Safety concerns for Gulf Coast plants following BP oil spill

Watchdog groups are warning about the BP oil spill’s potential damage to Gulf and Atlantic coast nuclear power plants that use seawater to cool pumps and other safety equipment.

Earlier this month, representatives of the nuclear watchdog groups Beyond Nuclear, Three Mile Island Alert and Unplug Salem wrote a letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeking details on oil plume monitoring efforts to guard against damage to plants’ safety systems. The letter was copied to the Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

They have not received an official reply to date, reports TMIA safety consultant Scott Portzline.

“But that’s not unusual,” he says. “We don’t usually hear back from the NRC on anything for at least a month.”

The watchdogs wrote to the NRC on June 14 asking for assurances that federal and state agencies are coordinating efforts to prevent safety problems at coastal nuclear power plants. While seawater is not used to cool the reactors themselves, it’s used in the plants’ secondary cooling systems. There are concerns that contamination could damage those systems.

The letter asked for details about monitoring of the subsurface oil plumes and what plants are doing to protect themselves from the oil, chemical dispersant and dissolved methane.

Among the nuclear plants that could be impacted by the oil slick is Progress Energy’s Crystal River plant on Florida’s Gulf Coast (pictured above). There are also concerns about Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point and St. Lucie nuclear plants on south Florida’s Atlantic Coast.

A May 12 situation report from the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability acknowledged the potential for problems.

“If water supply for these facilities becomes contaminated with oil, cooling water systems could be damaged,” it said.

Last month Progress Energy announced that it was monitoring the oil slick and had a boom system for its seawater intake canals at Crystal River, which is currently shut down for repair work.

“If the oil approaches our plants,” the company said, “we will work with our oil spill-response contractor to augment the existing protective measures.”

FPL has also said it’s monitoring the situation.

There are concerns about the oil spill impacts on the region’s coal-fired power plants as well.

At Southern Co.’s James F. Crist coal plant in northwest Florida, workers have placed boom at the spot where the plant draws water from the Escambia River, which flows into oil-contaminated Pensacola Bay. The company is also monitoring the situation at its Jack Watson coal plant near Gulfport, Miss.

There’s a precedent for shutting down nuclear power plants due to oil spills: In 2004, the Salem nuclear power plant at Lower Alloways Creek, N.J. was shut down for two weeks after an oil tanker spilled 165,000 gallons of crude oil near Philadelphia.

In that case, Coast Guard officials did not have the phone number for the nuclear plant. Instead, they called the chair of the Unplug Salem group at home in the the middle of the night.

“We would like to be certain that no one is caught off guard,” the watchdogs’ said in their letter to the NRC.

Source: Southern Studies

Russian nuclear facility decommissioned

The site of a plant for the production of ceramic powders of low concentration uranium dioxide has become the first nuclear facility in Russia to be returned to a greenfield site.

On 29 June, representatives of Russian nuclear fuel producer TVEL and state nuclear company Rosatom’s technical committee signed a document to mark the completion of decommissioning of the facility at JSC Chemical and Metallurgical Plant in Krasnoyarsk, in the far east of Russia.

In a statement, TVEL said that the completion of decommissioning of the plant marks the first time that the site of an industrial-scale nuclear facility has been totally demolished and decontaminated. It said that the site now poses no hazard and can now be used for another industrial or social use.

The cost of the project to decommission the site totalled some 656 million roubles ($21 million), which was provided by Rosatom and the federal budget.

Since 2006, when an agreement was signed between Rosatom and the municipality of Krasnoyarsk Kraj on the decommissioning of the uranium dioxide plant, the production equipment has been dismantled, buildings demolished and some of the soil at the site replaced. The complexity of decommissioning the site was made even more difficult by the fact that the plant was located within the city, which posed additional restrictions and raised the level of safety requirements.

Commenting on the completion of the project, Evgeny Kudryavtsev, head of Rosatom’s project for used fuel management and decommissioning, said: “We have full confidence that all the work has been conducted successfully. The experience gained will be used in the nuclear industry in the future. The site is now ready for use without restriction.”

Sergei Svinarenko, TVEL’s executive director of nuclear, radiological, industrial and environmental safety, said that the decommissioning documents will soon be sent to the Federal Service for Ecological Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostekhnadzor) to resolve the issue of removing the site from regulatory oversight.

Source: World Nuclear News

Radiation exposure at Bruce 1 prompts industry-wide investigation

Regulator questions safety at privately owned Bruce reactor where 195 workers put at risk

Emerging details of accidental radiation exposure at an Ontario nuclear power plant have triggered an order to investigate the possibility of similar incidents across the country, while raising doubts about safety at Canada’s only privately owned operator.

Last Nov. 26, a routine air sample taken at Bruce Power’s No. 1 reactor on Lake Huron near Owen Sound detected elevated levels of radiation. The incident is one of the most serious safety breaches at a Canadian reactor in recent memory and poses troubling questions about why Bruce executives assumed – mistakenly, it turns out – that they could send workers in to upgrade a laid-up reactor without exposing them to cancer-causing alpha radiation.

The extent of the radiation problem will not be known until Bruce receives test results for all 195 workers considered most at risk of exposure. At a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission hearing on Monday, Bruce officials revealed that two workers received a dose exceeding the allowable limit of 25 millisieverts a year under its operating licence. However, they stressed that no one received a dose above the regulatory limit, which allows nuclear employees to receive up to 50 millisieverts of radiation a year on the job, the equivalent of 500 chest X-rays.

Nevertheless, the discovery of radiation has shaken the regulator as well as workers at Bruce.

“I’m disturbed by what I’m hearing,” CNSC commissioner Alan Graham said Monday. “I’m wondering, what else is out there that we’re not looking at.”

The regulator has issued a formal request to all operators in Canada, asking them to investigate whether their workers have been exposed to alpha radiation. Continued…

Read more: Karen Howlett, The Globe and Mail

Davis-Besse nuclear reactor restarts

The Davis-Besse nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Erie near Oak Harbor, Ohio.

FirstEnergy Corp.’s Davis-Besse nuclear power plant is generating electricity today following a four-month shutdown for refueling and work to repair extensive stress cracking in parts of the reactor’s lid.

The plant near Toledo is running at about 21 percent of capacity, said the company. Operators are expected to slowly ramp up the power over the next several days, conducting safety checks as the output increases.

At full power, Davis-Besse sends 908 megawatts (908 million watts) to the high-voltage lines in the region. That’s enough power to supply about 750,000 homes.

Under an agreement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, FirstEnergy intends to operate Davis-Besse for only 14 months rather than the usual 24 months, and shut down no later than Oct. 1, 2011, to replace the reactor lid with a new one.

The Akron company has also agreed to step up scrutiny of unidentified reactor coolant leakage and shut down sooner if necessary.

The lid now on the reactor has been in use since only 2004 but has developed cracking problems more quickly than the reactor’s original lid from the 1970s.

The problem parts are called “nozzles” because of their shape. They are tubes made of a corrosion-resistant alloy that carry control rods through the carbon steel reactor lid into the nuclear core. Operators use the control rods to modulate the rate of nuclear fission.

Following a shutdown on Feb. 28 for refueling and instrument-aided inspections of the nozzles, engineers found indications of welding cracks in 24 of the lid’s 69 nozzles.

The original lid on the reactor developed similar cracks over years that ultimately led to massive, unprecedented corrosion of the carbon steel lid itself. That lid had to be scrapped.

Neither FirstEnergy nor the NRC expected the nozzles in the lid now on the reactor — an old but never-used lid from a power plant that was never completed — to develop stress cracking in just six years.

FirstEnergy’s engineers think they may have found the cause — the placement of the newest fuel rods in the reactor core. Fuel rods in a reactor are changed gradually, usually one-third of them during every refueling shutdown.

By placing the new fuel rods in the center of the reactor core, engineers inadvertently boosted the temperature of metal in the center of the reactor lid above the core — exactly where the first and worst cracking has occurred.

Temperatures on the lid itself have been as high as 613 degrees, the company told the NRC, although the reactor water temperatures have been in the range of 603 to 605 degrees, as designed.

For this refueling, the older fuel rods were moved to the center of reactor core, said company spokesman Todd Schneider.

“We are trying to position the fuel in the core so it burns evenly,” he said. “The older fuel rods are not as hot.”

The company anticipates that the temperature of nozzles in the center of the lid should not get so high during this run as it has previously, reducing the chances of additional cracking.

The new lid, engineered and manufactured by French-based AREVA, has nozzles made of an improved, more crack-resistant alloy.

French reactors are similar to Davis-Besse and the French industry began replacing  reactor lids years ago. Reactor lids are no longer manufactured in the United States.

Source: Cleveland.com

DOE directed to proceed with repository project

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission legal panel says the federal Department of Energy can’t withdraw its application to build a national nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

The NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruled Tuesday that Congress directed the DOE to file an application for the Yucca Mountain repository, and directed the NRC to consider it.

It says letting the department “single-handedly derail” the process would be “contrary to congressional intent.”

The NRC legal panel held hearings on the issue earlier this month in Las Vegas.

Neither Nevada nor DOE officials have said whether they will appeal.

Nevada opposes the plan that’s been studied since the 1980s to bury the nation’s spent nuclear fuel 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Source: Las Vegas Sun / The Associated Press

Siemens increases stake in Chinese joint venture

Siemens announced that it has increased its share in Shanghai Electric Power Generation Equipment Co Ltd (SEPG) – its joint venture with China’s Shanghai Electric Group – from 33.7% to 40% after receiving approval from authorities. SEPG supplies power generation products and solutions for coal-fired power plants, as well as for the conventional part of nuclear power plants. Wolfgang Dehen, CEO of Siemens’ energy sector, commented: “The share increase in the joint venture is another important step for Siemens to enforce its market penetration in the huge Chinese energy market and underlines our successful strategic partnership with Shanghai Electric.” He noted, “Power demand in the fast-growing Chinese economy is expected to rise on average by 4% annually over the next two decades.” Siemens and Shanghai Electric are discussing establishing a new service joint venture for the rapidly growing Chinese steam and gas turbine power plant market. According to Siemens, together with Shanghai Electric, it is market leader in the 1000 MWe class of advanced steam power plant technology in China.

Source: World Nuclear News

Russia and U.A.E. to sign nuclear agreement

The United Arab Emirates and Russia plan to sign “in the near future” an agreement to work together on nuclear energy.

“After the signing of the cooperation agreement, we will have the potential to work on research reactors and we also plan to take part in the Emirates’ program with the Koreans,” Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said Monday in Moscow after a meeting with U.A.E. Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The U.A.E. awarded an $18.6 billion contract in December to Korea Electric Power Corp. to build four nuclear plants by 2020 as it seeks to meet increasing demand for power. The plants, to be built on the coast of western Abu Dhabi, will each have a capacity of 1,400 megawatts.

The Persian Gulf nation is pursuing nuclear power while neighboring Iran faces sanctions aimed at forcing it to scale back nuclear development work.

Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes such as generating power. It has rebuffed United Nations Security Council demands to suspend uranium enrichment. The council imposed a fourth set of sanctions on Iran on June 9, backed by Russia and China, while the Congress approved U.S. sanctions last week.

Power demand in the U.A.E. will double to 40,000 megawatts by 2020, Anwar Gargash, the minister of state for foreign affairs, said last November. The nation prohibits the enrichment of uranium on its soil and signed a nuclear energy cooperation deal with the U.S.

“We are ready to cooperate with Russia in nuclear power on various aspects,” Sheikh Abdullah said after Monday’s meeting of the Russian-U.A.E. commission on cooperation. “By 2030, we plan to generate as much nuclear power so as to meet one third of our energy consumption.”

Source: Bloomberg / The St. Petersburg Times

EOn and CEA signs R&D agreement

German energy group EOn and French national nuclear energy commission the CEA have signed a framework agreement on future cooperation in nuclear energy research and development. The CEA has also signed a cooperation agreement with French car maker Renault.

The agreement with EOn “provides the basis for new research projects focused on the future use of nuclear energy, which are in both CEA’s and EOn’s interest,” according to the press release issued by both EOn and the CEA. It will cover projects relating to so-called second generation nuclear reactors - most of the world’s currently operating nuclear power fleet – as well as third generation plant construction projects that are currently underway and future reactors and options for fourth generation fuel cycles, which according to the two bodies are expected to reach technical maturity for commercial use by the middle of this century.

Under the cooperation agreement, EOn will gain access to the CEA’s research results, while the CEA will expand its European focus. It will also be able to include types of reactors in its research program that are planned or operated outside France.

In addition to several other European cooperation projects, the two companies are already partners in the European Sustainable Nuclear Energy Technology Platform (SNETP) and in various communities of interest under the European Commission’s Strategic Energy Technology Plan.

Advanced nuclear reactors, of which third generation plants are an example, include standardised, simplified designs and extensive use of passive, or inherent, safety features to deliver long, reliable operating lives with enhanced safety at lower capital costs and with lower fuel consumption than second generation reactors. The first third generation reactors, GE-Toshiba-Hitachi advanced boiling water reactors (ABWRs), started up in Japan in the 1990s, with two more starting in 2004 and 2005. Third generation plants are under construction in various locations in Finland, France and China.

Generation IV reactors are being developed by an international task force for deployment between 2020 and 2030. Six types are currently being studied, all of which operate at higher temperatures than today’s reactors and represent advances in sustainability, economics, safety, reliability and proliferation resistance.

Renault and CEA to cooperate

The CEA has also signed a new research and development agreement with French car manufacturer Renault to work together on cleaner vehicles and sustainable mobility for all. The agreement follows on from previous joint studies which have identified areas of possible synergy. Under the new three-year agreement, Renault will aim to achieve “technological breakthroughs” to offer cleaner, widely affordable vehicles, while the CEA will provide “input and suggestions”.

The CEA’s full title is the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives, and according to CEA chairman Bernard Bigot the agreement fits well with its aims. “This strategic cooperation with Renault perfectly illustrates the CEA’s new mission in the field of alternative energies,” he said.

Source: World Nuclear News

CNNC inks agreement with the province of Sichuan

A nuclear power plant could be constructed in China’s southwestern inland Sichuan province following the signing of an agreement between China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) and the provincial government.

During a signing ceremony in Chengdu on 24 June, a framework agreement on cooperation in the field of nuclear power was signed by CNNC and the Sichuan government.

Signing of the CNNC-Sichuan agreement (Image: CNNC)

Under the agreement, the Sichuan government will actively support CNNC, which was instructed by the Chinese government to conduct preliminary work for the construction of nuclear power projects in the province as part of the country’s nuclear power policy and development plans.

CNNC will hold a controlling stake in any nuclear power plant it builds in Sichuan. The company said that it aims to get approval as soon as possible from the central government to construct power reactors in the province.

In addition, Sichuan will actively support CNNC in prospecting and mining uranium resources in the province and in developing nuclear fuel processing and manufacturing enterprises in Sichuan.

CNNC’s main pressurized water reactor fuel fabrication plant at Yibin, Sichuan province, was set up in 1982 to supply Qinshan 1. It is operated by CNNC subsidiary China Jianzhong Nuclear Fuel (JNF), and by October 2008 was producing 400 tU/yr. VVER fuel fabrication was due to begin in 2009, using technology transferred from TVEL under the fuel supply contract for Tianwan. The Yibin plant is expected to keep expanding – to 600 tU per year by 2010 and 1000 tU per year or more by 2020.

More than 16 provinces, regions and municipalities have announced intentions to build nuclear power plants in the 12th Five Year Plan, 2011-15. These include Sichuan province.

In July 2008, it was announced that Sichuan was planning the 4000-6000 MWe Sanba nuclear power plant at Nanchong or Nanchun city on the Jialing River, at a cost of some $3.7 billion. Majority ownership would be China Guangdong Nuclear Power Company (CGNPC), but the project will also be open to other investors.

The eleven nuclear power reactors currently in operation in China are all on the country’s eastern coast. A number of provinces – including Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Henan and Jiangxi – are vying to construct China’s first inland nuclear power plant.

Source: World Nuclear News

India and Canada inks cooperation agreement

Canada’s nuclear industry will be able to access India’s expanding nuclear market under a nuclear cooperation agreement signed by the two countries.

The nuclear cooperation agreement was signed in front of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh at a ceremony in Ottawa. The two leaders announced the agreement in November 2009. Now, with the final signature completed, both have said that they are committed to completing all the remaining steps needed to ensure its early implementation.

The Indian and Canadian prime ministers watch the signing of the agreement (Image: Office of the Prime Minister)

According to information released by Harper’s office, the agreement aims to create an enabling environment that will permit members of Canada’s nuclear industry to cooperate with designated civilian nuclear installations under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards in India. Such agreements provide international treaty level assurances that the nuclear material, equipment and technology involved will only be used for civilian, peaceful and non-explosive purposes. As well as providing access to each other’s markets, they also open the door to the possibility of joint ventures.

Japan next? The first round of negotiations on a nuclear cooperation agreement between India and Japan are under way in Tokyo. The current two-day meeting will include discussions on how future talks will be conducted and on the contents of the agreement, according to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

India has a flourishing, and largely indigenous, nuclear power program, with plans for 20,000 MWe of nuclear capacity on line by 2020 and 63,000 MWe by 2032, although it has limited domestic uranium resources. However, the country’s nuclear weapons program, and hence its status outside the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), meant that it did not have the full-scope safeguards required by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for international trade for over three decades. India’s effective nuclear isolation came to an end when it reached an agreement with the NSG in September 2008, opening up possibilities for the supply of both reactors and fuel from other countries. India has also signed civil nuclear cooperation agreements with the USA, Russia, France, UK, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Namibia.

Early Canadian-designed Candu pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR) imported by India in the early 1970s before its isolation from international nuclear trade provided the reference for the country’s indigenous reactor designs. With similar infrastructure requirements, the two countries have plenty of scope for technology exchange and cooperation as well as trade in both equipment and materials. Canada is one of the world’s major uranium exporters, while India’s relatively modest uranium resources mean it will need to import uranium to meet the needs of its ambitious nuclear energy expansion plans.

According to Stephen Harper’s office, India is projected to be the world’s third largest economy by 2050 and is a priority market for Canada. The nuclear agreement was one of several Canada-India bilaterals covering economic, diplomatic, educational, scientific and cultural areas.

Source: World Nuclear News

Next Page »