Danger to nuclear reactors, of California’s earthquakes
California earthquakes may pose threat to nuclear plant, expert says http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0826/California-earthquakes-may-pose-threat-to-nuclear-plant-expert-says
By Michael R. Blood, Associated Press AUGUST 26, 2014 LOS ANGELES — A senior federal nuclear expert is urging regulators to shut down California‘s last operating nuclear plant until they can determine whether the facility’s twin reactors can withstand powerful shaking from nearby earthquake faults.
Michael Peck, who for five years was Diablo Canyon‘s lead inspector, says in a confidential report that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not applying safety rules it set out for the plant’s operation.
The document, which was obtained and verified by The Associated Press, does not say the plant is unsafe. Instead, according to Peck’s analysis, no one knows whether the facility’s equipment can withstand strong shaking from those faults — the potential for which was realized decades after the facility was built. Continuing to run the reactors, Peck writes, “challenges the presumption of nuclear safety.”
Peck’s 2013 filing is part of an agency review in which employees can appeal a supervisor’s or agency ruling. The NRC, however, has not yet ruled. Spokeswoman Lara Uselding said in emails that the agency would have no comment.
The NRC, which oversees the nation’s commercial nuclear power industry, and Diablo Canyon owner Pacific Gas and Electric Co., say the nearly three-decade-old reactors are safe and that the facility complies with its operating license, including earthquake safety standards.
Israel aimed a stealth drone at Iran uranium enrichment site
Israeli stealth drone downed at nuclear facility, Iran claims Revolutionary Guard hails act against ‘warmongers’ as incident reported at major uranium enrichment plant Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem and Saeed Kamali Dehghan in Boston The Guardian, Monday 25 August 2014 Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards claimed on Sunday that an Israeli stealth drone had been brought down above the Natanz uranium enrichment site in the centre of the country.
The semi-official Fars news agency reported that Iran’s elite forces had intercepted and brought down an unmanned aircraft belonging to “the Zionist regime”. The news was announced in a statement published by the guards, but it was not clear when the incident, if true, happened.
“This mischievous act once again reveals the adventurist nature of the Zionist regime [of Israel] and added another black page to this fake and warmongering regime’s file which is full of crimes,” said the Revolutionary Guards’ statement.
The state news agency ISNA reported that the aircraft was “of the stealth, radar-evasive type and it intended to penetrate the off-limits nuclear area in Natanz … but was targeted by a ground-to-air missile before it managed to enter the area.”
A spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards later told Iranian television that parts of the aircraft had been retrieved. Iran claimed to have reverse engineered a drone after capturing an American RQ-170 Sentinel in 2011.
“Major parts of the devices of the drone are intact and have been received by our friends that can be used for further information,” said General Ramazan Sharif. He did not say when the aircraft was shot down, but said it was “identified upon arrival in Iranian airspace”. He said authorities allowed it to fly for a short time to determine its destination.
Israeli political and military officials said they never respond to such claims. They have repeatedly threatened to take military action against Iran’s nuclear installations, but have been reluctant to do so without US backing or participation.
Natanz is Iran’s main uranium enrichment site, housing more than 16,000 centrifuges. About 3,000 more are at the Fordo plant, buried inside a mountain and hard to destroy…….. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/24/israeli-stealth-drone-nuclear-facility-iran-natanz
Nuclear facilities: dangerous “assets” in volatile countries
What can be done to reduce nuclear risks in volatile countries? Bennett Ramberg The Daily Star 24 Aug 14 Nobody would dispute the danger inherent in possessing nuclear assets. But that danger becomes far more acute in a combat zone, where nuclear materials and weapons are at risk of theft, and reactors can become bombing targets. These risks – which are most apparent in today’s chaos-ridden Middle East – raise troubling questions about the security of nuclear assets in volatile countries everywhere.
Two recent events demonstrate what is at stake. On July 9, the militant group now known as the Islamic State, formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, captured 40 kilograms of uranium compounds at Mosul University in Iraq. The captured uranium was not weapons-grade; international inspectors removed all sensitive material from Iraq following the Gulf war of 1991 (which is why it was absent when the United States invaded in 2003). But what international response, if any, would have been initiated if the cache had been highly enriched?
On the same day, Hamas launched three powerful Iranian-designed rockets from Gaza at Israel’s Dimona reactor. Luckily, two missed the target, and Israel managed to intercept the third. But the episode represented a serious escalation of hostilities and served as an important reminder of the vulnerability of nuclear reactors in warzones.
In fact, Hamas made similar attempts to attack the Dimona complex in 2012, as did Iraq in 1991, with the aim of releasing the site’s contents to inflict radiological damage on Israel’s population. (The perpetrators appeared clueless to the fact that certain weather conditions would have concentrated the radioactive debris in the Palestinian-majority West Bank.)……..
Pakistan has a large nuclear weapons program and faces an expansive jihadist insurgency, which previously attacked military bases that were suspected of housing nuclear assets. Though Pakistan has not experienced a nuclear breach, and the government insists that safeguards remain robust, the country’s increasingly frequent and severe bouts of instability raise serious questions about the future.
While North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is much smaller, persistent doubts about the regime’s sustainability make it a matter of grave concern. In the event of the regime’s collapse – which remains a distinct possibility – it would be difficult to prevent the diversion of its assets, or even the use of its weapons………
Bennett Ramberg, a policy analyst in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of
Politico-Military Affairs under President George H. W. Bush, is the author of “Destruction of Nuclear Energy Facilities in War” and “Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy.” THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org). http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2014/Aug-25/268338-what-can-be-done-to-reduce-nuclear-risks-in-volatile-countries.ashx#axzz3BRnATjln
Cause of radiation accident at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) still unknown
Cause of New Mexico nuclear waste accident remains a mystery , LA Times, By RALPH VARTABEDIAN contact the reporter 24 Aug 14 A 55-gallon drum of nuclear waste, buried in a salt shaft 2,150 feet under the New Mexico desert, violently erupted late on Feb. 14 and spewed mounds of radioactive white foam.
The flowing mass, looking like whipped cream but laced with plutonium, went airborne, traveled up a ventilation duct to the surface and delivered low-level radiation doses to 21 workers.
The accident contaminated the nation’s only dump for nuclear weapons waste — previously a focus of pride for the Energy Department — and gave the nation’s elite ranks of nuclear chemists a mystery they still cannot unravel.
Six months after the accident, the exact chemical reaction that caused the drum to burst is still not understood. Continue reading
Should Japan take the nuclear power risk again?
Should Japan restart its nuclear reactors? Cyprus Mail, 22 Aug 14, By Arnie Gundersen Only luck and real courage at 14 nuclear reactors on Japan’s Pacific coast overcame the technical failures of nuclear power and prevented the nation from being destroyed by radiation.
The untold story of March 11, 2011 is how close Japan came to three more spent fuel pool fires at Fukushima Daiichi and four meltdowns at Fukushima Daini.
When the magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the Pacific coast caused a seismic shock wave that reverberated throughout northern Japan, the country’s nuclear plants shut down automatically, as planned, preventing any further nuclear chain reactions.
Therein lies nuclear power’s fatal flaw, because an automatic shutdown does not stop the ongoing heat generated inside each nuclear reactor.
When uranium atoms split (a process called fission), they release tremendous energy, as well as rubble. Even when the chain reaction stops, the highly radioactive rubble emits decay heat that continues for years. Automatic shutdown simply means that no new nuclear fissions will occur……..
When the tsunami struck, the cooling equipment along the shoreline was turned into a scrap yard of twisted metal. Even if they had not been flooded, without operational shoreline pumps, the emergency diesel generators were doomed to fail, making it impossible to cool the nuclear core. In truth, the utter destruction of the shoreline pumps caused the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi.
The tsunami also wrecked cooling pumps at eight other reactors located at Fukushima Daini, Onagawa, and Tokai.
Twenty-four of the 37 emergency diesel generators located at four separate nuclear power sites, which contained a total of 14 nuclear reactors, failed during the tsunami. Of the 24 diesel generators that failed, only nine failures were due to flooding (eight at Fukushima Daiichi and one at Fukushima Daini). The other 15 diesel generators were not flooded, but were disabled when the tsunami wrecked their shoreline cooling pumps.
The situation in Japan was dire when the sun set on March 11, 2011. At Fukushima Daiichi, three reactors were melting down and three spent fuel pools were at risk of catching fire because they could not be cooled. Conditions were also worsening at Fukushima Daini’s four reactors.
It was good fortune and extreme courage that saved Japan and its people from a more tragic catastrophe………
If the earthquake and tsunami had begun at night, only 200 employees would have been working at these plants. With roads and bridges destroyed, none of the necessary staff would have been able to return to work.
Now, more than three years after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, shoreline cooling pumps throughout the world – including in Japan – remain unprotected from flooding or terrorist attacks.
Japan is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. Is reopening its nuclear plants worth the risk to its people and their homeland?
The simultaneous technological failure at 14 nuclear reactors due to a single natural phenomenon clearly shows that the nuclear engineers who envisioned and designed nuclear power failed to expect the unexpected.
Unfortunately, the nuclear industry continues to push its message that nuclear power can be made safer. Fukushima, and before it Chernobyl, shows us that nuclear technology will always be able to destroy the fabric of a country in the blink of an eye. http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/08/22/should-japan-restart-its-nuclear-reactors/
Catastrophic Risk if Nuclear Regulatory Commission relaxes waste safety rules
that they should just stop making the stuff!
Ruling on Nuclear Waste Storage Could Create a “Catastrophic Risk” Regulators may let companies store radioactive rods in on-site pools for up to 120 years. Mother Jones, —By Josh Harkinson Fri Aug. 22, 2014 Strict safety controls sought by environmental groups for the storage of radioactive waste at dozens of nuclear power plants may fall to the wayside under a rule that’s expected be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next week. According to a congressional source who does not wish to be identified, the NRC is rushing to vote on the rule before the September retirement of Commissioner William Magwood, an ally of the nuclear power industry.
The rule would establish that the environmental risks of storing spent fuel in pools of water at reactor sites for extended periods are negligible and for the most part don’t need to be studied as part of the licensing requirements for nuclear power plants.
But critics of the rule say that the NRC is blatantly ignoring its own research, which shows that the practice could lead to serious disasters: “You will have all the waste sitting, basically, in a giant swimming pool,” the source says, “and the potential of the swimming pool draining or being breached by an accident or an attack or a power loss that causes the water to boil off—all of those things would have impacts that the NRC’s own analysis says would equal that of a meltdown of the reactor core.”
<!–more–>
Existing nuclear plants are designed to store spent fuel for no more than a few years but have accumulated large stockpiles of it due to repeated delays in plans to build a permanent repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. In 2010, the Obama administration canceled the $15 billion Yucca project, raising the distinct possibility that a single geologic waste storage site may never be built. In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council successfully sued to force the NRC to stop licensing nuclear reactors until the commission conducted an environmental impact study on the long-term risks posed by on-site waste—including the possibility that those temporary storage sites will become permanent. The completed study, along with the new rule, is expected to be approved by the NRC on Tuesday, over the strong objections of environmental groups.
The NRC rule would pave the way for nuclear waste to be stored in open cooling pools at reactor sites for up to 120 years—and up to 60 years after a reactor is decommissioned. Environmental groups say that’s way too long. “The pools are a catastrophic risk,” says Kevin Kamps, the radioactive-waste watchdog for a group called Beyond Nuclear. Many pools are holding up to four times as many spent rods as intended. Packing so many rods into the pools dramatically increases the risk of a fire should a leak cause the cooling water to drain. A 2013 NRC study found that a pool fire could contaminate 9,400 square miles and displace 4 million Americans from their homes for years.
The NRC’s assumption that operators will guard and maintain their waste for decades after their plants are decommissioned is laughable to many enviros. In comments submitted to the NRC last December, the NRDC pointed to “the sad history” of managing hazardous waste in America, which often involves commercial operations going bankrupt and saddling taxpayers with the cleanup.
Even at operable nuclear plants, about a dozen waste storage pools are known to be leaking, including one at New York’s Indian Point reactor, which is discharging radioactive water into the Hudson River. To minimize the risk of disaster, environmental groups want the industry to immediately move its waste into thick concrete-and-steel dry casks at a cost of roughly $7 billion. But in a 4-1 vote earlier this year, the NRC ruled that this wouldn’t be cost-effective…….
Environmental groups hope the new commission will break with its industry-friendly past. “The industry crawls all over that place in terms of lobbying,” Kamps told me. “They own that place.” http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/nuclear-regulatory-commission-radioactive-waste-magwood
Los Alamos worker sold nuclear secrets
Los Alamos worker imprisoned for selling nuclear secrets CBS News, 21 Aug 14 A former contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 71, of Los Alamos, N.M., pleaded guilty to passing “classified nuclear weapons data to a person believed to be a Venezuelan government official,” and to lying to the FBI, the DOJ said in a statement.
Mascheroni is a Ph.D. physicist. Her husband was also a Los Alamos employee who pleaded guilty to similar charges. He has not been sentenced yet. Both were indicted in 2010……..http://www.cbsnews.com/news/los-alamos-worker-imprisoned-for-selling-nuclear-secrets-to-apparent-venezuelan-official/
USA Nuclear Regulatory Commission the victim of cyber attacks
U.S. government’s nuclear watchdog victim of cyber attacks -report, Yahoo7 News
August 20, 2014, By Jim Finkle BOSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was “successfully hacked” three times in recent years in attacks involving tainted emails, according to an internal investigation on cyber attacks at the agency, Nextgov.com reported on Tuesday.
At least two of the attacks originated overseas, according to the report obtained by Nextgov, a rare public report with details of a cyber attack on the energy sector.
The publication said it obtained a copy of a report by the NRC’s Office of the Inspector General, which reviewed 17 suspected breaches from 2010 to 2013.
The report did not name the countries where the attacks originated or say if data had been stolen from the regulatory agency, which holds sensitive data on the nuclear power industry.
Reuters was not immediately able to access the report, which Nextgov said it obtained through a Freedom of Information request……..https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/24757967/u-s-governments-nuclear-watchdog-victim-of-cyber-attacks-report/
Lax security at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant
7News Investigates: Security at Seabrook Nuclear Plant 7 News Aug 19, 2014 by Cheryl Fiandaca SEABROOK, N.H. (WHDH) – Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant is one of the 107 nuclear facilities in the country considered to be a potential terrorist target by Homeland Security. Now a long time Seabrook employee has come forward telling 7News he thinks the plant is vulnerable.
“We’re not checking who’s coming on and off the property,” the employee, who asked to not be identified, said.
It seemed like no one was checking on three different days this summer when 7News videotaped cars coming and going through an unmanned employee gate at Seabrook Station.
No one approached the crews and security patrols never passed the area, even with the cameras no one questioned the 7News photographers and reporters.
The employee said it has been nearly a year since there was a person manning the employee entry.
“You’d be able to see where upgrades have been placed in, where defensive positions are, where alarmed fences are at.”………
“It doesn’t take a security expert to know that a nuclear power plant is a place that would be an attractive target and would cause unimaginable mayhem and injury,” Amore said…….An unmanned gate may not be the only concern: a recent study initiated by the defense department claims significant security gaps exist at the nation’s nuclear power plants. http://www.whdh.com/story/26311206/7news-investigates-security-concerns-at-seabrook-power-plant
Safety problems, toxic spill, in Canada’s uranium industry
Nuclear watchdog requests safety checks after B.C. mine breach CTV News, Dene Moore, The Canadian Press August 19, 2014 VANCOUVER –– A toxic spill from a British Columbia mine has prompted the country’s nuclear watchdog to request a series of checks at uranium facilities.
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will discuss the failure of the tailings pond at the Mount Polley gold and copper mine during a meeting Wednesday.
In the interim, the commission has asked the uranium mining and milling operations it oversees to ensure that all necessary inspections and monitoring are in compliance with licence conditions……..
The breach sent 10 million cubic metres of waste water and 4.5 million cubic metres of silt into a network of salmon-bearing lakes and rivers near Likely, 600 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.
The reason for the failure at Mount Polley is not yet known: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/nuclear-watchdog-requests-safety-checks-after-b-c-mine-breach-1.1966932#ixzz3AzIudlBn
Europe’s aging reactors: increasing safety and cost problems
With exposure to radiation, high temperatures and pressure, the components of nuclear plants take a battering over time. “They can, for example, become more brittle, susceptible to cracking or less able to cope with temperature extremes,” said Anthony Froggatt, senior research fellow at London-based thinktank Chatham House.
Insight: The cost of caring for Europe’s elderly nuclear plants LONDON (Reuters)
18 Aug 14, – Europe’s ageing nuclear fleet will undergo more prolonged outages over the next few years, reducing the reliability of power supply and costing plant operators many millions of dollars.
Nuclear power provides about a third of the European Union’s electricity generation, but the 28-nation bloc’s 131 reactors are well past their prime, with an average age of 30 years.
And the energy companies, already feeling the pinch from falling energy prices and weak demand, want to extend the life of their plants into the 2020s, to put off the drain of funding new builds…….
as nuclear plants age, performance can suffer, and outages – both scheduled and unplanned – rise.
With nuclear safety in the spotlight since the 2011 reactor meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant – which in turn prompted Germany to call time on its entire nuclear fleet – operators can take no chances with their elderly plants, but the outages get longer and more difficult.
“These reactors were designed over 30 years ago. The people involved are either retired or dead, and most of the companies involved no longer exist,” said John Large, an independent nuclear engineer and analyst who has carried out work for Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority.
Jean Tandonnet, EDF Group’s nuclear safety inspector, said in January that its French fleet last year had a series of “problematic unit outages”, and scheduled outages were extended by an average of more than 26 days. Regular maintenance and major equipment replacement jobs had increased by 60 percent in the last six years, he said. France is the EU’s nuclear leader, its 58 reactors producing nearly three quarters of the country’s electricity. France’s nuclear watchdog will make a final decision on whether to extend the life of the French fleet to 50 years in 2018 or 2019. EDF has estimated the extension would cost 55 billion euros.
“The average age of the (French) reactors is now about 30 years, which raises questions about the investment needed to enable them to continue operating, as ageing reactors increasingly need parts to be replaced,” according to the World Nuclear Industry Status report 2014.
SAFETY FIRST
Though the EU has conducted risk and safety tests on the bloc’s nuclear plants, environmental campaigners say the tests failed to address risks associated with ageing technology, among other things.
With exposure to radiation, high temperatures and pressure, the components of nuclear plants take a battering over time. “They can, for example, become more brittle, susceptible to cracking or less able to cope with temperature extremes,” said Anthony Froggatt, senior research fellow at London-based thinktank Chatham House.
“While this can be monitored, it can be problematic if ageing occurs at a greater rate than anticipated or it occurs in areas which are difficult to access or monitor,” he added.
As reactors age, there is also a risk of finding a generic design flaw that could affect all the reactors in a country if they are of the same design. ………..Additional reporting by Barbara Lewis in Brussels and Geert de Clercq in Paris; Editing by Will Waterman) http://www.firstpost.com/world/insight-the-cost-of-caring-for-europes-elderly-nuclear-plants-1668443.html
Geriatric disorders in old nuclear reactors – Britain, France and Belgium
Insight: The cost of caring for Europe’s elderly nuclear plants LONDON (Reuters) 18 Aug 14
“…………...GERIATRIC DISORDERS Britain has 16 reactors in operation that came online from the 1970s to 1990s, and all but one will be retired by 2023 unless they get extensions.
At the Wylfa plant in Wales – Britain’s oldest, at 43 years – the one remaining operational reactor was out of service for seven months this year. It was first taken down for maintenance, but the restart was delayed as new problems were discovered.
The reactor is scheduled to be taken out of service for good in September, but operator Magnox is seeking an extension to December 2015.
This week, EDF Energy took offline three of its nuclear reactors at its Heysham 1 and Hartlepool plants in Britain for inspection which are both 31 years old, after a crack was discovered on a boiler spine of another Heysham 1 reactor with a similar boiler design, which had already been taken offline in June. [POWER/GB]
The boilers will be checked for defects with thermal imagery done using robotics, and the firm will know more about what caused the fault after the inspections, which should take around eight weeks, the EDF Energy spokeswoman said. EDF Energy has been incorporating extra checks into its strategy for its ageing nuclear plants since it inherited them from previous operator British Energy, she said.
British Energy was delisted in 2009 following financial collapse. Several unplanned outages had reduced its power output, and its load factor – the ratio of actual output to its maximum capacity – fell to its lowest level of 56 percent in 2009, Britain’s National Archives show.
This compares with EDF’s average load factor for its French nuclear fleet of 73 percent in 2013, which is also down from its highest level of 77.6 percent in 2005, the company’s 2013 results show.
The fleet’s net output of electricity has declined from 429 terawatt hours in 2005 to 404 TWh last year, though this could be for a range of reasons, including weak energy demand.
Apart from reducing the reliability of Europe’s electricity supply, operators stand to lose many millions of euros from a single outage from lost electricity sales alone. Reuters calculations, based on industry estimates of lost daily electricity sales, show the outages at two EDF Energy plants could cost the firm some 155 million pounds during the outages from when they began in June or August to October, not including the costs of inspection and maintenance work.
Industry sources say the lost revenue from the loss of output at a 1 gigawatt plant could reach 1 million pounds a day.
British utility Centrica, which owns 20 percent of EDF Energy’s nuclear fleet, said on Monday the reduction in output would reduce its earnings per share by around 0.3 pence this year.
More than half of Belgium’s nuclear capacity is offline for maintenance. The three closed reactors are 29, 31 and 32 years old.
Though it doesn’t break out the nuclear data separately, statistics from Europe’s electricity industry association Eurelectric show both planned and unplanned outages mostly increased at thermal power plants in eight European countries examined, and periods of energy unavailability increased from around 12.8 percent in 2002 to 18.3 percent in 2011.
As the plants age, that can only increase. Additional reporting by Barbara Lewis in Brussels and Geert de Clercq in Paris; Editing by Will Waterman) http://www.firstpost.com/world/insight-the-cost-of-caring-for-europes-elderly-nuclear-plants-1668443.html
Sabotage of a nuclear reactor
Belgian Doel 4 nuclear reactor closed till year-end Major turbine damage forces closure till year-end By Geert De Clercq PARIS, Aug 14 (Reuters)
* GDF Suez confirms outage was due to sabotage
* Other reactors down, Belgian nuclear capacity halved
* Further outage set to impact GDF Suez earnings (Adds GDF Suez quote on sabotage, detail on capacity)
– Belgian energy company Electrabel said its Doel 4 nuclear reactor would stay offline at least until the end of this year after major damage to its turbine, with the cause confirmed as sabotage.
On Tuesday, Electrabel had said the plant would remain offline until Sept. 15 as it carried out repairs and investigated an oil leak that forced its closure on Aug. 5. Its French parent company GDF Suez confirmed the closure was due to sabotage.
The shutdown of Doel 4’s nearly 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity generating capacity as well as closures of two other reactors (Doel 3 and Tihange 2) or months because of cracks in steel reactor casings adds up to just over 3 GW of Belgian nuclear capacity that is offline, more than half of the total.
The latest closure will put further pressure on the earnings of GDF Suez, which warned last month that the closure of the first two Belgian plants would push its 2014 group net recurring income to the lower end of its forecast range of 3.3 billion to 3.7 billion euros.
The French company said those outages would have an impact of about 40 million euros per month on net recurring income.
Electrabel said on Thursday the Doel 4 reactor had shut automatically on Aug. 5 following an oil leak in its steam turbine in the non-nuclear part of the plant. The firm said the leak had caused major damage to the turbine’s high-pressure section.
“Based on this partial analysis, Doel 4 will certainly not be available before Dec. 31, 2014,” Electrabel said.
A GDF Suez spokesman confirmed Belgian press reports about suspicion of sabotage.
“There was an intentional manipulation,” he said, adding that somebody had tampered with the system used for emptying oil from the Alstom-made turbine.
He said no outsiders had penetrated into the plant but declined to say whether an employee could have purposely caused the leak, as has been reported in some Belgian media.
He said Electrabel had filed a complaint and that the Belgian police had started an investigation.http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/08/14/belgium-nuclear-doel-idUKL6N0QK43R20140814
Defects in EDF’s nuclear reactors could close down many reactors: a warning to France
Belgian Doel 4 nuclear reactor closed till year-end Major turbine damage forces closure till year-end By Geert De Clercq PARIS, Aug 14 (Reuters) “…In Britain, EDF Energy, owned by France‘s EDF, took three of its nuclear reactors offline for inspection on Monday after finding a defect in a reactor of a similar design.
The problems of the two French utilities with their reactors abroad may serve as a warning of possible generic flaws that could appear in EDF’s ageing nuclear park at home.
With 58 reactors in 19 nuclear plants, France is the world’s most nuclear-dependent country, relying on it for nearly three quarters of its power.
All of its plants are of the same basic Pressurised Water Reactor design, which means that a flaw discovered in one of EDF’s reactors could force the closure of others…..http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/08/14/belgium-nuclear-doel-idUKL6N0QK43R20140814
A truly ‘hot’ export – Japan’s radioactive cars
Japan’s ‘Hottest’ Export This Year – Radioactive Cars Zero Hedge by Tyler Durden on 08/11/2014 At the start of the year, Russia said ‘nyet’ to 132 Japanese cars imported through Vladivostok due to high radiation levels. Fast forward seven months and as AutoWeek reports, it appears the Japanese are up to their old tricks – desperate to make Abenomics look like it’s working by jamming exports higher – a total of 70 used cars imported from Japan and found to have increased levels of radiation are being stored in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The import of used Japanese cars is big business in Central Asia, especially in Mongolia and the Russian far-east regions, but several batches of cars have been seized by the government during the last three years – despite ‘agreements’ from Japan……..http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-11/japans-hottest-export-year-radioactive-cars
-
Archives
- May 2026 (72)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 