be suitably treated in sewage treatment plant and the treated effluents should be recycled and reused within the plant premises for greenbelt and other things, it said.
The radioactive liquid waste emanating from the plant should be treated and managed as per the guidelines of AERB, it said.
The clearance is also subject to clearance from the wildlife authorities due to location of Schedule-I species of the animals in the vicinity. “As directed by the Ministry, conservation plan for Schedule-I species should be prepared in consultation with the State Chief Wildlife Warden, Wildlife Institute of India or Zoological Survey of India,” an official said.
In case the area is declared as wildlife park or sanctuary, necessary prior wildlife clearance should also be obtained from the Steering Committee of National Board of Wildlife, he said.
The proposal would be considered by the respective authorities on their merits and decision taken. The committee has also suggested that independent environment clearance should be sought for the township, if shifted from the present location due to change in surrounding environment.
December 29, 2013
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…“They used us and threw us away,” he quoted an acquaintance as saying. The acquaintance could not return to the work site because he had been exposed to radiation above the limit immediately after the accident. He later quit his job at a TEPCO subcontractor….
By TAKURO NEGISHI/ Staff Writer
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201312290006
As a former employee of Tokyo Electric Power Co., Akihiro Yoshikawa says he knows about the miserable conditions, declining morale and how workers are treated like garbage at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
His mission now is to spread awareness of the circumstances surrounding those struggling to deal with the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and to help them get through the winter.
“I wanted to get people thinking about their working environment and do something to improve it,” Yoshikawa, 33, said.
Yoshikawa and his friends are now collecting donations to deliver heat packs and long underwear to the workers.
Born in Ibaraki Prefecture, Yoshikawa graduated from high school at Toden Gakuen, a now-defunct academy for training future workers of TEPCO, operator of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.
Yoshikawa’s work at TEPCO included supervising equipment inspections at the No. 1 plant.
After the tsunami caused the meltdowns at the plant in March 2011, Yoshikawa and his wife fled from the town of Namie. They now live in evacuee housing provided by the prefectural government in the nearby city of Iwaki.
Yoshikawa worked at the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant, which was also hit by the tsunami but shut down properly.
Whenever he talked with workers toiling at the No. 1 nuclear plant, he heard about their fears of radiation contamination and low morale.
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December 29, 2013
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By Travis Gettys
Friday, December 27, 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/27/noam-chomsky-were-no-longer-a-functioning-democracy-were-really-a-plutocracy/
The world faces two potentially existential threats, according to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky.
“There are two major dark shadows that hover over everything, and they’re getting more and more serious,” Chomsky said. “The one is the continuing threat of nuclear war that has not ended. It’s very serious, and another is the crisis of ecological, environmental catastrophe, which is getting more and more serious.”
Chomsky appeared Friday on the last episode of NPR’s “Smiley and West” program to discuss his education, his views on current affairs and how he manages to spread his message without much help from the mainstream media.
He told the hosts that the world was racing toward an environmental disaster with potentially lethal consequence, which the world’s most developed nations were doing nothing to prevent – and in fact were speeding up the process.
“If there ever is future historians, they’re going to look back at this period of history with some astonishment,” Chomsky said. “The danger, the threat, is evident to anyone who has eyes open and pays attention at all to the scientific literature, and there are attempts to retard it, there are also at the other end attempts to accelerate the disaster, and if you look who’s involved it’s pretty shocking.”
Chomsky noted efforts to halt environmental damage by indigenous people in countries all over the world – from Canada’s First Nations to tribal people in Latin America and India to aboriginal people in Australia—but the nation’s richest, most advanced and most powerful countries, such as the United States, were doing nothing to forestall disaster.
“When people here talk enthusiastically about a hundred years of energy independence, what they’re saying is, ‘Let’s try to get every drop of fossil fuel out of the ground so as to accelerate the disaster that we’re racing towards,’” Chomsky said. “These are problems that overlie all of the domestic problems of oppression, of poverty, of attacks on the education system (and) massive inequality, huge unemployment.”
He blamed the “financialization” of the U.S. economy for income inequality and unemployment, saying that banks that were “too big to fail” skimmed enormous wealth from the market.
“In fact, there was a recent (International Monetary Fund) study that estimated that virtually all the profits of the big banks can be traced back to this government insurance policy, and in general they’re quite harmful, I think, quite harmful to the economy,” Chomsky said.
Those harmful effects can be easily observed by looking at unemployment numbers and stock market gains, he said.
“There are tens of millions of people unemployed, looking for work, wanting to work (and) there are huge resources available,” Chomsky said. “Corporate profits are going through the roof, there’s endless amounts of work to be done – just drive through a city and see all sorts of things that have to be done – infrastructure is collapsing, the schools have to be revived. We have a situation in which huge numbers of people want to work, there are plenty, huge resources available, an enormous amount to be done, and the system is so rotten they can’t put them together.”
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December 29, 2013
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Published: December 28th, 2013 at 3:57 pm ET
By ENENews
http://enenews.com/epidemiologist-back-from-fukushima-were-talking-about-a-sacrifice-zone-and-millions-of-people-live-in-this-area-exceeds-allowable-radiation-dose-for-nuclear-workers-40-kilometers-from-fukush
At 18:00 in
Epidemiologist Dr. Steve Wing, University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill, discusses the human impacts of the Fukushima nuclear disaster based on his visit to the area: This reading here, just to put it in perspective, the guard there if he stood there for a year, right where he is now in this picture, he would exceed the allowable radiation dose for a nuclear workers inside a plant. And this is 40 kilometers away. So we’re talking about a sacrifice zone, and millions of people live in this area.
So the guard — can you see on the ground behind the guard there’s a metal plate? He’s supposed to stand on that metal plate, and that’s his protection. And he’s wearing a surgical mask, and he has a helmet. It made me feel kind of bad, that here is someone that’s working in a radiation exposed job and he’s been issued a surgical mask and a helmet as though he’s supposed to feel protected.
Watch the presentation here
December 29, 2013
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….As in Chernobyl, the situation confirmed that nuclear industry is unable to deal with large scale accidents….
[…]
….In 1988 former director of the IAEA Dr. Hans Blix visited Chernobyl and met Spetsatom’s leaders. During the meeting he said that an organization like Spetsatom would have to be established in the structure of IAEA,
but it seems this idea was not supported by the staff of the Agency. Now it is easier to understand which arguments were at the base of the decision not to create an international nuclear emergency center…..
[…]
Nuclear Emergency Service
Why does this service not exist on the international scale?
Iouli Andreev
Former Scientific Director of Soviet Nuclear Emergency Service “Spetsatom”
BOKU Wien 08.03.2012
Beyond design accidents.
http://www.risk.boku.ac.at/WP/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Vortrag_Andreev.pdf
How frequently do they happen?
• 1 – Three Mile Island, 1979
• 2 – Chernobyl, 1986
• 3 – Fukushima, 2011
It is too early to produce statistics from several events, but we may predict that “beyond design accident” will inevitably happen in future.
Three Mile Island 1979
• Nuclear safety is too expensive to permit nuclear energy to be competitive, the USA decided after Three Mile Island accident.
• During more than 30 years no new nuclear power plants were built in America.
• This does not mean America has no risk from nuclear accidents.
• A TMI control room operator wrote a memo warning of “a very serious accident” if the condensate system problems were not properly addressed. He stated that “the resultant damage could be very significant.” Additionally, James Cresswell, an NRC inspector, warned for two years that a design flaw with U-shaped tubes could prevent coolant circulation and cause an accident like that which later occured at TMI. His warnings were ignored until the NRC met with him six days before the accident at TMI.
(Testimony of former NRC Commissioner Peter A. Bradford, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, March 24, 2009)
Chernobyl 1986
• Positive void coefficient, the main cause of nuclear explosion in reactor, is inversely to the grade of fuel enrichment. The wish of industry to use the cheap low enriched fuel was a cause of decreasing safety. After the accident enrichment of RBMK fuel was increased from 1,8 to 2,4%.
BOKU Wien 08.03.2012
• It was found immediately after the Chernobyl accident that nuclear industry and civil defense forces cannot deal with consequences of the reactor explosion. The Special Military Scientific Center was created in Moscow within two weeks and sent on the ChAES site. It had orders to develop methods for regular army formations to deal with the consequences of the accident.
• In 1988 the Russian Government decided to create the Nuclear Emergency Service (“SpetsAtom”) to deal with future large scale nuclear accidents.
• Nuclear Industry attempted to downplay the role of SpetsAtom, saying that accidents like Chernobyl would never happen again in the future.
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December 29, 2013
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Getting the ship out of water into dry dock will mark a significant milestone in reducing the overall radioactive threat posed by the vessel.
Officials told Russian media that this milestone, which will significantly reduce the overall radiation hazards posed by the ship, will happen in May 2014.
And though the ship has only be moved into position to be taken out of the water, Andrei Zolotkov, chairman of Bellona Murmansk said that “because the [Lepse dismantlement project] was Bellona’s idea,” he greets each new step toward the project’s completion as “positive.”
The Lepse has been laid up at Nerpa, a naval shipyard equipped to handle the ships dangerous nuclear cargo some 20 kilometers up Kola Bay from Murmansk, since September 2012.
That’s nothing compared to the 24 years it spent bobbing at dockside four kilometers north of central Murmansk and its population of 300,000 at the Atomflot nuclear icebreaker port, since its decommissioning in 1988.
The boat was finally towed away from the most populous city above the Arctic Circle in September 2012, after more than a decade of strenuous negotiations among Bellona, the Russian government and financial institutions to back its disposal.
Lepse salvaged for a radioactive career
The Lepse, which in its heyday had been used as a support vessel for Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet, now contains casks and caissons holding 639 spent nuclear fuel assemblies –equaling hundreds of tons of radioactive materials – some 300 of which have been damaged, including assemblies that were banged up during offloading from the nuclear icebreaker Lenin.
On top of that, the ship is old. Its keel was laid as a dry goods ship in 1934 and construction on it continued until World War II. It was eventually dumped in a river in the Ukraine. Its reactivation came about when the icebreaker Lenin was under construction and the Lepse’s durable hull saved it from mothballs in 1961.
That year, it was specially retrofitted to refuel the Lenin and the growing icebreaker fleet at sea, pulling spent nuclear fuel off, and refilling icebreakers’ reactors.
Between 1963 and 1981, the Lepse re-loaded nuclear fuel on the nuclear powered icebreakers Lenin, Arktika and Sibir 14 times. In 1981, it was again retrofitted to become a storage ship for irradiated parts and waste as well as spent nuclear fuel assemblies.
Submarine traffic jam
Progress toward getting the Lepse into dry dock at Nerpa, where the real dismantlement and spent nuclear fuel removal procedures can begin in earnest, however, have been thwarted ever since the vessel’s arrival at Nerpa in 2012.
Simply put, miscommunication between Russia’s Ministry of Defense, and Russian State nuclear corporation Rosatom, which is legally responsible for dispensing with the ship, steered the Lepse into a traffic jam at Nerpa with Russia’s oldest nuclear submarine, the Leninsky Komsomol.
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December 29, 2013
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MURMANSK – As the end of Russia’s year of the Environment draws to a close, Bellona Murmansk held an event to tally up who in the region has been naughty and who’s been nice.
In the heavily industrialized swathe of Northwest Russia, there were plenty of opportunities to hand out lumps of coal – and many would have received them if they had actually showed up for Bellona Murmansk’s round table discussion on Tuesday.
The Bellona hosted discussion did bring together members of the Murmansk area government and the area’s biggest environmental organizations. But the companies and factories representing the areas biggest polluters called in last minute cancellations to say they were otherwise engaged
Among those RSVPing in the negative for the discussion of how closely they adhered to the principles of Russia’s environmental year were the controversial Kola Mining and Metallurgy Company, a daughter corporation of Russia’s Norilsk Nikel; the Northwest Phosphorous Company; the apatite mining and processing center Kovdorsky Mining and Processing complex (Kovdorsky GOK), and the Olenogorsk iron-ore miner and processor (Olenogorsk GOK).
And on one count, a member of the Murmansk Parliament who had been invited, told Bellona on the condition that she remain anonymous, was advised against attending by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the KGB’s successor organization.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Andrei Zolotkov, chairman of Bellona Murmansk. “They’ve already received their letters of appreciation for their ecological work from the Murmansk Regional government,” he added, wryly.
According to Elvira Makarova, director of the ecology department of the Murmansk division of Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources (Rosprirodnadzor), the Year of the Environment saw the realization and continued implementation of a host of large-scale environmental projects.
“The Murmansk Region is a pioneer in the implementation of many environmental projects,” she told the Bellona seminar.
She was referring primarily to decisions regarding foul industrial odors, studies of coal dust pollution in Murmansk, as well as the thorny issue of cross-border pollution with Norway.
Industrial pollution
One of the hottest topics at the seminar concerned industrial emissions.
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December 29, 2013
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https://www.wefightcensorship.org/censored/japan-freelance-journalist-sued-over-nuclear-industry-articlehtml.html
Minoru Tanaka, a 52-year-old Japanese freelancer who has written many investigative pieces about the nuclear power industry, is being sued for 67 million yen (600,000 euros) – an enormous sum he would never be able to pay – over a story that looked at the connections between nuclear industry figures, investors and politicians.
Published in the 16 December 2011 issue of the weekly Shukan Kinyobi and indiscreetly headlined “The last big fixer, Shiro Shirakawa, gets his share of the TEPCO nuclear cake,” the article tried to shed light on Japan’s opaque nuclear industrial complex, known as the “nuclear village,” and in particular, the activities of Shiro Shirakawa, the head of a company the provides security systems for power stations owned by the electricity utility TEPCO.
The article accused Shirakawa of taking advantage of his connections with key nuclear industry figures, including TEPCO’s former chairman, and politicians such as the parliamentarian Kamei Shizuka to obtain unjustified profits since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011.
Most freelance and foreign journalists regard the libel suit that Shirakawa brought against Tanaka (but not against Shukan Kinyobi) as a bid to deter all journalists from doing investigative reporting about the nuclear industry and, in particular, about the way that the Fukushima Daiichi accident was handled.
When the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan organized a news conference in Tokyo on 31 August 2012 to give Tanaka a chance to talk about the lawsuit, not a single journalist from Japan’s official Kisha press clubs attended. Freelancers are discriminated against in Japan and excluded from the Kisha clubs. As a result, Tanaka’s freelance status prevents him from receiving the support of his colleagues and increases his vulnerability.
Freelance and independent journalists such as Yu Terasawa, Michiyoshi Hatakeyama, Yuichi Sato and Ryuichi Hirokawa are often harassed over their nuclear industry reporting. Like TEPCO and the nuclear industry in general, the government seems to fear that coverage of the Fukushima aftermath and public discontent could result in their being blamed and lead to a national debate about energy issues in Japan.
Before a Tokyo court began hearing the lawsuit on 7 May 2012, Shirakawa sent Tanaka a letter warning that he would be rendered insolvent if the court rules against him. Several hearings have been heard since then and they are steadily wearing Tanaka down.
In Tanaka’s view, the case has all the hallmarks of what is often called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) or “gag suit,” with a powerful plaintiff who has many political and business connections, on the one hand, and an isolated journalist, on the other.
The last big fixer, Shiro Shirakawa, gets his share of the TEPCO nuclear cake published in the 16 December 2011 issue of the weekly Shukan Kinyobi. Download the full article (pdf).
The Last Fixer
A mystery letter (怪文書) was distributed at the House of Representative Building 1 towards the end of May in 2011. It was titled, “WANTED: The Transporter of Nuclear Industry Bribes” and printed on A4 sized paper. Who the heck is the person it was written about? Under the headline of the mystery letter was a copy of the ID badge of the deceased 三塚博衆院議員（Mitsuka Hiroshi-LDP)’s personal secretary, in a collage. The person being criticized in the letter was a man called “The Last Big Fixer” aka Shirakawa Shiro.
“Ishihara Bank” also involved in huge loans
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December 28, 2013
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nuclear-news
仙台市の病院で白内障手術が急増 ’09年395件,’10年399件,’11年514件,’12年784件
Operation of cataract increased in Sendai hospitals:
395 in 2009,
399 in 2010,
514 in 2011,
784 in 2012.
The data from the official website of the Japan Labour Health and Welfare Organization.
Tohoku hospital in Aoba-ku, Sendaishi-city, Miyagi prefecture
http://www.tohokuh.rofuku.go.jp/
Above graph from here…http://bran7.net/archives/43285
Evidence of soil contamination in Miyagi Prefecture Contamination by Cesium 137 and Cesium 134 from 60 Km to approximately 150 Km north of the Fukushima Daichi disater site..
Radioactive contamination in soil in Izunuma area in Kkurihara-city, Miyagi prefecture
Cs137：2100 Bq/Kg（検出下限minimum limit of detection 40.7）
Cs134：870 Bq/Kg（検出下限minimum limit of detection 10.4）
Total Cesium – Cs合計：2970 Bq/Kg（検出下限minimum limit of detection 51.1）
https://nuclear-news.net/2013/12/18/radioactive-cesium-levels-in-miyagi-forest-soil-up-since-2011/?relatedposts_exclude=60913
Meet Grigorij Nikolaevich Sorikov
Pensioner, Bartolomeevka village, Belarus |
“The day after the accident there was an old aeroplane, an E2 I think, flying very low, about 300 metres above ground, to and fro…
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December 27, 2013
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Jess Gehin, a nuclear-reactor physicist at Oak Ridge, says the pact allows the two sides to share information about their research.
“The Chinese are very aggressive, very determined and programmed to move forward with this technology,” Gehin said. “Right now we agree that we should meet routinely, maybe a couple of times a year.”
[….]
Top British naval engineers last year proposed a design for a thorium reactor to power warships
[…]
http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/breakout-thorium-idINL4N0FE21U20131220
By David Lague and Charlie Zhu
Dec 20 (Reuters) – Scientists in Shanghai are attempting a breakthrough in nuclear energy: reactors powered by thorium, an alternative to uranium.
The project is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government body with close military ties that coordinates the country’s science-and-technology strategy. The academy has designated thorium as a priority for China’s top laboratories. The program has a budget of $350 million. And it’s being spearheaded by the influential son of a former Chinese president.
But even as China bulks up its military muscle through means ranging from espionage to heavy spending, it is pursuing this aspect of its technology game plan with the blessing – and the help – of the United States.
China has enlisted a storied partner for its thorium push: Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The U.S. government institute produced the plutonium used for the Manhattan Project and laid important groundwork for the commercial and military use of nuclear power.
The Tennessee lab, as it happens, helped pioneer thorium reactors. The Pentagon and the energy industry later sidelined this technology in favor of uranium. The Chinese are now enthusiastically tapping that know-how, in an example of how the rising Asian superpower is scouring the world for all sorts of technology needed to catch up to America in a broad array of scientific fields.
Thorium’s chief allure is that it is a potentially far safer fuel for civilian power plants than is uranium. But the element also has possible military applications as an energy source in naval vessels. A U.S. congressman unsuccessfully sought to push the Pentagon to embrace the technology in 2009, and British naval officers are recommending a design for a thorium-fueled ship.
In a further twist, despite the mounting strategic rivalry with China, there has been little or no protest in the United States over Oak Ridge’s nuclear-energy cooperation with China.
“The U.S. government seems to welcome Chinese scientists into Department of Energy labs with open arms,” says physicist and thorium advocate Robert Hargraves. He and other experts note that most of the U.S. intellectual property related to thorium is already in the public domain. At a time when the U.S. government is spending very little on advanced reactor research, they believe China’s experiments may yield a breakthrough that provides an alternative to the massive consumption of fossil fuels.
The technology’s immediate appeal for China, both Chinese and American scientists say, is that thorium reactors have the potential to be much more efficient, safer and cleaner than most in service today.
The Chinese plan to cool their experimental reactors with molten salts. This is sharply different from the pressurized water-cooling systems used in most uranium-fueled nuclear plants. The risks of explosions and meltdowns are lower, proponents say.
“If a thorium, molten-salt reactor can be successfully developed, it will remove all fears about nuclear energy,” says Fang Jinqing, a retired nuclear researcher at the China Institute of Atomic Energy. “The technology works in theory, and it may have the potential to reshape the nuclear power landscape, but there are a lot of technical challenges.”
Other advocates agree on thorium’s peaceful promise. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, introduced legislation in 2010 calling on the U.S. government to share its thorium expertise.
The unsuccessful bill said it was in U.S. “national security and foreign policy interest” to provide other countries with thorium fuel-cycle technology, because doing so would produce less long-lasting waste and reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation.
Oak Ridge has been free to proceed in spite of that bill’s failure.
TURNING BACK THE CLOCK
What China is attempting is to turn the nuclear clock back to the mid-1960s, when Oak Ridge successfully operated a reactor with fuel derived from thorium and cooled with molten salts. The lab also produced detailed plans for a commercial-scale power plant.
Despite considerable promise, the thorium test reactor was shut down in 1969 after about five years of operation. Research was effectively shelved when the Nixon Administration decided in the 1970s that the U.S nuclear industry would concentrate on a new generation of uranium-fueled, fast-breeder reactors. For a range of technical and political reasons, not least the public’s fear of nuclear plants, these new uranium reactors have yet to come into widespread commercial use.
The die was cast against thorium much earlier. In the early 1950s, an influential U.S. Navy officer, Hyman Rickover, decided a water-cooled, uranium-fueled reactor would power the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus. Rickover was instrumental in the 1957 commissioning of a similar reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania – the world’s first nuclear-power station.
Admiral Rickover was a towering figure in atomic energy and became known as the father of the U.S nuclear navy. He had clear reasons for his choice, engineers say. The pressurized water reactor was the most advanced, compact and technically sound at the time. More importantly, these reactors also supplied plutonium as a byproduct – then in strong demand as fuel for America’s rapidly growing arsenal of nuclear warheads.
“The short answer is that uranium was good for bombs and thorium wasn’t,” says Kirk Sorensen, president of Flibe Energy, a privately held thorium-technology start-up based in Huntsville, Alabama.
With the launch of the Nautilus in 1955, a course was set that is still followed today, with most of the world’s nuclear power generated from this type of reactor.
Although it does not yield byproducts that can be readily used to make weapons, thorium does have military applications.
The fuel could be used to power Chinese navy surface warships, including a planned fleet of aircraft carriers. China’s nuclear submarine fleet has struggled with reactor reliability and safety, according to naval commentators, and thorium could eventually become an alternative.
Top British naval engineers last year proposed a design for a thorium reactor to power warships. Compact thorium power plants could also be used to supply reliable power to military bases and expeditionary forces.
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December 27, 2013
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….The case also raises serious questions about whether the NSA properly executed its mission to protect U.S. troops from overseas threats. These possible injuries came at a time when the spy agency seemed preoccupied with conducting surveillance on the American people in what U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon called an “almost Orwellian” violation of the U.S. Constitution in his ruling on the NSA’s PRISM…..
WASHINGTON, December 24, 2013 —
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/freedom-press-not-free/2013/dec/24/did-nsa-conceal-fukushima-meltdown-military-sent-a/
More than 50 U.S. Navy sailors who served aboard ships that responded to the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan report falling ill to cancer and other radiation-linked diseases.
The reported illnesses among sailors who served on the USS Ronald Reagan and other Navy ships make it imperative to ascertain whether the Navy knew or should have known the conditions into which it was sending personnel. To that end, it is critical to know whether the NSA intercepted telephone and email communications from the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and whether the spy agency knew that TEPCO was covering up the multi-reactor meltdown at the time the Pentagon ordered sailors into harm’s way during “Operation Tomodachi.”
It would be hard to imagine that the NSA, the embattled spy agency which has been caught eavesdropping on the German and Brazilian heads of state, as well as on the pope, was not using all available surveillance technology and Japanese translators to monitor the unfolding TEPCO catastrophe. It would be highly unlikely that it failed to provide the Obama Administration with frequent updates on the situation.
Did the Navy get updates about Fukushima from NSA? Who was responsible for deciding who would get updates? Who was responsible if the NSA did not provide them?
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December 27, 2013
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Posted by liz ⋅ December 27, 2013
Katsutaka Idogawa, mayor of the town of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, said on Dec. 26 that he has dissolved the town assembly after it passed a no-confidence motion against him.
Idogawa notified assembly chairman Seiichi Sasaki of the dissolution. Under the public offices election law, an election will be held within 40 days of the day following the notification. The town election board is seeking to arrange voting on Feb. 3.
The assembly unanimously passed a no-confidence motion against Idogawa on Dec. 20, citing his absence from a meeting in November about a plan to set up temporary storage facilities for soil contaminated with radioactive substances released from the disaster-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The assembly passed the no-confidence motion in a session held in the city of Kazo, Saitama Prefecture, to which the Futaba municipal government relocated its office following the outbreak of the nuclear disaster in March 2011.
Idogawa was absent from the Nov. 28 meeting of prefectural government officials and mayors of municipalities in Futaba county held to discuss the central government’s proposal to set up temporary storage facilities for radiation-contaminated soil.
December 27, 2013
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