Chalk River Laboratory is a Canadian nuclear research facility in Deep River, Ontario about a hundred miles northwest of Ottawa. CRL is dedicated to research and development of advanced nuclear technology, including support of the Candu nuclear reactor technology. CRL produces a big share of the nuclear isotopes needed for nuclear medicine across the world. It is owned and operated by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

        Weapons grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the U.S. is used as a source fuel by CRL in the production of medical isotopes. In 2010, the Canadian Prime Minister and the U.S. President agreed to the return of spent HEU fuel used to produce medical isotopes from CRL in Canada to the U.S. for reprocessing and disposal. The national leaders made this commitment to reduce the number of areas where weapons grade nuclear materials were stored around the globe in order to reduce the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons.

        Spent nuclear fuel and other HEU has been repatriated in the past from Canadian reactors but the 2010 agreement included the repatriation of liquid wastes known as Highly Enriched Uranyl Nitrate Liquid or HEUNL from the production of medical isotopes. HEUNL contains many different radioactive isotopes including as cesium, niobium, zirconium, rhodium, rubidium, iodine, xenon, tellurium, barium, lanthanum, cerium, strontium, praseodymium, neodymium, europium, neptunium and plutonium. Special transportation canisters have been developed for the transport of HEUNL which is more complex and dangerous that the transportation of solid HEU waste.

        The plan is to transport over six thousand gallons of liquid waste over twelve hundred miles from CRL to the Savannah River Site in Georgia in the U.S. The shipments are to take place weekly and will continue for over a year. The U.S. DoE say that all necessary precautions will be taken and that the danger to the environment and the public is “marginal.”

        The Savannah River site is a nuclear reservation located in South Carolina southeast of August, Georgia. It was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy in the 1950s to process nuclear materials for the construction of nuclear weapons. There is a Liquid Waste Operation at the site which is managed by Savannah River Remediation, a team of companies working on cleaning up the waste left over from decades of nuclear weapons development. The CRL HEUNL waste will be reprocessed at the LWO at Savannah River.

      Environmental groups are highly critical of the plan to transport the HEUNL via truck from the CRL in Canada to the SRS in the U.S. They demand that a full environmental impact review be undertaken before the transport begins. They point out that if there is an accident and liquid waste is spilled, it will be almost impossible to contain and recover. Any such spill could pose a grave threat to the environment and public of the area surrounding the spill. While the DoE maintains that the wreck of one of the trucks would pose not substantial danger, the environmental groups say that a single wreck could contaminate the water supply of an entire city.

        Unable to make progress with the DoE, the activists opposing the HEUNL transport have turned to the courts. The Savanna River Site Watch group and other groups have just requested a temporary restraining over and an injunction against the shipments. One of the allegations in the complaint is that the DoE is seeking to profit sixty million dollars off the liquid waste repatriation at a serious risk to the public.

Chalk River Laboratory:

Beijing decries ‘China-phobia’ after Britain cools on Hinkley Point nuclear deal. theguardian.com

Neglecting nuclear security in the 2016 election. thebulletin.org

Before Trump, Americans hadn’t worried this much about nuclear weapons since the Cold War. latimes.com

A U.S. Navy sailor has been sentenced to a year in prison for taking photos of classified areas inside a nuclear attack submarine while it was in port in Connecticut. abcnews.go.com

 

       During the recent aborted coup in Turkey, the Incirlik air base near the Syrian border was surrounded and all flights in and out were cancelled. The U.S. is currently using Incirlik as a base for bombing operations against ISIS. The U.S. has fifty B61 nuclear gravity bombs stored at the base. The Turkish base commander was arrested as part of the aftermath of the coup attempt. The events at the Incerlik air base raise the question of whether the U.S. would be able to maintain control of U.S. nuclear weapons at the base in the event of widespread civil disorder in Turkey. The fact President Erdogan of Turkey visited Russian President Putin in St. Petersburg shortly after the coup to rebuild relations also has U.S. military planners worried.

       EurActiv, a European online news site based in Brussels, has just reported that the U.S. is moving twenty of the B61 nuclear bombs from Incirlik in Turkey to the Desevelu air base in Romania. Russia is already upset about the U.S. anti-missile system that was turned on in May in Romania. The U.S. says that the system is meant to guard against missiles fired from Middle Eastern countries like Iran but Russia is concerned that it might be used against Russian missiles.

       The movement of nuclear weapons from Turkey to Romania would be sure to anger the Russians even more. Romania recently denied the stories about the move and stated that there were no U.S. nuclear weapons in Romania and there would not be any U.S. nuclear weapons moved to Romania from Turkey. The Founding Act signed in 1997 between NATO and Russia specifically states that NATO members “have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members [such as Romania], nor any need to change any aspect of NATO’s nuclear posture or nuclear policy – and do not foresee any future need to do so”.

      The non-profit Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is saying that under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it would be illegal for the U.S. to move nuclear bombs to Romania. Article One of the treaty says that the movement of nuclear weapons to a non-nuclear state is prohibited. In addition, Article Two states that non-nuclear signatories of the treaty agree to never acquire nuclear weapons from a nuclear state. There are currently U.S. nuclear weapons in other non-nuclear NATO members so it is unclear why moving such weapons to Romania would be any different.

      Since the annexation of the Crimea by Russia in 2014, the situation on the western Russian border has been deteriorating. In the Ukraine, the lull in the fighting with Russian back rebels has been disappearing and the fighting is intensifying. Russia is in the process of moving forty thousand troops to the border with Ukraine. Moving nuclear weapons to Romania which is a neighbor of Ukraine would probably not be a good idea given the current geopolitical climate in Eastern Europe.

Young professionals from 14 countries attended the first Arabic-language international school on nuclear security held in Cairo, Egypt as part of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) efforts to promote awareness of nuclear security amongst young professionals. world-nuclear-news.org

Urenco is to supply uranium enrichment to Ukraine under a contract signed today by the country’s national nuclear company Energoatom and the enrichment firm owned by Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. world-nuclear-news.org

NuScale Power announced today that it will begin its selection of fabrication partners for the NuScale Power ModuleTM with NuFAB.  nuclearstreet.com

BWX Technologies said Thursday that its subsidiary BWXT Canada Ltd. had entered into a share purchase agreement to acquire all of the shares of the GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Canada Inc. joint adventure.  nuclearstreet.com

       Since Donald Trump started talking about other countries under treaty for U.S. defense who were not pulling their weight, the question of nuclear weapons has been brought up. Trump thinks that if another country such as Japan is not contributing enough to their own defense, then the U.S. should back off and leave them on their own. When asked whether or not Japan should have their own nuclear weapons, Trump said “Maybe they would be better off – including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.”

        Apparently, Trump is unaware of the Japanese constitution which was drafted in 1947 by the Allies after World War II that forbids Japan from having offensive forces and weapons with which they could wage war on other countries.

       Article 9 of the Japanese constitution states that the Japanese people “forever renounce war.” It also says that Japan will never maintain “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential.” While nuclear weapons are not actually mentioned specifically in Article 9, they are major offensive weapons and such weapons and their delivery systems would logically be covered by Article 9.      Japan does have some military capability for self-defense including land, sea, and air forces.

       In addition to the constitution of Japan forbidding offensive weapons like nuclear bombs, there is also the fact the U.S. brought countries like Japan and South Korea under its nuclear umbrella to discourage them from developing their own nuclear weapons programs. Both Japan and South Korea certainly have the technical capability to develop their own nuclear weapons. But, this would lead to a nuclear arms race in southeast Asia which would certainly draw in China. Such a development would destabilize that region and go against U.S. strategic interests.

       The Abe government in Japan is considering revising their constitution. Any changes would have to be voted on by the citizens of Japan. Many members of Abe’s political party want to modify the wording of the section in Article about military capability in order to clarify the right of Japan to expand and maintain military capability in the name of self-defense. If the U.S. withdrew its nuclear umbrella from Japan, it is likely that Japan would embark on the development of nuclear weapons.

      Being realistic, it is difficult to believe that a small vulnerable country like Japan does not have top secret plans for rapid conversion of industries producing consumer products to the production of weapons and military vehicles, ships and planes. There are also likely plans for the production of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Indeed, the national security institutions of Japan would be derelict in their duties if they had not developed such plans. And, considering how automated the Japanese industries are, the retooling of Japanese industry would probably happen very quickly if we withdrew our protection and the geopolitical situation deteriorated.

      If Donald Trump is elected President and turns away from the countries that we are under treaty to protect with our nuclear arsenal, he may unintentionally destabilize southeast Asia and trigger a nuclear arms race. 

The owner of FitzPatrick nuclear plant in New York state has allowed highly radioactive waste to leak into a contained area of the facility for at least four years, a safety violation that poses no risk to the public but might make it more difficult to decontaminate the site after the reactor closes. syracuse.com

Britain’s decision to stall a Franco-Chinese project to build its first nuclear power plant in a generation has fuelled speculation that the new government is reviewing its energy strategy to boost the role of renewables. breitbart.com

Russia has expressed an interest in Saudi Arabia’s plans to develop its nuclear power sector. gulfbusiness.com

Rosatom intends to develop the most cost-effective nuclear power plant (NPP) in the world by 2027, according to the corporation’s roadmap of innovative development until 2030 published on Wednesday. sputniknews.com

       Fennovoima Ltd. is a Finnish nuclear power company. It was established in 2007 by a consortium of Finnish power and industrial companies. It does not currently own any nuclear power reactors but is preparing to build a twelve hundred megawatt nuclear power plant at Pyhajoki. The Vice Chairman of the Fennovoima Board of Directors is the Deputy Director General for Business Development for Rosatom Energy International, a Russian government owned firm.

       The Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) is responsible for the protection of Finnish citizens, their society, the environment and future generations from the dangers of nuclear radiation. STUK has been conducting a safety audit of the plans for the Fennovoima power plant construction project since last fall. The project will need to satisfy the safety requirements being analyzed by the audit in order to qualify for a permit to construct the power plant. Fennovoima hopes to start construction in 2018 and complete construction in 2024.

       An initial report was issued by STUK last December. In that report, STUK raised concerns about whether or not Fennovoima was making safety a priority on the project. The report also posed the question of whether or not Fennovoima had the technical expertise required to safely construct and operate a nuclear power plant.

      Part of the safety audit included interviews with three quarters of the workers on the project. Some of the workers interviewed said that the project managers were ignoring safety issues. There were reports of retaliation against workers who raised safety concerns. The interviewees included both recent hires and experienced workers. It turned out that some of the most experienced workers interviewed were very critical and reported troublesome observations about Fennovoima and their management practices.

      The report said that in some cases, if workers refused to sign safety documents,  signatures were forged on those documents so that they would be approved. Multiple interviewees reported this problem. Another problem that was reported suggested that keeping to the schedule was more important to the management than insuring that safety requirements were met. Only one member of the Fennovoima management team has experience in nuclear safety and different members of the management team have different ideas about nuclear safety.

       The newspaper that wrote the story about the preliminary audit report has requested that STUK make the report public. STUK has refused to do so and said that the audit was still ongoing and would not be finished until 2017 at which time the full audit report would be issued.

     Fennovoima has rejected the charges leveled by the workers who were interviewed. Fennovoima representative have said that they are working on improving communications within the project. They also said that the changed signatures that were reported had to do with the organization of the Rosatom portion of the project team and were not relevant to safety issues. Rosatom is the principle contractor on the project and will be responsible for the actual construction of the reactor.

        The concerns raised by the workers who were interviewed reflect my concerns about nuclear power reactor construction projects. Too often, safety takes a back seat to money and time. And whistleblowers are often persecuted. Corporations tightly focused on the bottom line cannot be trusted to build and operate safe nuclear power plants.