My last blog was about tritium, the dangerous radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is being released worldwide by operating nuclear reactors. Nuclear accidents such as Fukushima can release huge amounts of tritium. There is no existing nuclear technology for the removal of tritium from water. Japan is now seeking bids for demonstration projects for tritium removal. Three companies have been selected to construct the demonstration projects.

         The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) sent out a request for proposals in September of 2013 to remove tritium from contaminated water at Fukushima which is filling up emergency tanks and leaking into the Pacific Ocean. After the official submission period ended in late October of 2013, a review panel from the International Research Institute for Nuclear Disarmament went over all the proposals. Unfortunately, none of the many proposals that were submitted could be immediately applied to decontaminating Fukushima waste water.

         A Japanese government committee charged with finding treatments for the contaminated waste water said that “Since technologies that have a quick effect in separating tritium have not been found after collecting technical proposals from both inside and outside of Japan, it will be necessary in the future to assess measures proposed in response to our requests for information.” The committee called for proposals in mid-May that could demonstrate a method for tritium removal. The deadline for the new proposals was July 17, 2014. In late August, METI stated that Kurion from the U.S., GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy of Canada (GENEC) and FSUE Radioactive Waste Management Enterprise (RosRAO) from Russia will build demonstration projects to show how their technology can remove tritium from water.

        The demonstration projects have to show that the propose tritium removal technologies actually work as promised. Additionally, the demonstration projects will provide a basis for estimating the cost of constructing and operating tritium removal at the Fukushima nuclear plant where the disaster occurred. The demos will have to show that they can remove tritium from water where the tritium concentration is between six tenths of a million Becquerels and four million Becquerels per quart. The processes demonstrated have to be expandable to treating more than four hundred cubic yards of water a day. The Mitsubishi Research Institute will be handling the funding on behalf of METI’s Agency for Natural Resource and Energy. Funding of up to nine million four hundred thousand dollars will be made available to each of the companies for the construction and operation of the demonstration projects.

       Tritium is a threat to human health and it is a growing problem around Fukushima. Development of a technology that can remove tritium from water is an important step toward mitigating the environmental pollution from the Fukushima disaster. Hopefully, at least one of the demonstration projects will be successful and there will be a new technology to assist in decontamination of water released from nuclear power plants.

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Models show “greater potential impact” to US West Coast from rainfall containing Fukushima radioactive material.  enenews.com

Firefighters quickly doused a fire reported in an auxiliary building at North Carolina’s Harris nuclear plant Wednesday. nuclearstreet.com

Meeting the energy needs of a growing global population while tackling climate change is the “biggest diplomatic challenge of the era,” according to leading climate change expert Professor Sir David King. world-nuclear-news.org

Transparency is key to the United Arab Emirates’ program to build its first nuclear power plant, Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation chief Mohamed Al Hammadi told the World Nuclear Association’s 2014 Annual Symposium. world-nuclear-news.org

         Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons in the nucleus in addition to the single proton. Radioactive beta particles are emitted by tritium. (Beta particles are high energy electrons or positrons.) Since water is contained in living cells, heavy water with tritium instead of normal hydrogen is easily absorbed by living tissue when it is consumed. It can also enter a living body by being inhaled as water vapor. If the tritium is incorporated into organic compounds instead of being excreted or exhaled, it is referred to as organically bound tritium (OBT) and it can remain in a human body for up ten years, emitting beta particles. 

        If a beta particle from tritium hits the DNA in the nucleus of a living cell, it can cause mutations. If the DNA mutated is part of an important gene, the mutation can cause serious diseases. Laboratory animals exposed to tritium have developed cancer and birth defects. Research has shown that tritium can deliver what is called relative biological effectiveness in terms of radiation damage to living tissue at a rate of up to five times that of cosmic rays or x-rays.

      Tritium is created naturally when cosmic rays collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. It is also created by human activity such as the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons. It can also be released as a gas or water vapor by the normal operation of a nuclear power plant. In nuclear accidents at power plants, much greater releases of tritium are possible. It is estimated that nuclear power plants release tens of thousands of curies into the atmosphere and tens of millions of picocuries per liter into bodies of water near operating reactors.

       The NRC allows a licensed nuclear power plant to release a planned quantity of tritium into the environment that could result in a member of the public receiving a maximum of one milliseievert per year. Tritium has a half-life of about twelve years. Although increasing amounts of tritium are being released by normal nuclear reactor operations and nuclear accidents at nuclear power plants, the NRC does not require water or steam containing tritium to be filtered because there is no existing commercial technology that can remove tritium for water or water vapor.

         Much has been written about massive tritium releases caused by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in March of 2013. The fuel cores of three of the Fukushima reactors melted down and may have escaped from the reactors. In any case, the integrity of the reactors’ containment vessels has been destroyed. Ground water is flowing through the area containing the cores where it picks up tritium. In May of 2014 it was reported that the level of tritium in the water beneath the crippled power plant is exceeding the level which is allowed for dumping water directly into the Pacific Ocean.

       The contaminated water has been pumped into storage tanks but the tanks are rapidly being filled and some are leaking. TEPCO attempted to freeze the soil around the reactors that melted down in an attempt to create an “ice wall” to contain the contaminated water but that plan has failed. Water from the area around the destroyed reactors is now flowing directly into the Pacific Ocean. At this point, it is estimated that water containing tritium will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima for the foreseeable future. This poses a danger to all life on Earth.

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A nuclear plant in southwestern Japan will obtain a safety clearance from regulators this week to become the first such facility in the country to meet new, tighter regulations introduced following the 2011 Fukushima crisis, official sources said Monday. english.kyodonews.jp

Senior scientist says that no one knows how far melted nuclear fuel from Fukushima reactors has spread. enenews.com

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory recently announced further cooperation with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute to develop a new Generation IV sodium-cooled fast reactor. nuclearstreet.com

The head of Hitachi has said his company is considering a move to the UK for its nuclear power business. nuclearstreet.com

         Dounreay is a facility on the north coast of Scotland that was used to develop prototypes of fast breeder reactors and to test submarine reactors. There are five nuclear reactors at Dounreay, three of which are operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority which is a government agency responsible for the development of nuclear fusion. The other two nuclear reactors are operated by the Ministry of Defense. The Dounreay site is being decommission. A low level nuclear waste storage facility is being dug underground to store wastes from the demolition of the Dounreay reactors. The nuclear fuel from the Dounreay reactors is going to be shipped to the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria on the northeast coast of England.

        There have been shipments of fuel from Dounreay to Sellafield via rail and anti-nuclear activists have protested the shipments. Now there is talk of shipping nuclear fuel from Dounreay to Sellafield by sea. There have already been controversial sea shipments of nuclear fuel to Belgium from Dounreay. Sea trials are scheduled later this year to test the concept of shipping to Sellafield. The details of the tests and shipment plans are being kept secret on the grounds of national security.

       Critics point out that the sea is rough around Cape Wrath and the west coast of Scotland. People living on the coast along the proposed shipping route have not been consulted about the plan and they have been complaining. The weather in that part of Scotland can be severe and would pose a threat to shipments. An emergency tug boat has been lost in that area so currently there would not be a tug that could go out to rescue a radioactive shipment in trouble.

        Dounreay’s record of handling nuclear fuel is poor. There have been calls to close public beaches in the area because there are particles of nuclear fuel on the beaches in the area. Authorities say that there is no danger to the public but the public is not convinced. There is a whole bank of nuclear fuel fragments on the seabed off Dounreay.

        The question of Scottish independence is also a concern for the shipment plans. There will be a vote held soon by the Scots to see if they want to secede from the United Kingdom. If they do secede, this will complicate the planned shipments. U.K. law says that once fuel is reprocessed, it must be returned to the country of origin. An independent Scotland would have to go through a process of negotiation to arrange for shipments of nuclear fuel to Sellafield in England for reprocessing.

        There is a U.K. naval base for nuclear submarines in Faslane, Scotland. If Scotland becomes independent, the status of that base would come into question. Moving the base would be very expensive. There have been calls for the U.K. to declare the naval base to be sovereign U.K. territory in an independent Scotland.

        If Scotland achieves independence, it will further complicate an already complicated situation with respect to U.K. nuclear installations in Scotland and the movement of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste from Scotland to England.

Dounreay nuclear research facility:

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US Energy Dept. estimated Fukushima release up to 10,000 times larger than nuclear regulators predicted. enenews.com

The Chinese nuclear regulator has approved the preliminary safety analysis report of the CAP1400 reactor design following a 17-month review. world-nuclear-news.org

PPL shut down unit 2 at its Susquehanna nuclear plant over the weekend after indications of additional turbine blade cracking that has bedeviled both of the Pennsylvania reactors in recent years.  nuclearstreet.com

China General Nuclear Power Holding Corp. submitted the only non-binding bid for Romania’s $7.7 billion construction project for two new nuclear reactors at the Cernavoda plant on the Black Sea coast. bloomberg.com

         Spain gets about twenty percent of its electricity from seven nuclear power reactors. In 1983, the Spanish government put in place a moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power reactors or the relicensing of existing nuclear power reactors. For many years, Spain had a policy of replacing nuclear reactors with renewable energy sources. The forty year old Jose Cabrera nuclear power plant was shut down in 2006. In 2011, the Spanish government cancelled the moratorium. Now power reactor owners are able to apply for 10 year extensions for operating nuclear power plants.

      Enresa is a public company created by the Spanish government in 1984 to manage the treatment, conditioning, storage and disposal of radioactive wastes produced in Spain. This includes spent fuel from nuclear power reactors as well as radioactive chemicals used in laboratories. When Spanish nuclear power reactors are shut down permanently, Enresa is responsible for dismantling them.

      Since 1984, Spain has created and implemented six General Radioactive Waste Plans. The sixth and most recent Plan was implemented by resolutions of the Congressional Commission for Industry in 2006. Among other things, it called for creating the Centralized Temporary Storage (CTS) facility for spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive wastes from Spanish reactors and laboratories.

     Enresa has just called for bids to carry out major civilian construction work at the CTS in central Spain. “The scope of the work to be carried out under the contract includes construction of the used fuel and waste reception building, processing buildings, phases 1 and 2 of the storage modules, a storage container warehouse and a waste container maintenance workshop. It also includes the construction of used fuel and radioactive material laboratory, radioactive waste treatment facility and other ancillary buildings.” The maximum cost of the project will not exceed two hundred and eighty three million dollars.

      The first step in the construction project will be obtaining a municipal building permit and a construction license from the Ministry of Industry. Construction is to take about five years. The town of Villar de Cãnas in the central province of Cuenca province was selected as the site of the facility in 2011. Currently, spent nuclear fuel assemblies are stored on site in canisters at the nuclear power plants around Spain. With the completion of the CTS, the canisters will be shipped to Villar de Cãnas for storage.

      The waste will be repackaged in smaller containers and placed in a dry store cooled by passive circulation of air. About thirteen thousand cubic yards of waste are to be stored at the facility for sixty years. At the end of sixty years it is expected that there will be a permanent geological repository for nuclear waste in Spain. Considering problems that other countries including the U.S. have had in building permanent geological repositories for spent nuclear fuel, the anticipated Spanish permanent repository may not be ready in sixty years to receive nuclear wastes.

Artist’s conception of Enresa Centralized Temporary Storage facility:

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