French energy group EDF says it is reviewing the start-up schedule and costs of its flagship Flamanville nuclear project after the regulator said it would have to fix faulty weldings, which have already delayed the project.
ASN, the nuclear watchdog, said on Wednesday that nuclear-focused EDF needs to repair eight of the joins at Flamanville in northern France.
“EDF is currently analysing the impact of this decision on the Flamanville EPR [nuclear reactor] schedule and cost, and, in the upcoming weeks, it will give a detailed update on the next steps in the project,” said the company in a statement on Thursday.
“This is negative news but it does not come as a surprise,” said analysts at Société Générale, since EDF had already flagged the likelihood of a delay. EDF’s shares fell 1.8 per cent by midday in Paris. The ASN said in October that the weldings were being reviewed. While, in July, EDF said there would be further delays and cost overruns due to problems with the connections. It pushed back the loading of nuclear fuel and the target construction costs at the late and over-budget plant.
EDF had said the loading of nuclear fuel was scheduled for the end of 2019 with commercial activity starting in 2020 and costs revised up again from €10.5bn to €10.9bn. Initially, Flamanville was expected to cost €3.3bn and start operations in 2012. ASN suggested in its communication to EDF that the plant would not be operational before 2022.
The Flamanville plant in France is one of three being built in Europe using the next-generation European Pressurised Reactor technology. The other two projects are the Olkiluoto project in Finland, which is more than a decade late, and the UK’s Hinkley Point, which is mired in controversy over the high cost of the project.
More broadly, EDF is expected to brief trade unions on Thursday about plans to reorganise the company. The plan, codenamed Hercules, say people familiar with the matter, would involve a holding company 100 per cent-owned by the state and two subsidiaries sitting beneath it. EDF Bleu, or EDF Blue, would house all nuclear and hydroelectric assets and EDF Vert, or EDF Green, would hold the renewables, services and network assets.
EDF Vert would then be floated to raise funds.
The company will also propose a regulated pricing mechanism for 100 per cent of France’s nuclear production to replace the current mechanism, said analysts at Bernstein. The plan to split the company stems from this move since, as Bernstein add, a “100 per cent regulated price for nuclear production in France would likely be considered state aid by the EU”.
The plan thus still has to clear the European Commission as well as probable public pushback to higher regulated prices and heavy union opposition. French trade unions remain particularly powerful within EDF and has used threats of power cuts in the past.
In a joint statement this week, the unions said they “oppose a strictly financial reorganisation that would lose sight of the industrial project, the social ambition and the general interest” of the group.
Chernobyl Episode 4 Scene | HBO | Graphite Clearing
This man knows what it’s really like shovelling radioactive debris on top of Chernobyl’s reactor ABC News
By Katri Uibu “Sometimes it happens in life that someone, somewhere, has to do something. Whether they want to or not.”
Key points:
At age 32, Jaan Krinal was forced to go to Chernobyl and clean the roof of the reactor
He says men were initially enthusiastic to help eliminate the radiation
One-third of the men of his town he served with in Chernobyl have died
When he left his wife and two children on May 7, 1986 and went to work, Jaan Krinal didn’t know he would be one of those people.
The 32-year-old was working on a state-owned farm in Soviet-occupied Estonia.
Because he’d been forced to complete the Soviet military’s retraining a year before, he was confused when officers surprised him at work and said he’d been called up again — immediately.
Jaan and 200 other men were taken to a nearby school. Once they’d walked through the door, no-one was allowed to leave.
The men’s passports were seized before they were loaded onto buses and taken to a forest, where they were told to slip into brand new army uniforms.
“That’s when I first questioned what’s really going on here,” Jaan recalls………
Workers told radiation could have health benefits
It all happened fast.
Hundreds of men boarded a Ukraine-bound train on May 8. By the next evening, they were setting up camp on the edge of Chernobyl’s exclusion zone.
They were just 30 kilometres away from the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster — the still-smouldering wreckage of a reactor torn apart by a series of explosions and spewing radiation in a plume across Europe.
Jaan was among the first group sent to clean up in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
Tasked with hosing down radiation on the houses in nearby villages, he was thrown into the thick of it……
Despite the apparent uselessness of the job, they continued to work 11-hour days without a day off until the end of June. After that, they had two days of downtime a month.
As the weeks rolled on, suspicions grew.
“We started to have doubts. But all the officers said, ‘Why are you fretting, the radiation levels aren’t that high.”
In a cruel irony, the commanders told the men that being exposed to radiation would actually have health benefits.
“They joked that whoever has cancer can now get rid of it — because the radiation helps,” Jaan says.
Men unaware of deadly reason behind roof time limit
By the end of September, whatever enthusiasm the men initially felt had faded.
As many developed a cough, concerns grew about whether they were being lied to about the radiation being harmless. The respirators the men were given wouldn’t stay on because of the heat and were used until they got holes in them.
Later they found they should have been replaced every day…….
A rumour had it that the very last leg of the assignment was going on the roof of the reactor to clean up as much debris as possible.
Humans were going to be given a task that remote-control robots had previously attempted, but failed. The machines simply stopped working due to the unprecedented levels of radiation.
“When they told us, ‘You have to go to the roof’, we thought, ‘Oh, this means we can go home soon’,” he says.
On the day, he changed his army uniform for a protective suit, glasses and a gas mask, and a metal groin guard.
“We were all lined up and told, ‘who doesn’t want to go on the roof, step forward’. But only a couple of us did,” he says.
“There was no mass rejection. Most people went up there.
“It had to be done. We couldn’t just leave it. I think everyone realised the longer the reactor would have stayed open, the more dangerous it would have become.”
Jaan was shown on a small screen exactly which piece of debris he had to pick up with a shovel and throw off the roof of the reactor, but strictly warned against going too close to the edge.
He had two minutes to complete the assignment — a bell would ring to tell him when to run back.
The two-minute timeframe was to limit exposure to radiation, which could kill a man.
But this wasn’t communicated to the men at the time.
Jaan says the roof-cleaning scene depicted in HBO’s mini-series Chernobyl mirrored real life events…….
A staggering one-third of the men of his town who went to Chernobyl have died.
The average age of death has been 52.
“Over the past couple of years, just a couple of us have died. But not too long ago it was around 10 men a year,” he says.
“There have been cancers. There have been suicides too, but thankfully not too many.”……
he hopes tourists won’t start flocking to the ghost city.
“I hope they’ll never start sending large groups of tourists there. It’s still a dangerous zone,” he says.
Turkey holds drill over risk stemming from Armenia’s Metsamor nuclear plant, DAILY SABAH, ISTANBUL, 20.06.2019 Fearing impact from a possible accident from an aged nuclear power plant in neighboring Armenia, residents of a border village held a drill on Wednesday coordinated by the local governorate.
As part of the drill, medical rescue teams and gendarme troops evacuated residents of Orta Alican, one of eight villages of the eastern province of Iğdır, which are located in close proximity of Metsamor. It is the first comprehensive drill of its kind in the region against the danger the plant poses.
“Survivors” of the nuclear accident were taken to a tent camp set up in central Iğdır by crews and they were “decontaminated.” Iğdır Gov. Enver Ünlü said it was their responsibility to conduct such a drill against “a disaster that might happen.”
He said Metsamor was assessed as one of the world’s most dangerous nuclear plants by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and according to data by European Union…….
Following an earthquake in 1988, Metsamor was closed. However, in spite of widespread international protests, it was reactivated in 1995. Armenia earlier rejected the EU’s call to shut down Metsamor in exchange for 200 million euros to help meet the country’s energy needs.
19/06/2019 PARIS (Reuters) – French nuclear regulator ASN said in a statement on Wednesday that utility EDF will have to repair eight faulty weldings that traverse the containment vessel at the nuclear reactor EDF is building in Flamanville, northern France.
In April, IRSN – ASN’s technical arm – had already recommended that EDF repair the eight weldings, which are hard to reach and hard to repair. EDF had hoped to convince ASN that the flaws in the weldings were not a threat to the reactor’s safety and wanted to leave them in place.
The ASN was due to rule on the recommendation this month. Its statement gave no further details.
EDFCEO Jean-Bernard Levy said on Tuesday that repairing the weldings would cause further delays to the reactor, which is already years behind schedule and billions of euros over budget.
Following the discovery of the problems with the weldings, EDF in July 2018 delayed the scheduled loading of nuclear fuel by a year to the fourth quarter of 2019.
(Reporting by Geert De Clercq; Editing by Leigh Thomas)
HBO’s new series, “Chernobyl,” claims that these changes were designed to “prevent an accident like Chernobyl from happening again.”
But some nuclear scientists still worry that the fundamental design of an RBMK could pose a safety risk………
The type of reactor involved in the explosion, an RBMK or high-power channel reactor, has since been modified throughout Russia to account for some of its fatal design flaws, such as control rods with graphite tips and uranium with a low enrichment level. Many of the reactor’s original features were likely chosen to cut costs.
The goal of the retrofit, according to the HBO series, was to “prevent an accident like Chernobyl from happening again.” But that might be easier said than done.
The World Nuclear Association lists ten RBMK reactors that are still operating in Russia(one RBMK was recently decommissioned in Saint Petersburg in 2018). Russia is now the only country with these reactors, which were designed and built by the Soviet Union.
Four RBMKs are located in Kursk, a city in western Russia. Another three are found Saint Petersburg, a city with more than 5 million inhabitants, and three more are in Smolensk (about five hours outside Moscow). One of the Smolensk RBMKs is licensed to operate until 2050. The rest of the licenses expire sometime between 2021 and 2031.
QUAKE SHOCK Japan earthquake – Tsunami warning lifted after 6.8-magnitude tremor strikes near nuclear power plant and sparks power cuts, The Sun By Jon Lockett18 Jun 2019JAPAN has lifted an emergency tsunami warning after a 6.8-magnitude undersea earthquake struck near a huge nuclear power plant.Thousands of families lost electrical power and bullet train services were suspended on Tuesday, but there were no reports of serious injuries or damage.
Initial reports of waves crashing against the shore held chilling echoes of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster – sparked just 80 miles away after it was hit by monster waves.
Tsunami warnings were issued for the Yamagata, Niigata and Ishikawa regions.
But only a minor swelling of the sea was observed in several cities about half an hour after the earthquake struck, 53 miles northeast of the island of Honshu…….
Bullet train service was suspended in parts of the region because of power outages and for safety checks. About 9,000 households in Yamagata and Niigata lost power, according to Tohoku Electric Power Co.
All seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata were off line and no abnormalities were reported. Two other nuclear power plants in the affected region were also intact, according to the Nuclear Regulation Authority…….https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9318581/japan-earthquake-tsunami-warning/
Get your fax right: Bungling officials spark Japan nuclear scare, https://phys.org/news/2019-06-bungling-japan-nuclear.html Bungling Japanese officials sparked a nuclear scare after a violent, late-night earthquake by ticking the wrong box on a fax form—inadvertently alerting authorities to a potential accident.
Employees of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata—where the 6.4-magnitude quake struck—faxed a message to local authoritiesseeking to allay any fears of damage.
But TEPCO workers accidentally ticked the wrong box on the form, mistakenly indicating there was an abnormality at the plant rather than there was no problem.
One official filled out the form, and it was checked by a colleague before being sent.
Many Japanese government departments and companies still rely on fax machines for communication.
TEPCO’s Tokyo headquarters noticed the mistake, and a correction was published 17 minutes after the original release, the firm’s Tokyo-based spokesman told AFP.
Kashiwazaki city mayor Masahiro Sakurai saw the incorrectly filled-out form and immediately directed staff to check what was happening.
The mayor hit out at TEPCO, which also operated the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant—site of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl—when an earthquake and tsunami struck in 2011.
“When a real earthquake is happening, not a drill, this is a massive error,” Sakurai told local reporters, according to the Mainichi Shimbun daily.
“It is extremely poor on their part to make errors in the most important and basic information at a time of crisis,” he said, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
TEPCO apologised and vowed not to make the same mistake.
The late-night quake prompted a tsunami advisory, but only small ripples of 10 centimetres (three inches) were recorded.
The government said up to 26 people were injured—two seriously, although not life-threatening.
How The Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Meltdown Formed World’s Most Dangerous Lava, Forbes, David Bressan 16 June 19 “………Even areas thousands of kilometers away from Chernobyl are still today contaminated with radioactive particles, transported by the wind in a gigantic plume over Europe.
As the cooling system of the reactor was shut down and the insertion of control rods into the reactor core failed, the nuclear fission went out of control, releasing enough heat to melt the fuel rods, cases, core containment vessel and anything else nearby, including the concrete floor of the reactor building. The fuel pellets inside the fuel rods are almost entirely made of uranium-oxide while the encasing in which the pellets are placed is made of zirconium alloys. Melting at over 1,200°C the uranium and zirconium, together with melted metal, formed radioactive lavaburning through the steel hull of the reactor and concrete foundations at a speed of 30 cm (12″) per hour. Concrete doesn’t melt, but decomposes and becomes brittle at high temperatures. Part of the concrete was incorporated in the lava flow, explaining its high content of silicates, minerals composed mostly of silicon, aluminum and magnesium. Due to its chemical composition and high temperature, the lava-like material has a very low viscosity. When lava has low viscosity, it can flow very easily as demonstrated by stalactites hanging from valves and tubes in the destroyed reactor core.
Four hundred miners were brought to Chernobyl to dig a tunnel underneath. It was feared that the radioactive lava would burn through the containment structure and contaminate the groundwater. Only later it was discovered that the lava flow stopped after 3 meters (9 feet). Chemical reactions and evaporating water cooled the mixture below 1,100°C, below the decomposition temperature of the concrete.
About eight months after the incident and with the help of a remotely operated camera, the solidified lava was discovered in the ruins of the reactor building. Externally resembling tree bark and grey in color, the mass was nicknamed the Elephant’s Foot.
At the time of its discovery, radioactivity near the Elephant’s Foot was approximately 10,000 roentgens, a dose so high, only minutes of exposure would prove fatal. In 1996, radioactivity levels were low enough to visit the reactor’s basement and took some photographs. The photos are blurry due to radiation damage. The lava-like material resulting from a nuclear meltdown is also named corium, after the core of the reactor. An unknown uranium-zirconium-silicate found in the corium of Chernobyl was named later chernobylite. Chernobylite is highly radioactive due to its high uranium content and contamination by fission products. Corium will likely remain radioactive for the next decades to centuries. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2019/06/14/how-the-chernobyl-nuclear-plant-meltdown-formed-worlds-most-dangerous-lava-flow/#4d73b4f01691
Selfless Chernobyl ‘suicide divers’ saved Europe from nuclear devastation. Mirror UK , 16 June 19
The world held its breath as the brave volunteers risked it all to but to prevent a second huge explosion. he world owes him an eternal debt, but for Chernobyl hero Alexei Ananenko, it was just part of the job.Engineer Alexei was one of three men who volunteered to wade through radioactive water to prevent a second cataclysmic explosion at the stricken nuclear reactor.
They were dubbed “suicide divers” over the perilous mission.
Decked from head to toe in protective clothing, they descended into the bowels of Reactor 4 on a doomsday mission as the world held its breath.
Their heroism gripped viewers of Sky Atlantic drama Chernobyl. But with great understatement, 60-year-old Alexei insisted last night: “It’s nothing to brag about. Why should I feel a hero?
“I was on duty and it was my job. I was trained in what to do.”………
Experts believed that if 185 tons of molten nuclear lava hit the water below it would cause a radioactive steam explosion of 3-5 megatons – so massive that it would leave much of Europe uninhabitable for 500,000 years. Alexei was one of the few employees who knew where the latches and valves were located to drain water from the coolant system.
He, senior engineer Valeri Bespalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov were tasked with turning them off.
Firefighters drained a huge volume of water so the men would not have to swim, but they were still forced to walk through radioactive fluid three metres below ground level.
The image of them carrying search lights as they wade through a toxic soup is captured in the TV drama…….
After the explosion a cloud of radioactive strontium, caesium and plutonium affected mainly the Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus, as well as parts of Russia and Europe. Between 1987 and 1990, 530,000 workers – known as liquidators and conscripted from across the USSR – worked in and around Chernobyl to clear up the toxic mess. ……….. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/selfless-chernobyl-suicide-divers-saved-16523155
World Nuclear News 13th June 2019 Nuclear power reactors in Japan that have resumed operation could be forced
to temporarily shut down again if back-up safety measures are not in place
by specified deadlines under new rules approved by the country’s Nuclear
Regulation Authority (NRA). Operators of restarted units have already said
they expect delays in the completion of such facilities.
Born Violent: The Origins of Nuclear Power, Asian Journal of Peacebuildling, 2019, Robert (Bo) Jacob
Please excuse the “t”s and “f”s which have somehow turned into squares–my copying problems.
(Copious references are provided on the original) “…his article traces the origins o nuclear power technology as it was speciically developed to produce nuclear weapons or use against a civilian population in war……
It will trace numerous radiological disasters during the production history o the Hanord reactor fleet and at other military plutonium production reactor sites during the early Cold War.It will describe the later emergence o the nuclear power production industry which used nuclear reactors to also produce energy or civilian use and the history o partial and ull nuclearuel meltdowns that accompanied that industry……..
Hanford during the Cold War…..During the Cold War, the United States produced over 60,000 nuclear weapons, most o them with the plutonium produced at Hanord. This includes both ission weapons like the one used in the nuclear attack on Nagasaki, and also in thermonuclear weapons. While nuclear weapons were not used in wararea ater 1945, over 2,000 weapons have been detonated in nuclear tests, roughly hal o those (1,054) by the United States. The United States tested 928 nuclear weapons at the Nevada est Site, and another 67 at the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands. wo hundred and sixteen o those tests were in the atmosphere, which distributed vast quantities o radioactive allout in heavy quantities close to the test sites, and also globally when the atmospheric clouds reached the upper atmosphere.
A 2015 article in The Lancet describes how “risk modelling studies o exposure to ionising radiation rom the Nevada est Site in the United States suggest that an extra 49,000 (95 percent CI 11 300–212 000)cases o thyroid cancer would be expected to occur among U.S. residents alive at the time o the testing—an excess o about 12 percent over the 400,000 cases othyroid cancer expected to develop in the absence o allout” (Simon and Bouville 2015, 407-408).
The Marshall Islands had ar ewer tests than the Nevada test site, however the United States tested its thermonuclear weapons exclusively at the Pacific Proving Ground which resulted in massive amounts o radioactive allout aecting the local population and also entering into the Paciic Ocean rom which the radionuclides could disperse throughout the Pacific Rim.
One test, the Bravo test o 1954, which was the largest weapon ever tested by the United States, created a vast and lethal allout cloud that enguled numerous Marshallese atolls. he entire population o Rongelap Atoll suered rom radiation sickness after the Bravo test. The Japanese tuna fishing boat the DaigoFukuryu Maru , among many others, was also exposed to the allout cloud. When it came to port in Yaizu, Japan two weeks after the test, its crew was hospitalized or radiation sickness. One crew member, radioman Aikichi Kuboyama, died ocomplications rom his exposure six months later,even though he was physically located about 100km rom the actual detonation point. All of these illnesses and deaths can be traced back to the nuclear reactors at Hanford.
During its years o production, Hanord was the site o numerous substantial radiological releases that endangered the local population as well as those downwind. …….. Large releases o radiation into the nearby ecosystem would be routine during the operation o the Hanord reactors and especially the plutonium extraction procedures. hese activities would leave a disastrous legacy once the plants were closed……
Historical Disasters at Plutonium Production Sites
Hanord did not suffer a major uel meltdown or catastrophic fire. However, all other nuclear weapon states have also operated multiple plutonium production reactors and the first two large-scale nuclear disasters occurred in such reactor complexes, happening within two weeks o each other.
On September 29, 1957, writes Kate Brown, as a soccer game was beingplayed in a stadium in Ozersk, in the Chelyabinsk Oblast near the Ural Mountainsin Central Russia, where the Mayak Production Association was located, a loudexplosion was heard nearby.Te source o the blast was an underground storage tank holding highly radioactivewaste that overheated and blew, belching up a 160-ton cement cap buried twenty-oureet below the ground and tossing it seventy-five eet in the air. Te blast smashedwindows in the nearby barracks and tore the metal gates off the perimeter ence.
The explosion and subsequent radiological disaster, known as the KyshtymDisaster, occurred just eight years and one month after the detonation o the firstnSoviet nuclear weapon made with plutonium produced at Mayak, the plutonium production that was the target o surveillance motivating the Green Run at Hanord.
he radioactive cloud rom the explosion, “settled over an area o 20,000square kilometers, home to 270,000 people” (Rabl 2012). Te Soviet authorities were slow to react to the crisis. “A week after the explosion,” writes Brown, who did extensive fieldwork in the region as well as at Hanord, “radiologists ollowed the cloud to the downwind villages, where they ound people living normally,children playing bareoot. hey measured the ground, arm tools, animals and people. he levels o radioactivity were astonishingly high” (Brown 2013, 239-240). he contaminated area would eventually be known as the East Urals Radioactive race (Ichikawa 2015).
Eleven days later a fire ignited in one o the reactors at the Windscale Works, the plutonium production site o the United Kingdom located in Cumbria in Northwest England. he ire burned inside o the reactor or three days and released massive amounts o radiation blanketing surrounding communities and downwind areas. “While the authorities denied large releases o radioactivity at the time, this was not a correct portrayal o the situation…On 12 October, authorities stopped the distribution o milk originating rom seventeen areaarms. However, just three days later, milk rom a ar wider area (200 square miles compared to the previous 80) was restricted” (Makhijani et al. 1995, 418). Falloutrom the accident was detected in Ireland, and the confiscated milk was dumped into the Irish Sea (Bertell 1985)
The Establishment of Commercial Nuclear Power……. Many o these plants would experience occasional leaks or releases oradiation into their local ecosystems. Several would have catastrophic nuclear accidents. In addition to the accidents at plutonium production reactors citedabove, partial core meltdowns would occur at Santa Susana in Simi Valley,Caliornia (1957), Fermi-1 in Detroit, Michigan (1966), the Lucens reactor inVaud, Switzerland (1969), Leningrad-1 in Leningrad, USSR (1975), and hreeMile Island-2 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (1979). A ull, catastrophic nuclearmeltdown occurred at Chernobyl-4 (1986) and three ull meltdowns occurred at Fukushima 1-2-3 in 2011.
In addition to these dire nuclear accidents, the spent uel rom normal operations at nuclear power plants pose a vexing problem or tens o thousands o generations. hese spent uel rods will need to be eectively contained or millennia as they will remain highly dangerous or over 10,000 years, and seriously dangerous or over 100,000 years. Almost all o this spent uel, millions o tons, sit in temporary or intermediate storage on the grounds o the reactors where the uel was burned. Finland will be the very irst nation to attempt to permanently store the spent uel rom its very limited nuclear power program in deep geological storage at the Onkalo site on the Baltic Sea, beginning in the2020s. All o the spent nuclear uel rom the long history o operation at Hanord still sits in temporary storage, some o it or over seventy years now (Deense Nuclear Facilities Saety Board 1997).
he challenges o containing this highly toxic waste or millennia and insuring that the sites are not damaged by geologicalorces or breached by uture human societies is speculative at best. The ongoing capacity o nuclear power to damage the health o human beings and other creatures or millennia, through the risks posed by this waste, means that we can never adequately grasp the ull violence that will result rom its production (Jacobs2018). o date, over seventy years after the successul operation o CP-1, not one spent uel rod has been placed in “permanent” storage anywhere on the planet………
Beyond the visible, nuclear waste may kill and harm for tens of thousands of years to come. Hundreds of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel rods will remain deadly for over 100,000 years and must be successfully contained for that entire period of time to protect the health of thousands of generations of humans and other creatures yet unborn. Nuclear power will remain violent long past the generation of any electricity that will benefit any being. The legacy waste of operating nuclear power plants—for weapons or for electricity—will remain dangerous for longer than human civilization has so far existed.
Daily Star 8th June 2019 CRACKS found in a UK nuclear reactor could lead to the
radioactive contamination and full evacuation of major Brit cities, experts
have said in a terrifying warning. Experts have warned that in the very
worst case the hot graphite core could become exposed to air and ignite
leading to radioactive contamination and evacuation of a large area of
Scotland’s central belt – including Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The reactors have been closed since October 2018 as a result, but owners EDF Energy are
currently making a case for turning them back on, with help from trade
union GMB. Although the probability of a meltdown is still low, the
consequences could be incredibly severe.
In such an event, both Glasgow and
Edinburgh would need to be entirely evacuated due to radioactive
contamination. According to Dr Ian Fairlie, an independent consultant on
radioactivity in the environment, and Dr David Toke, Reader in Energy
Policy at the University of Aberdeen, the two reactors definitely should
not be restarted. Speaking about the cracks in the barrels, they warned:
“This is a serious matter because if an untoward incident were to occur –
for example an earth tremor, gas excursion, steam surge, sudden outage, or
sudden depressurisation, the barrels could become dislodged and/or
misaligned.
The U.S. kept nuclear accidents like the Damascus Incident secret for decades.
HBO’s Chernobyl is over, but if you’ve seen the series, you’ll remember it for a long time.
Coming on the heels of the mega-hyped Game of Thrones series finale, the five-part miniseries—created and written by Craig Mazin, and directed by Johan Renck—quickly overtook the fantasy story with its astonishing performances and commitment to its immersion in a world that Americans never really understood.
The focus in the discussion around Chernobyl lies where the miniseries has gone: nuclear reactors meant for peaceful energy. The safety of nuclear plants is of upmost importance, but that’s not the only place nuclear energy is located. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Department of Defense maintains an estimated stockpile of approximately 4,000 warheads. Mishaps with these weapons of mass destruction are referred to as “Broken Arrow” accidents.
The United States has officially had approximately 32 of these incidents, often involving the transport of weapons from one location to another. None of these incidents caused a major disaster, let alone a Chernobyl-like event. Two nuclear weapons were dropped on Goldsboro North Carolina in 1961 and are now commemorated with an historical marker. But there’s no such memorial for the 1980 accident in which a Titan II missile carrying a thermonuclear reactor exploded near Damascus, Arkansas.
Chernobyl offers a new chance to examine these Broken Arrows. Fortunately, both the stories of Goldsboro, the Damascus Incident, and other Broken Arrows have already been documented in the film Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner and based on a book by Eric Schlosser.
Available on PBS, Netflix, and other streaming services, the documentary shows that the story of lies and of nuclear mismanagement is not limited to Soviet borders.
On September 18, 1980, routine maintenance on an Titan II went awry. A Propellant Transfer System (PTS) team was working on the missile under the authority of the Air Force. A ratchet was used instead of a torque wrench, and that was all it took for a socket from the missile’s oxidizer tank to fall 80 feet down, where a freak bump allowed it to puncture the missile’s first-stage fuel tank.
Efforts to stabilize the missile failed, and late into the night, it exploded. Two men sent in to vent the gas were presumed dead. One of them, Senior Airman David Livingston, died 12 hours later. The nuclear warhead was later found in a field.
There are many differences between Damascus and Chernobyl, of course. Honesty was maintained within the chain of command, although the man who dropped the socket had trouble articulating the truth of the situation for half an hour afterward. And while safety protocols couldn’t keep the 7-story missile from exploding, they did keep the warhead in check.
But when it comes to nuclear incidents, Command and Control makes it clear that the U.S. shares more with the scientists of Chernobyl than many feel comfortable to admit.
There may not be a deeply embedded culture of lying stateside, but the U.S. was as willing to cover up the truth of Damascus, as well as thousands of other nuclear accidents, for decades. And when it came down to the final decision making in Damascus, the documentary paints a picture of an out-of-touch Strategic Air Command that issued commands without any understanding of the situation on the ground—decisions that resulted in Livingston’s death.
Mazin has made it clear that his Chernobyl is not primarily focused on nuclear power. It’s a complex subject, as Valery Legasov, played masterfully by Jared Harris, makes clear in the final episode. But perhaps the greatest similarity between Damascus and Chernobyl was the confident belief that nuclear power could be safely managed at all.
Explaining how nuclear power works in a Soviet court, Legasov describes a dance that can generate tremendous energy. But as Adam Higginbottom shows in Midnight in Chernobyl, it’s a dance that people have been trying to get right for many years.
The Soviet system might have set up the scientists at V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant for failure. But even with the best dancers in the world, there’s eventually a missed step.
Halting Holtec – A Challenge for Nuclear Safety Advocates, CounterPunch, byJAMES HEDDLE 7 June 19 “……….The California – Chernobyl Connection
Holtec and its client Edison would have the public believe that the San Onofre ISFSI is top of the line, up to date and state-of-the-art spent fuel handling. But that image seems to be contradicted by a recent Holtec press release and accompanying animated video that may seem to describe something like the kind of waste storage system many are advocating for at San Onofre.
On May 6, 2019, Holtec was “pleased to announce the start of final system-wide trials for Chernobyl’s dry store facility….” In the next two months, Holtec expects to complete “stem-to stern functional demonstrations of the [SF-2] spent fuel handling and storage processes before handing over the facility to Ukraine’s State owned enterprise Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP).”
The Holtec press release boasts, “Dismembering more than 21,000 RBMK spent fuel assemblies in a special purpose “hotcell,” packaging those fuel assemblies in double walled canisters(DWCs), and transferring them from (open) water-cooled pools into hermetically sealed rugged helium-filled storage systems inside ventilated modules will mark a huge safety milestone for Ukraine.” https://youtu.be/GYR3GmkRZV0
Holtec is also building a project called a Central Spent Fuel Storage Facility (CSFSF) for the Ukrainian company Energoatom. Holtec says the “CSFSF will employ double-confinement DWCs, the world’s first double-walled, double-lid multi-purpose canister system for dry storage of spent nuclear fuel.”
Many may now be asking, “Why isn’t what’s good for Ukraine, also good for California?” But, Donna Gilmore points out that, “It’s a thin-wall canister system. Exterior wall is 3/8″ thick. Interior wall is 1/2″ thick. Both welded shut. Still must be stored in Holtec concrete cask with air vents. Still cannot be inspected, maintained, monitored or repaired inside or out.” …………https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/07/halting-holtec-a-challenge-for-nuclear-safety-advocates/
AI technology improves critical crack detection in nuclear reactors, bridges, buildings, Phys Org, JUNE 7, 2019, by Purdue University A tiny crack in a nuclear reactor, skyscraper, bridge or dam can cause catastrophic consequences. The Minneapolis bridge collapse, which killed 13 people in 2007, is just one example of what can happen when structural integrity is compromised.
Unidentified or under-identified structural damage in nuclear reactors can be cataclysmic. Inspection of critical systems such as nuclear reactors is complicated and time-consuming.
Videos captured by an automatic crack detection system can easily misidentify small scratches or welds as cracks, so technicians must review videos frame by frame. It is a time-consuming process with opportunities for human errors.
Nuclear Energy Regulators Need to Bring on More Cyber Experts, Watchdog Says Defense One, 7 June 19, Cyberattacks on nuclear power stations on the rise, and an aging workforce may soon leave the government struggling to defend plants against the latest threats.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is facing a mass exodus of cybersecurity experts in the years ahead, which could limit its ability to ensure the nation’s nuclear power plants are safe from digital attacks, an internal watchdog found……….
As of March 31, NRC officials had inspected 24 of the 57 power plants under its jurisdiction. While assessments “generally provide reasonable assurance that nuclear power plant licensees adequately protect digital computers, communications systems and networks,” auditors said, the agency could be hindered if the NRC doesn’t ramp up its recruitment and training efforts. …….
The situation at NRC is a symptom of the government’s broader struggle to recruit tech and cyber talent amid an aging workforce.
The IG advised NRC to improve its process for addressing skill gaps and managing its workforce, leaning on practices laid out in its existing Strategic Workforce Planning initiative.
