Majority of Americans oppose nuclear power in new Gallup poll

Gallup reported yesterday:

For the first time since Gallup first asked the question in 1994, a majority of Americans say they oppose nuclear energy. The 54% opposing it is up significantly from 43% a year ago, while the 44% who favor using nuclear energy is down from 51%.

Gallup found that support for nuclear power declined among Democrats and Republicans:

Republicans continue to be more likely than Democrats and independents to be in favor of nuclear energy. Still, support for the use of nuclear energy among Republicans and Democrats has declined in comparison to 2015. A slight majority of Republicans, 53%, are in favor of nuclear energy, down significantly from 68% last year. One in three Democrats, 34%, favor it, down from 42% in 2015. Independents’ support is essentially unchanged from last year, but is down from the high Gallup found in 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

Explosion and fire cause Alert declaration at South Carolina nuclear power plant

Yesterday afternoon, an explosion and fire took place in the Unit 1 transformer at the Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, South Carolina. The reactor shut itself  down as a result of the incident. According to a report filed today with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Oconee asked for additional assistance for its on-site fire brigade, with three nearby units responding.

Initially, the incident caused plant operators to declare an Unusual Event, the lowest level of emergency under NRC guidelines. However, following the discovery of damage to overhead cables that provide power to all three reactors at the facility, the emergency level was raised to an Alert.

Almost two hours after the initial explosion, the fire was declared out. Three hours after that, the emergency declaration was lifted. The cause of the transformer explosion is still under investigation.

 

Another warning sign: EDF’s CFO resigns over Hinkley Point costs

Expatica reported today:

The chief financial officer of French energy giant EDF, Thomas Piquemal, has resigned over a disagreement about the feasibility of an ambitious project to build Britain’s first new nuclear power plant in decades, a source close to the matter told AFP on Sunday, confirming a Bloomberg report.

“The chief financial officer presented his resignation last week to Jean-Bernard Levy (CEO) because of a disagreement over Hinkley Point,” the source said.

Construction estimates for the two new reactors have reached a staggering 18 billion pounds, which translates to 25 billion dollars.

 

Event Reports: A scram, a radiation release at a recycling center and yet another drunk supervisor

 

Just a few items from this week’s Event Reports at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission website:

1. On Wednesday, the Seabrook nuclear station informed the NRC that the facility’s sole reactor had shut itself down just before 3 am following a turbine trip. Cause of the turbine trip is under investigation.
2. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Radiation Protection reported an incident to the NRC that took place almost ten days earlier. PSC Metals in Beaver Falls noted high radiation levels in its shredder. Apparently, they had shredded a large radium source that and then shipped the scrapped metal to two destinations without performing a required outbound radiation monitoring. (I wonder  why the facility was not required to monitor incoming material, which would have prevented the shredding from happening in the first place.) The shredder was isolated and additional radiation monitoring was done, which showed some contamination to the gloves of two employees.
3. And on Monday, the Grand Gulf station in Mississippi reported that a contract supervisor had failed a followup Fitness for Duty test for alcohol. The supervisor’s access to all Entergy facilities has been terminated.

Bird poop caused Indian Point closure

I now that this site has been silent for several months now, but I couldn’t think of a better way to begin again.

Albany’s The Journal News reported today:

Bird droppings are likely to blame for the brief shutdown of one of the Indian Point Energy Center’s reactors last December, according to the nuclear plant’s owner.

Excrement from large birds — known as “bird streamers” — appears to have damaged outdoor transmission insulators connected to the Buchanan plant’s Unit 3, creating an electrical disturbance that caused the nuclear reactor to automatically trip, Entergy Corp. wrote in a Feb. 11 federal filing.

Yet another nail in the coffin for the argument that nuclear power plants are more reliable than other forms of power generation,

Coming soon to a railroad near you: The Plutonium Express

 

There are these two holes in the ground, one in West Texas and one in eastern New Mexico, and the owners are fighting over who can bury the worst radioactive nightmares imaginable. The problem is that every imaginable route to the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) site and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant(WIPP) runs through somebody’s backyard, usually mine.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, which never met a piece of glowing garbage that it didn’t like, reposted an article today on its NEI SmartBrief from yesterday’s Carlsbad Current-Argus. The Current-Argus article outlines perhaps the most frightening project yet for WIPP:

The likelihood that the Department of Energy might use the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad to dispose of surplus weapons plutonium increased this past week.A report that provided a cost estimate of a “federal mixed oxide nuclear program” from the Department of Energy was released Saturday. The report indicates that the DOE is considering using WIPP as a lower cost alternative to the oxide nuclear program. The mixed oxide nuclear program, or MOX, is intended to convert plutonium from surplus nuclear weapons into commercial nuclear fuel.It appears that the plan is not to store and process plutonium at WIPP, but to keep it forever. The Current-Argus reported that the changes to the MOXX program were outlined in a report to Congress:The report was required by the Omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in mid-December to review the costs of two plutonium disposition options.

It states that a cost-effective alternative to the MOX program would be down-blending the surplus weapons plutonium and having it packaged for final disposal at WIPP.

One small detour — WIPP is still recovering from an accident last year:

To send plutonium for disposal at WIPP, the repository would first have to be reopened fully. The facility has been closed since February 2014 after a salt truck fire and radiological release forced a shutdown.

Something that I had been blocking from my memory is that WIPP already stores some plutonium on site. Tom Clements is the director of the environmental group Savannah River Site Watch:

“Savannah has shipped some plutonium to WIPP before; it is on the surface. And I believe they have more plutonium ready to ship,” Clements said.

And there are plans for more, whether or not the MOXX proposal happens:

Jim Giusti, the DOE spokesman for the Savannah River Site, confirmed that Savannah does still have a small amount of plutonium at their site for shipment, waiting for WIPP to reopen.

Some good news: Japanese court blocks restart of two reactors

Reuters reported today:

A Japanese court on Tuesday issued an injunction to prevent the restart of two reactors citing safety concerns, in a blow to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push to return to atomic energy four years after the Fukushima crisis.

It is the second court ruling in less than a year against reactors operated by Kansai Electric Power, the country’s most nuclear-reliant utility before Fukushima.

The ruling is seen as a major setback to Japan’s nuclear industry:

The ruling is a snub to Japan’s beefed up nuclear safety after Fukushima and threatens to set back government plans to restart reactors deemed safe by the atomic regulator.

Kansai’s reactors, located on the coast of Fukui prefecture in western Japan, have met basic safety regulations set by Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRA) and were expected to be restarted some time this year.

“The fact that the court ruled in favor of the injunction after regulators had already given the go-ahead carries weight and will have an impact,” said Hiroshi Segi, a former judge who is now critical of the judicial system because he feels it is often reluctant to challenge government policy.

The decision constitutes a significant loss for Kansai Electric:

Kansai Electric said it would appeal the decision, but it could mean months, even years of delays and hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for the utility, which is about to report a fourth annual loss since Fukushima.

More legal actions are pending against the industry:

Judges are now considering injunctions that could halt the restarts and indefinitely extend the countrywide shutdown of Japan’s 43 operable reactors.

A ruling on a similar injunction against a Kyushu Electric Power Co plant in southern Japan is scheduled for April 22. Kyushu Electric’s Sendai station is “very close” to being approved for restart, an official at the regulator told Reuters last week.

Event Reports: Seismic monitor reviews reveal many outages

I’m trying to play catch up after not posting anything in quite a length of time. I’ve decided to do a series of longitudinal reviews of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Event Notification Reports for the last month covering a number of subjects, beginning with seismic warning capabilities. The nation’s nuclear power plants have been tasked with reviewing seismic monitoring capabilities in the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami. There were five items in the March reports.

1. On March 20, Illinois’ Byron nuclear power plant submitted a report titled Seismic monitor not available for Emergency Plan Assessment:

“…this notification reports a loss of Emergency Preparedness assessment capability with the unplanned inoperable condition for the Byron seismic monitor. Specifically, the seismic monitor was declared non-functional at 0345 CST on March 7, 2015 following an unplanned loss of the seismic monitoring central computer. This condition adversely impacted the capability to perform an ALERT EAL (HA4) assessment in accordance with the Radiological Emergency Plan Annex.”

In addition, plant operators reported:

“…Byron Station has identified six previous occurrences where the Seismic Monitor was declared non-functional, which impacted the capability to perform an ALERT EAL (HA4) assessment in accordance with the Radiological Emergency Plan Annex. These occurred on November 6, 2014; April17, 2013; January 2, 2013; October 10, 2012; July 18, 2012 and July 9, 2012.

2. On March 27, the LaSalle facility, also in Illinois, “identified 6 times in the past 3 years that the seismic monitor was inoperable such that emergency classification at the ALERT level could not be obtained with site instrumentation.”

3. Also on March 27, Illinois’ Quad Cities nuke reported that its review had found three occasions when “the seismograph was non-functional….”

4. On March 30, Braidwood (Illinois again) reported five instances when seismic monitoring equipment was not available.

5. And also on that day, Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reported out monitoring outage in the three year review.

Interesting fact: All five plants are operated by Exelon.

Event Reports: A plethora of low level radioactive waste incidents

 

After having spent the better part of the morning tilting with the Texas Low Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission, I thought I’d focus on a month or so of Nuclear Regulatory Commission Event Reports on the kinds of waste that are supposed (in theory) to be regulated by the Commission.

1. Everybody knows that delivery services sometimes screw up, but you’d think that carriers would be extra careful when it comes to radioactive materials. Well, you’d be wrong. QSA Global of Baton Rouge notified the NRC on February 10, 2015, of an incident that occurred the previous day when ” the common carrier delivered a ‘crate/container’ of [Radioactive Materials] RAM to the Baton Rouge, LA address that was intended for Seoul, South Korea.” But it was an error that was easy to understand: “The labeling on one of the Korean containers was not legible or missing….”

The shipment consisted of three containers, one of which was bound for Louisiana. The third box was supposed to go to South Korea.

I did some shipping and receiving long ago when I worked in a record store. (Long enough ago that there were still record stores.) There were some hard and fast rules: Every box needed to have a label and the label needed to have a “_ of _” piece count on it. Also, I wouldn’t sign for anything where the number of boxes didn’t match the shipping paperwork. But I guess Sound Warehouse was a little more organized than QSA Global.

But maybe getting the right number of copies of the new Dead Kennedys album needs more attention to detail than does the shipment of Iridium-192, which is what was dropped off eight thousand miles short of its intended destination.

2. On February 11, B&W Nuclear Operating Group of Lynchburg, Virginia, submitted an update on a previous Event Report on an incident that had taken place at its uranium fuel fabrication facility. Seems that scrap material (contaminated filters, vacuum cleaner bags and other industry detritus) is processed in the Low Level Dissolver, ” to reclaim as much of the uranium as possible.” According to the Event Report:

“On occasion during processing a slight amount of material will spill over the edge of the dissolver trays, filter bowls, or when hand-transferring material between the trays and filter bowls. These small spills collect on a large catch tray in the bottom of the enclosure. Periodically the catch tray is cleaned to limit the amount of material buildup. By procedure the solid material is to be scraped up and collected in a [less than or equal to] 2.5 liter container.”

But, apparently the safety procedures proved too complicated for the technicians:

“On January 9, 2015, the LLD process was shutdown and the enclosure was undergoing a routine cleanout. However on this occasion the operators scraped the material on the tray into several piles for subsequent collection into containers. The volume of most of the piles exceeded the 2.5 liter limit.”

The ever-vigilant NRC summarized the safety implications:

The scenarios for the handling of materials containing an unknown amount of U-235 assume the material is containerized rather than in piles. Some of the IROFS credited in these scenarios were therefore not available for the collection of the material in piles. Although the as-found condition presented no safety concern, the scenarios as documented in the ISA [Integrated Safety Analysis] did not demonstrate the performance requirements of 10 CFR 70.61 were maintained.”

But nothing blew up, so the NRC is satisfied:

“There was no immediate risk of a criticality or threat to the safety of workers or the public as a result of this event.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the seven scariest words in the English language are: “The public was never in any danger.”

3. Another transportation incident took place on Feb. 13, this time in Florida

“[The common carrier] was delivering 2 packages from CA to Isoaid in Port Richey (they dispose of the used material sent in by customers). The boxes at some point fell out of the truck and they were not discovered missing until the driver reached Isoaid. It is not known the exact time this [occurred], the phone call to the BRC [Bureau of Radiation Control] was at 1:40 pm. They did locate them but one package was run over and (1) I-125 seed was missing from the box.”

4. And while we’re talking about things falling off the back of trucks…. I don’t know why this report didn’t appear on the NRC page until February 18, since it happened three weeks earlier:

“On January 26, 2015, the licensee notified the Agency [State of Texas] that one of its technicians had left a temporary job site in Fort Worth and after traveling approximately 30 minutes toward another job site, he realized the tailgate was down [and the gauge was missing]. When he left the first site, he had left the Humboldt 5001EZ moisture/density gauge (SN: 3613), containing one 10 millicurie cesium-137 source and one 40 millicurie americium-241/beryllium source, on the tailgate and not secured in the back of the vehicle. The technician returned to the site and looked for the gauge.”

Apparently the driver wasn’t the only person looking for unsecured nuclear materials:

“Other construction workers at the site did produce the carrying case and the lock that had been on it, the standard block, and the flattening plate but not the gauge. The licensee is notifying local law enforcement and will return to the site in the morning with reward offer.”

5. In the category When Medical Devices Attack, there is this:

“On Friday, February 13, 2015, the Wisconsin Radiation Protection Section received notice from the Radiation Safety Officer (RSO) of Marshfield Clinic that their Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion gamma stereotactic radiosurgery unit failed to function as designed. The Gamma Knife unit became stuck open and staff had to manually retract the patient bed and close the shielding doors on the unit.”

Hope the patient was sedated during the procedure.

6. On February 23, the State of Pennsylvania finally found out what set off the radiation monitors at a landfill on January 23. According to the original Event Report:

“A Pennsylvania landfill rejected a load of garbage based on elevated radiation readings (188 uR/h) and sent it back to NJ. PA identified the nuclides as Mn-54 and Co-57. [A New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP)] inspector went to the NJ garbage facility to verify the readings and nuclides.

“[NJDEP informed] the waste facility that [they] would be coming to observe the separation/isolation process, but [before the] inspector got there, they had already done everything. According to the facility personnel, there was a bag of metal parts (they opened it up), but had double bagged it by the time [the inspector] got there. [The] inspector got 23 mR/h on contact, 849 uR/h at 1 foot and 62 uR/h at 1 meter. Discussions revealed that no one picked it up with their hands and they were not near the source for very long.”

The update identified the culprit:

“The radioactive item was determined to be a small metal foil. No specific point of origin could be determined.”

Think I’ll wrap up here, although there’s plenty more where this came from. If you’d like to play along, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission posts Event Notification Reports Monday through Friday (excluding holidays) at www.nrc.gov.

 

Water leak forces shutdown at Pennsylvania nuke

Allentown, Pennsylvania’s The Morning Call reported yesterday:

A water leak forced the shutdown of PPL Susquehanna nuclear power plant Unit 1 early Saturday morning.

PPL Susquehanna, a subsidiary of PPL Corp. in Allentown, described the problem in a press release as “a small water leak inside the containment structure” surrounding the reactor. 

One of the more frustrating things in following nuclear issues is separating fact from press release. As The Morning Call reported:

“Although the water leak is well within the plant’s limits for continued safe operation, operators began shutting the unit down as a conservative measure to complete repairs and enhance the unit’s reliability for the upcoming winter, when cold weather drives higher electricity use,” PPL said.

PPL expects to quickly identify the source of the water leak, complete repairs and resume generating electricity.

Hope to know more after tomorrow’s NRC Event Reports.