The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to open the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge to the public this summer despite attempts to block developing the refuge, which circles a shuttered nuclear weapons production facility. Theknow.denverpost.com

Incoming US national security adviser John Bolton on Sunday vowed to maintain a hardline stance in upcoming negotiations with North Korea, warning that Pyongyang was only coming to the table in an effort to buy time to develop its nuclear weapons program. Telegraph.co.uk

Protesters in Hungary floated a symbolic inflatable nuclear barrel down the river Danube in Budapest to highlight the problem of radioactive waste. The government is planning to build a Paks II new nuclear power plant but Greenpeace says the issue of waste is still unresolved. Euronews.com

President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan today attended a ceremony to celebrate the completion of construction at the United Arab Emirates’ first nuclear power reactor. World-nuclear-news.org

 

 

 

Part One of Two Parts

       Zambia is a land-locked nation in south central Africa. It occupies almost three hundred thousand square miles and has a population of about sixteen million five hundred thousand people. The agricultural sector of the Zambian economy provides about six and a half percent of the national GDP. It accounts for just under ten percent of the nation’s exports. The agricultural sector employs about half of the Zambian labor force. Despite these facts, the agricultural industry is the least developed industry in Zambia and it has huge growth potential.

       The Zambia Agriculture Research Institute (ZARI), is a program of the Zambian Agricultural Ministry. ZARI is currently operating multiple research projects. The primary objective of the ZARI research projects is to “…provide a high quality, appropriate and cost-effective service to farmers in generating and adapting crop, soil and plant protection technologies.” There is great opportunity to advance agriculture in Zambia through science and technology.

       Zambia recently signed an agreement with the Russia-owned firm Rosatom to create a new Centre for Nuclear Science and Technology (CNST) in Lusaka, the Zambian capital. This new project is expected to help Zambia with its energy problems through the construction of nuclear power reactors. Water levels in its hydro-electric dams have been at record lows recently and power rationing can be in effect for as much as fourteen hours a day. Beyond the use of nuclear technology for energy generation, many techniques have developed with nuclear science for soil conservation and agricultural development.

      One major use of nuclear science in agriculture has been dealing with pests that threaten crops. Pests can spread diseases that can reduce crop yields by forty percent or more costing millions of dollars. Currently, spraying pesticides is a major response to pests but these pesticides often have a negative impact on the environment. Toxic residues can remain on plants and be passed to human beings. In addition, as pests develop resistance to popular pesticides, more powerful and toxic pesticides must be used.

       The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) has been used in Australia to control fruit fly infestations. The SIT employs nuclear radiation from commercial isotopes to sterilize millions of female fruit flies raised in a laboratory. Next, the sterile flies are released into the wild in the targeted area to mate with wild male fruit flies. Because the sterile female flies produce no offspring, the overall population of fruit flies drops, reducing the threat to crops. The irradiated flies pose no threat to the environment because the treatment does not make them radioactive.

       In Zambia, Tsetse flies are a serious problem that impacts livestock as well as the human population by spreading sleeping sickness, a disease that affect both animals and humans and can be fatal. The UN estimates that the sleeping sickness spread by the flies kills as many as three million animals every year with an estimated cost of four billion dollars. The SIT could be the solution to the problems posed by the Tsetse flies.

Please read Part Two

Zambian flag:

 

 

The tritium discovered last month in groundwater in Genoa was not the first radioactive material released in the decommissioning of the former Dairyland Power nuclear plant. Winonadailynews.com

A power company in western Japan has decided to decommission an aging nuclear reactor.
The No. 2 reactor at the Ikata plant in Ehime Prefecture has been in operation for 36 years.
Government guidelines introduced after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident limit the operation of reactors to 40 years in principle. www3.Nhk.or.jp

 Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said Mon. that the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran is planning to unveil a number of nuclear achievements on National Nuclear Technology Day. En.mehrnews.com

The United States has imposed sanctions on seven Pakistani companies over suspicions that they have engaged in nuclear trade. The move could potentially damage Pakistan’s ambition to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a group of countries that can trade nuclear technologies. Rferl.org

 

 

      I have often blogged about the problem of spent nuclear fuel assemblies that are piling up in the cooling pools of U.S. nuclear reactors. There is no permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. The attempt to build such a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was cancelled in 2009 although there are members of Congress who are trying to get that project going again. The only path forward seems to be the creation of interim storage facilities with dry casks to hold spent nuclear fuel assemblies.

       After the San Onofre nuclear power plant in San Diego, CA was shut down, the spent nuclear fuel had to be dealt with. Following a great deal of debate and discussion, it was decided to store the spent nuclear fuel in dry casks called HI-STORM UMAX constructed by Holteck International. They are a well-known dry cask company and brag about how advanced their HI-STORM UMAX dry casks are.

      South California Edison (SCE), the owners of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, are responsible for the decommissioning of the old nuclear power plant. This includes dealing with the spent nuclear fuel.  A few weeks ago, SCE technicians were loading spent nuclear fuel assemblies into HI-STORM UMAX dry casks when they discovered a loose pin at the bottom of aluminum shims. The shims are supposed to provide space for helium gas to flow around the fuel assemblies to cool them. SCE stopped loading spent fuel assemblies into the casks for a week while they explored this finding.

       Holtec engineers informed SCE that they had made a design change to some of the HI-STORM UMAX dry casks supplied to SCE. SCE has requested that Holtec provide SCE with all the information they have on the design change. They have also requested that Holtec run thorough tests on the design change and inform SCE of the results.

      It turns out that of the seventy three dry casks Holtec has supplied to SCE for San Onofre, thirty of the casks conform to the original design for the UMAX series while the remain forty three cask have the new design where the problem was discovered. SCE has resumed loading spent fuel assemblies into the casks with the original design which is widely used in the construction of dry casks.

      Ray Lutz is with the watchdog group, Citizens Oversight.  He said “It’s pretty worrisome that the first four canisters that they loaded, already, we’re notified that they are having these defects, and now, when they were asked, ‘Can we open them up and replace these parts?’ they said, ‘No, no one has ever opened these canisters up, we don’t know how to do it — it would take years of research.”

        SCD began the task for removing hundreds of spent fuel assemblies stored in the cooling pool at San Onofre this January. The spent fuel assemblies are being inserted into the dry casks which are partially buried after being encased in concrete. The casks are stored next to the beach at San Onofre. A citizen’s group has asked for a permanent monitoring system around the casks to detect any leakage of radioactive materials. A new panel has just been appointed to consider how and where to store the spent fuel.

 

Russian nuclear power giant Rosatom said Wednesday that the withdrawal of an investor group from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant project would not derail construction of the envisioned 4,800-MW, four-reactor facility that would be the country’s inaugural nuclear power plant. Nuclearstreet.com

The Georgia Public Service Commission has unanimously approved the merger of Dominion Energy, Inc., and SCANA Corporation, becoming the first state regulatory agency to act on the proposed combination that has already been approved by the Federal Trade Commission. Nuclearstreet.com

China has completed a “large-scale demonstration project for a new generation of uranium enrichment centrifuges”, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) announced yesterday. The new centrifuges have now been put into production at the Hanzhun fuel facility in Shaanxi province. World-nuclear-news.org

Unmanned aerial system technology is being developed to fly into the containment vessels of the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan to assess their condition. Tokyo Electric Power Company contracted the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) of the USA to carry out the work. World-nuclear-news.org

 

 

 

The addition of John Bolton to Trump’s national security team is another boost for critics of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Bolton is in favor of killing the deal and has previously supported the idea of bombing Iran. Aljazeera.com

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman vowed Sunday that Iran will not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. Ynetnews.com

The UK nuclear regulator has raised concerns with EDF Energy over management failings that it warns could affect safety at the Hinkley Point C power station if left unaddressed, official documents reveal. Britain’s chief nuclear inspector identified several shortcomings in the way the French firm is managing the supply chain for the £20bn plant it is building in Somerset. Theguardian.com

The British government suffered a setback in its plans to leave the Euratom agreement that governs euro block countries in matters of nuclear power and radioactive material safety and security, as the House of Lords voted last week to demand the government maintain a presence in the agreement until new agreements are in force. Nuclearstreet.com