Hot Spots in the 5th Year Over 20μSv h in Fukushima city Feb. 23, 2016 youtube.com

“Nuclear power plants around the world now have flexible approaches to dealing with a wide range of accident scenarios,” said William Magwood, director general of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, commenting on five years of international cooperation to improve safety after the Fukushima accident. world-nuclear-news.org

The recent radioactive leak at New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plant is prompting renewed calls for the site to be shut down, amid growing concerns about the potential damage a nuclear accident could do in one of the most densely populated parts of the country. cbsnews.com

Russia and Algeria plan to meet for talks this week on the possibility of building a nuclear power plant in Algeria, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said in an interview with Algerian newspaper L’Expression that was published on 28 February.  world-nuclear-news.org

 

India has amended its atomic energy act to enable the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) to form joint venture companies with other Indian public sector units (PSUs) in a move that will help the state-owned company to secure funding for new projects. world-nuclearnews.org

Three former Tokyo Electric Power Company executives are to be indicted Monday for “professional negligence” that contributed to injuries and deaths associated with the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japanese media reported Friday. nuclearstreet.com

An unarmed Minuteman 3 nuclear missile was shot into the California night sky Thursday amid tensions with North Korea and Russia. foxnews.com

Can you be an environmentalist without embracing nuclear energy? slate.com

        Yesterday, I blogged about illegal disposal of radioactive waste from fracking at a landfill in Kentucky. Today I am going to blog about another problem with nuclear garbage. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. about thirty two thousand nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union had about forty thousand nuclear warheads. Fortunately, the U.S. and Russia, which inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, came to their senses and signed treaties to reduce arsenals to their present size of about five thousand active warheads each. Still too much but much less than during the Cold War. The creation of those huge arsenals left behind a terrible legacy of radioactive pollution in both countries. The U.S. Hanford nuclear reservation still contains a great deal of dangerous radioactive materials left over from nuclear weapons production which I have blogged about. I have also been blogging about waste from nuclear weapons polluting residential area in around St. Louis. This blog is about a Cold War legacy problem in Ohio.

         The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is located near Piketon, Ohio. The locations was chosen because it had available electricity, water for cooling, transportation, labor and flat topography. The plant was built between 1952 and 1956 with the first enriched uranium being produced in 1954. It is a huge facility whose buildings had a combined ten million square feet of floor space. During maximum operation, it consumed over two thousand megawatts. The plant first enriched uranium ore to ninety percent U235 for use in nuclear weapons in the 1950s. In the mid-1960s, after the U.S. arsenal reached its maximum level around 1960, the plant switched to making nuclear fuel for power reactors. The gaseous diffusion facility was shut down in 2001 and decommissioning began. A new facility employing centrifuges to enrich uranium began construction  in 2007.

        People who worked at the plant now say that they are suffering from health effects of exposure to radiation. There are many cases of a particularly malignant form of prostate cancer among retired workers. This and other cancers constitute what is called a “cancer cluster” meaning that the rate of cancers is much higher than their average occurrence in the U.S. Workers are having a very difficult time getting their health insurance coverage to cover their claims for radiation related illnesses.

        Ill workers also claim that the U.S. government is ignoring them although there is a federal program in place to handle such complaints. The Department of Energy evaluates radiation exposure with something called “dose reconstruction.” Dose reconstruction tests for exposure to U235, the highly radioactive isotope of uranium which is needed for creation of nuclear weapons. Positive results of dose reconstruction are necessary to get workers compensation from the DoE.

        Critics of the dose reconstruction method point out that the test does not cover U234, which is also highly radioactive and the isotope to which many of the workers at the plant were exposed. There is legal action against the DoE to get it to change its methodology and to seriously study the claims from workers that are currently being refused.

        Sadly, it is not just the combat veterans that are being treated poorly by the U.S. Government. The veterans of nuclear weapons plants also have been denied the health care they deserve.

Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant:

French nuclear technology company Areva has announced a €2.0 billion ($2.2 billion) net loss for 2015 due to additional provisions for the delayed completion of the Olkiluoto 3 EPR as well as impairments for restructuring and weak market conditions. world-nuclearnews.org

The two most highly contaminated pieces of processing equipment have been removed from the former Plutonium Finishing Plant at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Hanford site in preparation for the plant’s demolition later this year. world-nuclearnews.org

Time to begin modernizing the country’s nuclear weapons is running short, Pentagon leaders say. They contend the force is still in fighting shape — “safe, reliable and effective” is the official mantra. But they also argue the time has come to begin modernizing the force or risk eroding its credibility as a deterrent to attack by others. twincities.com

Iran has carried out most of its commitments under the nuclear agreement reached in July, the United Nations’ atomic agency said Friday, although for a time it exceeded the permitted amount of heavy water, which can be used to produce plutonium. wsj.com

 

 

       Radioactive waste is a major global problem. It can be left over from various stages of the mining and refining of uranium. It can be a by-product of the creation of weapons grade nuclear materials. Radioactive materials are used in medicine and industry and must be disposed. Nuclear power reactors generate huge quantities of spent nuclear fuel which must be dealt with. Radioactive wastes are separated into high-level and low-level. Each has its own recommended methods of disposal. There can be problems with the competent execution of these disposal method. In addition, there are many cases in which no attempt was made to dispose of the materials in any legitimate way. Illegal dumping of radioactive waste is also a global problem.

       There are naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in soil and rock. When fracking wells are drilled and fluids are pumped down into rock formations to shatter the rock and release oil, the mixture of fluids that returns to the surface carries some of these radioactive isotopes. Many states have laws against dumping radioactive waste in state landfills. This poses a serious problem for fracking operations that are constantly generating such waste materials. Unscrupulous companies which prefer profit to following the law have a track record of illegally disposing of radioactive waste from fracking operations.

        A company in West Virginia recycles the fluids from fracking operations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. This concentrates the radioactive isotopes in the fluids. The Kentucky Division of Waste Management has reported that forty seven sealed boxes of radioactive wastes from this company’s operations was illegally sent to the Blue Ridge landfill in Estill County, Kentucky between July and November of 2015. It is believed that the boxes have been buried since November.

        The Waste Management Division is working with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and its Radiation Health Branch on are working on the Blue Ridge landfill investigation as well as investigation of other possible illegal dumping at a landfill in Greenup County. They think that the illegal waste sent to Greenup County was not put through the full recycling process. This would mean that the radioactive isotopes had not been concentrated and so this waste would not be as dangerous as the waste that was sent to Blue Ridge.

        The WMD sent letters out to operators of landfills, waste haulers, transfer station operators and local waste management offices. The letters warned the recipients about the recent shipments of illegal waste to Blue Ridge and Greenup County. The recipients were admonished to be certain that they were following the law with respect to banned radioactive wastes.

        The WMD is working with the operators of the Blue Ridge landfill to obtain more details about exactly how the radioactive waste made its way to the landfill. They are trying to determine if any of the workers at the landfill might have been exposed to radiation from the waste. At this time, they do not believe that there is any continuing danger of exposure from the buried waste.

Blue Ridge Landfill:

 

Nearly five years after the nation’s worst nuclear accident, Tokyo Electric Power Co. has admitted that its staff failed to follow damage assessment guidelines, according to which they should have reported the meltdowns almost immediately. japantimes.co.jp

Terrestrial Energy is submitting its Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) design to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) for pre-licensing review, the Canadian company announced today. The submission marks a first step towards an eventual licence application. world-nuclear-news.org

A chemical oceanographer from the University of Victoria said that the 2015 study of salmon off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, found no traces of cesium-134, the radionuclide that could have been attributed to the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which suffered from three reactor meltdowns due to a tsunami event that flooded back up power systems. nuclearstreet.com

Ratepayers in Florida are challenging Duke Energy and Florida Power & Light in a class action suit that alleges they were illegally forced to pay $2 billion in nuclear power plant construction costs for abandoned projects that were never completed. nuclearstreet.com