TOKYO — Keeping the meltdown-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in northeastern Japan in stable condition requires a cast of thousands. Increasingly the plant’s operator is struggling to find enough workers, a trend that many expect to worsen and hamper progress in the decades-long effort to safely decommission it.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant that melted down in March 2011 after being hit by a tsunami, is finding that it can barely meet the headcount of workers required to keep the three broken reactors cool while fighting power outages and leaks of tons of radiated water, said current and former nuclear plant workers and others familiar with the situation at Fukushima.

Construction jobs are already plentiful in the area due to rebuilding of tsunami ravaged towns and cities. Other public works spending planned by the government, under the “Abenomics” stimulus programs of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is likely to make well-paying construction jobs more abundant. And less risky, better paid decontamination projects in the region irradiated by the Fukushima meltdown are another draw.

Some Fukushima veterans are quitting as their cumulative radiation exposure approaches levels risky to health, said two long-time Fukushima nuclear workers who spoke to The Associated Press. They requested anonymity because their speaking to the media is a breach of their employers’ policy and they say being publicly identified will get them fired.

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French nuclear group Areva said Thursday that one person was killed and 14 wounded in a car bomb attack at its uranium mine in northern Niger, without disclosing their nationalities.

Areva said in a statement that the wounded were being treated at a local hospital following the attack, one of two car bombings in Niger Thursday claimed by an Islamist extremist group as revenge for the country’s involvement in a French-led military offensive against Al-Qaeda-linked groups in neighbouring Mali.

In an earlier statement Areva had said 13 of its employees, all from Niger, had been wounded.

Niger’s Interior Minister Abdou Labo had said that around 50 people were wounded at the site, almost of them security agents.

Areva, the world’s second-largest uranium producer, extracts more than a third of its uranium in the impoverished west African country.

Continue reading at One dead, 14 wounded in Niger uranium mine bombing: Areva

Related article:

• Islamists hit Niger army base, uranium mine via the australian.com

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has completed a ground-breaking study on populations living near Ontario’s three nuclear power plants (NPPs). The most important finding of this study is no evidence of childhood leukemia clusters in the communities within 25 km of the Pickering, Darlington and Bruce NPPs.

The Radiation and Incidence of Cancer around Ontario Nuclear Power Plants from 1990 to 2008 study (the RADICON study) estimated radiation doses to members of the public living within 25 km of the three NPPs and compared cancer cases among these people with the general population of Ontario. The study was conducted using data from the Canadian and Ontario Cancer Registries and the Census of Canada.

“This is an important study,” said CNSC President Dr. Michael Binder. “We often hear concerns from the public about a possible link between childhood leukemia and radiation from nuclear power plants. We now have Canadian data to reassure them with science-based and conclusive evidence that children living nearby are as healthy as children living elsewhere in Ontario.”

Overall, the study found that all cancers are well within the natural variation of the disease and there is no consistent pattern across the three facilities studied. When looking at all age groups, some cancers were higher than expected and some cancers were lower than expected. The most likely causes of cancer in the communities are a number of known health risk factors.

“Sixty percent of all cancers in Ontario are due to smoking, obesity, poor diet and physical inactivity,” said Rachel Lane, epidemiologist and lead researcher on the RADICON study. “Other studies have found that these health risk factors explain the pattern of cancers in Ontario communities. These health risk factors are the most plausible cause of cancer – not radiation.”

Continue reading at No Childhood Leukemia Found Near Ontario Nuclear Power Plants

(Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel appointed him for his charm and political skill as marshal of her vision of a ‘green revolution’ in Europe’s biggest power market. A year on, Peter Altmaier finds himself spurned by many environmentalists, disdained by industry and viewed cooly by a public wary of the costs.

Now, the chancellor herself seems to be turning her back on him, an increasingly isolated figure, as September polls near.

Merkel’s ambitious goal of weaning Germany off fossil fuels and phasing out nuclear power is widely viewed as her most significant domestic policy. Implementation is a mammoth task and means taking decisions unpopular either with Germany’s powerful industry or its strong green lobby.

Altmaier, who had impressed Merkel in quashing turmoil in her conservative party over euro zone bailouts, has become a lightning rod for dissatisfaction over the costs of an energy policy long central to her domestic agenda.

Merkel has maintained a high personal popularity rating, far higher than her party’s, and kept the peace in her centre-right coalition; but in so doing she has made his job harder, staying silent on some of his more controversial, but much-needed ideas such as reining in subsidies for renewables.

“He’s been remarkably active and good at focusing on the message but he’s had difficulty building the bridges he wanted to. Not everybody is behind Peter Altmaier,” said Miranda Schreurs, member of a government environment advisory panel.

Continue reading at Merkel protege struggles with Germany’s green revolution

An energy policy veteran, Ernest Moniz, was sworn in May 21 as the 13th secretary of energy.

“I am thrilled to be back at DOE,” Moniz told a Department of Energy (DOE) employee gathering moments after being sworn in by Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman.

“He [Moniz] understands human nature and is able to bring out the best in people,” Poneman said. The fact that Moniz passed the Senate without any opposing votes is evidence of that, Poneman said.

DOE is a department that covers everything from windmills to nuclear weapons, Moniz said. He added that he looked forward to building upon former secretary Steven Chu’s work on “the clean energy and climate agenda.”

Secretary Moniz had a first day at the DOE helm that included briefings today by the National Nuclear Security Administration, as well as the department’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.

Moniz, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, was confirmed to head DOE on a 97-0 vote by the U.S. Senate May 16.

[...]

In addition to being a frequent government policy advisor, Moniz has been a faculty member at MIT since 1973.

At MIT, he headed the Department of Physics and the Bates Linear Accelerator Center.  Most recently, Dr. Moniz served as the founding Director of the MIT Energy Initiative and of the MIT Laboratory for Energy and the Environment and was a leader of multidisciplinary technology and policy studies on the future of nuclear power, coal, nuclear fuel cycles, natural gas, and solar energy in a low-carbon world.

Continue reading at  Moniz sworn in as secretary of DOE

While a deal between the government and EDF over a pricing structure for nuclear-generated power remains elusive, the minister in charge has today reaffirmed his commitment to a major nuclear construction programme.

French company EDF is all ready to start construction at Hinkley Point C in Somerset but has been unable to agree a crucial ‘contract for difference’ with the government. Without this, EDF does not know if its business case stands up and so everything has been put on hold and staff have been laid off.

However, Michael Fallon, the minister responsible for both energy and construction, has said that the government remains “firmly committed to ensuring that new nuclear goes ahead in this country”.

And if a deal cannot be done with the French, then there is always the Japanese.

Mr Fallon is meeting today with executives from Hitachi and Horizon, who are planning to invest £20bn in new nuclear plants at Wylfa in Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire. Hitachi stepped in last year to rescue the Horizon nuclear project after German firms RWE and E.ON backed out in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Hitachi plans to build two or three reactors at each site with the first station in Wylfa coming online in the first half of the 2020s. Some 6,000 jobs are expected to be created during construction.

Continue reading at [UK] Government reaffirms nuclear commitment

[...]

Construction jobs are already plentiful in the area due to rebuilding of tsunami ravaged towns and cities. Other public works spending planned by the government, under the “Abenomics” stimulus programs of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is likely to make well-paying construction jobs more abundant. And less risky, better paid decontamination projects in the region irradiated by the Fukushima meltdown are another draw.

Some Fukushima veterans are quitting as their cumulative radiation exposure approaches levels risky to health, said two long-time Fukushima nuclear workers who spoke to The Associated Press. They requested anonymity because their speaking to the media is a breach of their employers’ policy and they say being publicly identified will get them fired.

TEPCO spokesman Ryo Shimizu denied any shortage of workers, and said the decommissioning is progressing fine.

“We have been able to acquire workers, and there is no shortage. We plan to add workers as needed,” he said.

The discrepancy may stem from the system of contracting prevalent in Japan’s nuclear industry. Plant operators farm out the running of their facilities to contractors, who in turn find the workers, and also rely on lower-level contractors to do some of their work, resulting in as many as five layers of contractors. Utilities such as TEPCO know the final headcount – 3,000 people now at Fukushima Dai-ichi – but not the difficulties in meeting it.

Read more at Stricken Japan nuke plant struggles to keep staff

Disaster is about to strike in western Kentucky, a full-blown nuclear catastrophe involving hundreds of tons of enriched uranium tainted with plutonium, technetium, arsenic, beryllium and a toxic chemical brew. But this nuke calamity will be no fluke. It’s been foreseen, planned, even programmed, the result of an atomic extortion game played out between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the most failed American experiment in privatization, the company that has run the Paducah plant into the poisoned ground, USEC Inc.

As now scheduled, main power to the gargantuan gaseous diffusion uranium plant at Paducah, Kentucky, will be cut at midnight on May 31, just nine days from now—cut because USEC has terminated its power contract with TVA as of that time [“USEC Ceases Buying Power,” Paducah Sun, April 19, page 1] and because DOE can’t pick up the bill.

DOE is five months away from the start of 2014 spending authority, needed to fund clean power-down at Paducah. Meanwhile, USEC’s total market capitalization has declined to about $45 million, not enough to meet minimum listing requirements for the New York Stock Exchange, pay off the company’s staggering debts or retain its operating licenses under financial capacity requirements of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Paducah plant cannot legally stay open, and it can’t safely be shut down—a lovely metaphor for the end of the Atomic Age and a perfect nightmare for the people of Kentucky.

[...]

The gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, TN, was powered-down dirty in 1985, in a safer situation because the Oak Ridge plant did not have near the level of transuranic contaminants found at Paducah. The Oak Ridge catastrophe left a poisonous site that still awaits cleanup a quarter-century later, and an echo chamber of political promises that such a stupid move would never be made again. But that was before the privatization of USEC.

Could a dirty power-down at Paducah—where recycled and reprocessed uranium contaminated with plutonium and other transuranic elements was added in massive quantities—result in “slow-cooker” critical mass formations inside the process equipment?

No one really knows.

Read more at Countdown to Nuclear Ruin at Paducah

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Republican lawmaker resurrected a radioactive waste bill on Tuesday that once signed into law would allow a West Texas storage site to accept more hazardous materials from out of state.
The measure allows the Waste Control Specialists’ nuclear waste facility to import materials with greater radioactivity from other states. The proposed law also encourages Texas companies to export lower-level waste. Originally, the facility was only intended to accept materials from Texas and Vermont, but lawmakers have expanded what materials it can accept.
Waste Control Specialists says it needs the changes to make the site profitable. The company’s owner, Harold Simmons, is one of the state’s largest political donors to Republican politicians.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/texas/article/Lawmaker-resurrects-radioactive-waste-bill-4536220.php#ixzz2U4sM2Sw0

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A German law has recently come into effect ordering the cleanup of 126,000 barrels of radioactive waste at the Asse nuclear dump site. But it seems the process could take a lot longer than locals initially hoped for.
[...]
Wiegel, the wife of a farmer, says she doesn’t have any concerns about drinking the water here.
“Obviously you can’t worry about it all the time,” she says. “Most people living here tend to push it out of their minds, to be honest.”
Wiegel is not just a resident here, she’s also a member of the citizen group ‘aufpASSEn’ – meaning ‘watch out’ in German – which helps raise awareness about issues from the Asse nuclear waste site.
[...]
The Asse site used to be one Germany’s most productive salt mines until it was closed down in 1964. Shortly thereafter it was bought by the German government and used as a storage site for the country’s low to medium-level radioactive waste for more than a decade. The barrels, most of which came directly as nuclear waste from power plants, were stored in empty chambers already dug out by the salt miners.
[...]
But, while there is no nuclear waste now being brought in, there are still thousands of drums down in the salt chambers. Emrich says the condition of many of the barrels is unknown and that’s why exploratory drilling is now taking place. In the 50 years since they were dropped in, many barrels are believed to have rusted and may be leaking.
And, he says that the mine itself is also unstable. Water has been seeping into the mine from groundwater runoff for years. That’s why new, more stable, access shafts are now being designed for the planned waste removal.
The barrels of low to medium radioactive waste were stored in Asse between 1967 and 1978
“Since 1988 water has been coming into the mine,” Emrich explains. “People have realized that this site isn’t safe. After all, if more and more water comes in, there is always the chance that the mine floods completely.”
The fear is that, through the pressure created by a flooded mine, nuclear waste could be pushed back up to the surface, contaminating local water supplies.
[...]
However, once the waste removal work begins, one big question remains: where will the radioactive material be stored once it’s brought up? Locals are worried that authorities will decide on an aboveground storage facility, right next to the mine site.

Read more.