While the Abe government has announce they will accelerate decontamination efforts Asahi Shimbun has found out that the opposite is actually happening. In communications with local governments backtracking on decontamination efforts began this spring. simplyinfo.org

TEPCO puts test of water decontamination system on Unit 1 reactor at Fukushima on hold after possible leak of highly radioactive water. ajw.asahi.com

St. Louis-area lawmaker seeks removal of radioactive waste from Bridgeton landfill. therepublic.com

CO2 alarms forced workers to temporarily evacuate a turbine building at Pennsylvania’s Beaver Valley nuclear plant Friday morning. nuclearstreet.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on June 18, 2013

Ambient office = .085 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .069 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .068 microsieverts per hour

Vine ripened tomato from Costco =  .118 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .102 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .088 microsieverts per hour

 

              The new administration of Prime Minister Abe in Japan is bullish on nuclear power. Although the majority of the Japanese people do not want to restart the Japanese nuclear reactor fleet that has been shut down since the Fukushima disaster in 2011, the Abe government has been very insistent that nuclear power has got to part of the Japanese energy mix if they are going to expand the Japanese economy in the coming years. Abe has purged a lot of nuclear energy opponents for the inner circles of the Japanese national government. Abe’s focus on nuclear power is not restricted to Japan. He is traveling outside of Japan to other countries to advertise Japan’s interest in increasing exports of Japanese nuclear technology. Abe has pledged to triple Japanese infrastructure exports to three hundred billio, partly with nuclear components.

             In May, it was announced that Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and France’s Areva are expected to win a twenty two billion dollar contract to construct a nuclear power plant in Turkey. The plan is for four pressurized water reactors to be constructed at Sinop on the Black Sea. The four reactors will produce over four million kilowatts of electricity. This will be the second nuclear power plant for Turkey and the first rector is expected to start producing electricity in 2023.             

            Last week, Japan and France announced that they were entering into a partnership to capture a bigger share of the global marked for nuclear technology. France gets eighty percent of its electricity from nuclear power and it is very important for them to support a thriving global nuclear technology industry. Japan is hoping to substantially expand their economy with nuclear exports. In addition, France has said that it will assist Japan with their spent fuel reprocessing and fast breeder projects that have been plagued by problems.

              Recently Japan attended a conference with the leaders of four ex-communist countries in Poland to push Japanese nuclear products. The Visegrad Group consists of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.  At Japan’s first summit with the Visegrad Group, Abe called for increase cooperation, especially in energy policies. Following the meeting, a joint statement was issued that said that there was interest by private parties on both sides in cooperating on nuclear power.

               The Japanese Atomic Energy Commission has been criticized for being a victim of regulatory capture by the private Japanese nuclear companies. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is one of the leading Japanese nuclear technology companies at the forefront of efforts to expand nuclear exports. They manufactured two new steam turbines for the San Onofre reactors near San Diego. The new turbines failed in two years due to design flaws. Japan has a lot of problems with their nuclear industry which tends to motivate skepticism about their ability to successfully export safe and reliable nuclear reactors. While the Japanese government is working hard to convince the people of Japan that their future prosperity depends on nuclear power, there are tens of thousands of anti-nuclear protestors expressing their disagreement in major Japanese cities.

20 million tons of Fukushima debris is getting closer to the west coast of the United States. rense.com

Official to reveal “new concerns” about landfill fire near a nuclear dump outside of St. Louis, Missouri. enenews.com

There has been a radioactive leak at the Perry nuclear reactor in Ohio.  enenews.com

Sellafield Ltd in the U.K has been fined $1.1 million for mistakenly sending four bags of low-level waste to a conventional landfill instead of the correct facility. world-nuclear-news.org

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on June 17, 2013

Ambient office = .096 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .060 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .081 microsieverts per hour

Romaine lettuce from Costco =  .100 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .085 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .058 microsieverts per hour

Cameco’s Cigar Lake project has a uranium mining license from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) that clears the way for the start of production at the northern Saskatchewan site. World-nuclear-news.org

EDF, one of the largest utilities in Europe, will equip its French nuclear plants with American software that can prevent problems by detecting subtle changes in equipment behavior. Nuclearstreet.com

In October, the Tennessee Valley Authority plans to cut its budget for completion of a reactor at the Bellefonte nuclear plant by nearly two-thirds, dismissing 400 workers in the coming months. Nuclearstreet.com

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was on hand Sunday as officials at a nuclear plant took a critical step toward completing a reactor, the semiofficial Fars News Agency reported. Cnn.com

 

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on June 16, 2013

Ambient office = .075 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .079 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .087 microsieverts per hour

Mango from Costco =  .103 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .104 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .071 microsieverts per hour

Leak in Hanford double-shell tank getting worse.  king5.com

Fungus at a Fukushima high school is emitting radiation 70 times higher than nearby asphalt. Enenews.com

Korea’s nuclear authority approves resumption of Hanul 5 reactor. arirang.co.kr

Director of pro-nuclear power film says that no one ever will get sick or die from Fukushima’s radioactive contamination. enenews.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on June 15, 2013

Ambient office = .072 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .093 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .103 microsieverts per hour

Iceberg lettuce from Costco =  .137 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .093 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .079 microsieverts per hour

               The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has mandated new vent filters for the thirty five Mark I and Mark II reactors in the United States because of what happened at Fukushima involving the Mark reactors there. Other rule changes have been suggested to the safety protocols for nuclear reactors in the U.S. Other nations and groups of nations have also been updating their rules for nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

               In the European Union, the central agency for nuclear power regulation, the European Commission for Energy has proposed new tougher rules for the one hundred and thirty five nuclear reactors in the EU with an emphasis on increasing the safety of nuclear power generation. A battery of stress tests was run on all the reactors in the twenty seven nations of the European Union following the Fukushima disaster. The report the resulted from those tests found that almost all of the reactors in the EU needed to have improvements in their safety measures. There was also a call for standardizations so that there would be greater consistency across all the reactors in all the countries in the Union.

              E.U. reactors already have regular tests but under the new rules there would more frequent and stringent tests. The new rules call for a safety review across the EU every six years. Inspectors from the Commission would be sent into any member state that was not doing enough to insure the safety of their reactors. There was also a call for peer review which in this context would mean that countries in the Union could send their own inspectors into neighboring member countries to review their neighbors’ adherence to safety rules and procedures. One additional provision of the new rules would be to have an emergency response center on each reactor site that would be protected against radioactivity, earthquake and flooding.

             The rules would not go into effect unless and until approved by each of the member states in the E.U. As might be expected, some critics are saying that the new rules don’t go far enough while other critics are saying that they do not go far enough. It is not surprising that France which gets eighty percent of its electricity has been resisting some of the new rules, claiming that the rules that it has in place are good enough. Greenpeace, on the other hand, criticizes the new rules because there is no increased protection against the threat of terrorism. They are also concerned about regulatory capture and the lack of any increase in the power and authority of the regulators. The Commission views the new rules as “realistic.” The estimated cost spread of the coming years of all the proposed changes is in the neighborhood of thirty two billion U.S. dollars. Some of the countries in the E.U. such as Germany are turning their back on nuclear power entirely while some Eastern European countries have old Soviet era reactors that will have to be shut down because they cannot even be brought up to the current standards for reactors in the E.U.

Nuclear European Union: