Onagawa: The Japanese nuclear power plant that didn’t melt down on 3/11

Three years ago, the biggest recorded earthquake in Japanese history hit Tohoku prefecture, leaving more than 20,000 people dead or missing. On the heels of the destructive magnitude 9.0 earthquake came a tsunami that reached a run-up height of 30 meters in some areas, sweeping entire towns away in seconds.

Within the affected area were three nuclear power plants: the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), and the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station operated by the Tohoku Electric Power Company. While the three power stations shared similar disaster conditions, nuclear reactor types, dates of operation, and an identical regulatory regime, their fates were very different. The Fukushima Daiichi plant experienced fatal meltdowns and radiation releases. Fukushima Daini was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami, but the heroic efforts and improvisations of its operators resulted in the cold shutdown of all four operating reactors. Onagawa managed to remain generally intact, despite its proximity to the epicenter of the enormous earthquake.

“The earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, were natural disasters of a magnitude that shocked the entire world. Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster—that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.” - Kiyoshi Kurokawa, “Message from the Chairman,” The Official Report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission

Everyone knows the name Fukushima, but few people, even in Japan, are familiar with the Onagawa power station. Fewer still know how Onagawa managed to avoid disaster. According to a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency mission that visited Onagawa and evaluated its performance, “the plant experienced very high levels of ground motion—the strongest shaking that any nuclear plant has ever experienced from an earthquake,” but it “shut down safely” and was “remarkably undamaged.”

Most people believe that Fukushima Daiichi’s meltdowns were predominantly due to the earthquake and tsunami. The survival of Onagawa, however, suggests otherwise. Onagawa was only 123 kilometers away from the epicenter—60 kilometers closer than Fukushima Daiichi—and the difference in seismic intensity at the two plants was negligible. Furthermore, the tsunami was bigger at Onagawa, reaching a height of 14.3 meters, compared with 13.1 meters at Fukushima Daiichi. The difference in outcomes at the two plants reveals the root cause of Fukushima Daiichi’s failures: the utility’s corporate “safety culture.”

Higher ground. While the Fukushima Daiichi and Onagawa plants are similar in many ways, the most obvious difference is that Tohoku Electric constructed Onagawa’s reactor buildings at a higher elevation than Tepco’s Fukushima reactor buildings. Before beginning construction, Tohoku Electric conducted surveys and simulations aimed at predicting tsunami levels. The initial predictions showed that tsunamis in the region historically had an average height of about 3 meters. Based on that, the company constructed its plant at 14.7 meters above sea level, almost five times that height. As more research was done, the estimated tsunami levels climbed higher, and Tohoku Electric conducted periodic checkups based on the new estimates.

Tepco, on the other hand, to make it easier to transport equipment and to save construction costs, in 1967 removed 25 meters from the 35-meter natural seawall of the Daiichi plant site and built the reactor buildings at a much lower elevation of 10 meters. According to the National Diet of Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), the initial construction was based on existing seismological information, but later research showed that tsunami levels had been underestimated. While Tohoku Electric learned from past earthquakes and tsunamis—including one in Chile on February 28, 2010—and continuously improved its countermeasures, Tepco overlooked these warnings. According to the NAIIC report, Tepco “resorted to delaying tactics, such as presenting alternative scientific studies and lobbying.”

Tepco’s tsunami risk characterization and assessment was, in the judgment of one the world’s renowned tsunami experts, Costas Synolakis, director of the Tsunami Research Center at the University of Southern California, a “cascade of stupid errors that led to the disaster.”

Emergency response. Tohoku Electric also took a different approach to emergency response—one that was more organized, collaborative, and controlled than Tepco’s. Tohoku Electric established an emergency response center at the Onagawa plant, as well as at company headquarters, immediately after the earthquake. Throughout the disaster, headquarters supported the plant operators minute by minute. Supervisors and chief engineers were dispatched to the main control rooms of the damaged reactors to make decisions, and information was sent in a timely manner to all levels of the response team.

Why did the Tohoku Electric team remain more poised and unified than their counterparts at Tepco? According to the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Facilities Research Institute, Yanosuke Hirai, vice president of Tohoku Electric from 1960 to 1975—a time period that preceded the 1980 groundbreaking at Onagawa—was adamant about safety protocols and became a member of the Coastal Institution Research Association in 1963 because of his concern about the importance of protecting against natural disasters. With a senior employee in upper management advocating forcefully for safety, a strong safety culture formed within the company. Representatives of Tohoku Electric participated in seminars and panel discussions about earthquake and tsunami disaster prevention held by the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization. The company implemented strict protocols for disaster response, and all workers were familiar with the steps to be taken when a tsunami was approaching.

These initiatives were not part of Tepco’s culture. The company had a mindset that its domination in the electricity industry was an indication of flawlessness. After the disaster, Hasuike Tooru, the former president of Tepco, described how management decided to lengthen the expected lifetime of power plants, even if there were severe safety consequences.

Safety culture. Government investigations of the Fukushima accident, as well as a statement by US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chairwoman Allison MacFarlane, have explicitly acknowledged the vital role of safety culture, which the NRC has defined as “the core values and behaviors resulting from a collective commitment by leaders and individuals to emphasize safety over competing goals to ensure protection of people and the environment.”

The NAIIC report described the Fukushima accident as “made in Japan,” because Japan’s nuclear industry failed to absorb the lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. In the words of NAIIC chairman Kiyoshi Kurokawa, “It was this mindset that led to the disaster.” Safety culture has also been implicated as a primary root cause of the Chernobyl accident.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station’s meltdowns were not due to the natural disaster, but rather to a series of decisions by Tepco not to be proactive with safety, dating back to when the reactors were being constructed. With most other factors being similar, it was Tokohu Electric’s overall organizational practices and safety culture that saved the day for Onagawa. If safety and disaster response had been properly recognized, addressed, and implemented at Fukushima Daiichi—as they were within Tohoku Electric’s corporate safety culture—perhaps the disastrous meltdowns would have been prevented.

Editor's note: This article is adapted from a research paper based on material available in the public domain in Japan and the United States; the full version of the paper can be found here.

 

© 2014

Take Action at Fukushima: An Open Letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

Dear Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

You no doubt observed the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011, with terror and worry: what would another nuclear disaster mean for state relations, especially in your home region of East Asia? Fortunately, it seemed, the effects were largely kept to Japan’s islands and were less than many experts anticipated. Within weeks the stories dissipated if not disappeared from the major media outlets, only to be resurrected with personal interest stories of a hero or an especially tragic case of a lost loved one.

But the crisis is not over. Today, Martin Fackler reported in the New York Times that radioactively polluted water is leaking out of the plants and that the site is in a new state of emergency. Mitsuhei Murata, Japan’s former ambassador to Switzerland, wrote a letter last year that brought international attention to the thousands of radioactive spent fuel rods at the site and the danger their vulnerability presents; he has testified to this several times before Japan’s parliament. International experts, independent and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, have commented that the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s plans for the removal of the rods from the site and their storage in a safer, if still temporary, location are optimistic if not unrealistic.

The news media has done an adequate if meager job of reporting the many issues the fuel rods present. The radioactive fuel must be continuously cooled in order to stay safe; the improvised electric system that maintains this cooling has failed several times, once for more than 24 hours, both on its own and because of hungry rats. The mechanism that stands between safety and a fire at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is, to say the least, precarious. (And, as has been clear to many since the beginning, TEPCO hope to shirk its responsibility: first, in its safety and maintenance of the site; second, in paying its costs to Japan.)

One can only speculate to the extent of the consequences of a spent fuel fire, but, unarguably, once a fire ignites (from lack of cooling water or from an earthquake-caused spill), even the best case scenario would be an unprecedented global disaster. Possible consequences are the evacuation of Tokyo’s 35 million people, permanent disuse of Japan’s land, and poisoned food crops in the United States. These are not fantastic projections, but reasonable, if not conservative, expectations.

Yet, unimaginably but all too familiarly, the situation is still relegated to the back pages of our papers, and thus to the back of our leaders’ minds. This reminds me of our international approach to solving climate change, which I have partaken in for decades, first in the United Nations and then as the Secretary General of the Parliamentary Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro: we have a latent but very serious issue that we can likely fix but lack the resolve and political will to do so. As you well know, a successful climate change agreement has eluded us.

In comparison with climate change, however, the radioactive fuel rod issue at Fukushima is both easier to solve and more urgent. Any Japanese can tell you another serious earthquake will hit Japan well inside the next decade. That is to say, this situation must be resolved quickly.

Still, even if possible to solve, the issue needs constant attention and competent and well funded actors. So who might take charge? The International Atomic Energy Agency said last week that it will take TEPCO 40 years to secure the radioactive fuel rods in more appropriate storage containers. TEPCO is already refusing to pay Japan billions of Yen in cleanup costs, and does not have the technology or wherewithal to perform the task competently and expediently. Yet, so far the Japanese government has only looked to TEPCO.

The next obvious choice outside Japan is the United States, for their technological superiority, money, and leadership. Early after the accident, the U.S. Department of Defense offered assistance to Japan, but the Japanese denied their help. It remains to be seen whether that door has permanently closed. This would not be a benevolent action: the U.S. sits in harm’s way in the case of a fuel pool fire; residents of California, Oregon, and Washington have already received much radiation. U.S.-led action, except perhaps by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, is unlikely: U.S. senators and representatives continues to demonstrate their impotence at home or abroad.

I have long been advocating for an international team of independent experts to investigate the situation. The United Nations is one appropriate body to assemble and deliver such a team. The IAEA, however, should not take on the responsibility.

The IAEA’s mission is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Concerns of proliferation are not applicable here, and the disaster itself has certainly called into question (again) what the peaceful use of nuclear energy means and whether it should be promoted. While the agency has recently urged safety improvements at Fukushima, the official line of thinking is still, incorrectly and impossibly, to use TEPCO to carry out the process.

We are not only waiting for a bigger disaster. One is already unfolding before us. The health consequences of the released radiation are large: despite what major news outlets are reporting, we will see a significant jump in thyroid and other cancers in Japan in four to five years. Congenital malformations will likely begin to appear. The premature reporting of some UN agencies and the press at large has been irresponsible: do we have no notion of what “precaution” means? These latent effects will cripple much of Japan’s young population within the decade.
Our myopia, in Japan and internationally, is tragic. One bright spot was the UN Special Rapporteur Anand Grover’s fact-finding mission in Japan last year; I hope you back his findings and circulate them widely.

We have already waited too long, as we did for climate change, to take international action on Fukushima. But now it is clear that we cannot allow Japan to take care of an issue that could affect all of us.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, I urge you to use your unique position as the head of the United Nations to galvanize political will and organize an independent assessment team of international scientists and engineers to solve the Fukushima radioactive spent fuel rod issue before we are forced to reckon with the fallout of another disaster. Japan and the world should not have to suffer more because we choose to wait.

Yours truly,

Akio Matsumura

-Former Special Advisor to the United Nations Development Program
-Founder and Secretary General of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders for Human Survival
-Secretary General of the 1992 Parliamentary Earth Summit Conference in Rio de Janeiro More

 

 

Fukushima disaster: Long road to nuclear clean-up

It would be reassuring to think that the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl is contained, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is in stable shut-down.

Unfortunately a look inside the Fukushima plant suggests otherwise.

I was part of a group taken in to the Fukushima plant last week, only the second time foreign TV journalists have been allowed in since the disaster two year ago. Very little that we saw in our brief two-hour tour was reassuring.

Our first stop was reactor building number four. This place was potentially the most worrying.

Inside the shattered building, more than 1,500 spent fuel rods were still sitting inside a cooling pool. They were still highly radioactive and the pool was outside the reactor's steel and concrete containment vessel, perched high on the third floor.

But that operation will not start until the end of this year, and will then take two more years to complete. If another large earthquake strikes during that time there is real concern the building could collapse.A race is now on to get the fuel rods out. A huge steel structure is being erected around building four that will be used to raise the spent fuel out.

Tepco, the company that runs the plant, told us the building was now strong enough to withstand another quake. But contractors who have worked inside building four have reported that the structure is still extremely fragile.

Waste water

Reactor number four was only the tip of a radioactive iceberg. Two hundred meters away I could clearly see the twisted and rusting steel of reactor building number three.

Two years after the disaster it was still virtually untouched. The reason was simple. The radiation at reactor three was so high workers could not safely go near it.

Like reactor four, reactor three had spent fuel rods sitting inside a cooling pool beneath the twisted steel and rubble. Remotely-operated cranes are being used to try and pull away the debris, but it is a painfully slow process.Our bus rushed past without stopping. The Geiger counter reading was over 1,000 micro sieverts an hour. That is roughly the same as ten chest X-rays every hour, or a full CT scan every ten hours.

Tepco's other huge problem is contaminated water, tens of thousands of tonnes of it.

This work will take 30 to 40 years” Takeshi Takahashi

Continue reading the main story

The 9.0 earthquake that struck two years ago appears to have severely damaged the foundations of the plant - creating large cracks in the underground walls that are supposed to keep the plant water tight.

Ground and seawater is now leaking through the cracks in to the basements around the reactors.

The water rapidly becomes highly contaminated and cannot be pumped out into the sea. Instead Tepco is building huge 1,000 tonne water tanks to store the contaminated water.

The Fukushima sight is now dotted with hundreds of them. But the water leakage is so severe that they are having to add a new tank every two to three days. Within two years they will have run out of room. More

 

Reactor reuses nuclear waste

Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidates are designing a nuclear power plant that would convert nuclear waste from conventional reactors into electricity — a plant you could walk away from, they said, without the risk of a radioactive leak like the meltdown last year that crippled parts of Japan.

Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, co-founders of Transatomic Power, have developed the WAMSR, or Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor, a 400- to 500-megawatt plant that would convert high-level nuclear waste into electric power, at a price competitive with fossil fuels.

“About two years ago, we got really excited about nuclear power because we saw so much potential in the industry to improve the design of reactors and stretch the limits of the technology,” said Dewan, 27.

The two researched different designs and settled on a molten salt reactor, Massie said, because other types of reactors have not been economically viable.

They estimate the WAMSR could convert the waste produced by conventional nuclear reactors each year into $7.1 trillion worth of electricity, at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.

At full deployment, the two said, their reactors could use existing stockpiles of nuclear waste to satisfy the world’s electricity needs through 2083, all the while reducing the majority of the waste’s radioactive lifetime from hundreds of thousands of years to hundreds of years, thereby decreasing the need for permanent repositories such as Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Most importantly, they said, the WAMSR would differ from conventional reactors like the Fukushima I nuclear power plant — which melted down after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan — in that it would not require electric power or water to cool it in the event of an accident. More

 

Earthquake-Causing Fracking to Be Allowed within 500 Feet of Nuclear Plants

Nuclear Plants Vulnerable to Earthquakes

The American government has officially stated that fracking can cause earthquakes. Some fracking companies now admit this fact The scientific community agrees. See this, this, this, this and this.

Earthquakes can – of course – damage nuclear power plants. For example, even the operator of Fukushima and the Japanese government now admit that the nuclear cores might have started melting down before the tsuanmi ever hit. More here.

Indeed, the fuel pools and rods at Fukushima appear to have “boiled”, caught fire and/or exploded soon after the earthquake knocked out power systems. See this, this, this, this and this. And fuel pools in the United States store an average of ten times more radioactive fuel than stored at Fukushima, have virtually no safety features, and are vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks. And see this.

Indeed, American reactors may be even more vulnerable to earthquakes than Fukushima.

But American nuclear “regulators” have allowed numerous nuclear power plants to be built in earthquake zones:

And they have cover up the risks from earthquakes for years … just like theJapanese regulators did. For example:

• The NRC won’t even begin conducting its earthquake study for Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York until after relicensing is complete in 2013, because the NRC doesn’t consider a big earthquake “a serious risk”

• Congressman Markey has said there is a cover up. Specifically, Markey alleges that the head of the NRC told everyone not to write down risks they find from an earthquake greater than 6.0 (the plant was only built to survive a 6.0 earthquake)

• We have 4 reactors in California – 2 at San Onofre 2 at San Luis Obisbo – which are vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis

For example, Diablo Canyon is located on numerous earthquake faults, and a state legislator and seismic expert says it could turn into California’s Fukushima:

On July 26th 2011 the California Energy Commission held hearings concerning the state’s nuclear safety. During those hearings, the Chairman of the Commission asked governments experts whether or not they felt the facilities could withstand the maximum credible quake. The response was that they did not know.This is similar to what happened at Fukushima: seismologists dire warnings were ignored (and see this.)

Yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t even take earthquake risk into account when deciding whether or not to relicense plants like Diablo Canyon. More

 

Fukushima disaster could have been avoided, nuclear plant operator admits

Tepco, which previously insisted nothing could have protected plant, now says it failed to implement safety improvements

The company at the centre of Japan's worst-ever nuclear crisis has acknowledged for the first time it could have avoided the disaster that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi power plant last year.

In a dramatic reversal of its insistence that nothing could have protected the plant against the earthquake and tsunami that killed almost 20,000 people on 11 March 2011, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said it had known safety improvements were needed before the disaster, but had failed to implement them.

"When looking back on the accident, the problem was that preparations were not made in advance," Tepco's internal reform taskforce, led by the firm's president, Naomi Hirose, said in a statement on Monday.

The company could have taken steps to prevent a catastrophic accident by adopting more extensive safety measures, the statement added.

Tepco's about-turn came after an independent panel of experts challenged the company's claim that it could not have foreseen the waves, which reached up to 14m high, that swept through the plant, knocking out its backup power supply and causing three of its six reactors to melt down.

In a damning report released in July, a parliament-appointed panel criticised years of "collusion" between Tepco, industry regulators and politicians, and described the disaster as "manmade". More

 

EU nuclear reactors need 10-25 bln euros of safety spending

BRUSSELS, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Europe's nuclear reactor fleet needs investment of 10 billion to 25 billion euros, a draft Commission report said, following a safety review designed to ensure there is never a repeat of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The report is expected to be finalised by Thursday and debated by EU ministers later this month.

After that, the Commission intends in 2013 to propose new laws, including on insurance and liability to "improve the situation of potential victims in the event of a nuclear accident", the draft seen by Reuters said.

Of the 134 EU nuclear reactors grouped across 68 sites, 111 have more than 100,000 inhabitants living within a circle of 30 kilometres.

Safety regimes vary greatly and the amount that needs to be spent to improve them is estimated at anywhere between 30 million euros and 200 million euros per reactor unit - or a total of 10-25 billion across the fleet.

The lesson of Fukushima was that two natural disasters could hit at the same time and knock out the electrical supply system of a plant completely, so it could not be cooled down.

The stress test findings include that four reactors, located in two different nations, have less than one hour available to restore safety functions if electrical power is lost. More

 

Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants Covered Up By Regulators, NRC Whistleblower Claims

In a letter submitted Friday afternoon to internal investigators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a whistleblower engineer within the agency accused regulators of deliberately covering up information relating to the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear power facilities that sit downstream from large dams and reservoirs.

Fort Calhoun Nuclear Facility

The letter also accuses the agency of failing to act to correct these vulnerabilities despite being aware of the risks for years.

These charges were echoed in separate conversations with another risk engineer inside the agency who suggested that the vulnerability at one plant in particular -- the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, S.C. -- put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year. That event caused multiple reactor meltdowns.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency's division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security concerns in redacting large portions of a report detailing the agency's preliminary investigation into the potential for flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure.

In addition to the Oconee facility, the report examined similar vulnerabilities at the Ft. Calhoun station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among others.

Perkins was the lead author of that report, which was completed in July of 2011 -- roughly four months after an earthquake and subsequent tsunami flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, cut off electric power to the facility and disabled all of its backup power systems, eliminating the ability to keep the reactors cool and leading to a meltdown.

The report concluded, among other things, that the failure of one or more dams sitting upstream from several nuclear power plants "may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable." High floodwaters could conceivably undermine all available power sources, the report found, including grid power, emergency diesel backup generators, and ultimately battery backups. The risk of these things happening, the report said, is higher than acceptable.

"The totality of information analyzed in this report suggests that external flooding due to upstream dam failure poses a larger than expected risk to plants and public safety," Perkins's report concluded, adding that the evidence warranted a more formal investigation.

In response to the report, the NRC launched an expanded investigation, which is ongoing. It also folded the dam failure issue into the slate of post-Fukushima improvements recommended by a special task force formed in the aftermath of that disaster. But in a press release dated March 6 of this year, the agency said the report "did not identify any immediate safety concerns."

The NRC made a heavily redacted copy of the report publicly available on the NRC website the same day.

"Nuclear power plant designs include protection against serious but very rare flooding events, including flooding from dam failure scenarios," the agency release noted. "Dam failures can occur as a consequence of earthquakes, overflow, and other mechanisms such as internal erosion and operational failures. A dam failure could potentially cause flooding at a nuclear power plant site depending on a number of factors including the location of the dam, reservoir volume, dam properties, flood routing, and site characteristics." More

 

Nuclear reactor safety in the post-Fukushima world

Since the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011, there have been calls for increasing safety levels in nuclear plants worldwide. The incident in Japan was the fourth significant accident in the 55-year history of nuclear reactor operation.

The first occurred in 1957 at the Windscale reactor in the UK. Two decades later, in 1979, a reactor at Three Mile Island in the USA was severely damaged, though radioactive material releases were slight. The third incident is well-known: the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, Ukraine, where the destruction of a reactor by steam explosion, fire and core disruption had significant health and environmental consequences, mainly due to fission product release and dispersion, as well as a human death toll at the site itself.

But throughout the nuclear age, countries and international bodies have, of course, been developing a variety of approaches and systems to promote safety and minimize the risk of accidents. In the UK and US, for example, nuclear reactor safety has, since the latter part of the twentieth century, been based on a comprehensive risk assessment approach in which experts, at the design stage, identify what could go wrong—based on a detailed knowledge of the components, materials, energy flows and core neutronics.

The experts then identify the various paths that an accident might follow, taking into account the plant design and its safety features such as emergency shutdown control rods, emergency core cooling and pressure vessel strength. They also calculate probabilities for each scenario (how often in ten thousand years a given accident might happen). For each hypothetical accident, they calculate the likely release of radioactive materials and model what the consequences would be for human life, health and the environment. Once all the above is complete, the so-called ‘envelope of risks’ for the planned reactor can be examined. If any part of this represents a risk above that which is judged to be tolerable, improvements can be made.

A landmark event in the UK was the Public Enquiry into the construction of a pressurised water reactor at the existing nuclear site at Sizewell. This enquiry revealed that neither the operators nor the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate had a numerical basis for comparing the tolerability of risks from nuclear reactors to such things as deaths from earthquakes, aircraft crashes and lightning strikes. The Sizewell enquiry was adjourned until these things were developed and approved. The result was two seminal documents: ‘The Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations HSE, London 1988 (revised 1992)’; and ‘Safety Assessment Principles for Nuclear Facilities (revised as 2006 Edition, Revision 1, HSE, Bootle, UK).

The US has also engaged in studying these issues. The latest document is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses, which analyzed the potential consequences of severe accidents at the Surry Power Station, Virginia, and the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania as real examples of nuclear reactors. The project combined up-to-date information about the plants’ layout and operations with local population data and emergency preparedness plans. This information was then analyzed using computer codes that incorporate decades of research into reactor accidents. More

 

International Experts' Meeting to Discuss Protecting Nuclear Power Plants from Natural Hazards

The importance of protecting nuclear power plants (NPPs) from extreme natural hazards remains a priority for the nuclear power industry. In this light, the International Experts' Meeting (IEM) on Protection Against Extreme Earthquakes and Tsunamis in the Light of the Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is being convened by the IAEA under the framework of the IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety.

This meeting will take place in Vienna, Austria from 4 to 7 September 2012. More than 120 experts and government officials from 37 countries, from regulatory bodies, utilities, technical support organizations, academic institutions, vendors and research and development organizations will participate in the meeting.

The IEM will discuss technical developments and research programmes in site evaluation and nuclear plant safety, particularly as they relate to extreme natural hazards such as earthquake and tsunamis.

The IEM will provide an opportunity to share lessons learned from recent extreme natural events, including the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 11 March 2011. This earthquake and associated tsunami affected the Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushima Daini, Tokai and Onagawa NPPs in Japan and triggered the accident at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

This was the first NPP accident to arise from the combined hazards of ground motion and flooding. It highlighted the importance of preparing not only for a single external hazard, but also the combined effect of multiple external hazards, in the safety assessment of NPPs, and the measures for defence in depth. More

I must admit I find it strange that it has taken this long to convene this meeting. I raised the issue at a panel discussion last March at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. Granted the official Japanese report was only released eight weeks ago but.... Editor

Fukushima Daiichi NPS Reactor 4 in July 2012

This aerial view shows the damaged No. 4 reactor building at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, northeastern Japan, Wednesday, July 18, 2012. A giant crane removed two rods packed with nuclear fuel from the reactor building on Wednesday, the beginning of a delicate and long process to deal with a remaining risk of more radiation escaping from the disaster-struck plant. AP More

 

New report blasts Japan’s preparation for, response to Fukushima disaster

TOKYO — Last year’s nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was a “profoundly man-made disaster,” the result of poor earthquake-safety planning and faulty post-tsunami communication, a report from an independent parliamentary panel said Thursday.

Daiichi Nuclear Power Station

The sharp criticism of the Japanese government and the nuclear operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) provided an alternative narrative to an earlier investigation from Tepco itself, whose in-house panel concluded that the nuclear crisis was unforeseeable, spurred by a “giant tsunami beyond our imagination.”

In contrast, the report released Thursday suggested that the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that triggered the tsunami may also have caused critical damage that led to the series of meltdowns. It argued that the nuclear power plants could and should have been made more quake-proof, and blamed lax safety measures on what it called the country’s powerful and “collusive” decision makers and on a conformist culture that allowed them to operate with little scrutiny.

The nuclear bloc, while reassuring the nation about its safe atomic plants, ignored safeguards that would have helped strengthen the Fukushima facility against a massive but foreseeable earthquake, the 641-page report said.

In a blistering assessment, authors described how regulators and nuclear operators went to painstaking lengths to either ignore safety risks at the plant or cover them up. It accused Tepco and government officials of slow and faulty communication after the disaster, which, the report said hampered the emergency response.

Both regulators and nuclear operators disregarded earlier warnings from outside watchdog groups that earthquakes posed a significant safety risk to the nuclear plants, an English summary of the report said. In the process, they “effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents.”

“What must be admitted — very painfully – is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan,’ ” investigation Chairman Kiyoshi Kurokawa wrote in the introduction to the report. “Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.” More

 

Spent fuel rods drive growing fear over plant in Japan

TOKYO — What passes for normal at the Fukushima Daiichi plant today would have caused shudders among even the most sanguine of experts before an earthquake and tsunami set off the world’s second most serious nuclear crisis after Chernobyl.

Fourteen months after the accident, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and filled with vast quantities of radioactive cesium still sits on the top floor of a heavily damaged reactor building, covered only with plastic.

The public’s fears about the pool have grown in recent months as some scientists have warned that it has the most potential for setting off a new catastrophe, now that the three nuclear reactors that suffered meltdowns are in a more stable state, and as frequent quakes continue to rattle the region.

The worries picked up new traction in recent days after the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, said it had found a slight bulge in one of the walls of the reactor building, stoking fears over the building’s safety.

To try to quell such worries, the government sent the environment and nuclear minister to the plant on Saturday, where he climbed a makeshift staircase in protective garb to look at the structure supporting the pool, which he said appeared sound. The minister, Goshi Hosono, added that although the government accepted Tepco’s assurances that reinforcement work had shored up the building, it ordered the company to conduct further studies because of the bulge.

Some outside experts have also worked to allay fears, saying that the fuel in the pool is now so old that it cannot generate enough heat to start the kind of accident that would allow radioactive material to escape.

But many Japanese scoff at those assurances and point out that even if the building is strong enough, which they question, the jury-rigged cooling system for the pool has already malfunctioned several times, including a 24-hour failure in April. Had the outages continued, they would have left the rods at risk of dangerous overheating. Government critics are especially concerned, since Tepco has said the soonest it could begin emptying the pool is late 2013, dashing hopes for earlier action.

“The No. 4 reactor is visibly damaged and in a fragile state, down to the floor that holds the spent fuel pool,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute and one of the experts raising concerns. “Any radioactive release could be huge and go directly into the environment.” More

 

Fukushima: More bad news 20/04/2012

Here we go again,more news finally got out on something that i've been thinking about from day two. The common spent fuel pool, knew there was one, they let that slip at the start of this crisis, then shut up about it right away. That is the mother load of spent nuclear fuel, and now finally, guess where it is ? If you guessed by the # 4 reactor, your right, no wonder they kept that quite. So now we know the REAL REASON, they are so worried about # 4 falling over, once it topples over, they won't be able to access the common fuel pool, and it will eventually catch fire and melt down. Releasing 85x more cesium alone, than Chernobyl. Makes it exciting doesn't it ? never knowing what bombshell information Tepco, and the Japanese government, will drop on us next

 

Urgent Request to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

An Urgent Request on UN Intervention to Stabilize the Fukushima Unit 4 Spent Nuclear Fuel

Recently, former diplomats and experts both in Japan and abroad stressed the extremely risky condition of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool and this is being widely reported by world media. Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), who is one of the best-known experts on spent nuclear fuel, stated that in Unit 4 there is spent nuclear fuel which contains Cesium-137 (Cs-137) that is equivalent to 10 times the amount that was released at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Thus, if an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain, this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.

Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima Daiichi plant sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl.

Nuclear experts from the US and Japan such as Arnie Gundersen, Robert Alvarez, Hiroaki Koide, Masashi Goto, and Mitsuhei Murata, a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland, and, Akio Matsumura, a former UN diplomat, have continually warned against the high risk of the Fukushima Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool.

US Senator Roy Wyden, after his visit to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 6 April, 2012, issued a press release on 16 April, pointing out the catastrophic risk of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4, calling for urgent US government intervention. Senator Wyden also sent a letter to Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan’s Ambassador to the United States, requesting Japan to accept international assistance to tackle the crisis.

We Japanese civil organizations express our deepest concern that our government does not inform its citizens about the extent of risk of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool. Given the fact that collapse of this pool could potentially lead to catastrophic consequences with worldwide implications, what the Japanese government should be doing as a responsible member of the international community is to avoid any further disaster by mobilizing all the wisdom and the means available in order to stabilize this spent nuclear fuel. It is clearly evident that Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool is no longer a Japanese issue but an international issue with potentially serious consequences. Therefore, it is imperative for the Japanese government and the international community to work together on this crisis before it becomes too late. We are appealing to the United Nations to help Japan and the planet in order to prevent the irreversible consequences of a catastrophe that could affect generations to come. We herewith make our urgent request to you as follows: More

 

How the Virginia earthquake packed such a punch

Last summer’s Virginia earthquake continues to reverberate in the scientific community.

The 5.8-magnitude tremor August 23 wasn’t huge by global standards, but punched above its weight. Scientists were struck by the way the tremor near the town of Mineral managed to damage the nation’s capital 84 miles away, putting cracks in the Washington Monument and toppling a spire at the National Cathedral. So: How’d it do that?

They’re also studying the ongoing aftershock sequence. The Mineral event isn’t truly over, because the fault is still generating small quakes, though fewer and fewer. Herein lies a research opportunity for understanding enigmatic East Coast tremors — how long does it take for the earth to calm down?

“The scientific evidence suggests that much of the earth’s crust is in a condition where the rock is close to failure everywhere,” said U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Bill Ellsworth. “Even in the East Coast, the rocks are highly stressed.”


And Mineral is also a warning. No one was shocked when a moderate quake hit the Central Virginia Seismic Zone — that’s precisely where you might expect an earthquake. But it was much bigger than any recorded tremor in the zone. The previous standard was a roughly 5-magnitude event in 1875, its strength estimated from the damage it caused.

The obvious implication is that other seismic zones in the east are capable of generating earthquakes more powerful than anything in the historical record.

“The Virginia earthquake suggests that what we’ve seen in the past is not as bad as what we could potentially see in the future,” said John Ebel, a Boston College geophysicist who spoke with reporters in a conference call Wednesday from a meeting of the Seismological Society of America in San Diego.

Based on what happened in Virginia, “we have a seismic hazard that we really have to take seriously” in other major East Coast cities, including Philadelphia, New York, Providence and Boston, Ebel said. More

Nuclear plant operators globally must take heed of this information, and build it into their risk planning. Also see this article by KENICHI OHMAE. Editor







 




 

Fukushima: Probability theory is unsafe

A year has now passed since the complete core meltdowns of three boiling water reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 plant. Because of the limited and biased information issued by the Japanese government, the world does not know what really happened when the earthquake and the tsunami hit the six Fukushima nuclear reactors. There are many important lessons that must be learned to avoid a future disaster. These lessons can be applied to all the nuclear reactors globally. People around the world deserve the right to know what happened.

As a nuclear core designer and someone who earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in nuclear engineering, I volunteered to look into the situation at Fukushima No. 1 in June of 2011. Mr. Goushi Hosono, minister of nuclear power and environment, personally gave me access to the information and personnel who were directly involved in the containment operations of the postdisaster nuclear plants. After three months of investigation, I analyzed and wrote a long report detailing minute by minute how the nuclear reactors were actually disabled (pr.bbt757.com/eng/)

Here are the highlights of my findings:

1. Three of the six reactors of Fukushima No. 1 had a complete core meltdown a few days after the tsunami hit. The molten fuel penetrated not only through the bottom of the thick pressure vessel, but also poked holes at the bottom of the containment vessel, thus releasing fission materials into the environment. The meltdown itself started at 11p.m. on the day of the tsunami, March 11, 2011.

2. As expected, the meltdown caused the fuel cladding material, zircaloy (zirconium alloy), to react with vapor and to create large quantities of hydrogen and zirconium oxide, which caused the catastrophic hydrogen explosion that blew out three reactor buildings. The hydrogen explosion took place on March 12, 14 and 15. The Japanese Government did not admit to the meltdown until three months later, nor did they admit to the damage to the containment vessels until a half year later. Our government tried to hide this important information for some reason, though judging from the amount of fission material released and from the size of the hydrogen explosion, the meltdown of the entire core was undeniable for anyone who has studied reactor engineering.

3. The earthquake on March 11 damaged all of the five independent external power supply systems, and the 15-meter-high tsunami damaged all of the pumps and motors of the main and emergency cooling systems that were constructed along the shore line, thus disabling the cooling system that pumps in sea water.

4. The tsunami also sent massive amounts of water into the reactor buildings and the turbine housing, thus soaking the emergency diesel engines and batteries, which were stored in the basement of these buildings. This meant that all sources of emergency backup power stored in the basement of the reactors were totally destroyed.

5. There was an air-cooled diesel engine sitting atop a hill close to Reactor No. 6. Its airfins were too big to fit into the basement and was luckily placed outside, and as such, this engine started to generate electricity. With a pump brought in from outside, it started to cool not only Reactor No. 6, but had enough power to cool Reactor No. 5. Of the 13 emergency generators associated with the six plants, this was the only one of the three air-cooled backups, and hence not dependent on water as the heat sink. This air-cooled diesel engine was the only one not entirely submerged in water, but in fact at one point the water level did reach up to half its height. A few weeks later Reactors No. 5 and No. 6 were brought to a cold shutdown.

6. The buildings of reactors No. 1 and No. 3 were blown away by an explosion of hydrogen generated by the core meltdown. Reactor No. 4 eventually exploded, though its core had no fuel inside due to a periodic inspection that meant the fuel rods were stored elsewhere. It turned out that the Reactor No. 4's building filled with hydrogen that leaked from Reactor No. 3 through their common gas release ducts. Reactor No. 2 escaped from the massive explosion, although its core had completely melted. Its windows were blown away most likely by the explosions from neighboring reactors No. 1 and No. 3 and the hydrogen inside Reactor No. 2 escaped into the air. More

 

Fukushima Reactor #4 and its spent fuel pool

Akio Matsumura talks about nuclear power plants, spent fuel pools, and the trouble with Reactor 4 at Fukushima.

Dear Akio –

This photo is quite sobering. As you know the pool at Unit No. 4 contains 1,538 fuel assemblies, including a full core that was freshly discharged prior to the accident.

The Fourth Reactor at Fukushima on February 20, 2012. The yellow area is the containment vessel. --The Asahi Shimbum Digital

As I might have mentioned, based on data from the U.S. Department of Energy, a spent fuel assembly from a typical boiling water reactor contains about 30,181 curies ( ~1.1E+15 becquerels) of long-lived radioactivity. So the Unit No. 4 pool contains roughly 49 million curies (~1.8E+18 Bq), of which about 40 percent if Cs-137. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy, Final Environmental Impact Statement, for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada, 2002, Appendix A, Tables A-7, A-8, A-9, A-10, BWR/ Burn up = 36,600 MWd/MTHM, enrichment = 3.03 percent, decay time = 23 years.)

As you know, the risk of yet another highly destructive earthquake occurring even closer to the Fukushima reactors has increased, according to the European Geosciences Union. This is particularly worrisome for Daiichi’s structurally damaged spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4 sitting 100 feet above ground, exposed to the elements. Drainage of water from this pool, resulting from another quake could trigger a catastrophic radiological fire involving about eight times more radioactive cesium than released at Chernobyl.

Best Regards,

Bob Alvarez

Dear Bob:

I thank you very much for your comments on the photo of the Fukushima reactor unit 4.

You and Dr. Gordon Edwards of Canada used the same word, “sobering,” when you saw the photo.

My great concern is what Dr. Hans-Peter Durr, former Director of Astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute in Germany told me ten months ago. Japan had not yet admitted the core had melted down, but Hans-Peter knew that Fukushima was close to bringing us beyond the limits of our scientific knowledge and strongly suggested that Japan’s government should create an independent assessment team to bring the best minds of the nuclear scientists and structural engineers to seek the best solution. In such circumstances, Dr. Edwards accurately said, “It is important to seek the advice of experts who are genuinely independent having no conflict of interest and no need to save face. National pride makes it understandably difficult to seek help from outside, but sometimes it is the best thing to do.”

I have to admit that my country’s strong national pride makes it unrealistic to see an independent assessment team form soon enough, and so I now turn to rely on U.S. leadership to act out of the need for common, global security before a strong earthquake comes in the near future. If the reactor unit 4 building collapses, we will face a global environmental and human catastrophe larger than ever before.

I ask you and your colleagues to help bring this to the attention of U.S. senators and representatives so we may overcome the political hurdles and find a constructive solution.

Yours truly,

Akio

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