A terrifying incident has occurred at Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant. It has been reported that about twenty-five tons of radioactively contaminated water has leaked from the plant’s Reactor Unit-2.
     The Fukushima plant’s operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) discovered the leak on August 9th. However, the company claimed that the contaminated water didn’t get into the environment as it flowed into the basement, according to reports.
     Before the discovery of the leak, an abnormal decrease in the water level was noticed in one of the water control tanks in the nuclear fuel cooling pool.
     A robot was launched into the building to look for the reason. It turned out that the water that had leaked from the tank had run into the basement, reported UNN. The robot’s inspection confirmed that the water leaked via sewage systems and there was no outside leak, as per TEPCO. TEPCO says that a robot will be used for a more detailed examination of Unit 2.
     The company has now stopped pumping water into the cooling pond. They claim that the leak will not cause the fuel to heat up beyond the threshold of sixty-five degrees Centigrade.
     Earlier in February, TEPCO detected a radioactive water leak at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The leakage volume for the February leak was about five and a half tons of water and the area was approximately four by four meters. The company began discharging water from the plant into the ocean in August of 2023. There were many complaints from other nations around the Pacific Ocean fearing radioactive contamination. Some countries banned import of Japanese seafood.
     Previously, TEPCO announced on August 9th that equipment related to the spent fuel pool of Reactor Unit 2 had malfunctioned. As a precautionary measure, the cooling system for the spent fuel pool was subsequently halted while investigations into the cause of the malfunction commenced were carried out.
     On the 11th of March 2011, the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (FDNPS) suffered major damage after the magnitude 9.0 great east-Japan earthquake and subsequent tsunami which caused flooding of the plant.
     The combined impact and consequences of the earthquake and tsunami caused great loss of life and widespread devastation in north-eastern Japan. It was the largest civilian nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986.
     This was followed by severe flooding at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station which destroyed electrical generators that were needed to cool the nuclear fuel. The fuel overheated, melted down and caused explosions which destroyed other reactors at the plant. Radioactive material was released from the damaged plant and tens of thousands of people were evacuated. The Fukushima disaster was categorized as a Level 7 Major Accident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
     In the first days following the accident, the International Atomic Energy Commission established teams to evaluate key nuclear safety elements and assess radiological levels. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) investigated the levels and effects of exposure to ionizing radiation.

     Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy nuclear contamination in Los Alamos. Los Alamos is the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons.
     Michael Ketterer is a Northern Arizona University professor emeritus. He analyzed soil, water and vegetation samples taken along a popular hiking and biking trail in Acid Canyon. He said last Thursday that there were more extreme concentrations of plutonium found there than at any other publicly accessible sites he has researched in his decades-long career. That includes contamination of land around the federal gvernment’s former weapons plant at Rocky Flats in Colorado.
     Michael Ketterer specializes in tracking the chemical fingerprints of radioactive materials. Outdoor enthusiasts may not be in immediate danger while traveling through the pine tree-lined canyon. However, Ketterer said state and local officials should be warning people to avoid coming in contact with water in Acid Canyon.
     Ketterer said, “This is an unrestricted area. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in the United States. It’s just an extreme example of very high concentrations of plutonium in soils and sediments. Really, you know, the contamination is hiding in plain sight.”
     Ketterer teamed up with the group Nuclear Watch New Mexico to gather the samples in July. July is a rainy period that often results in isolated downpours and stormwater runoff coursing through canyons and otherwise dry arroyos. Water was flowing through Acid Canyon when the samples were taken from water and soil.
     Ketterer’s work followed mapping done by the group earlier this year that was based on a Los Alamos National Laboratory database including plutonium samples from throughout the area.
     Jay Coghlan is the director of Nuclear Watch. He said the detection of high levels of plutonium in the heart of Los Alamos is a concern. Especially as the lab gears up to begin producing the next generation of plutonium pits for the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The Los Alamos laboratory is under the direction of Congress, the U.S. Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration. He stated that Acid Canyon is a place where more comprehensive cleanup should have happened decades ago.

Coghlan said that “Cleanup at Los Alamos is long delayed.” He added that annual spending for the plutonium pit work has neared two billion dollars in recent years while the cleanup budget for legacy waste is expected to decrease in the next fiscal year.
     Acid Canyon is among the tributaries that eventually pass through San Ildefonso Pueblo lands on their way to the Rio Grande. From 1943 to 1964, liquid wastes from nuclear research at the lab was piped into the canyon.
     The federal government began cleaning up Acid Canyon in the late 1960s. The land was eventually transferred to Los Alamos County. Officials decided in the 1980s that conditions within Acid Canyon met DOE standards and were protective of human health and the environment.
     The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management at Los Alamos said Thursday that it was preparing a response to Ketterer’s findings.
     Ketterer and Coghlan said the concerns about contamination now are the continued downstream migration of plutonium, absorption by plants and the creation of contaminated ash following wildfires.
     Ketterer described it as a problem that cannot be fixed. However, he said the residents and visitors would appreciate knowing that it’s there.

     Ketterer said, “It really can’t be undone, I suppose we could go into Acid Canyon and start scooping out a lot more contaminated stuff and keep doing that. It’s kind of like trying to pick up salt that’s been thrown into a shag carpet. It’s crazy to think you’re going to get it all.”

     The construction of a new warehouse at the Spanish Almaraz Nuclear Power Plant, to store highly radioactive waste sixty miles from the Portuguese border, is under public consultation until September.
     The Spanish authorities claim that there will be “no impact” on Portugal from the construction of the new individual temporary storage facility (ATI). It will be located next to the Tagus River and approximately sixty miles in a straight line from the border.
     However, the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA) says that after assessing the initial documentation, it believes that “the project could be likely to have significant environmental effects on national territory” and has requested to participate in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure.
     The information sent by the Spanish authorities is available for public consultation until September 12th on the Participa portal (https://www.participa.pt ).
     The documentation sent by the Spanish authorities explains that the highly radioactive waste (HRW) created by the nuclear power plant is stored in spent fuel pools.
     The Spanish government plans to decommission the nuclear power plants by 2035. However, in order to dismantle the plant, a new temporary storage facility must be built to house the spent fuel (HF), HRW and special waste (SW). These are “produced throughout the entire period of operation of the plant (which cannot be stored in the existing ATI) and the radioactive waste (RW) that may be produced during its dismantling”.
     The Spanish government says that this project has already been submitted to a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and has a “favorable strategic environmental declaration”.
     “HF, HRW, and SW will initially be stored in the nuclear power plant pools and in an ATI, followed by intermediate storage”, this process that will end with “definitive storage in a Deep Geological Repository (AGP)”, states the documentation provided to the Portuguese.
     The strategic environmental statement contains the measures to be implemented in the construction of the new warehouse. They will ensure that if they are complied with, “no significant adverse environmental impacts are expected”. Also, they insisted that “no significant cross-border environmental impacts have been identified” during the operational phase of the new warehouse. “There is no impact of the project on Portugal”, with all potential “non-radiological” cross-border effects which have been identified as “not significant”.

     The Spanish authorities guarantee that vegetation and fauna will not be negatively affected by the construction and operation of the new warehouse. There will not be any change in the availability of water as a natural resource or contamination of surface water.
     The Natura 2000 network is the largest network of protected areas in the world, covering about 27,000 sites across 27 EU Member States. It aims to make the protection of natural and semi-natural species and habitats compatible with human activity, promoting the good conservation status of habitats and species of Community interest.    
     The impact of the Spanish construction on areas belonging to the Natura 2000 Network due to water consumption or the production of effluents will also not be affected by the construction and operation of the new building.
     The only potential “radiological” cross-border effect identified by the Spanish is the “external radiation of workers and the public in the vicinity”. However, this is also described as being “completely insignificant” for Portugal.
     Spanish studies suggest that the dose rates generated by the new Spanish nuclear waste storage “decrease rapidly with distance and at half a mile away the dose rate generated by ATI 100 represents a very small fraction of the natural background. Given that the minimum straight-line distance to Portugal is sixty miles, the radiological impact of ATI 100 in Portugal is completely insignificant”, the document reads.

     The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) developed the Atlas railcar to transport spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. It has been certified by the Association of American Railroads (AAR) to operate on all major freight railroads in the U.S.
     The DoE mentioned that the certification was the highest safety standard set by the AAR for transporting high-level radioactive materials.
     The 12-axle Atlas railcar comes equipped with high-tech sensors and monitoring systems. It was designed to safely and securely transport shipments of commercial spent nuclear fuel weighing up to two hundred and eighteen tons. The DoE said that the Atlas project took ten years to complete and cost about thirty-three million dollars.
     The entire railcar system consists of the Atlas railcar, two buffer railcars and a rail escort vehicle that was developed in partnership with the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.
     Final testing of the railcars was accomplished by the completion of a one thousand six-hundred-and-eighty-mile round-trip journey from Pueblo, Colorado, to Scoville, Idaho. The Atlas railcars are the first DoE railcars to meet the rigorous testing requirements of AAR’s S-2043 standard for transporting high-level radioactive materials.

     Paul Murray is the DoE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and High-Level Waste Disposition. He said, “The certification of the Atlas railcar by the AAR is a significant step forward as we develop the infrastructure to safely manage and store the nation’s nuclear waste. The capability for DOE to safely and securely transport spent nuclear fuel is a key component of DOE’s vision for an integrated waste management system that includes transportation, and government-owned storage and permanent disposal identified through a consent-based siting process.”
     The Atlas is one of two railcars DoE is developing to provide flexibility in transporting spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to future federal interim storage facilities and disposal sites.
     The eight-axle Fortis railcar is designed to carry lighter loads. It is expected to begin single car testing no sooner than 2025 and could be operational before 2030.
     The management of civilian spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. is a federal responsibility. The planned permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated in 1987 as the sole initial repository for seventy thousand tons of high-level wastes. However, the project was canceled before construction began. This means that spent nuclear fuel from more than 70 shutdown, decommissioned and operating nuclear energy facilities is currently in storage at sites across the U.S.
     Subject to appropriations, DoE is proceeding on a government-owned consolidated interim storage facility project that includes rail transportation. Commercial spent nuclear fuel is packaged in containers weighing between eighty and two hundred and ten tons. This is beyond legal weight limits for truck transport in the U.S. Rail is the preferred mode to move these heavy containers.
     DoE intends to eventually transport more than one hundred and forty ton of commercial spent nuclear fuel that it is estimated will have been generated in the U.S. by 2060.
    The location of the consolidated interim storage facility will be selected through DoE’s consent-based siting process. This puts communities at the forefront and would ultimately reduce the number of locations where commercial spent nuclear fuel is stored in the USA.
     Construction and operation of the interim storage facility will require amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to move this project forward.

     The Netherland Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection (ANVS) has granted the final permit to Urenco, the uranium enrichment company, for the construction and operation of a new radioactive waste storage facility at its Almelo site. Last year, Urenco was granted permission to build the facility prior to the permit being issued.
     In the autumn of 2022, Urenco received a warning from ANVS after an inspection. ANVS said that radioactive material (activated carbon and waste oils) was being stored in a room that was not sufficiently fire-resistant at Almelo.
     ANVS said in April 2023 that although there was no immediate danger to people and the environment, ANVS still issued a ‘tolerance decision’, allowing the construction of a new storage facility, without the required permit having been granted in advance. This was done so that Urenco could meet the safety requirements as quickly as possible.
     At the time of issuing its decision, ANVS said it “only tolerates [permit] violations either in the event of force majeure or in a transitional situation and if the situation does not lead to major environmental or safety risks. We have assessed that there is force majeure for the storage of the radioactive material at Urenco. The company may therefore create and use a new storage facility without a permit until 1 July 2024.”
   “Now that the final permit has been obtained, the tolerance situation has formally come to an end,” ANVS has recently noted.
     Radioactive waste from Urenco’s uranium enrichment activities at Almelo cannot immediately be sent for storage at the Central Organization for Radioactive Waste (COVRA). The waste must first be processed by the Urenco. Then it can be transported to COVRA which is the only storage facility for radioactive waste in the Netherlands. The radioactive material must therefore remain stored at Urenco until that processing has taken place.
     In addition to granting the final permit for the waste storage facility at Almelo, ANVS has also made three amendments to Urenco’s license for the plant. The company has the option to adapt the floor plan of its facility to the new situation. Urenco is also permitted to use a higher tube voltage for its X-ray equipment. The company uses these devices to screen its centrifuges during assembly. In order to use a new type of centrifuge, Urenco needs equipment with a higher tube voltage (two hundred and fifty kilovolts) than it is currently allowed to use (two hundred kilovolts)) according to the permit. In addition, Urenco may install two additional tipping autoclaves in the Central Services Building. These devices are used to take samples. Urenco will have the ability to take more samples at the same time by installing these additional tipping autoclaves.
     Urenco announced plans last December to increase capacity at its Almelo plant by fifteen percent in response to new commitments from customers. The project will see multiple new centrifuge cascades added to an existing plant at the site. This will add about seven hundred and fifty tons of SWU per year. The first new cascades are scheduled to come online at Almelo around 2027.

     A new online tool is allowing people to see how radioactive contamination is moving through plumes underground at Hanford, Washington, and other U.S. Department of Energy sites across the country.
     At Hanford, millions of gallons of radioactive liquid waste and many toxic chemicals leaked into the ground water from production of plutonium during World War II and the Cold War. Much of the radioactive liquid and toxic chemicals was dumped or injected into the ground in cribs, pits, trenches and injection wells, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology.
     Primary contaminants of concern in the soil and ground water under Hanford include uranium, technetium-99, iodine-129, tritium, carbon tetra chloride, chromium, nitrates and strontium-90.
    The newly developed online tool is called Tracking Restoration And Closure (TRAC). It maps the plumes and visualizes them as animations on a screen for viewers. Near the Columbia River, blobs of color move and expand depending on treatment of the radioactive plumes.
     April Kluever is the Acting Director of Subsurface Closure at DoE Headquarters. She said, “I could imagine somebody who lives along the Columbia River, either as a new resident, new to the area, or they’ve lived there for a while… perhaps they read a newspaper article or they have something that sparks their interest, and they want to know more. There’s this site, Hanford. Or I heard about this in (the movie) Oppenheimer, Hanford. You can go to TRAC and you can learn all of the information.”
     Kluever said that all of the data is being uploaded across the DoE complex, and the data updates of the TRAC program will soon be done every year across the Hanford complex.
     The tool shows which remediation technologies are being used, where the contaminated radioactive plumes are going and what progress has been made. It will even display the groundwater standard that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is trying to meet, and the concentration of radioactive contamination in the plume.
     Kluever said. “We have some of the most complex cleanup scenarios in the world, and we know that. We are instituting some of the most cutting-edge technologies to address these most complex scenarios in the world.”
     Kluever added that people cleaning up other public or private environmental sites might be able to use the map as a resource, to help understand new technologies that are available, she said.
     A three-dimensional view of the map is not available yet. However, the DoE is interested in making the map even more useful in the future, Kluever added.
     Kluever went on to say that the DoE hopes to use a similar sort of tool to show soil and closed Hanford tanks of radioactive waste that are being cleaned up in the future.
     “We started with groundwater because we had a lot of data and it was relatively easy to show in a visual platform like this,” Kluever said.
The TRAC system cost about $750,000 to start up from 2018 through 2023, and costs as much as $50,000 to maintain each year.

     A project to transfer more than one thousand drums of radioactive waste from the Winfrith site in Dorset, in southern England, to the Low-Level Waste Repository (LLWR) site in Cumbria, in northwest England, has been finished earlier than expected. The project was an accumulation of eight years’ work. Eleven consignments of drums have been transported by rail from Winfrith to the LLWR site.
     A total of one thousand sixty-eight drums of waste from the Winfrith Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor (SGHWR) were moved to the Treated Radwaste Store at the Dorset site. They are awaiting transfer to the intermediate-level waste storage facility at the Harwell site in Oxfordshire. However, the radioactive materials in the drums has decayed which means that the drums are now classed as low-level, rather than intermediate-level, waste. This allows early disposal at the LLW, the UK’s primary LLW disposal facility.
     The drums have been disposed of by utilizing void space in Vault 8, optimizing the use of the LLW Repository, and freeing up the Winfrith facility for alternative use or decommissioning, the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said. Final disposal of this waste has also removed the requirement for long-term storage. This will result in saving money for the UK taxpayer.
     The initiative was a collaboration with Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS) and Nuclear Transport Solutions (NTS). They are all part of the NDA group.
     Laura Street is the NRS’s head of waste at Winfrith and Harwell. She said, “The retrieval operation of the drums from the store went really well. We managed to improve our timings on each retrieval, meaning that the final drum was retrieved well ahead of schedule. The shipment of the drums by rail provided significant savings to the taxpayer and also saved 7502 kg of carbon emissions for each rail shipment compared to transporting these drums by road. This achievement takes us another step closer to completing our decommissioning mission and returning the site to heathland with public access.”
     Howard Falcone is the Head of Waste Services at NWS. He added, “Seeing the final train arrive at the LLWR was a proud moment and significant milestone for this successful project. It is the result of years of collaborative planning and preparation by Nuclear Waste Services, Nuclear Restoration Services, Nuclear Transport Solutions and our extensive supply chain partners involved. Planning and preparation were key to the success of this project with NWS staff working with Winfrith Site to explore alternatives to manage the waste more effectively. This work is integral to our mission, to make the UK’s nuclear waste permanently safe, sooner.”
     SGHWR was a one-hundred-megawatt prototype reactor which operated from 1968 until 1990. It supplied electricity to the grid as well as performing its prime function of supporting research into water-cooled reactor technology. It is one of only two remaining reactors Winfrith. Both of these reactors are being decommissioned. The 84-hectare site was a center for nuclear research and development to enable vital research into reactor design. It was home to nine experimental reactors at various times from the 1950s to the 1990s.