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:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is struggling to find enough workers to keep the meltdown-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in a stable condition. japantimes.co.jp

The lunar orbiter shows that plastic can protect space travellers from radiation better than aluminum. ca.news.yahoo.com

The shareholders of Finland’s Teollisuuden Voima Oyj have agreed to $400 million of loan commitments to enable the company to realize the completion of the Olkiluoto 3 EPR project. world-nuclear-news.org

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still unclear why inspectors missed a ‘flaw’ spot at Harris Nuclear Plant. wncn.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on June 14, 2013

Ambient office = .106 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .093 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .078 microsieverts per hour

Iceberg lettuce from Costco =  .125 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .074 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .061 microsieverts per hour

               I have been a science fiction fan since I was a teenager. I have always assumed that someday, the human race would explore the solar system. We have already walked on the moon and sent robot probes to the inner and outer planets. The planet Mars has held a fascination for the human race and, with the coming of the Twentieth Century, stories were written about the human exploration of Mars. As I write this blog post, we have a roving vehicle on Mars taking pictures and analyzing soil samples. There have been projects where volunteers lived for months inside an isolated environment to simulate a months’ long trip to Mars. In the past year, a group called for volunteers who are willing to take a one way trip to that planet and they got thousands of responses.

             Unfortunately for those who dream of the human exploration of Mars, recent scientific findings suggest that the radiation in space would pose a major hazard to any human explorers who spend months of space travel to reach Mars. During its trip to Mars, the Curiosity Rover spacecraft measured the radiation it encountered and found that human travelers would be exposed to over three times the radiation from cosmic rays and energetic particles from the sun that astronauts now encounter in the International Space Station. With current technology, the minimum transit time for a one way trip to Mars would be about six months. There is a tradeoff between shielding materials that could protect against radiation and the fuel required to lift the shielding off the earth and propel it through space. It appears that current spacecraft designs would expose astronauts to sufficient radiation on a trip to Mars to significantly impact their health.

             Fortunately for Mars exploration enthusiasts, NASA has been talking about the prospects for a rocket powered by nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion has not yet reached the point where a fusion reactor will consistently produce more energy than it consumers. On the other hand, creating a nuclear fusion rocket engine should be much simpler than creating a fusion reactor for power generation. The rocket engine would just use the fusion reaction to produce a burst of energy for propulsion instead of having to sustain a fusion reaction for power generation. NASA is currently funding research into prototype fusion engines. One of these projects at the University of Washington calculates that a fusion engine could take a rocket to Mars in thirty days. This would reduce the radiation to a manageable level and also reduce the need for food and water for the passengers. Not only would such an engine bring Mars within reach but would also open up the whole solar system to human exploration and exploitation.  For instance, a fusion powered ship would be able to reach Saturn in a couple of months.

One additional benefit of developing a fusion rocket engine might be to advance the general field of fusion research and bring us closer to a working fusion reactor for power generation. Nuclear fusion would be a way to help mitigate climate change without all the dangers and waste production of nuclear fission reactors.

Mars:

 

Two years after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, people are still worried about contaminated food, and farmers are struggling. radiationnews.blogspot.com

A planned acquisition of Strathmore Minerals by Energy Fuels would create the “premier pure-play US uranium company”, according to an announcement by the two companies. world-nuclear-news.org

Movie review by the Union of Concerned Scientists put “Pandora’s Promise” back in the box. nuclear-news.net

A public official charged with helping victims of Japan’s nuclear disaster said that he couldn’t help but only feel pity for the lack of intelligence of citizens groups who demand protection for people against radiation. enenews.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on June 13, 2013

Ambient office = .128 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .098 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .079 microsieverts per hour

Iceberg lettuce from Costco =  .116 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .124 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .107 microsieverts per hour