Flood risk to nuclear reactors raises meltdown fears

Paul Brown in the Ecologist: ...All nuclear plants need large quantities of water for cooling so all must be built close to the sea, large rivers or lakes. This makes them vulnerable to sea level rise, storm surges and to the possible collapse of large dams upstream from poor construction, floodwater or seismic activity.

Since nuclear plants are designed to operate for as long as 60 years and need around a further century to decommission, accelerating sea level rise and more intense rainfall may present serious problems. There are currently 435 operating nuclear reactors in the world, many of them potentially vulnerable to flooding because of natural disasters. Examples from the UK, Finland and the US show that the extent of the danger is not always being disclosed.

... The same fears [of flooding] were raised in the US by the Union of Concerned Scientists after a report was leaked about the danger to nuclear reactors from dams bursting. According to a report by the US Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRC), which had been withheld, more than 30 nuclear installations were in danger from flooding. The Commission was later accused of using security concerns to mask embarrassing information.

Among many revelations in the report was the fact that the authorities had known for a decade or more that the failure of a dam upstream from the Oconee nuclear plant in South Carolina would cause floodwater to overwhelm its three reactors, possibly causing a catastrophic meltdown The odds of the dam bursting were far higher than thechances of the accident that devastated Fukushima.

Oconee is one of the largest nuclear plants in America and has been operating since 1983. Its owner, Duke Energy, remains confident that it could shut the plant down safely in an hour, before floodwaters from upstream could reach the reactors. The NRC has decided that this is sufficient safeguard....

A 1974 image of the control room at the Oconee nuclear plant in South Carolina

Fukushima nightmare continues as homeless people are recruited for cleanup, scammed out of wages

Brandon Baker in Eco News: Police and media in Japan have discovered that homeless people near Fukushima have been recruited to help clean up the three-year-old nuclear devastation for minimum wages, but haven’t seen most of their money. Most have wound up in debt.

According to Reuters, recruiters like Seiji Sasa have been trolling Sendai Station another locations for homeless people to aid in the behind-schedule, taxpayer-funded radioactive cleanup throughout northern Japan. Police arrested members of Japanese crime syndicates several times this year for infiltrating Obayashi Corp.’s subcontractors and illegally sending workers to disaster sites. Those workers were often brought in for less than minimum wage, but essentially scammed out of their earnings because they were given a place to stay during the hours they weren’t attempting to clean up radioactive soil and debris.

“Many homeless people are just put into dormitories, and the fees for lodging and food are automatically docked from their wages,” Yasuhiro Aoki, a Baptist pastor and homeless advocate, said. ”Then at the end of the month, they’re left with no pay at all.”

The homeless workers reported to companies who then reported to Obayashi, known as the country’s second-largest construction firm and one of 20 large contractors involved in governmental cleanup efforts. There are at least more than 730 subcontractors working for performing work for the Ministry of Environment, an amount that has led to scarce oversight. Loose certification and disclosure rules have made it easier to obtain radiation removal contracts. Reuters found 56 subcontractors on environment ministry contracts worth $2.5 billion in the most radiated areas of Fukushima that would have been barred from traditional public works because they had not been examined by the construction ministry...

The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, shot by Digital Globe, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Typhoons spreading Fukushima fallout

Australia News Network: Typhoons that hit Japan each year are contributing to the spread of radioactive material from the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the country's waterways, researchers say. A joint study by France's Climate and Environmental Science laboratory (LSCE) and Tsukuba University in Japan shows contaminated soil gets washed away by the high winds and rain and deposited in streams and rivers.

"There is a definite dispersal towards the ocean," LSCE researcher Olivier Evrard said Wednesday. The typhoons "strongly contribute" to soil dispersal, he said, though it can be months later, after the winter snow melts, that contamination actually passes into rivers.

An earthquake-sparked tsunami slammed into the Fukushima plant in March 2011, sending reactors into meltdown and sparking the worst atomic accident in a generation. After the accident, a large number of radioactive particles were flung into the atmosphere, dispersing caesium particles which typically cling to soils and sediment.

Studies have shown that soil erosion can move the radioactive varieties of cesium-134 and 137 from the northern mountains near Fukushima into rivers, and then out into the Pacific Ocean. Last year, the radioactive content of Japan's rivers dropped due to fairly moderate typhoons. However, more frequent and fierce storms in 2013 have brought a new flood of caesium particles....

Reactor Unit 3 at Fukushima after 2011's earthquake and tsunami damage, shot by Digital Globe.jpg, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Typhoon threatens Japan; precautions at Fukushima nuclear plant

Aaron Sheldrick in Reuters: A once-in-a-decade typhoon threatened Japan on Tuesday, disrupting travel and shipping and forcing precautions to be taken at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Typhoon Wipha is moving across the Pacific straight towards the capital, Tokyo, and is expected to make landfall during the morning rush hour on Wednesday, bringing hurricane-force winds to the metropolitan area of 30 million people.

The center of the storm was 860 km (535 miles) southwest of Tokyo at 0800 GMT, the Japan Meteorological Agency said on its website. It was moving north-northeast at 35 kph (22 mph). The storm had weakened as it headed north over the sea but was still packing sustained winds of about 140 kph (87 mph) with gusts as high as 194 kph (120 mph), the agency said.

The agency issued warnings for Tokyo of heavy rain, flooding and gales, and advised people to be prepared to leave their homes quickly and to avoid unnecessary travel. A spokesman for the meteorological agency said the storm was a "once in a decade event".

The typhoon is expected to sweep through northern Japan after making landfall and to pass near the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, on the coast 220 km (130 miles) northeast of Tokyo, later on Wednesday...

Track of Typhoon Wipha, created by Keith Edkins, public domain

Rivers act as “horizontal cooling towers,” study finds

University of New Hampshire Media Relations: Running two computer models in tandem, scientists from the University of New Hampshire have detailed for the first time how thermoelectric power plants interact with climate, hydrology, and aquatic ecosystems throughout the northeastern U.S. and show how rivers serve as “horizontal cooling towers” that provide an important ecosystem service to the regional electricity sector — but at a cost to the environment.

The analysis, done in collaboration with colleagues from the City College of New York (CCNY) and published online in the current journal Environmental Research Letters, highlights the interactions among electricity production, cooling technologies, hydrologic conditions, aquatic impacts and ecosystem services, and can be used to assess the full costs and tradeoffs of electricity production at regional scales and under changing climate conditions.

...Thermoelectric power plants boil water to create steam that in turn drives turbines to produce electricity. They provide 90 percent of the electricity consumed nationwide and an even a greater percentage in the Northeast — a region with a high density of power plants.

Cooling the waste heat generated during the process requires that prodigious volumes of water be withdrawn and makes the thermoelectric sector the largest user of freshwater in the U.S. — withdrawing more than the entire, combined agricultural sector. Water withdrawals are either evaporated in cooling towers or returned to the river at elevated temperatures. Rivers can help mitigate these added heat loads through the ecosystem services of conveyance, dilution, and attenuation  — essentially acting as horizontal cooling towers as water flows downstream.

Says Stewart, a research scientist in the EOS Earth Systems Research Center, “Our modeling shows that, of the waste heat produced during the production of electricity, roughly half is directed to vertical, evaporative cooling towers while the other half is transferred to rivers.” The study also shows that, of the waste heat transferred to rivers, only slightly more than 11 percent wafts into the atmosphere with the rest delivered to coastal waters and the ocean. ...

Tricastin Nuclear Power Center in the Rhone wine region of Coteaux du Tricastin. Shot by jean-louis Zimmermann, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Learning curves, negative and positive--a Carbon Based original

    Under most circumstances, the more we practice at a task or a project, the greater our skill. In a positive learning curve, the costs of acting go down as the rewards increase.  But in some instances, practice makes our performance worse.  Economists and psychologists describe a negative learning curve as one where the more we persist with an activity, the greater the costs we face.  Practice makes us worse off.

    A 2011 article by the vigorously anti-nuclear Joe Romm in Think Progress asked, "Does nuclear power have a negative learning curve?"According to the piece, even the most successful nuclear operations suffer from a sharp growth in construction and operating expenses, even after adjusting for inflation.  Unlike wind and solar, where the cost per kilowatt hour has been steadily dropping, nuclear's has climbed.  A 2007 Moody's study finds nuclear costs mounting from $4000 before 2007 to $5000 to $6,000 today. One case Romm cites in Florida is even more expensive.

    Lest you think that this is just a problem for the balkanized, inefficient, poorly regulated US, Romm links to a paper that finds the same pattern in France's nuclear industry. Arnulf Grubler of the International Institute for Applied Systems in Austria analyzed public records for Energy Policy and wrote “The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing”.

     The cost escalation has happened even though French reactor designs are standardized to a degree that impossible in the US, and even though costs go down per unit as the size of the reactor increases.   France has other advantages, too, such as a powerful, well-run state utility. But this hasn't saved it from the negative learning curve.  Grubler speculates that the French cost rise stems from the inherent complexity of nuclear technology, which demands "a formidable ability to manage complexity in both construction and operation."  It's an ability nobody has, not even Electricite de France. 

    Romm's stinging conclusion: "New nukes have gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter." 

    So much for nuclear power (though I wonder whether the same objections would apply to thorium-based nuclear reactors).  But I'm struck by the notion of negative learning, defined as an activity that grows more costly the longer it's pursued.

    In the broader climate change landscape, the business as usual scenario -- the path we're on now -- exemplifies negative learning.  Sticking with our carbon-intensive ways entails worsening costs in the form of natural disasters, sea level rise and other impacts.  Most casual onlookers or organizations tend to regard climate impacts as random.  But they are externalities that follow predictably from burning fossil fuels.  The more greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere, the higher the costs go.

    One reason we remains stuck in this negative learning curve is ideological.  A substantial minority of American citizens have political objections to the kind of actions required to cut emissions drastically.

    Occasionally public opinions leans toward actually taking action against climate change, usually after a natural disaster.  That's when fossil fuel propagandists hurl themselves into the fray.  Hundreds of megaphones start blaring , stupefying the debate with a cacophony of marginal scientists, pro-capitalist think tanks, and industry flacks. A coalition of petroleum, steel, autos and utilities use their legislative clout to stop anyone from thinking about the origin of the growing costs, or noticing that they're not random. 

    This kind of political bind bedevils the whole world, not just the United States. The dispiriting fizzle of the latest round of international climate talks in Doha revealed yet again that the US inaction has global allies.  The motives of poorer countries are different from the wealthy nations, and stem largely from the urgent need to use energy to advance their development.  They have much catching up to do, and to reach the goal, they believe, they need a full energy portfolio, including fossil fuels.

    The irony is that with climate change, a positive learning curve awaits us when we cut emissions.  Because of the physical nature of growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, early carbon mitigation can have huge benefits.  We have the power to avoid decades of growing costs.

    A recent report in Nature suggested that an international price on carbon at $20 per ton today gives the world an almost 60% chance of holding global temperature increases under 2°C. This temperature level would blunt the costliest impacts of global warming, including: rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme weather.

    Unfortunately for slow learners or non-learners, the cost of action closely tracks the level of greenhouse gas concentrations.  By 2020, when the parts per million are higher, we will need a price of $100 per ton of carbon to achieve the same result.  If we wait until 2030, no price on carbon, no matter how expensive, will be able to hold the line on temperature. 

    Under these circumstances, the moral and economic case for action now is strong. Rather than linger in a negative learning curve, we should actually try to benefit from our experience.  But we live in a cynical, paralyzed, ungovernable time, when our elites cannot act on behalf of our species in any coherent way. 

Some learning curves from an 1899 issue of Popular Science Monthly

US nuclear plant exits 'alert' after storm waters recede

Nuclear Daily via AFP: A US nuclear plant exited "alert" status Wednesday after the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy receded, ending the flood threat at New Jersey's Oyster Creek plant, though it remained offline. Three other reactors were still shut down in the wake of the storm, which damaged transmission lines and other power infrastructure in the US northeast, officials said.

And one of the halted units, the New Jersey power company PSEG's Salem 1 reactor, reported having had to vent an amount of steam that possibly had small amounts of radioactive tritium. "When there is a steam dump (non radioactive) there are possibly trace amounts of tritium," PSEG spokesman Joseph Delmar told AFP via email. "It is closely monitored and well below any permit limitations," he said.

Officials ended the alert at the 43-year-old Oyster Creek reactor in Lacey Township, New Jersey, the country's oldest nuclear power plant, early Wednesday, saying the danger to the plant from rising waters had ended. The 636-megawatt plant, operated by power company Exelon, had already been shut down for maintenance ahead of the huge storm on Monday.

But an alert situation -- the second lowest of four emergency classifications -- was declared as the storm knocked out the 636-megawatt plant's main power supply, forcing it to rely on generators, and surging waters caused by the storm threatened to top the banks of canals used to supply cooling water. The alert was cancelled after waters fell to normal levels early Wednesday and power supplies from the main electricity grid resumed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said....

Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, shot by KyleAndMelissa22, public domain

Considering desperate measures, like geoengineering

EurActiv.com: A leading British academic has called for accelerated research into futuristic geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" to avoid runaway global warming. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, said both potential solutions had inherent dangers but were now vital as time was running out.

"It is very, very depressing that politicians and the public are attuned to the threat of climate change even less than they were 20 years ago when Margaret Thatcher sounded the alarm. Co2 levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms," he said.

"I am very suspicious of using technology to solve problems created by technology, given that we have messed up so much in the past but having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme."

Geo-engineering techniques such as whitening clouds by adding fine sprays of water vapour, or adding aerosols to the upper atmosphere have been ridiculed in some quarters but welcomed elsewhere. Wadhams proposes the use of thorium-fuelled reactors, being tested in India, which are said to be safer because they do not result in a proliferation of weapons-grade plutonium, experts say. Also, under certain circumstances, the waste from thorium reactors is less dangerous and remains radioactive for hundreds rather than thousands of years.

Wadhams, who is also head of the polar ocean physics group at Cambridge and has just returned from a field trip to Greenland, was reacting to evidence that Arctic sea ice cover had reached a record low this summer.

This latest rate of loss is 50% higher than most scenarios outlined by other polar scientists and coincide with alarming new reports about a "vast reservoir" of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, that could be released in Antarctica if the ice melts equally quickly there. Greenpeace said last night that it agreed with the academic's concerns but not with his solutions....

Isfjord, Ilulissat, Diskobay, West Greenland. Edge of the Sermeq Kujalleq Glacier, one of largest Glacier Streams of the Greenland ice cap. Shot by Michael Haferkamp, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Extreme heat, drought show vulnerability of nuclear power plants

Robert Krier in Inside Cliimate News: Will 2012 go down as the year that left the idea of nuclear energy expansion in the hot, dry dust?

Nuclear energy might be an important weapon in the battle against climate change, some scientists have argued, because it doesn't emit greenhouse gases. But separate of all the other issues with nuclear, that big plus would be moot if the plants couldn't operate, or became too inefficient, because of global warming.

In June, InsideClimate News reported on the findings of Dennis Lettenmaier, a researcher at the University of Washington. His study found that nuclear and other power plants will see a 4 to 16 percent drop in production between 2031 and 2060 due to climate change-induced drought and heat.

The U.S. is getting plenty of both this year. Just Sunday, the Millstone nuclear plant in Waterford, Conn., had to shut down one of its two reactors because seawater was too warm to cool it. It was the first time in the plant's 37-year history that the water pulled from the Long Island Sound was too warm to use.

So the question becomes, is the future already here? ... Much of the drought and unusual heat has been in areas that rely in part on nuclear plants: the upper Midwest, the Southeast and parts of New England....

The Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, viewed from Niantic, Connecticut, under  a rainbow, shot by Dave L, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

UK nuclear sites at risk of flooding

Rob Edwards in the Guardian (UK): As many as 12 of Britain's 19 civil nuclear sites are at risk of flooding and coastal erosion because of climate change, according to an unpublished government analysis obtained by the Guardian.

Nine of the sites have been assessed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as being vulnerable now, with others in danger from rising sea levels and storms in future decades. They include all of the eight sites proposed for new nuclear power stations around the coast, as well as numerous radioactive waste stores, operating reactors and defunct nuclear facilities.

Two of the sites for new nuclear stations are said to have a "high risk" of flooding now: Sizewell in Suffolk and Hartlepool in County Durham, where there are also operating reactors. Shutdown and running reactors at Dungeness in Kent are also classed as currently at high risk.

Another of the sites most at risk is Hinkley Point in Somerset, where the first of the new nuclear stations is planned and there are reactors in operation and being decommissioned. According to Defra, it already has a "low" risk of flooding, and by the 2080s will face a high risk of both flooding and erosion.

Other new reactor sites that face some risk now and high risks by the 2080s are Oldbury in South Gloucestershire and Bradwell in Essex. The huge old nuclear complex at Sellafield in Cumbria is said to face a "medium risk" of flooding now and in the future...

A view to the Sizewell A & B nuclear power stations along the beach near Thorpness, looking north. Shot by William M. Connolley, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

"Doomsday clock" moves one minute closer to midnight

Environment News Service: "Inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, and continuing inaction on climate change," prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists today to push the hands of the Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight.

"It is five minutes to midnight," said the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists group, announcing their decision at a news conference in Washington. "Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007."

...The Doomsday Clock expresses how close this group of scientists belives humanity is to catastrophic destruction, symbolized by midnight on the clock. The group monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences that could inflict irrevocable harm.

..."As we see it," he told reporters, "the major challenge at the heart of humanity's survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons, and in fact setting the stage for global reductions. Even though climate change is happening and is getting more urgent as we speak," warned Krauss, "no comprehensive global action is happening."

..."The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth's atmosphere," warned Allison Macfarlane, who chairs the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board and is a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on American's Nuclear Future, and an associate professor with George Mason University...

Persistent drought in Romania threatens Danube's power

Mirel Bran in the Guardian (UK): In Cernavoda, a small town in southeast Romania, social housing projects stretch all along the left bank of the Danube. The now dilapidated buildings sprang up in the 1970s and 1980s, after the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided to build the country's first nuclear power plant there.

In his ambition for power and prosperity, he also ordered a canal to be built from Cernavoda to Constantza, a port on the Black Sea, to shorten the trade route by 400km. The excavations were done by thousands of political prisoners, many of whom died.

Today, 21 years after the fall of communism, the threat to Cernavoda is not from dictatorship but the drought that has hit Romania since August. "Look at the water level," said Vasile Mogos, who lives in a council flat by the river. "I would never have imagined that the Danube could fall so low."

The Danube crosses Europe from west to east over 2,850km, from its source in Germany's Black Forest to the Black Sea in Romania. In its path Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania all exploit the waters of Europe's second-longest river after the Volga.

The first reactor in the Romanian nuclear power plant, which uses Canadian CANDU reactor technology based on natural uranium and pressurised heavy water, came on stream in 1996. A second reactor was built in 2007, and three others are planned, since the Romanian government counts on nuclear power for energy self-sufficiency. The two reactors in the Cernavoda plant generate 20% of those needs and were built on the banks of the Danube to use its waters for cooling.

Early this month, the Danube's flow rate in Turnu-Severin, a town in southwest Romania, home to the country's largest hydroelectric power plant, was 2,400 cubic metres per second, 63% of the usual average of 3,800 cubic metres per second. Hidroelectrica, the public corporation in charge of delivering the energy produced by the plant, is generating only 1,800MW instead of the usual 2,100 MW...

The nuclear power plant in Cernavoda, Romania, shot by Bogdan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Maryland nuclear reactor knocked offline by hurricane debris

Baltimore Sun: A reactor at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant remained shut down this morning as officials assess the damage caused when a piece of debris tossed by heavy winds damaged a transformer. A spokesman said as of 8 a.m. this morning that “Unit 1 is safely off-line.”

A second reactor was working fine at 100 percent power, said Mark Sullivan, the spokesman for the Constellation Energy Nuclear Group. “All employees are said,” he added.

Sullivan said Saturday night that officials believe the damage was caused by a large piece of aluminum that was torn loose from a building. The “unusual event,” declared by for the plant's Unit 1 is the least serious of four emergency classifications by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The company has begun its response to what it describes as a low-level emergency, and says the plant remains stable. There is no threat to employees or neighbors, according to a statement released by communications director Mark Sullivan….

An aerial view of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, shot by Jbs666 (I think), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Measurements at California pier reveal extent of leakage from damaged Fukushima reactor

University of Califorinia at San Diego: Atmospheric chemists at the University of California, San Diego, report the first quantitative measurement of the amount of radiation leaked from the damaged nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami earlier this year.

Their estimate, reported August 15 in the early, online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on a signal sent across the Pacific Ocean when operators of the damaged reactor had to resort to cooling overheated fuel with seawater. “In any disaster, there’s always a lot to be learned by analysis of what happened,” said senior author Mark Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego. “We were able to say how many neutrons were leaking out of that core when it was exposed.”

On March 28, 2011, 15 days after operators began pumping seawater into the damaged reactors and pools holding spent fuel, Thiemens’ group observed an unprecedented spike in the amount of radioactive sulfur in the air in La Jolla, California. They recognized that the signal came from the crippled power plant.

Neutrons and other products of the nuclear reaction leak from fuel rods when they melt. Seawater pumped into the reactor absorbed those neutrons, which collided with chloride ions in the saltwater. Each collision knocked a proton out of the nucleus of a chloride atom, transforming the atom to a radioactive form of sulfur.

When the water hit the hot reactors, nearly all of it vaporized into steam. To prevent explosions of the accumulating hydrogen, operators vented the steam, along with the radioactive sulfur, into the atmosphere. In air, sulfur reacts with oxygen to form sulfur dioxide gas and then sulfate particles. Both blew across the Pacific Ocean on prevailing westerly winds to an instrument at the end of the pier at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography where Thiemens’ group continuously monitors atmospheric sulfur.

Using a model based on NOAA’s observations of atmospheric conditions at the time, the team determined the path air took on its way to the pier over the preceding 10 days and found that it led back to Fukushima....

Air laden with radioactive sulfur can be traced to the source near the Fukushima reactor in Japan using data collected by NOAA. Image Credit: Gerardo Dominguez

Climate change putting electricity generation at risk

Soumya Karlamangla in AlertNet: Lost life, ecosystem damage, power cuts, job losses and increasingly expensive electricity is the price we pay if governments fail to make their power generation systems more climate-resilient. That's what scientists from the Institute for Development Studies are warning in a report which concludes that no system of generating energy -- not even renewable energy like solar or wind power -- is immune to the effects of climate change.

Tackling the disaster risk to nuclear power generation, the report says quakes, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons and flooding can have a devastating impact on nuclear power plants. It cites the crisis triggered at Japan's Fukushima plant when an earthquake and tsunami struck the country in March.

"Extreme weather events like storms and floods which can damage nuclear power plants — this is one of the most challenging issues in energy planning today," said Frauke Urban, lead author of the report published by the Strengthening Climate Resilience consortium. "Climate change is another risk for government and energy companies where they really need to rethink the energy planning for the future," she added.

Nuclear power accounts for about 6 percent of global energy generation. Like all power plants, nuclear facilities could face damage to its equipment from floods. Conversely, a drop in rainfall, a rise in temperature or a drought could reduce the amount of available water needed for cooling reactors, potentially posing a serious threat to public safety.

"Siting of major infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure needs to be done very carefully now," said Saleemul Huq, expert on climate change development and senior fellow in the Climate Change Group at the International Institute of Environment and Development....

The Civaux nuclear power plant in France, shot by Greudin (I think), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Fires near Los Alamos

Los Alamos National Laboratory News Center: Los Alamos National Laboratory emergency officials are closely watching wind directions this morning as the Las Conchas fire continues to burn southwest of the Lab. Winds generally from the northwest overnight have helped keep the fire from entering Lab property, but forecasts call for a change by mid-day. LANL’s Emergency Operations Center remains operational.

Observation aircraft are currently conducting aerial surveys to gauge the fire’s growth and current size. Overnight, as a precaution, the Lab cut natural gas to technical areas in LANL’s remote southwest area. All hazardous and radioactive materials remain accounted for and are appropriately protected, as are key Lab facilities such as its proton accelerator and supercomputing centers. Environmental specialists are mobilized and monitoring air quality, but say the principal concern is smoke. The Lab last night announced it would be closed Monday. “It’s been a very long night for the fire crews,” said Lab Director Charles McMillan. “There has been an outpouring of support from the region, the state, and the federal government and for that we are profoundly grateful.”

New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez came to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Emergency Operations Center just before midnight, June 26. “Our top priority is the safety of the people of our communities and property. I’m grateful to the state and local crews who are working so hard to keep damage to a minimum,” the governor said. Los Alamos County Councilor Sharon Stover also arrived, noting “We’ve got a good team here, with folks who were here for the Cerro Grande fire, so I feel very confident about their being able to manage this. In addition, we’re getting a lot of support from neighboring communities.” “We’d just like to thank the Governor and the leadership from surrounding areas who have been so quick to offer their support,” said Laboratory Director Charles McMillan….

An aerial nonincendiary view of the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test (DARHT) Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory shows the facility’s two accelerators set at right angles to one another. (Image courtesy of LANL)

Nebraska nuclear reactor dry though surrounded by flood

David Hendee in Reuters recaps the official assurances, but I am not filled with confidence about the sandbags protecting spent fuel rods from the rising water: The Fort Calhoun nuclear power station in Nebraska remains shut down due to Missouri River flooding, but the plant itself has not flooded and is expected to remain safe, the federal government said Friday. The rising river "has certainly affected the site, but the plant itself, the actual reactor is still dry," said Scott Burnell, Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman.

The 478-megawatt plant north of Omaha shut April 9 to refuel, and has remained shut because of the flooding, said Omaha Public Power District spokesman Jeff Hanson. "When the river reaches 1,004 feet above mean sea level, we shut down," said Hanson. "We don't have any idea when we'll be able to start again."

The Missouri River, swollen by heavy rains and melting snow, has been flooding areas from Montana through Missouri. Residents have been shoring up levees around towns as federal officials widen flood gates to allow record or near-record water releases to ease pressure on reservoirs.

The Fort Calhoun station is owned and operated by the Omaha Public Power District and supplies power to Nebraska's largest city. Contractors at the plant have completed construction of an earthen berm around the plant's switch yard and are protecting the plant and other facilities with large temporary structures filled with water.

According to the NRC's Burnell, the added flood barriers will protect the plant even if the river rises beyond where it is currently projected to go. Within that flood barrier, the plant has taken steps to provide additional protection for emergency diesel generators, Burnell said….

Aerial views of the Missouri River in the Bismarck-Mandan, North Dakota area June 8, 2011. The photos were taken from a North Dakota National Guard (UH-60) Black Hawk. The upstream Garrison Dam is releasing water into the Missouri River at a flow of 140,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). North Dakota National Guard photo by Maj. Gen. David Sprynczynatyk, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Europe's dry spring could lead to power blackouts

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): One of the driest springs ever recorded in northern Europe could lead to power blackouts this summer, with nuclear reactors going offline because of low river levels. The exceptionally dry weather will also raise food prices and has already forced water restrictions on millions of people, say governments, farm groups and meteorological organisations across the continent.

Large parts of southern Britain, northern France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and other northern and eastern European countries have had their driest three-month spells in more than 50 years, receiving just 25-60% of their long-term average rainfall since February. This has led to parched soils and difficult growing conditions for farmers, as well as to river levels that are dangerously low for wildlife.

Patchy rain has moistened soils in parts of northern Britain, France and Germany over the past few weeks, but with summer approaching and temperatures soaring to over 30C in France, it is not expected that any rains will compensate for months of exceptionally dry weather.

Last week the European Union warned that soils were now "critically dry" in six countries. The French wheat harvest is now expected to be 11.5%-13% down on average despite an increase in the area planted this year and German output is expected to fall 7-9%. In south-east England, many farmers expect crops to fail dramatically unless steady rains come soon….

The Tricastin nuclear power plant on the Rhone River, in France, shot by jean-louis Zimmermann, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

The climate change threat to nuclear power

Natalie Kopytko in New Scientist: The accident at the Fukushima power plant in Japan has led to much discussion about the future of nuclear power. I believe one important lesson of the accident has been overlooked. Nuclear power is often touted as a solution to climate change, but Fukushima serves as a warning that far from solving the climate problem, nuclear power may be highly vulnerable to it.

Of course, the emergency in Japan was caused by an earthquake and tsunami. But the effects of climate change could cause very similar problems.

Two facts that everyone should now know about nuclear power are that it needs access to large volumes of water to cool the reactor and a supply of energy to move the water. For this reason nuclear power plants are typically sited near large bodies of water, often seas or estuaries. It is this attachment to water that makes nuclear power vulnerable to climate change (Energy Policy, vol 39, p 318).

First of all, coastal areas are highly dynamic: storms batter, sea levels rise, and land shifts. This already poses problems for the safety of nuclear plants, and is only going to get worse. Secondly, nuclear power can be disrupted by water scarcity and rising water temperatures.

Nuclear regulators are already well aware of several safety issues, including flooding, loss of power, loss of communications, blockage of evacuation routes and equipment malfunction. Hurricanes pose the greatest threat.

…Another cause for concern is floods. All nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a certain level of flooding based on historical data, but these figures do not take climate change into account. Floods due to sea-level rise, storm surges and heavy rain will increase in frequency….

A 1999 picture of the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant, shot by kawamoto takuo, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Sea level rise brings added risks to coastal nuclear plants

Alyson Kenward in Climate Central: Power has finally been restored to all the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, nearly two weeks after the facility was ravaged by a 30-foot tsunami, giving Japanese officials new hope they can keep the crisis from spinning further out of control. With some of the immediate danger of a complete meltdown on hold and much hazardous work remaining, authorities are only starting to investigate exactly what happened, and what extra safety features might have prevented the disaster.

They’re not the only ones. In many parts of the world, including the United States, nuclear reactors are often located near the ocean, due to their requirement for abundant supplies of water for cooling purposes. And while tsunamis aren’t a threat everywhere, the sea can pose other challenges. Hurricanes, for example, can push walls of water ahead of them, like the storm surge that did most of the damage to New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina swept through in 2005. In fact, one U.S. nuclear plant has already been dealt a direct hit by a severe hurricane. In 1992, when Category 5 Hurricane Andrew hammered the Turkey Point power plant in southern Miami-Dade County, Fla., its nuclear reactors were unharmed despite extensive damage to other parts of the facility.

But scientists anticipate that in the future, sea level rise will cause hurricanes and their storm surges, as well as flooding caused by other types of storms, to be more severe than during the past few decades. In the wake of the Japanese crisis, which involved a more devastating tsunami than planners anticipated, nuclear analysts in the U.S. are now asking themselves how vulnerable coastal nuclear plants are to a comparable emergency.

“After the events in Japan, we took a hard look at whether our operating facilities are protected, based on current regulations and operating procedures,” says Roger Hannah, a senior public relations official with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Relying on models of expected flood levels and storm surges, along with “real-world experience with hurricanes,” the NRC believes all U.S. coastal nuclear facilities are already built to withstand the worst-case storm scenario, Hannah says. On March 23, the NRC also launched an additional two-step review of U.S. nuclear plants, aimed to last about three months…

Hurricane Andrew makes landfall, August 24, 1992, coming close to the Turkey Point nuclear power plant. NOAA image