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ARTICLE ARCHIVE

Nuclear Reactors

The nuclear industry is more than 50 years old. Its history is replete with a colossal financial disaster and a multitude of near-misses and catastrophic accidents like Three Mile Island and Chornobyl. Beyond Nuclear works to expose the risks and dangers posed by an aging and deteriorating reactor industry and the unproven designs being proposed for new construction.

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Entries by admin (520)

Thursday
Sep292011

Freeze Our Fukushima's National Call In Day to NRC October 7, 2011

Be a part of the dialogue! Call in on National Freeze our Fukushimas Day.

More than 6,000 of you have already co-signed Beyond Nuclear's petition to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It's not too late to sign. And you can also call in to participate in the NRC Public Hearing on October 7, 2011 - 10am to 12 noon EST. The petition calls on the NRC to halt operations on the deteriorating  General Electric Mark I boiling water reactors here in the US similar in design to the  Fukushima Dai-ichi units.

Call Toll Free

Friday, October 7, 2011   

10 AM to 12 Noon Eastern Standard Time

Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Public Hearing with Beyond Nuclear

1-877-553-7601 (passcode 5087356)

1-866-741-7099 (passcode 3340595)

1-866-732-2413 (passcode 8181837)

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Webcast at http://video.nrc.gov

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Following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine, the US government permanently closed a US reactor, the graphite-moderated Hanford N-reactor near Richland, Washington. Why? The antiquated reactor too closely resembled the design of the exploded Chernobyl reactor that blanketed much of the northern hemisphere in long-lived radioactive fallout.

Now following Japan's 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, more than 6,000 of you have co-petitioned with us to call upon the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "Freeze Our Fukushimas" and shutter dangerously old and deteriorating General Electric Mark I boiling water reactors here in the US similar in design to the  Fukushima Dai-ichi units. There, nuclear accidents have closed 24 miles of Japan's coastline to human habitation and forced hundreds of thousands more Japanese to live in sickening radioactive contamination.


The NRC has scheduled a public hearing to take public comment on requested emergency enforcement actions to suspend operations at these increasingly dangerous Fukushima-style nuclear reactors. Speakers will include Paul Gunter and Kevin Kamps (Beyond Nuclear), Dale Bridenbaugh (former GE engineer), Arnie Gunderson (Fairewinds Associates), Debi Katz (Citizens Awareness Network), Lou Zeller (Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League), Randy Kehler (Safe & Green Campaign), Michael Mariotte (Nuclear Information and Resource Service), Bobbie Paul (Georgia WAND) and more... 

You can participate in this public meeting via the toll free telephone bridge lines or watch the live webcast from NRC headquarters.

Please mark your calendars and help us mobilize a national campaign to hasten the closure of the most dangerous atomic reactors in America. Invite your friends, colleagues and post on listserves.

Freeze Our Fukushimas! 


Saturday
Sep172011

NRC rules no suspension on reactor licensing proceedings despite Fukushima

As reported by the Newburyport News, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has decided to proceed "full steam ahead" with the Seabrook license extension proceeding, despite a legal intervention by Beyond Nuclear and environmental allies to suspend the proceeding in the wake of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe.

In addition, Beyond Nuclear at the Fermi 3 new reactor proceeding, and the Davis-Besse license extension proceeding, and environmental allies at many additional old and new reactor proceedings, including new reactor design certification proceedings, have been rebuffed by the NRC Commissioners in a parallel call for license and design certification proceeding suspensions in the wake of Fukushima. At the time of the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, the NRC effectively suspended any and all license proceedings for a year and half. Not so this time, in the aftermath of the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.

Friday
Sep092011

Earthquake exceeded North Anna reactors' design specs: NRC nixes Dominion request for quick restart

A decades long saga of deception, best guess work and an emerging reality is now exposing just how much (or little) “margin of safety” really exists for inherently dangerous nuclear power plants built near and operating on earthquake fault lines. 

The two-unit North Anna nuclear power plant in Mineral, Virginia remains shut down under increasing scrutiny as the result of an automatic SCRAM caused by a 5.8 magnitude earthquake on August 23, 2011 centered 11 miles away.  While the main electrical grid never lost power, the reactors experienced a loss of offsite power following a failure in the plant’s electrical switchyard that disconnected all of the reactors’ safety systems from their main power source. The reactors automatically switched over to four onsite emergency diesel generators as designed. However, one of the backup generators lost cooling and failed.

Following the August 23, 2011 earthquake, it took over a week for Dominion Nuclear to admit that the earthquake also impacted North Anna's onsite dry cask storage for high-level radioactive waste, shifting 25 of 27 nuclear waste loaded vertical containers up to several inches, and damaging the concrete surface of empty horizontal containers. CNN interviewed Beyond Nuclear 's Kevin Kamps on the deadly risks of dry cask storage. Beyond Nuclear continues to advocate for Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS) which would include better defending dry casks against earthquakes as well as from attack and sabotage.

A preliminary analysis by plant owner Dominion has found that the earthquake’s ground motion was twice what the North Anna nuclear power plant was designed for.  Dominion managers met with NRC officials on September 8, 2011 to provide their preliminary damage assessment and restart schedule.  According to Dominion’s initial finding, no “safety-related” reactor systems, structures or components were damaged by the quake.  With both units down, Unit 2 is going into a refueling outage now scheduled to be completed by October 13, 2011. Dominion intends to use the Unit 2 refueling outage for the intensified inspections for quake damage. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval is needed before the reactors will be allowed to restart.  Dominion had intended to use the enhanced inspections at Unit 2 as the basis for NRC approval of an ambitious if not hasty restart of Unit 1 by September 22, 2011. However, NRC pushed back that more questions not less are likely to impact the Unit 1 restart date. The agency has sent in an inspection team which will remain on site for several weeks. One particular focus of NRC will be its review of company activity to assure that the quake did not damage the nuclear fuel in the reactor cores or the irradiated nuclear waste stored in the spent fuel pools. One clear question now regards the level of detail the company intends to submit to NRC for restart approval. When questioned, Dominion intends to submit only a summary of its inspection findings and conclusions for restart readiness.

The fact that the reactors safely shut down, this time, is outweighed by a more glaring fact that Virginia Electric Power Company (VEPCO) was allowed to build the reactor astride the earthquake fault line and originally lied to a federal licensing  agency about the fault line’s existence.  The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League published its exposé The Devil and the Reactor documenting the original decade-long licensing intervention work of the late June Allen disclosing an elaborate collusion of a government and corporation to cover-up the earthquake risks beginning in the late 1960s in order to complete the construction and operating licenses of the nuclear reactors.

VEPCO’s safety analysis report relied upon for the original construction permit deleted earlier findings in a geologic study to make its claim to the federal licensing board that “Faulting at the site is neither known nor suspected.” A lawsuit organized by June Allen and the North Anna Environmental Coalition brought in a geologist to prove that the construction site was above an earthquake fault line.  The citizen intervention subsequently led to a determination by the NRC and the Virginia Attorney General Office that VEPCO deliberately deleted maps indicating  known fault lines from the construction application along with six other findings of “making material false statements” on the earthquake risk.  The cover-up ran much deeper than a nuclear power company willfully lying under oath in its application.  In fact, high ranking NRC officials knowledgeable of the deception kept the company’s illegal secret from their own federal licensing board.  After fining the company a mere $32,000 for lying about the earthquake risk, on April 1, 1978 the NRC granted VEPCO a 40 year operating license for North Anna.  Then, on March 20, 2003, NRC rubberstamped a 20 year license extension on top of North Anna's original 40 year license -- seismic risks are excluded from license extension decision making proceedings, by NRC fiat.

 

Monday
Aug292011

Tepco now says Unit 3 blew up Unit 4

The Mainichi Daily News now reports that Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is asserting that hydrogen gas from the Unit 3 meltdown(s), rather than being vented out the stack shared with Unit 4, flowed instead into the Unit 4 secondary containment reactor building, blowing it up. So much for the "hardened vent" retrofits constituting a "safety improvement" on the General Electric Boiling Water Reactor Mark 1 containment system! If this is truly what caused the "mysterious" Unit 4 explosion, then not only did the "hardened vents" fail to prevent meltdowns and containment failures at Units 1, 2, and 3, but they also caused a large explosion in Unit 4 -- a reactor that had been de-fueled, and was not operating -- which now risks the release of large-scale amounts of hazardous radioactivity directly into the environment if its high-level radioactive waste storage pool boils dry, allowing the irradiated nuclear fuel within to catch on fire.

Saturday
Aug272011

New report on zombie TVA reactor at Bellefonte

On August 10th, 2011, Fairewinds Associates published a report commissioned by Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) regarding the Tennessee Valley Authority's proposal to attempt to resurrect a long abandoned nuclear power plant project at Bellefonte, Alabama. Arnie Gundersen summarizes his report in a video posted on the Fairewinds website. SACE published a media release, which includes a link to the full report by Gundersen.