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NRC Study Says Storage Facility Adequate
Index:
NRC Study Says Storage Facility Adequate
NRC sees FirstEnergy progress for Ohio nuke restart
2003 Global Nuclear Energy Output No Record, Still Hefty
US nuclear facilities fail security tests - repor
FPL looks to increase N.H. Seabrook nuclear power
Tokyo museum renews exhibits on boat irradiated by nuclear blast
TEPCO raises cost forecast for reactor shutdown
=================================
NRC Study Says Storage Facility Adequate
WASHINGTON - The risks of storing more used radioactive fuel rods
from nuclear power plants underwater in adjacent pools are less than
previously thought despite the new specter of terrorism, Nuclear
Regulatory Commission officials said Thursday.
Farouk Eltawila, who directs NRC's division of systems analysis and
regulatory effectiveness, told a National Academy of Sciences panel
that "previous NRC studies are overly conservative" and don't "take
advantage of all the work that we have done the past 25 years."
The new classified study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, will
be shown to the scientific panel on Friday. The study shows that more
spent fuel rods can be stored safely in pools of water next to
reactors and that the storage facilities are well protected against
potential terrorist attacks, Eltawila said.
The storage pools are typically about 25 feet wide by 20 feet high,
constructed to allow for convective cooling and with racks for
storing the rods.
The implications of the new study are that power companies would not
have to spend money transferring the fuel rods to dry storage casks
until they can be buried at a permanent repository now under
construction at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
"Not only does it cost too much, it's not necessary," said John
Vincent of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's top trade
group.
Although he hasn't yet seen the study, Princeton University professor
Frank von Hippel called its conclusion an attempt to save electric
power companies billions of dollars. He said allowing more high-
density storage of nuclear waste will only heighten the terrorism
risks.
"It's very sad," said von Hippel, a frequent critic of the nuclear
industry and its regulators. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has
been captured by the industry."
The National Academy panel is meeting this week at Congress' request
to review the safety and security of commercial nuclear spent fuel
until a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain is completed sometime
during the next decade.
Von Hippel and German scientist Klaus Janberg pointed to their own
research showing that the risks are greater than the NRC believes.
They also noted that Germany and Switzerland require their spent fuel
pools to be built inside containment buildings, a feature that the
United States doesn't require.
On the Net:
The National Academies: http://www.nationalacademies.org
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
-----------------
NRC sees FirstEnergy progress for Ohio nuke restart
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 12 (Reuters) - Nuclear inspectors found on
Thursday that FirstEnergy Corp. had made enough progress in two
operations areas to support a restart of the utility's Davis-Besse
nuclear power plant in Ohio, an NRC spokesman said.
In a meeting with FirstEnergy officials, inspectors concluded that
the utility had cleared up problems from earlier inspections on
"restart readiness" and Davis-Besse's "safety culture", said NRC
spokesman Jan Strasma.
A second NRC-FirstEnergy meeting was scheduled for Thursday night,
and the Akron, Ohio-based utility said it would request NRC
authorization to restart the plant.
The 925 megawatt Davis-Besse plant, near Oak Harbor, Ohio, was forced
to close two years ago when it was discovered that leaking boric acid
had chewed holes nearly all the way through the reactor vessel's
carbon steel lid, a serious safety violation.
Gary Leidich, president and chief operating officer of FirstEnergy's
Nuclear Operating Co. unit, told the NRC "we have created a solid
foundation for sustaining an overarching and relentless focus on
nuclear safety."
FirstEnergy said it replaced the damaged vessel lid, improved
equipment, programs and procedures to run the plant, and strengthened
the company's awareness of the need for plant safety.
The company also put in a new management team for nuclear operations.
NRC spokesman Strasma said an NRC decision on restarting Davis-Besse
could take up to two weeks.
------------------
2003 Global Nuclear Energy Output No Record, Still Hefty
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Long regulatory outages in Japan
cut nuclear generation some 86-million megawatt hours (MWh) gross in
2003 from the 2002 output, reduced average output from 77% of
capacity to 59%, and was the major factor in a worldwide decline in
nuclear output of about 70-million MWh, to some 2.60-billion MWh,
according to an exclusive analysis by Platts' Nucleonics Week. World
average capacity usage dropped more than two points, to 76.4%.
Regulatory outages, mainly for top and bottom vessel head inspections
and repairs, were also the major contributor to the decline of U.S.
nuclear generation by about 14-million MWh, with average gross
capacity factor dropping from nearly 90% to just over 87%.
Nevertheless, both the world and the U.S. performances in 2003 would
have set records in 2001, so the 2003 showing still meant a large
number of operators were running their plants very well. South
Korea's units generated some 13-million more MWh and Russia's, 10-
million more than in 2002. The Czech Republic produced some 9-million
more MWh with Temelin's becoming fully functional, while Bulgaria
lost about 3-million MWh in part from the permanent shutdown of
Kozloduy-1 and -2.
And some nuclear units did very well indeed. Germany's 1,475-MW Isar-
2 broke its own 2002 record by generating more than 12.3-million MWh.
For the first time, the second largest generator was French:
Electricite de France's (EDF) Cattenom-3, produced 11.7-million MWh.
Every one of the top 10 generators worldwide-six German, two French
and two U.S. units-put out more than 11-million MWh in the year.
"For a decade, nuclear operators have been pushing their plants to be
more efficient generators," said Margaret Ryan, Platts global
editorial director for nuclear. "The reduction in 2003 output was
largely due to one unique situation and does not appear to signal any
downward trend in nuclear capabilities."
Since 1960, Nucleonics Week has been the leading source of global
news for the commercial nuclear power business, and annually analyzes
nuclear performance worldwide. For more information, visit
www.nucweek.platts.com
-----------------
US nuclear facilities fail security tests - report
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Security at two U.S. nuclear weapons facilities
was breached at least three times in mock terrorist drills despite
heightened concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a report
to be aired Sunday by CBS news show "60 Minutes."
Security measures failed at the Y-12 nuclear complex in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee -- America's primary source of weapons-grade plutonium --
and at Los Alamos National Laboratory near Albuquerque, New Mexico,
the report says.
The scheduled tests showed long-standing security problems had not
been adequately addressed despite the new terrorism risk, according
to the man who conducted other mock drills for the Department of
Energy leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, assault.
"People should know that the Department of Energy facilities cannot
withstand a full terrorist attack ... a realistic attack, serious,
state-sponsored," said Richard Levernier, a former senior DOE nuclear
security specialist.
A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration said the
news release for the segment was "misleading at best and
irresponsible at worst."
"Our nuclear materials are secure and it's irresponsible to suggest
otherwise," said spokesman Anson Franklin, adding: "These tests are
designed to find vulnerabilities before someone else does ... it's
wrong to suggest that terrorists could easily penetrate security at
these sites."
Levernier said there was a 50 percent failure rate in the tests of
factories and laboratories he conducted.
Chris Steele, the DOE's senior safety official at Los Alamos, said he
was in the process of giving the laboratory an "F" grade because of
"systematic nuclear safety violations."
The "60 Minutes" report cited other examples of lax security
including the disappearance of hundreds of electronic key cards and
master keys at nuclear facilities.
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco failed to
immediately report its missing keys, while at Sandia National
Laboratories near Albuquerque, locks to missing keys had just been
replaced after three years, the report said.
"I find it inexplicable and unacceptable that people don't take
(security concerns) seriously," NNSA chief Linton Brooks told "60
Minutes."
"And that's why we have been working to fix that problem."
Security at the facilities, however, was "perfectly acceptable," said
Brooks. "Safe and no problem are not the same thing."
-----------------
FPL looks to increase N.H. Seabrook nuclear power
NEW YORK, Feb 11 (Reuters) - FPL Energy said it will likely apply
this spring with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to increase
the capacity of its 1,158 megawatt Seabrook nuclear unit in New
Hampshire.
"We have not submitted an application to the NRC yet, so all dates
and figures are preliminary at this time. We expect to file by late
March or April," Seabrook spokesman Al Griffith told Reuters on
Wednesday.
He said it would likely take the NRC about a year to approve of FPL's
application, which would allow the company to start the first phase
of the proposed two-phase increase during Seabrook's spring 2005
refueling outage.
If approved, the second phase would occur during the plant's autumn
2006 refueling outage. Seabrook is on an 18-month refueling cycle. It
last shut in October, 2003.
Most nuclear units in the United States shut in either the spring or
autumn months when consumers use less energy for heating or cooling
because temperatures are more moderate than in the winter and summer.
When completed, the power increase is expected to add about 7 percent
or 100 MW to the plant's output, allowing the station to provide
enough energy to serve more than 1.2 million homes. Seabrook is
already the single biggest unit in New England.
When FPL starting talking to the various federal and state agencies
about the proposed increase, the company forecast it would cost about
$47 million to complete the project, much of which will center around
the unit's turbine.
"That is a very preliminary number. We have not even submitted our
application to the NRC, so it's very difficult to talk numbers at
this time," Griffith said, noting the company would likely update its
cost and timing estimates after submitting the application to the
NRC.
------------------
Tokyo museum renews exhibits on boat irradiated by nuclear blast
TOKYO, Feb. 14 (Kyodo) - A Tokyo museum preserving a fishing vessel
that was irradiated by the 1954 U.S. hydrogen-bomb test at Bikini
Atoll unveiled renewed exhibits on Saturday, two weeks ahead of the
50th anniversary of the blast and the deadly radiation fallout.
The Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall, which houses the 140-ton
Fukuryu Maru No. 5, hopes the refreshed displays and exhibits will
make it easier for visitors, particularly schoolchildren, to
understand the incident and the destructiveness of nuclear weapons.
"Many of our visitors are elementary and junior high school students.
The past exhibition panels might have been a little difficult for
them to understand and seemed to be something from the old days,"
said Mari Ichida, a volunteer researcher at the museum run by the
Tokyo metropolitan government.
Twenty-three crew members on the trawler from Yaizu, Shizuoka
Prefecture, which is known as the Lucky Dragon in English, were
showered with radioactive ash from the blast of the U.S. hydrogen
bomb "Bravo" on March 1, 1954. They were fishing for tuna some 160
kilometers east of the Bikini Atoll test site and were outside of the
danger zone defined by the United States.
Of the 23 crew members, 12 have died, most of them after years of
treatment of illnesses believed to be linked to radiation.
Among the new exhibits are clothes the crew members were wearing at
the time of the fallout, sympathy letters from people from across
Japan after learning of what happened, and photo panels showing the
sharp contrast between the tropical beauty of the Marshall Islands
and the suffering caused by the nuclear test, Ichida said.
The Marshall Islands government estimates that 840 islanders from
Bikini Atoll have died from health problems caused by the U.S.
nuclear tests in the Pacific from 1946 to 1958. Another 1,000
islanders still suffer from health problems such as leukemia and
other types of cancer.
Marshall Islands Ambassador to Japan Amatlain Kabua, former Yomiuri
Shimbun reporter Kiyokazu Murao who first broke the story in 1954,
and crew member Matashichi Oishi are among guests who will attend a
ceremony at the museum in the afternoon marking renewal of the
exhibits.
The museum, for the first time since it opened to the public in June
1976, plans to show its exhibits at other facilities in Japan. The
first exhibition will be held in Kochi, Kochi Prefecture beginning
Aug. 6, the 59th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima,
Ichida said.
The Tokyo museum is located in a park in Yumenoshima, which used to
be a garbage dump in Tokyo Bay and where the Fukuryu Maru was
abandoned in the 1960s. It is expecting its cumulative visitor count
to top 4 million this year, curator Kazuya Yasuda said.
The "Bravo" hydrogen bomb was 1,000 times more powerful than the
atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
But unlike atomic-bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
Japanese government has not recognized the fishermen of the Fukuryu
Maru as victims of a nuclear bomb and has continued to exclude them
from relief measures under Japanese law.
-----------------
TEPCO raises cost forecast for reactor shutdown
TOKYO, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) on Tuesday
estimated the cost of a shutdown of its nuclear reactors at 310
billion yen ($2.93 billion) for the year to March, widening its
November forecast of 290 billion yen.
Japan's largest power company also forecast its nuclear power
utilisation rate for the year at 30 percent, down from its November
estimate of 35 percent.
TEPCO was forced to shut down its nuclear reactors after admitting
late in 2002 that it had falsified maintenance data.
With only six of its 17 reactors back on line, the company has had to
buy huge quantities of oil and gas to run thermal generators.
------------------------------------
Sandy Perle
Vice President, Technical Operations
Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.
3300 Hyland Avenue
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100 Extension 2306
Fax:(714) 668-3149
E-Mail: sperle@globaldosimetry.com
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
Personal Website: http://sandy-travels.com/
Global Dosimetry Website: http://www.globaldosimetry.com/
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