Twice as much Fukushima radiation near California coast than originally reported. enenews.com

Even though a majority of Japanese citizens are confused by and opposed to Abe’s “snap election” where he recently dissolved the Lower House, Abe has moved forward with this cheap political ploy in order to prove he has a “mandate” from voters to carry out constitutional reforms and restart the nuclear reactors. rense.com

Radioactive leak as fire strikes Scottish nuclear plant. rt.com

French nuclear power giant Areva’s announcement this week that it was suspending its financial goals for 2015 and 2016 was met with an investor pullback, as stock prices plunged 16 percent on Wednesday. nuclearstreet.com

         As part of nuclear disarmament, Russia and the U.S. agreed to convert the plutonium in many of their nuclear warheads into fuel for nuclear reactors. The plutonium is mixed with uranium to dilute it producing what is called Mixed Oxide fuel (MOX). For fifteen years, plutonium warheads from Russia were converted to nuclear fuel to burn in U.S. nuclear power reactors. This arrangement is just ending which will cause the price of MOX to rise.

         In 2005, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted a ten year construction license to Shaw Areva MOX Services (SAMS) for the construction of the first MOX plant in the U.S. That license will run out in 2015 and the MOX plant is far from complete. After a two year delay, actual construction of the MOX plant began in 2007. The MOX plant design was based on the design of the French Melox MOX facility. The U.S. MOX plant was supposed to begin operation in 2016 with an estimated construction cost of about five billion dollars. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that the MOX plant would not be ready to operate before 2019 and that it would cost almost eight billion dollars. There have been budget cuts over the years and SAMS only requested three hundred and twenty million dollars for 2014 due to project delays.

        SAMS requested an extension of its construction license in May of 2014. They said that there had been significant progress in construction of the MOX plant and that they estimated that the facility was sixty percent complete although some key structures still had to be built including the emergency generator building and the reagents processing building.

         SAMS has offered several reasons for the extension request. Since this is the first such plant to be constructed in the U.S., they were not able to draw on prior experiences in such plant construction. They pointed out that the actual annual funding has been less than the project funding requirements for several years. There is a shortage of vendors who produce the necessary components. There is also a shortage of qualified construction workers available for the project. In addition, there was that two-year delay between the grant of the original construction license and the actual beginning of construction.

        In October of 2014, the NRC basically said that extension “would not have a significant effect on the quality of the human environment because it does not involve any additional impacts or represent a significant change to those impacts described and analyzed in the previous environmental report and final environmental impact statement.” A week ago, the NRC granted SAMS the requested ten year license extension.

        Since the funding for the MOX project comes from Congress, there could be delays in construction introduced by reduction of funding in Congressional budget negotiations. As with many other nuclear construction projects, the MOX project is way behind in schedule and way over its estimated cost.

All efforts have failed to stop very high levels of radioactive materials from Fukushima disaster flowing into the Pacific Ocean. enenews.com

IRID has made some progress on their research to find ways to seal the containment structures at Fukushima Daiichi. fukuleaks.org

Bolivia’s Hydrocarbons and Energy Ministry said Wednesday that the country had signed letters of cooperation with France’s Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission. nuclearstreet.com

Koeberg Steam generators represent a stake in South Africa’s nuclear future. nuclearstreet.com

 

 

      I have blogged several times about the accidents and radiation releases at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The WIPP is the single repository for wastes from nuclear weapons development and manufacture in the U.S. In mid-February of 2014, the contents of a drum from the Los Alamos National Laboratory overheated and caused the drum to burst, raising the temperature in the WIPP chamber to a level that could have caused other drums to rupture. Radioactive materials from the burst drum made their way into the ventilation system which was not functioning properly. Plutonium and americium were detected in Carlsbad, over twenty of miles away. The WIPP had to be shut down which has resulted in hundred of problematic drums of waste being left at LANL, WIPP and in temporary storage in Texas. It will take years to repair the damage from the accident and hundreds of millions of dollars.

      The LANL was chasing a deadline of June of 2014 to have sent all of the radioactive waste from nuclear weapons development to the WIPP. If the private consortium could make the deadline, that would help it to get an extension of its two billion dollar annual contract from the U.S. Department of energy. In the summer of 2013, one batch of waste at LANL was found to be far too acidic to be transported to the WIPP. The official policy of LANL called for stopping work with that acidic waste until a specific set of reviews were conducted with respect to how to treat the waste. Such a process is time consuming and expensive and it might have interfered with meeting the June 2014 deadline. Instead of following its own guidelines, the lab and its subcontractors took shortcuts. LANL added a neutralizer to the waste to change its pH and added an organic wheat based kitty litter to absorb excess liquid. One of the subcontractors said that he was not an expert on the chemistry of the wastes at LANL and he requested that LANL experts review the treatment of the waste. This was not done. It turns out that the additives basically turned the contents of the drums of waste into potential bombs.

      Drums of the treated acidic waste were shipped to WIPP for permanent disposal. Every drum that is shipped to the WIPP is supposed to be accompanied by documents that give a detailed and complete account of the contents of the drum. The documents that came with the acidic waste drums did not contain the required information. There was no mention of the high acidity, the neutralizer or the organic kitty litter. Most chemists would have recognized the explosive nature of the contents of the drums if they knew that organic kitty litter was being mixed with the nitrate salts in the waste.

       For two years before the accident this year, the LANL would not allow inspectors who conducted annual permitting audits for New Mexico’s Environmental Department into the area where waste was treated for shipment. The WIPP did not find out about the explosive chemistry in the burst drum until after the accident. Even after the drum burst last February, the LANL continued to withhold critical information from the people at the WIPP. It appears that there may have been a typo in the LANL guidelines that led to the switch to organic kitty litter.

       If the documentation for the waste shipments had been accurate and complete, they would not have been allowed on the road at all. The pending report from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Accident Investigation Board is expected to be critical of the behavior of the staff at LANL and their subcontractors who were apparently more interested in meeting the deadline than they were in the safety of the wastes they were shipping. Once again this illustrates a point that I keep repeating. Corporations cannot be relied upon to follow nuclear safety regulations.

As part of reviewing IRID’s updates on work progress for Fukushima Daiichi, new information about robots to be used and their proposed work has been released. fukuleaks.org

Saudi Electricity Co. is considering taking a stake of about 15 percent in the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, which recently received the green light for construction by the European Commission. nuclearstreet.com

French power giant Electricite de France SA (EDF) announced on Tuesday it had pushed back its third-generation pressurized water (EPR) nuclear plant start date in Flamanville to 2017 due to delayed components expected from infrastructure firm Areva. nuclearstreet.com

The regulatory authorities of Sweden, Norway and Ukraine have agreed to cooperate in making improvements to the regulatory guidelines of the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine as well as establishing more robust safety systems at nuclear power plants in the country. world-nclear-news.org

         Yesterday, I blogged about a loan program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration aimed at the development of domestic sources of Molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), a radioactive isotope that is critical for most medical imaging systems. Mo-99 has a half-life of about three days. Then it decays into technetium-99 which is the isotope that is actually used in medical imaging. Because of its short half-life, Mo-99 cannot be stockpiled and so it must be constantly produced.

         Currently, five reactors in Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa and Russia produce most of the commercial Mo-99 in the world. The primary method of production is based on bombarding highly enriched uranium with neutrons. Because of the dangers of proliferation of nuclear weapons, other methods of production not involving highly enriched uranium are being developed. In my last blog, I mentioned that Canada produces as much as forty percent of the world’s supply of Mo-99 in its NRU reactor which is slated for shut down in 2016. It turns out that this will not be the end of Mo-99 production in Canada.

          The Canadian Medical Isotope Project (MIP) just used the Canadian Light Source linear accelerator in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to produce a batch of Mo-99 that did not require a nuclear reactor. The CLS contains a target of enriched molybdenum-100 (Mo-100). The target is bombarded with high-energy X-rays which knock single neutrons out of the Mo-100 atoms which results in the creation of Mo-99.  

          The Canadian government has allocated over fifty billion dollars since 2010 to the development of non-reactor sources of useful radioisotopes through the Isotope Technology Acceleration Program (ITAP). The Saskatchewan Government and ITAP are funding the MIP in partnership with the Prairie Isotope Production Enterprise (PIPE). The MIP is testing the production of isotopes until they obtain approval from Health Canada, the Canadian national health regulatory agency. It is anticipated that upon completion of testing and approval, this project will be able to supply Mo-99 to healthcare facilities across Western Canada by 2016.

        CLS has stated that just three accelerators systems could produce enough Mo-99 to supply all of Canada’s domestic needs for the radioisotope. CLS hopes to that the commercialization of Mo-99 productions from accelerators will provide sufficient funding to extend production and seek foreign markets.

         The Canadian announcement about new processes for M0-99 production came just a few days after the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced an eight million dollar loan program aimed at new methods of production of Mo-99 that do not utilize highly-enriched uranium. The timing of the Canadian announcement is very interesting. Is it possible that Canada which has announced the shut down of the reactor currently producing forty percent of the global supply of Mo-99 is concerned about losing that market share due to efforts of other countries such as the U.S. to produce their own Mo-99 internally? Perhaps the recent Canadian announcement was intended to reassure current Canadian customers for Mo-99 that Canada will continue to be a major source for Mo-99 after the scheduled closing of the NRU reactor.

Canada’s NRU reactor:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. appears unable to stem the flow of radioactive water from the No. 2 reactor building to underground tunnels at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, officials said. japantimes.co.jp

The prime ministers of India and Australia have underlined their commitment to implementing agreements that will enable Australian uranium to be exported to India. world-nuclear-news.org

The US House of Representatives on has passed legislation to authorize Department of Energy (DoE) research on whether low-dose ionizing radiation poses a risk. world-nuclear-news.org

An agreement has been signed for the construction and installation of the MBIR multipurpose fast neutron research reactor, which will be built at Russia’s Scientific Research Institute of Atomic Reactors (NIIAR) near Dimitrovgrad in western Russia, state nuclear corporation Rosatom said. nucnet.org