tagged w/ Nuclear Safety
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Japan to open airlock at crippled nuclear plant
CNN...
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/06/19/japan.nuclear/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
New cleanup measure halted at plant
Japan still on high radiation alert
Japan green tea crisis
Japan's radiation twice as bad
TEPCO admits to more possible meltdowns
PHOTO: Workers enter the No. 2 reactor at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclar power plant in Japan in May.
Japan to open airlock at crippled nuclear plant
By the CNN Wire Staff
June 19, 2011 11:12 p.m. EDT
Tokyo (CNN) -- Workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been cleared to open the No. 2 reactor building's airlock to ease sauna-like conditions inside, the plant's owner said Sunday.
The Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it planned to open the heavy double doors slowly overnight, taking about eight hours to complete the process to avoid disturbing contaminated dust inside the containment building. The company has been trying to filter radioactive particles out of the air inside the building for several days, and Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency approved Friday plans to open the airlock, Tokyo Electric announced.
The reactor is one of three at Fukushima Daiichi that suffered meltdowns after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan. The tsunami swamped the plant and knocked out cooling systems that kept the three operating reactors from overheating, leading to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Japanese authorities used robot probes to peer into the reactor housings in April, finding temperatures up to 41 degrees Celsius (106 F) and humidity ranging from 94% to 99% inside unit 2. Engineers have long suspected that the reactor was leaking a large percentage of the hundreds of
But radiation levels inside were far lower than those recorded at units 1 and 3, holding open the possibility that workers could get inside and try to repair some of the damage if the humidity and temperature could be controlled.
Japan's nuclear safety agency has estimated that tens of thousands of tons of contaminated water has leaked out of the three reactors since the disaster, collecting in the turbine plant and utility tunnels around the reactors since March 11. Decontaminating and storing that water is a key step in Tokyo Electric's plans to wind down the ongoing crisis by January -- but those plans suffered a setback over the weekend, when a newly installed treatment system registered higher-than-expected radiation levels.
The latest developments come as the International Atomic Energy Agency prepares to open a four-day conference on nuclear safety and the Fukushima accident in Vienna, Austria, on Monday. The conference is aimed at drawing lessons from the Fukushima disaster, the agency says.
Though no deaths have been attributed to the accident, the resulting contamination has forced authorities to evacuate more than 100,000 people from towns surrounding the plant. In addition, restrictions on various agricultural and fisheries products have devastated Japanese farmers and fishers since the crisis began.
In a June 7 report to the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the Japanese government described a chaotic situation in the hours following the quake, as the company and the government struggled to respond to the disaster.Japan to open airlock at crippled nuclear plant
CNN...... more
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WNN...
Last Updated : 27 May 2011
G8 fixed on nuclear safety
Only ten minutes were allocated for leaders of the G8 countries to discuss nuclear energy at the summit in Deauville, France. Host President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said, "Many among the G8 think that there is no alternative to nuclear power, even if we are convinced of the need to develop alternative energy, renewable energy."WNN...
Last Updated : 27 May 2011
G8 fixed on nuclear safety
Only ten... more
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The Toronto Star...
Photo: Greenpeace protestors, from left, Brooke Forbes, Laura Severinac and Thomas Rohner, are handcuffed by Durham Region Police at the Hope Fellowship Church in Courtice after they disrupted hearings into nuclear safety. (March 22, 2011)
For the Toronto Star/Yvonne Berg
Police move on Greenpeace activists blocking Darlington nuclear hearings
John Spears Business Reporter
Durham Regional Police removed four Greenpeace protesters from a hearing into nuclear safety and environment issues Tuesday at around 1:30 p.m. after they had chained themselves to a table in the hearing room.
Police made their move at around 1 p.m. but had trouble removing the locks and chains the protesters had secured around their waists.
After a half-hour struggle, they managed to remove the chain from the table, and took the four off with the chains still around their waists.
Protesters had been handcuffed as well, and were told they would be charged with mischief.
Ontario Power Generation, or OPG, wants to build new reactors at the Darlington site.
Greenpeace spokesman Shawn-Patrick Stensil said the protest had drawn attention to what the group considers to be inadequacies in the hearings.
“We don’t want these hearings to be used as a promotion for OPG’s project,” said Stensil.
“This process shouldn’t be used to legitimate that project.”
Environmentalists had asked the panel on Monday to adjourn the hearings until more information is gathered about the Japanese nuclear disaster, but the panel refused.
"They won't look at a Fukushima-scale accident," Stensil said of the panel.
He noted that China and Switzerland have suspended their nuclear processes.
The demonstrations began at around 9 a.m. by nine protesters, four of whom chained themselves to the table at the front of the room in a church in Courtice where the hearings were scheduled. The other five agreed to move to the back of the room.
Although the protest wasn’t physically preventing the hearings from proceeding, Chairman Alan Graham called an adjournment when he asked them to move and they quietly refused.
By around noon, a hearing official formally requested police to clear the hall of anyone disrupting the hearings.
Police then gave the protesters one more chance, asking them to leave voluntarily, but all refused.
That’s when the police took action.
The protesters had previously been warned that they would be arrested and charged with mischief if they didn't leave but they held their ground.
“We're continuing to disrupt the hearings that are happening today that we feel are unjust, especially given the situation that's happening in Japan,” Laura Severinac, one of the four, said earlier.
“We feel that nuclear energy is dirty, dangerous and expensive and we want these hearings suspended.”
“We're not prepared to leave until they stop the hearing,” said Alex Speers-Roesch, another one of the four.The Toronto Star...
Photo: Greenpeace protestors, from left, Brooke Forbes, Laura... more
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|+MoJoBlog%29&utm_content=Twitter
Mother Jones...
Sheppard on "Hardball": Determining America's Nuclear Safety
Tue Mar. 22, 2011 4:12 PM PDT
Kate Sheppard and Johanna Neumann joined Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball to discuss the danger Americans face from our aging fleet of nuclear plants.
Kate Sheppard covers energy and environmental politics in Mother Jones' Washington bureau.|+MoJoBlog%29&utm_content=Twitter
Mother Jones...
Sheppard on... more
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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Faced with the nuclear crisis in Japan, governments around the world are confronting the vulnerabilities of their nuclear energy programs. Some European countries, such as Germany and France, are considering more stringent safety measures or backing off of nuclear development altogether, but in the United States, the Obama administration is pushing forward with plans for increased nuclear energy production.
Ultimately, these questions are the same that the country faced after last summer’s Gulf Coast oil spill. As we search for more and more clever ways to fill our energy needs, can we write off the risk of disaster? Or are these large-scale catastrophes so inevitable that the only option is to stop pursuing the policies that lead to them?
The risks of nuclear
As Inter Press Service’s Andrea Lund reports, anti-nuclear groups are using the Japanese disaster as just one example of the disadvantages of nuclear power. Linda Gunter, of the group Beyond Nuclear, told Lund:
Even if you get away from the safety issue, which is obviously front and centre right now because of what’s happening in Japan, and you look at solutions to climate change, then nuclear energy takes way too long to build, reactors take years to come online, they’re wildly expensive. Most of the burden of the cost will fall on the U.S. taxpayer in this country, so why go there?…The possibility of it going radically wrong, the outcome is so awful that morally you can’t justify it. The reliability of nuclear power is practically zero in an emergency when you have this confluence of natural disasters.
And, as Maureen Nandini Mitra writes at Earth Island Journal, there are plenty of nuclear plants that are at risk. “More than 100 of the world’s reactors are already sited in areas of high seismic activity,” she reports. “And what’s happening in Japan makes one thing clear – we have absolutely no idea if any of these plants are actually capable of withstanding unprecedented natural disasters.”
Build up
The irony of nuclear energy is that the world started relying on it in part to mitigate the perceived threat of nuclear weapons. Jonathan Schell writes in The Nation about nuclear power’s transition from warheads to reactors:
A key turning point was President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953, which required nuclear-armed nations to sell nuclear power technology to other nations in exchange for following certain nonproliferation rules. This bargain is now enshrined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which promotes nuclear power even as it discourages nuclear weapons….
Eisenhower needed some proposal to temper his growing reputation as a reckless nuclear hawk. Atoms for Peace met this need. The solution to nuclear danger, he said, was “to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers” and put it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace”—chiefly, those who would use it to build nuclear power plants.
While the threat of nuclear war still looms, since World War II, the nuclear materials that have caused the most damage have been those in the energy industry. And, as Schell reminds us, soldiers still have nuclear weapons in hand, as well.
The nuclear era
The Obama administration has always been gung-ho about nuclear energy: The president is from Illinois, after all, where Exelon Corp., one of the countries’ biggest nuclear providers, is based. Even in the face of Japan’s disaster, the administration is not backing off of its push for nuclear, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones:
Nuclear power is part of the “clean energy standard” that Obama outlined in his State of the Union speech in January. And in the 2011 budget, the administration called for a three-fold increase in federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, from the $18.5 billion that Congress has already approved to $54.5 billion. “We are aggressively pursuing nuclear energy,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu in February 2010 as he unveiled the budget….In Monday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Jay Carney said that nuclear energy “remains a part of the president’s overall energy plan.”
The state of safety in the U.S. nuclear industry isn’t particularly reassuring, though. As Arnie Gunderson told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, almost a quarter of American nuclear plants rely on the same design as the one currently faltering in Japan. Even worse, experts have known for decades that the design of this reactor is not safe. Gunderson explained:
This reactor design, this containment design, has been questioned since 1972. The NRC in 1972 said we never should have licensed this containment. And in 1985, the NRC said they thought it was about a 90 percent chance that in a severe accident this containment would fail. So, that we’re seeing it at Fukushima is an indication that this is a weak link. It’s this Mark I, General Electric Mark I, containment. And we have—essentially one-quarter of all of the nuclear reactors in the United States, 23 out of 104, are of this identical design.
It’d be reassuring if the U.S. government could promise that our superior safety standards would overcome these dangers. But, as Mother Jones‘ Sheppard writes, the day before the earthquake in Japan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission extended the life a Vermont plant using this very design, over the objections of the state’s legislature.
Stumbling with stellar fire
Whatever the attractions of nuclear energy, it’s a dangerous business. The Nation’s Schell puts it best when he argues that the fallibility of humankind is the biggest risk factor. He writes:
The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax. It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Faced with the nuclear crisis in Japan,... more
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Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility.
The book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus.
http://www.alternet.org/health/146619/new_book%3A_chernobyl_radiation_killed_nearly_one_million_peopleNearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by... more
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