Nuclear watchdog raises Hinkley Point C concerns Management failings could affect safety at EDF power station if unaddressed, says inspector, Guardian, Adam Vaughan, 26 Mar 18,
The UK nuclear regulator has raised concerns with EDF Energy over management failings that it warns could affect safety at the Hinkley Point C power station if left unaddressed, official documents reveal.
Britain’s chief nuclear inspector identified several shortcomings in the way the French firm is managing the supply chain for the £20bn plant it is building in Somerset.
NBC 20th March 2018, With reports of American power plants across the country having their
systems accessed by hackers, one group of scientists are calling out the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Southern California Edison for
their recent decision to remove enhanced cyber-security systems at the San
Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
Paris Normandie 17th March 2018, [Machine Translation]“They are not ready. “Monday morning, at the end of acommittee of health, safety and working conditions of the plant, trade unionists of the CGT are circumspect. EDF agents have just visited the future Local Crisis Center (CCL), one of the “post-Fukushima” equipment whose vocation is to ensure the management of crises.
“They’re supposed to be up and running in two weeks, but we’re far from it …” After seven
years of delay and a construction cost that has tripled to reach 10.5
billion euros, the commissioning of the EPR, this new generation nuclear
reactor under construction in Flamanville, is scheduled for May 2019. The
goal is to be able to load the fuel into the tank in December.
But the context remains tense for this site which accumulated the setbacks: the
problems recently discovered on the tank lid – which will have to be
changed before 2024 when it is normally every 20 or 30 years – or on the
secondary circuit welds leave an uncertainty about the authorization that
could give – or not – the ASN, the “policeman” nuclear.
Reuters 16th March 2018, A science advocacy group urged the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on
Friday to reject a longstanding industry request to limit cyber attack protections at nuclear plants, a day after the Trump administration publicly blamed Moscow for hacking into nuclear power and other energy infrastructure.
The Nuclear Energy Institute industry group petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June 2014 to limit the scope of the agency’s cyber-protection safeguards to only systems with a direct impact on safety. The institute said in the petition that such limits would be “less burdensome” for operators of nuclear power plants while being “adequately protective” of public health and safety.
Union of Concerned Scientists 16th March 2018,Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation officially confirmed that Russian hackers have been targeting US nuclear power plants and other critical facilities since at least 2016.
Regardless, the US nuclear industry has been pressuring the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to relax its cyber security standards. Below is a statement by Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The Department of Homeland Security alert is a stark
reminder that nuclear power plants are tempting targets for cyber
attackers. Although the systems that control the most critical safety
equipment at US nuclear plants are analog-based and largely immune to cyber
attacks, many other plant systems with important safety and security
functions are digital and could be compromised. For instance, electronic
locks, alarms, closed-circuit television cameras, and communications
equipment essential for plant security could be disabled or reprogrammed.
And some plants have equipment, such as cranes that move highly radioactive
spent fuel, that utilize computer-based control systems that could be
manipulated to cause an accident.” https://www.ucsusa.org/press/2018/russian-cyber-attacks-call-stringent-security-standards-us-nuclear-plants-plant-owners
Nucnet 16th March 2018, The UK’s nuclear regulator has identified five key areas of supply chain
management where improvements are needed ahead of acceleration in both
construction and manufacturing for the Hinkley Point C EPR project in
Somerset, England.
The Office for Nuclear Regulation has rated an overall
inspection finding as ‘amber’. This means that some arrangements are
below standard and the ONR is seeking improvements.
The five key areas include issues such as improvement programmes, lessons learned,
self-assessment and quality assurance. The ONR said the inspection of the
supply chain for Hinkley Point C was instigated in the context of the
records falsification issues that emerged in 2016 at Areva’s Le Creusot
forge facility. The facility, now operated by Framatome, is a supplier of
key components to the Hinkley Point C project. The falsification issues
became apparent after the French nuclear safety regulator, ASN, confirmed
that major technical and organisational shortcomings had occurred at the Le
Creusot. https://www.nucnet.org/all-the-news/2018/03/16/uk-regulator-says-improvements-are-needed-in-hinkley-point-c-supply-chain
Feds: Russian Hackers Are Attacking U.S. Power Plants, TIME By NASH JENKINS 16 Mar 18 Officials in Washington say that Russian hackers are in the midst of a widespread attack on crucial components of U.S. infrastructure, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report released Thursday.
The targets of these attacks include the country’s electric grid, including its nuclear power system, as well as “commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors,” the statement said.
The report is damning confirmation of what has for months been suspected: that hackers in Russia are capable of infiltrating and compromising vital systems relied on by millions of Americans. According to the new report, the attacks began at least as early as March 2016, thriving on vulnerabilities in these systems’ online operations.
………..The report cites a widely circulated investigation from Symantec released in October 2017 that linked the hacking group Dragonfly, suspected to be Russian, to a series of attacks on energy systems in the U.S. and Europe.
Bloomberg reports that victims of the attacks included a nuclear power plant located in Kansas.
Russia Hacks U.S. Nuclear Plants, Infrastructure ‘Hundreds Of Thousands Of Times A Day’ Investors Business Daily MICHAEL LARKIN-16 Mar 18,Russian hackers are attacking critical U.S. infrastructure, including the energy grid, nuclear power plants, and airports, according to U.S. government officials.
Water processing plants are among the other targets being repeatedly tested by rolling attacks. Last year, more than a dozen power plants in seven states were breached due to Russia’s ongoing campaign of cyberattacks.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry told the House Appropriations Subcommittee Thursday cyberattacks are “literally happening hundreds of thousands of times a day. … The warfare that goes on in the cyberspace is real, it’s serious, and we must lead the world.”
Such attacks were cited as being one of the reasons the Trump administration imposed sanctions on a series of Russian organizations and individuals Thursday. In a doomsday scenario, such attacks could leave millions without water and electricity……..
An alert issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI Thursday laid out in more detail what the Russians have been targeting, and how they are going about it.
“Since at least March 2016, Russian government cyber actors … targeted government entities and multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors,” the alert said.
The techniques being employed include sending spear-phishing emails from compromised legitimate accounts, host-based exploitation and the targeting of industrial control system infrastructure………
While information theft was one of the goals, a key prize would have been gaining control of systems used by infrastructure. They could then launch attacks that could leave millions without water and power.
An even more worrying prospect would be hackers gaining control of a nuclear power plant. A sudden shutdown can trigger safety systems designed to disperse excess heat and prevent a meltdown, though safety systems themselves may be vulnerable to attack. However, the operating systems used at such plants are usually decades-old legacy controls that cannot be exploited by hackers. …….https://www.investors.com/news/russia-hackers-attacking-u-s-power-plants-infrastructure-water-plants/
The federal government is demanding that the company building a giant nuclear waste treatment plant in Washington state provide records proving that the steel used in the nearly $17 billion project meets safety standards.
The U.S. Department of Energy says in a letter obtained by the Associated Press that records needed to ensure that the structural steel used in the project is safe are either missing or of “indeterminate quality.”
“This condition is a potentially unrecoverable quality issue,” said the letter sent March 6 from the agency’s Office of River Protection in Richland to Bechtel National Inc., which is building the long-delayed plant to dispose of wastes created in the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The agency gave Bechtel National 14 days to provide proof that work on the project should continue.
The plant is located on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, which for decades made most of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The resulting 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous wastes are stored in 177 underground tanks, many of which are leaking.
The waste treatment plant is designed to turn much of that waste into glass-like logs for burial, a technically demanding process.
But construction of the giant plant, which began in 2002, has long been slowed by safety and technical issues.
Bechtel National is working on providing the records, spokeswoman Stasi West said. “We have documentation that demonstrates the nuclear-grade structural steel meets project requirements,” West said. “The safety and quality of the structural steel was never in question.”
The letter from the Office of River Protection, which is named for the Columbia River that flows through the Hanford site, did not contend that the structural steel in the Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant was defective. Rather it says that records proving the steel can perform its safety function were missing or of poor quality.
The agency directed Bechtel “to promptly investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding the procurement, receipt and acceptance of materials installed … to justify the continuation of work,” the letter said.
In a statement, the Department of Energy said it was committed to the safety of workers, the public and the environment.
“The department directed Bechtel National Inc. to gather the necessary documentation and provide it to the department,” the DOE said Friday. “When received, DOE will determine whether the documentation meets applicable quality assurance standards for the steel being used in the (plant).”
The watchdog group Hanford Challenge contended the issue was potentially a “showstopper.”
“If the structural steel and other components cannot meet rigorous safety standards for nuclear operations, the plant cannot be allowed to operate,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge. “The contractor failed and needs to be held accountable.”
About 40,000 tons of structural steel is needed for the plant, to help prevent the release of radioactive and hazardous wastes into the environment.
“Structural steel, in conjunction with reinforced concrete structures, is integral to performing functions relied on in safety basis accident analyses,” the letter said.
The plant will use state-of-the-art vitrification technology, which involves blending the nuclear waste with glass-forming materials and heating it to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The molten mixture is poured into stainless steel canisters to cool and solidify. In the glass form, the waste is stable and its radioactivity will safely dissipate over hundreds to thousands of years.
The construction site spans 65 acres and plant buildings are up to 12 stories tall. The plant is expected to be completed early in the next decade.
National assembly 9th March 2018, [Machine Translation]
La Hague: the boss of Orano (ex-Areva) minimizes the risks in the event of a plane crash on spent fuel pools. According to
Philippe Knoche, a plane crash or rocket fire could not damage enough spentfuel storage tanks to dewater them. “I would like to take this example
because our opponents use it a lot …”
Thursday, before the parliamentary commission of inquiry on the safety and security of nuclear facilities, the director general of Orano (formerly Areva) Philippe Knoche tried to reassure the deputies on the resistance of the reprocessing site of La Hague. According to him, spent nuclear fuel storage pools are not vulnerable to falling or rocket fire. http://www.lcp.fr/la-politique-en-video/la-hague-le-patron-dorano-ex-areva-minimise-les-risques-en-cas-de-chute-davion
US hardens nation’s power plants seven years after Fukushima nuclear disaster, Washington Examiner, by John Siciliano | Seven years later, all of the nation’s 99 reactors comply with NRC regulations established in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, according to the commission.
However, the reactors that are of the same or similar design to the Japanese Daiichi power plant still have some work to do.
The commission ordered all boiling-water reactors with Mark I and Mark II designs to achieve “full compliance” with new venting requirements beginning at the end of June 2018………..
Lawsuits filed against the Japanese utility company that ran the Daiichi plant will be heard in court later this year.
More than 100 U.S. sailors and servicemen who participated in the rescue effort after the tsunami hit Japan are suing the TEPCO electricity company for not warning them about the threat of radiation after they knew of the damage to the power plant.
“The NRC was not a party to that,” said Burnell, who said the agency has not been requested by the courts to participate.
In 2011, the commission issued warnings to U.S. citizens in Japan about the risk of radiation, directing all citizens who live within 50 miles of the Daiichi plant to evacuate. Japanese authorities downplayed the seriousness of the radiation and refuted the claims made by then-NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko.
Safecast operates using measurements captured by volunteers. Data is verified and validated when two randomly selected people take the same measurement of the same place. Safecast’s reliable system means local people could count on its data and stay informed. Around 3,000 Safecast devices are deployed worldwide, and 100 to 150 volunteers regularly contribute their time and effort to the project.
As Safecast’s power and influence in society — both inside and outside of Japan — expanded, so did its technologies.
“We are a pro-data group, we are not an activist group,”
Back in 2011, soon after the 3/11 disaster, Safecast was born. Today, the global volunteer-centered citizen science organization is home to the world’s largest open data set of radiation measurements.
Safecast was a response to the lack of publicly available, accurate and trustworthy radiation information. The group initially set out to collect radiation measurements from many sources and put them on a single website. What the volunteers quickly realized was that there was simply not enough official data available.
Soon after the disaster, members attached a homemade Geiger counter to the side of their car and drove around Fukushima taking measurements. They quickly noticed that radiation levels were radically different even between streets, and that the government-issued city averages were far from sufficient as data that could be used by citizens to determine the safety of their areas.
Within weeks the group’s members decided to build their own Geiger counters and collect the data themselves. They picked the name Safecast the following month.
For months after the nuclear disaster began, the government released only very limited information about the spread of radiation. The first informative map of radiation levels in Fukushima, based on aerial surveys, was not available until May 2011. The first map with an adequate level of detail to show contamination in the Tokyo metropolitan area, including infamous “hot spots” in cities such as Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, was not released until October that year. As confusion spread and triggered panic among citizens, Safecast was determined to commit itself to one thing: openness. “What Safecast proves is that all the preparation in the world — all the money in the world — still fails if you don’t have a rapid, agile, resilient system,” explains Joi Ito, Safecast co-founder and director of MIT Media Lab, on Safecast’s website.
In 2012, Safecast began working with municipal governments in Fukushima to put Geiger counters on postal delivery cars and collect data. As international attention on the group’s activities grew, Safecast was invited to present its findings at an expert meeting at the International Atomic Energy Agency in February 2014.
Safecast operates using measurements captured by volunteers. Data is verified and validated when two randomly selected people take the same measurement of the same place. Safecast’s reliable system means local people could count on its data and stay informed. Around 3,000 Safecast devices are deployed worldwide, and 100 to 150 volunteers regularly contribute their time and effort to the project. “How do you make a trustworthy system where the people don’t have to trust each other?” Azby Brown, Safecast’s lead researcher, asked during a recent interview at its Shibuya office.
As Safecast’s power and influence in society — both inside and outside of Japan — expanded, so did its technologies. The group’s first mobile device, named “bGeigie” with b standing for bento (boxed lunch), was built and deployed in April 2011. The first of these needed to be tethered to a laptop for data collection. But the group soon developed all-in-one devices. They were gradually shrunk, and the “bGeigie Nano” sold as a kit is now the organization’s main machine. It’s compact and able to accumulate all of the data it captures onto a memory card.
In December, Safecast members were given a special tour of Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings’ gutted Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The operator allowed them, for the first time ever, to bring their sensors on site and openly measure radiation there during the hourlong tour, with the clear understanding that they would publish the data and radiation maps openly online. “We consider it an important step towards transparency on Tepco’s part,” Brown said in an email. Then in January, Safecast managed to install a “Solarcast Nano,” a solar-powered real-time radiation monitor, on the fence of an abandoned facility for the elderly about 2 km from Fukushima No. 1. It is the closest independent real-time data-collection point to the crippled plant. Over the years, the group has collected over 90 million data points worldwide. Each data point comes with a string of data containing the time, GPS coordinates and a radiation measurement.
It’s been seven years since the devastating earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent meltdown of the nuclear power plant, so why is Safecast’s work still relevant today?
“We are a pro-data group, we are not an activist group,” said Pieter Franken, another Safecast founding member. Safecast is constantly supplying local people with up-to-date information on radiation conditions, allowing them to make crucial decisions such as where and when evacuees can move back. Many locals are also volunteers, motivated by their emotional attachment to the area and determined to do their part in rebuilding their hometown, the group said.
While most of Safecast’s volunteers in Japan are Japanese who wanted to help out as much and as quickly as they could with the skills that were available, the unique composition of the group’s core members — many of whom are non-Japanese and hailing from diverse academic and professional backgrounds — has given the group the advantage of an outside perspective, and an agility that locals lacked. Franken is a computer scientist who has worked in the financial industry for over 25 years, while another founding member, Sean Bonner, has worked in community activism and is currently an associate professor of media and governance at Keio University. And Brown, who is a senior adviser at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology and also teaches at other Japanese universities, is a design and architecture expert. “A true Japanese company would have spent two years making the perfect Geiger counter before they would have released anything,” said Franken. “You need a little bit of extra impulse,” he added. “I think that is where, if you look at the composition of this group, some of us were in a unique position because of our ability to work in Japan, but also work with people outside to provide that spark to go and do it.”
In fact, as Brown explained, they have the ability to work as foreigners in Japan — without facing the social consequences of speaking out, criticizing or breaking rules that have prevented many Japanese and local firms from being able to help out as much as they wanted to. At the same time, most key members of Safecast are long-term residents of Japan and their desire to help amid the disaster was deeply rooted. “Not one of us flew away or would even think of abandoning our home just because there is a disaster. We live in Japan; this is our home,” said Joe Moross, a Safecast engineer and expert on radiation and environmental sensors.
Unfortunately, the environmental effects of the nuclear disaster will persist for decades. Brown believes that because cesium is known to migrate slowly into the soil, there is a possibility that some plants and trees will show higher levels of radioactivity in five to 10 years as the cesium reaches their roots.”We have to keep the pressure up and the only way to do this is to consistently keep on going, even if there is no disaster,” explained Franken. Holding workshops for high school and college students both in Japan and around the world, Safecast is continuing to expand its dominance in the field of independent radiation monitoring. Franken explained that by hosting these events, Safecast hopes to increase its volunteers and people’s awareness about the nuclear issues at hand.
“It’s been an amazing experience to be able to create something positive out of something so negative,” Franken said.
There’s no slowing down for Safecast. “Globally, we still have a lot to fill in,” said Bonner, noting there are still many places that have no or little data, such as Russia and China. “(At the) beginning of last year we started to measure air quality as well, so that’s another effort that we’re starting to reach out to. Between those two things, that’s a significant amount of stuff.
“We haven’t finished what we started,” he said. “We can’t even begin to think of what’s the next thing. We still have a lot of work to do that we’re still deeply engaged in doing.”
Report says radioactive monitors failed at nuclear plant, abc news, By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS RICHLAND, Wash. — Mar 9, 2018, A new report says mistakes and mismanagement are to blame for the exposure of workers to radioactive particles at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state.
Contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. on Thursday released its evaluation of what went wrong in December during demolition of the nuclear reservation’s highly contaminated Plutonium Finishing Plant.
Sortir du Nucleaire 7th March 2018, In December 2017, a radioactive leak was detected at the Bugey nuclear
power plant, 35 km from Lyon. Four associations complain and call for the
immediate shutdown of the plant, which combines risks of all kinds.
On December 20, 2017, EDF detected an abnormal concentration of tritium in a
piezometer (tube allowing access to the water table) on the site of the
Bugey nuclear power station. The concentration of this radioactive
substance, which can cause serious damage to the DNA, reached 670
Becquerels per liter.
Larger concentration peaks (up to 1600 Bq / l) were
detected on subsequent days and at other locations on the site. This
presence of tritium in the Rhône water table suggests the release into the
environment of other radioelements and probably chemical elements.
Contaminated water has also certainly reached the Rhône. http://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/Fuite-radioactive-a-la-centrale-nucleaire-du
Dispelling Claim 4: Thorium reactors are safer than conventional uranium reactors Thorium ‒ a better fuel for nuclear technology? Nuclear Monitor, by Dr. Rainer Moormann 1 March 2018
The fission of U-233 results in roughly the same amounts
of the safety-relevant nuclides iodine-131, caesium-137
and strontium-90 as that of U-235. Also, the decay heat is
virtually the same. The differences in produced actinides (see
next claim) are of secondary importance for the risk during
operation or in an accident. In this perspective, thorium use
does not deliver any recognisable safety advantages.
Of greater safety relevance is the fact that uranium-233
fission produces 60% less so-called delayed neutrons than
U-235 fission. Delayed neutrons are not directly created
during the fission of uranium, but from some short-lived
decay products. Only due to the existence of delayed
neutrons, a nuclear reactor can be controlled, and the
bigger their share (for instance 0.6% with U-235), the
larger is the criticality range in which controllability is given
(this is called delayed criticality). Above this controllable
area (prompt criticality) a nuclear power excursion can
happen, like during the Chernobyl accident. The fact that
the delayed super-critical range is with U-233 considerably
smaller than with U-235, is from a safety point of view an
important technical disadvantage of thorium use.
During the design of thermal molten salt reactors (breeders),
the conclusion was that the use of thorium brings problems
with criticality safety that do not appear with classical
uranium use in this type of reactors. For that reason, it was
necessary to turn the attention to fast reactors for the use
of thorium in molten salt reactors. Although this conclusion
cannot be generalised, it shows that the use of thorium can
lead to increased safety problems.
As mentioned, a serious safety problem is the necessity to
restart breeder and reprocessing technology with thorium.
Thorium is often advertised in relation to the development
of so-called advanced reactors (Generation IV). The
safety advantages attributed to thorium in this context are
mostly, however, not germane to thorium (the fuel) but
rather due to the reactor concept. Whether or not these
