Vermont Yankee workers “dis” police

In a recent post the Vermont Digger reported on a bomb scare at the nuclear reactor at Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vermont:

An official from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in a statement that the situation was not handled appropriately, and Entergy staff in Vernon did not follow proper procedures.

Vernon police were called to the plant Nov. 4 and the officer who responded turned off his portable radios and cellphones as he approached the pipe in the “south forty,” a shipping and receiving area outside the “protected area” where nuclear power production buildings are located at the plant, according to the report.

The officer recommended that the security manager and superintendent call in the bomb squad.

Against the advice of the police, Entergy employees duct taped a piece of string to the pipe, stood back and pulled the string to see if it “went off,” according to the report.

       This seems to be more irresponsible behavior on the part of the staff at VY.   The ask the police for help, the police say that experts are needed, and the staff at VY decide that they can deal with the problem after all.  Thank goodness that this was a false alarm.  I can only imagine what would have happened if the police were called to a private home on a bomb scare, and the residents disregarded the recommendations of the police.

Japan to give up nuclear bomb grade stockpile

There was a recent report that Japan has finally agreed to give up its nuclear weapon grade stockpile of plutonium:

        Japan possesses 331 kilograms of mostly weapons-grade plutonium offered by the US during the Cold War era for research purposes. The highly-concentrated plutonium can produce 40 to 50 nuclear weapons.
The US has repeatedly asked Japan to return the plutonium for the sake of nuclear security. Tokyo rejected initially, citing that the nuclear stock is needed for fast reactor research, but it finally gave in to the demands of its ally in January, according to the Kyodo News Agency.
At the Nuclear Security Summit in the Netherlands, Abe and US President Barack Obama said Monday that Japan would turn over the nuclear stockpile to the US to be downgraded and disposed of, which will “help prevent unauthorized actors, criminals, or terrorists from acquiring such materials,” Reuters reported. The plutonium would be prepared for “final disposition.”
However, what triggered concerns is not just the plutonium originally from the US. Japan also possesses more than 1.2 tons of highly enriched uranium and 44 tons of low-quality plutonium from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, far exceeding its need for nuclear energy.

        I had always been lead to believe that Japan had renounced nuclear weapons in Article 9, which forbids war.   The worry is always expressed that the danger is  that the terrorists will somehow get hold of these materials, and cause the world irreparable harm.   However, the facts are that the vast majority of the nuclear destruction has been done by governments or the corporations to their own people: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Mayak.

Audits at Vermont Yankee forbidden from finding violations

There was a recent post by Susan Smaller in the Rutland Hearld  about an audit at Vermont Yankee:.  The audit addressed the issues learned at the Fukushima disaster which could be applied to Vermont Yankee:

While Vermont Yankee is built on the banks of the Connecticut River, its location above the river is estimated to be at the 500-year flood level. But flooding can come from more common sources. Just in the past year, Vermont Yankee has had problems with missing flood seals, which allowed standing water to seep into underground equipment….“This was not an inspection, it’s an audit designed to find out whether the guidance was faithfully followed,” said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the NRC…Sheehan said that since it was not an inspection, there are no violations, but that the audit team found problems or areas of concern.

“As has been the case at other plants, our audit team developed several observations on areas where Vermont Yankee did not include certain necessary information in walkdown reports or failed to properly perform calculations,” he said Thursday.

      There is such wonderful use of language:   Since it was an audit and not an inspection, there were no violations.  I wonder if an audit would trigger an inspection?    Perhaps  we could apply such principles to the tax code: an IRS audit would not be able to find violations.    Maybe that is the way that corporate taxes are done.

Meanwhile, downstream of the nuclear reactor we put our faith in nature that there will not be a once in every 500 year  flood in the Connecticut River anytime soon.

Drunkenness not tolerated at Vermont Yankee

There was  a recent report by the NRC about the Vermont Yankee that an supervisor  was fired for being drunk:

FITNESS-FOR-DUTY REPORT INVOLVING A NON-LICENSED SUPERVISOR

A non-licensed contract employee supervisor had a confirmed positive for alcohol during a random fitness-for-duty test. The employee’s access to the plant has been terminated. ..The licensee notified the NRC Resident Inspector.

I suppose you could conclude that the system is working: bad behavior is stopped.   I wonder about the morale of a company  where supervisors are coming to the work place drunk.   It is hard to imagine that a random test has caught all of the cases of drunkenness.

NYT: the truth is a victim at Fukushima

The New York Times recently reported that scientists are being told not to publish data that might upset the public.  They wrote:

TOKYO — In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Michio Aoyama’s initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Two months later, as Mr. Aoyama prepared to publish his findings in a short, nonpeer-reviewed article for Nature, the director general of the institute called with an unusual demand — that Mr. Aoyama remove his own name from the paper.

“He said there were points he didn’t understand, or want to understand,” the researcher recalled. “I was later told that he did not want to say that Fukushima radioactivity was worse than Chernobyl.” The head of the institute, who has since retired, declined to comment for this article. Mr. Aoyama asked for his name to be removed, he said, and the article was not published.

There are powerful forces that are shaping the narration of the disaster at Fukushima, and the truth is not one of the forces.

New York Times: unskilled hired at Fukushima

What was once whispered on the fringe is now being discussed in the New York Times:

 “Out of work? Nowhere to live? Nowhere to go? Nothing to eat?” the online ad reads. “Come to Fukushima.”

That grim posting targeting the destitute, by a company seeking laborers for the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, is one of the starkest indications yet of an increasingly troubled search for workers willing to carry out the hazardous decommissioning at the site.  The plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco, has been shifting its attention away, leaving the complex cleanup to an often badly managed, poorly trained, demoralized and sometimes unskilled work force that has made some dangerous missteps. At the same time, the company is pouring its resources into another plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, that it hopes to restart this year as part of the government’s push to return to nuclear energy three years after the world’s second-worst nuclear disaster. It is a move that some members of the country’s nuclear regulatory board have criticized.

The article goes on to say that the workers are not being adequately supervised:

That crisis was especially evident one dark morning last October, when a crew of contract workers was sent to remove hoses and valves as part of a long-overdue upgrade to the plant’s water purification system.

According to regulatory filings by Tepco, the team received only a 20-minute briefing from their supervisor and were given no diagrams of the system they were to fix and no review of safety procedures — a scenario a former supervisor at the plant called unthinkable. Worse yet, the laborers were not warned that a hose near the one they would be removing was filled with water laced with radioactive cesium.  As the men shambled off in their bulky protective gear, their supervisor, juggling multiple responsibilities, left to check on another crew. They chose the wrong hose, and a torrent of radioactive water began spilling out. Panicked, the workers thrust their gloved hands into the water to try to stop the leak, spraying themselves and two other workers who raced over to help.

These conditions at Fukushima have been discussed in a previous posts, such as a post.   Cleaning up a nuclear reactor disaster is problematic in the best of hands.   Disaster upon man made disaster is likely when  a complex project in the hands of the unskilled and the untrained.   These acts, apparently sanctioned by TEPCO, are environmental crimes against the world.

 

NBC says the NRC deceives the public

There was a recent post by NBC  stating that the NRC was keeping two sets of answers:

Jaczko did push for release of a report on Fukushima and its lessons just 90 days after Fukushima. Some of those recommendations have been implemented. Jaczko, who resigned in 2012, declined a request last week to be interviewed.

‘Non-public information’

The talking points written during the emergency for NRC commissioners and other officials were divided into two sections: “public answer” and “additional technical, non-public information.” Often the two parts didn’t quite match.

One topic the NRC avoided in the talking points, even when responding to a direct question: meltdown.

 “Q. What happens when/if a plant ‘melts down’?

“Public Answer: In short, nuclear power plants in the United States are designed to be safe. To prevent the release of radioactive material, there are multiple barriers between the radioactive material and the environment, including the fuel cladding, the heavy steel reactor vessel itself and the containment building, usually a heavily reinforced structure of concrete and steel several feet thick.

“Additional, non-technical, non-public information: The melted core may melt through the bottom of the vessel and flow onto the concrete containment floor. The core may melt through the containment liner and release radioactive material to the environment.”

The Japanese public television network, NHK, asked if the NRC could provide a graphic depicting what happens during a meltdown of a nuclear reactor.

From: McIntyre, David

Date: Friday, March 18, 2011, 9:02 AM

NRC would not have such a graphic. I suspect any number of anti-nuclear power organizations might.

When reporters asked if the Japanese emergency could affect licensing of new reactors in the U.S., the public answer was “It is not appropriate to hypothesize on such a future scenario at this point.”..The non-public information was more direct: This event could potentially call into question the NRC’s seismic requirements, which could require the staff to re-evaluate the staff’s approval of the AP1000 and ESBWR (the newest reactor designs from Westinghouse and General Electric) design and certifications.”

Typically, the main steam media such as NBC repeats the corporate line.   It is encouraging to see that they are doing some honest reporting.   This is rather bold, because NBC is owned by GE.   GE, in turn, is regulated by the NRC, or owns the NRC, depending upon your perspective.

TEPCO knew, and did nothing

There was a recent report about the nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

An adviser to Prime Minster Shinzo Abe during his first term, Kurokawa continues to criticise the government and industry. He delivers speeches around the country to prod the public to demand greater transparency and improved public-safety measures from the nuclear industry.

According to the report, government regulators and Tepco had understood since 2006 the impact catastrophic weather could have on coastal nuclear plants. Japan is vulnerable to powerful earthquakes, and officials knew that if the plant was hit by a giant tsunami, a total electrical outage could occur, potentially damaging the reactor cores. Regulator the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (Nisa) knew that Tepco had failed to prepare for these risks, but took no action.

As in many cases, the questions are: what did you learn, when did you learn it, and what did you do.   It seems that TEPCO and the government were aware of the risks that  earthquakes and  tsunamis pose to nuclear reactors, and  have chosen to do nothing.  Even after the disaster, there has been no change in the corporate culture to address these serious issues.  The mark of intelligence is the ability to learn from mistakes.

Main Stream Media Reports on Fukushima Disaster

There were several reports today from Main Stream Media about the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

One report by CBS stated that the children around Fukushima are no longer allowed to play outside, because of fears about radiation.   The report goes on to say that  the radiation levels have returned to normal.  The story makes the parents seem unnecessarily anxious in the face scientific facts, but does not mention that reporting facts might be a crime.  There is no longer any trust between the people and the government.

There is another report by Time Magazine that low level radiation will reach the West Coast, but the levels are nothing to worry about.  There is some discussion that perhaps more monitoring should be done.

The main stream media has acknowledged the problem, but then goes on to trivialize the problems.

Fukushima remembered around the world, 3/11/14

There was a  recent report  commemorating the disaster that occurred in Fukushima three years ago.

In Japan, tens of thousands rallied near the crippled plant, demanding

an end to nuclear power as the nation held memorial ceremonies for a
disaaster that claimed almost 20,000 lives…. Around 16,000 people
gathered at a baseball stadium in Koriyama, some 60 kilometres (40
miles) from the plant.

Participants called for an end to nuclear energy in Japan and
compensation for victims from operator Tokyo Electric Power.

“Our town has turned out to be another Chernobyl,” Masami Yoshizawa,
who ran a cattle farm in Namie, 10 kilometres (six miles) from the
plant, shouted through a loudspeaker. “We are in despair now, but I
will get back my hometown even if it takes me the rest of my life.”

Demonstrators in France’s Rhone valley formed a human chain that
organisers said stretched for 230 kilometres (140 miles) and consisted
of about 60,000 people. The region has Europe’s highest concentration
of nuclear reactors, demonstrators said.

People have mobilized around the world to stop nuclear power. Here is a list of events being staged around the world.  Here in the United States, there   was an earthquake on the West Coast, Richter 6.9, reminding us that there will be earthquakes again, and again.  So far there have been no immediate reports of damage.   Perhaps it was just another warning shot across the bow, warning us to slow down and stop this nuclear madness before it is too late.