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January 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Eight Countries with Reactors Most at Risk of Tsunamis

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

By Andrew Topf

— Andrew Topf, who was an editor at mining.com, wrote a version of this article for Oilprice.com.

The tsunami that followed shortly after a 9.0 [undersea] mega-quake off the northeast coast of Japan was shocking in its magnitude—killing close to 16,000. But it was soon apparent that another disaster was in the making, when the surging waves inundated pumps used to cool down the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex.

The resultant [triple reactor] fuel meltdown[s] and leakage of radiation led to the immediate evacuation of the site, and a chain of events that eventually had Japan shutting down all of its nuclear reactors. Germany, a major consumer of nuclear power, permanently closed eight of its 17 nuclear reactors following Fukushima [and legislated a permanent phase out of the rest]; other European countries shelved their [reactor construction] plans.

While nuclear proponents view Fukushima as an aberration and trust that nuclear is mostly safe, opponents hold it, and other major accidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as exemplifying the perils of nuclear power.

Fukushima Daiichi reactors after 2011 explosions.

Oilprice.com looked at the countries whose nuclear reactors would be most vulnerable to a tsunami. We based our list—in no particular order—on a report by the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS), part of the European Commission, which mapped out the world’s geographic zones most at risk of large tsunamis. We then cross-referenced those countries with information from the World Nuclear Association on each country’s nuclear program. According to the CORDIS report, 23 nuclear power stations with 74 reactors were identified in high-risk areas. The riskiest country was China, which has 27 reactors currently under construction, the largest number in the world. Of those 27, 17 are being built in areas considered dangerous for tsunamis.

China—China currently has 21 operating nuclear plants, and 27 being built. China’s most active earthquake zones are in the interior, far from its existing reactors on the east coast. However, high earthquake activity on the Chinese east coast should not discount this threat. Moreover, as its electricity needs grow, China is likely to site new reactors in the interior, including two proposed reactors in Sichuan—the site of a major quake in 2013.

Taiwan—Two of the reactors cited in the CORDIS report are in Taiwan. Like Japan, Taiwan is at considered high-risk of nuclear reactor damage from tsunamis due to its high frequency of earthquakes, historically, correlated to its land area—which is known as seismic density.

Japan—Japan has 19 reactors at seven sites at risk of tsunamis, including Fukushima I, according to the CORDIS report.

South Korea—Twenty-three reactors provide 20.7 Gigawatts of electrical output, nearly a third of the country’s needs. However, CORDIS identified five reactors at tsunami risk, through the expansion of two plants.

United States—Many seismologists believe that the Cascadia subduction zone, running from Vancouver Island to northern California, is overdue for a major earthquake of equal force to what occurred recently in Japan and Chile. That puts the US on the high end of the risk scale. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission put out a report in 2011 rating US reactors at the highest risk of earthquake damage. Surprisingly, the Diablo Canyon reactors, situated between the California coastline and the San Andreas Fault, were not considered most prone to a tsunami. No. 1 on the NRC list was Indian Point, 24 miles from New York City, with second and third positions occupied by reactors in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, respectively.

Pakistan—Pakistan has a small nuclear program. A 7.7-magnitude quake struck Pakistan’s remote southwest region in 2013, killing at least 328. CORDIS identified one Pakistani reactor in its report that is at risk of a tsunami.

India—CORDIS also mentioned two nuclear reactors in India that could face tsunami damage. India’s seismicity is well-documented. A mega-quake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale hit Gujarat in 2001 killing over 20,000. The same number of people were killed eight years earlier during a quake in Maharashtra.

Iran—Iran currently has one operating nuclear reactor. After the Japanese tsunami, then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that its Brushehr nuclear plant could not be hit because the facility is more modern than the 40-year-old Fukushima complex. In 2013, two earthquakes, one at 5.6 magnitude and the other at 6.1, struck the region around the Brushehr plant.

January 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Radioactive Waste Fuel Pools Declared ‘No Danger to the Public’

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

KEWAUNEE, Wisconsin—The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted Dominion Energy in October a request to lift disaster preparedness requirements for its shuttered nuclear Kewaunee reactor on Lake Michigan.

“Specifically, Kewaunee will no longer be required to maintain offsite radiological emergency preparedness plans or the 10-mile emergency planning zone,” the NRC announced.

The single reactor Kewaunee station was shut down May 7, 2013 and is undergoing decommissioning. Dominion has said the process will take 40 years.

With hundreds of tons of ferociously radioactive waste uranium fuel—known as “spent fuel”—now in the company’s on-site cooling pool, Kewaunee’s accident preparedness exemptions put lake water and hundreds of thousands of downwind residents at risk. A “loss-of-coolant” accident can cause the fuel to catch fire—like the waste fuel fire that may have occurred at Fukushima in March 2011—resulting in catastrophic radiation releases.

Rose-Colored Safety Assumptions

The NRC conducted a series of “Nuclear Waste Confidence” hearings around the country, along with some “transfer of waste nuclear fuel” proceedings. In all of them, NRC declared that in the event of a catastrophic radioactivity release, large-scale evacuations (out to a certain distance) would go well.

Kevin Kamps, of Beyond Nuclear, the Takoma Park, Maryland think tank, asks: “How is it possible that such evacuations would go well, if emergency preparedness requirements have been eliminated?”

The NRC’s optimistic assumption is at the heart of the agency’s conclusion that there is extremely little danger from waste pool storage. The NRC claims that if there’s a large radiation release due to a fire, no one will get hurt, because everyone will have evacuated out of harm’s way.

NRC staff has concluded that the company “will maintain an acceptable level of emergency preparedness at [Kewaunee]…and that there is reasonable assurance that adequate offsite protective measures can and will be taken by State and local government agencies, if needed, in the event of a radiological emergency.”

The NRC notice claims that, “In the unlikely event of a … complete loss of heat removal …there will be at least 10 hours available before an offsite release might occur and, therefore, at least 10 hours to … restore … heat removal to the spent fuel. … a minimum of 10 hours is considered sufficient time for offsite authorities to …protect the health and safety of the public.”

So far, every US reactor operator that has asked for the exemptions during decommissioning has had their request granted, rubber stamp fashion by the NRC.

Meanwhile, the owners of the Vermont Yankee reactor near Vernon, Vermont have asked for the similar exemptions from accident preparedness rules, but NRC has been far more demanding of Entergy Corp. than of Dominion in Wisconsin.

Vermont Yankee will be shut down at the end of the year, and Entergy has asked that its 10-mile evacuation zone be reduced to the station’s 148 acre footprint.

And while the potential risks of a disastrous waste fuel pool fire are similar at both sites, the NRC has demanded that Entergy rewrite its exemption request, noting three times that the company “inaccurately states” the effects of a waste fuel fire. Left unsaid in the Kewaunee case, the NRC has said about Vermont, “In the unlikely event that there is a catastrophic loss of spent fuel pool water inventory, there is a potential for an offsite release of radioactive material …” —JL

January 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Proposed Lake Huron Waste Dump Critics Proliferating

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

By John LaForge

The proposed Deep Geological Repository for radioactive waste being considered by Canada’s Joint Review Panel (JRP) is such a bad idea that even pro-nuclear Republican US senators like Illinois’ Mark Kirk are against it. Still, it’s not dead yet.

The Southgate Michigan News-Herald reported last September that “some of the waste is highly radioactive and much of it will remain toxic for more than 100,000 years. The proposed site is less than a mile inland from the shore of Lake Huron and about 440 yards below the lake level. It is approximately 120 miles upstream from the main drinking water intakes for southeastern Michigan.”

The language is from a Michigan State Senate resolution against the dump which passed last year. Now the US Senate has taken up the fight with a similar bill introduced by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and co-sponsored by Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan, and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin. Dozens of cities along the Great Lakes, Duluth, Minnesota included, have formally opposed the craziness of burying leaky tins of radiation in a watershed that serves H₂O to 40 million people.

Dave Herndon, writing for the News-Herald dug up this zinger: The Canadian government itself raised identical objections about radioactive waste near drinking water in the 1980s, when the US Energy Department surveyed sites for a US waste dump. Back then, Canada formally protested and a Parliamentary resolution urges US officials to prevent such a dump from ever being built in the Great Lakes Basin.

Ontario’s Joint Review Panel (JRP) will make a recommendation to the federal government after studying the plans pros and cons. It has held two sets of formal hearings, and loads of highly critical testimony is in the record. Not the least is that of former Ontario Power Generation (OPG) scientist Frank Greening.

OPG—the radioactive waste producer that runs 18 reactors in Ontario—is the dump’s chief promoter. Dr. Greening worked for the company for 22 years.

Radioactive waste generator’s “cavalier attitude”

A PhD in chemistry, Dr. Greening testified last September that OPG has a “cavalier attitude” toward the long-lived hazards of radioactive wastes.

(In 2013, I testified likewise that one particularly cavalier information sheet from OPG said, “…even if the entire waste volume were to be dissolved into Lake Huron, the corresponding drinking water dose would be a factor of 100 below the regulatory criteria initially, and decreasing with time.” This quip refers to 200,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste in over 50,000 containers.)

In his attack on OPG’s analysis, Dr. Greening reported that the company estimated the sorts of radioactive materials that would be in the waste—and in what proportions—instead of taking samples. “Estimating is cheaper,” Greening told the panel on Sept. 10. “OPG has chosen to skimp on the costs of properly characterizing [its] radioactive waste, perhaps because the analysis of just one sample costs over a thousand dollars,” Greening said.

Last April, Greening reported that materials to be placed in the dump are up to 1,000 times more radioactive than OPG had formally reported. Dr. Greening’s report devastated the company’s (OPG’s) public image and professional credibility.

After Greening broadcast OPG’s gross mistakes, the company said its errors resulted from the use of “available data” in 2010.

“This is simply not true,” Greening then charged. “OPG did not use available data, but used fabricated data instead.”

With cesium-137, OPG’s numbers “are 1,000 times lower” than the actual radioactivity level in some of the waste, Greening discovered. “[OPG] got these numbers wrong up front …” Greening said. “Why would I trust [OPG’s] numbers now?”

Replying to Greening’s crucial testimony, Dr. Stella Swanson, the chair of the JRP, warned that some of his information was “new to the panel,” and could for that reason perhaps be ignored. New information was supposed to been given to the JRP in advance of September’s formal hearings.

Dr. Swanson said the government panel will rule later on whether all of Greening’s materials would be accepted for review.

Louder and more robust objections to OPG’s Lake Huron dump plan need to be organized in order to make the Canadian authorities do the right thing. Senator Stabenow made a start when she told the press, “Canada’s proposed nuclear waste dump … puts our Great Lakes at risk of radioactive contamination that could have devastating consequences for future generations. I have expressed my strong objections to the Canadian government directly, and (this) resolution puts additional pressure on the Canadians to stop this plan.”

Eight Countries with Reactors Most at Risk of Tsunamis

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

By Andrew Topf

— Andrew Topf, who was an editor at mining.com, wrote a version of this article for Oilprice.com.

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Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

By Andrew Topf

— Andrew Topf, who was an editor at mining.com, wrote a version of this article for Oilprice.com.

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

Rose-Colored Safety Assumptions

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

By John LaForge

Radioactive waste generator’s “cavalier attitude”

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