Nuclear Energy Production
April 16, 2010
1. The Palladium Times (Oswego, NY), "Beef up nuke employee screening process",
April 12, 2010.
2. ProPublica, "U.S. Terror Targets Unprotected, According to Former CIA Official", April 15, 2010.
3. Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Problems at the David-Besse nuclear reactor near Toledo are worse than expected", April 15, 2010.
4. USA Today, "In Vermont, nuke power faces a test", April 15, 2010.
5. Scientific American, "Is Reprocessing the Answer to Eliminating Fissile Materials from Bombs and Nuclear Waste?", April 15, 2010.
6. WBZ TV (Boston, MA), "House Advances Yankee Decommissioning Bill", April 13, 2010.
7. NJ.com, "Radioactive tritium found in storm drain at Salem 2 nuclear reactor", April 8, 2010.
8. Wasau (WI) Daily Herald, (op-ed by Sara Barczak, Sara Barczak, high risk energy choices program director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy), "The high cost of nuclear power", April 16, 2010.
9. UPI, "Quake rattles Chilean-U.S. uranium move", April 14, 2010.
10. Associated Press of Pakistan, "Radiation leakage in Delhi panics Indian nuclear establishment", April 10, 2010.
"Reactor Reax" is featured on www.NuclearBailout.org, a Web site maintained by Physicians for Social Responsibility. For more information, contact reactorreax@nuclearbailout.org.
April 9, 2010
1. Las Vegas Review Journal, "NUCLEAR WASTE: Expert: Reprocessing often fails, too costly",
April 9, 2010.
2. New York Times (editorial), "Showdown at Indian Point", April 5, 2010.
3. Chicago Tribune, "Fired worker's suit raises questions on nuclear plant's safety", April 4, 2010.
4. The Hill, "Nuclear regulators want new study on cancer rates near nuclear reactors", April 7, 2010.
5. Chattanooga Times Free Press, "TVA reports tritium leak near Browns Ferry plant", April 8, 2010.
6. Aiken Standard (SC), "Utility faces new court challenge to nuclear plant", April 7, 2010.
7. The Keene Standard (NH) (editorial), "The Vermont Yankee saga continues", April 5, 2010.
8. WGNS Radio (TN), "Nuclear Waste Could Soon be Prohibited in Tennessee", April 7, 2010.
9. National Journal, "Salary Survey: Nuclear Exec Earns $3 Million", April 2, 2010.
As Clock Ticks, Nuclear Plant Searches for Leak
New York Times
Published: February 26, 2010
VERNON, Vt. — At Vermont Yankee, a nuclear reactor on the ropes, the search for a tritium leak that may doom the plant is proceeding as quickly as possible — which is to say, at a painstaking pace.
Over the last few weeks, in the buildup to a vote Wednesday in which the State Senate approved shutting down the plant, engineers have been digging well after well here in an exploratory strategy that evokes the child’s game of Battleship. At each spot, workers measure the level of radioactive tritium found in the water in the hope of triangulating their way to the source of the contamination.
To avoid losing track of the wells under the blanket of snow that renews itself here every few days, the locations are marked with yellow cones like the ones janitors use to warn of wet floors.
Finding and fixing the leak would be a first step toward rebuilding the plant’s credibility — crucial if the owner, the Louisiana-based nuclear company Entergy, is to persuade lawmakers to reverse their decision to force the plant to close when its license expires in 2012.
In voting 26 to 4 on Wednesday to shut the plant, senators cited the leak, a collapsed cooling tower and initial denials by company employees that underground pipes carry tritium — even though they do.
Now, based on the tritium levels logged at various spots, a team of several dozen technicians, chemists, hydrologists and others who have been working in shifts around the clock think they may have found their target.
In recent days, they have been digging toward a two-inch steel pipe wrapped in a plastic one that is itself surrounded by concrete. The operation is unfolding in a narrow industrial alley between two plant buildings in a late winter jumble of snow, mud, scaffolding and railings covered with bright orange plastic mesh to prevent anything from falling in.
In the world beyond the plant fence, digging this trench would take about two days, supervisors say. But as this is an operating nuclear plant, the effort has taken more than two weeks. There are no shovels, but a device that is a cross between a giant Shop-Vac and a Waterpik: it sucks up dirt and squirts a jet of water to loosen the soil when necessary.
This excavation, 13 feet long and 7 feet wide, is now about 15 feet deep. Four essential pipes that are closer to the surface — two carrying fuel for the reactor’s emergency diesel generators and two carrying air used to power equipment at the plant — are suspended near the center of the trench, forming obstacles to be assiduously avoided.
To prevent a cave-in, the trench is lined with steel plates on each side that are also handled delicately. On Thursday, one of them, perhaps caught on a rock or other obstruction, was refusing to slide down toward the ever-lowering bottom. So supervisors brought in a huge backhoe on caterpillar treads to try to tap it farther down.
“In the real world, you’d just bang it in,” said Tom Wrinn, a supervisor from Shaw Inc., a contractor digging the trench. “But you can’t do that here.”
Mr. Wrinn watched intently as the backhoe operator maneuvered a giant claw under the roofing his men had erected to keep rainwater out of the trench. The operator set the claw down on top of the plate. Nothing happened. So the workers gave up and went back to digging with the giant vacuum. “We’re being ultra-careful,” Mr. Wrinn said.
Updates on the operation are issued regularly, and health officials continue to monitor the area’s drinking water. No tritium has shown up in any drinking water wells, and there is no evidence that anyone has been exposed to radiation from the leaks.
Strewn with laptop computers, cellphones, beepers, grubby jackets slung on chair backs and heroic quantities of soft drink bottles, a conference room known as the “tritium room” operates 24 hours a day. Blueprints tacked to the walls show underground piping, monitoring wells and other plant equipment. (Another contractor continues to sink more wells around Vermont Yankee, which lies on the western side of the Connecticut River, just north of the Massachusetts border.)
Some technicians and engineers holed up here are long-time employees of Vermont Yankee, which opened in 1972 and is one of the nation’s oldest nuclear plants. Others include specialists in finding flaws in buried piping who use ultrasound and other techniques perfected in the oil and gas industries.
For the nuclear industry as a whole, the safety issues raised by tritium leaks have political implications. The dispute over the fate of Vermont Yankee arose just as the Obama administration was promoting a revival of nuclear plant construction backed by billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees.
The push for such construction is cast mainly as a drive to embrace clean and renewable energy sources but is also aimed at drawing Republican support in Congress for a climate and energy bill.
Adding to the urgency over the leak is regulatory pressure. “We expect them to move forward and fix the problem,” said Donald E. Jackson, a branch chief at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regional office of reactor projects, who was at the site this week.
While the commission is disposed toward extending the plant’s lease for another two decades, Entergy now needs the approval of Vermont’s House and the Senate to reverse itself for that to happen.
“We want to get this behind us,” said Timothy Trask, Entergy’s chief engineer, who grew up in the area and was sent back to oversee the fix.
“We are fixing it,” he added firmly, “and getting ready for the next 20 years.”
source... www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/us/27nuke.html
Vermont Power Plant Continues to Leak Radiation
February 2, 2010
Technicians seeking the source of a leak of radioactive tritium at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant have found concentrations in groundwater there that were three times higher than what was discovered last week, a plant spokesman said Monday.
Tritium was measured at 70,500 picocuries per liter, which the spokesman, Rob Williams, characterized as a low level. The highest level discovered so far “does not present a risk to public health or safety whatsoever,” he said in a statement.
But it does put Vermont Yankee over the threshold at which it is obligated to make a report to federal regulators within 30 days, and say what it will do about the problem. The limit, 30,000 picocuries, was crossed on Sunday.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already been at the site to study the problem, and Vermont Yankee is well into an attempt to find the leak and map the pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency standard for the allowable level of tritium in drinking water is 20,000 picocuries per liter, lower than the N.R.C. reporting threshold. But so far no contamination has been found in drinking water sources, plant officials and the Vermont health department said. The new, higher level of 70,500 picocuries per liter of radioactive tritium was measured in a monitoring well, one of six that the owner, Entergy, is drilling to try to find the problem. At a new well, the tritium concentration was 1,840 picocuries.
Vermont Yankee is seeking a 20-year extension of its operating license, which expires in 2012, from the regulatory commission. Renewal is also subject to state approval.
MAJOR CONCERNS ABOUT REACTOR DESIGN SAFETY
In November, European safety regulators raised major concerns about both of the designs for new U.S. reactors – the AP1000 and the EPR.
As New Civil Engineer (NCE) reports: “The (UK) Government’s plans to increase the country’s reliance on nuclear power have been thrown into doubt after experts raised a raft of safety concerns about two proposed reactors. Britain’s main safety regulator, the Health and Safety Executive, said it could not endorse the use of French and American designed reactors because of wide-ranging concerns about their safety. … in reports on the assessment of the French EPR and US AP1000 reactor designs, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said there was a much more ‘detailed work’ to do before they could be approved for use. The HSE said of both units: ‘We have identified a significant number of issues with the safety features of …that would first have to be progressed. ‘If these are not progressed satisfactorily then we would not issue a design acceptance confirmation.’”
The NCE account continues: “Among the criticisms raised, experts said there were significant concerns about EPR’s proposed architecture, and that improvements were required for ‘hazard barriers’. Other issues relating to the reactor’s structural integrity were also addressed, with the report saying it was ‘too early to say whether they could be resolved solely with additional safety case changes or whether they may result in design modifications being necessary’. The safety case of the AP1000’s internal hazards also showed “significant shortfalls.” (See New Civil Engineer, November 27, 2009,
The European concerns were even broader than those voiced in October by the US. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which objected to major problems in the AP1000 reactor design, proposed for use in 14 of 25 proposed new U.S. reactors. Two of the four new nuclear projects that the DOE is reported to be considering for taxpayer-backed loan guarantees are AP1000 designs proposed by the Southern Company at the Vogtle site in Georgia and the South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) V.C. Summer site.
The NRC has made it clear that there are grave doubts if the AP1000 nuclear reactor structure can withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and other external impacts, as required by the NRC’s regulations. The NRC said that its “staff has informed Westinghouse that the company has not demonstrated that certain structural components of the revised AP1000 shield building can withstand design basis loads,” and also stated that the unsuccessful efforts to secure information had gone on for a year. The NRC announced: “This is a situation where fundamental engineering standards will have to be met before we can begin determining whether the shield building meets the agency’s requirements.” (Nuclear Regulatory Commission, October 15, 2009 news release, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2009/09-173.html.)
EDITOR’S NOTE: A streaming audio replay of the news event will be available on the Web at www.nuclearbailout.org as of 5 p.m. on December 16, 2009.
The nuclear industry has been described as “the largest managerial disaster in history.”
The driving force of the ‘nuclear renaissance’ is a claim that nuclear power, once up and running, is a carbon-free energy source. The assertion is that a functioning nuclear reactor creates no greenhouse gases and thus contributes nothing to global warming or chaotic weather. That part is almost true, but the claim ignores the total environmental impact of nuclear energy, which includes a long and complicated chain of events known in the industry as the ‘nuclear cycle’. The cycle begins with finding, mining, milling and enriching uranium, then spans through plant construction and power generation to the reprocessingand eventual storage of nuclear waste, all of which creates tons of CO2.
By Mark Dowie (Mark Dowie is an investigative historian living in Point Reyes Station, California.)
EUROPEAN EXPERT: U.S. POLICYMAKERS ARE “AS WRONG AS THEY CAN BE” ABOUT THE FRENCH EXPERIENCE WITH NUCLEAR POWER
U.S. policy makers are in the grips of “dangerous and costly illusions” if they think that France is a model showing how nuclear power could be implemented aggressively in the United States, according to Yves Marignac, a leading international consultant on nuclear energy issues and the executive director of the energy information agency WISE-Paris.
Marignac Says “Far From Being a Model, France Should be a Powerful Cautionary Tale for the U.S. about the Folly of a Headlong Rush into More Nuclear Power”.
WASHINGTON, D.C.///September 15, 2009///
read more... userfiles/file//091509_Marignac_news_release_FINAL1.pdf
The bumpy road to nuclear energy
Of the 182 construction permits granted by government commissions, 50 were abandoned in construction with billions in investment lost and 28 were closed before their 40-year licenses expired.
By Mark Clayton | Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor/ August 13, 2009 edition
read more... features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/08/13/the-bumpy-road-to-nuclear-energy/
Nuclear's Renaissance:
"After several decades of disappointing growth, nuclear energy seems poised for a comeback. Talk of a “nuclear renaissance” includes perhaps a doubling or tripling of nuclear capacity by 2050, spreading nuclear power to new markets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and developing new kinds of reactors and fuel-reprocessing techniques. But the reality of nuclear energy’s future is more complicated. Without major changes in government policies and aggressive financial support, nuclear power is actually likely to account for a declining percentage of global electricity generation."
"The much-heralded “nuclear renaissance” is, in many ways, a misleading description of what is happening in the global nuclear energy industry today. International assessments project that without major changes in government policies and aggressive financial support, nuclear power is actually likely to account for a declining percentage of global electricity generation. For example, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA’s) World Energy Outlook 2008 projects that without policy changes, nuclear power’s share of worldwide electricity generation will drop from 15 percent in 2006 to 10 percent in 2030." read more... userfiles/file/nuclear_energy_rebirth_resuscitation.pdf
Nuclear energy and carbon emissions:
"Nor is nuclear power going to make a big difference in reducing carbon emissions in the next two decades, when the biggest reductions will have the most impact. Nuclear power is certainly a cleaner alternative to coal-based electricity, but the need for dramatic and immediate reductions in carbon emissions suggests cheaper and quicker approaches that span all energy uses, not just electricity—namely, improved efficiency. This report specifically examines the nuclear industry’s capacity to build enough reactors to reduce carbon emissions significantly in the next two decades."
"In 2003, the authors of the MIT study The Future of Nuclear Power concluded that “given the difficulties that confront nuclear power, the effort required to overcome them is justified only if nuclear power potentially can make a significant impact on the major challenges of global warming, electric supply, and security [emphasis added]”121 This report has examined nuclear energy’s contribution to energy security and the mitigation of climate change, as well as bottlenecks in nuclear supply, and it concludes that a major expansion of nuclear energy may be neither feasible nor desirable to promote." read more... userfiles/file/nuclear_energy_rebirth_resuscitation.pdf
NRDC on New nuclear power plants: "New nuclear power plants are unlikely to provide a significant fraction of the future U.S. needs for low-carbon energy."
read more... userfiles/file/NRDC%20paper%20on%20nuclear%20plants.pdf
Sustainability of Uranium Mining and Milling: Toward Quantifying Resources and Eco-Efficiency
G A V I N M . M U D D A N D M A R K D I E S E N D O R F
The mining of uranium has long been a controversial public issue, and a renewed debate has emerged on the potential for nuclear power to help mitigate against climate change. The central thesis of pro-nuclear advocates is the lower carbon intensity of nuclear energy compared to fossil fuels, although there remains very little detailed analysis of the true carbon costs of nuclear energy. In this paper, we compile and analyze a range of data on uranium mining and milling, including uranium resources as well as sustainability metrics such as energy and water consumption and carbon emissions with respect to uranium production projects. read more... userfiles/file//Gavin Mudd U Mining Milling.pdf
It takes energy to make energy... does it have to take contamination?
"The percentage of uranium usable for fuel is less than 5% of the total ore dug out of the ground. Those rare isotopes must then be enriched in giant factories that are extremely inefficient. The dominant process actually coverts the solid ore into a gas (uranium hexafluoride), and then back to solids. The plants consume huge quantities of energy, most of it now generated by fossil fuels. The biggest enrichment plant in the US, at Paducah, Kentucky, is powered by two huge coal plants. Though the nuke reactor industry claims to generate about 18% of the nation's electricity, some 3% of the nation's electricity is used to refine uranium for those power plants." read more... www.nukefreefuture.com/educate/weapons.htm
The Paducah Enrichment facility electricity usage is 70% of its operating expense.
1,900 Megawatts per hour – enough to power Cleveland
1/10th of the electricity used in Ohio
Produced from Coal (which rivals nuclear as the dirtiest way to produce energy)
CFCs – Freon – Destroys the Ozone Layer
Exempt from 1987 Montreal Protocol & Clean Air Act
2002 – 197.3 metric tons (55% of all large users in US)
CFCs last up to 100 yrs in stratosphere
Philippine Nuclear Revival
(Posted on 31 January 2009 - www.philippines-newspaper.com )
Justifying the Activation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant: More Official Abuse of Scientific Data - Link to Full Article
By Kelvin S. Rodolfo
 People who are eager to reactivate the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant are dangerously misrepresenting scientific data, ... Recently we learned that Hon. Congressman Mark Cojuangco [5th District of Pangasinan] has filed House Bill 4631 of the 14th Congress, “Mandating the immediate re-commissioning and commercial operation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant”. The Bataan nuclear plant is situated on Napot point, near the east coast of Subic Bay . We have no Uranium ore in the Philippines , and no hope of finding any. Reviving nuclear power here, in addition to putting many Filipinos in harm’s way, means that we would expend a huge amount of money to put ourselves at the mercies ...
The remainder of this page is under construction. Please check back later for updates.
Thank you for understanding.
Energy Production - The Power Plants
(Brief description of Nuclear Power Plants)
Facility Locations
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Power Plant Contamination Releases
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Other Wastes from Energy Production
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Power Plant Water Usage by Type
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Back-Up Electrical for Nuclear Power Plants
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"Reactor Reax" is a weekly round-up of nuclear industry stories that are "flying below the radar" of most of the news media in the United States. Despite the rosy picture that is painted by the nuclear industry of an imminent "renaissance," the truth is that its track record is one of construction problems and cost overruns, frequent leaks and other accidents, a failure to solve the radioactive waste problem, and a host of other issues.
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