The French government is hampering discussion about how to reduce the country’s reliance on nuclear energy by limiting debate about more radical alternatives, renewable energy advocates said on Thursday. Reuters.com

Bulgaria should accelerate new nuclear build to meet the growing need for reliable, low-carbon electricity, Agneta Rising, director general of the World Nuclear Association, told Energy Commission Members at the Bulgarian Parliament today. World-nuclear-news.org

Monitors at the federal Hanford Nuclear site found plutonium and americium contamination up to 10 miles from a troubled demolition project that was suspended in December due to concerns about the spread of radioactive particles. Seattletimes.com

The French overseas minister says she is not opposed to calls for a study into the possible genetic consequences of the French nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia. Radionz.co.nz

              Uranium is a very common element on Earth. It combines with many other elements to form a wide variety of minerals. There are deposits of uranium ore in many locations that can be mined. Uranium is a main contributor to background radiation that is found in varying amounts all over the Earth.

        There is a tiny amount of radium mixed in with naturally occurring uranium. All isotopes of radium are highly radioactive. The most stable isotope of radium is radium-226 which has a half-life of sixteen hundred years. R-226 decays into radon which is a gas.

        The Environmental Working Group (EWG) website says that the EWG is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting human health and the environment. They have just released the results of an important study on radioactive elements in U.S. drinking water. The study was conducted between 2010 and 2015.

        The EWG investigation found that over half of the drinking water available in the U.S. contains radioactive elements. During the investigation, the EWG tested almost fifty thousand public water systems. They estimated that the water consumed by over one hundred and seventy million citizens of the U.S. contain radioactive elements. The EPA sets safe limits for such elements in drinking water and twenty-seven states have water supplies in which the radioactive elements exceed what is considered safe by the EPA.

       The most common element that was found in drinking water by the EWG was radium. Radium is dissolved out of soil and rock by the passage of water. Radon gas is also released into underground water as the radium decays. In areas where the Earth is shocked and strained by the process of fracking, the amount of radium in the water is greater. Radium releases ionizing radiation which is potentially carcinogenic which means it can cause cancers.

       The EWG found that in one hundred and fifty-eight public water supply systems used by two hundred and seventy-six thousand U.S. citizens, the level or radium is greater than that allowed by the EPA. The EPA requirements say that there should not be more than seventy cases of cancer caused by drinking water out of one million consumers. Texas was found to be the state with radium in the most water supplies. It is estimated that about eighty percent of Texans have some radium in their water supply.

       The EPA guidelines for safe drinking water have been criticized as being too lenient. In 2006, California released much more stringent requirements for safe levels of radium than the EPA. The California standards say that there should not be more than one case of cancer caused by drinking water in a million consumers. By these standards, over one hundred and twenty-two million people nationwide are drinking water with too much radium in it.

       A senior science advisor with EWG issued a statement that said, ““Most radioactive elements in tap water come from natural sources, but that doesn’t take away the need to protect people through stronger standards and better water treatment.” “Millions of Americans are drinking water with potentially harmful levels of radioactive elements, but the outdated federal standards mean many people don’t know about the risk they face when they turn on the tap.”

       The EWG has created this interactive map of U.S. water supplies that contain radium.

President Vladimir Putin praised a newly-built supersonic strategic bomber on Thursday after watching it in flight, saying it would beef up Russia’s nuclear weapons capability.reuters.com

A quirky bill pending in the 2018 Legislature has some Washington residents wondering what they should do in case of a nuclear attack. Tri-cityherald.com

THE Doomsday Clock is expected to move closer to midnight when scientists announce their latest findings on the danger of the apocalypse on Thursday, January 25. Express.co.uk

Cybersecurity is a topic covered frequently in the pages of POWER magazine, and one that all power plants need to take seriously. A recent simulation proved that the consequences of a hack can be grave. The drill took place in Sweden, but could have been conducted anywhere in the world. The attack used plant control systems against themselves to flood a cooling system, showing that hacking of computer systems can lead to physical plant damage. Powermag.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            One of the biggest problems with nuclear power is disposing of the spent nuclear fuel. Thirty nations are running nuclear power reactors and spent nuclear fuel is piling up in all of them. While there have been test geological repositories built, there is no commercial storage for high-level nuclear waste such as spent fuel anywhere in the world. In the U.S., it is unlikely that there will be a geological storage for such waste until 2050 at the earliest. The United Kingdom is currently working on the creation of a geological repository but there have been problems with siting.

        It is estimated that the U.K. has over eight hundred thousand cubic yards of nuclear waste generated by nuclear power plants and the production of nuclear weapons. They have decided that a geological repository would be the best and cheapest way to deal with the backlog of nuclear waste as well as nuclear waste that will be generated. There are five new nuclear power reactors being constructed or planned which will add their own waste to the total. It is estimated that the U.K. geological repository will cost about seventeen billion dollars. This will be considerably cheaper than continuing to store the waste at the current thirty sites.

        The Institute of Directors is a U.K. business organization for company directors, senior business leaders and entrepreneurs. It was founded in 1903 and is the oldest organization for professional leaders. A representative said that “Running costs for a geological disposal facility storing the waste 1,000 yards below the surface would be significantly lower,” than surface storage.

        In 2013, the U.K. embarked on a search for a site for the proposed geological repository. They narrowed it down to Copeland and Allerdale borough councils in Cumbria and Shepway District Council in Kent. Unfortunately, all three of these locations ultimately rejected the opportunity to host the geological repository.

        The U.K. decided to try to convince some community to take the waste for one and a half million dollars a year that could be applied to such things as skill training or apprenticeships. The payments could rise to three and a half billion dollars as communities considered the proposal. It is expected that the payments would last for up to five years.

        Local communities around England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be offered the money to host the proposed geological repository. A test of public support would be necessary in order for the proposal to go forward. One such test would be a local referendum at a proposed location to ensure that a majority of the citizens in that area actually wanted to have the geological repository nearby. Local authorities, labor unions and businesses have welcomed the new plan to site the repository.

       The U.K. Minister of Energy said: “We owe it to future generations to take action now to find a suitable permanent site for the safe disposal of our radioactive waste. And it is right that local communities have a say.”

        The chief scientist of Greenpeace in the U.K. said “Having failed to find a council willing to have nuclear waste stored under their land, ministers are resorting to the tactics from the fracking playbook – bribing communities and bypassing local authorities.”

      The U.K. Minister of Energy said: “We owe it to future generations to take action now to find a suitable permanent site for the safe disposal of our radioactive waste. And it is right that local communities have a say.”

        The chief scientist of Greenpeace in the U.K. said “Having failed to find a council willing to have nuclear waste stored under their land, ministers are resorting to the tactics from the fracking playbook – bribing communities and bypassing local authorities.” “With six new nuclear plants being planned, the waste problem is just going to get much worse. Since there is no permanent solution for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel, the responsible thing to do would be to stop producing more of it instead of just passing the radioactive buck to future generations.”

Can we fight climate change without scaling up nuclear power?  Pghcitypaper.com

The Trump administration issued fresh sanctions Wednesday as it tries to stifle North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Cnbc.com

In 1976, Lord Flowers pronounced that there should be no further commitment to nuclear energy in the United Kingdom unless it could be demonstrated that long-lived highly radioactive wastes could be safely contained for the indefinite future. Ever since, efforts to find a suitable site for a geological disposal facility have been rejected by communities.  Theguardian.com

Russia and Argentina have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on uranium exploration and mining in the South American country. Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom is also proposing to supply Argentina with a nuclear power plant. World-nuclear-news.org

 

        Cybersecurity has been in the news a lot lately. In the past few years, there have been thefts of customer records from major corporations as well as government institutions. The interference of Russia in the 2016 U.S. presidential election via hacking emails from the Democratic side really generated a lot of headlines.

       A very serious but under-publicized concern is the possibility of cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure such as public utilities and communications systems. One of the biggest worries about infrastructure is the possibility that hackers could gain control of the operational software of a nuclear power plant and sabotage the operation.

         Some analysts believe that a cyberattack combined with a physical attack on a nuclear power plant could result in the release of radiation or the release or theft of fissile materials. Even the penetration of non-operational IT systems at a nuclear power plant could result in adverse publicity for the nuclear industry and a loss of public support for nuclear power.

          The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) is a non-profit organization that was created in 2001 for the purpose of “preventing catastrophic attacks and accidents with weapons of mass destruction and disruption including nuclear, biological, radiological, chemical or cyber.” (Wikipedia) The NTI has catalogued around twenty-four “cyber” incidents since 1990. About a dozen of those were considered to be of “malicious intent.”

        In one of the malicious attacks, it is believed that in December of 2014, North Korea stole the blue prints for one of South Korea’s nuclear power plants along with estimates of possible radiation exposure for people living nearby in case of an accident or sabotage.

       Another malicious attack took place in Japan between November 2015 and June 2016. Hackers posing as university students sent malicious emails to researchers at the University of Toyama Hydrogen Isotope Research Center in order to obtain access to the computers at the research center. They went on to steal almost sixty thousand files including research on the Fukushima disaster.

        Any catalog of cyber attacks in the U.S. nuclear industry will inevitably be incomplete. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires nuclear plant operators to report events that threaten “the safety, security functions, or emergency preparedness of the plant.” This does not include non-critical IT systems which are generally easier to access. If nuclear power plants are looking to boost security, they cannot afford to leave out the non-critical IT systems.

       Fortunately, most of the power plants in the U.S. are so old that they employ analogue control systems that would be difficult to hack because they are not accessible from the Internet. In addition, the NRC has been improving regulatory requirements for U.S. nuclear plant cybersecurity. On the other hand, many nuclear power plant systems are being upgraded to include digital components which may reduce their cybersecurity.

       In early 2007, engineers at the Idaho National Laboratory gave a demonstration called “Aurora” to U.S. energy regulators and industry representatives. They showed the attendees how only twenty-one lines of computer code could seriously damage a big generator. For some of the industry representatives, this was a wakeup call about the dangers of cyberattacks on their nuclear power plants.

       In 2009, the Stuxnet attack inserted what is called a computer worm into Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz which destroyed a thousand centrifuges. The facility’s computers were physically disconnected from the Internet but the attackers were able to smuggle a USB thumb drive into the facility in order to inject the worm. The U.S. and Israel were suspected of devising and carrying out the attack. The computer worm the attackers used was very sophisticated and utilized four different vulnerabilities in the Natanz computers to take over heavily protected industrial controls. This incident convinced many in the nuclear industry that there needed to be stronger regulation and investment in cybersecurity.

        Cybersecurity experts in the U.S. and abroad are now being proactive. Groups of hackers are invited to deliberately attack test systems in order to reveal vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. Governments and private companies are collaborating in such exercise in order to improve nuclear cybersecurity.

Last year, months before South Carolina’s V.C. Summer project went belly up, a senior Westinghouse executive reportedly was demoted and sent to Canada after he identified problems with a key contractor, a nuclear industry trade publication says. Postandcourier.com

The siren that went off Friday afternoon at the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant resulted from an accidental activation, authorities said. A spokesman for Duke Energy, which owns the plant in New Hill, N.C. in southern Wake County, said the energy company is investigating what prompted the alarm to sound shortly before 1 p.m. The siren prompted a flurry of calls to WRAL News and posts on social media. Wral.com

Members of the South Carolina House will begin overhauling the state’s utility regulations this week, but lawmakers are likely to wait a bit longer to repeal a controversial law that allowed SCANA to charge customers for two unfinished nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer station.  Postandcourier.com

Anti-nuclear campaigners have described plans by the National Museum of the Royal Navy for a major new exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of Britain’s first nuclear submarine patrols as a “propaganda offensive”. Theguardian.com