COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The chief executive at the second South Carolina utility involved in a failed $9 billion project to build two nuclear reactors is stepping down.
SCANA announced Tuesday that Kevin Marsh is retiring as chairman and CEO of the company and its subsidiary, South Carolina Electric & Gas, at the end of the year.
Senior Vice President Stephen Byrne also is retiring at the same time.
Lawmakers and others had been putting pressure on the company to make leadership changes since SCANA and state-owned utility Santee Cooper announced they were abandoning construction of the reactors July 31.
SCANA Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Addison will become the utility’s new CEO on Jan. 1.
Santee Cooper CEO Lonnie Carter also is retiring after the project was abandoned
SHANGHAI–China’s first offshore nuclear reactor is set to be completed soon, engineers involved in the project said, bolstering Beijing’s maritime ambitions and stoking concerns about the potential use of atomic power in disputed island territories.
Beijing hopes offshore reactors will not only help win new markets, but also support state ambitions to become a “strong maritime power” by providing reliable electricity to oil and gas rigs as well as remote South China Sea islands.
Zhang Nailiang, engineer with the China Shipbuilding Industry Corp. (CSIC), said the technology was “mature” and the first demonstration project would be deployed soon at drilling platforms in northern China’s Bohai Sea.
“We are confident we should be able to get it finished very soon,” he said at an industry meeting this month. He declined to give an exact date, saying only that it would be ready well before 2020.
The demonstration project is being developed by a research team established by CSIC, China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) and two reactor builders, China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) and China General Nuclear Power (CGN).
The direct use of military technology has aided progress, Zhang said, noting that other projects–including one launched by CNOOC and CGN last year–are still at the testing stage.
China has urged nuclear firms to develop technologies that will help boost domestic capacity and win projects abroad.
Zhang said floating reactors also served a wider political goal to strengthen China’s maritime presence, an aim reiterated by President Xi Jinping during his Communist Party Congress address this month.
“We in the nuclear and shipbuilding industries have a call of duty to construct a ‘strong maritime power,'” Zhang said in a speech.
China National Nuclear Power (CNNP), CNNC’s listed unit, launched a floating nuclear power subsidiary in August and also said the technology would help China become “a strong maritime power.”
Though CNNP did not mention the South China Sea, CGN and CNOOC’s rival project will be deployed in the region, which includes islands and reefs claimed by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam as well as China.
Experts warn offshore reactors could raise safety and security questions.
“The problem is the remoteness raises all kinds of questions about security, safety, economics and logistics,” said Mark Hibbs, senior fellow of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Offshore nuclear power could lead to the militarization of disputed waters, with China arguing “they have to beef up their presence” in order defend the reactors, Hibbs said.
“The big picture is that the Chinese see nuclear energy as a very strategic technology and as something that China will deploy to its strategic benefit,” he added.
The San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace present the first in a series of events designed to educate on the challenges and options for radioactive waste storage at nuclear power plants. Guest presenters are Molly Johnson of Mothers for Peace and Donna Gilmore of San Onofre Safety.
San Luis Obispo, October 20, 2017 http://www.mothersforpeace.org
A report has revealed the scale of Royal Navy vessels being ‘cannibalised’ as the need grows to swap parts between ships and navy helicopters.
Nuclear-powered Astute-class hunter-killer submarines, one of the most modern and advanced vessels in the navy, experienced the highest level of cannibalisation in the fleet with 59 instances per boat on average.
Equipment ‘cannibalisation’ increased 49 per cent from 2012 to 2017. Spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) said budget cuts in the last two years could have increased the need to carry out the practice.
In the past two years, the Navy has removed an estimated £92m from its maritime support in-year budgets
In the Astute class, some parts were taken from submarines as they were still being constructed – adding to delays in the production process – and costing the taxpayer millions of pounds.
In the past five years, the three in-service Astute-class submarines had 506 defects, with 28 per cent of the 313 resolved defects in 2016-17 fixed through cannibalisation. The remaining fixes were resolved by sourcing parts from the supply chain.
A Royal Navy spokesman said: “Less than 0.5 per cent of parts we use come from swapping components, and we only do this when it’s absolutely necessary to get ships out of port and back on to operations more quickly.
“We continue to make improvements to how we manage this long-established practice.”
The Mail has approached Barrow MP John Woodock for comment and will also make inquiries with BAE Systems.
Cannibalisation: What are the guidelines?
Official guidance states that cannibalisation should only happen when no other solution is available. But, the NAO said delays in deliveries of spares and a lack of information about when parts will be available contributed to the increase in the practice.
The NAO report noted that in some circumstances, such as during high-intensity operations, cannibalisation can be the most effective way to keep vessels at sea.
“The risk of cannibalisation has increased further with reductions in fleet sizes meaning the armed forces have limited alternative equipment to deploy,” the report noted.
The NAO said the Ministry of Defence had taken decisions to cut support, which could have exacerbated the problem of cannibalisation.
“In the past two years, the Navy has removed an estimated £92m from its maritime support in-year budgets,” the report said.
That amounted to 34 per cent of the total £271m of maritime support budget cuts.
An estimated £22m of parts from submarines in production have been supplied to in-service parts and the practice delayed the completion of HMS Artful by six weeks, leading to an extra £4.9m in indirect costs.
The NAO said the Ministry of Defence had identified that cannibalisation has affected submarines currently in production “leading to an estimated £40m cost increase”.
Cannibalisation: The figures
In the last five years, between 0.3 per cent and 1.4 per cent of parts provided to the main classes of ships and submarines have been cannibalised.
Between April 2012 and March 2017 there were 3,230 instances involving 6,378 parts, with 795 instances in 2016-17 alone – the equivalent of 66 a month, up from 30 a month in 2005.
Cannibalisation can be functional but can actually increase costs. In 50 per cent of cases on Type 23 frigates the expense of moving equipment was equal to or greater than the value of the part – and risks causing damage or disruption.
An average 1.4 per cent of parts issued to Astute-class submarines involved cannibalisation compared with 0.4 per cent across all ships and submarines.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s latest inspection of Indian Point says the power plant’s owners must do more to resolve a recurring problem with O-rings used to seal off nuclear reactors, the cause of eight water leaks since 2003.
Indian Point’s owner, Louisiana-based Entergy, has taken “prudent, conservative action to shut down the plant” to make repairs and identify what may have caused leaks of slightly radioactive water.
But, the NRC notes in its inspection report of Indian Point for the third quarter of 2017, those efforts have not been completely successful.
“Corrective actions to address the causal factors over the years have not been completely effective at preventing recurrence of the issue,” the NRC report states.
The large stainless steel O-rings work to secure the lid or head of the reactor onto the body of the reactor vessel, where nuclear fission occurs.
The leakage issue is likely tied to a 2003 design change that affected how O-rings are installed during the plant’s maintenance shutdowns, typically every two years, the NRC adds. The NRC says Entergy must evaluate its installation procedure to make sure it meets requirements and expectations.
Currently, Indian Point’s two reactors — Units 2 and 3 — are operating without leaks, the NRC said.
The most recent leak was discovered in Unit 3 in June during scheduled maintenance.
And the leaks of slightly radioactive water dating back to 2003 have not escaped into the environment. Any leakage would likely be captured by a leakoff line or by a drainage system inside the reactor building.
“We will continue to follow developments involving the O-rings at Indian Point,” NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said.
An Entergy spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
In January, Entergy announced that it will shut down operations at Indian Point in 2021, following a protracted legal battle with the state of New York.
A report on Tuesday by a local newspaper, the Independent said that the feasibility studies for the plant and a research center construction will include site screening, capacity, financing, and time frames of the projects.
The newspaper report quoted a report by Bloomberg, a foreign news agency as saying that the state-owned Russian nuclear company Rosatom disclosed the nuclear deal in an emailed statement.
It noted that Nigeria and Russia in 2009 signed an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the field of the peaceful usage of nuclear technologies.
According to the report, the Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission reported in 2015, Nigeria had talks with Rosatom to build as many as four nuclear power plants costing about $20 billion.
The report added that the chief officer of the Egbin power plant in Lagos State, the nation’s biggest, said last month that Nigeria distributes an average of 4,500 megawatts of electricity, but that half the output is lost because of inadequate transmission infrastructure.
“Rosatom is seeking to build nuclear power plants in other countries on the continent, including South Africa,” the report added.
A government report predicting it will cost $1.2 trillion to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal is raising alarms that the Pentagon severely underestimated what it will take to replace its current weapons — and sparked calls Tuesday for the Trump administration to reevaluate a modernization plan first proposed by former President Barack Obama.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated it will cost at least $1.2 trillion between 2017 and 2046 to introduce the mix of nuclear-armed submarines, bombers and missiles that are now under construction. That’s a higher price tag than some previous estimates had offered.
The projections immediately set off a fierce debate over whether such a plan is even practical, and presented Congress with a new quandary as lawmakers try to find the money to support President Donald Trump’s other military priorities, like building a bigger Navy.
“Congress still doesn’t seem to have any answers as to how we will pay for this effort, or what the trade-offs with other national security efforts will be if we maintain an arsenal of over 4,000 nuclear weapons and expand our capacity to produce more,” Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that praised the report as a “thorough, credible analysis.”
But supporters insisted that spending what the Pentagon projects could amount to 6 percent of Pentagon’s budget to upgrade the nuclear arsenal over the next three decades is a fair price for what one called the “cornerstone of America’s national security.”
“The price is affordable and the mission is imperative,” Claude Chafin, the spokesman for Republican members of the Armed Services panel, said in a statement. “Those who might argue otherwise ignore the enormous cost of facing an increasingly insecure world with an eroding and uncertain deterrent.”
And the country’s top nuclear officials have defended the modernization effort’s cost. “We’re now at a point where we must recapitalize every leg of the nuclear triad,” Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee in March. “We have squeezed about all of the life we can out of the systems we possess.”
The new report comes as Trump pledges to make the nation’s nuclear deterrent “far stronger and more powerful than ever before,” and as his administration reassesses the nation’s nuclear weapons structure. That so-called Nuclear Posture Review is expected to be completed by January, and could propose new programs.
A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, asked to comment on the report, noted the Trump administration’s nuclear review is ongoing and that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is due to present his recommendations to the president by the end of the year.
But the new CBO estimate shows that even the current plan poses significant challenges for a strained federal budget outlook. It updates a previous analysis that concluded the nuclear modernization plan would cost more than $400 billion between 2017 and 2026.
“If this goes through this will be the biggest increase in U.S. spending for nuclear weapons since the Reagan administration in the early 1980s,” said Stephen Schwartz, a nuclear policy consultant. “It is not penny-wise. It is likely that Congress, the Air Force and the Navy are really going to get spooked by the looming bill. It is not affordable.”
The new budget estimates reinforce the concerns of those who have long insisted the plan is not viable.
Indeed, the new government cost estimate is in line with a one previously published by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif., which estimated that updating the nuclear triad could cost more than $1 trillion over 30 years. That assessment has been widely criticized by advocates of nuclear weapon spending as an exaggeration.
But in actuality the costs could even be higher than even the CBO is now estimating, according to a number of nuclear policy experts.
Tom Collina, director of policy at the nonprofit Ploughshares Fund, which advocates for having fewer nuclear weapons, pointed out that the new report does not take inflation into account. He said the real cost could be more like $1.5 trillion.
“The price of the nuclear arsenal rebuild is skyrocketing and it’s unsustainable,” he said in an interview. “This is now a spending spree.”
In addition, the costs of the nuclear arsenal are almost sure to fluctuate as weapons programs and spending on new facilities and communications systems mature. And they could grow substantially if the Trump administration’s nuclear review results in an even more robust upgrade plan.
“If the forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review by the administration does not scale-back current nuclear weapons spending plans — or worse, accelerates or expands upon them — expenditures on nuclear weapons will endanger other high priority national security programs,” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said in a statement.
“This also only looks at the current plan,” Schwartz added. “If the NPR comes back and it turns out they want a new sea-launched cruise missile or a new warhead or a more bombers, all this stuff goes out the window.”
The CBO report is already being used to try to force a new debate on nuclear needs.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the upgrade plan “nothing more than a budgetary boondoggle” and in a statement urged “cutting unnecessary and destabilizing nuclear weapons systems.”
“There has never been a serious debate in Congress over the comprehensive cost of the nuclear weapons program,” added Schwartz. “We have a golden opportunity. I do not have a great deal of optimism that there are enough people in the Trump administration that are interested in this and looking at this closely.”
But Reif said reality is bound to set in eventually.
“Unless the U.S. government finds a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” he said, “the nuclear weapons spending plan inherited by the Trump administration will pose a crushing affordability problem.”
At least 200 people have been killed at a nuclear test site in North Korea after a tunnel collapsed, according to an unverified Japanese media report.
The collapse is said to have happened during the construction of an underground facility at the Punggye-ri site in northeastern North Korea, the report says.
But there has been no official confirmation of the claims, apparently made by an unnamed North Korean “source”.
According to Japan’s TV Asahi, up to 100 people had been trapped in the tunnels and a further collapse happened during attempts to rescue them, raising the death toll to at least 200.
The collapse is believed to have happened on October 10, but South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, said it was still unclear when the disaster happened.
The network claimed the tunnel collapse the ground around the site was weakened by North Korea’s sixth nuclear test, which was carried out at the same site.
It comes a day after Seoul warned that one more North Korean nuclear detonation could destroy its mountain test site and trigger a radiation leak.
South Korea says any future nuclear test by Kim Jong-Un risks collapsing the location set aside for launching missiles.
Seoul detected several earthquakes near the hermit nation’s nuclear test site in the country’s northeast after its sixth and most powerful bomb explosion in September.
Experts say the quakes suggest the area is now too unstable to conduct more tests there.
South Korea’s weather agency chief Nam Jae-Cheol made the comments Monday during a parliament committee meeting.
Last month US experts issued a similar warning, stating a second nuclear test site in North Korea’s northwest could cave in but that it won’t be abandoned.
Five of Pyongyang’s recent tests have been carried out under Mt Mantap at the Punggye-ri military base, in North Korea’s northwest.
Department of Geology & Geophysics, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, 1680 East-West Road, POST 701, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
Received 18 August 2017, Revised 2 October 2017, Accepted 7 October 2017, Available online 31 October 2017
Abstract
Several reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant suffered damage on March 11, 2011, resulting in the release of radiocesium (134Cs and 137Cs), as well as other radionuclides, into the atmosphere. A week later, these isotopes were detected in aerosols over the state of Hawai’i and in milk samples analyzed on the island of Hawai’i. This study estimated the magnitude of cesium deposition in soil, collected in 2015–2016, resulting from atmospheric fallout. It also examined the patterns of cesium wet deposition with precipitation observed on O’ahu and the island of Hawai’i following the disaster. Fukushima-derived fallout was differentiated from historic nuclear weapons testing fallout by the presence of 134Cs and the assumption that the 134Cs to 137Cs ratio was 1:1. Detectable, Fukushima-derived 134Cs inventories ranged from 30 to 630 Bq m−2 and 137Cs inventories ranged from 20 to 2200 Bq m−2. Fukushima-derived cesium inventories in soils were related to precipitation gradients, particularly in areas where rainfall exceeded 200 mm between March 19 and April 4, 2011. This research confirmed and quantified the presence of Fukushima-derived fallout in the state of Hawai’i in amounts higher than predicted by models and observed in the United States mainland, however the activities detected were an order of magnitude lower than fallout associated with historic sources such as the nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. In addition, this study showed that areas of highest cesium deposition do not overlap with densely populated or agriculturally used areas. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X17306896
I’ve asked radiation specialists to take on this research, but they have never been willing to take this on because they say we don’t have any resources or time to spare because humans are much more important.
This year the evacuated residents of Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture began returning home, and as they resume their lives, the monkeys who have lived there all along have some cautions for them—in the form of medical records.
The Japanese macaques show effects associated with radiation exposure—especially youngsters born since the March 2011 meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, according to a wildlife veterinarian who has studied the population since 2008.
Dr. Shin-ichi Hayama detailed his findings Saturday in Chicago as part of the University of Chicago’s commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the first man-made controlled nuclear reaction, which took place under the university’s football stadium in 1942 and birthed the technologies of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
Hayama appeared alongside documentary filmmaker Masanori Iwasaki, who has featured Hayama’s work in a series of annual documentaries exploring the impact of fallout from the reactor meltdowns on wildlife. The fallout led the Japanese government to evacuate residents from a highly contaminated area surrounding the plant and extending to the northwest. The plume crossed the Pacific Ocean and left much diluted quantities of fallout across the United States, an event closely monitored on this page.
Since 2008, Hayama has studied the bodies of monkeys killed in Fukushima City’s effort to control the monkey population and protect agricultural crops (about 20,000 monkeys are “culled” annually in Japan). Because he was already studying the monkeys, he was ideally positioned to notice changes affected by radiation exposure.
“I’m not a radiation specialist,” Hayama said Saturday in Chicago, “but because I’ve been gathering data since 2008—remember, the disaster took place in 2011—it seems obvious to me that this is very important research. I’ve asked radiation specialists to take on this research, but they have never been willing to take this on because they say we don’t have any resources or time to spare because humans are much more important.
“So I had to conclude that there was no choice but for me to take this on, even though I’m not a specialist in radiation,” Hayama said, his remarks translated by University of Chicago Professor Norma Field. “If we don’t keep records, there will be no evidence and it will be as if nothing happened. That’s why I’m hoping to continue this research and create a record.”
Fukushima City is 50 miles northeast of the Fukushima-Daiichi Power Plant, so the radiation levels have been lower there than in the restricted areas, now reopening, that are closer to the plant. Hayama was unable to test monkeys in the most-contaminated areas, but even 50 miles from the plant, he has documented effects in monkeys that are associated with radiation. He compared his findings to monkeys in the same area before 2011 and to a control population of monkeys in Shimokita Peninsula, 500 miles to the north.
Hayama’s findings have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature. Among his findings:
Smaller Bodies — Japanese monkeys born in the path of fallout from the Fukushima meltdown weigh less for their height than monkeys born in the same area before the March, 2011 disaster, Hayama said.
“We can see that the monkeys born from mothers who were exposed are showing low body weight in relation to their height, so they are smaller,” he said.
Red circles represent the body weight and height (CRL=crown-to-rump length) of monkeys born post-Fukushima. Blue triangles represent monkeys born before.
Smaller Heads And Brains — The exposed monkeys have smaller bodies overall, and their heads and brains are smaller still.
“We know from the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that embryos and fetuses exposed in utero resulted in low birth weight and also in microcephaly, where the brain failed to develop adequately and head size was small, so we are trying to confirm whether this also is happening with the monkeys in Fukushima,” Hayama said.
And it appears that it is:
Blue triangles represent the head size of pre-disaster monkey fetuses relative to their height (CRL=crown-to-rump length). Red circles represent post-disaster monkey fetuses.
Anemia — The monkeys show a reduction in all blood components: red blood cells, white blood cells, hemoglobin, and the cells in bone marrow that produce blood components.
“There’s clearly a depression of blood components in the Fukushima monkeys,” said Hayama. “We can see that in these monkeys, that there is a correlation between white blood cell counts and the radio-cesium concentrations in their muscles. This actually is comparable to what’s been reported with children of Chernobyl.”
Monkeys with higher concentrations of radioactive cesium in their muscles, to the right on the graph, have lower white blood cell counts.
“We have taken these tests from 2012 through 2017, and the levels have not recovered. So we have to say this is not an acute phenomenon. It has become chronic, and we would have to consider radiation exposure as a possible cause,” Hayama said.
Hayama has appeared in several documentaries by Masanori Isawaki, who was 70 years old in 2011 and ready to retire from a thirty-year career making wildlife documentaries—he is best known for his portrait of “Mozu: The Snow Monkey“—when the Fukushima reactors melted down.
“Having turned 70 I thought, I’ve done enough, I can sit back. And then the nuclear disaster struck,” he said, his remarks also translated by Field. “I watched TV shows and read the newspaper for a year and kept asking myself, is there something left in me that I can do? A year later in 2012, with a cameraman and a sound engineer, the three of us just decided: In any case let’s just go to Fukushima, see what’s there.”
Since then he has made five films, one each year, documenting radiation impacts on wildlife, grouping them under the title “Fukushima: A Record of Living Things.” Two episodes were screened Saturday in Chicago, their first screenings in the United States.
At first Iwasaki documented white spots and deformed tails on the reduced number of barn swallows who survived after the disaster.
“It’s something we haven’t seen anywhere else but Chernobyl and Fukushima,” says the narrator of Iwasaki’s 2013 film, “so it’s clearly related to radiation. It probably doesn’t hurt the bird to have some white feathers, but it’s a marker of exposure to radiation.
“The barn swallows in Fukushima are responding in the same way as what we’ve seen in Chernobyl. The young birds are not surviving. They are not fledging very well.”
The white spots also turned up on black cows. Some types of marine snails vanished, then gradually returned. Fir trees stemmed differently, and the flower stalks of some dandelions grew thick and deformed. Dandelion stalks are a favorite food of Japanese monkeys, but the monkeys showed no obvious deformities, so Isawaki turned to Hayama to find out how radiation was affecting them.
Tokyo, 4 October 2017 – Japan’s nuclear regulator today granted preliminary safety approval for two Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reactors at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant despite widespread public opposition. These are the first TEPCO reactors to receive approval since the nuclear disaster at the TEPCO operated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
“The NRA’s decision to grant approval to TEPCO’s reactors is reckless. It’s the same disregard for nuclear risks that resulted in TEPCO’s 2011 triple reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi site,” said Shaun Burnie, Senior Nuclear Specialist with of Greenpeace Germany. “Approving the safety of reactors at the world’s largest nuclear plant, when it is at extreme risk from major earthquakes completely exposes the weakness of Japan’s nuclear regulator,” said Burnie.
Twenty-three seismic fault lines run through the TEPCO site, located in Niigata prefecture. The utility admitted earlier this year that due to the soft sand under the site, areas of the plant are vulnerable to soil liquefaction.[1]
Despite the NRA decision to grant TEPCO this preliminary safety approval, there is no prospect for the Kashiwazaki Kariwa 6 and 7 reactors to restart in the near future. Such a restart is opposed by the Niigata Governor and a majority of the citizens of the prefecture. The Governor launched a new technical investigation into the causes and impact of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster this summer. He will not decide on whether to approve restart until the assessment is completed in 2020.
In addition, a citizen-led lawsuit against the restart of the Kashiwazaki reactors is currently underway in the Niigata courts, centered on the seismic risks at the site.[2]
“This attempt to restart reactors at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa site is a last-ditch effort to save TEPCO’s nuclear business. Powerful political and public opposition remains and means that these reactors will not restart for at least the next several years. TEPCO should abandon its futile efforts to restart seismically vulnerable reactors and instead focus on dealing with the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi,” said Hisayo Takada, Energy Project Lead of Greenpeace Japan.
In July, the NRA had warned TEPCO that it would not approve a safety review for the two reactors unless the utility takes a more active and responsible approach to the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi. This decision to grant preliminary approval flies in the face of that warning and exposes the regulator as a paper tiger. Since July 2017, TEPCO has made no major progress at the crippled Fukushima site. It still does not know where hundreds of tonnes of molten reactor fuel is located, continues to have a radioactive water crisis at the site, and has no credible plan for decommissioning.
Meanwhile, the costs for its ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi continue to climb. An estimate from a Tokyo economics think tank earlier this year warned that the cost of decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant, plus decontamination and compensation, could range between 50-70 trillion yen (US$449-628 billion).[3]
Currently there are four reactors operating in Japan.
[ENDS]
Notes to editors:
[1] For background analysis of the technical, financial, and political obstacles to operating the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant see “TEPCO’S Atomic Illusion”, June 2017, Greenpeace Japan
“The current solar cycle has been an odd one, with less activity than usual during the peak, and now we have this large event as we’re approaching solar minimum,”
Mars was hit by an unexpected blast from the sun in September, doubling radiation levels on the surface and causing an incredibly bright aurora over the planet.
The “solar event” took place on September 11, and was observed by Nasa’s missions in orbit and on Mars’ surface.
“Nasa’s distributed set of science missions is in the right place to detect activity on the sun and examine the effects of such solar events at Mars as never possible before,” said Elsayed Talaat, program scientist for NASA’s Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission.
The aurora was more than 25 times brighter than any previously observed by MAVEN, which has been studying the Martian atmosphere’s interaction with the solar wind since 2014.
The strong solar blast also more than doubled radiation levels on the Red Planet’s surface, according to readings by Nasa’s on-the-ground mission, the Curiosity rover.
Another “strange” element of the phenomenon, according to Nasa, was that the unseasonable blast occurred during a usually-quiet period within the sun’s 11-year sunspot and storm-activity cycle.
“The current solar cycle has been an odd one, with less activity than usual during the peak, and now we have this large event as we’re approaching solar minimum,” said Sonal Jain a member of MAVEN’s Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument team.
The blast was so strong that readings remained high on the surface for more than two days and was big enough to be detected from Earth – even though we sit on the opposite side of the sun from Mars.
“This is exactly the type of event both missions were designed to study, and it’s the biggest we’ve seen on the surface so far,” said RAD Principal Investigator Don Hassler.
“It will improve our understanding of how such solar events affect the Martian environment, from the top of the atmosphere all the way down to the surface,” Hassler added.
The increase in forest fires, seen this summer from North America to the Mediterranean to Siberia, is directly linked to climate change, scientists say. And as the world continues to warm, there will be greater risk for fires on nearly every continent.
On a single hot, dry day this summer, an astonishing 140 wildfires leapt to life across British Columbia. “Friday, July 7 was just crazy,” says Mike Flannigan, director of the wildland fire partnership at the University of Alberta. A state of emergency was declared. By the end of summer, more than 1,000 fires had been triggered across the Canadian province, burning a record nearly 3 million acres of forest—nearly 10 times the average in British Columbia over the last decade. As the fires got bigger and hotter, even aerial attacks became useless. “It’s like spitting on a campfire,” says Flannigan. “It doesn’t do much other than making a pretty picture for the newspapers.”
Forest fires are natural. But the number and extent of the fires being seen today are not. These fires are man-made, or at least man-worsened.
“Evidence is becoming more and more overwhelming,” says Flannigan, that climate change is spreading fires around the world. Globally, the length of the fire weather season increased by nearly 19 percent between 1978 and 2013, thanks to longer seasons of warm, dry weather in one-quarter of the planet’s forests. In the western United States, for example, the wildfire season has grown from five months in the 1970s to seven months today.
The number-crunching now shows an increased risk for fire on nearly every continent, says Flannigan, though most of the work has focused on North America, where there is a larger pot of funding for such research. In the western U.S., where fires ravaged Oregon this summer, the annual burned area has, on average, gone from less than 250,000 acres in 1985 to more than 1.2 million acres in 2015; human-caused climate change has been blamed for doubling the total area burned over that time.
Similarly, for fire-ravaged British Columbia, an analysis from this July estimates that climate change has made extreme fire events in western Canada 1.5-6 times more likely.
So how much worse are things set to get?
Pinning any specific environmental event on climate change is a tricky business, though the science of weather attribution has grown in leaps and bounds over the past decades. Individual wildfires are still near the bottom of the list of things that can easily be pegged to a changing climate, thanks to all the other factors in the mix. If people break up forests into smaller chunks through logging or agriculture, that can limit the spread of forest fires; on the other hand, some trees burn faster than others (younger trees are greener, so burn slower), and shrubs under a tree canopy can make fire more intense. A particularly rainy year can paradoxically increase fire risk if the rain comes in springtime, by boosting the volume of vegetation available to burn later in the season. Natural weather patterns like El Niño can have a dramatic effect on precipitation, and so on fire.
“If we have higher temps, we have a greater probability of fire starting, fire spreading, and fire intensifying.”
Fire management is also a big contributor, leading to some surprising trends in the world’s total burn area. Globally, wildfires actually decreased by about 7 percent over the first half of the 20th century, probably due to increased efforts in places like the U.S. to stamp them out (though fires have gone up since the 1960s in the western U.S., the burned area there was actually just as bad in the early 1900s, before fire-fighting efforts kicked into high gear). The last half of the 20th century saw that global trend reverse, with the area burned bumping up by 10 percent, thanks in part to an increase of fires set in the tropics to clear land. The past 18 years saw burned area decline again, by nearly 25 percent, largely due to agriculture taking over fire-prone grasslands in areas like the African savanna.
All that makes it hard to pin down why any one given fire happened, or even why any one region might be seeing more fire, though a handful of such attributionstudies have been done. Nevertheless, there is still a clear link between general climate trends — in particular warming temperatures — and an increased risk for fire. “If we have higher temps, we have a greater probability of fire starting, fire spreading, and fire intensifying. That’s basic physics,” says Stefan Doerr, a geographer at Swansea University in Wales and a chief editor of the International Journal of Wildland Fire. Warm air holds more water. So as air temperatures climb, the thirsty air sucks more moisture out of vegetation, making it better firewood. Warmer temperatures also lead to more lightning, which sparks some destructive wildfires — each degree of warming is thought to increase strikes by about 12 percent. Earlier snowmelts make fire seasons longer. And a warmer world is a windier world, bringing the potential to further fan flames.
British Columbia had more than 1,000 wildfires this summer, including this one in the Cariboo region. B.C. Wildfire Service
Though climate change might also bring more rain to some areas, you need a lot of water to offset the impact of temperature: In Canada, one study shows, you need about 15 percent more rain to offset the increased fire risk from a 1-degree Celsius rise in heat. Climate models call for something on the order of a 10 percent increase in rain alongside 1 degree of warming in Canada — not enough to counteract the drying effect.
Last year, John Abatzoglou of the University of Idaho published a paper showing that human-caused warming since the 1970s has been responsible for about half of the increased dryness of western U.S. forests over the last 30 years. And the drier it was, the more forest burned. “It’s a complicated issue,” says Abatzoglou. “But the way we see it, how dry fuels are explains about three-quarters of year-to-year variability [in fires].” By the train of logic followed by Abatzoglou and his colleagues, climate change is to blame for doubling the area that burned in the western U.S. between 1984-2015, adding an extra 10 million acres of charred trees.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report, in 2014, could only pin down strong evidence of major impacts on forest fires due to climate change in three areas: Alaska, some parts of the Mediterranean, and eastern Africa. But that was a few years ago and, fire researchers argue, it was a conservative view even at the time.
The effects of warming temperatures on fire are being felt widely. Even Greenland has had a significant number of fires this year.
Today, researchers agree the effects of warming temperatures on fire are being felt widely. Even Greenland has had a significant number of fires this year, notes Flannigan, who ticks off the many areas where climate change is having, or will have, an impact: “Alaska and all boreal Canada is already seeing change, and it’s going to continue. Western U.S., for sure. Southeastern U.S., maybe. Mediterranean, yes. Scandinavia, possibly. Sweden had a big fire in 2014 that really blew them away. Chile had the worse fire season on record by far. Australia, definitely. China, in the northern areas, yes.”
Siberia is seeing its worst fires in 10,000 years, probably due to extreme temperature rises in that region. Interestingly, the new climate and all this fire looks set to change the types of trees growing in the Siberian landscape, to more fire-resistant species like deciduous conifer larch; researchers think fires there may actually level out.
Australia, which has had horrific wildfires in recent years, added a new category at the upper end of its fire risk scale in 2009: “catastrophic.” But so far, scientists say, it is difficult to say if, or how much, climate change is responsible for that. The fire risk in Australia is very strongly affected by natural climate patterns like El Niño, and populations are moving into higher risk areas. “Human interaction is probably more important than climate change,” says Doerr. Nevertheless, climate change is expected to bring warmer, drier weather to some parts of Australia, extending the fire season and increasing the number of days where risk is particularly high.
While it’s clear that a warmed world will likely be a more fiery one, the specifics are hard to pin down. In general, global climate models show a patchy map of future fire risk, with the areas of increased risk outweighing areas with a decreased chance of fire. The areas of increased hazard are scattered widely across the high latitudes, like Alaska, where changing climate tends to boost vegetation growth. Areas of decreased risk are mainly in the tropics, where rainforests, for example, might see more rain. One 2008 study predicted that the area burned across Alaska and Canada might increase 3.5–5.5 times over 1990 levels by 2100.
The increased risk for fires means we need to change how we manage them, argue Doerr and others. Since World War II, North America has largely been focused on fighting a war on wildfire, military-style. In the U.S., a 2016 paper reports, aggressive fire suppression policies mean that only 0.4% of wildfires are allowed to burn; the rest are tackled by firefighters. But the strategy of putting out every fire only works when there are fewer fires, and when they happen in cooler, wetter years. Pumping ever-more money into firefighting tends to have only a small effect: one Canadian study showed that to meet a 15 percent increase in fire load, officials would have to more than double their firefighting budgets.
More fires mean more carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere and more smoke, with its attendant health problems.
One alternative is to allow more fire on the landscape, to eat up the excess fuel and fragment the forests into smaller burnable chunks. When you get more than 100 fires lit in a single day, as happened in British Columbia on July 7, there is no option but to do triage and assess which fires to attack and which to leave: “There was no way they had enough crews for them all, so they had to choose,” says Flannigan. But that’s what they should be doing all the time, he adds, using better models to predict fire growth and assess each fire’s potential to harm valuable assets like watersheds and buildings. Flannigan is working to build artificial intelligence algorithms that can better predict the hot, dry, windy days that are particularly conducive to fire spread. “Allowing more fire on the landscape is good,” says Flannigan, so long as there are the resources and warning systems to attack the threatening ones.
Other sensible options include restricting the type of vegetation planted near urban areas, and using prescribed burning and logging to intentionally break up the landscape. But integrating all the different jurisdictions and companies involved with land management is a big task that’s easier said than done, researchers note. The 1988 fire that burned half of Yellowstone National Park, Flannigan says, did a lot to help shift attitudes about fire from seeing it as evil to natural: Scientists used it as a springboard to talk about fire’s healthy and rejuvenating effects on a landscape. But official policies did not change much, and there’s still a long way to go in shifting opinions, he says.
Whatever actions are taken, in the face of climate change we will have to accept the idea of more fire in our lives. That means more carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere as trees and vegetation burn; more smoke, with its attendant health problems from pneumonia to heart disease; more fire retardant chemicals in our landscape and watersheds; more poisons like mercury spread from peatland and forest fires; and more black particulates darkening the planet’s ice caps.
“We do expect to see more years like this one,” warns Abatzoglou.
Radioactive mushrooms in Japan article deleted #safecast【rough translation】
720 bq per kg of nuclear substance has been detected in mushrooms sold at a farmers market in Nasu Shiobara City in Tochigi Prefecture. That figure is over seven times higher than the government’s standard. It came to light through an individual inspection. The market has been recalling the products and alerting customers not to consume them.
Radioactive substance from mushroom of direct sales place
08/25/17
Radioactive substances exceeding the standards of the country were detected from the mushrooms sold at agricultural products direct sales place in Nasushiobara city, Tochigi prefecture, and the direct sales office calls for voluntary collection and refrain from eating.
According to Nasushiobara city, Tochigi prefecture, from the person who bought “mushroom mushroom” sold this month at “Susumu no Tomo Direct Distribution Center” in the city’s agricultural products direct store ” There were contacts with the city that more radioactive substances were detected. ”
According to the city’s investigation, 720 Becquerels of radioactive substance per kilogram exceeding the national standard was detected from “Chichitake”.
“Tichitake” was collected outside the prefecture by men in the city and brought them to the direct sales department, and 134 packs were sold from the 8th to the 22nd of this month, about 21 kilos in total, so the place where the city was sampled etc. I am examining.
At the direct sales office, we voluntarily collect and recall that those who bought it want to report before eating.
For inquiries about “Chizitake” this time, we accept “Susumu no Tomo Direct sales center”, telephone number 0287-37-7768.
It might be noted also that the upcoming 2020 Olympics will put a strain on the planned cleanup of domestic and public areas and mean that it will be likely to put back any possible clean up plans for the forested areas. Also, as soil sampling has not generally been effective, will there be a threat to Olympic tourists and athletes who might venture into these largely unmapped and untested areas? https://nuclear-news.net/2017/07/27/fukushima-radioactive-mushrooms-report-details-concerns-to-olympic-tourists-and-athletes/
Everyone should be careful and aware that radiation contaminated food is being distributed anywhere in Japan, not only in Fukushima Prefecture.To know the exact measure, becquerels level in each food to be consumed is becoming vital so as to not be harmed internally, knowing that radiation exposure internally is much more harmful than external exposure : at least 100 times more harmful. https://nuclear-news.net/2016/06/15/the-spread-of-radiation-internal-contamination-thru-fresh-produce-in-japan/
A public relations facility here that was set up to publicize the safety of the Ikata nuclear power plant operated by Shikoku Electric Power Co. still insists that nuclear plants can withstand a tsunami of any height.
Like the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant that went into triple meltdown, the Ikata facility faces the coast. A magnitude-9.0 earthquake on March 11, 2011, triggered tsunami that put the Fukushima facility out of action.
More than six years after that catastrophic event, the Ehime prefectural government is finally moving to revise the information designed to ease fears about a nuclear accident.
The contents on display will be updated before the end of the fiscal year because, as one prefectural government official put it, “Some of the information does not square with the current situation.”
The facility is located in the Minatoura district of Ikata about four kilometers east of the Ikata nuclear plant. It was established in 1982 by Ehime prefectural authorities to remove concerns the public may have about nuclear power generation.
It is operated by an organization that survives on funding from Shikoku Electric, the Ehime prefectural government and the Ikata town government.
In the last fiscal year, the facility had 1,761 visitors, including elementary school students who live nearby.
Near the entrance to the facility is a touch-panel screen where visitors can learn about nuclear power plants in a quiz format.
One question asks, “What would happen to a nuclear power plant if a large earthquake should strike?”
The three alternatives to choose from are: 1) Continue to generate power; 2) The reactor automatically stops to prevent any form of accident; and 3) It would be destroyed if a large earthquake struck.
The second choice is considered the correct answer.
The monitor also offers this reassurance: “(The nuclear plant) is a sturdy building that would not budge an inch in an earthquake, typhoon or tsunami.”
Another entry states that “it was designed with the largest possible quake in mind.”
Another question asks, “Would a nuclear power plant explode like a nuclear bomb?”
Again, there are three choices: 1) It would explode if used in a wrong way; 2) It would never explode; and 3) Nuclear reactors might explode once it ages.
The correct answer is again the second choice.
In fact, after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 plant were severely damaged by hydrogen explosions caused by core meltdowns after cooling functions were lost when power to the plant was lost.
About a year ago, facility operators have attached a sign to the touch-panel screen that says, “We are in the process of preparing a revision because some of the wording differs from the current situation.”
However, no explanation is offered to show what sections differ from reality.
A prefectural government official in charge of nuclear power safety measures said, “There is some accurate information so we decided it was preferable that some of it was viewed.”
But, the official added that the display would be revised along with improvements in other equipment. The cost of about 500,000 yen ($4,400) would be paid for from tax subsidies obtained through laws covering power generation.
After the Fukushima nuclear accident, a new display was added to show the safety measures being taken at the Ikata plant. There is also a video shown at the facility which explains there has been no noticeable spike in cancer rates or hereditary illness caused by radiation levels under 100 millisieverts.
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