Nuclear-concerned Norway wants to give iodine tablets to citizens, The Local, 8 Aug 17Aging nuclear power plants across Europe as well as increasing tensions between Russia and the West also concern Norwegian authorities, writes NRK.
The Dmitry Donskoi sailed through Danish territorial waters in July as part of a joint exercise between the Russian and Chinese navies.
The Dmitry Donskoi sailed through Danish territorial waters in July as part of a joint exercise between the Russian and Chinese navies. The presence of nuclear submarines along the coast of Norway means an increased risk of accidents, according to Norwegian authorities.
Maritime visits such as those from the 172-metre-long Russian sub Dmitry Donskoi, the world’s largest nuclear submarine currently sailing off Norway’s coast, are no longer a rare event, according to the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (Statens strålevern, NRPA).
The Russian vessel can carry up to 200 nuclear warheads and is powered by two nuclear reactors.
“We have seen an increasing number of nuclear submarines off Norway’s coast – both visiting allies and Russian submarines patrolling off the coast all the way to Great Britain,” NRPA section manager Astrid Liland told NRK.
Increased numbers of nuclear submarines along the coast of Norway increase the risk of radioactive accidents, say authorities, who have now decided to assess the viability of distributing iodine tablets to parts of the population.
“An accident of this kind with a nuclear-powered submarine could actually occur anywhere along our coast,” Liland said to NRK. A study group has been assigned to analyse how iodine tablets, sometimes used as a preventative measure against thyroid cancer in children and young adults after nuclear accidents, can be made available to that group, as well as to women who breastfeed.
For the tablet to have any effect, it must be taken within hours of any exposure to radioactive iodine.
43 crates containing a total of three million iodine tablets are already being stored at a depot in Oslo as one of Norway’s nuclear contingency precautions.
These tablets could be distributed to municipalities in the relevant areas.
Nuclear submarines are not the only reason for the Norwegian authorities’ increased concern over radioactive accidents.
Aging nuclear power plants across Europe as well as increasing tensions between Russia and the West also concern Norwegian authorities, writes NRK.
The Dmitry Donskoi sailed through Danish territorial waters in July as part of a joint exercise between the Russian and Chinese navies.
August 9, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
EUROPE, safety |
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Sunday Times 6th Aug 2017, Serious concerns about the environmental and safety record of the Dounreay
nuclear plant have been raised by Scottish environment secretary Roseanna
Cunningham. In a letter to UK energy minister Richard Harrington, she
complained of a disappointing lack of progress across a range of projects
in the past year that sat oddly with the planned reduction in workforce at
the site.
Her concerns come after shortcomings in safety performance at
Dounreay were identified in the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s annual
report, and criticism of the environmental management at the plant by the
Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
She said: “It is troubling that site management, despite repeated efforts, do not seem able to break the
pattern of incidents. Local stakeholders have told me that they cannot
understand why the substantial voluntary redundancy programme is in place,
when there is still so much work to complete.”
Local SNP MSP Gail Ross echoed the minister’s concerns. She said: “The Dounreay site is a vital
employer in Caithness and North Sutherland. Surely the most sensible route
to ensure safe operation would be to retain as many highly skilled and
experienced staff as they are able. Nuclear waste is not something that can
be dealt with on the cheap, regardless of the location. The UK government
must support Dounreay to ensure that the decommissioning process is as safe
as it can be, regardless of cost.” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/dounreay-safety-concerns-raised-by-cunningham-sf7nd5d9b
August 7, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, UK |
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Nuclear labs endanger public with radioactive mail, USA Today Patrick Malone, Center for Public Integrity, 1 Aug 17, At least 25 times in the past five years, nuclear weapons contractors have improperly packaged or shipped plutonium capable of being used in a nuclear weapon, conventional explosives and highly toxic chemicals, according to government documents.
While the materials were not ultimately lost, the documents reveal repeated instances in which hazardous substances vital to making nuclear bombs and their components were mislabeled before shipment. That means those transporting and receiving them were not warned of the safety risks and did not take required precautions to protect themselves or the public, the reports say.
The risks were discovered after regulators conducted inspections during transit, when the packages were opened at their destinations, during scientific analysis after the items were removed from packaging, or — in the worst cases — after unwary recipients released radioactive contaminants, the Center for Public Integrity’s investigation showed.
Only a few, slight penalties appear to have been imposed for these mistakes. In the most recent instance, Los Alamos National Laboratory, a privately run, government-owned nuclear weapons lab about 50 miles northeast of Albuquerque, admitted five weeks ago that in June it had improperly shipped unstable, radioactive plutonium in three containers to two other government-owned labs via FedEx cargo planes instead of complying with federal regulations that required using trucks to limit the risk of an accident.
Los Alamos initially told the government that its decision stemmed from an urgent need for the plutonium at a federal lab in Livermore, Calif. But “there was no urgency in receiving this shipment. This notion is incorrect,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s spokeswoman, Lynda Seaver, said in an email message.
The incident, which came to light after a series of revelations from the Center for Public Integrity about other safety lapses at Los Alamos, drew swift condemnation from officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington. It also provoked the Energy Department to order a three-week halt starting June 23 to all shipments out of Los Alamos, the largest of the nuclear weapons labs and a linchpin in the complex of privately run facilities that sustains America’s nuclear arsenal.
All of those involved from the individual contributor level up the management chain have been held accountable through actions that include terminations, suspensions and compensation consequences,” Los Alamos spokesman Matthew Nerzig said
The documents show that Los Alamos in particular has been a repeat offender in mislabeling its shipments of hazardous materials: For example, in a previously undisclosed 2012 case, it sent unlabeled plutonium — a highly carcinogenic, unstable metal — to a University of New Mexico laboratory where graduate students sometimes work, according to internal government reports.
The plutonium was accidentally opened there, leading to a contamination of the lab that the university to clean it and Los Alamos to dispose of the debris. In total, 11 of the 25 known shipping mistakes since July 2012 involved shipments that either originated at Los Alamos or passed through the lab. Thirteen of the 25 incidents involved plutonium; highly enriched uranium, which is another nuclear explosive; or other radioactive materials.
Some of the mislabeled shipments went to toxic waste dumps and breached regulatory limits on what the dumps were allowed to accept, according to the reports. Ensuring that all shipments are accurately labelled is vital to emergency personnel, whose safety and ability to protect the public in the event of an accident rely on correct knowledge of whatever they’re trying to clean up or contain, said Patricia Klinger, a spokeswoman for U.S. Department of Transportation hazardous materials regulators. She did not respond to questions about why the department only rarely appears to have imposed fines.
Internal National Nuclear Security Administration records indicate that in the 25 incidents since July 2012, contractors received three fines. In more than 20 instances, regulators did not directly fine the contractors in enforcement actions stemming from the shipping errors.
August 2, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, USA |
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Dear Royal Institute of British Architects and Landscape Institute,
Nuclear Beautifying Competitions –Endorsing the Safety of New Nuclear Reactors?
Amber Rudd the (then) Energy Secretary made statements in 2015 that new nuclear power stations must be designed to look beautiful in order to garner essential public support.
The RIBA and LI agreed to lend kudos and prestige to this unethical PR project by running competitions for the architecture and for the earth mounds (resulting from deep excavation for the foundations).
I would like to ask if you are endorsing the safety of the Moorside plan? If not will you please make a public statement clarifying that the design competition does not in anyway endorse the safety of Moorside. If you do not do this you are aiding and abetting the public being hoodwinked into embracing dangerous new untried untested reactors using “high burn” fuel next to Sellafield. Sellafield is widely acknowledged as the worlds most dangerous nuclear waste site, adding to an already intolerable risk is an abuse of the rights of all Europeans (and further afield) to expect a safe environment.
RED LIGHT SPELLS DANGER
Below are just a few of the many reasons why the RIBA and LI should make clear that their beautifying competitions do not in any way endorse the safety of the Moorside plan.
• Arnie Gundersen former US nuclear regulator has described the proposed Moorside AP1000 reactors as: Chernobyl on Steroids (1)
• Spent fuel arisings from Moorside would amount to 85% of the radioactivity contained in all existing legacy wastes from the UK’s nuclear power industry. (2)
• By applying the widely used fatal cancer risk factor of 10% per sievert we can calculate around 4 deaths will occur somewhere in the world for every year the station operates. Over 60 years the total would be 240 deaths. (3) (note this does not include accident or incident)
• The new reactors would be vulnerable to a very large release of radioactivity following an accident if there were just a small failure in the steel containment vessel.
In that event gases released from the reactor would be sucked through existing ‘pinhole’ containment flaws in the AP1000 Shield Building due to the ‘chimney effect’, potentially leading to the rapid venting huge amounts of radioactivity to the environment. (4)
• In 2013 Cumbria County Council suggested that a proposed low level radioactive landfill site should be located on or near the Sellafield site instead of at Keekle Head. The reply from the Keekle Head applicants, Endecom was that: it is not possible to site a low level nuclear dump at or near to Sellafield: there is insufficient space on the site ..and.. large areas of contaminated land would have to be excavated to develop a VLLW Facility ie deep excavation near Sellafield would disturb decades of nuclear seepage from the site. The Moorside Landscape Mounds would leach that contamination currently held underground to the nearby village of Beckermet which regularly floods. (5)
• According to the designers, the rainbow installation was inspired by a William Wordsworth poem remarking on the beauty of Cumbria, “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky”. The poem is actually about mans relationship with nature. Every aspect of nuclear power is an assault on the natural world from the ripping out of uranium in Greenland to the plan to dump high level nuclear wastes in Borrowdale Granite. No amount of beautification can hide the obscenity of nuclear.
Lending prestige to the Moorside plan is unethical at best an assault on human rights at worst. Radiation Free Lakeland ask both the RIBA and LI to make clear to the public that they are not in any way endorsing the safety of these three nuclear reactors on the greenfields and river Ehen floodplain next to Sellafield.
Yours sincerely,
Marianne Birkby,
Radiation Free Lakeland
Cumbria UK [many references supplied]
August 2, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, UK |
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North Korea prompts US cities to prepare for a nuclear attack, SMH, Ralph Vartabedian and W.J. Hennigan, 29 July 17, Fleets of big black trucks, harbor boats and aircraft, equipped with radiation sensors and operated by specially trained law enforcement teams, are ready to swing into action in Los Angeles for a catastrophe that nobody even wants to think about: a North Korean nuclear attack.
American cities have long prepared for a terrorist attack, even one involving nuclear weapons or a “dirty bomb,” but North Korea’s long-range missile and weapons programs have now heightened concerns along the West Coast over increasing vulnerability to a strike……..
This month, Wellerstein and other researchers launched Reinventing Civil defence, a nonprofit project that over the next two years will examine how best to reeducate the American public on the nuclear threat – one that never went away. It is being funded by a $US500,000 ($626,000) grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
“If we live in a world where a nuclear detonation is possible, and we do, then people should be informed on what that means,” he said. “It’s something that’s been nonexistent in our society since the late 1980s.”
The reluctance to prepare reflects what LoPresti calls a “generational PTSD” from the decades of living under the threat of instant thermonuclear war. “It is not something people are comfortable talking about,” he said……
The main responsibility would lie with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which declined to provide an official to discuss the issue and did not answer written questions.
Some arms control experts say it would be a mistake to launch a full-scale civil defence effort in response to North Korea. Wright, the expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said such a response would send the wrong message that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has put a dent in US confidence.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons analyst with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said Kim presents the same threat that existed throughout most of the last century. “He’s ruthless, but he’s not crazy,” Lewis said. “There’s reason to be cautious. But it’s not a reason to start digging bomb shelters.”
But Levin, the Ventura County health director, argues that doing nothing is equally wrong. The key point of the Ventura plan is to ask residents not flee, but to “get inside and stay inside” immediately after a detonation.
The county’s plan was developed with technical assistance from Brooke Buddemeier, a nuclear weapons effects expert at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has made the case that sheltering indoors for just 24 hours after a detonation provides significantly reduced exposure.
“Talking about nuclear detonation is not one of those topics you can bring up at a cocktail party,” Buddemeier said. “But a little knowledge can save a lot of lives.” http://www.smh.com.au/world/north-korea-prompts-us-cities-to-prepare-for-a-nuclear-attack-20170727-gxkdu2.html
July 29, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, USA, weapons and war |
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The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people
Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre. He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that D.O.E. program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs.
Trump’s budget … cuts funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of 6,000 of their people. It eliminates all research on climate change. It halves the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster
WHY THE SCARIEST NUCLEAR THREAT MAY BE COMING FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s budget is now on the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities? BY MICHAEL LEWIS SEPTEMBER 2017 “………..Two weeks after the election the Obama people inside the D.O.E. read in the newspapers that Trump had created a small “Landing Team.” According to several D.O.E. employees, this was led by, and mostly consisted of, a man named Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, D.C., propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. Pyle himself had served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a side business writing editorials attacking the D.O.E.’s attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon……….
…..There was a reason Obama had appointed nuclear physicists to run the place: it, like the problems it grappled with, was technical and complicated……..
Pyle, according to D.O.E. officials, eventually sent over a list of 74 questions he wanted answers to. His list addressed some of the subjects covered in the briefing materials, but also a few not:
“Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings?
Can you provide a list of Department employees or contractors who attended any of the Conference of the Parties (under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in the last five years?”
That, in a nutshell, was the spirit of the Trump enterprise. “It reminded me of McCarthyism,” says Sherwood-Randall……..
The one concrete action the Trump administration took before Inauguration Day was to clear the D.O.E. building of anyone appointed by Obama…….
Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where.
The Trump people didn’t seem to grasp, according to a former D.O.E. employee, how much more than just energy the Department of Energy was about……..Trump had nominated three people and installed just one, former Texas governor Rick Perry……..With the nuclear physicist who understood the D.O.E. perhaps better than anyone else on earth, according to one person familiar with the meeting, Perry had spent minutes, not hours. “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,” a D.O.E. staffer told me in June. “He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking.”
Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre. He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that D.O.E. program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs. His sporadic public communications have had in them something of the shell-shocked grandmother trying to preside over a pleasant family Thanksgiving dinner while pretending that her blind-drunk husband isn’t standing naked on the dining-room table waving the carving knife over his head.
Meanwhile, inside the D.O.E. building, people claiming to be from the Trump administration appear willy-nilly, unannounced, and unintroduced to the career people. “There’s a mysterious kind of chain from the Trump loyalists who have shown up inside D.O.E. to the White House,” says a career civil servant. “That’s how decisions, like the budget, seem to get made. Not by Perry.”…….
Because of that lack of communication, nothing is being done. All policy questions remain unanswered.”……..
Another permanent employee, in another wing of the D.O.E., says, “The biggest change is the grinding to a halt of any proactive work. There’s very little work happening. There’s a lot of confusion about what our mission was going to be. For a majority of the workforce it’s been demoralizing.”
Over and over again, I was asked by people who worked inside the D.O.E. not to use their names, or identify them in any way, for fear of reprisal…..
…….The D.O.E. ran the 17 national labs—Brookhaven, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Oak Ridge, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and so on. “The office of science in D.O.E. is not the office of science for D.O.E.,” said MacWilliams. “It’s the office of science for all science in America. I realized pretty quickly that it was the place where you could work on the two biggest risks to human existence, nuclear weapons and climate change.”…….
Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant. Trump didn’t invent this desire. He is just its ultimate expression. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-risks-michael-lewis
July 28, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
investigative journalism, politics, safety, USA |
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Security flaws ‘leave nuclear plants at risk’, Vulnerabilities in equipment used at nuclear plants and at borders could be exploited by hackers and terrorists, it is claimed. Sky News, UK,Thursday 27 July 2017 Critical security flaws have been found in devices used to monitor radiation levels in nuclear facilities and at borders globally, according to cybersecurity researchers.
It could allow terrorists to traffic nuclear material past radiation monitoring devices at air and sea ports by raising the radiation threshold that authorities’ machines scan for.
An attacker could also falsify readings to hide a radiation leak or even falsely set off the alarm to make authorities believe one was taking place.
Alongside another attack – such as the Stuxnet computer worm which destroyed a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2010 – the vulnerabilities could be exploited to increase the time it takes to detect an attack against a nuclear facility.
The energy sector is a regular target for hackers, with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warning that attackers have compromised organisations connected to the power grid.
There are 15 operational nuclear reactors at seven nuclear power plants in the UK……..
“Failed evacuations, concealed persistent attacks and stealth man-in-the-middle attacks are just a few of the risks I flagged in my research,” said Ruben Santamarta, the principal security consultant at US cybersecurity firm IOActive, which was behind the research.
Mr Santamarta’s team found the vulnerabilities by analysing the software binaries and devices used by several popular sellers of radiation monitoring equipment, and announced their findings at the Black Hat USA conference in Nevada.
Mr Santamarta said: “Being able to properly and accurately detect radiation levels, is imperative in preventing harm to those at or near nuclear plants and other critical facilities, as well as for ensuring radioactive materials are not smuggled across borders.”….http://news.sky.com/story/security-flaws-leave-nuclear-plants-at-risk-10961383
July 28, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
2 WORLD, safety |
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Specter of Chernobyl: Ukraine ‘Losing Control’ of Its Nuclear Facilities https://sputniknews.com/europe/201707191055679086-ukraine-radioactivity-theft/ 19.07.2017 Hundreds of containers with radioactive materials inside have been reportedly stolen from a nuclear storage facility in central Ukraine. An expert told Sputnik about the consequences this and other such cases could have for people in and outside the country.
According to 1+1 TV channel, the containers with Cesium-137-contaminated soil and metals, which had spent the past 30 years buried at an unguarded storage site near the city of Krapivnitsky in Kirovograd region, were supposed to stay there for at least 300 years more.After the unknown thieves dug up the containers, the radiation level in the area jumped 10 times above normal.
In an interview with Radio Sputnik, Valery Menshikov, a member of the Environmental Policy Center in Moscow, shared his fears about the dangerous situation in Ukraine.
“What is now happening is Ukraine is bedlam, period. The stringent Soviet-era controls are gone and not only there. All nuclear storage facilities in Ukraine pose a very serious radiation threat. It’s a very alarming situation we have there now,” Menshikov warned.
He underscored the need to place such nuclear storage sites under strict control.
“Such places must be fenced off, have adequate alarm systems, etc. However, it looks like [the Krapivnitsky facility] had none of these things. In addition to vials with Cesium, there was also metal there and this metal could now be used in construction or smelted, which means that radiation will keep spreading,” Valery Menshikov added.
He blamed the sorry state of Ukraine’s nuclear energy sector on the erratic policy of the Kiev government.
“There are regulations, both domestic and international, drawn up by the IAEA, but the problem is that the current political situation in Ukraine has made it possible to get rid of experienced managers and specialists in the nuclear energy and other economic sectors and replace them (with incompetent ones),” Valery Menshikov emphasized.
“The loss of radiation safety is also evident at Ukrainian nuclear power plants, hence the strange things that keep happening there,” Menshikov concluded.
Ukraine’s nuclear industry has been in dire straits since Kiev ended nuclear energy cooperation with Russia in 2015 and specialists fear that the recurrent cases of thefts of radioactive materials and lax security at the country’s nuclear facilities are dangerously fraught with a repetition of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
July 24, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, Ukraine |
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After pressure from Norway, Rosatom says floating nuclear plant will be fueled in Murmansk
The two reactors on “Akademik Lomonosov” will not have uranium fuel on board when being towed around Scandinavia next year, Barents Observer, Thomas Nilsen, 22 July 17,
In late June, State Secretary Marit Berger Røsland in Norway’s Foreign Ministry raised safety concerns about Russia’s plans to tow its first floating nuclear power plant around the coast of Norway.
“We clearly expressed that the Government is highly critical to the planed twoing of the nuclear power plant along the coast of Norway,” Berger Røsland said after meeting Rosatom officials at the annual Joint Norwegian-Russian commission on nuclear safety.
Norway and Russia has since the mid-90s cooperated on nuclear safety projects in the high north. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oslo has in total granted some €200 million in support, mainly for nuclear waste and reactor safety projects on the Kola Peninsula.
For Norway, having a floating nuclear power plant with two reactors loaded with irradiated uranium fuel sailing outside the coast has caused public concerns about possible accident and, in worst-case, radioactive contamination of marine resources.
On Friday, Russia’s State Nuclear Corporation Rosatom announced the shift of plans.
Will be loaded in Murmansk
“The loading of nuclear fuel into the reactors of the floating nuclear power plant “Akademik Lomonosov” and the start of the reactors will take place in Murmansk after the plant has be delivered without fuel on board,” General Director of Rosatom, Alexey Likhachev says.
“We will carry out the transportation through the Baltic and the Scandinavian region without nuclear fuel on board,” he noted and said this will meet the wishes of the countries of the Baltic-Scandinavian region……..
Not everyone, though, is happy with the move. Regional environmental group Priroda i Molodezh (Nature and Youth) in Murmansk on Saturday tweeted “This is transfer of the problem to another region where people also live.”
Another tweet from the organization reads: “By this logic, St. Petersburg is a nuclear-free zone, and Murmansk is a testing ground for nuclear tests?”
Atomflot is located less than a kilometre north of the nearest apartment blocks in the Rosta district in Murmansk.
Testing in Murmansk
After testing the reactors in Murmansk, a city with some 300,000 inhabitants, the floating nuclear power plant will be towed along Russia’s northern coast to the Arctic port town of Pevek on the Chukotka Peninsula……
Rosatom has further plans to build a series of similar floating nuclear power plants, both for use in remote Arctic regions and for leasing to other countries. https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2017/07/after-pressure-norway-rosatom-says-floating-nuclear-plant-will-be-fueled
July 24, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Russia, safety |
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More certain is the fact that the danger has not entirely passed. With dozens of Islamic State stragglers still loose in the city, U.S. officials requested that details about the cobalt’s current whereabouts not be revealed.
They also acknowledged that their worries extend far beyond Mosul. Similar equipment exists in hundreds of cities around the world, some of them in conflict zones.
“Nearly every country in the world either has them, or is a transit country” through which high-level radiological equipment passes
How ISIS nearly stumbled on the ingredients for a ‘dirty bomb’, WP, By Joby Warrick and Loveday Morris July 22 On the day the Islamic State overran the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, it laid claim to one of the greatest weapons bonanzas ever to fall to a terrorist group: a large metropolis dotted with military bases and garrisons stocked with guns, bombs, rockets and even battle tanks.
But the most fearsome weapon in Mosul on that day was never used by the terrorists. Only now is it becoming clear what happened to it.Locked away in a storage room on a Mosul college campus were two caches of cobalt-60, a metallic substance with lethally high levels of radiation. When contained within the heavy shielding of a radiotherapy machine, cobalt-60 is used to kill cancer cells. In terrorists’ hands, it is the core ingredient of a “dirty bomb,” a weapon that could be used to spread radiation and panic.
Western intelligence agencies were aware of the cobalt and watched anxiously for three years for signs that the militants might try to use it. Those concerns intensified in late 2014 when Islamic State officials boasted of obtaining radioactive material, and again early last year when the terrorists took over laboratories at the same Mosul college campus with the apparent aim of building new kinds of weapons.
In Washington, independent nuclear experts drafted papers and ran calculations about the potency of the cobalt and the extent of the damage it could do. The details were kept under wraps on the chance that Mosul’s occupiers might not be fully aware of what they had.
Iraqi military commanders were apprised of the potential threat as they battled Islamic State fighters block by block through the sprawling complex where the cobalt was last seen. Finally, earlier this year, government officials entered the bullet-pocked campus building and peered into the storage room where the cobalt machines were kept.
They were still there, exactly as they were when the Islamic State seized the campus in 2014. The cobalt apparently had never been touched.
“They are not that smart,” a relieved health ministry official said of the city’s former occupiers.
Why the Islamic State failed to take advantage of its windfall is not clear. U.S. officials and nuclear experts speculate that the terrorists may have been stymied by a practical concern: how to dismantle the machines’ thick cladding without exposing themselves to a burst of deadly radiation.
More certain is the fact that the danger has not entirely passed. With dozens of Islamic State stragglers still loose in the city, U.S. officials requested that details about the cobalt’s current whereabouts not be revealed.
They also acknowledged that their worries extend far beyond Mosul. Similar equipment exists in hundreds of cities around the world, some of them in conflict zones.
“Nearly every country in the world either has them, or is a transit country” through which high-level radiological equipment passes, said Andrew Bieniawski, a vice president for the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative who once led U.S. government efforts to safeguard such materials.
“This,” he said, “is a global problem.”
A lethal dose in three minutes
The worries began within hours of the Islamic State’s stunning blitz into Iraq’s second-largest city. As TV networks showed footage of triumphant terrorists parading through Mosul’s main thoroughfares, intelligence agencies took quiet inventory of the vast array of military and material wealth the Islamist militants had suddenly acquired. The list included three Iraqi military bases, each supplied with U.S.-made weapons and vehicles. It also included bank vaults containing hundreds of millions of dollars in hard currency, as well as factories for making munitions and university laboratories for mixing chemicals used in explosives or as precursors for poison gas.
U.S. officials also were aware that the Islamic State had gained control of small quantities of natural or low-enriched uranium — the remnants of Iraq’s nuclear projects from the time of Saddam Hussein’s presidency — as well as some relatively harmless radioactive iridium used in industrial equipment.
But a far bigger radiological concern was the cobalt. Intelligence agencies knew of the existence in Mosul of at least one powerful radiotherapy machine used for cancer treatment, one that could potentially provide the Islamic State with a potent terrorist weapon.
Outside experts were becoming aware of the threat as well…..
Leaders of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are known to have sought materials for a dirty bomb, a threat that has added urgency to efforts by U.S. agencies and private groups to improve security for machines with heavy concentrations of cobalt-60, or other radioactive elements such as cesium-137, which comes in a powdery form that is even easier to disperse.
The machines are a necessary fixture in many cancer clinics around the world, but in Western countries efforts are underway to replace the most dangerous models with new technology that cannot be easily exploited by terrorists, said Bieniawski, the former Energy Department official. His organization, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, has raised money to try to speed up the transition, but for now, he said, older machines such as the ones in Mosul are commonly found in developing countries where the risk of theft or terrorism is greatest.
“The ones we see overseas are in the highest category — the highest levels of curies — and they are also portable,” he said. “They are exactly the ones we are most worried about.”
Morris reported from Beirut. Mustafa Salim in Irbil, Iraq, contributed to this report. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-isis-nearly-stumbled-on-the-ingredients-for-a-dirty-bomb/2017/07/22/6a966746-6e31-11e7-b9e2-2056e768a7e5_story.html?utm_term=.564e04f5c470
July 24, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Iraq, safety, weapons and war |
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Radiation Free Lakeland 22nd July 2017, Braving the rain in Carlisle today campaigners went to bear witness to the Nuclear Industry’s whitewashing of its seemingly never ending transports of mountains of spent fuel and nuclear materials.
The day is a great draw for thousands of railway enthusiasts who are in love with the diesel
engines. Many are unaware of the dangerous cargo of nuclear fuel, even those who live in Carlisle.
Created in 1994 by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (now the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority) to take over British Rail’s handling of nuclear material. DRS has since diversified into other freight operations including food. This diversification serves to take the focus away from the main purpose which is the transport of nuclear materials (the only publicly owned railway we are allowed to have is that bearing nuclear freight!) https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2017/07/22/beware-nuclear-trains-bearing-gifts/
July 24, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, UK |
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By Keith Rogers Las Vegas Review-Journal, July 22, 2017 Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson sees a need to protect the space frontier and envisions bolstering the ranks of drone warfare all while preserving the vast Southern Nevada range that shrinks as fighter jets zip faster across it.
What she doesn’t see in her crystal ball is a nuclear-waste train rolling across the 2.9-million-acre Nevada Test and Training Range to reach the Department of Energy’s planned repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
“If Yucca Mountain becomes a storage area it needs to operate without impacting the ability of the country to defend itself,” Wilson said Friday in an exclusive interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “There is no route across the range that would not impact testing and training.”
Even a rail corridor that closely parallels the range’s boundary in Nye County could raise encroachment issues, she said, comparing what Nellis Air Force Base has dealt with balancing jet noise complaints and national security as urban Las Vegas sprawled closer to it over the decades……..
n 2003, Air Force Secretary James Roche and Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper wrote the House Armed Services Committee objecting to the Energy Department’s proposed Chalk Mountain route across the range. They said it would impact “mission-critical systems evaluations” as well as air combat training. They noted that 75 percent of all Air Force live munitions stateside are employed there.
Roving the range
The range’s role in testing of how new generation aircraft perform and can be detected or not by radar is also vital to the readiness.
Roche and Jumper also expressed concern for the fringe of the range citing “any modified routes into portions of the NTTR (Nevada Test and Training Range). Additionally, any overflight restrictions on aircraft operating in NTTR-associated airspace will negatively impact our readiness activities.”
The Chalk Mountain route, a short-cut option for rail shipments of spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the Midwest and eastern U.S., was later downgraded to “nonpreferred” by the Energy Department but is still part of the routes evaluated for the license application submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008…….. https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/military/air-force-chief-objects-to-yucca-mountain-nuclear-routes/
July 24, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, USA |
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Iran skips opportunity to upset nuclear deal over U.S. sanctions: sources VIENNA (Reuters) 22 July 17 – Iran decided on Friday for the second time since January not to upset its nuclear pact with six world powers, two informed sources said, despite public statements by Tehran accusing the United States of violating the deal.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday new U.S. economic sanctions imposed against Iran contravened the nuclear accord reached with world powers in 2015 and he pledged Tehran would “resist” them while respecting the deal itself.
The Trump administration slapped new sanctions on Iran on Tuesday over its ballistic missile program and said Tehran’s “malign activities” in the Middle East undercut any “positive contributions” coming from the nuclear accord, which was reached during the Obama administration.
Iran can use the so-called Joint Commission meetings held every three months in Vienna to trigger a formal dispute resolution mechanism set out for cases where one party feels there is a breach of the deal……
A source with knowledge of the matter said “the Iranians did complain a lot and the Russians supported them, but they won’t play along to Washington’s game and be turned into killjoys.”
This source, and another one with knowledge of Friday’s meeting, said Iran did not use the plenary session comprised of envoys from Iran, the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany and the EU to start a dispute resolution.
This mirrored Tehran’s actions in January at a previous so-called Joint Commission meeting, which is held in Vienna every three months, when Iranian officials opted not to escalate a stand-off over the extension of other U.S. sanctions…….https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-usa-idUSKBN1A6248
July 22, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Iran, safety |
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Fukui governor and mayors ask Inada for added protection for reactors against North Korea attacks, Japan Times BY ERIC JOHNSTON OSAKA – Fukui Gov. Issei Nishikawa and the mayors of six towns and villages in the prefecture hosting nuclear power plants have called on Defense Minister Tomomi Inada to dispatch Self-Defense Forces personnel to the prefecture to guard Fukui’s 15 reactors (including those being decommissioned) against a possible attack by North Korea…….
“In order to deter a missile attack, and in order to secure peace of mind of local residents, we ask that Self-Defense Forces be dispatched to the southern part of the prefecture,” the request stated.
In a 2013 report on the nation’s mid-term defense posture for 2014-2018, the Defense Ministry said it will strengthen cooperation with local governments hosting nuclear power plants and take necessary measures to protect them.
Nishikawa also called on the ministry to establish a landing area for helicopters that could be used if a large-scale evacuation of residents in towns near the nuclear power plants would be necessary in the event of damage at a reactor……http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/20/national/politics-diplomacy/fukui-governor-mayors-ask-inada-added-protection-reactors-north-korea-attacks/#.WXE0fRWGPGg
July 21, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Japan, safety |
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Gas may have ruptured bag at nuclear facility https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20170721_01/NHK has learned the operator of a nuclear research facility northeast of Tokyo believes a bag containing nuclear fuel materials ruptured last month due to a buildup of gas in it.
The rupture occurred on June 6th at the facility run by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency in Ibaraki Prefecture. Five workers were exposed to plutonium and other radioactive materials.
In the bag was a plastic container that stored nuclear fuel materials. The materials were held together by an adhesive agent to make it easier to use in experiments.
A report compiled by the agency says gas is believed to have been generated when radioactive rays disintegrated the adhesive agent, the polyethylene container, and the molecules of water in the bag.
The agency plans to submit a report to the Nuclear Regulation Authority as early as Friday. It will also conduct further analyses to determine the amount of the adhesive agent and the condition of the nuclear fuel materials when they were inside the container.
July 21, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
incidents, Japan |
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