October 28, 2014
The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL) and the Mothers Against Tennessee River Radiation (MATRR) conducted a workshop last November in Chattanooga, TN on the radioactivity monitoring they perform around the Browns Ferry and Sequoyah nuclear plants. Read More
October 21, 2014
Fission Stories #175
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) manages the inherent dangers from nuclear power plant operation by establishing and enforcing (at least sometimes) federal safety regulations.
But this post is not about the NRC sending someone to nuclear jail. It’s about the NRC violating federal regulations and perhaps being on its own way to nuclear jail. Read More
October 17, 2014
Sensory deprivation involves the intentional elimination of stimuli of one or more of the senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. While it can be used to promote meditation and other helpful applications, it often has more sinister connotations. For example, few if any Hollywood films feature sensory deprivation followed by scenes of folks winning huge lottery awards or otherwise experiencing unlimited glee. Read More
October 15, 2014
The third X-37B space plane flight is coming to an end this week, after a record 22 month long mission. We have written pretty extensively on the “space plane” here on ATN, and have a factsheet where we condensed that thinking. Read More
October 14, 2014
The 2014 edition of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report was released in July. Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt authored this report with contributions by Yurika Ayukawa, Shaun Burnie, Raffaele Piria, Steve Thomas, and Julie Hazeman. Read More
October 10, 2014
People’s Park rests within a maze of tall buildings in central Shanghai. At the tale end of a week-long national holiday, whose only U.S. equivalent might be Christmas, a human sea shopped along the banks of Nanjing Road, which was all dressed up in red regalia to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the People’s Republic. Read More
October 7, 2014
Irony is not just the opposite of wrinkly. It also applies to the results obtained from sustained efforts by the owner of the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina to downplay one minor safety problem and in the process causing an even larger problem to be identified. Read More
October 3, 2014
So, happy anniversary to you, Ground Based Midcourse missile defense (GMD) system. I see that the traditional 10-year anniversary gift is tin or perhaps diamonds, though your best friends seem to be favoring tons of concrete. Read More
October 1, 2014
Senator David Vitter recently expressed his view that groups like the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Union of Concerned Scientists had teamed up with Senator Barbara Boxer to shut down the nation’s nuclear power plants one at a time. Read More
September 30, 2014
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) nuclear safety oversight efforts consist of three elements: inspection, assessment, and enforcement. Most of the time, findings by NRC’s inspectors and/or adverse trends from performance indicators result in the agency taking enforcement action in the form of supplemental inspections. Read More
September 28, 2014
A new version of the UCS Satellite Database, which includes launches through July 31, 2014, has been posted at http://ucsusa.org/satellites. Read More
September 24, 2014
Next month, on 16 October, China will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its first successful nuclear weapons test. That same day in 1964 the Chinese government released an official statement declaring, “China will never at any time or under any circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons.” The Chinese government reconfirmed its commitment to that declaration many times over the past five decades, most recently in April 2013. Read More
September 23, 2014
The Fukushima disaster revealed many things: the unselfish sacrifices of workers who put duty ahead of their own safety and concern for their families, the vulnerability of reactor designs to severe challenges and common mode failures, the inadequacy of severe accident management guidelines, and the regulatory bias in risk assessments. Read More
September 16, 2014
The March 1979 partial meltdown of the core in the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was the worst—so far—nuclear plant accident in United States history. Read More
September 9, 2014
The Pentagon’s Inspector General (IG) released a report yesterday about the U.S. Ground Based Midcourse (GMD) missile defense system: “Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle Quality Assurance and Reliability Assessment, Part A.” It’s telling. Read More
September 9, 2014
During a winter storm on January 21, 2014, the Unit 2 reactor at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland automatically shut down from full power. That event should not have cascaded to cause the Unit 1 reactor to also shut down, but it did. Read More
September 2, 2014
NEAT #14 covered the NRC’s regulations and associated guidance documents. NEAT #5 covered the technical specifications, an appendix to the operating license issued by the NRC for each reactor. NEAT #37 explains the relationship between the regulatory requirements in these, and other, sources. Read More
August 27, 2014
Several recent news articles covered a report filed by Dr. Michael Peck, an NRC engineer, within his agency. The Friends of the Earth (FOE) obtained the non-public report and posted it online. Read More
August 26, 2014
U.S. nuclear power plant owners are spending millions of dollars on measures to reduce vulnerabilities revealed during the March 2011 disaster at Fukushima in Japan. These are only latest in a series of costly safety upgrades. Read More
August 19, 2014
The Reactor Core Isolation Cooling system is relied upon at most boiling water reactors (BWRs) to provide makeup water to the reactor vessel housing the nuclear core to compensate for water being boiled away when the normal makeup system is unavailable. Read More
