(Please read yesterday’s Part 1 before this article.)        

        All of the agency representatives from the Navy, Seattle Parks, WA Dept. of Ecology and WA Dept. of Health at the meeting at the Mountaineer’s Club in Magnuson Park basically said the same things: There was never a great danger from the radioactive contamination, the contamination is being cleaned up properly and there will not be any danger when the cleanup program is done.

        Representative Pollet begged to differ with the agency reps about what constituted a “safe level” of contamination to leave behind. He also raised the issue of exposure times. The agency people were working on a “recreational use” standard that said if someone used the park two hours a day for five days a week over the course of the year, their exposure would not endanger their health. The Navy was going to clean up the contaminated areas so that the exposure of recreation use would result in a 15 milliRem dose.

        Pollet pointed out that a 15 milliRem dose could pose a health problem and that the EPA had rejected using that standard years ago. For comparison, the standard for the Hanford Cleanup was more stringent than that and it was basically an area of scrub grass along the Columbia River. The Hanford plan was based on ensuring low exposure for a residential area where someone might be outside for ten hours or more every day for a year. The irony is that there is low income housing in Magnuson Park and hundreds of people live there including children.

        When pressed on the question of where the 15 milliRem standard came from, the rep from the WADoH said that that was the cleanup limit because it was impossible to cleanup any more than that because you could not detect radioactive contamination below the natural radiation levels in the area. Rep Pollet stated that that was not true and once again repeated that the EPA standards and the work at Hanford already require that lower levels of radioactive contamination be left behind at a cleaned up site.

       There were a lot of questions about the safety of the people living in the low income housing who were being urged to grow their own food in pea patches in Magnuson Park. These people will definitely be in the Park for more than a few hours a day. The rep from Seattle Parks was very confident that there was absolutely no danger from growing food in the Park because the Parks Department had brought in outside soil for the pea patch garden area. Some in the audience were not reassured and pointed out that contamination from below the imported soil could be brought out by heavy rains and possibly drawn out of the soil by growing plants.

      There were questions about the origin of the cesium and strontium that were also detected in the soil near one of the old buildings. The rep from Seattle Parks said that there could be strontium in the paint for the gauges in the planes. She also said that the cesium could have come from gauges. My research found that that strontium was not used in radioluminescent paint. Neither was cesium. An audience member suggested that the cesium and strontium might have been washed off planes returning from monitoring the testing of nuclear devices in the Pacific in the 1950s.

       Rep Pollet and members of the audience demanded that a citizens advisory board be created and hold regular meetings with public access. If rep Pollet had not been there to counter some of the statements of the panel of “experts,” the audience would have left with the impression that experts agreed that the cleanup was going just fine. However, there are plans for the Navy to conduct a search of historical records and to do more testing in other areas of the Park in the future. There is no guarantee that all the contamination has been found.

One of the contaminated buildings at Magnuson Park:

Radioactive material from Fukushima will keep coming across to North America for centuries. enenews.com

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday that the country would build its third nuclear power plant within five years and that it would be a 100 percent domestic project. nuclearstreet.com

A windy day with several nuclear reactors off line in Britain resulted in an unlikely turning of the tables with more electricity in the country generated by wind turbines than nuclear power for a day. nuclearstreet.com

U.S. regulators on Monday took the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry power station off a watch list after forty-one months and scheduled a conference to review flood protection safety at Arkansas Nuclear One. nuclearstreet.com

        I blogged last summer about the cleanup of radioactive materials left in Magnuson Park in Seattle from when the park was a Naval air base in World War II. The Navy turned the park over to the city of Seattle in 1999 with the assurance that any hazardous material had been removed and it was safe for recreational and low-income housing. In 2010, when the Seattle Parks Department was working on renovation of  a couple of buildings, old blueprints revealed that one of the buildings had a room dedicated to removed and replacing old radioluminescent paint on the dials in the cockpit of planes based there. Tests showed that there was measurable amounts of radium in the room and drain pipe from the room.

         The Seattle Parks Department and the Navy decided that there was no need to alarm the public so they boarded up the radium room and they put up a fence around an outside area that had radium in the soil. Small eight and a half by eleven signs said “Controlled Area.” on the fence.

         In March of 2013, people started asking questions about the signs and found out about the radioactive contamination. The Navy reached out to the Washington State Department of Health to work on cleaning up the contamination. There were contentious public meeting that summer as the citizens of Seattle demanded to know about the contamination and cleanup plans. One of the big issues was why there was no plan for public input. The Navy did finally allow some public meetings but the Navy already had a cleanup plan in place and were moving forward with it.

        Last night I attended a meeting called by the agencies cleaning up Magnuson park which included the U.S. Navy, the Washington State Department of Ecology, the Washington State Department of Health and the Seattle Parks Department. The purpose of the meeting was to explain progress on the cleanup and to take questions from concerned citizens. A representative of each of these agencies was on a panel at the front a room at the Mountaineers Club at the Park. Washington State Representative Gerry Pollet was also on the panel. He has been with Hearts of America Northwest, a watchdog group for Hanford cleanup, for decades.

        As usual, there were about eight big display boards with excellent photographs and diagrams covering the history of the base, the location of the contamination, the time line of the cleanup, etc. I remarked to Barbara that if the same level of expertise shown in the display panels had been applied to the cleanup, we would not have to have these meetings. Hearts of American Northwest also had a table with display boards and handouts about the situation. King 5 News attended the meeting with cameras and reporters. Thirty plus people were in attendance.

          On tomorrow’s post, I will go into detail on some of the discussion, questions and disagreements at the meeting.

(See Part 2 for more details)

Washington State Department of Health radiation survey at Magnuson Park:

A Fukushima evacuee says that they never heard of so much sickness & death in such a short period. enenews.com

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ European version of its Advanced Pressurized Water Reactor has been formally certified as compliant by the European Utility Requirements organization. world-nuclear-news.org

Work to deactivate the former Paducah gaseous diffusion enrichment plant can begin in earnest after Centrus Energy subsidiary United States Enrichment Corporation formally handed back full control of the Kentucky complex to the US Department of Energy. world-nuclear-news.org

Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj has revised its estimated costs and losses relating to the continued delay in completion of the first-of-a-kind EPR at Olkiluoto. world-nuclear-news.org

 

        I wrote a recent article about legal action being taken by the Governor and Attorney General of the State of Washington against the United States Department of Energy. The issue of contention was the failure of the DoE to meet deadlines with respect to emptying a leaking waste storage tank at Hanford and construction of a vitrification plant to sequester nuclear waste in glass logs at Hanford.

        There will be a court hearing next February where both sides will get to present their arguments. Both sides are seeking changes in the 2010 consent decree set down by the federal court for the schedule of these particular parts of the Hanford cleanup. The DoE says that the original schedule was too optimistic and the State of Washington has agreed that there is no way that DoE can meet the original schedule. The consent decree settled a 2008 lawsuit about missed deadlines at Hanford. Now in February the court will discuss setting still later deadlines.

        DoE argues that it has been unable to meet the consent decree deadlines because of “unforeseen technical and budget issues.” DoE was confident that it clearly and completely understood the problems that had to be solved. DoE thought that it knew what had to be done and had created a corresponding budget and schedule that would satisfy the requirements of the consent decree. Included in the plans were solutions to twenty eight technical issues that had been identified in a 2006 review of the Hanford cleanup.

        Only two months after the consent decree had been issued, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board came up with more technical issues and called for more tests. In 2012, a DoE employed pointed out that there was still a risk of corrosion in vessels and pipes in the vitrification plant although the DoE thought that they had solved the problem. In 2013, it was discovered that the planned ventilation system might allow toxic gas to leak into areas where people were working. Fixing this is going to require expensive changes to existing systems. DoE is building a new lab to test how to ensure that the waste stream at the vitrification plant is well mixed to prevent nuclear reactions and generation of flammable gas. The tests will take three years and additional time will be required to redesign the vitrification plant system.

         The shutdown of the federal government in 2013 over budget issues and the sequester that cut federal spending across the board caused delays and other problems with the Hanford cleanup and the consent decree schedule. DoE says that it does not want to agree to future fixed deadlines because it has learned that the complexity of the job at Hanford makes meeting such deadlines impossible. They admit that, “Despite the application of extraordinary levels of effort and expertise, the project has proved to be far more difficult, and the technical solutions for more elusive, than DoE anticipated.” The State of Washington accepts that the job is complex and difficult but still wants some set deadlines.

        DoE has been working on cleanup of Hanford for decades. There have been repeated failures to comprehend the complexities and difficulties of cleaning up the Hanford site on the part of the DoE. There have been repeated assurances that DoE knew what it was doing and would be able to meet deadlines which were repeatedly missed. Is DoE capable of cleaning up Hanford or are we destined to witness repeated promises and failures until future budget problems drain the funds needed to clean up Hanford and they just put up a big fence and walk away?

 

Japanese TV anchor said the he couldn’t tell the truth about Fukushima. enenews.com

Japan’s Fukushima reactors could have emitted nearly four times as much cesium-137 at Chernobyl. enenews.com

Iranian security services have arrested several suspected spies in the southern province of Bushehr where the country’s first nuclear power plant is located, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Tuesday. in.reuters.com

South Africa is moving towards signing framework agreements with China and Japan and is inviting would-be reactor vendor countries to participate in workshops to showcase their offerings as it moves through the pre-procurement phase of its nuclear new-build plans. world-nuclear-news.org

 

Ambient office = 98  nanosieverts per hour

        I have blogged a lot about the aging U.S. nuclear power reactors. Most of them were built decades ago and are nearing or have already passed their initial forty year licenses. There does not seem to be much interest among investors and utilities in building new nuclear power reactors. The U.S. has a guaranteed loan pool of about twenty billion dollars that was created seven years ago. Since creation, the fund has only found one power company interested in building two new reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. This company got an eight billion dollar loan. There is still over twelve billion in the fund but, for the moment, no other takers.

       With lack of interesting in building new reactors, the nuclear power industry in the United States is working on extending the lifespan of the current nuclear power reactors. The owners of seven old power reactors in Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina are going to ask the U.S. government for permission to extend the lifespan of their reactors to eighty years, twice the original licensed lifespan. They claim that it will be more economical to keep the old reactors going rather than build more new reactors. Critics of the plan say that many of the reactors were built on designs that were decades older than the reactors. They point out that it may be difficult to keep the old reactors going as long as eighty years.

       After decades of exposure to radiation, some metal reactor parts become brittle and are more likely to crack when subjected to stress. One big concern is that some of the piping in the cooling system of a reactor could crack and leak which might trigger the emergency cooling system to dump large amounts of water into the reactor. The reactor could keep operating but the temperature drop could induce what is called “pressurized thermal shock.” This could crack open the reactor containment vessel and release radioactive materials into the environment.

       Supporters of extending the lifespan of these old reactors say that they will carefully monitor the steel, concrete, cable insulation as well as other critical components. Small pieces of metal called “coupons” are kept inside the reactor and removed one at a time to check for brittleness. Unfortunately, some of the reactors have run out of coupons and their operators are trying to figure out another way to check for brittleness. In other cases, the operators have placed coupons closer to the reactor core to “age them faster.”

         The consensus of the Nuclear Regulator Commissioners and the nuclear power industry is that these old reactors can continue to operate for decades more with adequate monitoring. Currently, the owners of many old reactors have filed for and been granted twenty year extensions of their forty year licenses. No requests have been denied but some requests are still under review. There is a new push for another round of twenty year extensions which would bring the licensed life of a reactor to eighty years.

         My big concern is that the nuclear industry has a poor record of adhering to regulations on nuclear safety and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a very poor record of monitoring and enforcing such adherence. As the U.S. power reactors age, the odds of a nasty accident increase. Extending reactors life spans to eighty years is a very bad idea.

Microscopic images of samples of stainless steel. The top sample shows steel with its normal integrity. The bottom image shows steel that has been made brittle by exposure to radiation.