Despite calls to slow down, NRC grants Vermont Yankee license renewal

Plutonium is forever
By LeRoy Moore and Robert Del Tredici
Posted: 01/29/2012 01:00:00 AM MST

"Whether to build the Jefferson Parkway or to turn Rocky Flats into a playground, the determining factor should not be commercial or residential development. The determining factor should be hot particles of plutonium.

A hot particle of plutonium is one that can lodge in air sacs of a lung or be moved via blood elsewhere in the organism. Wherever it resides in the body it irradiates surrounding tissue. A single particle of plutonium can damage more than 10,000 cells within its range.

Nobel chemist Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium in 1941, called it "fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts." Physicist Jeremy Bernstein recently declared plutonium "the world's most dangerous element."

In 2004, well before U.S. Fish and Wildlife received most of the site of the defunct Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory to manage as a wildlife refuge, it decided to open the future refuge for public recreation. Never mind that 81 percent of parties commenting on the plan rejected public access. In December the agency made a second decision to allow construction of the Jefferson Parkway along the plutonium-contaminated eastern edge of Rocky Flats.

Implementing the highway decision has been delayed, perhaps stopped, by lawsuits brought by the towns of Superior and Golden. It's a safe bet that if the parkway or playground decisions are implemented, future generations will curse us for it. For people will inevitably arrive at an understanding of plutonium dangers that today is not yet broadly shared.

Those promoting the parkway and playground are ill informed about the long-term hazards of plutonium. Federal and state agencies backing these projects base their support on assurances of a nuclear establishment intent on perpetuating itself.

The blindness regarding plutonium on the part of otherwise savvy people is reminiscent of attitudes toward germs in the early 19th century. Some few realized that invisible entities called germs existed and could cause deadly diseases, but many scoffed. By the end of the century, however, the reality of germs and their relation to disease had become common knowledge.

Plutonium particles in the soil at Rocky Flats will one way or another, sooner or later, come into people's lungs and lives, since, with a half-life of 24,000 years, it poses a radiation hazard essentially forever. Minute particles much smaller than germs get brought to the surface by burrowing animals, incautious humans, turbulent geology and extreme weather. Such particles can be carried near and far by the wind and inhaled by unsuspecting people, including children, the most vulnerable. Once inside the body, plutonium does its damage.

The late Edward Martell, NCAR radiochemist, pointed out as early as 1970 that the radioactivity from plutonium dust particles at Rocky Flats is "millions of times more intense than that from naturally occurring radioactive dust particles (uranium) of the same size. Minute amounts ... are sufficient to cause cancer."

Martell maintained that standards for permissible exposure to plutonium are at least 200 times too lenient. He called for the appointment of independent researchers to develop far more stringent standards. This has yet to happen. When in 1983 he heard that antinuclear activists planned to encircle Rocky Flats, he warned: No children or women of childbearing age should go near the place."
read the rest:
http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_19837234

Ace Hoffman Salem-News.com

Every American nuclear power plant could be closed down if Americans turned off extra lights and became energy efficient.

"(CARLSBAD, Calif.)- In the United States, radiation-related "safety" decisions regarding commercial nuclear power plants are handled very undemocratically. They are considered to be strictly the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. State and federal courts, public utilities commissions, state energy commissions, water boards, air boards, EPA, DOE, and everyone else whose regulatory authority touches on nuclear power will insist that you cannot talk to them about "safety." You must go to the NRC.

And the folks at the NRC think they know everything because they've: "watched a lot of valves get turned" as one NRC resident inspector actually put it at a public hearing here last year.

Somehow that makes them "experts" regarding the economic costs of genetic damage to embryos in the womb, but I'm not sure how.

Ninety percent of the NRC's funding comes from the industry they regulate. The five largest nuclear power corporations own nearly half of the 104 commercial reactors in operation in the U.S.: Exelon (17), Entergy (11), FPL (8), Duke and Dominion (7 each). Lobbyists from these and other nuclear corporations hound our Congresspeople every day.

There are about 4,000 people on the NRC's staff. Usually two NRC inspectors are on site at each location, which might have 1,500 employees (the number of workers varies with the work load, the reactor design, the number of reactors on site, etc.). Overall, less than 1/2 of 1% of the working public is employed by the nuclear industry.

Radiation is supposed to be carefully contained on site. Assurances of >99.999999% containment are given with straight faces. Yet for every atom split for energy, at least two dangerous fission products are created on average, which are the first in a long chain of perhaps dozens of "radioactive decay products," all of which are harmful to humans. Every radioactive decay is capable of destroying DNA (the genetic code of life), or any container the radioactive material is stored in. Some of the radioactive products are noble gasses or radioactive hydrogen, which are virtually impossible to contain. Yet containment is always promised anyway (and always with a straight face).

Although records are invariably poorly kept, 2011 was surely the nuclear industry's worst year for containment ever, because of Fukushima. A million years worth of promised containment has already left the containment buildings, and Fukushima is still spewing more poisons daily. No matter how radiation escapes -- willfully, accidentally, noticed or unnoticed -- it can give you cancer or make you sick in all sorts of other ways.

On March 10, 2011, the day before Fukushima, the NRC revealed to the media that Vermont Yankee, a poorly-designed old reactor in America, would be granted a license extension in a few days. After an earthquake and tsunami in Japan the next day, a slew of nearly identical reactors began melting down and exploding before our eyes. Did the NRC change their minds and delay their decision? NO! Did they want to find out if what went wrong in Japan was applicable to Vermont? NO! The NRC does not lack in hubris, or in skill in manipulating the media to its advantage. Every accident -- even Fukushima -- is an "opportunity to learn," and so in their macabre way of thinking, every accident, no matter how severe, can be considered a GOOD thing!

Five politically-appointed commissioners make all the "big" decisions at the NRC, and so just three commissioners constitute a majority. There are about 320 million citizens in America, so in a sense, these three people -- who are not elected -- control the fate of more than one hundred million Americans each. That's what we call "democracy"?".. .

Read the rest:
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/january262...

Nuclear Damage Control
Russ Baker, WhoWhatWhy

"What if you were promoting an industry that had the potential to kill and injure enormous numbers of people as well as contaminate large areas of land for tens of thousands of years? What if this industry created vast stockpiles of deadly waste but nevertheless required massive amounts of public funding to keep it going? My guess is that you might want to hide that information.

From the heyday of the environmental movement in the late 1960s through the late 1970s, many people were openly skeptical about the destructive potential of the nuclear power industry. After the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania in March 1979 and the explosion of Chernobyl’s unit four reactor in the Ukraine in April 1986, few would have predicted that nuclear power could ever shake off its global pariah status.

Yet, thanks to diligent lobbying efforts, strong government support, and a full public-relations blitz over the past decade, the once-reviled nuclear industry succeeded in recasting itself in the public mind as an essential, affordable, clean (low carbon emission), and safe energy option in a warming world. In fact, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has just cleared the way for granting the first two licenses for any new reactors in more than 30 years. The new reactors will be built at the Vogtle plant in Georgia, southeast of Augusta.

Even so, the ongoing crisis following meltdowns in three of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan nearly a year ago has shined an unwanted spotlight on the dark side of nuclear power, once again raising questions about the reliability and safety of atomic reactors.

In response, the nuclear industry and its supporters have employed sophisticated press manipulation to move the public conversation away from these thorny issues. One example is PBS’s recent Frontline documentary, Nuclear Aftershocks, which examines the viability of nuclear power in a post-Fukushima world.

What follows is a detailed critique of many of the issues raised in the program, which initially aired January 17, 2012.

In the program, NASA’s celebrated chief climate scientist, James Hansen—who has a penchant for getting arrested protesting the extraction and burning of the dirtiest fossil fuels—says that the Fukushima accident was “really extremely bad timing.” Though it was at the end of a statement about the harm of continuing to burn fossil fuels, Hansen’s comment begs the question: Is there ever a good time or place for a nuclear catastrophe?

Under the cloud of what some experts believe is already worse than Chernobyl, the nuclear industry and its supporters are scrambling to put as good a face on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster as possible.

Fukushima’s triple meltdowns, which are greatly complicating and prolonging the cleanup of the estimated 20 million metric tons of debris from the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami last March, present a steep public relations challenge.

Read more: http://whowhatwhy.com/2012/02/10/nuclear-dama...

continued from:
http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-damage...
..."As significant a problem as this ongoing contamination is, the biggest discharges of radioactivity into the Pacific—considered the largest ever release of radioactive material into the sea—occurred within the first seven weeks of the accident. At its peak concentration, cesium-137 levels from Fukushima were 50 million times greater than levels measured before the accident, according to research by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution chemist, Ken Buesseler and two Japanese colleagues.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much radioactivity contaminated the Pacific or what the full impact on the marine food chain will be. A preliminary estimate by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency reported in the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun in October said that more than 15 quadrillion becquerels of radioactivity poured into the ocean just from the Fukushima Unit 1 reactor between March 21st and April 30th last year.(One quadrillion equals 1,000 trillion.)

A report in January in the Montreal Gazette noted that Japanese testing for radioactive cesium revealed contamination in sixteen of 22 species of fish exported to Canada. Radioactive cesium was found in 73 percent of the mackerel tested, 91 percent of the halibut, 92 percent of the sardines, 93 percent of the tuna and eel, 94 percent of the cod and anchovies, and 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark, and monkfish. These tests were conducted in November and indicate that the radioactivity is spreading, because tuna, for example, is caught at least 900 kilometers (560 miles) off shore."...

Read more: http://whowhatwhy.com/2012/02/10/nuclear-dama...

It is perfectly possible to know. THe Soviet Kyshim accident led to little local impact and no distant impact.
.
The Fukushima accident, being several orders of magnitude smaller, will no have an imapact either.

Nearly half a million people were contaminated as a result of the Kyshtym disaster. Victims were seen with skin 'sloughing off' their faces, hands and other exposed parts of their bodies." "Hundreds of square miles were left barren and unusable for decades and maybe centuries. Hundreds of people died, thousands were injured and surrounding areas were evacuated."
This is but one event at the Mayak plant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak
(the source of some of the fuel used at Vermont Yankee and other US nuclear plants) which continues, with impunity, to dump radioactive waste into the environment.
Suggesting that there was "little local impact and no distant impact" from this event is absurd, heartless and deplorable.

Indeed.
.
But even for a horrific military-industrial accident like Kyshtim, the impact on the downstream oceanic life was zero. Also, even the local impact was so subtle that it was not detectable to American sattelite and high-fly espionage, and became known only through the reporting of Soviet biologists.
.
Talk of any impact of Fukushima on the ocean life, is thus the realm of scare tales and scare tactics.
.
When one also considers the immense disruption of litoral life by the very tsunami that led to the accident, the toxic petrochemical brew that washed from the shore into the ocean, one make come to understand what a bunch of gobbledydook radiation scaremongers are peddling.

The Mayak plant is about 1000 kilometres away from the Arctic Ocean, comparing the oceanic impact of the Kyshtym accident to Fukushima which is on an ocean shore only proves either your ignorance, or an obvious pro-nuclear aganda. I suspect it is both.

I might add that the area around the complex is considered to be one of the most contaminated spots on the globe. The Techa river was hopelessly polluted long before the event and radioactive contamination still prevents it's use as a source for dinking water or irrigation to this day.

The local impact was not "subtle" as you are trying to suggest, in an area of abot 40km around the site trees lost their leaves and vegitation died.

The CIA knew of this event, indeed it first became aware when an entire town went missing from satellite photos of the area, but kept it secret presumably to protect the US nuclear power industry.

Perhaps the CIA would of had more aerial photographic evidence if not for the fact that on May 1st 1960 a spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers was shot down while preforming a reconnaissance mission of the site.

Your attempt to reduce the unfolding radiological impact on ocean life off the coast of Fukushima to "scare tales and scare tactics" is a sickening and your comparisons to "the toxic petrochemical brew" does nothing to minimize the enormous impact a large scale radiological event like Fukushima wreaks, it will continue to poison the environment and humanity far into the foreseeable future.

If history is to be a guide, then the true impact will likely be supressed, records will not be properly kept, studies will be defunded if they begin at all and the nuclear industry will continue to place enormous profits over public safety while it hides behind a wall of government endorsed secrecy.

http://www.wise-uranium.org/epeur.html#CHGEN

"Leakages from Mayak reprocessing plant continued in recent years: A 2006 document of the Chelyabinsk district court reveals that then Mayak director Vitali Sadovnikov failed to prevent the leakage of liquid radioactive waste into nearby rivers between 2000 and 2004. The strontium-90 standard was exceeded 10-fold. Rather than reparing the leaks, the director set aside company money for himself.
These events fall into a period, during which the plant did process fuel for use in Swiss nuclear power plants.(Schweizer Fernsehen Feb. 8, 2012)

Swiss utility halts use of nuclear fuel originating from Russian Mayak reprocessing plant, in response to denial of site inspection: On Nov. 12, 2011, the Swiss utility Axpo announced its decision to no longer acquire nuclear fuel originating from the Russian Mayak reprocessing plant. The decision was made based on Rosatom's denial to allow an inspection of the plant.(Neue Zürcher Zeitung Nov. 12, 2011)

Zürich Canton government asks utility to halt use of nuclear fuel originating from Russian Mayak reprocessing plant: The government of the canton of Zürich means to ask, through its representative in the board of directors of the utility Axpo, no longer to acquire nuclear fuel coming from the Russian reprocessing facility of Mayak.(RSI July 22, 2011)

Zürich Canton parliament urges government to terminate business relations with Rosatom: In view of the denial of access for a fact-finding mission of the Swiss utility Axpo to the Mayak reprocessing plant, the parliament (Kantonsrat) of the Canton of Zürich has urged the Canton government (Regierungsrat) to terminate the business relations with Rosatom as soon as possible. The Zürich Canton is co-owner of Axpo.(Tages-Anzeiger Jun. 27, 2011)

Rosatom denies fact-finding mission of Swiss utility access to Mayak reprocessing plant: Representatives of the Axpo energy group have called off a planned visit to Russia, after being suddenly told they could not visit the Mayak uranium reprocessing plant. The official reason given by Rosatom, the Russian State Nuclear Energy Corporation, which is responsible for Mayak, is that the plant is in a closed military area.
In a statement issued by Axpo on Sunday, chairman Robert Lombardini said they were "very annoyed" at the fact that the visit, scheduled for the end of the month, had been called off at such short notice. Lombardini explained that the aim of the visit by members of the Axpo board of directors was to "throw light on the allegations and decide on the basis of new factors whether the reprocessing of uranium in the Russian plants is consistent with the requirements laid down by Axpo for sustainable energy production".(Swissinfo June 19, 2011) "...

I'm not sure why the NRC is being attacked so severely for approving new reactors. The new reactors will have state of the art safety equipment, and will be more advanced than any older reactors (the last time they approved a reactor was 1978). Proponent of nuclear energy continue to praise its small environmental impact. I understand there is always a risk involved, but this seems to be a long time coming.

There are some very serious unresolved potential problems with these new reactors and although they are being advertised as being "more advanced" and safer than the old reactors, that is not really saying much.
The really obvious problems with building new reactors are not just the unknown escalating actual cost of construction backed by incredibly risky loans even wall street would not touch with a ten billion foot pole, but the enormous enviornmental impact at both the front and back end of the nuclear cycle.
Mining, refining and enriching nuclear fuel is dirty, fossil fuel intensive and generates huge volumes of radioactive waste generally leaving the taxpayers to pay to clean it up.
On the back end, even after more than a half a century and billions of dollars, there is still no real plan to care for the "spent fuel" the now centuries radioactive, dangerous waste left over after the irresponsible energy giants use it for a few months to boil water.
Not to mention that a landscape filled with a lot of small reactors presents a huge security risk which the American people are not about to accept and the energy companies are not about to pay to properly secure.
The nuclear age is over, it has failed to operate responsibly in the free market. There are much safer ways to supply the worlds energy needs without taking the unnecessary gigantic risks that nuclear power presents. It is time for the US to pull all nuclear subsidies and concentrate on efficiency and true green power.

US nuclear watchdog questions oversight of safety enforcement

By M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/13/...

"The federal government's nuclear watchdog has faulted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for failing to follow through on safety agreements with nuclear facilities, saying its system for tracking corrective action raises questions about its oversight of nuclear safety and security.

After an eight-month audit, the NRC's Office of Inspector General concluded last week that the commission has no centralized way to oversee or follow up on documents confirming that a nuclear facility has committed itself to address "significant concerns regarding health and safety, the environment, safeguards or security."

The documents — known as Confirmatory Action Letters, or CALs — are one of the last measures before the NRC cracks down with a stringent binding order like suspension or revocation of a nuclear plant's license.

Because CALs are reserved for a small number of potentially serious cases — 15 to 20 of the hundreds of incident reports the NRC issues each year, according to its records — effective oversight of the confirmation process is of "utmost importance," the inspector general said. But in some cases, the action letters are so poorly drafted that they don't even make it clear who the intended recipients are, the report asserts.

Read the full inspector general's report (.pdf)
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NE...

Bureaucracy to blame
The problem is one of red tape, not willful inaction or neglect, the report says. But the weaknesses — which include lack of consistent guidelines for regional NRC offices, regional offices' failure to comply with those guidelines and some offices' lack of any tracking system whatsoever — "degrade" the agency's accountability, it says.

A spokesman for the NRC said the agency believes "the CAL process has been effective" and that it would have a formal reply "in the near future." In an informal meeting last month, the NRC generally agreed with the inspector general's recommendations to update its main enforcement manual, centralize tracking and submit to occasional audits of the action letter system, the report said.

If the NRC is to do that, it will not be with added staff or money. In its fiscal 2013 budget request, the agency notes that it's asking for about $128 million less than it got last year, including what it called a "cost-conscious" reduction of 25 jobs.

And those cuts are coming as concerns are rising over the safety of America's aging nuclear infrastructure.

Until last week, the NRC hadn't licensed any new reactors for more than 30 years. Consequently, many of the nation's 104 nuclear plants are operating under licenses that the NRC has extended for up to 20 years beyond their original 40-year lifespans.

The need to keep those creaky plants running means many safety problems arise "because reactor owners, and often the NRC, tolerate known safety problems," the Union of Concerned Scientists — a nonprofit science watchdog at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — warned last year (.pdf).

About two dozen of those plants use the same containment system as the one that failed when a powerful earthquake and tsunami breached the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, msnbc.com reported last year."...

The hydrographic basin for the area contaminated in the Kysthim military accident ultimately drains in the Arctic.
.
Significant more radioactivity got to the Arctic than at Fukushima. Actually most of radioactivity derived from the Soviet military nuclear program ended up in the Arctic.
.
Beyond USofA (which stayed mum on Chernobyl, too), other countries like Norway and Denmark have fishing fleets in the Arctic. Any observable disruption of the oceanic fauna would have been noted by independent sovereign countries, with no interest in cover-ups. None was reported, so no observable disruption ocurred..
.
BTW, I'm not pro-nuclear, rather anti-antinukular. Mankind needs nuclear powerplants to provide for its energy needs, not because anyone fancies radiation.

I do not agree with your assements of the Kyshtym accident, or your claim that "most of radioactivity derived from the Soviet military nuclear program ended up in the Arctic".
I would also have to strongly disagree with your position that governments or the fishing industry does not have anything to gain by not testing, reporting and covering-up radioactive contamination in the very product they depend on.
Furthermore, the Soviets abysmal track record in matters of radioactive dumping, monitoring and studying are well known.
The dumping of radioactive contamination in the world oceans is a complex problem riddled with international relations, enormous business interests and government endorsed secrecy.
There are billions of dollars in NOT studying the effects of oceanic radioactive dumping.

You might find this, albeit older, article interesting:
TED Case Studies
Arctic Sea Dumping
http://www1.american.edu/ted/arctic.htm

And judging from your apparently unresearched opinions, you do not seem to be much of a reader so I will include a link to this in touching documentary of this contaminated region:

Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/w...

As if a Runaway Train, the Nuclear Juggernaut Roars On
Karl Grossman
Posted: 02/14/2012 2:40 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/a...

"Last week's granting by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission of combined construction and operating licenses for two nuclear plants to be built in Georgia -- both Westinghouse AP1000s -- is the culmination of a scheme developed by nuclear promoters 20 years ago.

There have been huge changes in energy since. The consequences in death and illness of of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster have become manifest. Wind energy has become cheaper than nuclear -- thus is the fastest growing new energy source -- and solar is well on its way. The two troubled giants of nuclear power, Westinghouse and General Electric, sold out to the Japanese in 2006: Toshiba took over Westinghouse's nuclear operations and GE partnered with Hitachi. And then there's been the catastrophe at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant complex.

Still, as if a runaway train, the nuclear juggernaut has roared on.

The strategy for what happened last week was set with the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 1992. The vote in the House of Representatives was 381-to-37. "As the bill wound its way through the Senate and the House, the nuclear industry won nearly every vote that mattered, proving that Congress remains captive to industry lobbying and political contributions over public opinion," reported the Nuclear Information & Resource Service then.(The same could be said about Congress now.) The New York Times said, "Nuclear lobbyists called the bill their biggest victory in Congress since the Three Mile Island accident."

The measure, signed into law by the first President Bush, provided for "one-step" nuclear plant licensing. Previously, there were hearings held in the area where a nuclear plant would be built -- one on granting a construction license and, later, a second on whether to issue an operating license.

This presented a big problem for the nuclear industry -- not that the Atomic Energy Commission or its successor, the Nuclear Energy Commission, ever turned down an application for a construction or operating license. But at the hearings for a construction license major issues arose -- such as, with the proposed Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, New York, the impossibility of evacuation off the crowded island in the event of a major accident, important in the eventual stoppage of Shoreham. And at operating license hearings, whistle-blowers would emerge, often engineers and others involved in the construction of the plant, going public with testimony about faults, defects and dangers.

Under the Energy Policy Act of 1992, instead of these hearings, the NRC, sitting in Washington far from the areas and people to be impacted, would be authorized to grant in one move a construction and operating license. That's what the NRC did last week for the two AP1000 nuclear plants that the Southern Company plans to build at its Vogtle site near Augusta.

Westinghouse said in the 90s that with this "one-step" process, it would take but five years after NRC approval for an AP1000 to be completed. Indeed, that was what the nuclear industry was saying last week about the Georgia project.

Westinghouse also, before the Energy Policy Act of 1992, touted its AP1000 as an "advanced" nuclear power plant. The act specifically greased the skids for "advanced" nuclear power plants. It featured a section titled "Subtitle C-Advanced Nuclear Reactors" that stated: "The purposes of this subtitle are (1) to require the Secretary [of Energy] to carry out civilian nuclear programs in a way that will lead toward the commercial availability of advanced nuclear reactor technologies; and (2) to authorize such activities to further the timely availability of advanced nuclear reactor technologies.""...

continued from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/a...

..."To push the new system along, NuStart, which calls itself "a consortium for new nuclear energy development," was formed. NuStart, says further on its website, that it has been "formed to respond to a Department of Energy issued solicitation to demonstrate the NRC's COL [Construction and Operating License] process." NuStart has been working closely with utilities for them to utilize the one-step licensing process and build new "advanced" nuclear plants. As to its funding, its website says that "NuStart is participating in a 50-50 cost sharing program" with the Department of Energy.

Thus U.S. tax dollars have been and are being used for a system all but eliminating public input to get new "advanced" nuclear power plants up and running -- and fast.

NuStart lists 10 corporate "members." These include the Southern Company, Exelon, Entergy and other utilities committed to nuclear power as well as Westinghouse and GE. The president of NuStart "since its inception," says the NuStart website, is Marilyn Krey. "Marilyn is also Vice President, Nuclear Project Development for Exelon," it states. Exelon owns the most nuclear power plants of any U.S. utility. "Prior to joining Exelon, Marilyn was a reactor engineer and project manager for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," it goes on. Yes, the nuclear power-revolving door.

The chairman of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, voted against the licensing on February 9. He cited the need to "learn the lessons from Fukushima." Jaczko stated: "I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima had never happened."

But the other four NRS commissioners -- nuclear power zealots all -- voted for the licensing. "There is no amnesia individually or collectively regarding the events of March 11, 2011 and the ensuing accident at Fukushima," wrote Commissioner Kristine Svinicki for the four. No, not amnesia -- they all know of the Fukushima disaster, but with their staunch allegiance to nuclear power, they don't give a damn.

There will be challenges to the licensing -- which beyond being the first issuance of combined construction and operating licenses is the first time since the 1970s that the NRC has given approval for a new nuclear power plant. There were no applications to build new nuclear plants as atomic energy, rightfully, went into a deep eclipse for decades.

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy announced: "Our challenge maintains that the NRC is violating federal laws by issuing the license without fully considering the important lessons of the catastrophic Fukushima accident." It will also raise various safety issues involving the AP1000.

And there are many. Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts -- one of the few members of Congress not in the pockets of the nuclear industry or a national nuclear laboratory in their district -- earlier in the year wrote Jaczko, "These concerns include those raised by one of the [Nuclear Regulatory] Commission's most long-serving staff that there is a risk that an earthquake at, or aircraft impact on, the AP1000 could result in a catastrophic core meltdown." In a statement last week, he re-emphasized the finding made in a report to the NRC by its staffer Dr. John Ma, a structural engineer, that theAP1000's "containment structure could" -- in Ma's words, " shatter like a glass cup"-- because of "flaws in the design of the shield building if impacted by an earthquake or commercial aircraft."

Of the NRC's licensing move, Markey said: "Today, the NRC abdicated its duty to protect public health and safety, just to make construction faster and cheaper for the nuclear industry.""...
read the rest:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/a...

Fission Stories #80: Brunswick’s Headache
February 21, 2012
http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/18005258071/...

"On November 15, 2011, operators began restarting the Unit 2 reactor at the Brunswick nuclear plant located south of Wilmington, North Carolina. The reactor had been shut down 11 days earlier to find and remove a damaged fuel assembly from the reactor core.

About 17 hours into the startup, the operators observed indications of unusually high leakage of reactor cooling water into the containment building. With all the valves and piping, a small leakage rate is normal. But instruments inside containment detected unusually high leakage. A maintenance crew was sent into containment to repair a valve that had been leaking a little before the outage.

The workers completed maintenance on the leaking valve, but the leak rate continued increasing. At 2:12 am on November 16, the indicated leak rate reached 5.88 gallons per minute. This leak rate exceeded the maximum limit established by the plant’s operating license. Workers had a short time to find and fix the leak or the reactor would have to be shut down.

Workers re-entered the containment building and observed water dripping from equipment and running down the containment walls. The operators in the control room noted that the temperature in the upper part of the containment was 240°F, or 40°F above the normal temperature in this area with the reactor at 100 percent power.

The leak rate continued to increase. By 2:53 am, it reached 10.11 gallons per minute. The head of operations ordered workers out of the containment building. At 3:01 am, the operators declared an Unusual Event—the least serious of the NRC’s four emergency classifications—due to the high rate of leakage inside the containment. The operators manually scrammed the reactor (i.e., depressed two pushbuttons to cause all the control rods to rapidly insert into the reactor core and interrupt the nuclear chain reaction) at 3:09 am. As the temperature and pressure inside the reactor vessel decreased following the reactor’s shut down, the leak rate also decreased. It dropped to 0.13 gallons per minute by 2:38 am on November 16.

The following day, workers on the refueling floor were able to turn several of the retaining nuts for the reactor vessel head by hand. This should not have been possible. As shown in Figure 1 above, the reactor vessel head is the domed-shaped part on top of the cylindrical reactor vessel. It is fastened to the reactor vessel by numerous heavy-duty bolts and nuts around the dome as shown in Figure 2.

When workers had reassembled the reactor vessel after the repairs earlier in November, they used a stud tensioning rig to tighten the nuts onto the bolts. Figure 2 shows four stud tensioners (in yellow) suspended over four nuts about to be tightened. Procedures guided the workers on the proper sequence to install the nuts and directed them to tighten the nuts to 13,000 pounds per square inch force. The stud tensioner had a digital read-out. The workers tightened each nut until the digital read-out said 1,300. They believed that the value in the read-out window was ten times the pressure. In reality, it displayed the pressure. They had tightened the nuts to one-tenth of the proper pressure.

The procedure used a second method of assuring proper tensioning. As the nuts were tightened onto the bolts, the applied pressure caused the bolts to elongate. The procedure had the workers measure the bolt lengths before and after tensioning and ensure each bolt elongated by 0.041 to 0.049 inches. As workers measured the bolt lengths after tensioning, they noted results ranging from -0.001 to 0.004 inches. They assumed that these values were not actual lengths but rather the deviation from the target elongation of 0.045 inches."...

continued from:
http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/18005258071/...

..."Based on the measurement results, they thought all nuts had been tensioned within the acceptable range. But once again, they misunderstood what the instruments were telling them. The read-outs actually showed the elongation, or lack thereof. Because the nuts had not been properly tensioned, the bolts had not properly elongated.

A worker and a quality control inspector signed off each bolt and nut as being properly tensioned when in fact, none were.

The NRC discovered that formal training on reactor vessel disassembly and reassembly had not been conducted at Brunswick since 2000. Only 4 of the 13 workers who reassembled the reactor vessel head in mid November 2011 had been formally qualified to do the tasks.

Because the reactor vessel head had not been properly reassembled, increasing pressure inside the reactor vessel during the reactor startup lifted the head enough to squirt water out past the flanges. The water was hot, increasing the temperature in the top portion of the containment. And the water drained down into the basement of the containment where instrumentation recorded the increasing leakage rate."
read the rest:
http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/18005258071/...

Very nice demonstration of the multilayered safety of a nuclear reactor.
.
PWRs are a little goofy to operate. BWRs seem to me much less headache. For poor countries, CANDU's are the ticket, IMO.
.
PS. The majority of the soviet nuclear program, and nuclear explosions were done in hydrographic basins draining in the arctic. Some Hbomb explosions were done directly over the Arctic.

The NRC is a joke wrote:

As if a Runaway Train, the Nuclear Juggernaut Roars On
Karl Grossman
Posted: 02/14/2012 2:40 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/a...
"Last week's granting by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission of combined construction and operating licenses for two nuclear plants to be built in Georgia -- both Westinghouse AP1000s -- is the culmination of a scheme developed by nuclear promoters 20 years ago.
There have been huge changes in energy since. The consequences in death and illness of of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster have become manifest. Wind energy has become cheaper than nuclear -- thus is the fastest growing new energy source -- and solar is well on its way.

All false.