Now 2 US sailors have died after Fukushima radiation exposure. enenews.com

Iran and six powers failed on Monday for a second time this year to resolve their 12-year stand-off over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and gave themselves seven more months to clinch an historic deal. reuters.com

Britain’s Office of Nuclear Regulation said it had granted permission for three reactors at Hartlepool and Heysham 1 to return to service after more than three months of suspended operations. nuclearstreet.com

Toshiba Corporation’s nuclear power giant Westinghouse Electric announced that had entered into exclusive negotiations to develop a four-reactor AP1000 power plant in the Republic of Turkey. nuclearstreet.com

 

         I have blogged a lot about all the reasons that nuclear power is not a viable option. Recently a promoter of nuclear power gave a lecture in which he questioned whether nuclear power was really necessary as a part of the mix of future global energy sources. Professor Sir David King was formerly a chief scientist and an advocate for building new nuclear reactors in the United Kingdom. He presented his lecture for the Ashden charity which presents the Ashden Energy Awards annually.

         Although King has been one of the most prominent strong advocates for nuclear power in the past, he did not make much mention of nuclear power in his lecture. A reporter who was struck by this omission got up and asked King about nuclear power in the Q & A part of the event. He did not get the answer that he expected. King said that Britain might be able to do without nuclear power and that the priority should be to develop battery systems that could support intermittent renewables such as wind and solar. “We have to keep reassessing the situation”, he said. “I believe that what we need, more than anything, is a surge of activity to develop energy storage capability …. Once we can do that technologically, why would we not just keep with renewables.”

        King pointed out that a country like India with lots of sunlight and deserts should go directly into solar energy. He said that solar power was already as much as a quarter the cost of connecting remote villages to the national electrical grid. On the other hand, he pointed out that countries such as Britain and Japan with less sunlight and fewer open spaces might have to include nuclear power if they could not solve the energy storage problems that accompany renewables. In that case, King said that he favored the small modular nuclear reactors that have recently been advocated by Owen Paterson, the former environmental secretary of the U.K. King did say in response to a later questioner that if the costs could be brought down enough, renewable energy sources and energy storage could provide all the electricity that Britain needed.

       In the past few years, there have been prominent opponents of nuclear power who have become advocates. This has been primarily a result of concern that we have to reduce the carbon footprint of energy sources if we are to ameliorate global climate change. It is true that the carbon footprint of nuclear power is much lower than fossil fuels but it is still not on par with renewable energy sources which also have many fewer problems than nuclear power. King’s conversion from an advocate to an opponent of nuclear power may be one of the first prominent advocates of nuclear power to switch sides in the debate.

        As the cost of renewables and energy storage drops and the problems with nuclear power increase, it is inevitable that nuclear power will be abandoned. The only question is how many more dollars will be spent and how many more lives will be damaged or lost before this happens.

Sir David King:

The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant plans to fill in trenches on the coastline with special concrete in yet another attempt to prevent highly contaminated water from pouring into the sea. ajw.ashai.com

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the third reactor (Unit 3) at the Enrico Fermi NPP in Newport, Mi. had passed its latest test.  nuclearstreet.com

Westinghouse Electric Company, China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation and Turkish power company Elektrik Üretim AŞ have signed an agreement to begin exclusive negotiations to develop and construct a four-unit nuclear power plant in Turkey. world-nuclear-news.com

Plans for a power uprate of over 14% at unit 3 of the Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden have been dropped as it is no longer economically feasible, Vattenfall has announced. world-nuclear-news.com

South Korea’s Shin Wolsong 2 has been loaded with its first core of nuclear fuel as it prepares for commissioning. world-nuclear-news.org

Two South Korean municipalities have each agreed to host two new nuclear power reactors. Ulchin County has approved construction of units 3 and 4 at the existing San Hanul plant, while Yeongdeok County has approved a new two-unit plant. world.-uclear-news.org

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Vienna on Sunday to take part in Iran nuclear negotiations, and China’s foreign minister was expected to follow on Monday, the deadline to complete a comprehensive agreement. online.wsj.com

China’s Fuqing-1 nuclear unit in Fujian province entered commercial operation after the thermal performance test was completed, the China National Nuclear Corporation and China Nuclear Industry Construction Company have said. nucnet.org

 

A fire at Dounreay nuclear power plant has caused the release of radioactive particles “via an unauthorized route” but no threat to the public officials said. mariauir.com

A leaked government report in Germany says the country has more than twice as much radioactive waste to deal with than indicated in previous reports. nuclearstreet.com

Vietnamese officials have chosen Rosatom’s AES-2006 design for the country’s first nuclear power plant at Ninh Thuan, increasing the planned capacity of the four unit plant by about 800 MWe. world-nuclear-news.org

China’s nuclear generating capacity is set to triple over the next six years, according to an energy development plan published by the State Council. world-nuclear-news.org

 

 

 

 

        I have often blogged about problems with the cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south central Washington State. The Federal government spend decades developing and manufacturing nuclear weapons there but that ended about twenty five years ago. Despite decades of cleanup, the Hanford site is still one of the most radioactively contaminated places on Earth. In addition to the nuclear waste and waste processing facilities at Hanford, it is also host to the only operating nuclear power reactor in Washington which is called the Columbia Generating Station (CGS). The CGS is owned and operated by Energy Northwest and CGS is the only operating reactor left from the failed attempt to build five reactors in Washington. It supplies about four percent of the electricity for the Pacific Northwest.

       Hearts of American Northwest (HAN) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) recently commissioned a report about the CGS. The report was written by Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies. All three of these organizations have been regular critics of the nuclear industry in the United States in general and Hanford in particular.

      Alvarez’s report raised concerns about the safety of the spent fuel rods in the cooling pool. Spent fuel rods assemblies are removed from the reactor and placed in a cooling pool for several years that is five stories above the ground in a building next to the reactor. After cooling for several more years, the assemblies can be moved to dry cask storage onsite.

       In the event of an emergency such as an earthquake, the spent fuel pool could drain and expose the spent fuel to the open air. Contact with the air would ignite the spent fuel which would result in smoke and radioactive particulates being released into the environment. A deliberate terrorist attack could have the same effect. Such a fire could cause a thermal plume that could spread the radioactive contamination over hundreds of square miles. The disaster at Fukushima left a five story spent fuel cooling pool in a severely damaged pool that could have been drain by another earthquake.

        Alvarez also said that almost half of the incidence of radiation exposure to workers at Hanford between 1999 and 2011 took place at the CGS. He expressed concern that nearby cleanup activities could possibly expose the CGS workers to radiation in the event of an accident. HAN and PSR have demanded that CGS be shut down as a public threat.

       As might be expected, Energy Northwest (EN) was not pleased by the demand to shut down their power reactor. A spokesperson for EN suggested that Alvarez actually knew very little about their plant. He said that the chances of a fire breaking out in the concrete steel-lined spent fuel pool structure was very remote and not even a part of their disaster planning. The EN spokesperson also downplayed threats to worker safety saying that they had not exceeded the annual federal safety limit for workers’ exposure to radioactivity for the past seventeen years.

The Columbia Generating Station at Hanford: