Construction of the floating plant, which is to be deployed in Russia’s Far East, has caused concern among environmentalists. Rashid Alimov of Greenpeace’s Russian branch said Tuesday’s fire showed that plans for loading nuclear fuel into the plant’s reactors are “irresponsible.”
The shipyard is about two kilometers (1.25 miles) downriver from some of St. Petersburg’s most renowned tourist sites, including the State Hermitage Museum.
The ministry statement says the fire was caused by a short circuit in a storage battery.
CORE 2nd July 2017, The Pacific Heron and sister shipPacific Egret, armed with naval canon and
carrying security ‘swat- squads’ sailed unladen from their home port of Barrow-in-Furness early this morning en-route to Cherbourg where MOX (mixed oxide) plutonium fuel assemblies will be loaded for onward delivery to Japan.
The 16 fuel assemblies, fabricated in French company Areva’s MeloxPlant and containing some 500kg of nuclear weapons useable plutonium aredestined for Kansai Electric’s Takahama 4 reactor in the south west of Japan. Preparation for the two-month voyage have been evident over the last few days at Barrow’s Ramsden Dock nuclear terminal with the loading of stores, the arrival of the security swat-squads provided by the Civil Nuclear Constabulary’s Strategic Escort Group (aka Sea-Plods), the
loading of ammunition and the sweeping of the ships’ hulls by divers.
Commenting on the preparations, CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today that the need for this level of armed security brings home the reality of the very real and significant dangers of transporting plutonium – in this case enough for around one hundred nuclear weapons – and demolishes the industry’s complacent and short-sighted claim that such shipments pose no risks.
“At a time of heightened and increasingly sophisticated action by terrorists we re-iterate our condemnation of the trans-world shipment of such dangerous material by sea. This voyage not
only foists needless risks on the marine environment and communities along the route, but also raises additional and significant concerns in Japan on the use of MOX fuel in the Takahama reactor (as also used in the fated Fukushima reactors) which has only just re-started after the overturning of a court injunction by local activists which kept the reactor off-line for inadequate safety standards” http://corecumbria.co.uk/news/nuclear-gunships-sail-from-barrow-on-plutonium-voyage-to-japan/
Rotten resin gas ‘most likely’ cause of Ibaraki nuclear accident http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201707040020.html July 4, 2017 The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) now considers the most likely cause of last month’s nuclear contamination accident at its Oarai research center to be gas produced by decomposing resin containing plutonium and other radioactive substances.
The June 6 incident at the facility in Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo, exposed five workers to plutonium when they handled 26-year-old radioactive waste stored there.
Resin was used to stick the radioactive waste on an aluminum sheet and stored in a tightly sealed polyethylene container, which was wrapped in plastic bags and placed in a stainless steel container.
The accident occurred when the workers opened the steel container and were exposed to radioactive particles that seeped out of the polyethylene container in gas that ruptured the plastic coverings and escaped into the room they were in.
“Decomposition of resin by a radioactive substance is considered as the most likely cause of the gas’s formation,” said Toshio Kodama, JAEA president, at a July 3 meeting with the science and technology ministry’s special investigation team that was set up to determine the cause of the accident.
JAEA found that the polyethylene container inside the plastic bags contained powdered plutonium set in pieces of epoxy resin.
The agency is looking at other possibilities, but now considers decomposition of the resin as the most likely cause.
On the same day, the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba announced that three of the five workers have been admitted to its facility for the third time to receive medication via an intravenous drip that speeds the excretion of radioactive substances from their bodies as urine.
The health of the five workers has not changed, according to NIRS.
Atomic Bellyflop: America’s 1st ’21st Century Nuclear Reactor’ Fails, Shuts Down After 5 Months bureauEnviroNews DC News Bureau ,byJulia Travers July 3, 2017
2nd Hanford tunnel storing radioactive waste at risk of failing, federal study says Seattle Times, July 1, 2017 “This makes it clear that the second tunnel may also pose a risk to human health and the environment,” said Alex Smith, nuclear-waste program manager for the state Department of Ecology. Hal BerntonSeattle Times staff reporter. A second tunnel storing radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation has structural problems and is at risk of failing, according to a U.S. Energy Department investigation released Friday.
This tunnel is more than four times longer than the smaller Hanford tunnel that suffered a partial roof collapse May 9, triggering an order for more than 4,800 employees to stay indoors.
Officials say the May 9 event did not trigger any radioactive releases. But it did escalate safety concerns about the storage of high-hazard materials left from the legacy of Hanford’s plutonium production.
State Department of Ecology officials ordered an engineering evaluation as part of a series of corrective actions. The findings were jointly released Friday in Richland by state and federal officials……..
It is not clear what caused the collapse of the wood-and-concrete tunnel that contains eight flatbed railcars holding radioactive waste. Possible factors included heavy rainfall in early May and deteriorating wood, according to the Energy Department.
The stabilization plan for the smaller tunnel involves filling it with grout, with work scheduled to be done by year’s end.
The Energy Department has until Aug. 1 to submit a plan to state officials for shoring up the second tunnel, which stretches for some 1,700 feet.
Made of metal and concrete, it was built in the 1960s and, like the other tunnel, holds railcars containing radioactive waste.
Investigators found it does not meet codes for structural integrity, and may not be able to bear the weight of soil above it……..
the Energy Department is examining options to shore up the larger tunnel. The task is complicated by the fact that, because of radiation, no one can enter the tunnel to assess its conditions…… About 8,000 people are working on a complex cleanup expected to cost more than $100 billion and last for decades.
Air Force to “Cyber-Secure” Nuclear Arsenal, SCOUT WARRIOR, 2 Jul 17, Modernizing computer networks for the nuclear arsenal is part of the current Air Force plan to build as many as 400 new Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, to serve through the 2070s.
The Air Force is seeking more interactions with private sector firms to build better networks for securing nuclear weapons computer systems, service officials said.
Air Force engineers say protection of computer networks is well established in many ways, but that the service needs to widen its scope with greater focus on IT dimensions to its nuclear arsenal’s command and control apparatus.
“Information technology that touches weapons systems needs to be cyber secure, updated and patched. Worldwide nuclear systems are one example of where we need to get an overhaul,” Peter Kim, Air Force Chief Information Security Officer, told Scout Warrior in an interview.
Ukrainian Firefighters Battle Forest Fire Near Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, https://www.rferl.org/a/firefighters-battle-forest-fire-near-chernobyl/28588006.html June 30, 2017 RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, Ukrainian firefighters are battling to contain a forest fire inside the irradiated exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, officials say.
The fire erupted around midday on June 29 during tree cutting works at the Lubyanskoye Forestry and spread to an area of some 25 hectares by early June 30, the emergency services said.
More than 100 firefighters and scores of trucks and aircraft were dispatched to the area, a statement said.
It is not the first wildfire to break out near the site of the 1986 reactor explosion and fire, the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster. In 2015 alone, fires engulfed some 400 hectares of forests in the exclusion zone.
A separate Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report in February detailed the magnitude of the shortfall:
Los Alamos’ dangerous work, it said, demands 27 fully qualified criticality safety engineers.
The lab has 10
Safety problems at a Los Alamos laboratory delay U.S. nuclear warhead testing and production A facility that handles the cores of U.S. nuclear weapons has been mostly closed since 2013 over its inability to control worker safety risks, Science, By The Center for Public Integrity, R. Jeffrey Smith, Patrick MalonJun. 30, 2017
In mid-2013, four federal nuclear safety experts brought an alarming message to the top official in charge of America’s warhead production: Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation’s sole site for making and testing a key nuclear bomb part, wasn’t taking needed safety precautions. The lab, they said, was ill-prepared to prevent an accident that could kill lab workers, and potentially others nearby.
Some safety infractions had already occurred at the lab that year. But Neile Miller, who was then the acting head of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, says those experts specifically told her that Los Alamos didn’t have enough personnel who knew how to handle plutonium so it didn’t accidentally go “critical” and start an uncontrolled chain reaction.
Such chain reactions generate intense bursts of deadly radiation, and over the last half-century have claimed nearly two dozen lives. The precise consequences, Miller said in a recent interview, “did not need an explanation. You don’t want an accident involving criticality and plutonium.” Indeed, Miller said, criticality “is one of those trigger words” that immediately gets the attention of those responsible for preventing a nuclear weapons disaster.
With two of the four experts remaining in her Washington office overlooking the national mall, Miller picked up the phone and called the lab’s director, Charles McMillan, at his own office on the idyllic Los Alamos campus in the New Mexico mountains, where nuclear weapons work is financed by a federal payment exceeding $2 billion a year. She recommended that a sensitive facility conducting plutonium operations — inside a building known as PF-4 — be shut down, immediately, while the safety deficiencies were fixed.
McMillan, a nuclear physicist and weapons designer with government-funded compensation exceeding a million dollars a year, responded that he had believed the problems could be solved while that lab kept operating. He was “reluctant” to shut it down, Miller recalled. But as the call proceeded, he became open to her view that the risks were too high, she added. So on McMillan’s order, the facility was shut within a day, with little public notice.
In the secrecy-shrouded world of America’s nuclear weapons work, that decision had far-reaching consequences. Continue reading →
A tunnel partially collapsed on May 9, forcing some 3,000 workers to seek shelter for a few hours.
There were no injuries.
The Energy Department said Friday it had completed an evaluation of a second tunnel on the former nuclear weapons production site and determined there is a high potential for that 53-year-old tunnel to collapse. The agency says it has an Aug. 1 deadline to develop plans to prevent that.
Hanford is located in south-central Washington state and for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons. The site is now engaged in cleaning up a massive inventory of nuclear waste.
Safety problems at a Los Alamos laboratory delay U.S. nuclear warhead testing and production A facility that handles the cores of U.S. nuclear weapons has been mostly closed since 2013 over its inability to control worker safety risks, Science,
Los Alamos’s progress in improving its criticality safety since the shutdown began has been fitful, and the dissonance between safety experts and its top managers has stubbornly persisted.
McMillan initially promised to train fissile material handlers to be more heedful of plutonium-handling perils, for example, and to bring the inventory and safety documents guiding their work up to date. In an email to lab employees, he promised that a “pause” lasting less than a year wouldn’t cause “any significant impact to mission deliverables.”
But at the end of 2013, a new group of safety experts, commissioned by the lab to guide its reforms, delivered bad news just as the lab was attempting to restart operations at PF-4. “Management has not yet fully embraced its commitment to criticality safety,” the group said, according to a copy of its report obtained by CPI.
It also listed nine weaknesses in the lab’s safety culture that were rooted in a “production focus” to meet work deadlines. Workers say these deadlines are typically linked to financial bonuses. Los Alamos’s leaders, the report said, had made the right promises, but failed to alter the underlying safety culture. “The focus appears to remain short-term and compliance oriented rather than based on a strategic plan,” the report said.
In May 2014, Peter Winokur, who at the time chaired the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, weighed in with a separate, written warning to the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. He said McMillan was improperly trying to restart “high-risk” PF-4 operations without first carefully setting new, written, safety benchmarks for the lab’s plutonium work.
The NNSA head, Klotz, alerted the Secretary of Energy, Moniz, and the two of them flew to Los Alamos to meet with McMillan, a man known for both charm and hubris. “Los Alamos is a legend,” McMillan has boasted in a promotional video. “It’s an icon. And of course, because of that, everybody notices what we do here; and we’re held to a very high standard.”
Moniz said he told McMillan personally that “I was not entirely satisfied with the reactions of some of his senior managers.” As a result, he said, “actions were taken,” without offering details.
But progress was not swift.
The NNSA, in its annual evaluation of Los Alamos’ overall performance for fiscal year 2014, judged the criticality safety program to be “below expectations” with deficiencies “similar to issues identified in past” evaluations; it particularly faulted the labels the lab had placed on nuclear materials and the guides the lab had prepared for workers performing plutonium handling chores.
Some of these shortfalls persisted in 2015, and new ones were discovered. On May 6, 2015, for example, the NNSA sent Los Alamos’ managing contractors a letter again criticizing the lab for being slow to fix criticality risks. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which summarized the letter in one of its weekly reports, said “there are currently more than 60 unresolved infractions,” many present for months “or even years.”
In January and again in April 2015, workers discovered tubes of liquids containing plutonium in seldom-used rooms at PF-4, with labels that made it hard to know how much plutonium they held or where they’d come from, the safety board said. In May, workers packed a drum of nuclear waste with too much plutonium, posing a criticality risk, and in the ensuing probe, it became clear that they were relying on inaccurate and confusing documentation. Safety experts had miscalculated how much plutonium the drum could safely hold.
“These issues are very similar to the issues that contributed to the LANL Director’s decision to pause operations in June of 2013,” safety board inspectors wrote.
Asked about the persistence of the Los Alamos lab’s problems, former NNSA director Miller smiled and said her colleagues at the nuclear oversight agency sometimes told the following joke: If Washington sent all three of America’s nuclear weapons labs an order to study how to “jump,” they would all respond differently. Lawrence Livermore, she said, would convene a conference and produce a three-inch stack of reports about “jumping.” Officials at Sandia would simply jump.
But at Los Alamos, she said, officials would instinctively respond with a “**ck you, we’re not jumping.”
Journal de l’environement 28th June 2017 [Machine Translation] While acknowledging its weaknesses, the nuclear gendarme should authorize the entry into service of the Flamanville EPR
reactor at the end of next year.
In return, EDF will have to multiply the controls, some of which are impossible to achieve. And change the lid of
the reactor vessel “as soon as possible”.
The conference room of the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) was full on Wednesday afternoon. After
months of suspense, the regulator of the nuclear park was to return its “position” about the future of the flagship of the tricolor atomic industry: the Flamanville EPR.
In a few minutes, the case is dispatched. What do you expect from the ASN? Work will continue in Flamanville. If all
goes well, the third reactor is expected to start at the end of 2018. Prudente, EDF has ordered, from April, a Japanese blacksmith a new tank lid. In Pierre-Franck Chevet’s opinion, the machine should be ready to install in 2024, six years after the reactor is commissioned!
BFM TV 29th June 2017 [Machine Translation]The manufacturing defects encountered in France also
exist on the two reactors of Taishan, in the south-east of China. The
decision of the nuclear safety authority prompts China to emulate it.
Barely the problem of Flamanville settled, the looks turn to China. The CGN
industrialist built in Taishan, in the south-east of the country, two EPRs
with EDF. These two tanks were manufactured in France, in the factory of Le
Creusot, like those of Flamanville. And obviously have the same
manufacturing defects.
“The same parts are concerned and have been
manufactured with the same process, explained the ASN president,
Pierre-Franck Chevet, but it is the responsibility of the Chinese to
decide. For two years, they have been associated with all the tests and
works of the French authority. On Monday and Tuesday, the representatives
of the Chinese authority and the industrialist CGN were in Paris to follow
the conclusions on the Flamanville EPR. They will have to decide whether
they also impose changes to the lids of the Taishan EPRs. These two
reactors must start between the end of 2017 and the end of 2018. http://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/entreprise/apres-flamanville-la-surete-des-epr-chinois-en-question-1197282.html
Robin Des Bois 29th June 2017, [Machine Translation]Next week, MOX fuel should be loaded at Cherbourg on
the Pacific Egret or Pacific Heron to Japan and the Takahama nuclear power
plant. The MOX contains 10% plutonium and 90% uranium.
This journey throughthe seas of the world of dangerous fissile materials induces tensions and
risks throughout the journey. The problem of safe havens in case of damage
or fire is still unresolved. The ability of Pacific Nuclear Transport
Ltd.’s small ships to withstand North Korean cyclones, tsunamis and
missiles is not demonstrated.
But it is the business as usual that continues for Areva and for a French nuclear industry without guard crazy
besides being penniless. Perpetuating small business as in the good old
days before Fukushima means avoiding questioning the reprocessing plant for
irradiated fuel and plutonium mining in La Hague, which the Nuclear Safety
Authority and the unions say Since 2 years that it is in a worrying state
in terms of safety.
Areva’s transports always give the marines of the whole
world the opportunity of exercises for the most underwater. Our first
advice is therefore aimed at fishermen and especially trawlers. They must
deviate widely from the convoy to eliminate any risk of hook with a
submarine, hypothesis more and more plausible to explain the sinking of the
Bugaled Breizh in January 2004, a few days before the departure of
Cherbourg of a cargo of waste Nuclear activities to Japan. http://www.robindesbois.org/moxquitue/
Hackers breached a US nuclear power plant’s network, and it could be a ‘big danger’, Business Insider, SONAM SHETH JUN 30, 2017
A US nuclear facility was breached in a cyberattack, outlets reported on Wednesday.
The attack was contained to the business-associated side of the plant, and evidence indicates that critical infrastructure was not affected.
But cybersecurity experts say that now that the network has been infiltrated, the nuclear systems have become “much more vulnerable.”
Unidentified hackers recently breached at least one US nuclear power plant and the situation is being investigated by federal officials, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News on Wednesday.
The name and location of the plant have not been released, but cyberattacks have affected “multiple nuclear power generation sites this year,” according to E&E News, which was the first to report the story.
It is not yet clear who launched the attack and whether it is connected to a global cyberattack that crippled several countries and corporations beginning on Tuesday.
The breach was contained to the business-associated side of the plant, officials said. So far, little information has come out about the origins of the hack, code named “Nuclear 17,” but evidence indicates that the attack was not serious enough to prompt alerts from the public safety systems at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the International Atomic Energy Agency, E&E reported. The information available thus far indicates that nuclear safety is not immediately at direct risk.
But cybersecurity experts say that now that hackers have infiltrated the system, nuclear safety could be at risk down the road. “If a nuclear power facility is attacked on the business side, that might actually serve as a way of information-gathering” for hackers, Paulo Shakarian, founder of the cybersecurity firm CYR3CON, told Business Insider. In some cases, hackers will try to “see if, by reaching that system, they can get more insight into what the facility is using on the operational side,” Shakarian said.
“This could be a big danger,” he added. “And it could lead to another attack that could be more serious.” Though nuclear power providers have rigorous practices in place to divide business and nuclear operations in their networks, experts say an attack on one could inform an attack on the other.
A breach to the business-associated end of a nuclear power plant “is very severe and very scary,” said Greg Martin, the CEO of cybersecurity firm JASK. He said that while it was “wonderful” that network segmentation prevented hackers from being able to attack critical infrastructure directly, “the business side has tons of information about the more vulnerable infrastructure side of these types of plants.”
That information can include emails; communications involving design plans; information about security assessments; emails or documents that contain passwords; and more. Martin echoed Shakarian’s assessment and added that some information that can be gleaned from a breach like this can open up a window that “can be used to set up for future, more damaging attacks just based on the proprietary information they’re able to steal.”….
In the case of the nuclear power plant breach, Martin said once hackers had accessed the business network, “it is much, much more vulnerable” despite having a firewall and being segmented off from the operational side.
A near-disaster at a federal nuclear weapons laboratory takes a hidden toll on America’s arsenal , Science Repeated safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Laboratory’s work on the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads By The Center for Public Integrity, Patrick Malone Jun. 29, 2017 Technicians at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory settled on what seemed like a surefire way to win praise from their bosses in August 2011: In a hi-tech testing and manufacturing building pivotal to sustaining America’s nuclear arsenal, they gathered eight rods painstakingly crafted out of plutonium, and positioned them side-by-side on a table to photograph how nice they looked.
At many jobs, this would be innocent bragging. But plutonium is the unstable, radioactive, man-made fuel of a nuclear explosion, and it isn’t amenable to showboating. When too much is put in one place, it becomes “critical” and begins to fission uncontrollably, spontaneously sparking a nuclear chain reaction, which releases energy and generates a deadly burst of radiation.
The resulting blue glow — known as Cherenkov radiation — has accidentally and abruptly flashed at least 60 times since the dawn of the nuclear age, signaling an instantaneous nuclear charge and causing a total of 21 agonizing deaths. So keeping bits of plutonium far apart is one of the bedrock rules that those working on the nuclear arsenal are supposed to follow to prevent workplace accidents. It’s Physics 101 for nuclear scientists, but has sometimes been ignored at Los Alamos.
As luck had it that August day, a supervisor returned from her lunch break, noticed the dangerous configuration, and ordered a technician to move the rods apart. But in so doing, she violated safety rules calling for a swift evacuation of all personnel in “criticality” events, because bodies — and even hands — can reflect and slow the neutrons emitted by plutonium, increasing the likelihood of a nuclear chain reaction. A more senior lab official instead improperly decided that others in the room should keep working, according to a witness and an Energy Department report describing the incident.
Catastrophe was avoided and no announcement was made at the time about the near-miss — but officials internally described what happened as the most dangerous nuclear-related incident at that facility in years. It then set in motion a calamity of a different sort: Virtually all of the Los Alamos engineers tasked with keeping workers safe from criticality incidents decided to quit, having become frustrated by the sloppy work demonstrated by the 2011 event and what they considered the lab management’s callousness about nuclear risks and its desire to put its own profits above safety.
When this exodus was in turn noticed in Washington, officials there concluded the privately-run lab was not adequately protecting its workers from a radiation disaster. In 2013, they worked with the lab director to shut down its plutonium handling operations so the workforce could be retrained to meet modern safety standards.
Those efforts never fully succeeded, however, and so what was anticipated as a brief work stoppage has turned into a nearly four-year shutdown of portions of the huge laboratory building where the plutonium work is located, known as PF-4.
Officials privately say that the closure in turn undermined the nation’s ability to fabricate the cores of new nuclear weapons and obstructed key scientific examinations of existing weapons to ensure they still work. The exact cost to taxpayers of idling the facility is unclear, but an internal Los Alamos report estimated in 2013 that shutting down the lab where such work is conducted costs the government as much as $1.36 million a day in lost productivity.
And most remarkably, Los Alamos’s managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards. ……
these safety challenges aren’t confined to Los Alamos. The Center’s probe revealed a frightening series of glaring worker safety risks, previously unpublicized accidents, and dangerously lax management practices. The investigation further revealed that the penalties imposed by the government on the private firms that make America’s nuclear weapons were typically just pinpricks, and that instead the firms annually were awarded large profits in the same years that major safety lapses occurred. Some were awarded new contracts despite repeated, avoidable accidents, including some that exposed workers to radiation…….
George Anastas, a past president of the Health Physics Society who analyzed dozens of internal government reports about criticality problems at Los Alamos for the Center, said he wonders if “the work at Los Alamos [can] be done somewhere else? Because it appears the safety culture, the safety leadership, has gone to hell in a handbasket.”
