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Blast occurs at India's nuclear fuel complex
Index:
Blast occurs at India's nuclear fuel complex
Report: MN Nuke Plant Upkeep Criticized
Fukui reactor shut, 5.6 tons of coolant water leaked
Nuclear Waste Arrives at German Dump
Russia: Nuclear Material Missing
================================
ast occurs at India's nuclear fuel complex
NEW DELHI, Nov. 18 (Kyodo) - A chemical plant at a nuclear fuel
complex near India's southern city of Hyderabad was sealed and
undergoing inspection by atomic experts Monday following a blast
early Sunday that left no casualties, according to official sources.
The sealed uranium oxide plant in the sprawling Nuclear Fuel Complex
(NFC) at Moulali near Hyderabad was being inspected by a team of
experts from India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Commission.
The explosion, which officials said occurred due to the high
temperatures in the plant, was described as a minor one, though it
blew off the roof of the plant.
''There is no fear of any leakage of radioactive material. There is
no reason to panic,'' NFC spokesman T.V. Nagender told Kyodo News.
The uranium oxide plant converts magnesium diurinate into final
uranium pellets used in the fuel bundles of reactors.
The NFC is India's only complex that makes critical core components
for all the operating nuclear reactors in the country.
-------------------
Report: Nuke Plant Upkeep Criticized
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Inspections of two nuclear power plants in
Minnesota revealed ongoing problems with maintenance, failure to
identify potential problems and slow repairs, a newspaper reported.
An examination of Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection records by
the St. Paul Pioneer Press also showed inadequate monitoring of
critical safety equipment, poor communication among employees and
problems in assessing risk factors at Xcel Energy's Monticello and
Prairie Island plants.
In one incident cited by the newspaper, workers at the Monticello
plant were performing a ``hot shutdown'' of the reactor when they
used the procedure for a ``cold shutdown'' instead, opening some
valves and venting pressure from the cooling water that protects the
reactor from a meltdown.
Unless kept at the proper pressure, the water boils away and exposes
the reactor's uranium fuel rods, which would then overheat. In the
Oct. 24, 2001 case, the problem was discovered in about 15 minutes,
workers closed the valves, the pressure stabilized and then climbed.
The NRC said the plant's operators downplayed the incident and failed
to report it in a timely manner.
The incident involved some of the same elements as the accident at
Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Chernobyl explosion in 1986,
nuclear experts told the newspaper in the report for its Sunday
editions.
However, Michael Wadley, senior vice president of Nuclear Management
Co., the Hudson, Wis.-based company set up by Xcel to run the plants,
said the NRC didn't follow up on the event because of the low safety
significance of the issue.
Xcel also said it reviewed the NRC report and noted that, although
some areas for improvement were identified, at no time was reactor
safety jeopardized.
No one claims the plants are unsafe. From a reliability standpoint,
the two plants are considered about average among the country's
nuclear plants.
``There are clearly some much worse, and there are also some that are
much better,'' said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who monitors
atomic power issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an
independent nonprofit group.
-------------------
Fukui reactor shut, 5.6 tons of coolant water leaked
TSURUGA, Japan, Nov. 15 (Kyodo) - Kansai Electric Power Co. on Friday
shut down a reactor at the Mihama nuclear power plant in Fukui
Prefecture following a continued leakage of radioactive cooling water
from the reactor's container vessel since Tuesday, company officials
said.
Some 5.6 tons of cooling water had leaked between the time the leak
was first detected shortly after 1:40 a.m. Tuesday and early Friday
morning at the plant's No. 3 reactor, Fukui prefectural officials
said.
The officials said the leaked water contains low levels of
radioactivity and the leakage would not pose a threat to the local
community. The water is accumulated inside the reactor, according to
the officials.
The leak came from the primary cooling system of the 826,000-kilowatt
pressurized-water reactor and engineers shut down the reactor because
the leakage rate had accelerated nearly sevenfold.
Kansai Electric officials said engineers took steps to shut down the
reactor when the leakage rate rose to about 400 liters per hour late
Thursday, from about 60 liters per hour in the initial stage.
Company officials said the leakage, which occurred from a welded part
of a reactor container valve that regulates the flow of coolant
water, was detected by employees on a roving inspection of the
reactor system.
The power company notified the authorities of Mihama town, the Fukui
prefectural government and the central government about the trouble
on Tuesday morning, but did not inform the public until the early
hours of Friday, when it became necessary to shut down the reactor as
workers could not fix the problem while it was in operation, the
officials said.
The Fukui authorities and the central government in Tokyo did not
inform the public about the situation either.
Fukui officials said they determined the situation initially did not
warrant a public announcement because there were no changes in power
output and no apparent influence on the reactor's operation.
Local residents opposing nuclear power complained about the
situation, saying such incidents should be made public regardless of
scale.
A government agency on nuclear safety said it provisionally rated the
incident as being of the lowest level in an international evaluation
system.
An official of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency of the
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry also said the radioactivity
level of the coolant water was ''quite low'' because it has been
filtered.
Also Friday, Kansai Electric Power said in a midterm report of its
review of close to 100 occasions of voluntary inspections of nuclear
power reactors conducted over the past 10 years that the inspections
were carried out appropriately.
The report was presented to the national government and the Fukui
prefectural government in the wake of a series of scandals involving
Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s concealing of problems at its nuclear
power plants.
----------------------
Nuclear Waste Arrives at German Dump
DANNENBERG, Germany Nov 14 (AP) - A shipment of nuclear waste arrived
early Thursday at a dump in northern Germany following a trip across
the country that was slowed by determined protesters.
A convoy of trucks carrying the 12 containers of reprocessed waste
arrived shortly after dawn at the Gorleben waste storage site, about
75 miles southeast of Hamburg and for more than two decades a focus
of Germany's strong anti-nuclear lobby. With the loaded containers
weighing in at a total 1,320 tons, it was the biggest shipment yet to
the site.
Overnight, police cleared several hundred protesters from the road
along the 12-mile final stretch of road from a rail terminal in the
town of Dannenberg, where the containers were loaded onto trucks
overnight.
Accompanied by a fleet of police vans, the convoy set off from the
sealed-off terminal for its hour-long trip to the aboveground shed at
Gorleben, where it was greeted with loud whistles but no trouble.
Demonstrations were banned within 50 yards on either side of the
route.
About 16,700 police were deployed to guard the shipment.
Protesters caused a delay of several hours as the containers traveled
by train across Germany Tuesday and Wednesday on their journey from a
reprocessing plant in western France, repeatedly occupying tracks.
Police twice had to free demonstrators who had chained themselves to
the rails. By Thursday, 950 demonstrators had been arrested, with
charges being pressed against 67, police said.
Protests were mostly peaceful but the two groups clashed several
times, resulting in damage to 38 police vehicles and injuries to 80
demonstrators.
Waste shipments to Gorleben resumed in March last year after a three-
year break. The previous German government suspended shipments after
radioactive leakage was discovered in some containers.
Activists argue that neither the waste containers nor the dump are
safe.
Spent fuel from Germany's 19 nuclear power plants is sent to France
and Britain for reprocessing under contracts that oblige Germany to
take back the waste.
Last year, the government and power companies signed an agreement to
phase out nuclear power within about 20 years. Activists hope that
protesting waste shipments will force a quicker shutdown.
-------------------
Russia: Nuclear Material Missing
MOSCOW Nov 15 The head of Russia nuclear regulatory agency says small
amounts of weapons- and reactor-grade nuclear
materials have disappeared from the country's atomic facilities.
``Instances of the loss of nuclear materials have been recorded, but
what the quantity is is another question,'' Yuri Vishnyevsky,
head of Gosatomnadzor, said Thursday. ``Of those situations that we
can talk about in actuality, they involve either grams of
weapons-grade or kilograms of the usual uranium used in atomic power
plants.''
``Most often, these instances are connected with factories preparing
fuel: Elektrostal in the Moscow region and Novosibirsk'' in
Siberia, Vishnyevsky said.
He did not give further details on when the losses were discovered or
how the material might have gone missing.
The International Atomic Energy Agency lists two known thefts of
uranium from Elektrostal, in 1994 and 1995. In both cases, the
uranium was seized by Russian police.
The agency also lists the 1994 seizure in Germany of 400 grams of
plutonium brought in from Moscow.
A few grams of Uranium-235, the most common weapons-grade nuclear
material, would not be sufficient to make a bomb. But
reactor-grade uranium can be enriched to weapons-grade through a
complicated process believed to be possessed by some
countries trying to develop nuclear weapons, such as Iraq.
Russia's nuclear security has been a high concern in the decade since
the Soviet Union's collapse brought financial troubles that
reduced funding for state facilities and induced poverty that could
motivate nuclear workers to sell atomic materials.
Worries have risen in the wake of increasing terrorism, including
last month's attack on a Moscow theater by Chechen gunmen who
held hundreds of hostages to press their demand that Russia withdraw
troops from Chechnya.
``After Sept. 11 of last year, the situation with regard to security
at all Russian nuclear facilities changed for the better, but it
still has
not reached perfection,'' Vishnyevsky said.
He estimated that bringing security to its ideal level at Russian
nuclear operations would require about 6 billion rubles, or $200
million.
Vishnyevsky made his statements while criticizing a proposed law on
technological regulation now being considered by the Duma,
the lower house of parliament.
He presented a letter to the Duma from a number of prominent
scientists criticizing the proposed law for calling for ``the minimal
necessary demands for security at the same time that in the whole
world and in our country the demands for security in using
atomic energy should be the maximum.''
It also was reported Friday that a Russian scientific expedition
located a Soviet nuclear submarine and 237 containers of radioactive
waste in the northern Kara Sea.
The K-27 submarine was dumped in the Kara Sea in 1981, 13 years after
one of its reactors released radiation and it was taken out
of service, according to the Norway-based environmental group
Bellona.
Expedition members also examined what is believed to be the burial
site of the reactor section of another nuclear submarine - the K-
254, Russian Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Mikhail Faleyev
told the Interfax-Military news agency.
Preliminary tests of water, sediment and sea life found that
radiation levels are ``stable'' at both sites, Faleyev said.
Environmental groups say the Soviet Union routinely dumped
radioactive waste and nuclear reactors from decommissioned submarines
into Arctic waters off the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, a former
nuclear testing site.
-------------------------------------------------
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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