Nuke: Greenpeace wants nuclear plant suppliers held accountable for Fukushima crisis

The international environmental group Greenpeace launched an online campaign Tuesday saying nuclear power plant manufacturers should be held accountable for the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant.

Greenpeace wants Japan’s law on compensation for nuclear damage to be revised so that the companies who designed and built the reactors pay as well.

Currently, compensation is being paid by Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima plant that has been crippled since the massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

Greenpeace said only India, Russia and South Korea have legislation under which nuclear plant suppliers are held liable in the event of a disaster.

The environmental group is calling for a system that does not allow the nuclear industry to evade responsibility for compensating the public for disasters.

“The Fukushima disaster exposes the shameful defects in a system that only requires nuclear operators to pay a fraction of the costs of a disaster and does not require suppliers of reactors to pay anything,” Aslihan Tumer, Greenpeace International nuclear campaigner, said in a press release dated Tuesday.

Kyodo News, Feb 20, 2013
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/02/20/national/greenpeace-wants-nuclear-plant-suppliers-held-accountable-for-fukushima-crisis/#.USmPeTfA55s

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 Nuclear watchdog exec held 30 illicit meetings with power firms

A former senior official of the Nuclear Regulation Authority held at least 30 meetings with power company executives in violation of the new watchdog’s internal rules, it was learned Saturday.

Tetsuo Nayuki, who served as director general of the NRA secretariat, met with representatives of regional utilities and power firms on his own even though the organizationÅfs regulations prohibit its officials from participating in such meetings alone.

The finding arose through interviews with the nine utilities that operate nuclear power plants, as well as Japan Atomic Power Co., Electric Power Development Co. (J-Power), the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.

In the four months after the NRA’s launch last September, Nayuki held eight meetings with executives from Japan Atomic Power, seven with Hokuriku Electric Power Co., and four each with Kyushu Electric Power Co. and Tohoku Electric Power Co., among other huddles with senior power company officials.

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Japan Nuclear Fuel and Chugoku Electric Power Co. refused to give concrete responses, saying they do not have detailed data on possible meetings between Nayuki and their executives.

Nayuki was removed from his post after the revelation earlier this month that he handed Japan Atomic Power a draft report by an NRA team of experts about a critical geological survey of a possibly active fault directly beneath the firm’s Tsuruga nuclear complex in Fukui Prefecture, before the draft was publicly released.

Before Nayuki’s blunder came to light, introductory meetings between NRA officials and power company officials were treated as an exception to the nuclear watchdog’s ban on unaccompanied confabs.

Jiji Press, February 10, 2013
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/02/10/national/exec-at-japans-nuclear-watchdog-held-30-illicit-meetings-with-power-firms/#.URi50_IrHhc

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 Faults may be active under Aomori plant — Higashidori reactor restart won’t be soon, NRA panel hints

Significant portions of major geological faults running under Tohoku Electric Power Co.’s one-reactor Higashidori nuclear power plant in Aomori Prefecture are probably active, a Nuclear Regulation Authority panel said in a draft report Monday.

The faults apparently do not run directly beneath the complex’s reactor but the assessment indicates the unit may have to remain offline for quite some time because the utility will need to reassess the plantÅfs quake resistance and take measures to reinforce the facilities.

The draft report, which was a summary of discussions among panel members, also touched on the need to further study other smaller faults that run underneath an area close to the reactor building.

Nuclear plant operators are banned from building reactors and related facilities important for safe atomic power output directly above active faults, and it’s possible that some faults were not detected or identified as active at the time plants were built, as suggested by recent fault probes at other atomic facilities.

Officials of Tohoku Electric, who also attended the discussions, said the utility will conduct additional geological surveys, taking into account the opinions it has received from the panel.

But the utility maintained its argument that there are no active faults on the plant’s premises. Executive Vice President Takeo Umeda said later in the day that one of the major purposes of the surveys is to “gproperly explain that there are no activities” in the faults. The utility plans to compile the results of the surveys in December.

The panel plans to finalize the draft report after listening to the opinions of other experts who have been tasked by the NRA to cooperate in the investigation of faults at other nuclear plants.

Kyodo News, Feb 19, 2013
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/02/19/national/faults-may-be-active-under-aomori-plant/#.USmOZjfA55s

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 New safety standards to clearly ban reactors above active faults

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority decided Tuesday to stipulate more clearly as a safety requirement that reactors must not be built directly above geologic faults that could move in the future.

The current guidelines, crafted before the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi complex disaster, employ indirect wording to rule out the placing of important facilities above active faults, saying regulators do “not expect” such a situation.

The NRA is in the process of compiling new safety standards, set to come into force in July, which will replace the current guidelines that proved insufficient in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, triggered by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan.

The new regulatory requirements are drawing attention because they could affect the reactivation of the country’s reactors. Only two reactors in Japan are currently operating amid safety concerns over the use of nuclear power.

On Tuesday, a panel of experts appointed by the NRA drew up the outline of the safety measures to address the risk posed by earthquakes and tsunami. A separate panel is crafting measures to address severe accidents.

As for the location of important facilities, utilities should not only take heed of active faults but faults that could cause deformation of the ground surface as well as earthquake-triggered landslide displacement.

The new safety standards will also call on utilities to assess the activity of faults under a plant’s premises as far back as around 400,000 years ago if they cannot rule out that the faults have moved in the last 120,000-130,000 years — the current benchmark for deciding whether faults are active.

To address the risk of tsunami, utilities will be asked to come up with estimates of the largest tsunami that could hit nuclear plants, reflecting the latest scientific knowledge, and to ensure important facilities are designed to withstand them, according to the outline of the new safety standards.

Kyodo Press, January 29, 2013
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130130p2g00m0dm033000c.html

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 Fault-linked nuke plants sitting on 800 tons of fuel

A combined 800 tons of spent nuclear fuel is being stored at two power stations thought to have active quake faults running underneath them.

Japan Atomic Power Co., operator of the Tsuruga plant in Fukui Prefecture, said Sunday that the storage pool of reactor 2 contains roughly 500 tons of spent fuel and the pool for reactor 1 has about 80 tons.

Beneath both buildings are crush zones that have been judged active faults by the Nuclear Regulation Authority. And another active fault has been found 250 meters away from unit 2.

At the Higashidori plant in Aomori Prefecture, meanwhile, Tohoku Electric Power Co. said Sunday that there are 131 tons of spent fuel inside reactor 1 and another 104 in the building’s fuel pool. The building is 200 to 400 meters from two crush zones that have been determined to be active faults.

Ruling out the existence of active faults under the reactors, both Japan Atomic Power and Tohoku Electric said they have no plans to relocate the plants.

But if the crush zones in question actually move, the fuel pools’ cooling systems could be damaged, experts warn.

Nuclear fuel generates much less heat once it’s spent, but it still must be left to cool in water pools for about five years. The three reactors at the Tsuruga and Higashidori plants were halted last year.

Kansai Electric Power Co.’s Oi power plant has 262 tons of spent fuel in reactors 3 and 4, the only units operating in Japan, and 1,329 tons in the reactor buildings’ pools.

The NRA plans to conduct on-site fault checks at the Oi plant, also in Fukui, from Friday.

Jiji Press, December 25, 2012
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20121225a2.html

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 Nuclear regulator sacked for leaking information to nuclear operator

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority said Friday that it sacked a senior official of its secretariat for having an inappropriate exchange with officials of a nuclear power plant operator, noting that his action could have undermined the newly-launched organization’s transparency and neutrality.

According to the NRA, the 54-year-old official, Tetsuo Nayuki, handed over to Japan Atomic Power Co. on Jan. 22 a draft assessment report on geologic faults running beneath the firm’s nuclear complex in western Japan, just about a week before the draft was scheduled to be made public by an NRA-appointed panel.

The NRA said that the leaked information was not necessarily confidential because it was a summary of discussions that had been open to public, but the incident is still a blow to the NRA, which was launched in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster to restore public confidence in regulations.

“It is extremely regrettable that a senior official did such a thing. It was a thoughtless act, because we should be careful especially when having contacts with parties subject to regulations and should be transparent in the exchanges,” NRA Chairman Shunichi Tanaka was quoted as saying by spokesman Hideka Morimoto.

The NRA, launched in September last year, was endowed with greater independence than the former nuclear safety agency in a bid to prevent close relations developing between regulators and promoters of atomic power, something said to have caused safety issues to be neglected.

Other than in an emergency, the NRA does not allow its staff to meet alone with officials of nuclear power plant operators so as to ensure transparency.

But Nayuki met with Japan Atomic Power officials alone and “carelessly” handed over the draft report, Morimoto told a press conference. The meeting came to light because Nayuki himself reported the matter the next day.

The draft report, officially disclosed Monday, said that a fault running directly underneath a reactor at Tsuruga plant is likely to be active — a judgment Japan Atomic Power opposes and that could force the operator to scrap the unit.

Japan Atomic Power, which separately held a press conference Friday, said the company was eager to have an opportunity to speak to the members of the panel discussing the issue before the report is finalized.

“We told (Nayuki) on Dec. 21 that if we are given a chance to express our opinions about the draft report during the panel meeting, we want to learn the content in advance so that we can make an accurate counterargument instantly,” a company official said.

Both Morimoto and Japan Atomic Power denied that Nayuki received any financial reward or gifts in exchange for handing over the report. The plant operator also said there was no “lobbying” based on the information it gained.

The panel members basically agreed on the content of the draft report on Monday, but it was not finalized. The panel also decided to listen to outside experts and opinions from Japan Atomic Power.

Effective Friday, the NRA reprimanded Nayuki and transferred him to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, where he originally came from.

Kyodo Press, February 2, 2013
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130202p2g00m0dm013000c.html

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