Creusot: 5 EDF reactors still without ASN green light. Five nuclear
reactors are still waiting for an operating license from the Nuclear Safety
Authority (ASN) as part of the investigation of the manufacturing records
of the Creusot plant, while the other 53 have already received fire green,
Creusot’s spokesperson said .
“We are still waiting for elements of answers from EDF,” she said to explain the delay of the
investigation which was to end on December 31, 2018. The five reactors
concerned are Cattenom 4 (1,300 MW ), Fessenheim 1 (880 MW), Flamanville 2
(1,330 MW), Golfech 1 (1,310 MW) and Tricastin 2 (915 MW). All five
reactors will be shut down for maintenance in the coming weeks, as follows:
Cattenom 4 (January 19th to April 11th), Fessenheim 1 (January 19th to
March 20th), Flamanville 2 (January 10th to July 10), Golfech 1 (February
16 to March 23) and Tricastin 2 (January 26 to April 1). The reactors will
not be able to restart without prior approval from ASN.
Photo shows venting radioactivity from 1987 nuclear bomb tests at Novaya Zemlya https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/01/photo-shows-venting-radioactivity-nuclear-bomb-tests-novaya-zemlya
It is two hours past midnight on August 2nd 1987 when the Soviet nuclear weapons scientists push the button triggering a series of five nuclear devises inside a tunnel at the Matochkin Shar nuclear testing site.
A load boom follows and the ground is shaking like an earthquake. A huge dust cloud blows out from the tunnel supposed to be hermetical sealed by meters thick stone- and concrete walls.
The radioactive dust cloud came as a big surprise to the personnel witnessing.
Now, more than 30 years later, a photo from the accident is published by Russian blogger who focuses on nuclear thematic and also posts photos on twitter.
Leakage of radioactivity from the August tests in 1987 is known from before, listed in a 2005 publication by Science and Global Security. Now, the photo from the site gives the public a better understanding of the size of tunnel collapse.
The photo is taken no more than a kilometer from the tunnel entrance and shows a military helicopter parked in in front. Each of the tunnels in the area where underground nuclear weapons testing took place from 1964 to 1990 has its own code number. The one collapsing on this photo is known as tunnel A-37A.
According to a list of all underground nuclear weapons tests at Novaya Zemlya, published by Science and Global Security, the total yield of the five devises exploded on August 2nd were 150 KT, ten times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
The leakages of radioactivity was estimated to 56 TBq. The gamma radiation near the entrance to the tunnel was measured to more than 500 R/h. First radioactive gases were detected 90 seconds after the blast.
500 R/h is about 1000 times the annual dose for an average human. Exposed directly, such dose could be lethal within an hour or two.
In the book USSR Nuclear Explosions about the northern test site at Novaya Zemlya, published in 1991, a group of Soviet radiation experts writes about the accident. «A powerful burst of a radioactive gas-jet.stream occurred just above the mouth of the adit, just 1,5 minutes after the explosion. It was later established that gas penetrated along a geologic fault that extended along the adit axis and hot gases melted the surface ice.»
The authors describe how an emergency program was immediately instituted evacuating all staff within a period of a few minutes. No cases of radiation sickness occurred amon the test site personnel at Novaya Zemlya.
Mountian Moiseev, where the nuclear weapons tests took place, is located about 10 kilometers south of Severny, the military settlement on the shores of the Matochkin Shar serving as the centre for the nuclear test site.
The last real nuclear weapon test at Novaya Zemlya took place on October 24th 1990. Today, only subcritical nuclear weapon tests are conducted on the Russian Arctic archipelago.
NRC officials say the company made changes after discovering a loose “bolt” last March at the San Onofre nuclear power plant in California. The small threaded posts connect to the bottom of shims in the canister of the cask to create space between multiple aluminum shims and the bottom of the canister to keep the basket stabilized in each of the casks.
The nuclear watchdog group’s technical adviser, Raymond Shadis, along with and board member Clay Turnbull, plan to monitor and offer comments on the canisters.
The coalition twice intervened before Vermont’s public utilities commission on using the Holtec steel canister-in-a-concrete-cask design at the Vernon plant, where 58 spent-fuel casks are now in place awaiting eventual transfer to a federal repository. It says its involvement helped result in more frequent radiation and temperature reporting, more conservative cask spacing, a protective line-of-site barrier wall and prohibition of using corrosive de-icing salts.
The coalition, which has repeatedly advocated for partially buried cask or earthen berm protection for the shuttered Vermont plant’s spent fuel, also commented on a previous Holtec design change, which it says resulted in a more in-depth NRC staff safety analysis.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said Holtec altered the cask design without a written evaluation, violating federal safety regulations.
Ferret 9th Jan 2019 Pressure is mounting to keep two nuclear power reactors at Hunterston in
Dounreay nuclear site closed due to high winds https://www.energyvoice.com/otherenergy/nuclear/190151/dounreay-nuclear-site-closed-due-to-high-winds/ David McPhee, 7 Jan 19The Dounreay nuclear site has been closed due to extremely high winds, according to a spokeswoman.
The site was officially closed at 1pm after the bosses took advice from the Met Office.
All 1,200 staff have been evacuated after winds had battered the nuclear site for a couple of hours.
A spokeswoman for Dounreay Site Restoration (DSRL) said “the safety of staff was paramount”, adding that DSRL “take their lead from the Met Office, resulting in us officially closing the site at 1pm this afternoon.”
DSRL are decommissioning the site at a cost of £2.32 billion. – 07/01/2019
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Nuclear patrol submarine returns to base with ‘unusual’ amount of damage, Telegraph UK defence correspondent, 6 JANUARY 2019 One of Britain’s nuclear deterrent submarines has suffered an “unusual” amount of damage as pictures emerge of HMS Vengeance returning from patrol with around 30 per cent of her sonar panels missing.
The ballistic missile submarine returned last week from her latest three-month patrol. As the nuclear-armed vessel surfaced near the Faslane naval base on the Clyde it was obvious the expected level of wear and tear had been exceeded by up to three times the usual amount.Britain’s ballistic missile submarines are covered with sonar panels – specially designed acoustic shields to mask any sound from inside the submarine and absorb the sound waves of an active sonar emitted by another vessel looking…(subscribers only) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/06/nuclear-patrol-submarine-suffers-unusual-amount-damage-government/ |
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Peach Bottom nuclear plant issued violation notice, will come under closer scrutiny from regulators https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/peach-bottom-nuclear-plant-issued-violation-notice-will-come-under/article_a147a194-105e-11e9-8b99-a32817bc8be2.htmlAD CRABLE | Staff Writer, Jan 4, 2019
It’s a law – Russian Arctic shipping to be regulated by Rosatom https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2019/01/its-law-russian-arctic-shipping-be-regulated-rosatom
President Putin signs the bill that makes the country’s state nuclear power company top regulator of the Northern Sea Route.By Atle Staalesen, January 02, 2019
Rosatom has officially been granted the leading role in the development of the vast Russian Arctic. The company that employs more than 250,000 people and engages in a multitude of activities related to nuclear power development and production is now formally Russia’s management authority for the Northern Sea Route.
The law was adopted by the State Duma on the 11th December and on the 28th signed by Vladimir Putin.
The new legislation comes as Russian Arctic shipping is on rapid increase. In 2018, about 18 million tons of goods was transported on the sea route, an increase of almost 70 percent from 2017. And more is to come. According to Vladimir Putin so-called May Decrees, the top national priorities, shipping on the Northern Sea Route is to reach 80 million tons already by year 2024.
Rosatom’s new powers in the Arctic include development and operational responsibilities for shipping, as well as infrastructure and sea ports along the northern Russian coast.
The responsibilities of the Northern Sea Route Administration, that until now has operated under the Ministry of Transport, will now be transferred to Rosatom.
It was Putin himself who in early 2017 made clear that a coordinating government agency for the Northern Sea Route was needed. A battle between Rosatom and the Ministry of Transport followed. In December 2017, it became clear that the nuclear power company had won that fight.
A central person in the new structure will be Vyacheslav Ruksha, the former leader of nuclear icebreaker base Atomflot.
The nuclear power company has since 2008 operated the fleet of nuclear-power icebreakers. Currently, five icebreakers are based in Atomflot, Murmansk, and several more ships are under construction, including four powerful LK-60 vessels.
Rosatom is also in the planning process of the «Lider», the 120 MW capacity super-powerful ship that can break through two meter thick ice at an unprecedented 10-12 knot speed.
September 2017 nuclear test triggers 2019 earthquake in North Korea https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/01/asia/north-korea-earthquake-intl/index.html, By Jake Kwon and Joshua Berlinger, CNN January 2, 2019 North Korea’s sixth nuclear test was so powerful that it’s still triggering earthquakes more than a year later.
Regulators File Complaint Against Maker Of Nuclear Fuel Cask https://www.wamc.org/post/regulators-file-complaint-against-maker-nuclear-fuel-cask By PAT BRADLEY • DEC 29, 2018 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has filed a complaint against the manufacturer of casks used at the closed Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan tells the Brattleboro Reformer that Holtec International adopted a new design for its steel and concrete casks without a written evaluation, violating federal safety regulations. Officials say the company made changes after it discovered a loose bolt at San Onofre nuclear power plant in California.
Holtec said Friday that the NRC has confirmed the safety of the canisters. It says it doesn’t agree with the severity level of the apparent violation.
The casks are used at other nuclear plants to store spent fuel.
Last month, regulators approved the sale of Vermont Yankee to NorthStar. The company plans to start decommissioning the plant no later than 2021.
Controversial nuclear reactor goes live in southern China
Reactor at Taishan Plant goes online, after five years of delays, debate and controversies about safety and other issues
The plant is in China’s southern Guangdong province, an economic dynamo whose annual gross domestic product is now on par with that of Russia and South Korea. The province has been intent on harnessing nuclear power to feed more electricity into its grid for its sprawling cities and manufacturing clusters.
Four nuclear plants along Guangdong’s coastline are already up and running and now a colossal new reactor at the Taishan Power Plant quietly went online last week. The plant has been plagued by bickering between technicians and Chinese officials as well as their French counterparts concerning safety and contingency measures, controversies that resulted in a five-year delay.
A joint venture by the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Corp (CGN) and Électricité de France, the Taishan plant is a mere 130 kilometers west of Hong Kong. It is home to the world’s first operational reactor of the novel third-generation European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) configuration, arguably the world’s largest electrical generator as measured by nameplate capacity……
Meanwhile, France’s Flamanville EPR project is still years behind its original commission target, the same as another plant in Finland.
Xinhua notes that the generator stator – the stationary part of a rotary system – at the Taishan reactor weighs almost 500 tonnes, and its double layer concrete dome is said to be strong enough to withstand a direct hit by a plane and can contain the fallout in a Chernobyl-like scenario, with improvements also made in light of the 2011 Fukushima incident.
CGN admitted that the Taishan reactor was “challenging to construct.” Environmentalists were also fuming at the elusive nature of the plant’s planning and project supervision, amid widespread skepticism about its safety and system redundancy.
Many opposed to the new EPR design demanded that the new reactor remain off the grid before every part could be checked by a third party, to which CGN and China’s National Energy Administration never acceded.
In 2015, France’s Nuclear Safety Authority admitted there were safety concerns about an EPR being built in Flamanville. The watchdog also warned that Taishan, which shared the same design and whose pressure vessels were procured from the same supplier, could also suffer from the same safety issues.
There were also reports alleging that the Taishan rector “did not receive the latest safety tests before installation,” as the French manufacturer said its tests detected faults that could lead to cracks in the reactor shell.
In December 2017, Hong Kong media blew the lid on a cover-up involving a cracked boiler found during test runs.
But CGN insisted that all design and quality issues had been ironed out throughout the years of delays and the pair of reactors in Taishan were indeed safer than the old units at the Daya Bay Plant built in Shenzhen in the late 1980s.
The Daya Bay project once triggered a massive outcry in Hong Kong when many rallied and petitioned against having a nuclear plant on the city’s doorstep. http://www.atimes.com/article/controversial-nuclear-reactor-goes-live-in-southern-china/
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Grand Gulf nuclear power plant troubles ‘happening far too often,’ Mississippi official says, Clarion Ledger
Operators took the southwest Mississippi plant offline last week, citing problems with a turbine bypass valve. Last Wednesday’s outage came to light Tuesday when the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced a special inspection. “The reactor was safely shut down but some equipment issues occurred that the agency wants to better understand,” the agency said in a statement. It’s at least the sixth unplanned decrease in output at the plant in the last 15 months, according to NRC documents. The plant has been running at reduced or zero power output for much of the time since 2016, according to an analysis published earlier this month by E&E News ……. The plant’s troubles come as President Donald Trump continues to support plans to subsidize nuclear power generation for reliability purposes. ……. Beyond questions of safety, the absence of Grand Gulf’s 1,443-megawatt capacity can stress power supplies and may cause higher prices across Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and southeastern Texas, a region that includes not only New Orleans-based Entergy’s utilities, but cooperatives and private utility Cleco of Pineville, Louisiana……. Entergy spent hundreds of millions to increase the plant’s generating capacity in 2012, setting it up to be a cornerstone of low-cost generation in the region for decades, especially after winning a 20-year extension of the plant’s license from the NRC through 2044. But when it’s down, utilities have to buy power from other plants in the MISO region……..https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2018/12/19/grand-gulf-nuclear-power-plant-outage-safety-reliability-ms-entergy/2361876002/ |
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Explosive Accidents: The Lost Nuclear Arsenal at the Bottom of the Sea https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/09/03/nuclear-arsenal/?fbclid=IwAR1dPU13kVGGrYK–PFmFciWyMO28xaa1nU7OFMlC7UfuQwjMFh4
Sep 3, 2018 Ian Harvey In July of 2018, Andrew Thaler wrote for Southern Fried Science that there were at least two nuclear capsules, four unarmed weapons, and one armed nuclear weapon sitting on the ocean floor, that he was aware of.
His information was based on declassified U.S. Department of Defense narrative summaries of accidents involving U.S. nuclear weapons.
He noted that the documents he had access to only covered the period of time between 1950 and 1980. Any more recent data would still be classified. There is reason to believe that his estimated numbers for nuclear material in the oceans are far too low.
Business Insider in 2013 wrote that since 1950 there have been 32 nuclear weapon accidents, known as Broken Arrows, where an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons resulted in the firing, launching, theft, or loss of said weapon.
BI reported in this piece that there were six nuclear weapons that have been lost and never recovered. The time frames for the BI list continued into the 2000’s, but this is also a lowball number.
According to a 1989 article in the New York Times, however, there have been at least 50 nuclear warheads and nine reactors scattered on the ocean floors since 1956.
These were the result of various accidents on the part of U.S. and Soviet bombers, ships, and rockets, according to a study of naval accidents that was published by Greenpeace and the Institute for Policy Studies.
The study outlines 1,276 accidents, both nuclear and non-nuclear, on the part of the world’s navies, and has some, more limited, information on another 1,000 accidents. The study points out that the total number of incidents amounts to one major peacetime accident a week
Information for the study was gathered mostly through the Freedom of Information Act, which included American intelligence assessments of Soviet naval accidents.
Eighty days after it fell into the ocean following the January 1966 midair collision between a nuclear-armed B-52G bomber and a KC-135 refueling tanker over Palomares, Spain, this B28RI nuclear bomb was recovered from 2,850 feet (869 meters) of water and lifted aboard the USS Petrel (note the missing tail fins and badly dented “false nose”).
The authors also received information from the governments of other nations. The report said that the worst accident occurred in 1986, when a Soviet submarine sank 600 miles northeast of the Bermuda coast, depositing two nuclear reactors and 32 nuclear warheads on the bottom of the ocean.
That one accident left more nuclear material under the sea than the authors of the first two pieces posited, combined. The study also notes that it doesn’t reflect data on any of the “many hundreds” of Soviet accidents about which little is known, and suggested that the Soviet Navy has far more accidents than those of America.
The accidents are, for the most part, due to human factors, ranging from issues of faulty navigation to outright sabotage.
So far, the U.S. has admitted to knowing of one hydrogen bomb that is leaking radioactive material. That bomb was accidentally dropped into the sea south of Japan in 1965 by an aircraft carrier.
Read another story from us: The Missing Nuclear Weapons Lost Off The Coast Of Bermuda
There is some likelihood that other bombs may have also begun to leak radiation into the water, and are just unknown as yet. Even if it hasn’t happened yet, the chances of such leaks will increase over time as the weapons degrade, having the potential to cause untold harm to the oceans and our planet as a whole.
Sortir du Nucleaire 6th Dec 2018 , An explosion followed by a major fire took place on 6 December 2018 at the
Advanced Nuclear Fuels plant in Lingen (Lower Saxony). This plant, located
near the Emsland nuclear reactor in northwestern Germany, is owned by
Framatome. Nuclear fuel elements are manufactured and sent to several
countries, including France. As a spokesman for the plant later confirmed
to the media Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the fire broke out in the laboratory
of a manufacturing workshop , where the quality of the uranium is tested
before shipment. This laboratory is located in the nuclear part of the
facility. Although quickly controlled, the fire required the intervention
of 150 firefighters from the area. The staff was evacuated. Since then, the
plant has been idling.
https://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/Allemagne-Lingen-Explosion-et-incendie-dans-l-usine-Framatome-de-fabrication-de-combustible-nucleaire1
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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