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January 18, 2014 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Disaster Averted in Philippines

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2013-2014

In the wake of Super Typhoon Haiyan, which may be the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in the Republic of the Philippines, there is one issue the overwhelmed authorities there do not have to address: a reactor meltdown. That’s because the country’s one unit, the Bataan reactor, 45 miles west of Manila, was closed before it was ever loaded with uranium fuel. Instead of producing electricity and radioactive waste, the vacant system now serves as a global tourist attraction.

Completed in 1984, the Bataan complex was commissioned by longtime US-backed President Ferdinand Marcos, who imposed martial law in 1972 and whose family was rumored to have profited from the $2.3 billion project cost. The 620-megawatt reactor, built by Westinghouse, was supposed to have been the first nuclear power generator in Southeast Asia, and was touted as the solution to the problem of high fossil fuel costs in the Philippines. But when Marcos was overthrown in a 1986 popular revolt and Corazon Aquino became president, she refused to start the reactor. Her concerns reportedly included its location above multiple fault lines, its close proximity to an active volcano, and the frequency of typhoons that ravage the island nation. The decision, made just after the Chernobyl catastrophe, has been constantly challenged by nuclear energy proponents but also regularly reinforced by subsequent nuclear disasters, most notably the ones at Three Mile Island and Fukushima. The last of the uranium that had been flown in from the United States to fuel the reactor was removed from the site in 1997.

In May 2011, just months after a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi, the Philippines’ Department of Tourism opened the shuttered Bataan facility for regular tours. Visits to the site must now be booked months in advance, as tourists from all over the world — especially Japan — seek more information about nuclear power. Shortly after it was opened to the public, regional tourism director Ronald Tiotuico told the Philippine Star, “Hopefully, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant would serve to warn the global community of the fallout disaster that struck people in the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima [accidents].” Since Super Typhoon Haiyan flattened entire towns with its 195 mile-per-hour winds and 16-foot-high waves, this warning will ring more true than ever. — CNN, May 11, 2011; New York Times, Feb. 13, 2012; Philippine Star, Aug. 6, 2013; AFP News, May 11, 2011 & Nov. 11, 2013 — ASP

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter

January 18, 2014 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Big Players Abandoning Nuclear Future

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2013-2014

Why do Congressional representatives, TV pundits, FOX and CNN promote nuclear power? Its industrial lobby — the Nuclear Energy Institute, and others — spent $645 million over 10 years lobbying Capitol Hill, and another $63 million in campaign contributions, as American University researcher Judy Pasternak and her students have documented. Between 1999 and 2008, over $64 million annually went to successfully manufacture the “fact” that nuclear power is “carbon free” and can help fend off climate chaos.

Independent scientists and researchers like Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research (IEER), Amory Lovins, President of Rocky Mountain Institute, and economists like Jeremy Rifkin disagree. They have all demonstrated how a nuclear “renaissance” — to replace the 440 old reactors now rattling apart worldwide, and get to a total of 1,600 needed for a minimum impact on climate change — would require that we build three new units every 30 days for 40 years.

The impossibility of such a reactor-building blitz is evident all around us. Vermont Yankee, Kewaunee in Wisconsin, and San Onofre in California are all shuttered for dismantling long before their licenses expired. UniStar Nuclear Energy has cancelled a bid to build a third reactor at its Nine Mile Point station near Oswego, New York, on Lake Ontario. The reason? “The company told the NRC it was because Nine Mile Point 3 was not selected for federal loan guarantees,” said Tim Judson of Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

TXU, Inc., owners of the Comanche Peak station 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth, just announced the cancellation of their planned expansion. TXU had asked the NRC for a license to double the number of reactors there from two to four. But as University of Texas engineering professor Ross Baldick told the Dallas Morning News, “Currently, it’s just not competitive with gas. Nuclear’s capital costs are so high you can’t win on it.”

Switzerland will phase out all five of its reactors by 2034 and Germany, which decided on a phase-out not long after Chernobyl in 1986, moved up its schedule and will mothball its 17 reactors by 2022. Italy has renewed its pre-Fukushima promise to go nuclear-free, and Taiwan is on the verge of a phase-out announcement. Venezuela and Israel have both decided against nuclear reactor plans. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN in 2011, “I think we’ll skip the nuclear.”

Utilities & Corporate Giants Exiting Nuke Industry 

Scientific American reported last year that Bill Johnson, CEO of Progress Energy, one of the nuclear utilities filing for a construction license but with no plans to actually build a reactor in the near future, said in 2012, “Nuclear can’t compete today.”

Forbes reported in 2012 that John Rowe, the recently retired CEO of Exelon Corporation — which owns 22 reactors, more than any other utility in the US — said, “… let me also state unequivocally that new ones [reactors] don’t make any sense right now…. It just isn’t economic, and it’s not economic within a foreseeable time frame.”

Four years before Fukushima, Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of the most powerful reactor builder and nuclear advocate in the country — General Electric — said to the Financial Times, “If you were a utility CEO and looked at your world today, you would just do gas and wind. … You would never do nuclear. The economics are overwhelming.”

Two years ago, Siemens Corporation, Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate, announced that it would stop building reactors anywhere in the world.

The firm built all 17 of Germany’s commercial reactors and was the first giant company to announce its departure from the nuclear roulette game.

In June 2012, Germany’s gas and electricity behemoth RWE — with 72,000 employees and 17 million customers — announced that it too was quitting the reactor biz altogether. Instead, it would be investing in solar power. Until then RWE, the largest utility in Germany, had been one of the world’s most vehement defenders of nuclear power.

Today, Fukushima-Daiichi is costing its owners and the Japanese government at least $150 billion and its on-going radiation geyser is tainting the whole of the Pacific Ocean. Consequently, real players in big electric generation sound overtly anti-nuclear.

Unlike Congressional Representatives feeding at the lobbyst’s trough, or commercial television executives who feast off the industry’s advertising budgets, Wall Street is not buying into potential radiation gushers. Major investors might have closed their check books permanently after World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said Nov. 27, “The World Bank Group does not engage in providing support for nuclear power. … we don’t do nuclear energy.”

Major utility investors must smirk at the snake oil sloganeering about “safe new reactor designs” spouted in hoax documentaries like “Pandora’s Promise” — recently aired on CNN. They remember the wildly exaggerated, optimistic public promises made at the beginning of the nuclear age. In 1945, author David Dietz wrote that our cars, “will travel for a year on a pellet of atomic energy the size of a vitamin pill … The day is gone when nations will fight for oil…” Lewis Strauss, Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, would become famous for saying in 1954, “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.”

It turns out, as Arjun Makhijani of IEER has documented in The Nuclear Power Deception, “Commercial nuclear power from new nuclear reactors has become the most expensive form of commonly used baseload electric power in the United States.” — JL

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter

January 18, 2014 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Defective Reactor Parts Scandal in South Korea Sees 100 Indicted

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2013-2014
By John LaForge 

A vast conspiracy of bribery and faked certification of power reactor parts in South Korea has resulted in the indictment in October of 100 people, including a former top state utility official. 

At issue are what prosecutors say are fabricated quality reports concerning parts inside 14 (New York Times) or perhaps 20 (Wall St. Journal) of the country’s 23 commercial nuclear reactors. 

The scandal surfaced in November 2012, and five reactors were shut down following the discovery of the faked safety certificates. Several engineers and reactor parts suppliers were jailed for their involvement in the corruption. 

The scandal grew in May when two more reactors were found running with safety control cables that were approved using faked certificates. The government then began an investigation. Prosecutors have pledged to study over 120,000 test certificates issued over that last 10 years. 

Boxes of cash were found in the home of one Korea Hydro official, and officials of Hyundai Heavy Industries have been arrested on bribery charges. 

As a result of the May revelations, Kim Kyun Seop, President of South Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, the country’s nuclear reactor operating firm, was dismissed, and the CEO of Korean Electric Power Corp. (Kepco) Engineering and Construction, An Seung-Kyoo, was also fired. Kepco runs all 23 of the country’s reactors, three of which are not in use. 

Earlier, South Korean President Park Geun-Hye reportedly called the corruption in the nuclear power complex “unpardonable” and likened the industry to a mafia. 

What AP news reports called “fabricated Environmental Qualification test reports” falsely verified the quality of cables that “control valves responsible for cooling nuclear fuel or preventing the release of radioactive materials during an emergency.” The Wall St. Journal reported Oct. 10 that parts suppliers are “suspected of bribing officials to accept their products with faked certification.” 

Armand Presentati

The cables reportedly failed nine of 12 tests of their ability to withstand changes in voltage and pressure during a “loss of coolant accident” — the sort of meltdown disaster that struck Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. 

In addition to the defective cables at the four shutdown reactors, counterfeit cabling was reportedly discovered at two reactors now under construction. 

The defective cables have been replaced at several of the reactors, and on Oct. 28 the government and Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP) confirmed that $2.8 billion had been spent on the project. 

By November, the government had found that eight parts suppliers had sold KHNP 7,682 parts using forged quality certificates between 2003 and 2012. Last year the government said that over 10 years, more than 10,000 components were sold using fabricated warranties. One firm contracted to test reactor parts, Saehan Total Engineering Provider, skipped sections of exams, doctored test results and even certified parts that failed the tests. 

In June, 10 of the country’s 23 reactors were offline for various reasons. In October Reuters reported that three of six reactors currently under construction had been delayed by allegations of unsafe designs 

— CNN, Nov. 5; Reuters & New York Times, Oct. 28, Wall St. Journal, Oct. 12; and Agence France Presse, Aug. 13; and Bellona (Norway) June 11, 2013

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

January 18, 2014 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Wa$te — of Billion$

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2013-2014
By Lisa Kasenow 

Editor’s note: 

Cancelled, unused and destroyed reactors give the lie to industry boosters who speak of its “24/7 reliability.” Shutdowns, fires, explosions, leaks, meltdowns and hugely expensive re-builds add up to a record of nuclear malfeasance. The industry has been such a financial failure that Forbes magazine thundered from its Feb. 11, 1985 cover, “The failure of the US nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. …only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent. … The scale of the US nuclear power program’s collapse is appalling: 75 plants cancelled since 1978, including 28 already under construction…” By 1999, a total of 121 reactors had been cancelled, squandering about $50 billion in 1995 dollars.* Lisa Kasenow sent Nukewatch an outline of the more recent financial disasters: 

1. Ten partially-constructed nuclear power reactors have been cancelled. All 10 were scrapped more than 10 years after they had been ordered, and half were cancelled 18-22 years into construction. Three possible terminations — Tennessee Valley Authority’s Bellefonte 1 & 2, and Watts Bar 2 — are still under construction today, even though these reactor orders date from 1970. 

2. Nuclear power units scratched before construction work had begun number 117, and in most cases the cancellations occurred years after the reactors were ordered. 

Of the 117 reactors abandoned after being ordered, half of them were stopped 4-10 years after being ordered, and 20% were halted 8-10 years after the order was made. 

The TVA wins the gold medal for nuclear wasted money, because it’s responsible for the abandonment of 10 and possibly 11 federally permitted reactors. Bellefonte 1 & 2; Hartsville A1, A2, B1 & B2; Phipps Bend 1 & 2; Yellow Creek 1 & 2 and possibly Watts Bar 2. 

3. There are 21 fully-constructed and licensed commercial reactors that no longer supply electricity. These 21 commercial reactors were in operation for an average of 17 years each. Of these, 14 have high-level radioactive waste (used fuel) on site. 

The longest operating time for one of these reactors is 34 years, while the shortest was under one year. More than half operated for less than 20 years. Twenty-eight percent were operational for less than 10 years. Three Mile Island Unit 2 operated for one year. Pathfinder in South Dakota ran for 30 minutes. Shoreham operated for less than one year and then closed. 

* Arjun Makhijani, The Nuclear Deception,1999, p. xiv. 

— Lisa Kasenow is a retired physics, chemistry & biology teacher and fulltime anti-nuclear activist in Florida.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

October 18, 2013 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Vermont Yankee Joins Landslide of Falling Reactors 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2013

Campaigning for the shut down of the faulty Vermont Yankee reactor, thousands participated in rallies, parades, public hearings, nonviolent sit-ins, lockdowns and blockades. It will close next year. See the story on the back page. 

From left to right, top: July 1, 2012, 38 people were arrested with a “Trojan Cow”; Mar. 23, 2012, mimes joined a protest where 130 were arrested; The “Expandable Brass Band” in Brattleboro, Apr. 16, 2013. Middle: Linda Pon Owen assists Frances Crowe in chaining shut the driveway, Oct. 19, 2012; Robin Panagakos and Gregg Crawford joined 1,000 protesters Apr. 14, 2012; A flotilla about water pollution, Connecticut River, Sept. 19, 2012; the relentless Shut it Down Affinity Group, Sept. 21, 2010. Bottom: New Year’s day blockade, 2011; banner at the main gate, Dec. 13, 2011; a parade on Mar. 21, 2012; a 2001 protest. 

Below: An exterior transformer fire erupted June 18, 2004; and a worker leaked this photo of the famous Aug. 21, 2007 cooling water system collapse.

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter

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