The United States Environmental Agency exists for the purpose of insuring the well-being of the environment and public health by monitoring for pollutants and regulating sources of pollution. The EPA has a history of criticizing other agencies when they proposed standards for acceptable levels of radiation that the EPS felt were not sufficiently protective of the environment and human health. The EPA “acceptable risk range” for limiting exposure to carcinogens lies between one new cancer in a million people and one new cancer per ten thousand people, the closer to one in a million, the better. The EPA does not distinguish between hazardous chemicals and radioactive materials. The EPA once complained to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission about a proposed standard. “To put it bluntly, radiation should not be treated as a privileged pollutant. You and I should not be exposed to higher risks from radiation sites than we should be from sites which had contained any other environmental pollutant.”

        This sounds good but it turns out that the EPA does not follow its own advice when it comes to acceptable levels of radiation exposure.  The EPA has just released an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking with respect to Environmental Radiation Protection Standards for Nuclear Power Operations covered in 40 Code of Federal Regulation 190. The proposed change would allow for whole body exposure to radiation that could result in a maximum risk of two thousand new cancers per one million people.

        It turns out that the EPA method of regulating radiation exposure is treated differently from the regulation of all other carcinogens. All other standards are stated in terms of risks of new cancers. Radiation standards are stated in terms of exposure measured in special radiation units of “Roentgen equivalent man” (REM) and Sieverts which equal one hundred REMs. These special measures make it difficult for decisions makers and the public to compare radiation exposure to exposure to other carcinogens. Since the initial adoption of 40 CFR 190 in the 1970s, it has been found that radiation exposure is much more dangerous than originally assumed. However, the standards for safety have not been changed to reflect this new understanding even though the EPA promised to review standards every five years from the original adoption in the 1970s.

         Instead of raising standards for radiation exposure, the EPA Office of Radiation and Indoor Air (ORIA) has proposed weakening the current standard to allow for increased exposure to radiation. The ORIA wants to abandon the use of measuring exposure by “actual organ dose” in favor of a new measure called the “effective dose equivalent.” This change would allow for up to twenty five times the current limit for exposure. For some particular radionuclides at contaminated sites, the risk would increase by three and a half times.

       The use of the new effective dose equivalent measure has been attacked  by critics because it allows subjective judgments of the damage and pain caused by particular cancers. These critics would like to replace the idea of effective dose equivalent with an effective risk equivalent measure which would be more objective and accurate in the assessment of risk. Basing danger of radiation exposure on estimated risks of additional cancers is a better way to protect public health. The EPA should be reducing acceptable exposure to radiation, not increasing it.

The meltdown of the Unit 3 reactor core at Fukushima was worse than thought. enenews.com

The fuel itself is exposed at Fukushima. enenews.com

Ukraine expects to prepare soon a draft presidential decree on establishing a biosphere reserve in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. world-nuclear-news.org

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel and his venture capital firm Founders Fund will make a $2 million investment in Transatomic Power. businessinsider.com

 

 

My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

         There are a number of different companies that are working on the development of new designs for nuclear reactors. Some of these are in the planning stages and others are actively building test systems. There are approaches that employ alternatives to the light-water reactors that are employed in most of the nuclear power stations around the world. There are serious difficulties for such companies to raise funds for their projects from private investors given all the concerns about nuclear power, especially since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011. Federal funds are mainly available for refining the light-water reactor design and not for create entirely new types of reactors. In addition to technical problems involved in developing new types of reactors, there are also questions about how long it will take to complete a new reactor and whether or not regulators will ultimately license a new reactor for commercial power generation.

          Transatomic Power (TP) is a new company that is actively raising funds for the development of their new reactor design. They had raised one and a half million from angel investors and now they have received two million from the Founders Fund venture capital investment firm. FF Science, a section of Founders Fund, is targeted at science and engineering companies.

         TP was started by two MIT nuclear engineering students. They want to create a source of reliable carbon free energy by burning some of the hundreds of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel generated by the world’s nuclear power reactors. TP is planning on using the infusion of cash from FF Science to refine their computer simulations and to test materials that they intend to use in their molten salt reactor. TP intends to collaborate with universities including MIT on gathering better data on the performance and corrosion of its chosen materials.  FF Science understands that this project is a risky long term investment and they find that acceptable.

         The TP approach is to dissolve spent nuclear fuel in a molten salt. One benefit of this approach lies in what happens if the reactor overheats. In such a case, a plug at the bottom of the tank of molten salt will melt and allow the molten salt to drain into a holding tank below the main tank where the molten salt will cool in a few hours thus preventing a core meltdown.

          There has been research on molten salt reactors for decades utilizing sodium. Unfortunately, there have been major problems with molten salt reactor design that have prevented this new approach from developing reactors which could be used for commercial power generation. Hopefully, the TP team will be able to find a way to deal with these problems and create a reactor design that can help rid the world of the huge quantities of spent nuclear fuel that currently pose a threat to the environment and human health.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. says it has placed tons of ice blocks in underground trenches at the Fukushima No. 1 complex in an attempt to freeze highly toxic water pooled there, a necessary step before a 1.5-km ice wall can be constructed to keep groundwater out. japantimes.com

Even before the ink was dry on last fall’s interim nuclear deal with Iran, some members of Congress bemoaned the “naiveté” behind its formulation and predicted that the Iranians would fail to implement its terms. nationalinterest.org

Shares in French nuclear power group Areva closed 20 percent lower on Friday, the worst fall since the company was formed in 2001, as it posted a first-half loss, exited a thermal solar power business and cut sales targets. nuclear-news.net

Angela Kane, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, delivered a message from the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to the World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, in Hiroshima today. un.org

My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

             Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been cooperation between the United States and Russia in reducing their nuclear arsenals. The nuclear power reactors in the U.S. have been burning diluted Russian nuclear materials from nuclear warheads left over from the Soviet Era. U.S. scientists helped clean up the area in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons. These are only two out of a number of examples of cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in dealing with problems involving nuclear materials and issues. For over two decades, scientists in the U.S. and Russia have worked together to evaluate each other’s nuclear research establishments. One great benefit of this cooperation was the reduction of the possibility of deadly miscalculations and technological surprises.

          About a year ago, the U.S. Secretary of Energy traveled to Vienna to sign a new agreement called the Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Russian Federation on Cooperation in Nuclear- and Energy-Related Scientific Research and Development. The Russian Energy Secretary signed for Russia. The agreement would have allowed Russian nuclear scientists to visit U.S. nuclear laboratories and U.S. scientists would have been allowed to visit Russian nuclear laboratories. This reciprocal sharing agreement extended to very sensitive sites where nuclear weapons were developed. The agreement also mentioned the possibility of U.S. and Russian nuclear scientists repurposing nuclear warheads to alter the course of or destroy an asteroid that is headed for collision with the Earth.

         The confrontation between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine is threatening the recent agreement between the two countries that would have brought the most comprehensive collaboration to date between nuclear scientists in the two countries. I have blogged about the missiles being tested by the Russians that the U.S. government claims violates the terms of one of the nuclear disarmaments treaties that the U.S. and Russia have signed. There are people in the government and armament industries in the U.S. that are lobbying for the U.S. to develop a missile that would definitely violate the same treaty.

        Now the U.S. has cancelled nuclear conferences, nuclear symposia and visits to nuclear labs because of the cooling relations between the U.S. and Russia.  The U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy explicitly stated that the reason for the cancellations could be traced directly to Russia’s recent annexation of the Crimea. He did say that cooperation between the U.S. and Russia would continue with respect to insuring the security of nuclear materials.  The U.S. and Russia are still cooperating on the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. The U.S. has been relying on Russian rockets to carry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station. The U.S. is currently buying Russian engines to install in U.S. rockets.

        It is of great concern that the two nuclear superpowers on Earth are slipping back into a posture of hostility. The U.S. and Russia each have enough nuclear warheads to destroy human civilization many times over. U.S. missiles are pointed at Russia and can launch in minutes. Russia has their missiles pointed at the U.S. and ready to launch. Any program that increases cooperation and understanding between the U.S. and Russia moves the world away from nuclear war. And the loss of any such program moves the world closer to nuclear war.

Signing the agreement:

A supermarket in Tokyo was selling peach labeling two different origins at once.  fukushima-diary.com

New report estimates that 278 trillion Bq of plutonium were released from Fukushima reactors in the March 11 2011 disaster. enenews.com

Southern California Edison has revealed its tentative plan to decommission the San Onofre nuclear plant, which permanently closed last year after its steam generators experienced premature wear. nuclearstreet.com

The long-awaited restart of Japan’s nuclear power plants is facing yet another setback and may be delayed until 2015, Japanese media said on Wednesday, piling pressure on struggling utilities to push for fresh price hikes. in.reuters.com

My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

             The United States developed and manufactured nuclear weapons at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in South Central Washington State from 1942 to 1987.  The B Reactor,  the first full sized plutonium reactor ever built, generated plutonium for the test of the first nuclear bomb and the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan at the end of World War II. Eventually a total of nine nuclear reactors and five plutonium processing facilities. The early safety procedures and waste disposal procedures were not sufficient. Radioactive materials were released into the atmosphere and the Columbia River and are still threatening the ecosystem and the population in the vicinity of the Reservation.  After decades of plutonium manufacture,  fifty three million gallons of liquid high level nuclear waste, twenty five million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste and two hundred square miles of ground water contamination were left behind. This represents two-thirds of the volume of nuclear waste in the entire country. It is the most contaminated site in the U.S. and clean up efforts are still going on after twenty seven years.

          Now the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has released a final draft of its proposed plan for the cleanup of the F Reactor and nearby ground. If the plan is adopted, it might serve as a template for the cleanup of the other eight plutonium production reactors along the Columbia at Hanford. The DoE has decided that the best approach for cleaning up the F Reactor is something called natural attenuation. This process includes biological processes that bind up buried radioactive materials, the dispersion of radioactive materials over a wider area reducing the level of contamination, the dilution of radioactive materials in the waters of the Columbia River and radioactive decay which will reduce the intensity of the radiation.  The DoE say that allowing  a natural reduction in the concentration of radioactive contaminants will not threaten human health or the environment. DoE says that the removal of two million tons of contaminated soil removed from the F Reactor site will reduce or eliminate any significant contribution to the radioactive plume in the Columbia River. The plan also has the benefit of being cheaper than other alternatives.

        The claims being made for the new plan include the following. The strontium 90 at the F Reactor site would take one hundred and fifty years to reach a safe level. The nitrates produced by animals used in tests would be at safe levels in eighty years. Tricloroethene, one of the first chemicals outlawed by the EPA, would be safe in ten years and chromium would be safe in thirty five years. New monitoring wells would have to be drilled to track the progress of the natural processes. In all, the estimated cost of the DoE plan would be about thirty million dollars.

          The Hanford Advisory Board composed of a wide cross-section of local government, environmental, health and worker concerns is not impressed with the DoE plan for Reactor F. They are concerned that the DoE plan will not be “dependable, protective, defensible or well supported.” They would prefer that DoE consider a plan to pump water from the entire twenty six thousand acre area currently generating a nitrate plume. This plan would reduce the nitrates in twenty five years, the chromium in ten years and the tricloroethene in ten years. It would cost an estimated one hundred and ninety four million dollars. The plan would also inject chemicals into the soil to bind the strontium so it will not leach out into the Columbia.

         Given the record of incompetence, lying, chronically low estimates of eventual clean up costs and claims of safety that are unfounded on the part of DoE in the past at Hanford, I would prefer that they seriously consider the plan proposed by the Advisory Board.

Reactor F: