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‘Sometimes I can’t sleep at night’: Adi Roche warns of nuclear risks of Ukraine conflict as she picks up peace award

“It’s a war crime to weaponise a nuclear facility,”

CCI’s medical volunteers treat children for illnesses such as “Chernobyl heart”, a cardiac condition prevalent in the region and thought to be caused by the fallout.

Founder of Chernobyl Children International, operations of which have been upended by Russian invasion, honoured by Ahmadiyya Muslim community

Mark Paul, Irish Times, Sat Mar 9 2024

Ukraine is “sitting on a nuclear powder keg” and the western world must not abandon it to its fate, said peace activist, charity founder and former presidential candidate Adi Roche as she received a major international peace award in London on Saturday.

Ms Roche, the founder of Chernobyl Children International (CCI), which has delivered more than €108 million of aid to Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus since the 1986 nuclear disaster in the region, has been awarded the Ahmadiyya Muslim Peace Prize.

The award is presented each year by the Ahmadiyya community, a south Asian Muslim movement, at a grand ceremony at one of Europe’s biggest mosques, the Baitul Futuh complex in south London.

Previous winners include Hiroshima bomb survivor and anti-nuclear campaigner Setsuko Thurlow and Buddhist nun Cheng Yen, the founder of the Tzu Chi humanitarian organisation in Taiwan.

Ms Roche was originally selected for the award in 2020 but the ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic.

Speaking to The Irish Times in advance of the peace symposium at the Baitul Futuh mosque, she said the award had “given her heart a little bit of a lift”, after CCI’s operations in Belarus and Ukraine were upended by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its neighbour.

But she also accused Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces of issuing a discreet nuclear threat by invading Ukraine from Belarus on a route directly through the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone in the north of the country – the power plant was captured on the first day of the war.

“It’s a war crime to weaponise a nuclear facility,” she said. “The Hague Convention should be invoked. Russia issued a nuclear threat without having to say it by going through that area. It made them triumphalist and so they went on to Zaporizhzhia [a nuclear plant in southeast Ukraine that has been the scene of fighting and is now controlled by Russia].”

Before the war, CCI operated mostly in Belarus, working with medical teams to provide care for children in the region whose health was affected by the nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. Some of the kids were brought to Ireland each year to stay with host families.

Ms Roche said her Cork-headquartered charity has been unable to go into Belarus ever since sanctions were put in place against the regime there of Aleksandr Lukashenko, a close Putin ally.

The CCI operation in Belarus is now run entirely by 60 local staff.

Before the conflict, CCI also operated from the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which was captured by Russia early in the war and subsequently liberated by the Ukrainians. The charity has since had to shift its operations to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv to avoid the fighting.

“In Ukraine we have a different set of problems. We are on the frontline of child cardiac services there,” said Ms Roche.

CCI’s medical volunteers treat children for illnesses such as “Chernobyl heart”, a cardiac condition prevalent in the region and thought to be caused by the fallout.

“With Chernobyl heart, the children can’t live with it, and they’ll die without help. Our surgeons there tried to stay working in Kharkiv after the invasion but they had to pull out two years ago and move to Lviv. The risk was too great – it would have been suicidal to stay. The surgeons were literally chased from east to west by the war,” said Ms Roche…………………………  https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2024/03/09/sometimes-i-cant-sleep-at-night-adi-roche-warns-of-nuclear-risks-of-ukraine-conflict-as-she-picks-up-peace-award

March 11, 2024 Posted by | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Aberdeen shipping logistics company warned over nuclear transport safety failings.

An inspection by the industry watchdog found that nuclear
material had been transported without the proper safety checks in place.
The UK’s nuclear watchdog has slammed an Aberdeen-based shipping
logistics company over risks posed by its transportation of radioactive
materials.

The Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), the UK nuclear
regulatory body, identified a series of failings with Streamline Shipping
Group’s risk assessments during a routine compliance inspection at their
site in Aberdeen on January 31. Among the alarming findings were the fact
that radioactive materials had previously been moved despite not being
identified in risk assessment documentation.

 Aberdeen Live 8th March 2024

https://www.aberdeenlive.news/news/aberdeen-news/aberdeen-shipping-logistics-company-warned-9152174

March 11, 2024 Posted by | safety, UK | Leave a comment

Greenpeace warns on danger of restarting Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant 

Greenpeace today warned that any plans by Russia to restart reactors at
the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant would be a further step closer to a
potential nuclear disaster and must be stopped.

The environmental organization has restated its demand for the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) Director General to state clearly to Rosatom, the Russian
state nuclear corporation, that restart of any of the reactors cannot be
permitted.

The IAEA Director General is traveling to Moscow for meetings
with Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev. On 4th March, the second
anniversary of the Russian attack on the Zaporizhzhia plant, Greenpeace,
together with the deputy head of the regional administration, held a press
conference in Zaporizhzhia city. The focus of the event was the
Zaporozhzhia nuclear plant crisis, including the reactor restart threats
and nuclear emergency planning.

 Greenpeace 5th March 2024

https://www.greenreconstruction.com/news/second-anniversary-of-russias-nuclear-plant-attack-in-ukraine

March 7, 2024 Posted by | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Oppenheimer feared nuclear annihilation – and only a chance pause by a Soviet submariner kept it from happening in 1962

on October 27, 1962, a nuclear war was averted not because President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev were doing their best to avoid war (they were), but because Capt. Vasily Arkhipov had been randomly assigned to submarine B-59.”

This is but one of countless examples where global and military history has been dramatically altered by chance and luck. On Oct. 27, 1962, the world was extremely lucky. The question that Robert Oppenheimer would surely ask is, will we be so lucky the next time?

March 7, 2024, https://theconversation.com/oppenheimer-feared-nuclear-annihilation-and-only-a-chance-pause-by-a-soviet-submariner-kept-it-from-happening-in-1962-223148 Mark Robert Rank, Professor of Social Welfare, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

History has often been shaped by chance and luck.

One of the blockbuster films of the past year, “Oppenheimer,” tells the dramatic story of the development of the atomic bomb and the physicist who headed those efforts, J. Robert Oppenheimer. But despite the Manhattan Project’s success depicted in the film, in his latter years, Oppenheimer became increasingly worried about a nuclear holocaust resulting from the proliferation of these weapons.

Over the past 80 years, the threat of such nuclear annihilation was perhaps never greater than during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

President John F. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, said that nuclear war was averted during that crisis by “just plain dumb luck.” As I detail in my forthcoming book, “The Random Factor,” nowhere was the influence of chance and luck more evident than on Oct. 27, 1962.

Russian missiles next door

To set the stage, a cold war of hostilities between the U.S. and the communist Soviet Union began almost immediately following World War II, resulting in a nuclear arms race between the two during the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s.

As a part of the Cold War, the U.S. was extremely concerned about countries falling under the Soviet communist influence and umbrella. That fear was magnified in the case of Cuba.

Tensions between the U.S. and Cuba had dramatically escalated following the failed 1961 U.S. attempt to overthrow revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and his communist ruling party. Known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, its failure proved to be a major embarrassment for the Kennedy administration and a warning to the Castro regime.

In May 1962, Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to secretly deploy strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba, with the intention of providing a strong deterrent to any potential U.S. invasion in the future. The Russian missiles and equipment would be disassembled and shipped aboard freighters bound for Havana, then be reassembled on-site.

On Oct. 14, a high-flying U.S. U-2 spy plane photographed the construction of a missile launch site in western Cuba. This marked the beginning of the 13 days in October known as the Cuban missile crisis.

After heated deliberations with his cabinet and advisers, Kennedy decided on a naval blockade surrounding Cuba to prevent further Soviet ships from passing through. In addition, Kennedy demanded removal of all missiles and equipment already in Cuba.

This began a standoff between the U.S. and Russia. Ultimately, the missiles were disassembled and removed from Cuba. In exchange, the U.S. removed its Jupiter ballistic missiles from bases in Turkey and Italy.

But one utterly random – and utterly crucial – aspect of this resolution was not known until years later through the memoirs of, and interviews with, Soviet sailors.

Continue reading →

March 7, 2024 Posted by | history, incidents, Reference | Leave a comment

Improvement notice served over storage of hazardous materials at Dounreay

 By Alan Hendry – alan.hendry@hnmedia.co.uk, 4 Mar 24,  https://www.johnogroat-journal.co.uk/news/improvement-notice-served-over-storage-of-hazardous-material-344039/

An improvement notice has been served over shortfalls in arrangements for storing alkali metals at Dounreay.

Buildings used to store these metals, predominantly sodium, were leaking in rainwater – with pools observed where the containers were being kept.

The notice was served by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) on Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS), formerly Magnox Ltd.

ONR inspectors judged that the prolonged period of exposure to moist and damp conditions was resulting in degradation of the barriers for safe storage of the chemicals.

Although no-one was harmed as a result of these shortfalls, and there were no radiological consequences, ONR concluded that there was potential for serious personal injury if workers had been exposed to the hazardous materials.

March 7, 2024 Posted by | safety, UK | Leave a comment

Mistakes, Misfiring and Trident: Britain’s Flawed Nuclear Deterrence

Australian Independent Media, March 4, 2024,  Dr Binoy Kampmark

Nuclear weapons are considered the strategic silverware of nation states. Occasionally, they are given a cleaning and polishing. From time to time, they go missing, fail to work, and suffer misplacement. Of late, the UK Royal Navy has not been doing so well in that department, given its seminal role in upholding the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. In January, an unarmed Trident II D5 nuclear missile fell into the Atlantic Ocean after a bungled launch from a Royal Navy submarine.

The missile’s journey was a distinctly shorter than its originally plotted 6,000 km journey that would have ended in a location somewhere between Africa and Brazil. In language designed to say nothing yet conceal monumental embarrassment, UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps called it “an anomaly” while the Labour opposition expressed concern through its shadow defence secretary, John Healey. An anonymous military source was the most descriptive of all: “It left the submarine but it just went plop, right next to them.

The anomaly in question, which Shapps witnessed on board the HMS Vanguard, took place off the coast of Florida during a January 30 exercise at the US’s Navy Port site. Its failure is the second for the missile, which was also tested in 2016 and resulted in its automatic self-destruction after veering off course and heading to the United States. It was therefore galling for the Defence Secretary to then claim in a written statement to Parliament that Trident was still “the most reliable weapons system in the world”, a claim also reiterated by the missile’s manufacturers, Lockheed Martin. With a gamey sense of delusion, Shapps continued to argue that the test merely “affirmed the effectiveness of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, in which the government has absolute confidence. The submarine and crew were successfully certified and will rejoin the operational cycle as planned.”…………………………………………………………………………………..

Even at the best of times, deterrence, as a claim, is the stuff of fluffy fiction, astrological flight and fancy. It is unverifiable, speculative, highly presumptuous. Who is to know if a nuclear weapon will be fired at any point, at any time, against any target, on whatever pretext presents itself?

The madman theory suggests that such a weapon will be deployed, though we are not sure when this might eventuate. Keeping company with such a theory is the rational, mass murderer type who takes comfort in the prospect that 100 humans might survive a holocaust killing billions. Shoot and take your chances. Human stupidity glows with the hope that errors will be healed, and mass crimes palliated.

In actual fact, the true proof of such deterrence would lie in hellish murder: weapons launched, catastrophe ensuing. Those recording such evidence are bound to be done by coarse skinned mutants with plumbing problems.

The Trident misfiring episode can be seen in one of two ways. First, it illustrates the point that we are here because of dumb luck, having survived error, misunderstanding and miscommunication. In the second sense, it yields an uncomfortable reality for the war planners in White Hall: Trident may not work when asked to.

Whether a system fails because of faulty machinery or accident, the problem of misfiring does not go away. At some point, a misfire with potency will result in deaths, though we can perhaps be assured that Trident may simply fail to live up to the heavy sense of expectation demanded of it. We can hope it just plops.  https://theaimn.com/mistakes-misfiring-and-trident-britains-flawed-nuclear-deterrence/

March 4, 2024 Posted by | safety, UK | Leave a comment

Texas wildfires continue to pose threat to Pantex nuclear weapons plant, and climate change will bring further threats to nuclear facilities

By Jessica McKenzie, François Diaz-Maurin | February 28, 2024

A wildland fire in the Texas Panhandle forced the Pantex plant, a nuclear facility northeast of Amarillo, to temporarily cease operations on Tuesday and to evacuate nonessential workers. Plant workers also started construction on a fire barrier to protect the plant’s facilities.

The plant resumed normal operations on Wednesday, officials said.

“Thanks to the responsive actions of all Pantexans and the NNSA Production Office in cooperation with the women and men of the Pantex Fire Department and our mutual aid partners from neighboring communities, the fire did not reach or breach the plant’s boundary,” Pantex said in a social media post on Wednesday afternoon.

At a press conference Tuesday evening, Laef Pendergraft, a nuclear safety engineer with the National Nuclear Security Administration production office at Pantex, said the evacuations were out of an “abundance of caution.”

“Currently we are responding to the plant, but there is no fire on our site or on our boundary,” Pendergraft told reporters.

The 90,000-acre Windy Deuce fire burning four to five miles to the north of the Pantex plant was 25 percent contained as of late Wednesday afternoon.

Until the fire is fully contained, it will continue to pose a threat to the nearby Pantex plant, says Nickolas Roth, the senior director of nuclear materials security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “I think the sign that the coast is clear is that the fire is no longer burning,” he told the Bulletin. “One can imagine many reasons operations would resume.”……………………………………….

While the specific cause of the Smokehouse Creek fire has not yet been identified, climate change is making explosive wildfires more likely, with serious implications for the country’s nuclear weapons programs.

Since 1975, the Pantex plant has been the United States’ primary facility responsible for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons. It is one of six production facilities in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Security Enterprise.

In addition to warhead surveillance and repair, the plant is currently working on the full scale production of the B61-12 guided nuclear gravity bomb and 455-kiloton W88 Alteration (Alt) 370 warhead as part of the broader US nuclear weapons life-extension and modernization programs. The plant handles significant quantities of uranium, plutonium, and tritium, in addition to other non-radioactive toxic and explosive chemicals.

If a wildfire were to impact the site directly, the health and safety implications could be enormous.

“I don’t like to speculate in terms of worst-case scenarios,” Roth told the Bulletin. “The potential for danger if a fire ever broke out at a site with weapons usable nuclear material is quite great.”

“The danger from plutonium really comes from inhaling particulates,” Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained on a podcast in 2023. “So if powder is inhaled, or if somehow powder were to be dispersed through, say, a big fire or some kind of incident at the site, that would certainly pose a risk for surrounding communities.”

Up to 20,000 plutonium cores, or “pits,” from disassembled nuclear weapons can be stored on site. (The exact figure is classified, but experts contacted by the Bulletin said the current number of “surplus” plutonium pits already dismantled is likely to be around 19,000, plus an additional unknown number of backlog pits awaiting disassembly.)

But as Robert Alvarez wrote in the Bulletin in 2018, the plutonium is stored in facilities built over half a century ago that were never intended to indefinitely store nuclear explosives. After extreme rains flooded parts of the facility in 2010 and 2017, some of the containers began showing signs of corrosion.

A 2021 review by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board of the Pantex plant’s operations found that an increasing number of plutonium pits are stored in unsealed containers. These pits are either “recently removed from a weapon, planned to be used in an upcoming assembly or life extension program, or pending surveillance,” the board explained. The board previously recommended that these pits be repackaged into sealed insert containers for their safe long-term staging. But the plant personnel “stated it is only achieving approximately 10 percent of its annual pit repackaging goals, citing a lack of funding and priority.”…………………………………………………………………………..

A Department of Energy report published in April 2022 on fire protection at the Pantex, which identified several weaknesses within the plant, did not discuss risks from wildland fires.

“The event is obviously a stark reminder of the dangers of climate change on even high security nuclear weapons facilities,” said Kristensen.

But as other authors have previously argued in the Bulletin, climate change is a blind spot in US nuclear weapons policy. “All of these [nuclear] structures were built on the presumption of a stable planet. And our climate is changing very rapidly and presenting new extremes,” Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Bulletin in 2021………..  https://thebulletin.org/2024/02/texas-wildfires-force-major-nuclear-weapons-facility-to-briefly-pause-operations/

March 2, 2024 Posted by | climate change, safety, USA | 1 Comment

New nuclear reactors shielded from liability if federal law passes Congress. Price-Anderson Act renewal hidden from public

February 28, 2024, https://beyondnuclear.org/price-anderson-act-renewal-still-hiding-from-public/

The ADVANCE Act of 2023 (HR6544) with Price-Anderson renewal for 40 years passes US House floor vote 

Bipartisan support to extend  severe accident liability protection to “inherently safe” new reactors?

The “Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act”, also known as the “Price-Anderson Act” (PAA), is moving for renewal by Congress. The federal law to shield the nuclear industry from full liability of a nuclear accident is presently scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2025.

However, there is remains little to no transparency of the Act’s extension and expansion process to the public’s scrutiny of its incongruities.

Since 1957, Congress has periodically extended an adjusted upper limit for the nuclear industry’s financial liability protection from the otherwise unpredictably high projected cost in damages from the next severe radiological accident at a commercial nuclear power plant.

Originally, the industry’s limited liability for damages caused by a single nuclear accident was artificially set at $500 million per incident including personal injuries caused by radioactive fallout, population and economic dislocation by prolonged evacuations without re-entry, potentially permanent loss of property (residential, commercial and industrial), agricultural production and the contamination of natural resources with widespread and long-lived radioactivity.

The “Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act”, also known as the “Price-Anderson Act” (PAA), is moving for renewal by Congress. The federal law to shield the nuclear industry from full liability of a nuclear accident is presently scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2025.

However, there is remains little to no transparency of the Act’s extension and expansion process to the public’s scrutiny of its incongruities.

Since 1957, Congress has periodically extended an adjusted upper limit for the nuclear industry’s financial liability protection from the otherwise unpredictably high projected cost in damages from the next severe radiological accident at a commercial nuclear power plant.

Originally, the industry’s limited liability for damages caused by a single nuclear accident was artificially set at $500 million per incident including personal injuries caused by radioactive fallout, population and economic dislocation by prolonged evacuations without re-entry, potentially permanent loss of property (residential, commercial and industrial), agricultural production and the contamination of natural resources with widespread and long-lived radioactivity.

According to the latest figures provided by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report published January 25, 2024, the industry’s financial liability ceiling for a single, severe nuclear accident is now capped at $16.6 billion by federal law. Beyond that ceiling, damages would supposedly be covered by US taxpayers. But the still unrealized total damage costs of a severe nuclear accident as evidenced by ongoing nuclear catastrophes at Fukushima (13 year ago) and Chernobyl (38 years ago) are already running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe’s damage is recently updated to surpass ¥15.4 trillion ($102.7 billion).

The PAA renewal is part of the controversial “Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act of 2023” that is now approved by both the Senate and the House with  significant differences including the PAA liability protection extension period.

The US Senate version (SB 1000) extends the PAA by 20 years to December 31, 2045, was passed on July 31, 2023 as a “must pass” inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 without a single public hearing.  With Senate passage, the National Defense Authorization Act went to the US House of Representatives for approval where the ADVANCE Act of 2023 along with the PAA renewal on its coattail were instead culled from the military spending bill.

The ADVANCE Act with its the Price-Anderson renewal rider were introduced to the House as  stand alone legislation (HR 6544) with the House version extending the industry’s limited accident liability protection to 40 years (December 31, 2065).  According to E&ENews,  “The House will vote on bipartisan nuclear energy legislation this week (02.26.2024) in hopes of reaching an agreement with the Senate in the coming weeks”—still without a single public hearing. The House floor vote to pass the HR 6544 with broad bipartisan support was confirmed by E&ENews February 29, 2024. The ADVANCE Act with the Price-Anderson extension for 40 years now goes back to the Senate to consider reconciliation.

Both the Senate and House versions intend to expand the government’s limited accident liability coverage beyond the aging, economically distressed and grandfathered commercial nuclear power fleet to now include new and supposedly “inherently safe” Small Modular Reactors and Advanced Non-Light Water reactor designs that incongruently could be licensed without any offsite radiological emergency planning zones.

All of this, thus far, has been accomplished without the transparency of a single congressional hearing in either the US Senate or House to explain the extension and expansion of Price-Anderson Act liability protection to increasingly economically distressed old reactors and new reactors where safety claims have yet to be technically certified.

March 2, 2024 Posted by | politics, safety, USA | Leave a comment

Texas nuclear weapons facility pauses as fires spread

The Standard, By John Crouch, February 28, 2024

A series of wildfires has swept across the Texas Panhandle, prompting evacuations, cutting off power to thousands, and forcing the shutdown of a nuclear weapons facility as strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blazes.

An unknown number of homes and other structures in Hutchinson County were damaged or destroyed, local emergency officials said.

The main facility that assembles and disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal shut down its operations Tuesday night.

“We have evacuated our personnel, non-essential personnel from the site, just in an abundance of caution,” Laef Pendergraft, a spokesman for National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office at Pantex, said during a news conference………………………………………………….

Republican Governor Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties as the largest blaze, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, burned more than 1000 square kilometres, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

That is more than twice its size since the fire sparked on Monday……………………………………more https://www.standard.net.au/story/8539003/texas-nuclear-weapons-facility-pauses-as-fires-spread/

March 1, 2024 Posted by | climate change, safety, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear security is under attack in Ukraine, say experts at Bellona forum.

 https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2024-02-nuclear-security-is-under-attack-in-ukraine-say-experts-at-bellona-forum—

These and other questions were raised during today’s Bellona forum, “War and the Russian Nuclear Industry,” which brough together experts from Norway and Bellona’s new offices in Vilnius — the new locale for the organization’s Russian staff, who can no longer safely conduct their work on Russian soil.

“We have full-scale war in a country with full-scale nuclear installations, and a situation where international cooperation on nuclear security no longer exists,” said Bellona founder Frederic Hauge in the forum’s opening remarks.

Bellona has worked on nuclear cleanup in Russia since the early 1990s, and this month mark 30 years since Bellona released its first report on the nuclear threat caused by the legacy of the Soviet nuclear navy. It has also been almost exactly two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. That was the backdrop for today’s Bellona Forum, where about 100 people participated physically or digitally.

Tons of Nuclear Waste

Aleksandr Nikitin, a former Russian nuclear submarine officer and Bellona employee of 30 years standing, opened the forum by discussing Bellona’s strategic goals for its nuclear project in Russia.

“First and foremost, together with international actors, we have worked to prevent radiation and nuclear accidents at Russian facilities,” he said. “We have also been concerned with ensuring the elimination or safe conversion of the Soviet nuclear and radiation legacy.”

He noted that the Russian nuclear and radiation legacy consists of nearly 20,000 tons of used nuclear fuel, approximately 800,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste, over 4,700 nuclear and radiation hazardous facilities — as well as more than 30,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste dumped on the seabed.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, international efforts to grapple with those issues have stalled.

“But at Bellona, we still have full focus on the Russian nuclear industry, even though now, since we were banned by Russian authorities, we must operate from outside Russia’s borders,” Nikitin said. “We are still working to gather and disseminate information; we share knowledge about the use of nuclear technologies and how the Russian nuclear industry contributes to the continuation of the war in Ukraine.”

‘Rosatom Significantly Involved in the War’

One of the employees at Bellona’s Environmental Transparency Center in Vilnius is nuclear expert Dmitry Gorchakov, who spoke at the Bellona Forum about the role of the Russian atomic agency Rosatom in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“We closely monitor nuclear risks in Ukraine. And we monitor Rosatom’s global nuclear activities and the agency’s role in the international nuclear market closely,” said Gorchakov.

Rosatom is the world’s largest builder of nuclear power plants. One-third of all nuclear power plants under construction in the world are either built by Rosatom or according to Rosatom’s technology and design.

“Rosatom is significantly involved in the ongoing war. One of the most critical situations is the occupation of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia (in southeastern Ukraine), which the Russians have occupied since the first weeks of the war. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been denied access to several areas of the facility,” said Gorchakov.

He highlighted three main risks at the nuclear power plant as it continues to be controlled by Russia on the front lines of the conflict.

“First, there is a risk of equipment damage due to abnormal operation and lack of maintenance. The second risk is the lack of qualified personnel. But the biggest risk, of course, is the war itself; it is unpredictable and creates chaos. Dramatic changes can occur at any time. For example, if Russia decides to switch reactors to power mode or if military activity escalates near the plant,” said Gorchakov.

Secret Nuclear Weapons Program

Thomas Nilsen from The Independent Barents Observer also participated in the Bellona forum. He talked about Russia’s secret reactor-driven nuclear weapons program and its development and testing in the Arctic.

We are in a new arms race involving new nuclear weapons and new reactor systems. And we are back to the flow of information that existed during the Soviet era, meaning almost no information. We at The Barents Observer have not reported a single incident from Russian nuclear submarines in the past four years, and that’s not because accidents haven’t happened. It’s becoming harder and harder to obtain information from Russia,” Nilsen explained.

The Barents Observer is the only Norwegian media outlet with four exiled Russian journalists on its editorial staff.

You can watch the entire Bellona forum by clicking on this link.

February 29, 2024 Posted by | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Minister urges TEPCO to ensure nuclear safety measures

By Jiang Xueqing in Tokyo 2024-02-22 ,  https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202402/22/WS65d6a0fca31082fc043b86ea.html

Japan’s industry minister said on Wednesday a recent radioactive water leak at the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant earlier this month has caused anxiety in Japan and abroad and will hinder the completion of the decommissioning of the plant.

Ken Saito, minister of economy, trade and industry, summoned Tomoaki Kobayakawa, president of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, operator of the Fukushima plant, to his office on Wednesday, urging TEPCO to take the incident as a serious management issue and ensure thorough safety measures.

Furthermore, Saito requested an analysis to identify any common factors contributing to a series of troubles for the purpose of preventing recurrence. He also urged the utilization of digital technology to prevent human errors, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported.

On Feb 7, TEPCO informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that water containing radioactive materials was found to have leaked from a caesium absorption tower at the plant.

TEPCO calculated that the leakage totaled around 5.5 cubic meters of water containing an estimated 0.022 terabecquerel of radioactive substances, according to the IAEA.

The water was assessed to have leaked from a valve left open during cleaning work at the absorption tower.

On Oct 26 last year, TEPCO announced that two male workers in their 20s and 40s, who were exposed to nuclear-contaminated water while cleaning pipes at the Advanced Liquid Processing System at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, have been hospitalized for decontamination and observation.

The two workers, employees of a partner firm of TEPCO, were engaged in the cleaning process along with three other male workers. During the operation, a hose used to transfer nuclear-contaminated water to a tank went loose, leading to the splashing of approximately 100 milliliters of radioactive water, as reported by The Asahi Shimbun, one of the major daily newspapers in Japan.

In the process of handling the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water, accidents have occurred repeatedly, fully exposing the chaotic and disorderly internal management of TEPCO, a spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in Japan said on Feb 8.

The accidents also demonstrate the inadequate and ineffective supervision measures by the Japanese government and once again prove the lack of long-term reliability of the nuclear-contaminated water treatment equipment, highlighting the necessity for international supervision, he said.

Japan has so far dumped approximately 23,400 cubic meters of nuclear-contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea since August 2023 in three rounds. The fourth round is scheduled to commence in late February.

The spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in Japan said the discharge of nuclear-contaminated water from Fukushima into the sea concerns the health of all mankind, the global marine environment and international public interests.

“We once again earnestly urge Japan to take seriously the concerns of neighboring countries and the international community; engage in sincere consultations with relevant stakeholders; fully cooperate in establishing effective international monitoring arrangements with substantive participation from stakeholders; and handle nuclear-contaminated water in a scientific, safe and transparent manner,” he said.

February 23, 2024 Posted by | Fukushima continuing, safety | Leave a comment

UK lawmakers seek reassurances after nuclear missile test fails for second time

By CNN, Associated Press9News Staff, Feb 22, 2024

British lawmakers are seeking reassurances about the nation’s nuclear deterrent after a test of the system failed dramatically last month when an unarmed missile crashed into the sea near the submarine from which it was launched.

It marks the second time in eight years that the country’s Trident II ballistic missiles have malfunctioned during trials.

An “anomaly occurred” during the test on board the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Vanguard, a UK Ministry of Defence spokesperson said on Wednesday in a statement……………

Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent system suffered an earlier failure off the coast of Florida in June 2016, a US defence official with direct knowledge of the incident previously told CNN.

The latest incident, first reported by The Sun newspaper, occurred during an exercise on January 30 near Florida.  https://www.9news.com.au/world/uk-trident-nuclear-missile-test-fails-sparking-concerns-about-program/0fe0541b-67e9-4690-b31a-291e81d8bc5b

February 22, 2024 Posted by | safety, UK | Leave a comment

The Complexity of Nuclear Submarine Safeguards Impacts the Current Landscape

InDepthNews

By Leonam dos Santos Guimarâes*

RIO DE JANEIRO | 14 February 2024 (IDN) — The topic of applying safeguards to nuclear submarine fuel, with a focus on ensuring security and proliferation resistance, involves a complex interplay of international regulations, agreements, and technical considerations.

A pivotal aspect of this discussion centers on the application of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, particularly in the context of military-to-military transfer of nuclear material for submarine programs. It has been argued that there should be no automatic exclusion from safeguards for nuclear material simply because it is used in military activities.

The emphasis is on ensuring that the non-application of safeguards is as limited as possible, encompassing all processes outside the actual use of relevant nuclear material in the submarine, such as enrichment, fuel fabrication, storage, transportation, reprocessing, and disposal.

AUKUS

The application of safeguards to the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, and United States) Nuclear Submarine program is a complex and highly technical subject, requiring a nuanced understanding of international nuclear non-proliferation norms, the specific details of the AUKUS agreement, and the technical aspects of nuclear submarine technology. The AUKUS pact, a security agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, announced in September 2021, involves the provision of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. This arrangement has significant implications for nuclear non-proliferation and safeguards. The following points are pertinent AUKUS agreement:

Nature of Nuclear Technology in Submarines: The nuclear reactors used in submarines are designed for propulsion and not for the production of nuclear weapons. However, they do use weapon degree HEU, which can be weaponized. This necessitates strict safeguards to ensure that the HEU is not diverted for non-peaceful purposes.

Australia’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Commitments: Australia is a non-nuclear weapon state (NNWS) party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). As such, Australia is obliged to maintain a civilian nuclear program exclusively for peaceful purposes and under international safeguards. The acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines places Australia in a unique position, as it will have to demonstrate that its new capabilities are not being used for prohibited military purposes, like nuclear weapons development.

International Safeguards and Oversight: The IAEA plays a crucial role in the implementation of safeguards. Australia, along with the UK and the US, must work closely with the IAEA to develop a framework that ensures the submarine program adheres to Australia’s non-proliferation commitments. This could involve regular inspections, monitoring, and verification mechanisms.

Regional and Global Implications: The deployment of nuclear-powered submarines by Australia could have significant implications for regional security dynamics, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region. There is a need for transparency and dialogue to address any concerns raised by neighboring countries and to prevent any escalation of regional arms races.

Technological and Operational Safeguards: Apart from international oversight, there are also technical and operational safeguards that are integral to the program. These include secure handling and accounting of nuclear materials, physical protection measures, and safety protocols to prevent accidents or unauthorized use.

Legal and Policy Frameworks: The AUKUS partners will need to develop robust legal and policy frameworks that align with international norms and bilateral agreements. This includes legislative and regulatory measures that govern the use, transfer, and disposal of nuclear materials and technology.

The application of safeguards

The application of safeguards to the AUKUS Nuclear Submarine program is a critical aspect of its implementation. It requires a balanced approach that addresses the non-proliferation concerns while allowing Australia to enhance its defense capabilities. Ensuring the program’s compliance with international nuclear non-proliferation norms and maintaining transparency will be essential in mitigating any regional tensions and in bolstering global nuclear security………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://indepthnews.net/the-complexity-of-nuclear-submarine-safeguards-impacts-the-current-landscape/

February 16, 2024 Posted by | politics international, safety, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Safety panel urges Fukushima nuclear plant operator to better communicate with public

Feb. 14, 202, By MARI YAMAGUCHI, TOKYO, https://japantoday.com/category/national/safety-panel-urges-fukushima-nuclear-plant-operator-to-better-communicate-with-the-public-after-leak

A panel of safety experts has urged the operator of the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan to communicate more quickly with the public over incidents such as last week’s leak of contaminated water.

Thirteen years after the Fukushima disaster in which the plant suffered triple meltdowns following the 2011 earthquake, safety culture at the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings company has improved but there is still work to do, said Dale Klein, a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairperson who now serves as an advisor to TEPCO’s reform committee.

The panel’s news briefing Tuesday on its periodic assessment came a week after highly radioactive water leaked from a treatment machine during maintenance work at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. TEPCO said no one was injured, and radiation monitoring shows no leakage escaped the compound.

But the leak triggered criticism in and outside Japan. Any leak of radioactive water is a sensitive topic.

In another accidental leak in October, four workers were sprayed with radioactive liquid waste while cleaning a treatment facility. Two were briefly hospitalized for skin contamination, though none showed symptoms of poisoning.

Klein said both incidents could have been prevented, and TEPCO needs to quickly analyze what happened in such mishaps and “very quickly communicate to the public what happened and why.”

For risk control, many companies, including TEPCO, often try to know everything before they say anything publicly, Klein said. But in the age of social media, speculation spreads quickly, he said.

The filtering machine involved in last week’s incident is part of TEPCO’s controversial wastewater discharge project, which began in August.

The discharges, expected to continue for decades, have been strongly opposed by fishing groups and neighboring countries including China, which banned imports of all Japanese seafood. The Japanese government hopes the International Atomic Energy Agency’s assistance and reviews affirming the discharges have met international safety standards would further help address concerns in and outside the country.

The TEPCO safety experts acknowledged improved safety culture at TEPCO. It noted the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s lifting of a suspension on the utility to resume preparations to restart another nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, after addressing lax safeguarding measures.

The next big hurdle is consent from the local community.

“TEPCO must build trust every day, all the time,” Klein said. “(Trust) is hard to gain but easy to lose.”

February 16, 2024 Posted by | safety | Leave a comment

Congress takes aim at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

By Victor Gilinsky | February 12, 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/2024/02/congress-takes-aim-at-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission-its-a-deja-vu-all-over-again/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter02122024&utm_content=NuclearRisk_NuclearRegulartoryCommission_02122024

Politico reports that congressional promoters of “advanced” nuclear plants are blaming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as the main obstacle to their deployment. The report singles out Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin (D-WV) and cites his and his colleagues blocking the reappointment to the commission of Jeff Baran, who tended to lean toward safety more than his fellow commissioners, as the start of a campaign to bring the agency to heel. Such crude bullying of a safety agency, especially by people who don’t understand what it involves, is so obviously improper as not to need further comment. But there is more to the story.

The triggering event for Sen. Manchin’s ire appears to be the faltering of NuScale, the leading firm touting the development of small modular reactors (SMRs), and the most likely to succeed commercially. The NuScale reactor design had some hiccups in satisfying the NRC’s requirements for a license, but its fundamental problem was its inability to attract customers. That commercial failure darkens the prospects of the rest of the nuclear industry’s stable of “advanced” designs, whose variety makes licensing more difficult. Safety is a subtle business (think of the Boeing door problem) and depends on design details.

More fundamentally, at risk is the dream of the nuclear industry and the US Energy Department—spun out in hearings before the Senate Energy Committee—of building large numbers of such reactors and exporting them around the world, with the United States regaining undisputed global leadership in nuclear technology.

If this beautiful dream isn’t working out, somebody must be at fault, and who better to blame than the nuclear licensing authorities for paying too much attention to safety. If you think this way, the obvious fix is to reorient the NRC. Legislation to do that (ADVANCE Act, S-1111) has passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support. As Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WV), the act’s chief sponsor, put it: “we must establish regulatory pathways for next-generation nuclear designs to be approved quickly and without burdensome unnecessary costs.”

There is a sense here of “deja vu all over again.” The most prominent in the pipeline of “advanced” reactor designs are fast reactors. (Sidebar: They rely on fast neutrons and are cooled by liquid sodium, whereas all currently operating US power reactors rely on slow neutrons and are cooled by water.)

The most prominent design of this type is TerraPower’s (Bill Gates’s) Natrium reactor. Despite its “advanced” label, this type of power reactor was developed by the US Atomic Energy Commission in the 1960s and 1970s. The prototype Clinch River plant, about the same size as Natrium, was then the country’s largest energy project. The AEC’s central goal, backed at the time by the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was to shift US electricity generation to such reactors, starting around 1980. The advantage of these reactors is that, fueled with plutonium, there are enough excess neutrons to convert uranium in the reactor into more plutonium than is being consumed; thus it is possible to “breed” plutonium, hence the name “breeder reactor.” Natrium can be fueled in this way and likely would be if it gained wide acceptability.

Just as supporters of new “advanced” reactors see NRC safety licensing as a threat, so the AEC’s fast reactor developers saw that agency’s semi-independent reactor licensing division as standing in the way and sought to undermine it. (“Regulatory,” as it was called then, was split off from the AEC in 1975 and became the NRC. In time, the rest of the AEC became the Energy Department.) The licensing division was treated by the AEC commissioners as a stepchild and kept weak so as not to threaten the big-budget reactor project.

In the end, this strategy didn’t help the fast breeder reactor project. It got canceled because it didn’t make sense economically. But the weakness of the AEC regulatory organization had important consequences affecting the safety of the power reactors utilities bought in large numbers starting in the mid-1960s. Under pressure from the industry and commissioners, plants got licensed after rather skimpy safety reviews. So as not to constrain the licensing process, the AEC commissioners did not approve any safety regulations for power reactors until 1971. All but two of today’s 94 US operating power reactors were ordered before 1974. When it later became evident the early power reactors needed important safety upgrades, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the nuclear industry resisted them.

In the late 1990s, it became evident that some of the plants’ safety documents—necessary for operation—were a mess. Then-NRC Chair Shirley Jackson tried to apply the NRC regulations strictly. The plant owners didn’t like this kind of oversight and got to New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, their senatorial godfather, who, in a private meeting, threatened Jackson with a huge budget cut. She got the point quickly, fired offending staff, hired Arthur Anderson management consultants to “improve” the licensing process, and ended the detailed public rating of nuclear power plants that the companies hated because Wall Street used the ratings for bond issues. After those changes, Domenici said he was happy. He boasted about coercing her in his book, A Brighter Tomorrow: “Since that meeting with Chairman Jackson, I have been very impressed with the NRC. They are now a solid, predictable regulatory agency.” There haven’t been many industry complaints since NRC fell into line—that is, until recently.

While the historical industry attacks on the NRC put self-interest above public safety, the agency, after its accommodating responses, didn’t come out looking good, either. A more recent change in the way the commission describes its responsibilities raises further questions about its priorities. It concerns the safety standard in the Atomic Energy Act (Sec. 182): “adequate protection of the public health and safety.” That phrase was cited by the agency for decades as the source of its authority and was the safety standard applied in commission actions.

Perhaps a dozen years ago, for reasons unknown but guessable, the commissioners began to use a modified version of the statutory standard, which now reads (for example, Strategic Plan 2022-2026) “reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety.” There is no denying that the added phrase waters down the Sec. 182 standard, which itself has not changed.

Do Nuclear Regulatory Commission actions under that modified standard even conform with the Atomic Energy Act? The Senate energy committee might usefully address itself to that question before it undertakes any more brow-beating of the already-timid NRC.

February 14, 2024 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

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