Kyodo News: Radioactive water removal hits snag, high iodine detected in sea
Efforts to remove radiation-contaminated water filling up at a troubled reactor building and an underground trench connected to it at the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have hit a snag, casting a shadow on restoration of the vital cooling functions at the site, the government's nuclear safety agency said Wednesday.
The evolving nuclear crisis also showed no signs of abating, as the agency said the same day the highest concentration of radioactive iodine-131 was detected Tuesday in a seawater sample taken near the plant's drainage outlets in the Pacific Ocean. The density was 3,355 times the maximum level permitted under law.
Workers rushed to pump out radiation-polluted water that has been filling up the basement of the No. 1 reactor's turbine building and the tunnel-like trench connected to it, but they found out Tuesday a tank accommodating the water from the building had become full, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.
The engineers also newly spotted water polluted with low-level radiation at a building designed for radioactive waste disposal at the plant, where the trench water is meant to be transferred. They nonetheless finished laying hoses to discharge the trench water, according to the agency.
Despite the halt of water-pumping operations at the No. 1 turbine building, the depth of stagnant water was confirmed to have been halved to 20 centimeters, the agency said.
On Wednesday evening, smoke was temporarily seen rising from a power distribution panel at the No. 1 reactor of the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant, some 10 kilometers south of the Daiichi power station, but it soon disappeared.
No radiation leak was confirmed from the site and nobody was injured in the incident, the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
At the Daiichi plant, radioactive water has also been soaking the basements of the Nos. 2-3 reactor buildings and filling the underground tunnels linked to them. The operator known as TEPCO continued work to secure enough space to accommodate the polluted water at the plant's tanks.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the governmental nuclear regulatory body, told a press conference that the stagnant water obstructs attempts by TEPCO to revive the key cooling functions at the plant, which were paralyzed after the March 11 magnitude 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami.
TEPCO has been pouring massive amounts of water into the reactors and spent nuclear fuel pools at the plant as a stopgap measure to cool them down, because serious damage to fuel rods from overheating could lead to the release of enormous amounts of radioactive materials into the environment.
However, pouring the water is believed to be linked to possible radiation leaks from the reactors, where fuel rods have partially melted.
''This will not lead to a sustainable condition. We want to restore power and rebuild the cooling system, but such efforts are hampered by the stagnant water,'' Nishiyama said. ''We have to find a way out of the contradictory missions'' of the incoming water and the removal of contaminated water.
As steps to resolve the situation, a member of the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, a government panel, has suggested digging a pool outside the turbine buildings in case the pumped contaminated water exceeds the capacity of the tanks.
TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata told a news conference that the firm's attempts to bring the nuclear emergency under control will take a long time, saying it is ''difficult to stabilize the reactors within several weeks.''
As for the future of the crippled plant, Katsumata said the company sees decommissioning the Nos. 1-4 reactors as inevitable. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano also indicated that all six reactors at the plant should be scrapped.
Experts had suggested that the emergency injection of seawater into the Nos. 1-3 reactor cores to cool them down would eventually lead to their dismantlement, as salt and impure substances in seawater causes equipment corrosion.
Nishiyama said it is expected to take at least 20 years to finish the procedures to decommission the six-reactor Fukushima plant. Katsumata said TEPCO considers it as an option to cover the troubled reactors with ''stone coffins'' made of concrete and iron, a solution adopted in the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear crisis.
Meanwhile, the nuclear agency said TEPCO will take measures to improve conditions for workers who have been battling to put the situation under control at the Fukushima plant by preparing a variety of meals and spacious rest stations equipped with tatami mats.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Radioactive water won't reach Taiwan for 250 days: experts
The Chinese Post: Radioactive water won't reach Taiwan for 250 days: experts
The radiation-contaminated seawater from the earthquake-hit Fukushima nuclear power plants won't reach Taiwan for at least 250 days. Therefore, there is no need for people in Taiwan to panic over the possible radiation, ocean environment experts said yesterday.
Professor Hu Chien-hua at the Department of Marine Environmental Informatics of the National Taiwan Ocean University (NTOU) said that the black tide, also known as the Kuroshio current, in the sea off the coast where the Fukushima power plant is located keeps flowing northward. The radiation-contaminated seawater will flow north to North Pacific and then flow to the west coast of the U.S. before finally flowing westward along the equator to Taiwan. “It will take 250 to 365 days for the radiation-contaminated seawater to reach Taiwan. Accordingly, Taiwan's seawater won't suffer any radioactive pollution,” Hu said.
As to whether the radiation pollutants will affect Taiwan's fishing industry, Professor Liao Cheng-hsin of the Department of Environmental Biology and Fisheries Science of the NTOU, said fish products caught by Taiwan's offshore fishing boats would be edible.
Liao said that Taiwan's offshore fishing boats seldom sail to the outer seas of Japan, instead they operate mainly off the Taiwan coast.
He added that although Taiwan's offshore fishing boats operate near Japan when fishing for neon flying squid, mackerel pike and tuna, the public had no cause for concern. This is because the season for squid fishing finished before the crisis began; the mackerel pike fishing season doesn't start till May; and the waters where tuna is fished are far from the Fukushima nuke power plants. “Accordingly, offshore fish caught by local fishermen won't have any radiation contamination,” Liao said.
Vice President Chang Ching-feng of the NTOU said that consumers' fears over possible radiation contamination have cast a cloud over the local fishing industry. To counter this, the government should implement an origin certification system for fish products to protect Taiwan's fishing industry.
In other news, the Central Weather Bureau said Japan hasn't found any leaks of radiation the air recently. Most radiation contaminants were found in soil and water. “Even if an air-borne radiation leak is confirmed, the density once blown to Taiwan would be relatively low and pose no threat to human health,” a CWB official said.
The official stressed that even if Iodine 131 is found in air particles in Taiwan, the density will be too low to cause harm.
The radiation-contaminated seawater from the earthquake-hit Fukushima nuclear power plants won't reach Taiwan for at least 250 days. Therefore, there is no need for people in Taiwan to panic over the possible radiation, ocean environment experts said yesterday.
Professor Hu Chien-hua at the Department of Marine Environmental Informatics of the National Taiwan Ocean University (NTOU) said that the black tide, also known as the Kuroshio current, in the sea off the coast where the Fukushima power plant is located keeps flowing northward. The radiation-contaminated seawater will flow north to North Pacific and then flow to the west coast of the U.S. before finally flowing westward along the equator to Taiwan. “It will take 250 to 365 days for the radiation-contaminated seawater to reach Taiwan. Accordingly, Taiwan's seawater won't suffer any radioactive pollution,” Hu said.
As to whether the radiation pollutants will affect Taiwan's fishing industry, Professor Liao Cheng-hsin of the Department of Environmental Biology and Fisheries Science of the NTOU, said fish products caught by Taiwan's offshore fishing boats would be edible.
Liao said that Taiwan's offshore fishing boats seldom sail to the outer seas of Japan, instead they operate mainly off the Taiwan coast.
He added that although Taiwan's offshore fishing boats operate near Japan when fishing for neon flying squid, mackerel pike and tuna, the public had no cause for concern. This is because the season for squid fishing finished before the crisis began; the mackerel pike fishing season doesn't start till May; and the waters where tuna is fished are far from the Fukushima nuke power plants. “Accordingly, offshore fish caught by local fishermen won't have any radiation contamination,” Liao said.
Vice President Chang Ching-feng of the NTOU said that consumers' fears over possible radiation contamination have cast a cloud over the local fishing industry. To counter this, the government should implement an origin certification system for fish products to protect Taiwan's fishing industry.
In other news, the Central Weather Bureau said Japan hasn't found any leaks of radiation the air recently. Most radiation contaminants were found in soil and water. “Even if an air-borne radiation leak is confirmed, the density once blown to Taiwan would be relatively low and pose no threat to human health,” a CWB official said.
The official stressed that even if Iodine 131 is found in air particles in Taiwan, the density will be too low to cause harm.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
German Reactor Operators Weigh Legal Action
Spiegel Online: German Reactor Operators Weigh Legal Action
Following the center-right election debacle in state votes on Sunday, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is moving to make the temporary shutdown of seven aging nuclear reactors permanent. But she may encounter stiff resistance from plant operators.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's announcement came quickly. Just days after the massive earthquake and resulting tsunami crippled several nuclear reactors at the Fukushima facility in northeastern Japan, she announced an immediate, three-month shutdown of Germany's oldest reactors pending strict safety checks.
"If in a highly developed country like Japan, a country with high safety standards and safety requirements, nuclear consequences from an earthquake and a tsunami can't be prevented," she said, "this has consequences for the whole world, it has consequences for Europe and it has consequences for us in Germany."
Increasingly, it looks as though the temporary shutdown may become permanent. Several center-right German politicians, including Merkel herself on Monday, have indicated a profound change of heart when it comes to nuclear power. And on Tuesday, her coalition partners in Berlin, the business-friendly (and formerly atomic energy-friendly) Free Democrats (FDP) said they hoped that eight German reactors would be permanently taken offline.
But the schedule for such a shutdown may be up to the courts to decide. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, German energy giants RWE and E.on are looking into legal measures to block any permanent order.
Deadline Approaching
RWE lawyers say stock ownership laws leave them little option but to file for damages, according to SPIEGEL's information. The deadline for complaints is approaching; they must be filed with authorities by the second week in April.
Politically, however, things appear to be moving more quickly. "My view of nuclear energy has been changed by events in Japan," Merkel said on Monday. "We simply cannot go back to business as usual."
On Tuesday, FDP General Secretary Christian Lindner said his party was in favor of making the temporary shutdown -- of Germany's seven reactors built prior to 1980 -- permanent. The party would also like to see the problem-plagued Krümmel reactor, which went into operation in 1984, taken permanently offline. Germany would then be left with nine functioning reactors.
Even Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Democrats -- the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) -- has distanced himself from nuclear power in recent days. "People are going to watch closely to see if actions now follow our words," he said at a party meeting on Monday.
'We Have Understood'
While concern over the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima fueled Merkel's shutdown order two weeks ago, this week's political flight from atomic energy is the direct result of Sunday elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. In both states, the environmentalist -- and anti-nuclear -- Green Party made large gains. By contrast, the CDU and FDP, which pushed through an extension of reactor lifespans last autumn, did poorly.
"That was a vote over the future of atomic energy," said FDP leader Guido Westerwelle, who is also Germany's foreign minister, in a standard interpretation of the election results. "We have understood."
Merkel's government in Berlin is currently rushing to come up with a long-term energy plan that relies less on nuclear energy. And talks have begun between state governments and the four companies in Germany which operate nuclear plants: Vatenfall, E.on, RWE and EnBW.
The negotiations promise to be difficult. Legal action could slow the process even further. But this week, the results desired in Berlin have become increasingly clear. "Now, it is time to show," said Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, "that we can quickly extract ourselves from reliance on nuclear energy."
Following the center-right election debacle in state votes on Sunday, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is moving to make the temporary shutdown of seven aging nuclear reactors permanent. But she may encounter stiff resistance from plant operators.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's announcement came quickly. Just days after the massive earthquake and resulting tsunami crippled several nuclear reactors at the Fukushima facility in northeastern Japan, she announced an immediate, three-month shutdown of Germany's oldest reactors pending strict safety checks.
"If in a highly developed country like Japan, a country with high safety standards and safety requirements, nuclear consequences from an earthquake and a tsunami can't be prevented," she said, "this has consequences for the whole world, it has consequences for Europe and it has consequences for us in Germany."
Increasingly, it looks as though the temporary shutdown may become permanent. Several center-right German politicians, including Merkel herself on Monday, have indicated a profound change of heart when it comes to nuclear power. And on Tuesday, her coalition partners in Berlin, the business-friendly (and formerly atomic energy-friendly) Free Democrats (FDP) said they hoped that eight German reactors would be permanently taken offline.
But the schedule for such a shutdown may be up to the courts to decide. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, German energy giants RWE and E.on are looking into legal measures to block any permanent order.
Deadline Approaching
RWE lawyers say stock ownership laws leave them little option but to file for damages, according to SPIEGEL's information. The deadline for complaints is approaching; they must be filed with authorities by the second week in April.
Politically, however, things appear to be moving more quickly. "My view of nuclear energy has been changed by events in Japan," Merkel said on Monday. "We simply cannot go back to business as usual."
On Tuesday, FDP General Secretary Christian Lindner said his party was in favor of making the temporary shutdown -- of Germany's seven reactors built prior to 1980 -- permanent. The party would also like to see the problem-plagued Krümmel reactor, which went into operation in 1984, taken permanently offline. Germany would then be left with nine functioning reactors.
Even Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Democrats -- the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) -- has distanced himself from nuclear power in recent days. "People are going to watch closely to see if actions now follow our words," he said at a party meeting on Monday.
'We Have Understood'
While concern over the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima fueled Merkel's shutdown order two weeks ago, this week's political flight from atomic energy is the direct result of Sunday elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. In both states, the environmentalist -- and anti-nuclear -- Green Party made large gains. By contrast, the CDU and FDP, which pushed through an extension of reactor lifespans last autumn, did poorly.
"That was a vote over the future of atomic energy," said FDP leader Guido Westerwelle, who is also Germany's foreign minister, in a standard interpretation of the election results. "We have understood."
Merkel's government in Berlin is currently rushing to come up with a long-term energy plan that relies less on nuclear energy. And talks have begun between state governments and the four companies in Germany which operate nuclear plants: Vatenfall, E.on, RWE and EnBW.
The negotiations promise to be difficult. Legal action could slow the process even further. But this week, the results desired in Berlin have become increasingly clear. "Now, it is time to show," said Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, "that we can quickly extract ourselves from reliance on nuclear energy."
Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor
Guardian.co.uk: Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor
The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.
The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.
Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have "lost the race" to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.
Workers have been pumping water into three reactors at the stricken plant in a desperate bid to keep the fuel rods from melting down, but the fuel is at least partially exposed in all the reactors.
At least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel "lower head" of the pressure vessel around reactor two, Lahey said.
"The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards."
The major concern when molten fuel breaches a containment vessel is that it reacts with the concrete floor of the drywell underneath, releasing radioactive gases into the surrounding area. At Fukushima, the drywell has been flooded with seawater, which will cool any molten fuel that escapes from the reactor and reduce the amount of radioactive gas released.
Lahey said: "It won't come out as one big glob; it'll come out like lava, and that is good because it's easier to cool."
The drywell is surrounded by a secondary steel-and-concrete structure designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment. But an earlier hydrogen explosion at the reactor may have damaged this.
"The reason we are concerned is that they are detecting water outside the containment area that is highly radioactive and it can only have come from the reactor core," Lahey added. "It's not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it's not going to be good news for the environment."
The radiation level at a pool of water in the turbine room of reactor two was measured recently at 1,000 millisieverts per hour. At that level, workers could remain in the area for just 15 minutes, under current exposure guidelines.
A less serious core meltdown happened at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. During that incident, engineers managed to cool the molten fuel before it penetrated the steel pressure vessel. The task is a race against time, because as the fuel melts it forms a blob that becomes increasingly difficult to cool.
In the light of the Fukushima crisis, Lahey said all countries with nuclear power stations should have "Swat teams" of nuclear reactor safety experts on standby to give swift advice to the authorities in times of emergency, with international groups co-ordinated by the International Atomic Energy Authority.
The warning came as the Japanese authorities were being urged to give clearer advice to the public about the safety of food and drinking water contaminated with radioactive substances from Fukushima.
Robert Peter Gale, a US medical researcher who was brought in by Soviet authorities after the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986, has met Japanese cabinet ministers to discuss establishing an independent committee charged with taking radiation data from the site and translating it into clear public health advice.
"What is fundamentally disturbing the public is reports of drinking water one day being above some limit, and then a day or two later it's suddenly safe to drink. People don't know if the first instance was alarmist or whether the second one was untrue," said Gale.
"My recommendation is they should consider establishing a small commission to independently convert the data into comprehensible units of risk for the public so people know what they are dealing with and can take sensible decisions," he added.
The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.
The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.
Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have "lost the race" to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.
Workers have been pumping water into three reactors at the stricken plant in a desperate bid to keep the fuel rods from melting down, but the fuel is at least partially exposed in all the reactors.
At least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel "lower head" of the pressure vessel around reactor two, Lahey said.
"The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards."
The major concern when molten fuel breaches a containment vessel is that it reacts with the concrete floor of the drywell underneath, releasing radioactive gases into the surrounding area. At Fukushima, the drywell has been flooded with seawater, which will cool any molten fuel that escapes from the reactor and reduce the amount of radioactive gas released.
Lahey said: "It won't come out as one big glob; it'll come out like lava, and that is good because it's easier to cool."
The drywell is surrounded by a secondary steel-and-concrete structure designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment. But an earlier hydrogen explosion at the reactor may have damaged this.
"The reason we are concerned is that they are detecting water outside the containment area that is highly radioactive and it can only have come from the reactor core," Lahey added. "It's not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it's not going to be good news for the environment."
The radiation level at a pool of water in the turbine room of reactor two was measured recently at 1,000 millisieverts per hour. At that level, workers could remain in the area for just 15 minutes, under current exposure guidelines.
A less serious core meltdown happened at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. During that incident, engineers managed to cool the molten fuel before it penetrated the steel pressure vessel. The task is a race against time, because as the fuel melts it forms a blob that becomes increasingly difficult to cool.
In the light of the Fukushima crisis, Lahey said all countries with nuclear power stations should have "Swat teams" of nuclear reactor safety experts on standby to give swift advice to the authorities in times of emergency, with international groups co-ordinated by the International Atomic Energy Authority.
The warning came as the Japanese authorities were being urged to give clearer advice to the public about the safety of food and drinking water contaminated with radioactive substances from Fukushima.
Robert Peter Gale, a US medical researcher who was brought in by Soviet authorities after the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986, has met Japanese cabinet ministers to discuss establishing an independent committee charged with taking radiation data from the site and translating it into clear public health advice.
"What is fundamentally disturbing the public is reports of drinking water one day being above some limit, and then a day or two later it's suddenly safe to drink. People don't know if the first instance was alarmist or whether the second one was untrue," said Gale.
"My recommendation is they should consider establishing a small commission to independently convert the data into comprehensible units of risk for the public so people know what they are dealing with and can take sensible decisions," he added.
Monday, March 28, 2011
U.S. nuclear plant says shielded against Japan emergency
Reuters: U.S. nuclear plant says shielded against Japan emergency
(Reuters) - A U.S. nuclear plant in Alabama similar in design to the earthquake-hit Fukushima facility in Japan has multiple defenses to prevent and tackle the same kind of emergency, its operator said.
Safety features at the Browns Ferry plant in northern Alabama are so superior to those at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant that even in the event of massive flooding the chances of a crisis were negligible, officials from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) told reporters.
"What we have here is defense in depth, multiple levels of redundancy, backup to the backup to the backup," TVA communications consultant Jim Nesbitt told journalists who toured the facility on Friday as he explained the plant's elaborate safety systems.
The emergency at the Japanese plant has escalated since March 11 when a tsunami, triggered by a massive earthquake, knocked out power.
It has revived debate over U.S. nuclear safety just as the industry is set for its first expansion since an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania in 1979. About 20 percent of U.S. electricity is supplied by nuclear power.
Japan's woes have focused attention on how far U.S. facilities are protected against one-off events such as terrorist attacks, earthquakes or flooding.
Comparisons between Fukushima and Browns Ferry are relevant because both have Mark 1 boiling water reactors made by General Electric. In total, there are 23 such reactors in the United States. [ID:nN24140384]
Some nuclear engineers deem these reactors more vulnerable than newer pressurized reactors to dangerous overheating in the event of power loss.
Critics point to objections raised by U.S. nuclear engineers in the 1970s and 1980s about possible design vulnerabilities in boiling water reactors and they say what happened at Fukushima merely validates those concerns.
"We've known since the 1970s that these designs are dangerous and now we've seen what can happen," Diane D'Arrigo, radioactive waste project director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said in an interview.
"If there's a loss of power the pressure suppression system doesn't work. The pressure builds up and you have an explosion," said D'Arrigo, whose non-profit organization advocates that the United States turns to renewable energy.
BACKUPS: BATTERIES AND HOSES
Officials at Browns Ferry, which first came online in 1974, said they would look to improve safety in the light of events in Japan.
"Once they get things stable over there, there will be a full blown root cause (investigation) across the world and that's when we will get the fixes," said Keith Polson, vice president at Browns Ferry.
The facility combines the functionality of a big industrial plant with the security of a federal prison. Armed guards are stationed at the plant's perimeter and patrol inside the reactor building itself.
(Reuters) - A U.S. nuclear plant in Alabama similar in design to the earthquake-hit Fukushima facility in Japan has multiple defenses to prevent and tackle the same kind of emergency, its operator said.
Safety features at the Browns Ferry plant in northern Alabama are so superior to those at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant that even in the event of massive flooding the chances of a crisis were negligible, officials from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) told reporters.
"What we have here is defense in depth, multiple levels of redundancy, backup to the backup to the backup," TVA communications consultant Jim Nesbitt told journalists who toured the facility on Friday as he explained the plant's elaborate safety systems.
The emergency at the Japanese plant has escalated since March 11 when a tsunami, triggered by a massive earthquake, knocked out power.
It has revived debate over U.S. nuclear safety just as the industry is set for its first expansion since an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania in 1979. About 20 percent of U.S. electricity is supplied by nuclear power.
Japan's woes have focused attention on how far U.S. facilities are protected against one-off events such as terrorist attacks, earthquakes or flooding.
Comparisons between Fukushima and Browns Ferry are relevant because both have Mark 1 boiling water reactors made by General Electric. In total, there are 23 such reactors in the United States. [ID:nN24140384]
Some nuclear engineers deem these reactors more vulnerable than newer pressurized reactors to dangerous overheating in the event of power loss.
Critics point to objections raised by U.S. nuclear engineers in the 1970s and 1980s about possible design vulnerabilities in boiling water reactors and they say what happened at Fukushima merely validates those concerns.
"We've known since the 1970s that these designs are dangerous and now we've seen what can happen," Diane D'Arrigo, radioactive waste project director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said in an interview.
"If there's a loss of power the pressure suppression system doesn't work. The pressure builds up and you have an explosion," said D'Arrigo, whose non-profit organization advocates that the United States turns to renewable energy.
BACKUPS: BATTERIES AND HOSES
Officials at Browns Ferry, which first came online in 1974, said they would look to improve safety in the light of events in Japan.
"Once they get things stable over there, there will be a full blown root cause (investigation) across the world and that's when we will get the fixes," said Keith Polson, vice president at Browns Ferry.
The facility combines the functionality of a big industrial plant with the security of a federal prison. Armed guards are stationed at the plant's perimeter and patrol inside the reactor building itself.
UPDATE 1-U.N. atom agency calls nuclear safety summit
Reuters: UPDATE 1-U.N. atom agency calls nuclear safety summit
VIENNA, March 28 (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog's chief on Monday called for a summit to strengthen nuclear safety and improve disaster management following Japan's crisis.
Japan is struggling to avert a severe meltdown at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and officials said on Monday highly radioactive water had been leaking from the site, hit by an earthquake and tsunami two weeks ago.
IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said he wanted ministers from the International Atomic Energy Agency's 151 member states to attend the summit in Vienna, possibly to be held in June.
"(The) political level is needed, this is a very important issue, this is not only for experts or technical people," he told a news conference.
He described the situation at the site as "very serious".
"The difficult situation has not been overcome and it will take time to stabilise the reactors. Radioactivity in the environment, foodstuffs and water is a matter of concern in the vicinity of the Fukushima plant and beyond," he said.
The IAEA, tasked with promoting peaceful uses of atom energy, has been criticised in the media and privately by diplomats for being too slow to react to the crisis and communicate information.
The agency has said it can only publish data given to it by Japan and says it lacks the power to enforce nuclear safety standards.
VIENNA, March 28 (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog's chief on Monday called for a summit to strengthen nuclear safety and improve disaster management following Japan's crisis.
Japan is struggling to avert a severe meltdown at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and officials said on Monday highly radioactive water had been leaking from the site, hit by an earthquake and tsunami two weeks ago.
IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said he wanted ministers from the International Atomic Energy Agency's 151 member states to attend the summit in Vienna, possibly to be held in June.
"(The) political level is needed, this is a very important issue, this is not only for experts or technical people," he told a news conference.
He described the situation at the site as "very serious".
"The difficult situation has not been overcome and it will take time to stabilise the reactors. Radioactivity in the environment, foodstuffs and water is a matter of concern in the vicinity of the Fukushima plant and beyond," he said.
The IAEA, tasked with promoting peaceful uses of atom energy, has been criticised in the media and privately by diplomats for being too slow to react to the crisis and communicate information.
The agency has said it can only publish data given to it by Japan and says it lacks the power to enforce nuclear safety standards.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Wall Street Journal: Radiation Spkes in Sea Near Japan Plant
TOKYO—The regulator overseeing Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex on Saturday announced a sharp elevation in radioactive contamination had been detected in nearby seawater, furthering signs of distress at a plant where officials had cautioned of radioactive leaks near hobbled reactors the day before.
A spokesman said the spike in radioactive iodine—to 1,250 times the legal limit—didn't pose an immediate threat to human health or the area environment, since the material quickly dissipates in the tides and would become diluted before reaching fish and seaweed.
"Because nobody is engaged in fishery in the evacuation area within a radius of 20 kilometers [from the plant], there will be no immediate impact on people in the area," added Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told reporters at a news conference Saturday morning.
But the news underscores the fact that, for all the progress claimed by officials over the past week, they have a long way to go in bringing Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s reactors under control and understanding exactly what is happening inside the compound.
Saturday's report came a day after efforts to repower key cooling systems at the plant bogged down amid reports of highly radioactive water in puddles at the plant's troubled reactor No. 3. Workers who came into contact with the water on Thursday had to be hospitalized.
Mr. Nishiyama on Friday linked the radioactive puddles in plant No. 3 to a possible breach in pipes or ventilators leading to, but not inside, the vessels that surround the core at plant No. 3. Plant officials said later Friday that puddles at Nos. 1 and 2 also contained high levels of radiation.
The precise source of the radiation in the seawater—by air or by water—could yield clues about whether there is new, unanticipated damage in the complex.
Mr. Nishiyama on Saturday said officials weren't sure what caused the latest surge. "Radioactive substances may have been transmitted through the air, or contaminated water could have drained from the plant somehow," he said. "I don't have further ideas."
He also said officials were crafting a plan to deal with the contaminated puddles. "I have heard that [the operator] has an idea about a place to store water and is preparing" for drainage, he said.
The results released Saturday were from samples collected Friday morning in seawater about 330 meters south of the plant. In addition to heightened levels of iodine-131, the seawater contained 117 times Japan's legal limit of cesium-134 and 80 times the threshold for cesium-137, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
The iodine-131 reading compared with an earlier report that showed the radioactive isotope at 126 times the legal limit. A person drinking half a liter of water with the latest level of contamination would be consuming 1 millisievert, the equivalent of a full year's acceptable consumption.
Samples gathered Friday north of the reactors 5 and 6—which have been the least worrisome since Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the complex—were also high, but roughly one-quarter of the levels to the south. NISA is scheduled to disclose the result of Saturday morning's tests on Sunday.
The plant's regulator said Saturday it had begun to drain puddles with high levels of radioactivity at the turbine building connected to the No. 1 reactor.
The agency and Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, are mulling ways to drain puddles in Nos. 2 and 3, Mr. Nishiyama said.
Workers started spraying fresh water on a reactor pressure vessel at No. 2 reactor Saturday, switching from a last-resort measure in which seawater had been used to cool reactors. The continued use of seawater had led experts to worry about the accumulation of crystallized salt in cooling pumps. Workers began using freshwater to cool Nos. 1 and 3 on Friday.
Among the plant's most immediate concerns is reactor No. 3, where the basement of the turbine building has partially flooded with water that officials said contained radiation levels 10,000 times as high as normal, according to official briefings.
"The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is still very grave," said Prime Minister Naoto Kan at a news conference. "We are still not at a stage where we can be optimistic."
Early Friday, Mr. Nishiyama said the radiation levels in the water at reactor No. 3 appeared to suggest there had been a breach to the reactor.
Later that day, he amended that view to say there was no indication that the structures around the fuel rods—the pressure vessel and the containment vessel that surrounds it—had been damaged. Rather, he said, damage to ventilators or pipes leading to those structures was believed to be responsible for the leak.
While a breach involving reactor No. 3 would already appear to represent the most significant radiation leak thus far at the plant, it would be less severe than any damage closer to the fuel rods.
Even so, Friday's report from the No. 3 complex foiled the completion a top-priority job, as officials sought to pinpoint where workers are being exposed to hazardous levels of radiation.
Workers at the six-reactor complex had hoped to connect the control room of the No. 2 unit to outside power and start cooling systems at the Nos. 1, 3 and 4 reactors by the end of Friday. Returning the plant's cooling pumps to stable functioning by Friday had been a priority for the government and Tepco.
"Radiation levels in some parts of the facilities are just stunning," said one official at Japan's nuclear regulator. "The work to fix the cooling system was made all the more difficult by the lack of information about where radiation is high inside the complex."
Officials said Friday they didn't know now when the cooling systems would come online. "We cannot say with certainty at this point in how many days all the reactors will be brought to a state of cold shutdown," or the cooling of a nuclear reactor to safe levels, said Mr. Nishiyama said Friday.
The setbacks came after a week in which workers at the plant appeared to make slow progress toward stabilizing the plant. High radiation levels, as well as difficulties in assessing and fixing damaged cooling equipment, have slowed efforts.
A week ago, much of the plant was still without power, control rooms were dark and temperatures were out of control in the pools holding spent nuclear fuel. Now, all the units are hooked up to the electric grid, all but one have lights on, and the temperatures in the pools have fallen. Mr. Nishiyama said he wanted to have the lights turned on at the last remaining dark control room Saturday.
"The amount of heat being generated by the core is declining.... Now physics is on their side. Last weekend it was against them," said Murray Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University, who worked in the commercial nuclear industry for 17 years. "The longer they go without anything major happening, the better."
Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said Friday the U.S. has offered to provide fresh water for the cooling operations. A U.S. military spokesman in Japan said that as an initial step, the U.S. military plans to ship 525,000 gallons of fresh water on two Navy barges from a base in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo.
Japan's government also said Friday it would begin helping evacuate people who live just beyond the "no-go" zone that surrounds the plant. The government has said it isn't considering officially broadening its 12-mile evacuation zone around the nuclear complex.
But a state monitoring body this week released estimates that suggested radiation in some areas just outside the zone had reached levels deemed harmful to infants in the long term. People in the zone from 12 to 18 miles (20 to 30 kilometers) of the plant are also suffering shortages of everyday goods.
The U.S. government has recommended a 50-mile (80-kilometer) exclusion zone.
More than a quarter million people have been evacuated overall in Japan following recent twin natural disasters. On Friday, Japan's National Police Agency said 10,102 people had been confirmed dead and 17,053 were missing.
TOKYO—The regulator overseeing Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex on Saturday announced a sharp elevation in radioactive contamination had been detected in nearby seawater, furthering signs of distress at a plant where officials had cautioned of radioactive leaks near hobbled reactors the day before.
A spokesman said the spike in radioactive iodine—to 1,250 times the legal limit—didn't pose an immediate threat to human health or the area environment, since the material quickly dissipates in the tides and would become diluted before reaching fish and seaweed.
"Because nobody is engaged in fishery in the evacuation area within a radius of 20 kilometers [from the plant], there will be no immediate impact on people in the area," added Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told reporters at a news conference Saturday morning.
But the news underscores the fact that, for all the progress claimed by officials over the past week, they have a long way to go in bringing Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s reactors under control and understanding exactly what is happening inside the compound.
Saturday's report came a day after efforts to repower key cooling systems at the plant bogged down amid reports of highly radioactive water in puddles at the plant's troubled reactor No. 3. Workers who came into contact with the water on Thursday had to be hospitalized.
Mr. Nishiyama on Friday linked the radioactive puddles in plant No. 3 to a possible breach in pipes or ventilators leading to, but not inside, the vessels that surround the core at plant No. 3. Plant officials said later Friday that puddles at Nos. 1 and 2 also contained high levels of radiation.
The precise source of the radiation in the seawater—by air or by water—could yield clues about whether there is new, unanticipated damage in the complex.
Mr. Nishiyama on Saturday said officials weren't sure what caused the latest surge. "Radioactive substances may have been transmitted through the air, or contaminated water could have drained from the plant somehow," he said. "I don't have further ideas."
He also said officials were crafting a plan to deal with the contaminated puddles. "I have heard that [the operator] has an idea about a place to store water and is preparing" for drainage, he said.
The results released Saturday were from samples collected Friday morning in seawater about 330 meters south of the plant. In addition to heightened levels of iodine-131, the seawater contained 117 times Japan's legal limit of cesium-134 and 80 times the threshold for cesium-137, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
The iodine-131 reading compared with an earlier report that showed the radioactive isotope at 126 times the legal limit. A person drinking half a liter of water with the latest level of contamination would be consuming 1 millisievert, the equivalent of a full year's acceptable consumption.
Samples gathered Friday north of the reactors 5 and 6—which have been the least worrisome since Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the complex—were also high, but roughly one-quarter of the levels to the south. NISA is scheduled to disclose the result of Saturday morning's tests on Sunday.
The plant's regulator said Saturday it had begun to drain puddles with high levels of radioactivity at the turbine building connected to the No. 1 reactor.
The agency and Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, are mulling ways to drain puddles in Nos. 2 and 3, Mr. Nishiyama said.
Workers started spraying fresh water on a reactor pressure vessel at No. 2 reactor Saturday, switching from a last-resort measure in which seawater had been used to cool reactors. The continued use of seawater had led experts to worry about the accumulation of crystallized salt in cooling pumps. Workers began using freshwater to cool Nos. 1 and 3 on Friday.
Among the plant's most immediate concerns is reactor No. 3, where the basement of the turbine building has partially flooded with water that officials said contained radiation levels 10,000 times as high as normal, according to official briefings.
"The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is still very grave," said Prime Minister Naoto Kan at a news conference. "We are still not at a stage where we can be optimistic."
Early Friday, Mr. Nishiyama said the radiation levels in the water at reactor No. 3 appeared to suggest there had been a breach to the reactor.
Later that day, he amended that view to say there was no indication that the structures around the fuel rods—the pressure vessel and the containment vessel that surrounds it—had been damaged. Rather, he said, damage to ventilators or pipes leading to those structures was believed to be responsible for the leak.
While a breach involving reactor No. 3 would already appear to represent the most significant radiation leak thus far at the plant, it would be less severe than any damage closer to the fuel rods.
Even so, Friday's report from the No. 3 complex foiled the completion a top-priority job, as officials sought to pinpoint where workers are being exposed to hazardous levels of radiation.
Workers at the six-reactor complex had hoped to connect the control room of the No. 2 unit to outside power and start cooling systems at the Nos. 1, 3 and 4 reactors by the end of Friday. Returning the plant's cooling pumps to stable functioning by Friday had been a priority for the government and Tepco.
"Radiation levels in some parts of the facilities are just stunning," said one official at Japan's nuclear regulator. "The work to fix the cooling system was made all the more difficult by the lack of information about where radiation is high inside the complex."
Officials said Friday they didn't know now when the cooling systems would come online. "We cannot say with certainty at this point in how many days all the reactors will be brought to a state of cold shutdown," or the cooling of a nuclear reactor to safe levels, said Mr. Nishiyama said Friday.
The setbacks came after a week in which workers at the plant appeared to make slow progress toward stabilizing the plant. High radiation levels, as well as difficulties in assessing and fixing damaged cooling equipment, have slowed efforts.
A week ago, much of the plant was still without power, control rooms were dark and temperatures were out of control in the pools holding spent nuclear fuel. Now, all the units are hooked up to the electric grid, all but one have lights on, and the temperatures in the pools have fallen. Mr. Nishiyama said he wanted to have the lights turned on at the last remaining dark control room Saturday.
"The amount of heat being generated by the core is declining.... Now physics is on their side. Last weekend it was against them," said Murray Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University, who worked in the commercial nuclear industry for 17 years. "The longer they go without anything major happening, the better."
Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said Friday the U.S. has offered to provide fresh water for the cooling operations. A U.S. military spokesman in Japan said that as an initial step, the U.S. military plans to ship 525,000 gallons of fresh water on two Navy barges from a base in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo.
Japan's government also said Friday it would begin helping evacuate people who live just beyond the "no-go" zone that surrounds the plant. The government has said it isn't considering officially broadening its 12-mile evacuation zone around the nuclear complex.
But a state monitoring body this week released estimates that suggested radiation in some areas just outside the zone had reached levels deemed harmful to infants in the long term. People in the zone from 12 to 18 miles (20 to 30 kilometers) of the plant are also suffering shortages of everyday goods.
The U.S. government has recommended a 50-mile (80-kilometer) exclusion zone.
More than a quarter million people have been evacuated overall in Japan following recent twin natural disasters. On Friday, Japan's National Police Agency said 10,102 people had been confirmed dead and 17,053 were missing.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Japan’s Prime Minister Says Can’t Let Down Guard Over Reactor
Bloomberg Business Week: Japan’s Prime Minister Says Can’t Let Down Guard Over Reactor
March 26 (Bloomberg) -- Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan said efforts to bring the damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant under control haven’t yet reached the stage where the government can let down its guard.
“We’re trying to prevent a deterioration of the situation,” Kan said in a public address in Tokyo yesterday. “We must continue to work with a high sense of alertness on each development.”
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said yesterday it doesn’t think there is a physical crack in the pressure vessel or containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor. There may be some kind of leak from the reactor causing high levels of radiation found in water in the basement of the reactor’s turbine building, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the agency, told reporters.
Repair work at the site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl has been plagued by explosions, fires and leaks of toxic material. Workers using fire engines have streamed 4,000 tons of water on the No. 3 reactor, five times more than any of the other five units, according to the government.
“Even if there has been encouraging news such as getting some power back to the site, the installation remains in an extremely precarious and very serious situation that has not yet been stabilized,” Thomas Houdre, head of reactors at France’s nuclear safety agency, told reporters in Paris.
Radiation Levels
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant operator, found water at No. 1 reactor with radiation levels 10,000 times higher than normal cooling water, company officials said at a press conference shown on a webcast.
A similar finding at the No.3 reactor delayed attempts to restore power to control and cooling systems. Three workers were hospitalized after stepping into water at the turbine building of the No. 3 reactor.
Tokyo Electric plans to drain radioactive water from the turbine building of the No. 3 unit where the accident occurred, spokesman Osamu Yokokura said. It has yet to determine how and when to do this, he said.
“The water that is coming out of that area is much higher in terms of radiation and this is obviously complicating the clean up,” said Tony Roulstone, an atomic engineer who directs the University of Cambridge’s master’s program in nuclear energy. “If it’s leaking out then they have to figure out some way to contain this water.”
Without Power
The March 11 quake, Japan’s biggest ever, left the plant without power needed to cool nuclear fuel rods. Japan yesterday advised more people living close to the nuclear plant to evacuate because basic goods are in short supply, while assuring them that radiation levels haven’t risen.
Radiation readings around residents living between 20 kilometers (12 miles) and 30 kilometers from the plant are falling, according to the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan.
An order for the residents to remain inside their homes does not have to be amended right now, commission member Seiji Shiroya said yesterday.
Should the reading for radioactive substances start to increase, the commission will advise the government to change the order for evacuation, he told a press conference in Tokyo.
Death Toll
The death toll from the quake and tsunami climbed to 10,102 as of 9 p.m. local time yesterday, with 17,053 people missing, according to the National Police Agency in Tokyo.
The spread of radiation to food and water supplies prompted bulk-buying of bottled drinks even as the government said the health threat remained minimal.
Changing weather systems were due to drive radiation from the Fukushima plant over the Pacific Ocean yesterday, Austria’s Meteorological and Geophysics Center reported, citing data from the United Nations nuclear-test ban treaty organization.
Wind will carry the radionuclides for a “short while” inland, the center said on its website. Reactors at Fukushima may have released as much as 20 percent of the radioactive iodine and up to 60 percent of the radioactive cesium that resulted from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, according to the report.
The maximum radiation reading reported so far at the nuclear plant is 500 millisieverts per hour, meaning a worker in the vicinity would receive the maximum-allowed dose in 30 minutes. Tokyo Electric said 17 workers had received more than 100 millisieverts of radiation since the crisis started.
March 26 (Bloomberg) -- Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan said efforts to bring the damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant under control haven’t yet reached the stage where the government can let down its guard.
“We’re trying to prevent a deterioration of the situation,” Kan said in a public address in Tokyo yesterday. “We must continue to work with a high sense of alertness on each development.”
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said yesterday it doesn’t think there is a physical crack in the pressure vessel or containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor. There may be some kind of leak from the reactor causing high levels of radiation found in water in the basement of the reactor’s turbine building, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the agency, told reporters.
Repair work at the site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl has been plagued by explosions, fires and leaks of toxic material. Workers using fire engines have streamed 4,000 tons of water on the No. 3 reactor, five times more than any of the other five units, according to the government.
“Even if there has been encouraging news such as getting some power back to the site, the installation remains in an extremely precarious and very serious situation that has not yet been stabilized,” Thomas Houdre, head of reactors at France’s nuclear safety agency, told reporters in Paris.
Radiation Levels
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant operator, found water at No. 1 reactor with radiation levels 10,000 times higher than normal cooling water, company officials said at a press conference shown on a webcast.
A similar finding at the No.3 reactor delayed attempts to restore power to control and cooling systems. Three workers were hospitalized after stepping into water at the turbine building of the No. 3 reactor.
Tokyo Electric plans to drain radioactive water from the turbine building of the No. 3 unit where the accident occurred, spokesman Osamu Yokokura said. It has yet to determine how and when to do this, he said.
“The water that is coming out of that area is much higher in terms of radiation and this is obviously complicating the clean up,” said Tony Roulstone, an atomic engineer who directs the University of Cambridge’s master’s program in nuclear energy. “If it’s leaking out then they have to figure out some way to contain this water.”
Without Power
The March 11 quake, Japan’s biggest ever, left the plant without power needed to cool nuclear fuel rods. Japan yesterday advised more people living close to the nuclear plant to evacuate because basic goods are in short supply, while assuring them that radiation levels haven’t risen.
Radiation readings around residents living between 20 kilometers (12 miles) and 30 kilometers from the plant are falling, according to the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan.
An order for the residents to remain inside their homes does not have to be amended right now, commission member Seiji Shiroya said yesterday.
Should the reading for radioactive substances start to increase, the commission will advise the government to change the order for evacuation, he told a press conference in Tokyo.
Death Toll
The death toll from the quake and tsunami climbed to 10,102 as of 9 p.m. local time yesterday, with 17,053 people missing, according to the National Police Agency in Tokyo.
The spread of radiation to food and water supplies prompted bulk-buying of bottled drinks even as the government said the health threat remained minimal.
Changing weather systems were due to drive radiation from the Fukushima plant over the Pacific Ocean yesterday, Austria’s Meteorological and Geophysics Center reported, citing data from the United Nations nuclear-test ban treaty organization.
Wind will carry the radionuclides for a “short while” inland, the center said on its website. Reactors at Fukushima may have released as much as 20 percent of the radioactive iodine and up to 60 percent of the radioactive cesium that resulted from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, according to the report.
The maximum radiation reading reported so far at the nuclear plant is 500 millisieverts per hour, meaning a worker in the vicinity would receive the maximum-allowed dose in 30 minutes. Tokyo Electric said 17 workers had received more than 100 millisieverts of radiation since the crisis started.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Rules Faulted for Poor Data on Failures at Reactors
The New York Times: Rules Faulted for Poor Data on Failures at Reactors
Nuclear power plants in the United States are not reporting some equipment failures to the government because of badly written rules, the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned.
Those rules, which are often contradictory, leave the commission without the muscle to enforce the federal law requiring the reporting of such problems, the inspector general said in a report issued Wednesday.
From December 2009 to September 2010, the report said, the commission found 24 instances in which equipment problems were not properly reported. If the rules are not improved, it said, they “could reduce the margin of safety for operating nuclear power reactors.”
The commission, which operates independently of the inspector general, countered in a statement that it “has a variety of other regulations that effectively encompass reporting all defects.” It added, “The N.R.C. continues to conclude plants are operating safely.”
The inspector general’s office said it was concerned about equipment involving safety features — for instance, systems that measure pressure in a reactor’s coolant. But the report did not detail any specific lapses in reporting equipment problems.
R. K. Wild, a senior analyst in the inspector general’s office, said Thursday that full reporting of equipment defects was crucial to ensuring that problems were not duplicated at other plants. When a plant operator reports a problem, the government can take the information to the manufacturer and determine where similar parts are in use.
Nuclear power generation in the United States has come under more scrutiny since an earthquake and tsunami struck a nuclear plant in Japan, setting off a crisis that continues to unfold. At the request of President Obama, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted Wednesday to set up a task force to review the safety of the 104 nuclear reactors operating across the United States.
In another development, federal authorities announced Thursday that a subcontractor at the Watts Bar nuclear plant under construction in Tennessee had been accused of lying about making crucial measurements on cables that carry power to safety systems there. The contractor, Matthew David Correll, 31, was charged with making false statements, the United States attorney in Knoxville, Tenn., said.
The reactor, the second at the Watts Bar plant, is the only one now being built in the nation.
Nuclear power plants in the United States are not reporting some equipment failures to the government because of badly written rules, the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned.
Those rules, which are often contradictory, leave the commission without the muscle to enforce the federal law requiring the reporting of such problems, the inspector general said in a report issued Wednesday.
From December 2009 to September 2010, the report said, the commission found 24 instances in which equipment problems were not properly reported. If the rules are not improved, it said, they “could reduce the margin of safety for operating nuclear power reactors.”
The commission, which operates independently of the inspector general, countered in a statement that it “has a variety of other regulations that effectively encompass reporting all defects.” It added, “The N.R.C. continues to conclude plants are operating safely.”
The inspector general’s office said it was concerned about equipment involving safety features — for instance, systems that measure pressure in a reactor’s coolant. But the report did not detail any specific lapses in reporting equipment problems.
R. K. Wild, a senior analyst in the inspector general’s office, said Thursday that full reporting of equipment defects was crucial to ensuring that problems were not duplicated at other plants. When a plant operator reports a problem, the government can take the information to the manufacturer and determine where similar parts are in use.
Nuclear power generation in the United States has come under more scrutiny since an earthquake and tsunami struck a nuclear plant in Japan, setting off a crisis that continues to unfold. At the request of President Obama, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted Wednesday to set up a task force to review the safety of the 104 nuclear reactors operating across the United States.
In another development, federal authorities announced Thursday that a subcontractor at the Watts Bar nuclear plant under construction in Tennessee had been accused of lying about making crucial measurements on cables that carry power to safety systems there. The contractor, Matthew David Correll, 31, was charged with making false statements, the United States attorney in Knoxville, Tenn., said.
The reactor, the second at the Watts Bar plant, is the only one now being built in the nation.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Nuclear Industry in Russia Sells Safety, Taught by Chernobyl
The New York TImes: Energy & Environment: Nuclear Industry in Russia Sells Safety, Taught by Chernobyl
MOSCOW — It was truly a trial by fire — one that has now become part of Russia’s nuclear marketing message. Cynical as that might seem.
In April 1986, as workers and engineers scrambled to keep the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s molten, radioactive uranium from burrowing into the earth — the so-called China syndrome — a Soviet physicist on the scene devised a makeshift solution for containing remnants of the liquefied core.
Teams of coal miners working in shifts tunneled underneath the smoldering reactor and built a platform of steel and concrete, cooled by water piped in from outside the plant’s perimeter.
In the end the improvised core-catcher was not needed. The melted fuel burned through three stories of the reactor’s basement but stopped at the foundation — where the mass remains so highly radioactive that scientists still cannot approach it.
Although 25 years later Chernobyl remains the radiation calamity by which all subsequent nuclear accidents will be measured, core-catchers are now a designed-in feature of the newest reactors Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom, is selling around the world. That includes a contract the company signed with Belarus just last week, even as radioactive steam was rising from the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.
Meanwhile that physicist, Leonid A. Bolshov, who was awarded a Soviet hero’s medal for his efforts at Chernobyl, is now the 64-year-old director of the Institute for Nuclear Safety and Development, formed in 1988 in the wake of that disaster.
Like many others involved in his country’s nuclear power industry, Mr. Bolshov expresses what to some ears might sound like a jarringly opportunistic sales pitch: that Chernobyl was the hard-earned experience that made Russia the world’s most safety-conscious nuclear proponent.
“The Japanese disaster will give the whole world a lesson,” Mr. Bolshov said in an interview last week. “After a disaster, a burst of attention to safety follows.”
Opportunistic or not, in recent years the Russian nuclear industry has profited handsomely by selling reactors abroad, mostly to developing countries. That includes China and India — whose insatiable energy appetites are keeping them wedded to nuclear power, despite their vows to proceed even more cautiously in light of Japan’s disaster.
And though Fukushima Daiichi provides a new opportunity to stress the message, Rosatom has long been marketing its reactors as safe — not despite Chernobyl, but because of it.
The Russians say they are now building more nuclear power plants globally than any other company, or 15 of the 60 new reactors under construction today. Rosatom says it has another 30 firm orders for reactors and plans to sell more. Late last year, the company has set a goal of tripling worldwide sales by 2030, to $50 billion annually — a goal that might seem much more doubtful now that Japan’s crisis is making many countries think twice about building new plants any time soon.
And yet, while stocks of publicly traded companies in the nuclear industry were falling around the world last week, Russian officials were persistently staying on message with their safety assurances.
The Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, himself flew to Belarus last week to sign the contract to build a new plant in that country, worth $9 billion.
“I want to stress that we possess a whole arsenal of advanced technical resources to ensure stable, accident-free performance for nuclear plants,” Mr. Putin told journalists in Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
And the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, used the occasion of a visit by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Erdogan, to praise the safety of Russian nuclear designs. “Even in connection with what has happened in Japan, no radical reconsideration of safety standards is needed” he said, referring to a four-reactor plant the Russians have contracted to build in a seismically active region of southern Turkey. That deal is worth $20 billion.
Sergei G. Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Rosatom now charges between $2 billion and $5 billion for a reactor, depending on its size and other factors. And despite the claimed safety premium, the Russians still win some business by underbidding competitors that include General Electric and Westinghouse, a division of Toshiba of Japan, according to Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an industrial analyst at the state-owned Gazprombank.
Independent nuclear safety experts say Russia’s export-model reactors are as safe as international peers. But that has not insulated the Russian industry from criticism, including the cutting of deals and the endorsement of nuclear safety to an almost unseemly degree in the midst of a crisis in Japan.
Igor V. Kudrik, an authority on Russia’s nuclear industry at the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental group, said Russian reactor designs had indeed improved dramatically since Chernobyl, which was built without a containment vessel. But the industry lacks independent oversight in Russia’s politically centralized system, he said, leaving profit motives alone to guide development.
“They promote this technology only because it engages the enormous military nuclear industry left over from Soviet times,” he said.
Pressurized water reactors, like the Rosatom VVER that is the company’s current standard, and the 40-year-old General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor model at the Fukushima plant, are inherently safer than Chernobyl-style reactors.
In both boiling water and pressurized water reactors, water cools the fuel and sustains the nuclear reaction. The water that floods the spaces between fuel rods slows neutrons, necessary for the reaction. Thus, in both designs, if the coolant is lost the reaction will stop, following the laws of physics — though, as the disaster-management team in Japan knows all too well, the shutdown does nothing to dissipate still-dangerous residual heat.
So, despite Rosatom’s core-catcher feature for arresting meltdowns, its reactors might be as potentially vulnerable to release of radioactive material if the water-cooling system failed — as happened at Fukushima Daiichi.
But whatever the reactor design, operational safety procedures are crucial. And the Russians contend that their industry and engineers benefited more than others from the lessons of Chernobyl, including the stark reality that most reactors are poorly equipped to contain a full core meltdown.
Rosatom says a reactor it completed in 2007 in Tianwan, China, is the first in the world with what the Russians call a core-catcher built in. It was partly designed by Mr. Bolshov, the physicist who jury-rigged the barrier under Chernobyl.
The contemporary Rosatom core-catcher is a pool in the basement of a reactor filled not with water, but a metallic alloy. Solid under normal circumstances, it is designed to liquefy if the hot, melted-down core drops into it after burrowing through the floors above. Once the whole metallic pool liquefied, Mr. Bolshov said, heat from the continuing nuclear reaction would create currents, swirling the mixture against water-cooled steel walls.
The Russians market it as a final safety net in the last stages of a nuclear catastrophe.
And they say it is a solution to the problem of China syndrome. It has not, of course, yet been subjected to real-world testing.
Russia is heavily invested in convincing other countries that these systems can make nuclear power safe.
As a legacy of the cold war, Russia possesses about 40 percent of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity. That is much more than it needs to service its domestic reactors, meaning the industry relies on exports. (Enrichment refers to raising the level of the uranium isotope 235 from about 0.7 percent in natural uranium to 3 percent to 5 percent for civilian reactor fuel.)
Russia exports about $3 billion worth of fuel a year. Rosatom says it intends to increase its share of the global nuclear fuel market to 25 percent by 2025, from 17 percent today. The strategy is to make money, but also to offer fuel at a discount to customers who buy Russian-made reactors.
The current threat to the market, for the Russians and others in the industry, is real. In the short term, Germany’s decision last week to close 7 of its 17 nuclear plants, and the probable delays of planned new reactors elsewhere, will diminish demand for uranium fuel.
The McIlvaine Company, a Northfield, Ill.-based energy consultancy, estimated last week that two-thirds of all new reactor projects will be delayed after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and that over five years $200 billion in energy investment globally will be redirected from nuclear to coal, petroleum or other alternatives.
Shares in publicly traded companies in the Russian nuclear power industry have plummeted in the wake of the Japan disaster, as have shares in uranium mines and nuclear companies elsewhere.
And even as Russia seeks to export reactors backed by Rosatom’s safety assurances, back home tight money has delayed plans for replacing some aging nuclear plants. That includes 11 Chernobyl-style reactors — the ones without containment vessels. Or core-catchers.
MOSCOW — It was truly a trial by fire — one that has now become part of Russia’s nuclear marketing message. Cynical as that might seem.
In April 1986, as workers and engineers scrambled to keep the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s molten, radioactive uranium from burrowing into the earth — the so-called China syndrome — a Soviet physicist on the scene devised a makeshift solution for containing remnants of the liquefied core.
Teams of coal miners working in shifts tunneled underneath the smoldering reactor and built a platform of steel and concrete, cooled by water piped in from outside the plant’s perimeter.
In the end the improvised core-catcher was not needed. The melted fuel burned through three stories of the reactor’s basement but stopped at the foundation — where the mass remains so highly radioactive that scientists still cannot approach it.
Although 25 years later Chernobyl remains the radiation calamity by which all subsequent nuclear accidents will be measured, core-catchers are now a designed-in feature of the newest reactors Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom, is selling around the world. That includes a contract the company signed with Belarus just last week, even as radioactive steam was rising from the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.
Meanwhile that physicist, Leonid A. Bolshov, who was awarded a Soviet hero’s medal for his efforts at Chernobyl, is now the 64-year-old director of the Institute for Nuclear Safety and Development, formed in 1988 in the wake of that disaster.
Like many others involved in his country’s nuclear power industry, Mr. Bolshov expresses what to some ears might sound like a jarringly opportunistic sales pitch: that Chernobyl was the hard-earned experience that made Russia the world’s most safety-conscious nuclear proponent.
“The Japanese disaster will give the whole world a lesson,” Mr. Bolshov said in an interview last week. “After a disaster, a burst of attention to safety follows.”
Opportunistic or not, in recent years the Russian nuclear industry has profited handsomely by selling reactors abroad, mostly to developing countries. That includes China and India — whose insatiable energy appetites are keeping them wedded to nuclear power, despite their vows to proceed even more cautiously in light of Japan’s disaster.
And though Fukushima Daiichi provides a new opportunity to stress the message, Rosatom has long been marketing its reactors as safe — not despite Chernobyl, but because of it.
The Russians say they are now building more nuclear power plants globally than any other company, or 15 of the 60 new reactors under construction today. Rosatom says it has another 30 firm orders for reactors and plans to sell more. Late last year, the company has set a goal of tripling worldwide sales by 2030, to $50 billion annually — a goal that might seem much more doubtful now that Japan’s crisis is making many countries think twice about building new plants any time soon.
And yet, while stocks of publicly traded companies in the nuclear industry were falling around the world last week, Russian officials were persistently staying on message with their safety assurances.
The Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, himself flew to Belarus last week to sign the contract to build a new plant in that country, worth $9 billion.
“I want to stress that we possess a whole arsenal of advanced technical resources to ensure stable, accident-free performance for nuclear plants,” Mr. Putin told journalists in Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
And the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, used the occasion of a visit by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Erdogan, to praise the safety of Russian nuclear designs. “Even in connection with what has happened in Japan, no radical reconsideration of safety standards is needed” he said, referring to a four-reactor plant the Russians have contracted to build in a seismically active region of southern Turkey. That deal is worth $20 billion.
Sergei G. Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Rosatom now charges between $2 billion and $5 billion for a reactor, depending on its size and other factors. And despite the claimed safety premium, the Russians still win some business by underbidding competitors that include General Electric and Westinghouse, a division of Toshiba of Japan, according to Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an industrial analyst at the state-owned Gazprombank.
Independent nuclear safety experts say Russia’s export-model reactors are as safe as international peers. But that has not insulated the Russian industry from criticism, including the cutting of deals and the endorsement of nuclear safety to an almost unseemly degree in the midst of a crisis in Japan.
Igor V. Kudrik, an authority on Russia’s nuclear industry at the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental group, said Russian reactor designs had indeed improved dramatically since Chernobyl, which was built without a containment vessel. But the industry lacks independent oversight in Russia’s politically centralized system, he said, leaving profit motives alone to guide development.
“They promote this technology only because it engages the enormous military nuclear industry left over from Soviet times,” he said.
Pressurized water reactors, like the Rosatom VVER that is the company’s current standard, and the 40-year-old General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor model at the Fukushima plant, are inherently safer than Chernobyl-style reactors.
In both boiling water and pressurized water reactors, water cools the fuel and sustains the nuclear reaction. The water that floods the spaces between fuel rods slows neutrons, necessary for the reaction. Thus, in both designs, if the coolant is lost the reaction will stop, following the laws of physics — though, as the disaster-management team in Japan knows all too well, the shutdown does nothing to dissipate still-dangerous residual heat.
So, despite Rosatom’s core-catcher feature for arresting meltdowns, its reactors might be as potentially vulnerable to release of radioactive material if the water-cooling system failed — as happened at Fukushima Daiichi.
But whatever the reactor design, operational safety procedures are crucial. And the Russians contend that their industry and engineers benefited more than others from the lessons of Chernobyl, including the stark reality that most reactors are poorly equipped to contain a full core meltdown.
Rosatom says a reactor it completed in 2007 in Tianwan, China, is the first in the world with what the Russians call a core-catcher built in. It was partly designed by Mr. Bolshov, the physicist who jury-rigged the barrier under Chernobyl.
The contemporary Rosatom core-catcher is a pool in the basement of a reactor filled not with water, but a metallic alloy. Solid under normal circumstances, it is designed to liquefy if the hot, melted-down core drops into it after burrowing through the floors above. Once the whole metallic pool liquefied, Mr. Bolshov said, heat from the continuing nuclear reaction would create currents, swirling the mixture against water-cooled steel walls.
The Russians market it as a final safety net in the last stages of a nuclear catastrophe.
And they say it is a solution to the problem of China syndrome. It has not, of course, yet been subjected to real-world testing.
Russia is heavily invested in convincing other countries that these systems can make nuclear power safe.
As a legacy of the cold war, Russia possesses about 40 percent of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity. That is much more than it needs to service its domestic reactors, meaning the industry relies on exports. (Enrichment refers to raising the level of the uranium isotope 235 from about 0.7 percent in natural uranium to 3 percent to 5 percent for civilian reactor fuel.)
Russia exports about $3 billion worth of fuel a year. Rosatom says it intends to increase its share of the global nuclear fuel market to 25 percent by 2025, from 17 percent today. The strategy is to make money, but also to offer fuel at a discount to customers who buy Russian-made reactors.
The current threat to the market, for the Russians and others in the industry, is real. In the short term, Germany’s decision last week to close 7 of its 17 nuclear plants, and the probable delays of planned new reactors elsewhere, will diminish demand for uranium fuel.
The McIlvaine Company, a Northfield, Ill.-based energy consultancy, estimated last week that two-thirds of all new reactor projects will be delayed after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and that over five years $200 billion in energy investment globally will be redirected from nuclear to coal, petroleum or other alternatives.
Shares in publicly traded companies in the Russian nuclear power industry have plummeted in the wake of the Japan disaster, as have shares in uranium mines and nuclear companies elsewhere.
And even as Russia seeks to export reactors backed by Rosatom’s safety assurances, back home tight money has delayed plans for replacing some aging nuclear plants. That includes 11 Chernobyl-style reactors — the ones without containment vessels. Or core-catchers.
Enrico Fermi
Amir D. Aczel, in his book Uranium Wars, which tells of the "scientific rivalry that created the nuvlear age" provides a "Cast of Characters". I'm going to take that list and provide biographies (from Wikipedia) for each scientist. I'll list one every other weekday.
Enrico Fermi (29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian-American physicist particularly known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.
Fermi is widely regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, highly accomplished in both theory and experiment. Along with J. Robert Oppenheimer, he is frequently referred to as "the father of the atomic bomb". He also held several patents related to the use of nuclear power.
Several awards, concepts, and institutions are named after Fermi, such as the Enrico Fermi Award, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, a type of particles called fermions, the synthetic element Fermium, and many more.
Biography
Early years
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy, to Alberto Fermi, a Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Communications, and Ida de Gattis, an elementary school teacher who built her own pressure cooker. As a young boy, he shared his interests with his older brother, Giulio. They dismantled small engines and other parts. When Giulio died unexpectedly of a throat abscess in 1915, Enrico was distraught, and immersed himself in scientific study to distract himself. According to his own account, each day he would walk in front of the hospital where Giulio died until he became inured to the pain.
One of the first sources for the study of physics was a book found at the local market of Campo de' Fiori in Roma. The 900 page book, entitled Elementorum physicae mathematicae, was written in Latin by Jesuit Father Andrea Caraffa, a professor at the Collegio Romano, covered subjects like mathematics, classical mechanics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics. Notes found in the book indicate that Fermi studied it intensely. Later, Enrico befriended another scientifically inclined student named Enrico Persico, and the two worked together on scientific projects such as building gyroscopes, and measuring the Earth's magnetic field. Fermi's interest in physics was further encouraged by a friend of his father, Adolfo Amidei, who gave him several books on physics and mathematics, which he read and assimilated quickly.
Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
In 1918 Fermi enrolled at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was later to receive his undergraduate and doctoral degree. In order to enter the Institute, candidates had to take an entrance exam which included an essay. For his essay on the given theme Characteristics of Sound, 17-year-old Fermi chose to derive and solve the Fourier analysis based partial differential equation for waves on a string. The examiner, Prof. Giulio Pittato, interviewed Fermi and concluded that his essay would have been commendable even for a doctoral degree.
Enrico Fermi achieved first place in the classification of the entrance exam. During his years at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Fermi teamed up with a fellow student named Franco Rasetti with whom he used to indulge in light-hearted pranks. Later, Rasetti became Fermi's close friend and collaborator. Besides attending the classes, Enrico Fermi found the time to work on his extracurricular activities, particularly with the help of his friend Enrico Persico, who remained in Rome to attend the university. Between 1919 and 1923 Fermi studied general relativity, quantum mechanics and atomic physics.
His knowledge of quantum physics reached such a high level that the head of the Physics Institute, Prof. Luigi Puccianti, asked him to organize seminars about that topic. During this time he learned tensor calculus, a mathematical instrument invented by Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita, and needed to demonstrate the principles of general relativity. In 1921, his third year at the university, he published his first scientific works in the Italian journal Nuovo Cimento: the first was entitled: "On the dynamics of a solid system of electrical charges in transient conditions"; the second: "On the electrostatics of a uniform gravitational field of electromagnetic charges and on the weight of electromagnetic charges". At first glance, the first paper seemed to point out a contradiction between the electrodynamic theory and the relativistic one concerning the calculation of the electromagnetic masses.
After one year with a work entitled "Correction of severe discrepancy between electrodynamic theory and the relativistic one of electromagnetic charges. Inertia and weight of electricity", Enrico Fermi showed the correctness of his paper. This last publication was so successful that it was translated into German and published in the famous German scientific journal Physikalische Zeitschrift.
In 1922 he published his first important scientific work in the Italian journal I Rendiconti dell'Accademia dei Lincei entitled "On the phenomena that happen close to the line of time", where he introduces for the first time the so-called "Fermi coordinates", and proves that when close to the time line, space behaves as a euclidean one. In 1922 Fermi graduated from Scuola Normale Superiore.
In 1923, while writing the appendix for the Italian edition of the book The Mathematical Theory of Relativity by A. Kopff, Enrico Fermi pointed out, for the first time, that hidden inside the famous Einstein equation (E = mc2), there was an enormous amount of nuclear energy to be exploited.
Fermi's Ph.D advisor was Luigi Puccianti. In 1924 Fermi spent a semester at the University of Göttingen, and then stayed for a few months in Leiden with Paul Ehrenfest. From January 1925 to the autumn of 1926, he stayed at the University of Florence. In this period he wrote his work on the Fermi–Dirac statistics.
Professor in Rome
Aged 24, Fermi took a professorship at the University of Rome (first in atomic physics in Italy) which he won in a competition held by Professor Orso Mario Corbino, director of the Institute of Physics. Corbino helped Fermi in selecting his team, which soon was joined by notable minds like Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segrè. For the theoretical studies only, Ettore Majorana also took part in what was soon nicknamed "the Via Panisperna boys" (after the name of the road in which the Institute had its labs).
The group went on with its now famous experiments, but in 1933 Rasetti left Italy for Canada and the United States, Pontecorvo went to France and Segrè left to teach in Palermo.
During their time in Rome, Fermi and his group made important contributions to many practical and theoretical aspects of physics. These include the theory of beta decay, with the inclusion of the neutrino postulated in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli, and the discovery of slow neutrons, which was to prove pivotal for the working of nuclear reactors. His group systematically bombarded elements with slow neutrons, and during their experiments with uranium, narrowly missed observing nuclear fission. At that time, fission was thought to be improbable if not impossible, mostly on theoretical grounds.
While people expected elements with higher atomic number to form from neutron bombardment of lighter elements, nobody expected neutrons to have enough energy to actually split a heavier atom into two light element fragments. However, the chemist Ida Noddack had criticised Fermi's work and had suggested that some of his experiments could have produced lighter elements. At the time, Fermi dismissed this possibility on the basis of calculations.
Fermi was well-known for his simplicity in solving problems. He began his inquiries with the simplest lines of mathematical reasoning, then later produced complete solutions to the problems he deemed worth pursuing. His abilities as a great scientist, combining theoretical and applied nuclear physics, were acknowledged by all. He influenced many physicists who worked with him, such as Hans Bethe, who spent two semesters working with Fermi in the early 1930s. From the time he was a boy, Fermi meticulously recorded his calculations in notebooks, and later used them to solve many new problems that he encountered based on these earlier known problems.
When Fermi submitted his famous paper on beta decay to the prestigious journal Nature, the journal's editor turned it down because "it contained speculations which were too remote from reality". Thus Fermi saw the theory published in Italian and in German before it was published in English. Nature eventually did publish Fermi's report on beta decay on January 16, 1939.
Fermi remained in Rome until 1938.
The Manhattan Project
In 1938, Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for his "demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". After Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he, his wife Laura, and their children emigrated to New York. This was mainly because of the Manifesto of Race promulgated by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in order to bring Italian Fascism ideologically closer to German Nazism. The new laws threatened Laura, who was Jewish. Also, the new laws put most of Fermi's research assistants out of work. Soon after his arrival in New York, Fermi began working at Columbia University.
In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Following advice of George Placzek, Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.
Meitner's and Frisch's interpretation of the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at Princeton University. Isidor Isaac Rabi and Willis Lamb, two Columbia University physicists working at Princeton, heard the news and carried it back to Columbia. Rabi said he told Enrico Fermi; Fermi gave credit to Lamb. Bohr soon thereafter went from Princeton to Columbia to see Fermi. Not finding Fermi in his office, Bohr went down to the cyclotron area and found Herbert L. Anderson. Bohr grabbed him by the shoulder and said: “Young man, let me explain to you about something new and exciting in physics.”
It was clear to a number of scientists at Columbia that they should try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium from neutron bombardment. On 25 January 1939, a Columbia University team conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States, which was done in the basement of Pupin Hall; the members of the team were Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G. Norris Glasoe, and Francis G. Slack. The next day, the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics began in Washington, D.C. under the joint auspices of The George Washington University and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. There, the news on nuclear fission was spread even further, which fostered many more experimental demonstrations.
Fermi then went to the University of Chicago and began studies that led to the construction of the first nuclear pile Chicago Pile-1.
Fermi recalled the beginning of the project in a speech given in 1954 when he retired as President of the American Physical Society:
"I remember very vividly the first month, January, 1939, that I started working at the Pupin Laboratories because things began happening very fast. In that period, Niels Bohr was on a lecture engagement at the Princeton University and I remember one afternoon Willis Lamb came back very excited and said that Bohr had leaked out great news. The great news that had leaked out was the discovery of fission and at least the outline of its interpretation. Then, somewhat later that same month, there was a meeting in Washington where the possible importance of the newly discovered phenomenon of fission was first discussed in semi-jocular earnest as a possible source of nuclear power."
In August 1939 Leó Szilárd prepared and Albert Einstein signed the famous letter warning President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the probability that the Nazis were planning to build an atomic bomb. Because of Hitler's September 1 invasion of Poland, it was October before they could arrange for the letter to be personally delivered. Roosevelt was concerned enough that the Uranium Committee was assembled, and awarded Columbia University the first nuclear power funding of US$6,000. However, due to bureaucratic fears of foreigners doing secret research, the money was not actually issued until Szilárd implored Einstein to send a second letter to the president in the spring of 1940.
The money was used in studies which led to the first nuclear reactor — Chicago Pile-1, a massive "atomic pile" of graphite bricks and uranium fuel which went critical on December 2, 1942, built in a hard racquets court under Stagg Field, the football stadium at the University of Chicago. Due to a mistranslation, Soviet reports on Enrico Fermi claimed that his work was performed in a converted "pumpkin field" instead of a "squash court", squash being an offshoot of hard racquet.
This experiment was a landmark in the quest for energy, and it was typical of Fermi's brilliance. Every step had been carefully planned, every calculation meticulously done by him. When the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction was achieved, a coded phone call was made by one of the physicists, Arthur Compton, to James Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. The conversation was in impromptu code:
Compton: The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.
Conant: How were the natives?
Compton: Very friendly.
This successful initiation of a chain-reacting pile was important not only for its help in assessing the properties of fission — needed for understanding the internal workings of an atomic bomb — but also because it would serve as a pilot plant for the massive reactors which would be created in Hanford, Washington, which would then be used to produce the plutonium needed for the bombs used at the Trinity site and Nagasaki. Eventually Fermi and Szilárd's reactor work was folded into the Manhattan Project.
Fermi moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory in the later stages of the Manhattan Project to serve as a general consultant. He was sitting in the control room of the Hanford B Reactor when it first went critical in 1944. His broad knowledge of many fields of physics was useful in solving problems that were of an interdisciplinary nature. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America in 1944.
Fermi was present as an observer of the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. Engineer Jack Aeby saw Fermi at work:
As the shock wave hit Base Camp, Aeby saw Enrico Fermi with a handful of torn paper. "He was dribbling it in the air. When the shock wave came it moved the confetti. He thought for a moment."
Fermi had just estimated the yield of the first nuclear explosion. It was in the ball park.
Fermi's strips-of-paper estimate was ten kilotons of TNT; the actual yield was about 19 kilotons.
In 1947, Fermi invented the FERMIAC, an analog computer that used the Monte Carlo Method to study neutron transport through fissionable materials.
Post-war work
The sign at Enrico Fermi street in RomeIn Fermi's 1954 address to the APS he also said, "Well, this brings us to Pearl Harbor. That is the time when I left Columbia University, and after a few months of commuting between Chicago and New York, eventually moved to Chicago to keep up the work there, and from then on, with a few notable exceptions, the work at Columbia was concentrated on the isotope separation phase of the atomic energy project, initiated by Booth, Dunning and Urey about 1940".
Fermi was widely regarded as the only physicist of the twentieth century who excelled both theoretically and experimentally. The well-known historian of physics, C. P. Snow, says about him, "If Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford's atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole". Fermi's ability and success stemmed as much from his appraisal of the art of the possible, as from his innate skill and intelligence.
He disliked complicated theories, and while he had great mathematical ability, he would never use it when the job could be done much more simply. He was famous for getting quick and accurate answers to problems which would stump other people. Later on, his method of getting approximate and quick answers through back-of-the-envelope calculations became informally known as the 'Fermi method'.
Fermi's most disarming trait was his great modesty, and his ability to do any kind of work, whether creative or routine. It was this quality that made him popular and liked among people of all strata, from other Nobel Laureates to technicians. Henry DeWolf Smyth, who was Chairman of the Princeton Physics department, had once invited Fermi over to do some experiments with the Princeton cyclotron. Walking into the lab one day, Smyth saw the distinguished scientist helping a graduate student move a table, under another student's directions. Another time, a Du Pont executive made a visit to see him at Columbia. Not finding him either in his lab or his office, the executive was surprised to find the Nobel Laureate in the machine shop, cutting sheets of tin with a big pair of shears.
After the war, Fermi served for a short time on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, a scientific committee chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer which advised the commission on nuclear matters and policy. After the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, he, along with Isidor Rabi, wrote a strongly worded report for the committee which opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb on moral and technical grounds. But Fermi also participated in preliminary work on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos as a consultant, and along with Stanislaw Ulam, calculated that the amount of tritium needed for Edward Teller's model of a thermonuclear weapon would be prohibitive, and a fusion reaction could not be assured to propagate even with this large quantity of tritium.
Fermi was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at an AEC hearing in 1954. The hearing resulted in denial of Oppenheimer's security clearance.
In his later years, Fermi did important work in particle physics, especially related to pions and muons. He was also known to be an inspiring teacher at the University of Chicago, and was known for his attention to detail, simplicity, and careful preparation for a lecture. Later, his lecture notes, especially those for quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and thermodynamics, were transcribed into books which are still in print.
He also mused about a proposition which is now referred to as the "Fermi Paradox". This contradiction or proposition is this: that with the billions and billions of star systems in the universe, one would think that intelligent life would have contacted our civilization by now.
Toward the end of his life, Fermi questioned his faith in society at large to make wise choices about nuclear technology. He said:
Fermi died at age 53 of stomach cancer (a result of heavy exposure to radiation) in Chicago, Illinois, and was interred at Oak Woods Cemetery. Two of his graduate students who assisted him in working on or near the nuclear pile also died of cancer. Fermi and his team knew that such work carried considerable risk but they considered the outcome so vital that they forged ahead with little regard for their own personal safety.
As Eugene Wigner wrote: "Ten days before Fermi had died he told me, 'I hope it won't take long.' He had reconciled himself perfectly to his fate".
Impact and legacy
Enrico Fermi had been the first to use a neutron to produce the radioactive change of one element to another. On 2 December 1942 he initiated the atomic age with the first self-sustaining chain reaction, after which he became known as ‘"father of the atomic bomb". Michael H. Hart ranked him #76 in his list of the most influential figures in history.
-The Fermilab particle accelerator and physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, is named after him.
-Three nuclear reactor installations have been named after Fermi:
-Fermi 1 and Fermi 2 nuclear power plants in Newport, Michigan
-Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant, in Italy.
-RA-1 Enrico Fermi, a research reactor in Argentina.
-Many schools are also named after him, such as the Enrico Fermi High School in Enfield, Connecticut.
-Fermi Court in Deep River, Ontario is named in his honor.
-In 1952, element 100 on the periodic table of elements was isolated from the debris of a nuclear test. In honor of Fermi's contributions to the scientific community, it was named fermium.
-Since the 1950s, the United States Atomic Energy Commission has named its highest honor, the Fermi Award, after him. Recipients of the award include well-known scientists like Otto Hahn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, John Wheeler and Hans Bethe.
-In 1976, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Enrico Fermi (29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian-American physicist particularly known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.
Fermi is widely regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, highly accomplished in both theory and experiment. Along with J. Robert Oppenheimer, he is frequently referred to as "the father of the atomic bomb". He also held several patents related to the use of nuclear power.
Several awards, concepts, and institutions are named after Fermi, such as the Enrico Fermi Award, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, a type of particles called fermions, the synthetic element Fermium, and many more.
Biography
Early years
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy, to Alberto Fermi, a Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Communications, and Ida de Gattis, an elementary school teacher who built her own pressure cooker. As a young boy, he shared his interests with his older brother, Giulio. They dismantled small engines and other parts. When Giulio died unexpectedly of a throat abscess in 1915, Enrico was distraught, and immersed himself in scientific study to distract himself. According to his own account, each day he would walk in front of the hospital where Giulio died until he became inured to the pain.
One of the first sources for the study of physics was a book found at the local market of Campo de' Fiori in Roma. The 900 page book, entitled Elementorum physicae mathematicae, was written in Latin by Jesuit Father Andrea Caraffa, a professor at the Collegio Romano, covered subjects like mathematics, classical mechanics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics. Notes found in the book indicate that Fermi studied it intensely. Later, Enrico befriended another scientifically inclined student named Enrico Persico, and the two worked together on scientific projects such as building gyroscopes, and measuring the Earth's magnetic field. Fermi's interest in physics was further encouraged by a friend of his father, Adolfo Amidei, who gave him several books on physics and mathematics, which he read and assimilated quickly.
Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
In 1918 Fermi enrolled at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was later to receive his undergraduate and doctoral degree. In order to enter the Institute, candidates had to take an entrance exam which included an essay. For his essay on the given theme Characteristics of Sound, 17-year-old Fermi chose to derive and solve the Fourier analysis based partial differential equation for waves on a string. The examiner, Prof. Giulio Pittato, interviewed Fermi and concluded that his essay would have been commendable even for a doctoral degree.
Enrico Fermi achieved first place in the classification of the entrance exam. During his years at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Fermi teamed up with a fellow student named Franco Rasetti with whom he used to indulge in light-hearted pranks. Later, Rasetti became Fermi's close friend and collaborator. Besides attending the classes, Enrico Fermi found the time to work on his extracurricular activities, particularly with the help of his friend Enrico Persico, who remained in Rome to attend the university. Between 1919 and 1923 Fermi studied general relativity, quantum mechanics and atomic physics.
His knowledge of quantum physics reached such a high level that the head of the Physics Institute, Prof. Luigi Puccianti, asked him to organize seminars about that topic. During this time he learned tensor calculus, a mathematical instrument invented by Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita, and needed to demonstrate the principles of general relativity. In 1921, his third year at the university, he published his first scientific works in the Italian journal Nuovo Cimento: the first was entitled: "On the dynamics of a solid system of electrical charges in transient conditions"; the second: "On the electrostatics of a uniform gravitational field of electromagnetic charges and on the weight of electromagnetic charges". At first glance, the first paper seemed to point out a contradiction between the electrodynamic theory and the relativistic one concerning the calculation of the electromagnetic masses.
After one year with a work entitled "Correction of severe discrepancy between electrodynamic theory and the relativistic one of electromagnetic charges. Inertia and weight of electricity", Enrico Fermi showed the correctness of his paper. This last publication was so successful that it was translated into German and published in the famous German scientific journal Physikalische Zeitschrift.
In 1922 he published his first important scientific work in the Italian journal I Rendiconti dell'Accademia dei Lincei entitled "On the phenomena that happen close to the line of time", where he introduces for the first time the so-called "Fermi coordinates", and proves that when close to the time line, space behaves as a euclidean one. In 1922 Fermi graduated from Scuola Normale Superiore.
In 1923, while writing the appendix for the Italian edition of the book The Mathematical Theory of Relativity by A. Kopff, Enrico Fermi pointed out, for the first time, that hidden inside the famous Einstein equation (E = mc2), there was an enormous amount of nuclear energy to be exploited.
Fermi's Ph.D advisor was Luigi Puccianti. In 1924 Fermi spent a semester at the University of Göttingen, and then stayed for a few months in Leiden with Paul Ehrenfest. From January 1925 to the autumn of 1926, he stayed at the University of Florence. In this period he wrote his work on the Fermi–Dirac statistics.
Professor in Rome
Aged 24, Fermi took a professorship at the University of Rome (first in atomic physics in Italy) which he won in a competition held by Professor Orso Mario Corbino, director of the Institute of Physics. Corbino helped Fermi in selecting his team, which soon was joined by notable minds like Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segrè. For the theoretical studies only, Ettore Majorana also took part in what was soon nicknamed "the Via Panisperna boys" (after the name of the road in which the Institute had its labs).
The group went on with its now famous experiments, but in 1933 Rasetti left Italy for Canada and the United States, Pontecorvo went to France and Segrè left to teach in Palermo.
During their time in Rome, Fermi and his group made important contributions to many practical and theoretical aspects of physics. These include the theory of beta decay, with the inclusion of the neutrino postulated in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli, and the discovery of slow neutrons, which was to prove pivotal for the working of nuclear reactors. His group systematically bombarded elements with slow neutrons, and during their experiments with uranium, narrowly missed observing nuclear fission. At that time, fission was thought to be improbable if not impossible, mostly on theoretical grounds.
While people expected elements with higher atomic number to form from neutron bombardment of lighter elements, nobody expected neutrons to have enough energy to actually split a heavier atom into two light element fragments. However, the chemist Ida Noddack had criticised Fermi's work and had suggested that some of his experiments could have produced lighter elements. At the time, Fermi dismissed this possibility on the basis of calculations.
Fermi was well-known for his simplicity in solving problems. He began his inquiries with the simplest lines of mathematical reasoning, then later produced complete solutions to the problems he deemed worth pursuing. His abilities as a great scientist, combining theoretical and applied nuclear physics, were acknowledged by all. He influenced many physicists who worked with him, such as Hans Bethe, who spent two semesters working with Fermi in the early 1930s. From the time he was a boy, Fermi meticulously recorded his calculations in notebooks, and later used them to solve many new problems that he encountered based on these earlier known problems.
When Fermi submitted his famous paper on beta decay to the prestigious journal Nature, the journal's editor turned it down because "it contained speculations which were too remote from reality". Thus Fermi saw the theory published in Italian and in German before it was published in English. Nature eventually did publish Fermi's report on beta decay on January 16, 1939.
Fermi remained in Rome until 1938.
The Manhattan Project
In 1938, Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for his "demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". After Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he, his wife Laura, and their children emigrated to New York. This was mainly because of the Manifesto of Race promulgated by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in order to bring Italian Fascism ideologically closer to German Nazism. The new laws threatened Laura, who was Jewish. Also, the new laws put most of Fermi's research assistants out of work. Soon after his arrival in New York, Fermi began working at Columbia University.
In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Following advice of George Placzek, Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.
Meitner's and Frisch's interpretation of the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at Princeton University. Isidor Isaac Rabi and Willis Lamb, two Columbia University physicists working at Princeton, heard the news and carried it back to Columbia. Rabi said he told Enrico Fermi; Fermi gave credit to Lamb. Bohr soon thereafter went from Princeton to Columbia to see Fermi. Not finding Fermi in his office, Bohr went down to the cyclotron area and found Herbert L. Anderson. Bohr grabbed him by the shoulder and said: “Young man, let me explain to you about something new and exciting in physics.”
It was clear to a number of scientists at Columbia that they should try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium from neutron bombardment. On 25 January 1939, a Columbia University team conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States, which was done in the basement of Pupin Hall; the members of the team were Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G. Norris Glasoe, and Francis G. Slack. The next day, the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics began in Washington, D.C. under the joint auspices of The George Washington University and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. There, the news on nuclear fission was spread even further, which fostered many more experimental demonstrations.
Fermi then went to the University of Chicago and began studies that led to the construction of the first nuclear pile Chicago Pile-1.
Fermi recalled the beginning of the project in a speech given in 1954 when he retired as President of the American Physical Society:
"I remember very vividly the first month, January, 1939, that I started working at the Pupin Laboratories because things began happening very fast. In that period, Niels Bohr was on a lecture engagement at the Princeton University and I remember one afternoon Willis Lamb came back very excited and said that Bohr had leaked out great news. The great news that had leaked out was the discovery of fission and at least the outline of its interpretation. Then, somewhat later that same month, there was a meeting in Washington where the possible importance of the newly discovered phenomenon of fission was first discussed in semi-jocular earnest as a possible source of nuclear power."
In August 1939 Leó Szilárd prepared and Albert Einstein signed the famous letter warning President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the probability that the Nazis were planning to build an atomic bomb. Because of Hitler's September 1 invasion of Poland, it was October before they could arrange for the letter to be personally delivered. Roosevelt was concerned enough that the Uranium Committee was assembled, and awarded Columbia University the first nuclear power funding of US$6,000. However, due to bureaucratic fears of foreigners doing secret research, the money was not actually issued until Szilárd implored Einstein to send a second letter to the president in the spring of 1940.
The money was used in studies which led to the first nuclear reactor — Chicago Pile-1, a massive "atomic pile" of graphite bricks and uranium fuel which went critical on December 2, 1942, built in a hard racquets court under Stagg Field, the football stadium at the University of Chicago. Due to a mistranslation, Soviet reports on Enrico Fermi claimed that his work was performed in a converted "pumpkin field" instead of a "squash court", squash being an offshoot of hard racquet.
This experiment was a landmark in the quest for energy, and it was typical of Fermi's brilliance. Every step had been carefully planned, every calculation meticulously done by him. When the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction was achieved, a coded phone call was made by one of the physicists, Arthur Compton, to James Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. The conversation was in impromptu code:
Compton: The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.
Conant: How were the natives?
Compton: Very friendly.
This successful initiation of a chain-reacting pile was important not only for its help in assessing the properties of fission — needed for understanding the internal workings of an atomic bomb — but also because it would serve as a pilot plant for the massive reactors which would be created in Hanford, Washington, which would then be used to produce the plutonium needed for the bombs used at the Trinity site and Nagasaki. Eventually Fermi and Szilárd's reactor work was folded into the Manhattan Project.
Fermi moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory in the later stages of the Manhattan Project to serve as a general consultant. He was sitting in the control room of the Hanford B Reactor when it first went critical in 1944. His broad knowledge of many fields of physics was useful in solving problems that were of an interdisciplinary nature. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America in 1944.
Fermi was present as an observer of the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. Engineer Jack Aeby saw Fermi at work:
As the shock wave hit Base Camp, Aeby saw Enrico Fermi with a handful of torn paper. "He was dribbling it in the air. When the shock wave came it moved the confetti. He thought for a moment."
Fermi had just estimated the yield of the first nuclear explosion. It was in the ball park.
Fermi's strips-of-paper estimate was ten kilotons of TNT; the actual yield was about 19 kilotons.
In 1947, Fermi invented the FERMIAC, an analog computer that used the Monte Carlo Method to study neutron transport through fissionable materials.
Post-war work
The sign at Enrico Fermi street in RomeIn Fermi's 1954 address to the APS he also said, "Well, this brings us to Pearl Harbor. That is the time when I left Columbia University, and after a few months of commuting between Chicago and New York, eventually moved to Chicago to keep up the work there, and from then on, with a few notable exceptions, the work at Columbia was concentrated on the isotope separation phase of the atomic energy project, initiated by Booth, Dunning and Urey about 1940".
Fermi was widely regarded as the only physicist of the twentieth century who excelled both theoretically and experimentally. The well-known historian of physics, C. P. Snow, says about him, "If Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford's atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole". Fermi's ability and success stemmed as much from his appraisal of the art of the possible, as from his innate skill and intelligence.
He disliked complicated theories, and while he had great mathematical ability, he would never use it when the job could be done much more simply. He was famous for getting quick and accurate answers to problems which would stump other people. Later on, his method of getting approximate and quick answers through back-of-the-envelope calculations became informally known as the 'Fermi method'.
Fermi's most disarming trait was his great modesty, and his ability to do any kind of work, whether creative or routine. It was this quality that made him popular and liked among people of all strata, from other Nobel Laureates to technicians. Henry DeWolf Smyth, who was Chairman of the Princeton Physics department, had once invited Fermi over to do some experiments with the Princeton cyclotron. Walking into the lab one day, Smyth saw the distinguished scientist helping a graduate student move a table, under another student's directions. Another time, a Du Pont executive made a visit to see him at Columbia. Not finding him either in his lab or his office, the executive was surprised to find the Nobel Laureate in the machine shop, cutting sheets of tin with a big pair of shears.
After the war, Fermi served for a short time on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, a scientific committee chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer which advised the commission on nuclear matters and policy. After the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, he, along with Isidor Rabi, wrote a strongly worded report for the committee which opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb on moral and technical grounds. But Fermi also participated in preliminary work on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos as a consultant, and along with Stanislaw Ulam, calculated that the amount of tritium needed for Edward Teller's model of a thermonuclear weapon would be prohibitive, and a fusion reaction could not be assured to propagate even with this large quantity of tritium.
Fermi was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at an AEC hearing in 1954. The hearing resulted in denial of Oppenheimer's security clearance.
In his later years, Fermi did important work in particle physics, especially related to pions and muons. He was also known to be an inspiring teacher at the University of Chicago, and was known for his attention to detail, simplicity, and careful preparation for a lecture. Later, his lecture notes, especially those for quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and thermodynamics, were transcribed into books which are still in print.
He also mused about a proposition which is now referred to as the "Fermi Paradox". This contradiction or proposition is this: that with the billions and billions of star systems in the universe, one would think that intelligent life would have contacted our civilization by now.
Toward the end of his life, Fermi questioned his faith in society at large to make wise choices about nuclear technology. He said:
"Some of you may ask, what is the good of working so hard merely to collect a few facts which will bring no pleasure except to a few long-haired professors who love to collect such things and will be of no use to anybody because only few specialists at best will be able to understand them? In answer to such question[s] I may venture a fairly safe prediction.
History of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature."
Fermi died at age 53 of stomach cancer (a result of heavy exposure to radiation) in Chicago, Illinois, and was interred at Oak Woods Cemetery. Two of his graduate students who assisted him in working on or near the nuclear pile also died of cancer. Fermi and his team knew that such work carried considerable risk but they considered the outcome so vital that they forged ahead with little regard for their own personal safety.
As Eugene Wigner wrote: "Ten days before Fermi had died he told me, 'I hope it won't take long.' He had reconciled himself perfectly to his fate".
Impact and legacy
Enrico Fermi had been the first to use a neutron to produce the radioactive change of one element to another. On 2 December 1942 he initiated the atomic age with the first self-sustaining chain reaction, after which he became known as ‘"father of the atomic bomb". Michael H. Hart ranked him #76 in his list of the most influential figures in history.
-The Fermilab particle accelerator and physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, is named after him.
-Three nuclear reactor installations have been named after Fermi:
-Fermi 1 and Fermi 2 nuclear power plants in Newport, Michigan
-Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant, in Italy.
-RA-1 Enrico Fermi, a research reactor in Argentina.
-Many schools are also named after him, such as the Enrico Fermi High School in Enfield, Connecticut.
-Fermi Court in Deep River, Ontario is named in his honor.
-In 1952, element 100 on the periodic table of elements was isolated from the debris of a nuclear test. In honor of Fermi's contributions to the scientific community, it was named fermium.
-Since the 1950s, the United States Atomic Energy Commission has named its highest honor, the Fermi Award, after him. Recipients of the award include well-known scientists like Otto Hahn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, John Wheeler and Hans Bethe.
-In 1976, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Monday, March 21, 2011
10 Things You Didn't Know About the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
US News and World Report: 10 Things You Didn't Know About the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
1. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974. The commission absorbed the regulatory powers of what had been the unsuccessful and highly criticized Atomic Energy Commission.
2. The NRC began operation on Jan. 19, 1975.
3. The commission is designed to be an independent regulator of nuclear material and nuclear power used commercially.
4. On March 28, 1979, an incident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania caused about half of the reactor core in one unit to melt. It was deemed the worst nuclear power accident in the United States.
5. The NRC is made up of five commissioners, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve staggered five-year terms. No more than three commissioners can be from the same political party.
6. The president selects one commissioner to serve as chairman and official spokesperson. The current chairman is Gregory Jaczko.
7. The NRC has inspectors assigned to 65 nuclear power plant sites and three fuel facilities.
8. The NRC's budget for the 2010 fiscal year was $1.07 billion, over three quarters of which was spent to ensure the safety of nuclear reactors.
9. The NRC does not have the authority to regulate nuclear weapons or lobby for nuclear power.
10. In March 2011, after a tsunami triggered nuclear power plant explosions in Japan, the NRC dispatched experts to provide advice and assistance in the effort to shut down the reactors. The agency is also monitoring events from its headquarters.
1. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974. The commission absorbed the regulatory powers of what had been the unsuccessful and highly criticized Atomic Energy Commission.
2. The NRC began operation on Jan. 19, 1975.
3. The commission is designed to be an independent regulator of nuclear material and nuclear power used commercially.
4. On March 28, 1979, an incident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania caused about half of the reactor core in one unit to melt. It was deemed the worst nuclear power accident in the United States.
5. The NRC is made up of five commissioners, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve staggered five-year terms. No more than three commissioners can be from the same political party.
6. The president selects one commissioner to serve as chairman and official spokesperson. The current chairman is Gregory Jaczko.
7. The NRC has inspectors assigned to 65 nuclear power plant sites and three fuel facilities.
8. The NRC's budget for the 2010 fiscal year was $1.07 billion, over three quarters of which was spent to ensure the safety of nuclear reactors.
9. The NRC does not have the authority to regulate nuclear weapons or lobby for nuclear power.
10. In March 2011, after a tsunami triggered nuclear power plant explosions in Japan, the NRC dispatched experts to provide advice and assistance in the effort to shut down the reactors. The agency is also monitoring events from its headquarters.
Safeguarding Spent Fuel Pools in the United States
Huffington Post: Safeguarding Spent Fuel Pools in the United States
A drained spent fuel pool in the U.S. could lead to a catastrophic fire that would result in long-term land contamination substantially worse than what the Chernobyl accident unleashed.
As recent satellite photographs show, the spent fuel pools at Units 3 and 4 at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex are exposed to the open sky and might be draining. The radioactive dose rates coming off the pools appear to be life-threatening. Lead-shielded helicopters trying to dump water over the pools/reactors could not get close enough to make much difference because of the dangerous levels of radiation.
If the spent fuel is exposed, the zirconium cladding encasing the spent fuel can catch fire -- releasing potentially catastrophic amounts of radiation, particularly cesium-137. Here's an article I wrote in January 2002 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about spent fuel pool dangers.
In October 2002, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire -- serving at that time as her state's attorney general -- organized a group letter to Congress signed by her and 26 of her counterparts across the nation. In it, they requested greater safeguards for reactor spent-fuel pools. The letter urged "enhanced protections for one of the most vulnerable components of a nuclear power plant -- its spent fuel pools." It was met with silence.
In January 2003, my colleagues and I warned that a drained spent fuel pool in the U.S. could lead to a catastrophic fire that would result in long-term land contamination substantially worse than what the Chernobyl accident unleashed. An area around the Chernobyl site roughly half the size of New Jersey continues to be considered uninhabitable.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the nuclear energy industry strongly disagreed. Congress then asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to referee this dispute.
In 2004, after the NRC tried unsuccessfully to suppress its report, the NAS panel agreed with our findings. The Academy panel stated that a "partially or completely drained pool could lead to a propagating zirconium cladding fire and release large quantities of radioactive materials to the environment."
Over the past 15 years, NRC has become too co-dependent on the industry it regulates. This has a lot to do with Congress, the nuclear industry lobby and its large amounts of money, which successfully rolled back the post Three Mile Island regulatory reforms of the early 19080s.. NRC is now much more dependent on industry self-reporting, much like what happened with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the banking industry before the economic collapse.
U.S. reactors are each holding at least four times as much spent fuel as the individual pools at the wrecked Daiichi nuclear complex in Fukushima. According to the Energy Department, about 63,000 metric tons of spent fuel has been generated as of this year, containing approximately 12.4 billion curies. These pools contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet. Merely 14 percent of U.S. spent fuel is in dry storage.
At this stage it's critical that:
The NRC hold off on renewing operating licenses for nuclear reactors, given our newfound certainty that many sites in earthquake zones could experience greater destruction than previously assumed.
The NRC promptly require reactor owners to end the dense compaction of spent fuel, and ensure that at least 75 percent of the spent fuel in pools operating above their capacity be removed and placed into dry, hardened storage containers on site, which are more likely to withstand earthquakes.
In our 2003 study, we estimated that it would take about 10 years to do this with existing technology, at an expense of $3.5 to $7 billion.
A drained spent fuel pool in the U.S. could lead to a catastrophic fire that would result in long-term land contamination substantially worse than what the Chernobyl accident unleashed.
As recent satellite photographs show, the spent fuel pools at Units 3 and 4 at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex are exposed to the open sky and might be draining. The radioactive dose rates coming off the pools appear to be life-threatening. Lead-shielded helicopters trying to dump water over the pools/reactors could not get close enough to make much difference because of the dangerous levels of radiation.
If the spent fuel is exposed, the zirconium cladding encasing the spent fuel can catch fire -- releasing potentially catastrophic amounts of radiation, particularly cesium-137. Here's an article I wrote in January 2002 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about spent fuel pool dangers.
In October 2002, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire -- serving at that time as her state's attorney general -- organized a group letter to Congress signed by her and 26 of her counterparts across the nation. In it, they requested greater safeguards for reactor spent-fuel pools. The letter urged "enhanced protections for one of the most vulnerable components of a nuclear power plant -- its spent fuel pools." It was met with silence.
In January 2003, my colleagues and I warned that a drained spent fuel pool in the U.S. could lead to a catastrophic fire that would result in long-term land contamination substantially worse than what the Chernobyl accident unleashed. An area around the Chernobyl site roughly half the size of New Jersey continues to be considered uninhabitable.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the nuclear energy industry strongly disagreed. Congress then asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to referee this dispute.
In 2004, after the NRC tried unsuccessfully to suppress its report, the NAS panel agreed with our findings. The Academy panel stated that a "partially or completely drained pool could lead to a propagating zirconium cladding fire and release large quantities of radioactive materials to the environment."
Over the past 15 years, NRC has become too co-dependent on the industry it regulates. This has a lot to do with Congress, the nuclear industry lobby and its large amounts of money, which successfully rolled back the post Three Mile Island regulatory reforms of the early 19080s.. NRC is now much more dependent on industry self-reporting, much like what happened with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the banking industry before the economic collapse.
U.S. reactors are each holding at least four times as much spent fuel as the individual pools at the wrecked Daiichi nuclear complex in Fukushima. According to the Energy Department, about 63,000 metric tons of spent fuel has been generated as of this year, containing approximately 12.4 billion curies. These pools contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet. Merely 14 percent of U.S. spent fuel is in dry storage.
At this stage it's critical that:
The NRC hold off on renewing operating licenses for nuclear reactors, given our newfound certainty that many sites in earthquake zones could experience greater destruction than previously assumed.
The NRC promptly require reactor owners to end the dense compaction of spent fuel, and ensure that at least 75 percent of the spent fuel in pools operating above their capacity be removed and placed into dry, hardened storage containers on site, which are more likely to withstand earthquakes.
In our 2003 study, we estimated that it would take about 10 years to do this with existing technology, at an expense of $3.5 to $7 billion.
Merkel Pays Political Price for Shift on Nuclear Power
The New York Times: Europe: Merkel Pays Political Price for Shift on Nuclear Power
BERLIN — Angela Merkel is not known to change her mind quickly. But that is what the chancellor did last week. In the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, which caused radioactive leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Mrs. Merkel temporarily shut down the country’s seven oldest nuclear power plants.
It means that a highly unpopular decision the government made last year to prolong the life of all of its 17 plants by an average of 12 years has been postponed until June while safety checks are carried out.
By then, conservative politicians and the nuclear industry are hoping that the crisis in Japan will be over and public attention in Germany will have moved on to another issue. Perhaps, said analysts, they believed that the government could then continue its support for nuclear energy and keep the plants functioning for many more years.
But Mrs. Merkel, at least for now, seems determined to disappoint them. Sensing the public mood, she said that the nuclear crisis in Japan “had changed everything in Germany.”
In fact, the crisis confirmed Germans’ deep angst, exaggerated or not, regarding anything nuclear. A quarter of Germany’s electricity is generated by nuclear power, relatively small in comparison to other countries. In France, it is more than 75 percent; in Slovakia, 53 percent; in Belgium, 51 percent; and in Ukraine, 48 percent, according to the European Nuclear Society, one of the largest lobbying groups for nuclear science, research and industry in Europe.
Yet in these countries, there have been hardly any anti-nuclear demonstrations in reaction to Japan. In Germany last week, hundreds of such protests took place across the country. And with Mrs. Merkel facing a major election challenge next Sunday in the important state of Baden-Württemberg, where four nuclear power plants are based, opposition parties are planning more anti-nuclear demonstrations.
“This is a big election issue,” said Claudia Kemfert, energy professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. “Maybe the media has exaggerated, suggesting that what happened in Japan could happen in Germany. But the point is that the opposition to anything nuclear is part of the German mentality. It’s cultural. It’s a fear of risk. Few politicians can afford to ignore this mentality.”
This angst about nuclear energy predates the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Indeed, it is a particularly German reverence of nature stemming from the romanticism of the 19th century, says Reinhard Bütikofer, a European Parliament lawmaker and a prominent member of Germany’s Greens.
“Even before the Greens were founded in 1980, the environmental movement was successful not only in mobilizing long haired, radical and tree-hugging factions of opposition-minded people. It was also successful in tapping into conservative feelings,” Mr. Bütikofer said.
The dizzying pace of the West German economy during the 1950s and 1960s had something to do with this. The pollution and industrialization took its toll on rivers, forests and the landscape. Conservatives worried about the destruction of tradition and values, leftists about unchecked capitalism.
But it was two decisions during the 1970s that brought the environmental and anti-nuclear lobbies together in a way that was to make Germany become one of the leaders in Europe of recycling.
The first was to build nuclear power stations in response to the oil price rise of 1973. The second was an agreement by Helmut Schmidt, the former Social Democrat chancellor, to base more U.S. nuclear missiles on West German territory.
“These created the bridge between the peace and environmental movements, which the Greens adopted as their program,” said Ingolfur Blühdorn, a political sociologist in the department of European studies at the University of Bath, in Britain. “In Germany, it is extremely difficult to be an environmentalist without being against nuclear power,” he added.
Mrs. Merkel tried. When she was first elected chancellor in 2005, she established a reputation at home and abroad for supporting the environment, particularly the need to combat climate change. Young voters who were seeking a more modern conservatism joined her Christian Democratic Union party.
Mrs. Merkel, however, said little about nuclear power. She abided by a decision made earlier by her coalition partners, the Social Democrats. When they were in government from 1998 to 2005, they had pushed through a law phasing out all nuclear energy by 2021.
That law shifted public opinion. A little less than half of the public, which was big by German standards, accepted nuclear power because it was going to be phased out relatively soon, according to opinion polls published at the time.
But in 2010, a year after Mrs. Merkel was re-elected, this time in coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats, she did a U-turn on nuclear policy by prolonging the life of the nuclear plants. Nuclear power, she argued, would be a “bridge technology” until renewable energy resources were sufficiently available.
“That decision was unnecessary and a big mistake,” said Mr. Blühdorn from the University of Bath.
Indeed, Mrs. Merkel’s decision was a political gift for the opposition Greens. Disappointed young conservative supporters flocked to that party. The Greens now hover between 16 percent and 18 percent in the opinion polls, their highest position ever. If that support can be sustained, they could be the kingmakers in the 2013 elections.
With Japan, public opinion is now becoming more radical. More than 70 percent of Germans, otherwise regarded as parsimonious, would now be willing to pay €20, or about $28, more a month for their energy if nuclear power was abolished.
“There’s a new momentum,” said Ms. Kemfert from the Hertie School of Governance. “Chancellor Merkel has a lot of explaining to do to voters. She is coming under increasing pressure to phase out nuclear energy soonest. It means finding alternative sources of energy. It will not be easy, cheap or fast.”
Mrs. Merkel knows that. This is why, whether for electoral reasons or not, she warned her own party and the nuclear industry last week that even after the Japan crisis, in Germany there will be no going back to the status quo ante.
BERLIN — Angela Merkel is not known to change her mind quickly. But that is what the chancellor did last week. In the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, which caused radioactive leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Mrs. Merkel temporarily shut down the country’s seven oldest nuclear power plants.
It means that a highly unpopular decision the government made last year to prolong the life of all of its 17 plants by an average of 12 years has been postponed until June while safety checks are carried out.
By then, conservative politicians and the nuclear industry are hoping that the crisis in Japan will be over and public attention in Germany will have moved on to another issue. Perhaps, said analysts, they believed that the government could then continue its support for nuclear energy and keep the plants functioning for many more years.
But Mrs. Merkel, at least for now, seems determined to disappoint them. Sensing the public mood, she said that the nuclear crisis in Japan “had changed everything in Germany.”
In fact, the crisis confirmed Germans’ deep angst, exaggerated or not, regarding anything nuclear. A quarter of Germany’s electricity is generated by nuclear power, relatively small in comparison to other countries. In France, it is more than 75 percent; in Slovakia, 53 percent; in Belgium, 51 percent; and in Ukraine, 48 percent, according to the European Nuclear Society, one of the largest lobbying groups for nuclear science, research and industry in Europe.
Yet in these countries, there have been hardly any anti-nuclear demonstrations in reaction to Japan. In Germany last week, hundreds of such protests took place across the country. And with Mrs. Merkel facing a major election challenge next Sunday in the important state of Baden-Württemberg, where four nuclear power plants are based, opposition parties are planning more anti-nuclear demonstrations.
“This is a big election issue,” said Claudia Kemfert, energy professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. “Maybe the media has exaggerated, suggesting that what happened in Japan could happen in Germany. But the point is that the opposition to anything nuclear is part of the German mentality. It’s cultural. It’s a fear of risk. Few politicians can afford to ignore this mentality.”
This angst about nuclear energy predates the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Indeed, it is a particularly German reverence of nature stemming from the romanticism of the 19th century, says Reinhard Bütikofer, a European Parliament lawmaker and a prominent member of Germany’s Greens.
“Even before the Greens were founded in 1980, the environmental movement was successful not only in mobilizing long haired, radical and tree-hugging factions of opposition-minded people. It was also successful in tapping into conservative feelings,” Mr. Bütikofer said.
The dizzying pace of the West German economy during the 1950s and 1960s had something to do with this. The pollution and industrialization took its toll on rivers, forests and the landscape. Conservatives worried about the destruction of tradition and values, leftists about unchecked capitalism.
But it was two decisions during the 1970s that brought the environmental and anti-nuclear lobbies together in a way that was to make Germany become one of the leaders in Europe of recycling.
The first was to build nuclear power stations in response to the oil price rise of 1973. The second was an agreement by Helmut Schmidt, the former Social Democrat chancellor, to base more U.S. nuclear missiles on West German territory.
“These created the bridge between the peace and environmental movements, which the Greens adopted as their program,” said Ingolfur Blühdorn, a political sociologist in the department of European studies at the University of Bath, in Britain. “In Germany, it is extremely difficult to be an environmentalist without being against nuclear power,” he added.
Mrs. Merkel tried. When she was first elected chancellor in 2005, she established a reputation at home and abroad for supporting the environment, particularly the need to combat climate change. Young voters who were seeking a more modern conservatism joined her Christian Democratic Union party.
Mrs. Merkel, however, said little about nuclear power. She abided by a decision made earlier by her coalition partners, the Social Democrats. When they were in government from 1998 to 2005, they had pushed through a law phasing out all nuclear energy by 2021.
That law shifted public opinion. A little less than half of the public, which was big by German standards, accepted nuclear power because it was going to be phased out relatively soon, according to opinion polls published at the time.
But in 2010, a year after Mrs. Merkel was re-elected, this time in coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats, she did a U-turn on nuclear policy by prolonging the life of the nuclear plants. Nuclear power, she argued, would be a “bridge technology” until renewable energy resources were sufficiently available.
“That decision was unnecessary and a big mistake,” said Mr. Blühdorn from the University of Bath.
Indeed, Mrs. Merkel’s decision was a political gift for the opposition Greens. Disappointed young conservative supporters flocked to that party. The Greens now hover between 16 percent and 18 percent in the opinion polls, their highest position ever. If that support can be sustained, they could be the kingmakers in the 2013 elections.
With Japan, public opinion is now becoming more radical. More than 70 percent of Germans, otherwise regarded as parsimonious, would now be willing to pay €20, or about $28, more a month for their energy if nuclear power was abolished.
“There’s a new momentum,” said Ms. Kemfert from the Hertie School of Governance. “Chancellor Merkel has a lot of explaining to do to voters. She is coming under increasing pressure to phase out nuclear energy soonest. It means finding alternative sources of energy. It will not be easy, cheap or fast.”
Mrs. Merkel knows that. This is why, whether for electoral reasons or not, she warned her own party and the nuclear industry last week that even after the Japan crisis, in Germany there will be no going back to the status quo ante.
Japan makes slow progress with nuclear reactors
BBC News: Asia Pacific: Japan makes slow progress with nuclear reactors
A day after Japanese officials reported progress towards regaining control of the Fukushima nuclear plant, smoke has been rising from two of its reactors.
Some workers at the stricken facility were temporarily evacuated after smoke was seen rising from reactor No 3. White smoke was later seen rising from the No 2 reactor.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation says the spread of radioactive material from the site is more serious than it first thought.
A day after Japanese officials reported progress towards regaining control of the Fukushima nuclear plant, smoke has been rising from two of its reactors.
Some workers at the stricken facility were temporarily evacuated after smoke was seen rising from reactor No 3. White smoke was later seen rising from the No 2 reactor.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation says the spread of radioactive material from the site is more serious than it first thought.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Japan nuclear crisis on edge, disaster toll grows
YahooNews: Japan nuclear crisis on edge, disaster toll grows
Not all about the nuclear problems, but I thought I'd share this anyway:
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan hoped power restored to its stricken nuclear plant may help solve the world's worst atomic crisis in 25 years, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that also left more than 21,000 people dead or missing.
Facing their darkest moment since World War Two, Japanese are in shock at both the ongoing battle to avert deadly radiation at the six-reactor Fukushima plant and a still-rising death toll from the March 11 disaster.
The world's third largest economy has suffered an estimated $250 billion of damage with entire towns in the northeast coastal region wiped out.
Easing the gloom briefly, local TV showed one incredible survival tale: an 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old grandson rescued from the rubble of their freezing house after nine days.
At Fukushima, around 300 engineers are working round-the-clock inside an evacuation zone to contain the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.
While spraying the coastal complex with sea-water so fuel rods will not overheat, their hopes for a more permanent solution depend on connecting electricity cables to reactivate on-site water pumps at each of the six reactors.
"I think the situation is improving step by step," Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Tetsuro Fukuyama said amid news that the workers, in suits sealed by duct tape, managed to connect power cables to the No. 2 and 5 reactors.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said workers aimed to extend power to No. 1 reactor, which is linked to No. 2, and then test systems later on Monday.
The U.N. atomic watchdog in Vienna said there had been some positive developments in the last 24 hours but that the overall situation remained very serious.
If the pumps cannot restart, drastic and lengthy measures may be needed like burying the plant in sand and concrete.
Even if the situation is contained, cases of contaminated vegetables, dust and water will continue to stoke anxiety though Japanese health officials insist the levels are not dangerous.
The government prohibited the sale of raw milk from Fukushima prefecture and spinach from another nearby area, and said more restrictions on food may be announced on Monday.
Tiny traces of radioactive iodine have been found in Tokyo, 240 km (150 miles) south of the plant. Many expatriates and local residents have left the capital. Those who remain are subdued but not panicked.
"There's no way I can check if those radioactive particles are in my tap water or the food I eat, so there isn't much I can really do about it," said Setsuko Kuroi, an 87-year-old woman shopping in a supermarket with a white gauze mask over her face.
AID TRICKLES IN
Official tolls of dead and missing are rising steadily -- to 8,450 and 12,931 respectively on Sunday.
They could jump dramatically since police said they believed more than 15,000 people had been killed in Miyagi prefecture, one of four that took the brunt of the tsunami.
Scores of nations have pledged aid to victims, but little is visible in many devastated towns and villages.
"All we have had is the clothes on our backs. But they are good enough. They've kept us warm through all of this," said Machiko Kawahata as she, her daughter and granddaughter looked for clothes at a drop-off point in Kamaishi, a coastal town.
"We will make do and we will make it through this."
The 9.0-magnitude quake and ensuing 10-meter high tsunami made more than 350,000 people homeless.
Food, water, medicine and fuel are short in some parts, and low temperatures during Japan's winter are not helping.
About 243,000 households in the north still have no electricity and at least 1 million lack running water.
While Japanese have been focused on the rescue operation rather than recriminations, media and others have raised questions over the government and TEPCO's performance.
There have been some suggestions the nuclear drama was taking priority over the human suffering, and that parts of officials' early response was slow and opaque.
TEPCO head Masataka Shimizu issued a statement on Saturday expressing regret for "causing such trouble" at the plant, but has not visited the site or made a public appearance in a week.
Economics Minster Kaoru Yosano put the overall economic damage at above 20 trillion yen ($248 billion).
Japan's crisis spooked markets last week, prompted rare intervention by the G7 group of rich nations to stabilize the yen, and fueled concerns the world economy may suffer because of disrupted supplies to the auto and technology industries.
Japanese markets are closed on Monday for a holiday.
The crisis has prompted an international reassessment of nuclear power. Physicians for Social Responsibility, a U.S. advocacy group, called for a halt to new nuclear reactors there.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has kept a low profile during the crisis except for one outburst at TEPCO, was to visit the affected region on Monday, Kyodo news agency said.
The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, Robert Willard, was also due to meet Japanese officials on Monday to offer support for disaster relief and the nuclear operation.
($1 = 80.610 Japanese Yen)
Not all about the nuclear problems, but I thought I'd share this anyway:
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan hoped power restored to its stricken nuclear plant may help solve the world's worst atomic crisis in 25 years, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that also left more than 21,000 people dead or missing.
Facing their darkest moment since World War Two, Japanese are in shock at both the ongoing battle to avert deadly radiation at the six-reactor Fukushima plant and a still-rising death toll from the March 11 disaster.
The world's third largest economy has suffered an estimated $250 billion of damage with entire towns in the northeast coastal region wiped out.
Easing the gloom briefly, local TV showed one incredible survival tale: an 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old grandson rescued from the rubble of their freezing house after nine days.
At Fukushima, around 300 engineers are working round-the-clock inside an evacuation zone to contain the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.
While spraying the coastal complex with sea-water so fuel rods will not overheat, their hopes for a more permanent solution depend on connecting electricity cables to reactivate on-site water pumps at each of the six reactors.
"I think the situation is improving step by step," Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Tetsuro Fukuyama said amid news that the workers, in suits sealed by duct tape, managed to connect power cables to the No. 2 and 5 reactors.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said workers aimed to extend power to No. 1 reactor, which is linked to No. 2, and then test systems later on Monday.
The U.N. atomic watchdog in Vienna said there had been some positive developments in the last 24 hours but that the overall situation remained very serious.
If the pumps cannot restart, drastic and lengthy measures may be needed like burying the plant in sand and concrete.
Even if the situation is contained, cases of contaminated vegetables, dust and water will continue to stoke anxiety though Japanese health officials insist the levels are not dangerous.
The government prohibited the sale of raw milk from Fukushima prefecture and spinach from another nearby area, and said more restrictions on food may be announced on Monday.
Tiny traces of radioactive iodine have been found in Tokyo, 240 km (150 miles) south of the plant. Many expatriates and local residents have left the capital. Those who remain are subdued but not panicked.
"There's no way I can check if those radioactive particles are in my tap water or the food I eat, so there isn't much I can really do about it," said Setsuko Kuroi, an 87-year-old woman shopping in a supermarket with a white gauze mask over her face.
AID TRICKLES IN
Official tolls of dead and missing are rising steadily -- to 8,450 and 12,931 respectively on Sunday.
They could jump dramatically since police said they believed more than 15,000 people had been killed in Miyagi prefecture, one of four that took the brunt of the tsunami.
Scores of nations have pledged aid to victims, but little is visible in many devastated towns and villages.
"All we have had is the clothes on our backs. But they are good enough. They've kept us warm through all of this," said Machiko Kawahata as she, her daughter and granddaughter looked for clothes at a drop-off point in Kamaishi, a coastal town.
"We will make do and we will make it through this."
The 9.0-magnitude quake and ensuing 10-meter high tsunami made more than 350,000 people homeless.
Food, water, medicine and fuel are short in some parts, and low temperatures during Japan's winter are not helping.
About 243,000 households in the north still have no electricity and at least 1 million lack running water.
While Japanese have been focused on the rescue operation rather than recriminations, media and others have raised questions over the government and TEPCO's performance.
There have been some suggestions the nuclear drama was taking priority over the human suffering, and that parts of officials' early response was slow and opaque.
TEPCO head Masataka Shimizu issued a statement on Saturday expressing regret for "causing such trouble" at the plant, but has not visited the site or made a public appearance in a week.
Economics Minster Kaoru Yosano put the overall economic damage at above 20 trillion yen ($248 billion).
Japan's crisis spooked markets last week, prompted rare intervention by the G7 group of rich nations to stabilize the yen, and fueled concerns the world economy may suffer because of disrupted supplies to the auto and technology industries.
Japanese markets are closed on Monday for a holiday.
The crisis has prompted an international reassessment of nuclear power. Physicians for Social Responsibility, a U.S. advocacy group, called for a halt to new nuclear reactors there.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has kept a low profile during the crisis except for one outburst at TEPCO, was to visit the affected region on Monday, Kyodo news agency said.
The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, Robert Willard, was also due to meet Japanese officials on Monday to offer support for disaster relief and the nuclear operation.
($1 = 80.610 Japanese Yen)
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Caps Decades of Faked Safety Reports, Accidents
Bloomberg.com: Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Caps Decades of Faked Safety Reports, Accidents
The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.
The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.
With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors -- more than any other country except the U.S. and France -- to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.
Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.
Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”
Nuclear Earthquake
In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi said fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could suffer a catastrophic disaster.
“We didn’t learn anything,” Ishibashi said in a phone interview this week. “Nuclear power is national policy and there’s a real reluctance to scrutinize it.”
To be sure, Japan’s record isn’t the worst. The International Atomic Energy Agency rates nuclear accidents on a scale of zero to seven, with Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union rated seven, the most dangerous. Fukushima, where the steel vessels at the heart of the reactors have so far not ruptured, is currently a class five, the same category as the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in the U.S.
‘No Chernobyl’
“The key thing here is that this is not another Chernobyl,” said Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation safety at the IAEA in Vienna. “Containment engineering has been vindicated. What has not been vindicated is the site engineering that put us on a path to accident.”
The 40-year-old Fukushima plant, built in the 1970s when Japan’s first wave of nuclear construction began, stood up to the country’s worst earthquake on record March 11 only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter tsunami that followed.
Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.
Radiation readings spiked around Fukushima as the disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people and causing radiation levels to rise on the outskirts of Tokyo, 135 miles (210 kilometers) to the south, with a population of 30 million.
Basement Generator
Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves.
“This in the country that invented the word Tsunami,” said Brockman, who also worked at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Japan is going to have a look again at its regulatory process and whether it’s intrusive enough.”
The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the U.S. two decades ago. The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.
While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, it seems adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.
Accident Foretold
“It’s questionable whether Tokyo Electric really studied the risks,” Tateno said in an interview. “That they weren’t prepared for a once in a thousand year occurrence will not go over as an acceptable excuse.”
Hajime Motojuku, a utility spokesman, said he couldn’t immediately confirm whether the company was aware of the report.
All six boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant were designed by General Electric Co. (GE) and the company built the No. 1, 2 and 6 reactors, spokeswoman Emily Caruso said in an e-mail response to questions. The No. 1 reactor went into commercial operation in 1971.
Toshiba Corp. (6502) built 3 and 5. Hitachi Ltd. (6501), which folded its nuclear operations into a venture with GE known as Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. in 2007, built No. 4.
All the reactors meet the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for safe operation during and after an earthquake for the areas where they are licensed and sited, GE said on its website.
Botched Container?
Mitsuhiko Tanaka, 67, working as an engineer at Babcock Hitachi K.K., helped design and supervise the manufacture of a $250 million steel pressure vessel for Tokyo Electric in 1975. Today, that vessel holds the fuel rods in the core of the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima’s Dai-Ichi plant, hit by explosion and fire after the tsunami.
Tanaka says the vessel was damaged in the production process. He says he knows because he orchestrated the cover-up. When he brought his accusations to the government more than a decade later, he was ignored, he says.
The accident occurred when Tanaka and his team were strengthening the steel in the pressure vessel, heating it in a furnace to more than 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature that melts metal. Braces that should have been inside the vessel during the blasting were either forgotten or fell over. After it cooled, Tanaka found that its walls had warped.
‘Felt Like a Hero’
The law required the flawed vessel be scrapped, a loss that Tanaka said might have bankrupted the company. Rather than sacrifice years of work and risk the company’s survival, Tanaka used computer modeling to devise a way to reshape the vessel so that no one would know it had been damaged. He did that with Hitachi’s blessings, he said.
“I saved the company billions of yen,” Tanaka said in an interview March 12, the day after the earthquake. Tanaka says he got a 3 million yen bonus ($38,000) from Hitachi and a plaque acknowledging his “extraordinary” effort in 1974. “At the time, I felt like a hero.”
That changed with Chernobyl. Two years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, Tanaka went to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to report the cover-up he’d engineered more than a decade earlier. Hitachi denied his accusation and the government refused to investigate.
‘No Safety Problem’
Kenta Takahashi, an official at the NISA’s Power Generation Inspection Division, said he couldn’t confirm whether the agency’s predecessor, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, conducted an investigation into Tanaka’s claim.
In 1988, Hitachi met with Tanaka to discuss the work he had done to fix the dent in the vessel. They concluded that there was no safety problem, said Hitachi spokesman Yuichi Izumisawa. “We have not revised our view since then,” Izumisawa said.
In 1990, Tanaka wrote a book called “Why Nuclear Power Is Dangerous” that detailed his experiences.
Tokyo Electric in 2002 admitted it had falsified repair reports at nuclear plants for more than two decades. Chairman Hiroshi Araki and President Nobuyama Minami resigned to take responsibility for hundred of occasions on which the company had submitted false data to the regulator.
Then in 2007, the utility said it hadn’t come entirely clean five years earlier. It had concealed at least six emergency stoppages at its Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station and a “critical” reaction at the plant’s No. 3 unit that lasted for seven hours.
Ignored Warnings?
Tokyo Electric ignored warnings about the tsunami risks that caused the crisis at Fukushima, Tatsuya Ito, who represented Fukushima prefecture in the national parliament from 1991 to 2003, said in a March 16 telephone interview.
The Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant was only designed to withstand a 5.7-meter tsunami, not the 7-meter wall of water generated by last week’s earthquake or the 6.4-meter tsunami that struck neighboring Miyagi prefecture after the Valdiva earthquake in 1960, Ito said.
The dangers posed by a tsunami the size of the one generated by the 9.5-magnitude Valdiva temblor off Chile are described in a 2002 report by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, Ito said.
“Tokyo Electric brought this upon itself,” said Ito, who now heads the National Center for the Citizens’ Movement Against the Nuclear Threat, based in Tokyo. “This accident unfolded as expected.”
Coming Clean
Ito said he has met Tepco employees to discuss his concerns at least 20 times since 2003 and sent a formal letter to then- president Tsunehisa Katsumata in 2005.
“We are prioritizing the safety of the plant and are not at a point where we can reflect upon and properly assess the root causes,” said Naoki Tsunoda, a Tokyo Electric spokesman in Tokyo. He said he couldn’t immediately confirm the exchanges made between Ito and the company.
Kansai Electric Power Co., the utility that provides Osaka with electricity, said it also faked nuclear safety records. Chubu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. (9505) said the same.
Only months after that second round of revelations, an earthquake struck a cluster of seven reactors run by Tokyo Electric on Japan’s north coast. The Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest, was hit by a 6.8 magnitude temblor that buckled walls and caused a fire at a transformer. About 1.5 liters (half gallon) of radioactive water sloshed out of a container and ran into the sea through drains because sealing plugs hadn’t been installed.
Fault Line
While there were no deaths from the accident and the IAEA said radiation released was within authorized limits for public health and environmental safety, the damage was such that three of the plant’s reactors are still offline.
After the quake, Trade Minister Akira Amari said regulators hadn’t properly reviewed Tokyo Electric’s geological survey when they approved the site in 1974.
The world’s biggest nuclear power plant had been built on an earthquake fault line that generated three times as much seismic acceleration, or 606 gals, as it was designed to withstand, the utility said. One gal, a measure of shock effect, represents acceleration of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per square second.
‘Rubber Stamp’
After Hokuriku Electric’s Shika nuclear power plant in Ishikawa prefecture was rocked by a 6.9 magnitude quake in March 2007, government scientists found it had been built near an earthquake fault that was more than twice as long as regulators deemed threatening.
“Regulators just rubber-stamp the utilities’ reports,” Takashi Nakata, a former Hiroshima Institute of Technology seismologist and an anti-nuclear activist, said at the time.
While Japan had never suffered a failure comparable to Chernobyl, the Fukushima disaster caps a decade of fatal accidents.
Two workers at a fuel processing plant were killed by radiation exposure in 1999, when they used buckets, instead of the prescribed containers, to eye-ball a uranium mixture, triggering a chain-reaction that went unchecked for 20 hours.
‘No Possibility’
Regulators failed to ensure that safety alarms were installed at the plant run by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. because they believed there was “no possibility” of a major accident at the facility, according to an analysis by the NRC in the U.S. The report said there were ‘indications’ the company instructed workers to take shortcuts, without regulatory approval.
In 2004, an eruption of super-heated steam from a burst pipe at a reactor run by Kansai Electric killed five workers and scalded six others. A government investigation showed the burst pipe section had been omitted from safety checklists and had not been inspected for the 28 years the plant had been in operation.
Unlike France and the U.S., which have independent regulators, responsibility for keeping Japan’s reactors safe rests with the same body that oversees the effort to increase nuclear power generation: the Trade Ministry. Critics say that creates a conflict of interest that may hamper safety.
‘Scandals and Lies’
“What is necessary is a qualified, well-funded, independent regulator,” said Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp. (LTBR), a nuclear consultant in the U.S. “What happens when you have an independent regulatory agency, you can have a utility that has scandals and lies, but the regulator will yank its licensing approvals,” he said.
Tanaka says his book on the experiences he had with the nuclear power industry went out of print in 2000. His publisher called on March 13, two days after the Fukushima earthquake, and said they were starting another print run.
“Maybe this time people will listen,” he said.
The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.
The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.
With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors -- more than any other country except the U.S. and France -- to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.
Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.
Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”
Nuclear Earthquake
In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi said fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could suffer a catastrophic disaster.
“We didn’t learn anything,” Ishibashi said in a phone interview this week. “Nuclear power is national policy and there’s a real reluctance to scrutinize it.”
To be sure, Japan’s record isn’t the worst. The International Atomic Energy Agency rates nuclear accidents on a scale of zero to seven, with Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union rated seven, the most dangerous. Fukushima, where the steel vessels at the heart of the reactors have so far not ruptured, is currently a class five, the same category as the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in the U.S.
‘No Chernobyl’
“The key thing here is that this is not another Chernobyl,” said Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation safety at the IAEA in Vienna. “Containment engineering has been vindicated. What has not been vindicated is the site engineering that put us on a path to accident.”
The 40-year-old Fukushima plant, built in the 1970s when Japan’s first wave of nuclear construction began, stood up to the country’s worst earthquake on record March 11 only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter tsunami that followed.
Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.
Radiation readings spiked around Fukushima as the disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people and causing radiation levels to rise on the outskirts of Tokyo, 135 miles (210 kilometers) to the south, with a population of 30 million.
Basement Generator
Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves.
“This in the country that invented the word Tsunami,” said Brockman, who also worked at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Japan is going to have a look again at its regulatory process and whether it’s intrusive enough.”
The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the U.S. two decades ago. The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.
While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, it seems adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.
Accident Foretold
“It’s questionable whether Tokyo Electric really studied the risks,” Tateno said in an interview. “That they weren’t prepared for a once in a thousand year occurrence will not go over as an acceptable excuse.”
Hajime Motojuku, a utility spokesman, said he couldn’t immediately confirm whether the company was aware of the report.
All six boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant were designed by General Electric Co. (GE) and the company built the No. 1, 2 and 6 reactors, spokeswoman Emily Caruso said in an e-mail response to questions. The No. 1 reactor went into commercial operation in 1971.
Toshiba Corp. (6502) built 3 and 5. Hitachi Ltd. (6501), which folded its nuclear operations into a venture with GE known as Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. in 2007, built No. 4.
All the reactors meet the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for safe operation during and after an earthquake for the areas where they are licensed and sited, GE said on its website.
Botched Container?
Mitsuhiko Tanaka, 67, working as an engineer at Babcock Hitachi K.K., helped design and supervise the manufacture of a $250 million steel pressure vessel for Tokyo Electric in 1975. Today, that vessel holds the fuel rods in the core of the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima’s Dai-Ichi plant, hit by explosion and fire after the tsunami.
Tanaka says the vessel was damaged in the production process. He says he knows because he orchestrated the cover-up. When he brought his accusations to the government more than a decade later, he was ignored, he says.
The accident occurred when Tanaka and his team were strengthening the steel in the pressure vessel, heating it in a furnace to more than 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature that melts metal. Braces that should have been inside the vessel during the blasting were either forgotten or fell over. After it cooled, Tanaka found that its walls had warped.
‘Felt Like a Hero’
The law required the flawed vessel be scrapped, a loss that Tanaka said might have bankrupted the company. Rather than sacrifice years of work and risk the company’s survival, Tanaka used computer modeling to devise a way to reshape the vessel so that no one would know it had been damaged. He did that with Hitachi’s blessings, he said.
“I saved the company billions of yen,” Tanaka said in an interview March 12, the day after the earthquake. Tanaka says he got a 3 million yen bonus ($38,000) from Hitachi and a plaque acknowledging his “extraordinary” effort in 1974. “At the time, I felt like a hero.”
That changed with Chernobyl. Two years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, Tanaka went to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to report the cover-up he’d engineered more than a decade earlier. Hitachi denied his accusation and the government refused to investigate.
‘No Safety Problem’
Kenta Takahashi, an official at the NISA’s Power Generation Inspection Division, said he couldn’t confirm whether the agency’s predecessor, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, conducted an investigation into Tanaka’s claim.
In 1988, Hitachi met with Tanaka to discuss the work he had done to fix the dent in the vessel. They concluded that there was no safety problem, said Hitachi spokesman Yuichi Izumisawa. “We have not revised our view since then,” Izumisawa said.
In 1990, Tanaka wrote a book called “Why Nuclear Power Is Dangerous” that detailed his experiences.
Tokyo Electric in 2002 admitted it had falsified repair reports at nuclear plants for more than two decades. Chairman Hiroshi Araki and President Nobuyama Minami resigned to take responsibility for hundred of occasions on which the company had submitted false data to the regulator.
Then in 2007, the utility said it hadn’t come entirely clean five years earlier. It had concealed at least six emergency stoppages at its Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station and a “critical” reaction at the plant’s No. 3 unit that lasted for seven hours.
Ignored Warnings?
Tokyo Electric ignored warnings about the tsunami risks that caused the crisis at Fukushima, Tatsuya Ito, who represented Fukushima prefecture in the national parliament from 1991 to 2003, said in a March 16 telephone interview.
The Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant was only designed to withstand a 5.7-meter tsunami, not the 7-meter wall of water generated by last week’s earthquake or the 6.4-meter tsunami that struck neighboring Miyagi prefecture after the Valdiva earthquake in 1960, Ito said.
The dangers posed by a tsunami the size of the one generated by the 9.5-magnitude Valdiva temblor off Chile are described in a 2002 report by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, Ito said.
“Tokyo Electric brought this upon itself,” said Ito, who now heads the National Center for the Citizens’ Movement Against the Nuclear Threat, based in Tokyo. “This accident unfolded as expected.”
Coming Clean
Ito said he has met Tepco employees to discuss his concerns at least 20 times since 2003 and sent a formal letter to then- president Tsunehisa Katsumata in 2005.
“We are prioritizing the safety of the plant and are not at a point where we can reflect upon and properly assess the root causes,” said Naoki Tsunoda, a Tokyo Electric spokesman in Tokyo. He said he couldn’t immediately confirm the exchanges made between Ito and the company.
Kansai Electric Power Co., the utility that provides Osaka with electricity, said it also faked nuclear safety records. Chubu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. (9505) said the same.
Only months after that second round of revelations, an earthquake struck a cluster of seven reactors run by Tokyo Electric on Japan’s north coast. The Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest, was hit by a 6.8 magnitude temblor that buckled walls and caused a fire at a transformer. About 1.5 liters (half gallon) of radioactive water sloshed out of a container and ran into the sea through drains because sealing plugs hadn’t been installed.
Fault Line
While there were no deaths from the accident and the IAEA said radiation released was within authorized limits for public health and environmental safety, the damage was such that three of the plant’s reactors are still offline.
After the quake, Trade Minister Akira Amari said regulators hadn’t properly reviewed Tokyo Electric’s geological survey when they approved the site in 1974.
The world’s biggest nuclear power plant had been built on an earthquake fault line that generated three times as much seismic acceleration, or 606 gals, as it was designed to withstand, the utility said. One gal, a measure of shock effect, represents acceleration of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per square second.
‘Rubber Stamp’
After Hokuriku Electric’s Shika nuclear power plant in Ishikawa prefecture was rocked by a 6.9 magnitude quake in March 2007, government scientists found it had been built near an earthquake fault that was more than twice as long as regulators deemed threatening.
“Regulators just rubber-stamp the utilities’ reports,” Takashi Nakata, a former Hiroshima Institute of Technology seismologist and an anti-nuclear activist, said at the time.
While Japan had never suffered a failure comparable to Chernobyl, the Fukushima disaster caps a decade of fatal accidents.
Two workers at a fuel processing plant were killed by radiation exposure in 1999, when they used buckets, instead of the prescribed containers, to eye-ball a uranium mixture, triggering a chain-reaction that went unchecked for 20 hours.
‘No Possibility’
Regulators failed to ensure that safety alarms were installed at the plant run by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. because they believed there was “no possibility” of a major accident at the facility, according to an analysis by the NRC in the U.S. The report said there were ‘indications’ the company instructed workers to take shortcuts, without regulatory approval.
In 2004, an eruption of super-heated steam from a burst pipe at a reactor run by Kansai Electric killed five workers and scalded six others. A government investigation showed the burst pipe section had been omitted from safety checklists and had not been inspected for the 28 years the plant had been in operation.
Unlike France and the U.S., which have independent regulators, responsibility for keeping Japan’s reactors safe rests with the same body that oversees the effort to increase nuclear power generation: the Trade Ministry. Critics say that creates a conflict of interest that may hamper safety.
‘Scandals and Lies’
“What is necessary is a qualified, well-funded, independent regulator,” said Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp. (LTBR), a nuclear consultant in the U.S. “What happens when you have an independent regulatory agency, you can have a utility that has scandals and lies, but the regulator will yank its licensing approvals,” he said.
Tanaka says his book on the experiences he had with the nuclear power industry went out of print in 2000. His publisher called on March 13, two days after the Fukushima earthquake, and said they were starting another print run.
“Maybe this time people will listen,” he said.
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