Special NRC inspection of leak from A southern Illinois uranium-conversion plant

NRC inspecting Illinois uranium-conversion plant after leak, WT  By – Associated Press – Tuesday, August 4, 2015 METROPOLIS, Ill. (AP) – A southern Illinois uranium-conversion plant is undergoing a special inspection after a weekend leak of uranium hexafluoride, a gas used to produce enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said.

August 5, 2015 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Indian Point nuclear station not safe – should be closed down

Aging Nuclear Power Plant Must Close Before It Closes Us http://ecowatch.com/2015/06/22/indian-point-aging-nuclear-plant/ Paul Gallay | June 22, 2015 We must face facts regarding the Indian Point nuclear plant. It’s infrastructure is aging, its safety is dubious and most everyone knows it. What many people don’t know is that it can be replaced at little cost to ratepayers—and energy technologies taking its place would create new economic opportunities for New York.

Indian Point—just 38 miles north of New York City—is vulnerable to terrorism, has 2,000 tons of radioactive waste packed into leaking pools and relies on an unworkable evacuation plan. While some argue that transformer accidents—such as the one that occurred last month—can happen at any power facility, they happen with astonishing frequency at Indian Point. Its age is problematic: You wouldn’t rely on a 40-year-old appliance, why extend this trust to a nuclear plant? Moreover, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says Indian Point 3 has the highest risk of earthquake damage of all the nation’s reactors. About 20 million people live within 50 miles of Indian Point. If a catastrophic accident occurred, the consequences would be unimaginable.

The NRC permits Indian Point to evade its own safety standards requiring that electrical cables controlling emergency reactor shutdowns have insulation that lasts 60 minutes in a fire. When the NRC found that the plant’s insulation lasted just 27 minutes, it gave Indian Point an exemption. Your own home likely has more insulation on its electrical cables than does the plant. Continue reading →

August 5, 2015 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

USA to sell nukes to China. Profit for corporations versus national security

Congress’s Other Nuclear Test A pending 30-year deal with China requires oversight too. WSJ 26 July 15  “……The deal’s basic purpose is to allow China to keep buying nuclear power plants from U.S. suppliers such as Westinghouse Electric, a slice of bilateral trade responsible for thousands of U.S. jobs, according to industry estimates. Yet civil-nuclear business carries proliferation risks, as technology used in power plants can also serve various military purposes.

Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton oppose the deal given China’s record of proliferating to Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. China has also secretly diverted U.S.-produced nuclear-reactor cooling pumps to make its naval submarines more quiet and therefore more stealthy, as confirmed in Congressional testimony by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Countryman in May. Such diversion violated China’s commitment to “peaceful use” of imported nuclear technology……..

A House amendment to the defense spending bill would require that the DNI and the Chief of Naval Operations weigh in on interagency approvals of future civil-nuclear sales to China, with the aim of mitigating risks of military diversion.

The Nuclear Energy Institute and other industry lobbyists protest that this provision would add needless bureaucratic review. …http://www.wsj.com/articles/congresss-other-nuclear-test-1437910661

July 29, 2015 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Many $millions later, Los Alamos Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility still not safe

Audit: Nuclear lab lets safety gaps languish for years, Center For Public Integrity 
Multi-billion-dollar Los Alamos contractor tells investigators it needs more money to meet basic safety expectations By Patrick Malone July 22, 2015 
An obscure facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory for nine years provided vital scientific data about a critical gas used in America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, until it was shuttered four years ago due to a raft of safety problems that have stubbornly persisted.

The Energy Department, which oversees and finances the lab’s work, has poured tens of millions of dollars into fixing the problems, but so far, the expenditures haven’t borne much fruit. The facility – known as the Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility – is “vital” to the lab’s national security mission, but it remains closed, the department’s inspector general said in a report released July 20.

In fact, Los Alamos managers have been unable – after seven years of effort – even to prepare a sound analysis of the site’s safety hazards and the steps being taken to ensure that the radioactive gas at issue does not leak or explode and harm either workers or those living nearby, according to the DOE report.

DOE Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman said in the report that poor hazard analysis has been a recurrent problem at the lab, and said weaknesses in other projects have remained unfixed from one annual evaluation to the next. The lab, he wrote, “lacked sufficient qualified staff to resolve certain safety issues.”

The purpose of the tritium facility is to refine, mix and analyze that high-hazard gas, which is used in small amounts to boost a nuclear bomb’s pulverizing force. Those who worked at the facility struggled to ensure that monitoring equipment accurately tracked oxygen levels, to avert any chance of a sudden combustion during processing, according to the report. The lab’s own assessments, dating back to 2007, warned that the oxygen monitoring system in the building was unreliable. Energy Department staff in April 2013 cited the oxygen monitoring as one of 450 issues that needed to be addressed there.

Although the lab fixed the oxygen monitoring system last year, and so far has spent $17 million to prepare a comprehensive safety plan, it hasn’t completed the task. “There had been higher safety-related priorities” at the lab, Energy Department staff told auditors……..http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/07/22/17702/audit-nuclear-lab-lets-safety-gaps-languish-years

July 27, 2015 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Potassium Iodide pills to be distributed to residents in area of nuclear facility

Department of Health distributing free Potassium Iodide to Pennsylvanians near Nuclear power plants, Pittsburgh Actio News, 

Published  11:40 AM EDT Jul 24, 2015 Harrisburg, PA —The Department of Health will offer free potassium iodide, or KI, tablets Thursday, August 6, to Pennsylvanians who are within 10 miles of one of the state’s five nuclear power plants. “If you live or work near a nuclear facility, KI tablets should be an essential part of your emergency preparedness plan and go kit,” said Secretary of Health Dr. Karen Murphy

July 25, 2015 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

History of safety failures at US nuclear plants

How the next US nuclear accident could happen, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Hugh Gusterson 5 July 15 “…….We can learn a lot about the potential for safety failures at US nuclear plants from the July 29, 2012, incident in which three religious activists broke into the supposedly impregnable Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Fort Knox of uranium. Once there, they spilled blood and spray painted “work for peace not war” on the walls of a building housing enough uranium to build thousands of nuclear weapons. They began hammering on the building with a sledgehammer, and waited half an hour to be arrested. If an 82-year-old nun with a heart condition and two confederates old enough to be AARP members could do this, imagine what a team of determined terrorists could do.

We have a detailed understanding of this incident thanks to energetic reporting byFrank Munger, Dan Zak, and, finally, a recent tour de force account in the New Yorker by Eric Schlosser, who has established himself as the premier reporter on nuclear accidents waiting to happen. Their cumulative reporting suggests that the Achilles’ heel of US nuclear safety culture lies in a fondness for automated security technologies, the delegation of government functions to private contractors, and a predilection for hollow facsimiles of effective audit procedures.

Where some other countries often rely more on guards with guns, the United States likes to protect its nuclear facilities with a high-tech web of cameras and sensors. Under the Nunn-Lugar program, Washington has insisted that Russia adopt a similar approach to security at its own nuclear sites—claiming that an American cultural preference is objectively superior. The Y-12 incident shows the problem with the American approach of automating security. At the Y-12 facility, in addition to the three fences the protestors had to cut through with wire-cutters, there were cameras and motion detectors. But we too easily forget that technology has to be maintained and watched to be effective. According to Munger, 20 percent of the Y-12 cameras were not working on the night the activists broke in. Cameras and motion detectors that had been broken for months had gone unrepaired. A security guard was chatting rather than watching the feed from a camera that did work. And guards ignored the motion detectors, which were so often set off by local wildlife that they assumed all alarms were false positives….

Instead of having government forces guard the site, the Department of Energy had hired two contractors: Wackenhut and Babcock and Wilcox. Wackenhut is now owned by the British company G4S, which also botched security for the 2012 London Olympics, forcing the British government to send 3,500 troops to provide security that the company had promised but proved unable to deliver. Private companies are, of course, driven primarily by the need to make a profit, but there are surely some operations for which profit should not be the primary consideration.

Babcock and Wilcox was supposed to maintain the security equipment at the Y-12 site, while Wackenhut provided the guards. Poor communication between the two companies was one reason sensors and cameras were not repaired. Furthermore, Babcock and Wilcox had changed the design of the plant’s Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, making it a more vulnerable aboveground building, in order to cut costs. And Wackenhut was planning to lay off 70 guards at Y-12, also to cut costs.

Incidentally, we hear similar stories coming out of Los Alamos, where the private contractor responsible for packaging nuclear waste for the Waste Isolation Pilot Project put pressure on an undertrained workforce to pack as many barrels of nuclear waste as possible everyday, if necessary by cutting safety corners to maximize profit.

These are the hazards of outsourcing essential state security functions to private contractors: They prioritize profit and, like the Soviet bureaucratic organizations Sonja Schmid blames for Chernobyl, they often find it hard to work together……

This time the nuclear facility was broken into by highly principled peace activists intent on symbolically spilling their own blood to make a point. Next time the intruders may be more malevolent, intending to spill others’ blood. If there is a next time, be prepared for an inquiry that shows a misplaced faith in automated security technology, private contractors cutting corners to make a buck, and government managers astonished that their reviews didn’t catch the problem. http://thebulletin.org/how-next-us-nuclear-accident-could-happen8441

July 6, 2015 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment