Overheating Spent Fuel Continues to Slow Reactor Cooling Efforts

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today - Tuesday, March 22, 2011:

Spent Fuel Hampers Efforts at Japanese Nuclear Plant - Hiroko Tabuchi, David Jolly, and Kevin Drew in The New York Times [link]

• Workers at Japan’s ravaged nuclear power plant on Tuesday renewed a bid to bring its command center back online and restore electricity to vital cooling systems but an overheating spent fuel pool hampered efforts and raised the threat of further radiation leaks.
• The storage pool at Fukushima Daiichi Power Station’s No. 2 Reactor, which holds spent nuclear fuel rods, was spewing steam late Tuesday, forcing workers to divert their attention to dousing the reactor building with water.
• Another major effort: to restore full power and resume operations at the plant’s central command center, which will make it easier for workers to monitor heat and water levels at the reactors. Recovery efforts have been hindered by difficulties in gauging readings of crucial data, forcing officials to work off aerial photos and speculation.
• The government has announced that traces of radioactive elements have been found in vegetables and raw milk from farms around the plant, prompting a government ban on shipments from those areas.
• More than 237,000 people remain living in temporary shelters, NHK reported.
• Unseasonably cold weather has added to the daily struggle for refugees and relief workers.
• On Tuesday, meanwhile, the government raised the official death toll upward to 9,079, and said more than 12,600 were missing, although officials cautioned there could be overlap between the figures. The final death toll is likely to reach 18,000, the government has said.

Japan Extended Reactor’s Life, Despite Warning - Hiroko Tabuchi, Norimitsu Onishi, and Ken Belson in The New York Times [link]

• Just a month before a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the center of Japan’s nuclear crisis, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the six reactors at the power station despite warnings about its safety.
• The regulatory committee reviewing extensions pointed to stress cracks in the backup diesel-powered generators at Reactor No. 1 at the Daiichi plant, according to a summary of its deliberations that was posted on the Web site of Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency after each meeting.
• Several weeks after the extension was granted, the company admitted that it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment related to the cooling systems, including water pumps and diesel generators, at the power station’s six reactors, according to findings published on the agency’s Web site shortly before the earthquake.
• The decision to extend the reactor’s life, and the inspection failures at all six reactors, highlight what critics describe as unhealthy ties between power plant operators and the Japanese regulators that oversee them.
• Over the next decade in Japan, 13 more reactors — and the other 5 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant — will also turn 40, raising the prospect of gargantuan replacement costs.

Russia, U.S. Warm Up on Missile Defense - Craig Whitlock in The Washington Post [link]

• Russian and U.S. officials have met multiple times in Moscow and Washington since January to consider sharing data from sensors that could detect the launch of a ballistic missile from Iran or another hostile country.
• Both sides have cautioned that no deal is imminent and that big differences remain. But the issue has been given a boost by back-to-back visits to Russia this month by Vice President Biden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
• Mutual suspicions over missile defense nearly derailed the New START arms-control pact last year. Although the treaty was ultimately ratified, U.S. officials until recently were largely dismissive of the idea that there was room for cooperation with Russia on missile defense.
• One possibility is that Russia and the United States could establish a “data fusion center” in which they could share information from their respective radar installations, which could provide earlier or more detailed warnings of a pending ballistic missile attack.
• “There is a potential for cooperation, and real cooperation,” John F. Plumb, the Pentagon’s principal director for nuclear and missile defense policy, said in an interview. “Of course, it’s difficult. This is not going to be easy. There’s a lot of history.”
• In Russia, security analysts said the benefit to Moscow would be primarily political. While the United States is worried about Iran, they said, Russia is more concerned about being excluded from NATO planning in the long-term.

Reflections on Fukushima: A Time to Mourn, to Learn, and to Teach - Robert Socolow in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [link]

• Three Mile Island, I convinced myself, was a teething accident: An industry had pretended that nuclear power was just another way to boil water, and the accident resulted from appalling deficiencies in worker training and "the man-machine interface."
• Chernobyl, I could pigeon-hole, as well: The Chernobyl RBMK (Russian acronym for "high power, channel-type reactor"), whose fateful design permitted prompt criticality, was a manifestation of the isolation of Russia and its obsession with self-reliance.
• I can find no escape from Fukushima Daiichi. Words I hoped never to read in a news report, like loss of coolant accident (LOCA), exposed core, hydrogen explosion: Here they are.
• We must explain, over and over, the concept of "afterheat," the fire that you can't put out, the generation of heat from fission fragments now and weeks from now and months from now, heat that must be removed. Journalists are having such a hard time communicating this concept because it is so unfamiliar to them and nearly everyone they are writing for. Every layman feels that every fire can be put out.
• We are watching a civilized society facing Sophie's Choice writ large, as the Japanese government decides how to use workers and soldiers and volunteers at the site, trading their large doses of radiation against an outcome where far more people will face the statistical risks of a shortened life.
• I think it may well emerge that the most important lesson that should be learned from this accident is to revisit the resilience of back-up systems. Power blackouts are a given; perhaps failures of back-up systems during power blackouts must also become a given.

Russia, US Start Work Under New START - Alexei Chernichenko in The Voice of Russia [link]

• Russia and the US have carried out the first information exchange on their nuclear stockpiles under the recently ratified Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, as stipulated by the attached protocol.
• As laid down in the document, Russia and the US should inform each other about the structure of their strategic nuclear weapons in writing. The information to this end comes from the Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers established at Russia’s Joint Staff and the US State Department.
• Upon the end of the information exchange process, the two sides will start reciprocal inspections to verify that the reality accords with the declarations. Bases to undergo such inspections will be selected at random, pursuant to quotas laid down in the treaty. They envisage 10 visits to nuclear facilities on each side per year, with the parties choosing the sites independently.
• Under the new arms reduction treaty, the next decade should see Russia and the United States cutting their nuclear arsenals to a maximum of 1,550 nuclear warheads and 700 deployed launchers.