How nuclear testing irradiates communities in the name of national security. dianuke.org

Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Port Gibson, Mississippi declared an Unusual Event due to a fire lasting greater than 15 minutes in an auxiliary transformer inside the Protected Area (PA). nrc.gov

Unit 2 at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant near Annapolis, Maryland remained offline Friday after a turbine trip shut down the reactor automatically earlier in the week. nuclearstreet.com

Federal regulators are conducting a major inspection this week at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Athens, Alabama.  wsfa.com

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

Ambient office = .046 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .061 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .071 microsieverts per hour

Banana from Costco = .105 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .127 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .100 microsieverts per hour

Just as the stock market performance has increasingly little or nothing to do with the real economy, the nuclear experts who are the members of Atomic Energy Society of Japan feel more confident about nuclear power while ordinary people continue to feel uneasy and threatened. ex-skf.blogspot.jp

An underground landfill fire near tons of nuclear waste raises serious health and safety concerns. rollingstone.com

Police and the Japan Coast Guard conducted a joint drill Saturday to prepare for a possible terrorist attack on the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. japantimes.co.jp

Florida House moves to fix nuclear tax law. yournuclearnews.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on May 12, 2013

Ambient office = .069 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .081 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .062 microsieverts per hour

Vine ripened tomato from Costco = .090 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .119 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .105 microsieverts per hour

Half of the nuclear reactors on Lake Michigan have been shut down. beyondnuclear.org

The ground under Fukushima Unit 4 is sinking. nuclear-news.net

Federal regulators are investigating whether workers at the Shaw Modular Solutions facility in Lake Charles, La.  that supplies parts to nuclear plants broke quality control rules and falsified records. bcnews.go.com

Dominion Virginia Power investigating vibrations that caused shutdown of their North Anna nuclear reactor. timesdispatch.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on May 11, 2013

Ambient office = .086 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .077 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .080 microsieverts per hour

Romaine lettuce from Costco = .141 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .097 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .081 microsieverts per hour

             In a recent post I mentioned problems they were having problems with the cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The situation is getting a lot more press recently. There are around fifty four million gallons of highly toxic nuclear waste stored in the tanks buried at Hanford. The older single wall tanks are leaking and they are transferring the contents of some of them to double walled tanks. Now it appears that some of the double walled tanks are also leaking. The tanks are only temporary storage for the waste and the plan is to solidify the waste into a glass material through a process called “vitrification.”

             Bechtel began construction of a vitrification plant at Hanford in 2000. The radioactive waste from the underground tanks will be analyzed and then separated into different batches by composition and radioactivity. Then each batch will be mixed into melted sand along with some other elements such as boron and hardened into a glass log which will be encased in steel.  Barring severe catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanoes, explosions, etc, the glass logs should be stable long enough for the radioactivity to decline to a safe level.  Even if all goes well, it will take at least until 2062 for all the Hanford waste to be vitrified. All of the glass logs will be kept at Hanford until a permanent geological repository is available and then highly radioactive logs will be move to the repository. Since the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain repository, the soonest that the U.S. will have a permanent storage site is 2048.

             Vitrification has been tested and works as expected. However, the tests were done on one type of waste with a standard composition. The Hanford tanks contain waste from different reactors using different processes and the composition of the waste varies widely from tank to tank. Around fifty radioactive isotopes may be present. Every element in the periodic table is represented in some tank. The tanks also contain hot, toxic metals and chemicals which pose their own problems aside from radioactivity. The chemical composition of the waste in the tanks is not the only problem. The waste has settled out into layers in the tanks with the passage of the years. There are solid, gooey, liquid and gaseous layers in the tanks.

             In order to process the waste, it must move through pipes and containers in the vitrification facility. Since there are so many different physical forms in different combinations, figuring out how to get the contents of any one tank to flow through the system without clogging pipes and filters is a big challenge. And, if enough plutonium or U-235 accumulated at one point, it might go critical and cause a nuclear explosion. Another concern related to the flow problem is the fact that the heat and radiation in the waste can disassociation water in hydrogen and oxygen. If the hydrogen is not allowed to escape from the piping, enough could build up to risk explosions. The waste is so radioactive that human beings cannot approach it. The plan is to have the waste move through a system of tanks over a period of forty years without human intervention.  Since there cannot be any moving parts in the chain of tanks, “pulse jet mixers” have been designed to stir the waste enough to keep it moving. The pulse jets suck in the waste and expel it back into the tanks. While it is uncertain whether the current design of the pulse jets can keep the waste properly mixed, they have been shown to move the gritty waste fast enough to grind away at the interiors of the piping. This, in addition to possible chemical corrosion, increases the probability of leaks.

              Unfortunately, they were in such a rush to construct the facility that they began construction before the final details of some of the critical processes and flows were worked out.  The safety manager at Hanford refuses to issue a permit to Bechtel for further construction before some of the safety issues are worked out. The Defense Nuclear Safety Board calls these problems a “show stopper”. People have resigned, whistleblowers have come forward and activist groups are lodging protests. Of course, technical advisors for the Vitrification Plant say that these are just technical snags and that they can be resolved. I am unconvinced.

A wall of water may flood the control room at the U.S. Palisades nuclear plant on Lake Michigan if the leaking 300,000 gallon tank fails? enenews.com

Tokyo Electric Power Co. will demolish and replace the makeshift canopy covering a badly damaged reactor building at its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in order to remove rubble and radioactive material. ajw.asahi.com

Iran says nuclear sites safe from earthquakes and cyber threat. reuters.com

North Korean nuclear weapons matter of when, not If, experts say. huffingtonpost.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on May 10, 2013

Ambient office = .087 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .100 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .088 microsieverts per hour

Mango from Costco = .121 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .106 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .085 microsieverts per hour

          California is dealing with a crisis with respect to the supply of electrical power available to its citizens in the southern part of the state. This crisis involves the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. I have discussed the San Onofre power plant in previous posts. The power plant is located on the Pacific Coast near San Diego. It is operated by Southern California Edison (SCE). SCE’s parent company, Edison International owns seventy eight percent of the plant. San Diego Gas & Electric Company owns another twenty percent and the city of Riverside Utilities Department owns about two percent. Unit One went operational in 1968 and was shut down in 1993 after twenty five years of operation.  Unit Two was completed in 1983 with a license to operation until 2022 and Unit Three was completed in 1984 with a license to operate until 2022. At full operation, the plant can generate two thousand, two hundred and fifty megawatts of electricity.

           There have been many problems at San Onofre including failure of emergency generators, bad electrical system wiring, falsified fire safety data and other issues that have earned the plant many citations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It has also been reported that employees are afraid to report concerns for fear retaliation by the company.

            In January 2012, the Unit Two reactor was shut down for refueling and replacement of a critical component. Unexpected wear was found in the tubes for steam generators installed in 2010 and 2011 for both reactors and the Unit Three reactor was also shut down. The cause of the wear in the tubing has been attributed to changes in the alloy of the tubes and design changes that were not reported to the NRC. Neither reactor has been restarted and the NRC has said that no permit will be issued until a number of problems had been corrected.

            In May of 2012, the Huntington Beach Power Station restarted two natural gas generators to help make up the loss in electrical capacity caused by the San Onofre shut down. The Encina Power Station is also supplying additional electricity to the area. The substitute power and strong conservation measures have prevented serious shortfalls in electrical capacity in the San Diego area to date. However, the burning of natural gas has resulted in increased pollution in the area. The cost of electrical power has also been rising due to the reactors being offline.

           The estimated costs of repairing Unit Three with all the requests of the NRC would cost billions of dollars and take at least five years. The owners of San Onofre have been considering shutting down Unit Three permanently. Recently, the owners threatened to shut down the plant permanently if they are not issued a permit to restart Unit Two in the near future.

           The San Onofre power plant has been the site of many public protests. The citizens in the area are concerned that the history of problems and the new issue of the wear in the generator tubing show that the plant is unsafe to operate and anti-nuclear activists want it shut down permanently. They say that the owners care more about profits than public safety. On the other side of the debate, supporters of the plant argue that permanently shutting down both reactors would have serious economic repercussions in the region. The cost of having both reactors offline is nearly one half billion dollars to date.  

         The debate over the future of San Onofre and power generation in Southern California is a preview of the national debate that is heating up. The U.S. nuclear fleet is aging. Many of the operating reactors have passed their original intended lifespan and are wearing out. Using other sources of energy such as natural gas will have environmental and economic impacts. No alternative energy sources are ready to take up the slack tomorrow. There has been talk of a “nuclear renaissance” in the United States with President Obama supporting the construction of new reactors for power generation. I think that this is a bad idea. The money would be better spent on a major national push into conservation and alternative energy sources.

San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station from KPBS: