Part Three of Four Parts (Please read Parts One and Two first)

8) A lot of nuclear waste has been casually dumped with no thought to safety around the world. At the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, millions of gallons of liquid nuclear waste from nuclear weapons manufacture was just poured into trenches dug in the dirt. Temporary underground storage tanks full of toxic chemicals and liquid nuclear waste are leaking into the ground. Drums of nuclear waste were just tossed into the English Channel. The Russians sank submarines with nuclear fuel and nuclear reactors from vessels into the sea near Murmansk off the northern coast of Russia. The Russians recently informed the Norwegians that Norwegian fishing grounds might be at risk.

9) There has been a lot of illegal dumping of nuclear waste around the world. In addition to the casual dumping on nuclear waste during the nuclear age, there has also been outright illegal dumping of nuclear waste. A Mafia informant told Italian authorities that a central Italian Mafia took a ship loaded with spent fuel from European reactors and deliberately sank it off the coast of Italy. They have also been dumping off the coast of Somalia. Nuclear waste from France and Germany was illegally smuggled to northern European ports for transport and illegal dumping in Russia. Illegal dumping of nuclear waste continues today.

10) Uranium mining devastates the environment. The process of mining uranium is terribly polluting. Acid is poured over piles of uranium ore to dissolve out the uranium and the acid often leaks out of the containment system. In the area of Spokane, Washington, decades of uranium mining have left toxic chemicals and radioactive isotopes in the groundwater, surface water and soil, threatening the health of the people who live there. In Canada, Australia and other locations around the globe, uranium mines have also ruined the environment. In Niger in Africa, dust from the local uranium mine blows through local villages and piles up in drifts. New uranium mines are being opened around the world which will severely impact the local environments.

11)  The fund for a geological repository for spent nuclear fuel is threatened in the U.S. The U.S. government started collecting funds for a permanent disposal site for U.S. spent nuclear fuel from the nuclear industry decades ago. The site was suppose to open in 1999 but that did not happen. The U.S. was working on a site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but that project was cancelled in 2009. There was around thirty billion dollars in the fund when the project was stopped. The best estimate now is that the earliest that the U.S. could possibly  open such a facility would in 2050. Owners of nuclear power plants that have been paying into the fund have begun to take some of the money back from the fund through court proceedings. If the fund is depleted and the U.S. is unable to replenish it, there may be a lack of funds for the creation of a permanent spent fuel disposal facility in the U.S. by 2050. This will leave spent nuclear fuel in deteriorating temporary dry casks at U.S. nuclear power plants.

(See Part Four)

Ranger open pit uranium mine in Australia:

TEPCO was reprimanded by the NRA after being caught lying about the use of the now failed transfer hose at the Fukushima plant. fukuleaks.org

A consortium comprising South Korean construction companies Samsung C&T, Doosan and Hanhwa Construction has been awarded a contract to build units 5 and 6 of the Shin Kori nuclear power plant.‘ world-nuclear-news.org

A US uranium processing plant could be shipped to Turkey to fast-track uranium production under a newly announced merger of Uranium Resources Inc with Australian uranium and exploration company Anatolia Energy, owner of the Temrezli uranium project. world-nuclear-news.org

The Czech cabinet has approved an action plan on nuclear energy, providing for future construction at both the Temelin and Dukovany nuclear sites. world-nuclear-news.org

 

 

Part Two of Four Parts (Please read Part One first)

4) There may be a lack of decommissioning funds.  The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission required the owners of nuclear power plants to maintain a fund sufficient to pay for the decommissioning of a nuclear power reactor when it reaches the end of its operational life. The NRC has been pressuring about the owners of about twenty U.S. power reactors to increase the amount of money that they have in their decommissioning funds. Some companies have funds invested in the stock market which could be wiped out if the market crashed. Even for those companies which the NRC says have sufficient funds, it has been found that the estimations of the cost of decommissioning are often too low. If the companies that own the reactors cannot pay to have them decommissioned, they will have to be paid for by the tax payers. If there are not sufficient federal funds to do the job, the plants will be mothballed and fenced. This leaves the danger of deteriorating containment being breached by storms, earthquakes, and/or terrorists which would contaminate the surrounding countryside and ground water.

5) There may  be a lack of trained nuclear technicians in the future. Many of the technicians at nuclear power plants are nearing retirement. Uncertainties in the future of the nuclear industry have resulted in fewer students studying and graduating in nuclear technology at the world’s universities. If there are not enough graduates in the future to fill the posts being emptied by retirements, then either the power plants will have to be shut down or they will have to risk operating with less competent technicians which would increase the risk of serious accidents.

6) There is a lack of replacement parts for nuclear power reactors. Although there are standard designs for nuclear reactors, the details of the actual construction vary from site to site. A lot of components are either modified or custom made for a particular power reactor. This makes replacing worn out parts difficult. Sometimes used parts are salvaged from decommissioned reactors or reactors which have replaced those parts. Sometimes new parts are purchased that have to be modified before use. Sometimes custom parts have to be manufactured. In all these cases, the possibility of problems and/or the costs increase. Some power reactors have had to be permanently shut down recently because it became too expensive to keep repairing them. With many of the worlds power reactors reaching the end of their original design lives, more and more replacement parts will be needed.

7) Jellyfish are clogging the water intakes for nuclear power reactors. Jellyfish used to be a dominant life form in the oceans millions of years ago. Then increases in oxygen and decreases acidity allowed other forms of aquatic life to flourish and replace the jellyfish. Now that there are large areas of the oceans which are losing oxygen and becoming more acidic, jellyfish are making a comeback. Jellyfish have already forced the temporary shutdown of nuclear power plants from Sweden to Japan by clogging their cooling water intake systems. Jellyfish are multiplying in the world’s oceans and this problem will just get worse.

(See Part Three)

Common moon jellyfish which clogged cooling water intakes of Swedish reactor.

It is being reported that tainted food from Fukushima, Ibaraki, Gumma, and Chiba is making its way into local supermarkets in Taiwan due to the irresponsibility of mislabeling.  naturalsociety.com

A number of countries are beginning to require Japan to place region-of-origin labeling on its food products to ensure that anything coming from the radiation-infested regions surrounding the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant are adequately screened for contamination. intellihub.com

Syrian residents from villages near the destroyed Syrian nuclear site, Al-Kibar, around 60 kilometers from Deir A-Zor report that members of Islamic State (ISIS / Daesh) have been excavating the destroyed Syrian secret nuclear facility. jewishpress.com

Russia and Tunisia have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. world-nuclear-news.org

 

Part One of Four Parts

          In my last several posts, I have been covering ten problems with nuclear power and ten dangerous misconceptions about nuclear power and radiation. Today, I am going to cover my own list of nuclear problems that do not get as much attention as the items on the other two lists but do deserve to be discussed.

1) Insurance issues: Potential liability for nuclear accidents is a very big issue worldwide. In the United States, the nuclear industry would not be possible without the Price-Anderson Act which limits amount of money that the owners of nuclear power plants can be charged for nuclear accidents. It is likely that in the event of a major nuclear accident in the U.S., the cost of the accident will exceed the amount that the owners will have to pay with the rest being passed along to the taxpayers. There was a scandal in South African recently because a secret deal with Russia for a nuclear reactor contained a provision that Russian nuclear technology suppliers not be liable for damages caused by an accident involving their equipment. India is having problems with nuclear technology imports because they have very stringent liability laws for the manufacturers of equipment involved in industrial accidents. The potential cost of a major nuclear accident is difficult to estimate but it may cost far more than any insurance coverage will pay for.

2) Emissions from operating reactors during refueling: Up until recently, nuclear power plants in the U.S. were allowed to report radioactive steam and gases emissions levels in terms of the emissions averaged over a year. However, critics of the reporting system have pressured regulators to have nuclear power plants report the daily releases of radioactive steam and gases. It has been revealed that while the average annual releases are well within what are considered to be safe levels, whenever the containment vessel is opened for refueling, there is a serious spike in emissions that rises well above safe levels posing a threat to people who live down wind of the plant. This is a danger not related to an accident but present whenever a nuclear reactor is refueled during normal, supposedly safe, operation.

3) Deficiency of dry cask design: The cooling pools at nuclear reactors in the U.S. are rapidly filling up. If some of the spent fuel in the pools is not removed, all operating reactors will have to be shut down when it comes time to refuel because there will be no place to put the spent fuel. The current plan is for spent fuel to be placed in steel and concrete containers called “dry casks” either at the reactor site or at a temporary storage facility offsite. The problem with this plan is the fact that the current design for commercial dry casks does not include a way to monitor dangerous gas build up in the casks that might cause an explosion. The massive cask building program that will be necessary to take the existing spent fuel will increase the odds of the rupture of a cask and the release of nuclear contamination. New casks are being developed but they will have to be tested and licensed before being available commercially. This will probably take at least five years and the existing spent fuel will have to be moved before then to prevent nuclear plant shutdowns. In addition, a massive amount of concrete will have to be used for all the new dry casks which will release additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

(See Part Two)

Refueling a reactor core:

After a recent Islamic State English magazine article claimed that the terrorist group could buy nuclear arms from Pakistan, India’s defense minister warned last weekend that ISIS does have the connections and resources needed to purchase nuclear weapons from Pakistan. christianpost.com

A magnitude-4.4 earthquake jolted a sparsely populated district some 110 kilometers (70 miles) northwest of Bushehr, Iran, Monday morning, rattling a region home to the Islamic Republic’s only operational nuclear power plant. timesofisrael.com

Russia emphasized that it retains the right to deploy nuclear weapons anywhere on its territory, including Crimea. nationalinterest.org

At first-ever conference, UN takes aim at cyber-threats against nuclear safety. un.org

Part Two of Two Parts. (Please read Part One first.)

       Yesterday, I posted the first part of my comments on comments on a list of misconceptions about nuclear power. Today I finish my comments on the list. This list was published on the listverse.com website.

5) The radiation risks from cell phone use are well understood and publicized.  There has been a long debate over whether or not cell phones pose a threat to human health. Scientific studies suggest that they might depending on the amount of radiation exposure. The FCC in the U.S. has published standards for the maximum radiation that a cell phone should emit based on the specific absorption rate (SAR) of a human head next to a cell phone. Manufacturers are supposed to measure the radiation of their specific models of phones and put that information in their manuals. The problem with this approach is that many manufactures recommend holding the phone much farther away from the ear than most people do in practice. People who read the published SAR ratings do not understand that the SAR rating system of the FCC is based on holding the phones in a very specific way at a specific distance that may not used when the manufactures test their phone. Users cannot rely on the SAR numbers published in their user manuals to assess the relative risk of the use of that particular model of cell phone.

4) There is a type of energy production originally called “cold fusion” that could provide safe and cheap energy. Around twenty years ago, a couple of scientists claimed that they had developed a device that produced more energy than was fed into it by a process they dubbed “cold fusion.” Subsequent experiments failed to duplicate the process and cold fusion was dismissed as a fraud. As more time passed, some researchers were able to produce some energy in their labs with similar approaches to the original experiments but the results were ambiguous and difficult to replicate. No generally accepted theory has been advanced that could account for the successful new experiments. Currently, there is a company in Italy which is claiming that they have a reliable way to produce energy with this mysterious process and that it will be on the market soon. Skeptics are still not convinced that there is anything to these claims.

3) Prolonged exposure to low levels of radiation are not harmful. There is an ongoing debate about whether or not low levels of radiation are harmful. There is naturally occurring background radiation from uranium and cosmic rays every where on Earth that varies from place to place. Experiments and studies have yielded different results. Some scientists think that not only is the natural background radiation not harmful but that it may have beneficial health effects. Other scientists feel that there is no level of radiation exposure that is totally safe, especially in the long term. A recent metastudy of health problems and natural radiation levels seemed to indicate that there was a direct relationship between radiation levels in the environment and a host of health problems. This study appears to validate the idea that any radiation exposure may cause damage to human health but some people may be unaffected.

2) Environmental increases in radioactivity are mainly the result of nuclear accidents. People assume that the increase in radioactivity in the natural environment in the past 60 years is due to major nuclear accidents such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Actually, the overwhelming additional radioactive materials in the natural environment caused by human activity can be attributed to fallout from the more than two thousand nuclear bombs that have been exploded since the beginning of the nuclear age in the 1940s.

1) North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is not a serious threat to the world. When North Korea embarked on its quest to create nuclear weapons, the world was skeptical that such a backward country could have the scientific knowledge and equipment to be successful. Over the years, the North Koreans have continued to surprise the world as they did develop and test nuclear bombs. They are also making progress on missile technology and the miniaturization of their bombs to make warheads. Recently, an article was published that claimed that North Korea may soon have missiles with nuclear warheads that could reach the west coast of the United States. Obviously the skeptics were wrong and North Korea does pose a serious threat to the world.