Wind power cheaper than nuclear, EU climate chief

From The Guardian: 

Generating energy from wind turbines at sea would be cheaper than building new atomic power plants, Europe's climate chief has said, in the latest challenge to the crisis-stricken nuclear industry. Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate change commissioner, said: "Some people tend to believe that nuclear is very, very cheap, but offshore wind is cheaper than nuclear. People should believe that this is very, very cheap."

Where are the US reactors similar to those in crisis in Japan?

There are 23 GE Mark1 Boiling Water Reactors in the U.S. of the same design as those at Fukushima. This list from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission shows which designs are Boiling Water or Pressurized Water reactors. Here is the list of Mark I BWRs in the country.

Browns Ferry 1,2,3 (W of Huntsville, AL); Brunswick 1,2, ( 40 miles W of Wilmington,NC), Cooper (23 miles south of Nebraksa City, NE), Dresden 2,3 (25 miles SW of Joliet, IL), Duane Arnold ( 8 miles NW of Cedar Rapids, IA), Fermi 2 (24 miles NE of Toledo, IL), FitzPatrick (6 miles NE of Oswego, NY), Hatch 1,2 (20 miles S of Vidalia, GA), Hope Creek 1 (18 miles SE of Wilmington, DE), Monticello (35 miles NW of Minneapolis, MN), Nine Mile Point 1 (6 miles NE of Oswego, NY), Oyster Creek (9 miles S of Toms River, NJ), Peach Bottom 2,3 (17.9 miles S of Lancaster, PA), Pilgrim 1 (38 miles SE of Boston, MA), Quad Cities 1,2 (20 miles NE of Moline, IL), Vermont Yankee (5 miles S of Brattleboro, VT).

Japan: radiation levels in milk, spinach high as traces of radioactive iodine discovered in Tokyo tap water

Spinach and milk taken from farms near Japan's crippled nuclear plant exceeded government-set safety limits for radiation, the government said on Saturday, in the first report of food contamination from the accident.The tainted milk was found 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the plant while the spinach came from a neighboring prefecture...The spinach radiation level is about one-fifth of one CT scan, Edano said. 

"It's not like if you ate it right away you would be harmed," Edano said. "It would not be good to continue to eat it for some time." IBN Live

Traces of radioactive iodine-131 have turned up in Tokyo tap water indicating that the resevoirs sources for drinking water were exposed to the shifing radioactive plume from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.

See Beyond Nuclear's No Safe Dose fact sheet and consider that consuming this contaminated milk or spinach will result in an internal dose of radiation which can be much more damaging than an external dose only. Contaminated food among hungry people is yet another way nuclear power has made what is a horrible natural disaster even worse.

Radioactive particles arriving in the Bay Area

While public health officials anxiously downplayed fears Thursday that a plume from Japan's crippled nuclear reactors was descending on California, scientists at UC Berkeley declared they were already detecting radioactive particles from 5,000 miles across the ocean.

"We see evidence of fission particles -- iodine, cesium, barium and krypton, a whole dog's breakfast of radiation," said Ed Morse, professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, whose students have set up a monitor on the rooftop of the campus's Etcheverry Building. A monitor at Lawrence Livermore Lab is also detecting the particles, he said. Mercury News

Giant "Common" Nuclear Waste Storage Pond to All Six Fukushima Daiichi Reactors Has Been Without Cooling

There is yet another surprise at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex.

The long awaited arrival of electrical power to Tokyo Electric Power Company's devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station has yet another vital task to perform: restore cooling to an independent large scale common nuclear waste storage pond for all six nuclear units that has received no attention since loss of electricity following the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.

According to Yomiuri Shimbun news service (March 18, 2011), the giant common "spent" fuel storage pond has also been without cooling since the tsunami.  The pool is not in a rated containment structure which is a concern if hydrogen gas generation leads to another explosion.  The shared nuclear waste fuel assembly pool building  is about 50 meters (150 feet) west of the now extremely radioactive Daiichi Unit 4. The common fuel pool facility has a total capacity of 6,800 highly irradiated fuel assemblies. According to TEPCO documentation from November 2010, the storage pool was at 90% capacity in March 2010 with 6,291 nuclear waste assemblies.

The large scale pool measures approximately 38 feet wide, 92 feet long and 35 feet deep. The older and highly radioactive nuclear waste assemblies allowed to cool down for many years in the six reactors' roof top storage ponds began its transfer to storage in the pool in 1997. From this pool, some of the fuel has been loaded into more secure dry cask storage units awaiting shipment to the Rokkasho nuclear waste reprocessing facility.

According to Yomiuri Shimbun, TEPCO authoriities have not been able to approach the largest nuclear waste storage facility at the complex  because of high radiation levels emitting from Units 3 and 4. As a result, it was reported that TEPCO has not been able to check the giant cooling pond's temperature and water level. However, TEPCO officials reassure that this nuclear waste inventory also stored outside of a containment facility consists of the "coolest" assemblies in wet storage onsite.

However, even after two decades, a single used fuel assembly from a typical Boiling Water Reactor will emit over 3,000 BTU/hr.