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Two men held in alleged extortion of Arizona nuclear plant
Index:
Two men held in alleged extortion of Arizona nuclear plant
2 Japanese firms to join in building new reactor in S. Africa
Protesters sail to meet plutonium ship
Industry Tackles Packaging of Nuclear Waste for Yucca
Nuclear Waste Could Soon Pass Through Northeast Ohio
====================================
Two men held in alleged extortion of Arizona nuclear plant
FONTANA, California JUL 16 (AP) - Two men have been arrested for
allegedly trying to extort dlrs 92,000 from an Arizona nuclear plant
in return for the power plant parts for which they were sent to
determine the cost of repairs, authorities said.
Kevin Mitlo, 20, and Tony Mitchell, 31, were arrested Friday and
booked for investigation of extortion, grand theft and conspiracy,
and were jailed on dlrs 2 million bail each, authorities said Monday.
The reactor cooling parts — worth dlrs 3 million — were recovered at
a truck stop where they had arranged to meet plant officials. The
parts weigh 45,000 pounds (20,250 kilograms) and required a 45-foot-
long (13.5-meter-long) flatbed trailer for hauling.
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Generating Station, located 55 miles (88
kilometers) west of Phoenix, supplies power to 4 million customers in
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and California.
Jim McDonald, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service, which operates
the plant, refused to comment.
Steve Brownell, a local detective, said each of Palo Verde's nuclear
reactors has two enormous water pumps for cooling, and their parts
routinely require refurbishing.
--------------
2 Japanese firms to join in building new reactor in S. Africa
TOKYO, July 16 (Kyodo) - Two Japanese companies will take part in the
construction in South Africa of a new type of nuclear reactor called
the pebble bed modular reactor, officials of the two companies said
Tuesday.
The new reactor has generated high expectations with regard to safety
and economic considerations.
Nuclear Fuel Industries Ltd. will construct a factory to build
special fuel -- spheres of graphite containing coated uranium -- for
the reactor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. will be in charge of
developing helium-powered turbine generators, the company officials
said.
PBMR (Pty) Ltd., an international consortium including Eskom, South
Africa's state-owned electricity utility, and British Nuclear Fuels
PLC (BNFL), is planning the construction of the reactor.
The pebble bed modular reactor is a new type of high-temperature
helium gas-cooled nuclear reactor, according to Eskom.
It is designed to produce 120,000 kilowatts, and more than one pebble
bed modular reactor can be located in a single facility to create an
energy park, according to officials close to the project.
A PBMR energy park can house a maximum of 10 modules sharing a common
control center, allowing sequential construction of modules to match
users' growth requirements, according to Eskom.
Depending on the building requirements, the construction cost per 1
kilowatt of energy output would be around 100,000-150,000 yen, about
half of that for light-water reactors, according to officials close
to the project.
As the pebble bed modular reactors are small, the initial investment
is relatively low and fuel can be changed while the reactors are
being operated. They can also be run for six straight years,
according to the officials.
South Africa plans to begin operating a pebble bed modular reactor in
2007 and plans to construct up to 10 reactors in the future, they
said.
The reactors may also be built in the United States, they added.
------------------
Protesters sail to meet plutonium ship
Australian Broadcasting Company JUL 16 - A protest flotilla is making
its way between Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands to greet a ship
carrying plutonium to the United Kingdom.
The ship, which recently set sail from Japan and was last spotted by
Greenpeace near Micronesia, is now believed to be near Vanuatu.
Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner Bunny McDiarmid says 11 boats are
now making their way to Lord Howe Island.
"It's the point which we think they will come through because they
will want to avoid going into the EEZ (exclusive economic zone) of
Australia and New Zealand," he said.
"That's where all the boats will gather to send a very strong message
of protest to the shippers which are the UK and Japan that we don't
want to see these shipment on our waters again."
The ship is expected to pass close to Tasmania next Tuesday or
Wednesday.
----------------
Industry Tackles Packaging of Nuclear Waste for Yucca
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. JUL 16 (NY Times)— While lawyers, senators and
even an occasional geologist argue over whether Yucca Mountain in
Nevada is a suitable place to store nuclear waste, scientific
entrepreneurs around the country are focusing on a finer detail: how
the waste can be packaged to isolate it for 10,000 years.
The Senate's approval of Yucca on July 9 makes the question urgent.
So far, the Energy Department, which is in charge of Yucca, has
chosen conventional materials; its current plan is for a cask made of
steel alloyed with chrome, molybdenum and nickel, called alloy 22,
and a titanium tent above that. The department says it needs 10,000
packages, and plans to spend about $500,000 per package, so the
financial incentives are significant.
But some scientists doubt that anything metal can sit for thousands
of years without rusting in rock that has rainwater percolating
through it. A few are offering alternatives, including recently
developed ceramics and polymers.
In a laboratory here at Rutgers University, a start-up company,
Nucon, is showing off a scale model made of an odd new ceramic.
Ceramics are not known for strength, but this has the same
compression strength as steel, Nucon says. Ceramics can be used as
thermal insulators, but this one is cold to the touch, a sign that it
conducts heat readily. This is desirable in a material that must
isolate heat-generating waste that cannot be allowed to heat itself
to the melting point.
This ceramic has these unusual traits because it has exceptional
density and has been painstakingly baked in a process called
cintering.
Cintering gives it another odd quality. Tapped with a metal pen, the
model rings like a bell. The sound brings a smile to the face of the
company's chief engineer, Adam Khizh, who came to this country from
Russia nine years ago. "Perfect cintering," Dr. Khizh said. "The
sound is very clear."
Nucon's material is a spinel, or magnesium-aluminum oxide. Oxidation
(or, in plain English, rust) is the big worry at Yucca. But oxides do
not rust; they have already oxidized.
So far, no one has cast ceramic containers large enough to hold
bundles of spent nuclear fuel rods. Nucon believes it can do this,
although the model it displays is about the size of half a large
watermelon.
Dr. Jared L. Cohon, chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review
Board, a panel established by Congress, said that early plans for
Yucca had included a ceramic covering over the metal, and that this
was dropped because engineers doubted that the covering could
withstand rough handling. But a ceramic that could would be
appealing, he said, because it would resist corrosion far better than
metal.
Some ceramics experts are dubious. Dr. Delbert E. Day, a professor of
ceramic engineering at the University of Missouri at Rolla, and a
former president of the American Ceramic Society, said it might be
simpler to protect the steel by encasing it in concrete.
Paige R. Russell, the Yucca project's technical lead for waste
package design and testing, said that no final packaging decisions
had been made and that the design of the containers so far was
"conceptual." But for now, she said, the Energy Department has come
down in favor of a material it knows better: metal. She said the
project would probably choose proven rather than experimental
materials.
"We have to understand the performance of the material over time,"
she said. "We have to understand the performance of the material in
different environments, how to manufacture and fabricate the
material. There are a lot of positives to using materials that are
already known and have been used in industry."
Ceramics are used to stabilize high-level nuclear waste, but only as
a matrix material, not as a wrapper.
For low-level wastes — as opposed to the high-level spent fuel that
the department wants to bury at Yucca — the Energy Department is
trying a new material, a polymer foam that its manufacturer believes
will bind up radioactive materials indefinitely. But the big
challenge is spent reactor fuel, which will remain intensely
radioactive for centuries and has many components that policy makers
want to keep out of underground water for millenniums.
The Energy Department's early plan was for ordinary steel, but it
moved up to alloy 22 for better corrosion resistance. But alloy 22 is
harder to weld than ordinary carbon steel, and welds, experts say,
are where failure most often occurs.
The department's plan is for a "drip shield" of titanium over each
container. The containers would be 6 to 7 feet in diameter, and about
16 feet long, to be parked in a line, filling the tunnel like subway
cars.
Nucon sees instead giant, 50-ton elongated watermelons made of
ceramic, 18 feet long, with a wall 3 inches thick and an inner
diameter of 5 1/2 feet. The ovoid shape is a way to reduce the risk
of cracking the ceramic if it bangs into something; with rounded
ends, the force of impact would be better distributed around the
container.
Nucon believes it has made an important advance in being able to cast
thick ceramics. Making a thick ceramic is a challenge because
cintering requires even heating and cooling, increasingly difficult
in thick structures. Nucon's solution is a combination of
conventional thermal heating, plus microwave energy, which heats
evenly. It recently won a patent on a microwave device for a second
purpose: marrying together the two halves of the watermelon.
"Most of the leakage in metal containers begins at the point of
sealing," Matthew O'Connor, the company president, said. But using
microwave energy to fuse the pieces together would leave no seam, he
said. The ceramic includes a "susceptor" that captures the microwave
energy and converts it to heat. A proprietary technology allows
application of the microwave energy without heating the wastes
inside.
Another important characteristic is density, which is about 3.5 grams
per cubic centimeter, about half that of steel but far heavier than
most ceramics. With high density, or few voids, strength is improved,
and so is thermal conductivity, which is essential to prevent the
wastes from stewing themselves to the melting point.
Nucon raised density by using an optimized mix of grain sizes, from 6
or 7 microns (millionths of a meter) in diameter down to 30
nanometers (billionths of a meter).
The spinel begins as a material that looks like talcum powder and is
broken down further. The micron-range particles are made by
tossing the material in a ball mill, with balls the size of
marshmallows; the smaller particles are broken up by balls the size
of BB's.
The nanometer-size particles are highly reactive, meaning that they
glue together well. Using a radiation laboratory at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, Nucon exposed a sample to one billion rads of
gamma rays, 10 times as great as the exposure the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission requires of a cask.
The company has yet to demonstrate its technology at full size and
has not attracted much interest from the Energy Department,
but others find the idea of a ceramic appealing.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research and an outside critic of the department who
has studied its waste problems for 20 years, said, "Metal is a bad
thing to put into Yucca Mountain if you want to say anything with
confidence." Using a ceramic could increase confidence in the
containers' durability, he said.
The department has taken a brief look at another technology, a foam
called Ekor, which was sprayed over reactor rubble at
Chernobyl. It was used on one mound about six feet long, three feet
high and three feet wide that was giving off 1,000 rads per hour
— in other words, a fatal dose in about half an hour — and appears
unchanged after two years, said Paul C. Childress, vice
president and general manager of the nuclear and environmental
division of the company that makes the product, Eurotech. The
Energy Department is not persuaded, so far, that it will last for the
hundreds or thousands of years that will be required.
Mr. Childress, who formerly worked for the Energy Department, said:
"Rainwater would just simply roll off. It completely repels water,
whether it's acidic or alkaline. It's almost impervious to chemical
attack."
But it is intended to encapsulate small chunks of waste, not hold
large intact structures. It could be an alternative for another form
of
waste now planned for Yucca, sludges in tanks at the Hanford and
Savannah River nuclear reservations. Those materials, under
current plans, will be mixed into glass to stabilize them.
Ekor may also be used to coat the drip shields, he said. That will
allow the shields to be made of something less costly than
titanium, perhaps aluminum, Mr. Childress said.
Ms. Russell said, however, that the department was wary of polymers,
because they contain materials that feed microbes, which
can induce corrosion. So thus far at least, Yucca is planning an all-
metal solution.
----------------
Nuclear Waste Could Soon Pass Through Northeast Ohio
Cleveland, OH (local news) JUL 15 - Just last week, Congress approved
a plan to haul radioactive nuclear waste by trains and trucks
to a site in Nevada.
NewsChannel5's Paul Kiska reported that the trains and trucks might
be moving through your back yard.
A freight train derailed Monday in Medina County, but fortunately
there were no hazardous materials on it. Near Milwaukee, another
freight train crashed and caught fire.
Train accidents are not uncommon, and that's exactly what worries
Chris Trepal of the Earth Day Coalition.
"It's just a colossal bad idea to put it on a truck or rail cars," he
said.
Trepal lives about 100 yards away from one of 27 train crossings in
Lakewood.
Because of the government plan to haul nuclear waste by truck and by
train from plants on the east coast to a site in Nevada,
specially designed trucks would transport nuclear waste down
Interstate 90, the Ohio Turnpike and by trains on tracks that run
right
through northeast Ohio.
Opponents said that 365 trains carrying nuclear waste would pass
through the area every year -- one nuclear train every day.
"I'm afraid there could be an accident," Trepal said.
Lakewood was the first Ohio city to pass a resolution saying it
doesn't want to catch nuclear waste moving through its back yards.
"There's no assurance in the wake of Sept. 11 to what would happen in
a terrorist attack sabotage or an accident," said Denis Dunn
of the Lakewood City Council.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must approve the plan to transport
nuclear waste across the country. Trepal said that protests are
planned to urge the NRC to derail the idea.
"I don't want to be chased away from my home by a very scary
situation," he said.
To find out where in your city nuclear waste could pass through,
visit the Environmental Working Group's Web site. At the site, click
on the mapscience.org link and then put in your zip code for a
nuclear waste route map.
-------------------------------------------------
Sandy Perle
Director, Technical
ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Service
ICN Plaza, 3300 Hyland Avenue
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100 Extension 2306
Fax:(714) 668-3149
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
E-Mail: sperle@icnpharm.com
Personal Website: http://sandy-travels.com/
ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com/
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