Monday, July 25, 2016

Fukushima Webcams and News Updates


I returned from vacation to find Fukushima still steaming:





Unit 1 in the forefront seems to be leaking greenish gas.

The good news is that Japan's former "acting chairman of the NRA" is raising concerns about whether earthquake safety assessments at nuclear plants adequately predict maximum shaking potential:
Editorial: Doubts about nuclear plant's quake resistance shake trust in NRA. The Mainich, July 25, 2016,  http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160725/p2a/00m/0na/006000c
Trust in Japan's nuclear watchdog, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), has been jolted. At hand is an issue raised by Kunihiko Shimazaki, former acting chairman of the NRA. Shimazaki pointed out that Kansai Electric Power Co. underestimated the maximum shaking that could occur during an earthquake at its Oi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukui Prefecture.
After the 1,000 recorded earthquakes in Kyushu this spring, nuclear power seems an inordinately risky enterprise.

The NRA has agreed to discard its risk assessment for the Oi nuclear plant because of the problems in evaluating shaking potential:
NRA to scrap recalculated quake ground motion data for Oi nuclear plant. The Mainichi, July 21, 2016, http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160721/p2a/00m/0na/013000c 
The chairman of Japan's nuclear watchdog admitted in a news conference on July 20 that its secretariat's renewed method of calculating standard ground motion from earthquakes at Kansai Electric Power Co.'s Oi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukui Prefecture was insufficient.... Kunihiko Shimazaki, former deputy chairman of the NRA, had earlier pointed out that the Irikura-Miyake method initially used to calculate standard ground motion at the Oi Nuclear Power Plant produced an estimate that was too low.
This is good news. Flawed risk assessments that under-estimate hazards and the potential for accidents endanger us all.


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