Radiation in ocean off Fukushima at highest levels in years because of leakage coming from plant. enenews.com

The UK’s Energy and Climate Change Committee has called EDF Energy, and other energy companies planning to build reactors in the UK, to Parliament on 23 March to give evidence on the future of the nuclear industry. world-nuclear-news.org

Hualong International Nuclear Power Technology – the joint venture between China General Nuclear (CGN) and China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) to promote the Hualong One reactor design in export markets – was officially inaugurated today. world-nuclear-news.org

The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating possible accounting fraud as a domestic follow-up to the scandal that has enveloped Westinghouse Electric Company’s Japanese parent company Toshiba, two sources have said. nuclearstreet.com

 

 

I have blogged about all the problems with nuclear power that make it a bad choice for generating electricity. There are many different problems including corruption, incompetence, bad design, lack of adequate regulations, cost overruns, environmental degradation, public health threats, flooding, sea level rise, warming oceans, terrorist and war threats, etc. Recently I listed forty reasons to reject nuclear power. Since then, I have found another five reasons. Sadly enough, even with all these serious concerns, nuclear power is still on the table and some countries, especially China, are making massive investments in reactor construction. One of the reasons for this resistance to the facts about nuclear power is that there is so much money in the construction of nuclear reactors that there is plenty for anyone involved. Greed seems to trump everything else. However, change is on the horizon, in the U.S. at least.

        The Gallup polling organization has been tracking public attitudes toward nuclear power in the U.S. since 1994. Before this year, the number of people supporting use of nuclear power was always higher than the number of people opposing it. The high point in polling on public acceptance of nuclear power in the U.S. was in 2010 when sixty two percent of the people polled supported nuclear power. Just before the major nuclear disaster at Fukushima, the support was at fifty seven percent. By 2015, the support had declined to fifty one percent. Now, the most recent poll shows that only forty four percent of U.S. citizens support nuclear power. So at this point, a majority of people in the U.S. do not support nuclear power. The margin of error for the latest poll is four percent. One more major nuclear accident anywhere in the world and the support will sink even further. This is one of the considerations that politicians and investors will take into account when considering new nuclear project proposals.

       Gallup believes that low energy prices for oil, gasoline and natural gas have been a major contributing factor to the decline in support for nuclear power. In addition, the decline in price for alternative sustainable energy sources has also contributed. The massive upfront investment in nuclear power cannot be justified when there are other cheaper energy sources available. With cheaper low-carbon alternative energy sources, environmental concerns are also contributing to rejection of nuclear power. Republicans are more supportive of nuclear power than Democrats but even the Republican support in the latest polls was only forty six percent.

       Although several new power reactors are being built in the U.S., this drop in public support bodes ill for the future of nuclear power in the U.S. Continuing problems with leakage of radioactive materials from power plants and debates over what to do with all the spent nuclear fuel that is piling up at the nuclear power stations also contribute to a decline of support for nuclear power. In the end I think that it will be a combination of public rejection and investor skepticism that will sink nuclear power once and for all, not only in the U.S. but all over the world.

 

Cleanup efforts at the shuttered and leaking Fukushima nuclear plant hit the skids this week as officials were confronted with a new and unexpected challenge: radiation levels are so high that a particularly damaged reactor cannot be accessed, even by robots. sputniknews.com

Sixteen U.S. ships that participated in relief efforts after Japan’s nuclear disaster five years ago remain contaminated with low levels of radiation from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, top Navy officials told Stars and Stripes. military.com

President Barack Obama levied sanctions against North Korea on Wednesday in response to the reclusive country’s recent “illicit” nuclear and ballistic missile tests. foxnews.com

One of the two reactors at the Torness nuclear power station in East Lothian has been shutdown. The plant’s operators, EDF Energy, said the incident was unplanned and the manual shutdown took place on Wednesday during routine maintenance. bbc.com

 

 

        Nuclear weapons are a threat to the existence of the human race. The U.S. and Russia possess large arsenals of thousands of nuclear warheads. Other countries such as the U.K, France, China, Pakistan, India and Israel only a few hundred nuclear warheads at most. It has been estimated that the detonation of as few as a hundred nuclear warheads anywhere in the world could cause a “nuclear winter” by blocking out the sun for years and destroying agricultural production. Beyond the millions incinerated by the nuclear detonations, billions more would starve in a few years. This would completely destroy human civilization.

       There are two main tracks to the removal of this existential threat. One is the effort to reduce the number of nuclear warheads. The U.S. and the Soviet Union followed by the Russians have reduced arsenals from tens of thousands of warheads at the height of the Cold War to a few thousand today. There are groups working hard to reduce this number even further.

        The other track is to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons. One way to do this is to discourage the production of plutonium which is one of the elements used to create nuclear weapons. Plutonium is produced naturally in nuclear reactors as nuclear fuel is burned. In order to extract pure plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, special reprocessing facilities and technologies are required. Those opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons work to prevent the use of existing facilities and the construction of new facilities for plutonium extraction. There is currently about 300 metric tons of plutonium in world.

        China recently announced their plans to proceed with the construction of a “commercial scale” facility for extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. The facility is slated to begin construction around 2020 and take a decade to complete. The Chinese are strongly committed to nuclear power and one third of the new builds under construction or being planned are in China. Although the U.S. says that plutonium reprocessing is not commercially viable, China may consider it a strategic necessity to insure an internal supply of fuel for their reactor fleet in the future. The U.S. Secretary of Energy has spoken out strongly against the Chinese plans. He said, “We don’t support large-scale reprocessing,” and  that the Chinese reprocessing plant “certainly isn’t a positive in terms of nonproliferation.”

       In the U.S., spent nuclear fuel is stored and reprocessing is prohibited because of concerns over nuclear proliferation. In other countries that utilize nuclear power such as France and Japan, the plutonium is reprocessed and plutonium is extracted for use a as a nuclear fuel. One of the concerns of the U.S. is that big stockpiles of plutonium could easily be used to make nuclear weapons by the countries that possess them and that the plutonium would also be a tempting target for terrorists.

      The U.S. is especially worried about reprocessing and proliferation in Asia where there is less international cooperation and less transparency. The recent actions and statement of North Korea with respect to nuclear weapons has the whole region on edge. Both South Korea and Japan which have historically rejected nuclear weapons are upset enough for there to be increasing calls to consider building their own nuclear weapons. In addition, if the Chinese accumulate big stockpiles of plutonium, Japan will have additional incentive to develop nuclear weapons in response. 

Cleanup efforts at the shuttered and leaking Fukushima nuclear plant hit the skids this week as officials were confronted with a new and unexpected challenge: radiation levels are so high that a particularly damaged reactor cannot be accessed, even by robots. sputniknews.com

Sixteen U.S. ships that participated in relief efforts after Japan’s nuclear disaster five years ago remain contaminated with low levels of radiation from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, top Navy officials told Stars and Stripes. military.com

President Barack Obama levied sanctions against North Korea on Wednesday in response to the reclusive country’s recent “illicit” nuclear and ballistic missile tests. foxnews.com

One of the two reactors at the Torness nuclear power station in East Lothian has been shutdown. The plant’s operators, EDF Energy, said the incident was unplanned and the manual shutdown took place on Wednesday during routine maintenance. bbc.com

        The members of the European Union (EU) are heavily conflicted over the future of nuclear power. Following Fukushima, Germany decided to close all their nuclear reactors. Austria has been suing other EU members over their nuclear policies and projects. On the other hand, the U.K. is involved in major nuclear projects such as the twenty five billion dollar Hinkley Point C project. Eastern Europe EU members who were part of the Soviet Union are building more nuclear reactors for power generation. Be that as it may, the EU as an entity is strongly committing to nuclear power.

        The first review of nuclear power in the EU since the March 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan has been drafted and will soon be released by the European Commission (EC). The main conclusion of the draft report is that the EU should invest up to five hundred and sixty billion dollars in nuclear power by the year 2050. The report points out that ninety percent of the current nuclear power reactors in the EU will have to be retired by 2050. Increased demand for electricity in the EU and the need to reduce carbon emissions sharply will require the massive investment in new nuclear power reactors. The report also calls for the investment of at least fifty six billion dollars to upgrade existing aging reactors so they can continue to produce power as long as possible.

        The German Green Party (GGP) which is strongly opposed to nuclear power has issued a report of their own which presents the results of a study that challenges the conclusions of the EC report. The GGP study claims that the EC report has severely underestimated the cost of extending the life of existing nuclear power plants, disposing of nuclear waste and the decommissioning of closed nuclear power plants. Considering that costs of dealing with these problems is constantly rising and there are often cost overruns in active projects, this conclusion is not surprising.

       The GGP study also points out that the question of liability is not seriously addressed in the EC report. The GGP feels that there should be mandatory insurance for possible nuclear accidents and that the question of who should pay for accidents needs to be definitely settled. The problem with the current situation is that each EU member regulates liability for nuclear power plants within its borders and there are different regulations in different members. The Energy Commissioner for the EU in 2012 proposed a uniform liability insurance for nuclear power plants in member nations. To date, the EU has not put forward such a proposal.

       The EU has recommended that the national regulatory agencies of EU members work more closely together to bring more coherence and uniformity to the licensing and regulation of nuclear power plants. The EC report states that such cooperation could help lower costs of nuclear power reactors and improve safety at the same time. Such goals are laudable but perhaps the EU would do better to invest in alternative sustainable power sources.