WCS attempting to bring high-level radioactive waste to its West Texas dump

It’s official now.

Waste Control Specialists wants to expand its low-level radioactive waste dump in Andrews County to include the much more dangerous spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants. Spent fuel rods are classified as high-level waste, and are specifically exempted from being disposed of at the WCS site under the conditions of its current license.

That may change. As Odessa/Midland’s NBC affiliate NewsWest 9 reported Monday:

Legislators, nuclear waste specialists and more than 400 Andrews County residents gathered Monday night to discuss the possibility of storing high-level nuclear waste at a facility approximately 25 miles west of Downtown Andrews.

Waste Control Specialists (WCS) operates the radioactive waste site and is responsible for the low-level nuclear material already being treated, stored and disposed of in Andrews County.

Although opponents of the operation of the Andrews County were not invited to nor informed of the meeting, some allowance for comment has been provided. According to WCS president Rod Baltzer:

“Anybody with questions or concerns can also submit them on our website, WCSTexas.com.”

 

As of Friday afternoon, the only link on the WCS page concerning the new plan takes you to a 1 minute, 35 second YouTube video, which has a section for comments.

 

One of the most frightening scenarios concerning current operations at the low-level waste dump and even more so if WCS is allowed to dispose of high-level waste is a serious transportation accident. In the course of writing this post, I went to the NewsWest 9 web page and found two serious non-nuclear transportation accidents. One involved a major diesel spill on Highway 191, and the other concerned an oversize load hitting the Interstate 20 bridge. Serious as these accidents were, they could have been major catastrophes if either truck had been transporting low-level or high-level radioactive waste.

A new record: Two new British reactors to cost $37.75 billion

The headline in today’s The Spectator pretty much says it all:

Is the Hinkley C nuclear power station the most expensive object ever built in Britain?

Ross Clark writes:

We might not have much of a coherent energy policy, but we do at least have the honour of breaking the record for the most expensive object ever built. According to Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, speaking at the Spectator Energy Forum, the cost of Hinkley C nuclear power station, Britain’s first nuclear power plant in 30 years, to be built in Somerset by French power giant EDF, is now up to £24 billion. (That’s $37.75 billion in U.S. dollars.) ‘I’ve looked online to see if there was a more expensive object ever built but I couldn’t find one’ says Atherton. ‘The most expensive bridge was something like £6 billion and the most expensive building something like £5 billion.’ The cost of the electricity to the British consumer will be 64 per cent more than that of a French nuclear power station. EDF will be guaranteed a strike price of £92.50 per megawatt, uprated with the Consumer Prices Index every year for the next 35 years.

Not that I’d advocate it, but I wonder how much electricity you could produce if you put $37.75 billion one dollar bills in a pile and burned them?

Electrical fire closes Belgian nuclear reactor

Reuters reported today:

Electrabel temporarily closed a nuclear reactor on Sunday after an electrical fire, Belgium’s electricity transmission system operator said, leaving only three of the Belgian firm’s seven nuclear plants in action.

Electrabel, part of France’s GDF Suez, had to halt the 1,000-megawatt Tihange 3, southwest of the city of Liege, after several electrical cables outside the reactor caught fire.

Electrabel was not immediately available for comment. Belgian news agency Belga quoted a company spokesman as saying the cause of the fire was a technical fault.

“On Sunday morning, a fire happened at Electrabel’s high-voltage power station on the site of Tihange 3,” said a spokeswoman for Elia, Belgium’s electricity transmission system operator. “Due to the fire, the generation unit was automatically disconnected from the grid.”

It was not immediately clear when Tihange 3 would restart.

Georgia Public Service monitor says new units could be delayed beyond 2017 and 2018‏

What happens when you’ve got all your approvals for two new reactors, but the bottom’s fallen out of the nuclear industry after Fukushima, with continued low natural gas prices, general incompetence on the part of your contractors and the continued rise of market share staked out by wind and solar?

For Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the answer seems to be to hunker down and hope for a miracle, like proof that wind energy causes erectile dysfunction and gingivitis.

There’s still no proof of anything like that, so Vogtle is doubling down on the hunkering and hope that nobody reads the Augusta Chronicle, which reported last week:

Scheduling delays for two nuclear reactors under construction at Plant Vogtle are worsening, according to a report from a state-hired construction monitor.

William Jacobs, who monitors the Vogtle project for the Georgia Public Service Commission, wrote in a report released Monday that he thinks the new units will be delayed past their current forecasted completions of late 2017 and 2018. Based on current activities, “it is impossible to determine” when the units will be begin producing commercial power.

 

Fire at Korean nuclear plant goes undetected for over an hour

BusinessKorea reported yesterday:

A fire occurred in the nuclear fuel storage facilities of the Kori Nuclear Power Plant located in Kijang County, Busan City, but none of the workers was aware of it for over an hour.

 

According to the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Corporation, the fire occurred at 4:26 p.m., Nov. 11, at Kori Power Plant Unit 4, burning up a waste dryer along with some gloves and towels. It is assumed that the dryer overheated and started the fire while drying wet gloves.

Strangely enough, the firefighters in the illustration with the piece are not fighting the dryer fire. Rather, they are training for such an event in June of this year.

 

Ohio reactor shuts itself down after losing power to cooling water pumps

Yesterday morning, Ohio’s Perry nuclear power plant shut down automatically after a voltage problem rendered the reactor’s cooling water pumps inoperable. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported yesterday:

An engineering team’s preliminary investigation released early this afternoon determined that a voltage problem in one of the electrical panels supplying power to the pumps that keep the reactor supplied with fresh, purified water and the fuel rods submerged led to the automatic shutdown.

A problem with the same circuits caused the Perry reactor to shut down on October 20. As the Plain Dealer reported:

During a routine maintenance procedure early in the morning on that day engineers switched the electrical circuits to the pumps — and the second circuit failed to switch on, instantly leading the reactor to shut itself down.

Engineers traced the power failure in that incident to an electrical circuit card in a power inverter, a kind of transformer that switches the direct current produced by the plant’s generator to alternating current that powers the pumps. The company restarted the reactor on Oct. 27.

Oh, well. At least they got the reactor up and running for ten days before it crapped out again. Keep this in mind the next time you hear anyone talking about the reliability of nuclear power.

Event Reports: Loss of offsite power, seismic vulnerability, a dropped control element assembly and another and another Fitness for Duty violation

This week in nuclear power kicked on Hallloween:

1. Friday afternoon, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power facility in California experienced an unplanned activation of all six of the plant’s emergency diesel generators when a thunderstorm knocked out offsite power to the station. Unit 2 was offline at the time of the incident. Power has now been restored.

2. Early the following morning, operators at Michigan’s Cook nuclear power plant scrammed both reactors due to lowering condenser vacuum. Turns out the culprit was a condition described as degraded forebay. Cook says that thick grass and sand prevented adequate ventilation, leading to the drop in condenser vacuum.

The Event Report says that all systems functioned properly during the incident with one exception. The auxiliary feed pump for the Unit 1 tripped during the shutdown.

Today’s Power Reactor Status Report indicates that the Unit 1 reactor is back up to 48 per cent power this morning, while Unit 2 is still shut down.

3. On Wednesday evening, six hydraulic control units (HCUs) on the Unit 2 reactor at Quad Cities in Illinois were declared inoperable. According to the Event Report, the riser brackets on the HDUs were installed improperly. The problem with the riser brackets “could challenge the ability of the CRD hydraulic control unit to perform its design function during a seismic event.” Quad Cities continued to operate the reactor at 100 per cent while repairs were underway.

4. Also on Wednesday, a Control Element Assembly (CEA) unexpectedly dropped into the reactor core at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona. Operators reduced power in the Unit 2 reactor, but when the anomaly could not be fixed within two hours, the reactor entered a Limiting Condition of Operation per station operating procedures.  Shutdown was achieved later that day, and the reactor remained shut down as of Friday morning.

5. And a report filed Friday said that a licensed operator at the Prairie Island nuclear power plant had been found to be in violation of the facility’s Fitness for Duty policy. The operator’s access to the plant has been suspended and that the individual has been removed from duty.

Duke, Dominion and Exelon ask NRC for permission to run seven reactors to the age of 80

(It should be noted that the collapse of the cooling tower at Vermont Yankee, pictured above, happened in 2007, when the plant was only 35 years old. Cause of the collapse: corroded steel bolts and rotten lumber.)

I’m going to try to resist the temptation to use all caps, bold and italic text and a stream of exclamation points in this post.

According to a recent opinion piece in the Las Vegas Informer by John LaForge of NukeWatch:

 The chances of radiation disasters will increase further if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows US reactors to run for 80 years. This is what Duke Power, Dominion Power and Exelon suggest for seven of their 40-year-old rattle traps now operating in Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina.
These seven reactors were designed and licensed to be shut down in the current decade. However, since 1991 the nuclear industry has been granted 70 “license extensions” that have generally added 20 years. Now the owners want to push their units an extra 40 years (or until the American Fukushima, whichever comes first).

Then-NRC Commissioner George Apostolakis didn’t reject the idea outright. Instead, he raised a public relations concern:

“I don’t know how we would explain to the public that these designs, 90-year-old designs, 100-year-old designs, are still safe to operate, he said.”

LaForge begins the piece with a disturbing summary:

Weakening radiation standards, a cap on accident liability, reactor propaganda vs improvements, old units running past expiration dates, revving the engines beyond design specs …. You’d think we were itching for a meltdown.

The Environmental Protection Agency is currently considering weakening exposure standards following an accident. According to LaForge:

The Environmental Protection Agency has recommended increased radiation exposure limits following major releases. It would save the industry a bundle to permit large human exposures, rather than shut down rickety reactors.

The EPA proposal is a knock-off prompted by Fukushima, because after the triple meltdown started three years ago, Japan increased — by 20 times — the allowable radiation exposures deemed tolerable for humans. Prior to the meltdowns of March 2011, Japan allowed one milliSievert of radiation per year in an individual’s personal space. Now, the limit is 20 milliSieverts per year. This is not safe, it’s just allowable, or, rather, affordable, since the cost of decontaminating 1,000 square miles of Japan to the stricter standard could bust the bank.

Event Reports: Three TVA nuclear plants are downstream from leaking dam

Tennessee anglers may have to find another place to get their PCB- and chlordane-laced catfish if the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) can’t figure out where the dam on Lake Boone is leaking. In three identical reports posted yesterday on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Event Notification page, the TVA announced its decision “to accelerate the Boone Reservoir annual drawdown after discovery of a sink hole near the base of the embankment and a small amount of water and sediment found seeping from the river below the dam.”

The Event Reports were headlined: OFFSITE NOTIFICATION AND PRESS RELEASE REGARDING BOONE DAM STABILITY ISSUES .

The Johnson City Press reported:

When an Oct. 20 inspection of the dam revealed a sink hole — a common occurrence — TVA workers repaired it quickly. Six days later, an uncommon occurrence happened when seepage was found near the location of the sink hole at the base of the dam.

The reservoir is upstream of the TVA’s Browns Ferry, Sequoyah and Watts Bar nuclear power plants. The three plants have a total of six reactors, with Watt Bar scheduled to have another unit operational soon. The three reactors at Browns Ferry are Fukushima-style General Electric boiling water reactors that came online in the 1970s.

Despite concerns about the dam’s stability, all of the reactors at the three facilities continue to be listed at 100 per cent output, although you might not be able to entirely believe the posted ratings, as Unit 2 at Watts Bar is listed as being at 100 per cent, even though the construction project is still ongoing, and fuel has yet to be loaded into the reactor.

How severe was the leak at nuclear fuel plant Sunday?‏

Sunday night, something happened on the fourth floor of the nuclear fuel enrichment facility in Metropolis, Illinois. The facility is slightly more than 10 miles from Paducah, Kentucky, across the Ohio River.

World Nuclear News minimized the severity of the incident. According to a piece that appeared on WNN yesterday:

Honeywell’s uranium conversion plant at Metropolis, Illinois suffered a leak late on 26 October which plant operators said was contained by prompt action including water sprays.

Describing the incident as an “on-site leak” of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), Honeywell confirmed to World Nuclear News in an emailed statement that the incident followed “an apparent equipment failure in the main production building.”

Some local media reports added important information.

The West Kentucky Star quoted a  Honeywell official who said that the facility was under a “plant emergency.”

Paducah’s WPSD-TV received reports in the newsroom of a white cloud drifting away from the plant Sunday night. Plant officials said it was water vapor from the equipment used to contain the leak, although they didn’t say how the water was isolated from the contaminants or whether radiation testing had been conducted on the cloud.

Interesting sidenote: WPSD transmits from a tower in Monkeys Eyebrow, Kentucky. It’s a strange world.

At least the facility’s union employees were not exposed to the leak. They’ve been locked out for a couple of months. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The leak comes at a time the company and union-backed workers at the Massac County plant are embroiled in a contract dispute. Employees have been locked out of the site since August.

Interesting sidenote: WPSD transmits from a tower in Monkeys Eyebrow, Kentucky. It’s a strange world.

More as it becomes available.