A cross-party committee has called on the Canadian government to reaffirm its long-standing support for the nuclear sector, including the commercialisation of small modular reactors (SMRs). The House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources made its recommendations in a report, The nuclear sector at a crossroads: Fostering innovation and energy security for Canada and the world, which it tabled before the government on 9 June. World-nuclear-news.org

JSC Akkuyu NPP, the Russian-owned company responsible for Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, has been awarded a 49-year electricity generation licence. The company received a preliminary licence, enabling it to start investment and permitting procedures for the project, in June 2015. Turkey’s energy market regulatory authority (EPDK) said then that JSC Akkuyu NPP would receive a production licence – needed to start generating electricity from the plant – once it met the requirements outlined in that document. The production licence was awarded yesterday. World-nuclear-news.org

Legislation that returns Yucca Mountain, Nevada, to the front of the line with regards to selection – and implementation – of the nation’s federal repository for spent fuel from nuclear power plants passed a House subcommittee’s review in Washington on Thursday. Nuclearstreet.com

U.S. and Chinese diplomatic and defense chiefs will meet Wednesday for a security dialogue that Washington says will focus on curbing North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. uk.mobile.reuters.com

    In March of 2011, there was an earthquake northeast of Japan. The resulting tsunami flooded the emergency generators of the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the Japanese coast. Three of the nuclear reactors at the plant suffered catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive materials were released into the atmosphere. Japan immediately shut down all their nuclear power reactors.

      Six years later, ground water contaminated with radioactive materials is still leaking out into the ocean off the coast of Japan. The Japanese nuclear fleet is being turned back on one reactor at a time. It is still not known exactly where the melted cores of the destroyed reactors are.

      TEPCO, the Japanese company that owns and operated the Fukushima power plant has attempted to use robots to explore parts of the damaged plant that are too radioactive for human beings to enter.

       Last February, TEPCO deployed a robot developed by Toshiba and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID). They sent the robot into Unit 2 but were unable to reach the area directly under the PVC. It did gather useful information though.

       In March of this year, TEPCO employed the PMORPH robot developed by Hitachi-GR Nuclear Energy and IRID. It had a dosimeter and a camera. The robot took readings at ten different points inside the Unit 1 PVC.

       Unfortunately, the robots employed rapidly broke down under the onslaught of hard radiation in the destroyed reactors. Now TEPCO is at it again with a new underwater robot.

      The new robot will be used to examine the primary containment vessel (PCV) of the Unit 3 reactor which was destroyed in the disaster. In 2015, TEPCO found that the Unit 3 PVC was filled with coolant to a depth of about twenty feet. The access port for the PVC is only five and a half inches in diameter. Any robot that is going to be inserted into the PVC has to be smaller than five and one half inches in diameter.

       The general manager of Toshiba Corporation’s nuclear energy systems and services division, said: “We have already developed remotely operated robots for inspections at Fukushima. In this case, we had to meet the specific challenges of limited access and flooding, in a highly radioactive environment. Working with the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID), we succeeded in developing a small robot with high-level radiation resistance, and through its deployment we expect to get information that will support the advance of decommissioning.”

     The new Toshiba robot is screw-driven. It is about five inches in diameter and about twelve inches long. It weighs about four and a half pounds. It has a video camera facing forward and a video camera facing backward. It has LED lights to provide illumination for the cameras. The robot is control by a wire that trails behind it. It should be able to withstand radiation of up to about 200 Sieverts.   

      The new robot will be deployed after operators are trained. It will be interesting to see if this robot will be able to withstand the hard radiation inside the PVC long enough to collect the needed information.

Toshiba – IRID robot:

Rosatom plans to carry out work to extend the operating period of unit 2 of the Metsamor nuclear power plant in Armenia in 2018 and 2019, the Russian state nuclear corporation said on 13 June, following a meeting between its director-general, Alexey Likhachov, and Armenian Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan. World-nuclear-news.org

Workers at unit 1 of the Qinshan nuclear power plant in China’s Zhejiang province have made significant progress in long-term operational safety, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team has concluded. The plant has applied to operate beyond its original 30-year design life. World-nuclear-news.org

Turkey has granted approval for a four-unit Russian-built nuclear power plant at Akkuyu, which is expected to cost $20 billion to build with an accelerated completion date set for 2023. Nuclearstreet.com

Further cuts planned for the police force which guards the UK’s nuclear arsenal could be “catastrophic”, according to a leading police officer. msn.com

 

 

 

       The Palo Verde Generating Station (PVGS) is a nuclear power plant that is near Tonopah, Arizona. It is only forty five miles from downtown Phoenix. There are three pressurized water reactors at the PVGS that each generate fourteen hundred megawatts.  This plant generates about thirty five percent of the electricity that is produced in Arizona. It provides power to Southern Arizona and Southern California. The PVGS generated more electricity than any other nuclear power plant in the U.S.

       Each of the three reactors at the PVGS have  two emergency backup generators which are used to keep cooling water flowing over nuclear fuel in case of an accident. If backup generators fail, nuclear fuel exposed to the air can spontaneously burst into flame and release radioactive materials.

      Last December 15^th, one of Unit 3’s backup generators exploded during a routine test. Arizona Public Service, the operators of the PVGS discussed repairs with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission five days after the accident. Normally, a nuclear power plant is given ten days to correct such problems before it has to shut down a reactor. The NRC gave PVGS twenty three days to repair the problem. A second extension was granted in January for an additional sixty two days before the reactor would have to be shut down. The backup generator was finally returned to service on February 9^th of this year. Unit 3 operated without two backup generators for fifty seven days.

        The NRC said that it decided to offer the two extensions after careful consideration of the risks. Some of the staff at the NRC disagreed strongly with the decision to grant two extensions to allow the Unit 3 reactor to keep operating. Three members of the NRC staff filed dissents with regard to the extensions.

        One of the dissents was a petition requesting that the extensions be revoked. This document was released to the public by the NRC. The author of the petition said that “The NRC’s action is inconsistent with the NRC mission, NRC vision, NRC safety objectives, NRC regulatory effectiveness strategies, NRC openness strategies and the principles of good regulation.” The NRC denied a similar request for an extension to deal with repairs from the Donald C Cook Nuclear Plant in Lake Township, Michigan. The author said that he did not understand why one plant was denied an extension while the other plant got to two extensions. He also said “I am not sure whether the loss of revenue for the utility had any influence on the NRC decision to approve these license amendments. I did not find any safety reason for NRC to approve these license amendments.”

        The other two dissents were Differing Professional Opinions (DPO). The authors have not been identified by the NRC and the documents have not been released. The NRC said that the DPOs were still under review. A representative of the NRC’s Office of Public Affairs stated that “The NRC reached its technical decision regarding Palo Verde’s request separately from its consideration of the DPO. The DPO process continues at this point.”

      Arizona Public Service said that the decision to keep Unit 3 in operation posed no threat of radiation release or any reduction in safety. They claimed that their risk analysis showed that it would be safer to keep Unit 3 operating than shutting down the reactor which would involve moving fuel rods.

      Fortunately for Arizona Public Service and the citizens of Southern Arizona, the Unit 3 backup generator was repaired before any other problems arose. There is a reason that there are deadlines for the repair of emergency equipment at a nuclear power plant. I would prefer that the NRC follow their own regulations. 

 

The OECD-Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the US-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to exchange global nuclear research experience. The MOU outlines the scope and objectives of a five-year agreement to establish dialogue between them. Representatives of each organisation will now be invited to participate in each other’s committee meetings and they may also organise joint events, seminars, workshops and training activities. World-nuclear-news.org

Over the next nine years, six nuclear power plants are expected to close unless economic interventions are put into place to keep at least one of them operating, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Tuesday. Nuclearstreet.com

An environmental group has filed a petition with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in opposition to the small modular reactor proposed for a Clinch River site by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Knoxnews.com

Radiation warning alarms sounded Thursday at a former plutonium production plant in Washington state, prompting a take-cover order that sent about 350 workers seeking cover indoors during the demolition of a plant that for decades had helped make nuclear weapons. Startribune.com

        Westinghouse Electric Company recently declared bankruptcy because of financial difficulties resulting from schedule delays and cost overruns on nuclear reactor construction projects in Geogia and South Carolina. Westinghouse, which is a subsidiary of Japan’s Toshiba, will end their nuclear reactor construction business. Toshiba is considering the sale of Westinghouse because it is also having severe financial difficulties  connected to accounting fraud unrelated to the nuclear industry. While Westinghouse will no longer be constructing nuclear reactors, it will continue to sell nuclear fuel and is releasing a new type of nuclear reactor fuel.     

       Westinghouse Electric Company formally announced Tuesday that it was launching its new accident-tolerant nuclear fuel solution called EnCore TM. Westinghouse made the announcement at its Fuel Users’ Group Meeting which is attended by nuclear fuel customers from around the world. Westinghouse says that EnCore Fuel “is intended to offer design-basis-altering safety, greater uranium efficiency.” They claim that the economic benefits of switching to the new fuel could rise as high as millions of dollars. Westinghouse will release the new fuel in two phases.

       The first phase of the new fuel will feature uranium silicide pellets with a new cladding. The pellets will have higher density and higher thermal conductivity than previous fuels. The new cladding has reduced oxidation and hydrogen pickup when compared to previous fuels. These changes will result in extending the life of the cladding and increasing the resistance of the cladding to wear. The cladding will also be able to withstand prolonged exposure to high temperatures of steam and air up to fourteen hundred degrees Centigrade in the event of a loss-of-cooling-accident, reactivity-initiated accident and other beyond-design-basis conditions.

       The second phase of the new fuel will feature silicon-carbide cladding. This new cladding is intended to offer increase safety benefits in case of beyond-design-basis accidents. It has a very high melting point of twenty eight hundred degrees Centigrade. It also has a very small reaction with water which means that there will be very little generation of heat and hydrogen in beyond-design-basis accidents.

        Michele DeWitt is the senior vice president for Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel. He said “Westinghouse is aggressively pursuing the benefits of accident tolerant fuel for our customers. As the leading supplier of nuclear fuel and components globally, Westinghouse has developed a world-class network of research, design and manufacturing partners. We are leveraging the breadth and depth of our resources, combined with U.S. Department of Energy awards, as well as utility funding, to collaborate with respected industry partners in order to deliver EnCore Fuel to the market on an aggressive, accelerated schedule. We are on track to manufacture EnCore Fuel lead test rods as early as 2018, with lead test assembly insertion planned starting in 2022.”

        In 2016, uranium prices hit a twelve year low. The Fukushima disaster in Japan exacerbated an already declining uranium market. All fifty nuclear reactors in Japan were shut down and are only now being restarted one by one. Germany is phasing out nuclear power. France is reducing the use of nuclear power. There is a big imbalance between the supply of uranium and the demand for uranium that will not improve in the near future. It will be interesting to see if Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel division will be able to profit from the release of this new fuel.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general Yukiya Amano yesterday updated the agency’s board of governors on recent developments including the IAEA’s storage facility for low-enriched uranium (LEU) – known as the LEU Bank – which will be inaugurated on 29 August and should receive its first uranium in 2018. World-nuclear-news.org

European foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said on Tuesday she was confident the United States would stick to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, despite its protestations to the contrary, as the deal is working. Uk.mobile.reuters.com

North Korea has been accused of spying on South Korea after a suspected Pyongyang drone was spotted on the site of a U.S. missile interceptor system, Seoul’s military officials said Tuesday. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system, which is designed to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles, is being deployed in Seongju in order to protect South Korea from Pyongyang’s growing threats. Yahoo.com

President Donald Trump will host South Korea’s new leader Moon Jae-In for talks on containing North Korea’s nuclear program, officials said Tuesday, amid fresh Pentagon warnings that the Pyongyang regime is a “clear and present danger to all.” Yahoo.com