Radiation Levels Hinder Emergency Efforts in Japan

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

Stories we're following today - Thursday, March 17, 2011:

High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japanese Plant - Norimitsu Onishi, David E. Sanger and Matthew L. Wald for The New York Times [link]

• Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan’s nuclear crisis, military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on spent fuel rods at the country’s stricken nuclear power station on Thursday, but later suspended the operation, the NHK broadcaster said. The development came as the authorities reached for ever more desperate and unconventional methods to cool damaged reactors, deploying helicopters and water cannons in a race to prevent perilous overheating in the spent rods.
• The Japanese decision to focus their efforts on the No. 3 reactor appeared to suggest that officials believe it is a greater threat, since it is the only one at the site loaded with a mixed fuel known as mox, for mixed oxide, which includes reclaimed plutonium.
• Western nuclear engineers have said that the release of mox into the atmosphere would produce a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site. Japanese authorities expressed concern on Wednesday that the pressure in the No. 3 reactor had plunged and that either gauges were malfunctioning or a rupture had already occurred.
• On Thursday afternoon, the Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had begun deploying eight water cannon trucks to Reactor No. 3. Before the radiation level drove them back, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had planned to use the trucks, which are usually used in riot control, to spray at least 12 tons of seawater into the reactor.  The Self-Defense Forces planned to send five fire trucks, carrying a total of 30 tons of seawater. The Japanese government said that the reactor typically needs 50 tons of water a day to keep from overheating.
• On Thursday evening, the American Embassy in Tokyo began offering seats aboard chartered flights to Americans wishing to evacuate from Japan. Americans who show up at the two main airports serving Tokyo, Narita and Haneda, would be flown to still unspecified “safe haven locations” from where they would be expected to arrange onward travel on their own, said Karen Kelley, a spokeswoman for the embassy.  The American move followed advisory notices from several European countries urging their nationals to move away from Tokyo or leave Japan altogether.

Scientists Project Path of Radiation Plume - William J. Broad for The New York Times [link]

• A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday.
• The projection, by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna, gives no information about actual radiation levels but only shows how a radioactive plume would probably move and disperse.
• Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States, even if hints of it are ultimately detectable. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule.  On Sunday, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it expected that no “harmful levels of radioactivity” would travel from Japan to the United States “given the thousands of miles between the two countries.”
• The test ban treaty group routinely does radiation projections in an effort to understand which of its global stations to activate for monitoring the worldwide ban on nuclear arms testing. It has more than 60 stations that sniff the air for radiation spikes and uses weather forecasts and powerful computers to model the transport of radiation on the winds.

The Other Nuclear Threat - William Hartung for The Huffington Post [link]

• Earlier this week Walter Pincus of the Washington Post wrote a critical essay in which he said that "The horrific earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last week lead me to this question: Is it not time to talk realistically about the $200 billion we plan to spend over the next decade on strategic nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles?"
• Pincus goes on to note that even under the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty - a welcome but modest step towards ridding the world of the nuclear danger - the United States will have over 1,500 deployed nuclear warheads, many of them more than 100 kilotons in explosive power.
• Maintaining large nuclear stockpiles always poses a risk that they will some day be used, but the most urgent nuclear threat is not from state-to-state warfare but from the danger that a bomb or bomb-making materials might fall into the hands of terrorists. Unbelievably, the Congress is poised to cut the programs that actually can make a difference in whether Al Qaeda gets the bomb.
• Many of the most crucial programs in this regard are housed in the budget of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Taken together with parallel initiatives in the Pentagon budget, these programs represent the most effective investment dollar-for-dollar of any national security program in the federal budget.
• Despite these achievements - and the dire threat they are designed to address - the House's stopgap budget proposal provides over $600 million less for NNSA nonproliferation programs than the Obama administration requested, a cut of over 20%. These funds must be restored.

Note: William Hartung is a Ploughshares Fund grantee.

Who wants to be responsible for nuclear terrorism? - Ken Luongo for The Hill's "Congress Blog" [link]

• Imagine a raging civil war against an autocrat with a history of supporting extreme terrorist acts in a country where nuclear weapons fuel was caught in the crossfire. That would be Libya today if the U.S. had not funded the removal of highly enriched uranium from that country in 2004.
• That is why it makes no sense for the Congress to be debating how much to cut the budget for the programs that protect, remove and eliminate these nuclear materials in vulnerable locations around the world. But they are doing it anyway.
• In the budget cutting competition, the House has kept off limits “security” funding, meaning the money for the Department of Defense. But, the key nuclear security programs in the Department of Energy that are the point of the spear in efforts to secure these materials is fair game for cuts because it is not part of the defense department’s appropriation — essentially caught on the wrong side of the jurisdictional fence.
• This senseless standoff is the kind of short-sighted gamesmanship that makes people wonder about the seriousness of the political leadership on both sides of the aisle and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
• Both Republican and Democrats in Congress and the administration should hold hands and put out a joint statement declaring these efforts vital to the “security” of the United States and the protection of its interests and deserving of budget cutting sanctuary.

The Need for a Resilient Energy Policy in Japan - Charles D. Ferguson for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [link]

• While the disaster continues to unfold in Japan, it is not too early to learn lessons for Japan's future energy policy. One immediate lesson is that Japan may be taking too great of a risk by having a relatively large portion of electricity generated by nuclear power.
• As of March 16, four reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant have suffered significant damage. The March 11 earthquake and tsunami forced the shutdown of about 12 gigawatts of electricity generating capacity. In comparison, Japan's nuclear power fleet has a capacity of 49 gigawatts; thus, about one-fourth of Japan's nuclear generation was knocked out by the natural disaster.
• Also before the disaster, Tokyo had plans for even greater use of nuclear power. In particular, it wanted to increase the share of nuclear-generated electricity to 40 percent in 2017 and up to 50 percent in 2030. Japanese leaders should reconsider having nuclear power play such a major role.
• If Tokyo wants to remain an outstanding example for combating climate change, it should launch a two-part strategy. First, it should not phase out nuclear power plants. But it should not have too great of proportional electricity generation from nuclear power...Second, Tokyo should promote greater use of renewable energy sources to reduce the significant dependency on fossil fuels.

Note: Charles Ferguson is a Ploughshares Fund grantee.

Nuclear Agency's Assessment Lags - David Crawford and Flemming Hansen for The Wall Street Journal [link]

• The International Atomic Energy Agency's failure to quickly and accurately assess the potential danger posed by Japan's nuclear disaster is raising questions about the United Nations organization's ability to respond to such crises.
• Teams of nuclear experts from the U.S. and elsewhere rushed to Japan after this past Friday's earthquake there, but the IAEA is only Thursday sending its director general, Yukiya Amano, with a team. IAEA officials say the agency is doing everything that it can and that it has been frustrated by a lack of cooperation from Japan.
• So far, IAEA officials have been monitoring the unfolding nuclear drama from a crisis room in Vienna, often with outdated information. After the initial explosion Saturday at one of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, for instance, the agency could only confirm it five hours later, long after dozens of media organizations had.
• A worried international public flocked to the IAEA's website seeking information on the blast but the site wasn't designed to cope with so much traffic and collapsed. The IAEA sent an email to journalists directing them to a page it set up on social-networking site Facebook.