nuclear-news

IAEA warns of impact on nuclear safety of attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure

 World Nuclear News 29th Nov 2024, https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/iaea-warns-of-impact-on-nuclear-safety-of-attacks-on-ukraines-energy-infrastructure

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said that Ukraine’s three operating nuclear power plants have had to reduce their electricity generation as a result of attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure.

In the agency’s latest update it said that the nuclear power plants – Khmelnitsky, Rivne and South Ukraine – had to lower their power levels on Thursday for the second time in two weeks as a precautionary safety step. The three plants have a total of nine reactors between them. One reactor at Rivne was disconnected from the grid and all three plants continued to receive off-site power, although Khmelnitsky lost connection to two of its power lines.

Grossi said: “Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is extremely fragile and vulnerable, putting nuclear safety at great risk. Once again, I call for maximum military restraint in areas with major nuclear energy facilities and other sites on which they depend.”

IAEA teams visited seven substations located outside the nuclear power plants in Ukraine in September and October to assess the situation after strikes on the energy infrastructure in August. Grossi reported to the IAEA board of governors earlier this month that there had been “extensive damage” and concluded that the reliability of off-site supply to nuclear power plants had been “significantly reduced”.

In his statement issued on Thursday, he said: “The IAEA will continue to assess the extent of damage to facilities and power lines that are essential for nuclear safety and security. The IAEA will continue to do everything in its power to reduce the risk of a nuclear incident during this tragic war.”

The IAEA has had teams stationed at each of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, and it said there had been no reports of direct damage to nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power plants need to have an electricity supply to ensure necessary safety functions can take place as well as reactor cooling, and they also need reliable connections to the grid to be able to distribute the electricity they produce. In addition to Ukraine’s three operating nuclear power plants, Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been under Russian military control since early March 2022. Its reactors are all shut down and it has had to rely on emergency diesel generators on occasions when it has lost all access to off-site power.

The IAEA has set out its seven rules for nuclear safety and security during the Russian-Ukraine conflict, which have been adopted by the United Nations Security Council. They include the core principles that no-one should fire at, or from a nuclear power plant, or use a nuclear power plant as a military base.

December 2, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety | Leave a comment

Why Bunkers Won’t Save The Super Rich

Inside the doomsday culture of the elites.

• Jessica Wildfire, November 26 2024,  https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.net/why-bunkers-wont-save-the-super-rich/?ref=ok-doomer-newsletter

If you ever wonder if you’re taking the end of the world too seriously, you can always google “doomsday bunkers” and see what the billionaires are up to. Also, Germany just started designing an app to help its citizens find a fallout shelter in case Putin ever makes good on his nuclear threats.

Five years…

That’s how long you’d last in the Survival Condo, a luxury bunker built into an abandoned missile silo. It’s what Bradley Garrett describes as a geoscraper, an inverse skyscraper designed to withstand the collapse of civilization. This thing has everything a disaster movie could want.

The operation is run by Larry Hall, a former military contractor and entrepreneur who once designed hardened data centers.

From House Beautiful:

There’s a general store, an indoor pool and spa, a gym, medical first aid center, a library, a classroom, a bar and more.

But features like the direct shooting range, digital weather station, monolithic dome cap, and security command center remind guests of the structure’s war zone history. “The mission is to protect residents from a whole wide range of threats,” Hall said. “Everything from viral or bacterial threats and chemicals to volcanic ash, meteors, solar flares and civil unrest,” he says.

The place also has at least one remote-controlled rifle turret. As the guy in charge says, “You can kill people like it’s a video game.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ll have drones and robots soon. This underground fortress also boasts three military-grade air filtration systems, at $30,000 each.

The cost of a suite here runs into the millions.

A Saudi Prince tried to buy one of Hall’s latest projects outright. He turned them down out of principle. As Hall himself admits, any bunker needs social cohesion to ensure survival. Even at the end of the world, people need to feel normal. Otherwise, they go bonkers… inside their bunkers.

Over the last decade, prepping has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry, filled with companies ready to capitalize on everyone’s growing sense of dread about the future. And yet, nobody does it like the rich. They’re spending millions of dollars on bunker palaces with moats, water cannons, and secret tunnels lined with flame throwers. I’m not even kidding.

Read this:

“The client [a business mogul] was saying, ‘I want to make sure that no one can get to my family,’ so we wound up literally building a 30-foot-deep lake [around the compound] skimmed with a lighter-than-water flammable liquid that can transform into a ring of fire.”

When they’re not preparing for the end of the world, the rich can use their water canons to play games or “blow rainbows in the air.”

Yep, some bunkers double as theme parks.

Obviously, it’s no fun to have a bunker if you can’t show it off to all your rich friends. According to a 2017 piece in The New Yorker, that’s exactly what the bankers and hedge fund managers do. They get together over wine.

They brag about their doomsday plans.

Luxury bunkers surged in popularity at the start of the pandemic, but they have a long heritage. Governments around the world have built thousands of them over the last century with hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. As militaries abandon the originals for better designs, the ultra rich have been snatching them up and flipping them. There’s a real booming dooming market for apocalyptic real estate, explored by Garrett in his book Bunker.

Yeah, bunker flipping.

It’s a thing.

If Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of The Richest whet your curiosity for the doomsday culture of the super rich, then Bunker satisfies it and then some. Toward the end, I was going, “Jeez another one…?”

(That’s a good thing.)

With enough subtility to avoid pissing off his interview subjects, Bradley Garrett answers every question I ever had about bunkers, specifically if they even stood a chance of surviving real doom.

Let’s dig in.

November 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety | Leave a comment

US Congress wants to turn the nuclear regulator into the US industry’s cheerleader—again

the new act does not cite the Atomic Energy Act’s original safety standard of “adequate protection” (Section 182), but rather a watered-down version of “reasonable assurance of adequate protection.” In the law, words matter.

By Victor Gilinsky | November 21, 2024, Victor Gilinsky is a physicist and was a commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.  https://thebulletin.org/2024/11/congress-wants-to-turn-the-nuclear-regulator-into-the-us-industrys-cheerleader-again/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter11212024&utm_content=NuclearRisk_NuclearRegulatorIndustryCheerleader_11212024

The US Congress overwhelmingly approved the ADVANCE Act in July to accelerate licensing of “advanced” reactors. These consist mainly of fast reactors, which radically differ from those operating today, and include “fusion machines.” There were no public hearings on the act, and it shows every sign of having been written by interested parties and with little vetting.

The Energy Department and the US nuclear industry are promoting fast reactor demonstration projects, the prime being TerraPower’s Natrium project in Wyoming. The project broke ground in June but still awaits a full construction permit. No commercial reactors of this type are operating today. TerraPower foresees selling hundreds of such reactors for domestic use and export. The new law is largely directed at clearing the way for the rapid licensing of such reactors by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It does so in part by providing additional resources but also—more ominously—by weakening the agency’s safety reviews and inspections in the name of efficiency.

Efficiency over safety. The act’s insidious approach is, first, to direct the NRC to modify its “mission statement” to add a provision that its licensing and safety reviews will “not unnecessarily limit the benefits of nuclear energy to society.” The addition sounds innocuous: No one is going to defend unnecessary work. But the message is clear. To make sure it works its way down to the daily decisions made by NRC’s safety engineers, the act then gives the commissioners one year to supply Congress with a report on what guidance they will provide to the professional engineering staff to “ensure effective performance” under the new mission.

In a bureaucracy, you get what you incentivize for: Congress wants the commissioners to make clear to safety reviewers that every hour they will take is an hour that society will be deprived of nuclear energy (and someone’s grandmother will sit in the dark). This sort of pressure spells trouble. The safety of complex systems with inherent dangers is a subtle trade and requires unbiased attention to avoid serious errors. That is especially true of newly commercialized technology. NRC safety reviews and inspections are especially critical in protecting the public because, with nuclear power, there is no customer feedback loop like there is with, say, commercial flying. If people get worried about flying, they can vote for more safety by not buying tickets. Once a nuclear plant is turned on, there is realistically not much the public can do.

The Energy Department’s web page said the new law would help to “build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s.” But the department seems to forget that the 1970s spurt of licensing—encouraged by the commissioners of the old Atomic Energy Commission—resulted in light-water power reactors with many safety problems. These problems were then left for the newly independent NRC to resolve, taking years and leading to considerable expense.

Weaker definition of safety. For Congress to address the mission statement of a federal agency is itself strange. Mission statements, like “vision” statements, are products of business schools and management consultants and are typically brief generalities that hardly anyone pays much attention to. The Energy Department says its mission is “to ensure the security and prosperity of the United States by addressing its energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges.” Congress could have told the department to speed up the reactor development process, but it didn’t. Instead, it acted on the assumption that the stumbling block to a nuclear future lies in the NRC licensing system.

The ADVANCE Act acknowledges the need for the NRC to continue to enforce the safety requirements of the Atomic Energy Act while pursuing the goal of “efficiency.” But in doing so, the new act does not cite the Atomic Energy Act’s original safety standard of “adequate protection” (Section 182), but rather a watered-down version of “reasonable assurance of adequate protection.” In the law, words matter.

The commission has been using that weaker standard of safety for some years—not legitimately, in my view. The new act now validates it. The NRC lamely claims that the additional three words are just explanatory—needed to avoid the implication that “adequate protection” would mean perfect safety—and do not affect the basic standard. But the commissioners don’t dare apply that logic to the security part of the NRC’s responsibilities, which, if they did, would read: “to promote reasonable assurance of the common defense and security.” There is no question that the addition changes the meaning.

Deja vu. For Congress to put the onus on NRC’s safety engineers to speed along the reactors of a yet-untested type is reminiscent of the situation before the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act separated the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) regulators from the agency’s reactor developers. The 93^rd Congress did not give the nuclear regulators independent status out of some concern for administrative neatness. It was done because the AEC commissioners neglected their safety responsibilities. The AEC kept the regulatory staff on a short leash, mainly so that they would not get in the way of the project the commissioners cared most about—as it turns out, also a demonstration fast reactor that was supposed to be followed by hundreds and even thousands of commercial orders. In the end, it all came to nothing. Glenn Seaborg, the then-chairman who was largely responsible for the debacle, would later admit: “[N]one of the [underlying] assumptions proved correct.”

We’ve gone through several iterations of nuclear power over-enthusiasm since the AEC thought fast reactors would soon power the world: The “nuclear renaissance” during the George W. Bush administration was to produce dozens of power reactor orders by 2010; then its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership was going to build fast reactors to burn spent fuel and obviate the need for additional geologic storage; and now fast power reactors are hyped again. None of the earlier expectations worked out. But each time, the certainty of the predictions was used to lean on the regulators to smooth the way. The ADVANCE legislation’s assumption that many orders for fast reactors will soon be coming and that the NRC must be disciplined to avoid a holdup has the makings of another such episode.

Congress’s main concern about the NRC should be that it is an effective protector of public safety.

November 24, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety | Leave a comment