Pressure and Containment

The title Pressure and Containment applies to two physical elements of nuclear reactor design, but it also applies to another essential aspect of the nuclear industry: its need to contain the abstract, ever-increasing, problematic pressure of accumulating information that threatens to leak out. Over the past year I have speculated about what people in the global nuclear industry must be thinking of the Fukushima catastrophe. The IEAE, professional organizations and government agencies form tight ranks and carefully control the message that gets out to the public. Official meetings and conferences are closed to the mass media, and most staff are barred from speaking publicly. 

From the outside it looks like it is all diplomatic language and soothing words of mutual respect, support and encouragement, but now one has to wonder why more anger and resentment would not break through the normally calm surface. After all, TEPCO and the Japanese nuclear village have done tremendous financial harm to the nuclear industry, which may have entered its period of decline. Nuclear engineers who belong to organizations with excellent safety records have good reason to be angry, and to breathe a sigh of relief when they hear talk of a phase out of nuclear power in Japan. They have to admit, as readily as many anti-nuke people, that Japan is just too seismically risky for nuclear power and it has a record of incorrigibly flawed management of nuclear safety. Even from the perspective of pro-nuclear advocates, it would be better if Japan got out of the game and left it to organizations that have a better record of handling the dangers.

It is difficult for an outsider to find evidence of such discord within the nuclear profession, but one good place to look is in the industry trade magazines. Volume 53, Issue 35 of Nucleonics Week (August 2012) contained a report on the Convention on Nuclear Safety meeting that was held in Vienna in late August. The report described a description of a rare and welcome undiplomatic debate occurring among nuclear professionals. One could argue that the information in such trade journals should be available to the public, and it is, in fact, but it comes with the least expensive payment option being an annual subscription of US$2,695 (basic web and email). I came across this article via forwarded email, and I’m posting it here with the defense that it is fair use because of its import to public policy debate within democratic societies.

The article discusses primarily comments by Rosenergoatom deputy director general Vladimir Asmolov. He pointed out that the extraordinary meeting of CNS parties was supposed to focus on why Fukushima happened, not on the known details of what happened. He openly criticized a presentation by Shinichi Kuroki, deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency as being too focused on what is already established knowledge. Nucleonics Week reported that Asmolov claimed Kuroki’s report, “shed little light on why Fukushima owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. had failed to apply IAEA safety principles like sufficient redundance [sic - redundancy] in safety trains and why regulators had not enforced stricter norms.”

Asmolov explained further, “weaknesses in the Japanese system had been identified by several missions from the IAEA and the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), over the past years, but the Japanese did not act on them.” Asmolov cited “criticism about the regulatory agency being within the industry ministry, the lack of technical competence in NISA, and failure by TEPCO to make key safety-related backfits even after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.

It was Asmolov’s assessment that TEPCO could have protected the Fukushima Daiichi plant if it had applied knowledge that was available before the accident. Putting it mildly, Asmolov said that TEPCO was “isolated from scientific support.” 

I think a dispossessed farmer in Fukushima would express these criticisms with much more anger and rage, but by the standards of nuclear industry peer pressure, Asmolov might have delivered a shocking effrontery when he said there was nothing new in the report by Kuroki, “whom he criticized for giving numbers with too great precision - for example, measurement of water levels in the spent fuel pool of Fukushima I-4 - but sidestepping an analysis of the mindset that allowed regulatory approval of extended operation for the oldest Fukushima unit without new safety requirements.”

Asmolov is also president of The World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) and a member of the International Nuclear Safety Group (INSAG), the Russian nuclear utility's chief technical expert and a professor at Moscow Technical University. It would be interesting to know what he has to say about other shocking lapses such as the South Korean utility that, in the post-Fukushima world, covered up - until it was caught - a twelve-minute station blackout at the Gori 1 Nuclear Power Plant in Busan on February 9, 2012. For that matter, in how many other countries are operators failing to apply IAEA safety principles, and where else are regulators failing to enforce measures against known low probability-high impact events? Who else is "isolated from scientific support"?

source article:

CNS meeting not focused on key Fukushima issues: Asmolov
Staff
991 words
30 August 2012
Nucleonics Week
NUC
ISSN: 0048-105X, Volume 53, Issue 35
English
(c) 2012 McGraw-Hill, Inc.

The world nuclear safety community lost an opportunity to focus on the most important lessons from the Fukushima accident at a meeting in Vienna this week, Rosenergoatom deputy director general Vladimir Asmolov said as the meeting of parties to the Convention on Nuclear Safety entered its third day August 29.

Asmolov said that the "extraordinary" meeting of CNS parties was supposed to shed light not primarily on what happened at Fukushima in March 2011 - which has been presented in many other forums over the past months - but why it happened, so that lessons could be drawn for the global nuclear safety regime.

But a presentation about Fukushima at the opening session August 27 by Shinichi Kuroki, deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, shed little light on why Fukushima owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. had failed to apply IAEA safety principles like sufficient redundance in safety trains and why regulators had not enforced stricter norms, Asmolov said.

Asmolov said that the weaknesses in the Japanese system had been identified by several missions from the IAEA and the World Association of Nuclear Operators WANO, over the past years, but the Japanese did not act on them. He cited criticism about the regulatory agency being within the industry ministry, the lack of technical competence in NISA, and failure by Tepco to make key safety-related backfits even after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.

Asmolov is president of WANO and a member of the International Nuclear Safety Group, Insag. He is also the Russian nuclear utility's chief technical expert and a professor at Moscow Technical University.

Asmolov said that if Tepco had properly assessed the consequences of a total loss of power, as happened on March 11, 2011, it would have realized that "the design [of the Fukushima units] is not good."

"The knowledge exists" about how to protect a plant in such circumstances, he said, but the Japanese operator was "isolated from scientific support."

Asmolov said there was nothing new in the report by Kuroki, whom he criticized for giving numbers with too great precision - for example, measurement of water levels in the spent fuel pool of Fukushima I-4 - but sidestepping an analysis of the mindset that allowed regulatory approval of extended operation for the oldest Fukushima unit without new safety requirements.

Kuroki's presentation did cover investigations of the cause of the accident, the taking of immediate safety measures at Fukushima and other reactor sites, and considerations of further steps, such as seismic safety re-evaluation for all sites. He outlined the action plan of nuclear utilities, designed to obtain approval for restart of units that were shut for inspections after the accident. Only two of 50 units in Japan have been allowed to restart so far.

Kuroki said that the Japanese government "needs to reconstruct [the] nuclear safety organization and regulation rapidly, so as to prevent [a] severe accident" and recover public trust in regulators and operators, which he said was "completely lost" because of Fukushima. Nominations of five people as Nuclear Regulatory Agency commissioners are in the approval process in the Diet, Japan's parliament.

Fukushima led to a nuclear regulatory reform act that creates a nuclear regulatory commission independent of the industry ministry and integrates NISA and other government offices dealing with radiation protection into the staff of the new NRA.

Kuroki said issues like improving safety culture, as well as new post-Fukushima regulations covering 30 safety issues identified after Fukushima, will be addressed by the new agency once it is functioning.

But Kuroki offered little information to the 600-plus participants in the Vienna meeting about nuclear safety philosophy and the international safety regime going forward, Asmolov said. He contrasted that with the recent expert report done for the Japanese Diet which drew some key conclusions about safety culture and accountability in Japan's nuclear community.

Asmolov said that discussions in a working group during the CNS meeting on international cooperation, which he chaired, had shown that "all the reasons [for Fukushima] were clear before the accident, but the [safety] convention and other mechanisms [like peer review missions]" could not prevent the accident.

He said Russia was seeking agreement from the CNS parties to establish a special high-level group to work out a "common proposal" for the global nuclear safety regime, evaluating where the nuclear community went wrong and how it can use "experience and knowledge" to improve the "fundamentals" of nuclear safety, like adequate design.

Asmolov said he sought agreement on "internationally coordinated research and development" to tackle "weak points" of reactor safety like hydrogen risks in containment or molten core interaction with water. A "common network" should also be established to link the results of all peer review missions and safety services - for example between the IAEA and WANO - and set "coordinated objectives" for those missions, he said.

The IAEA and WANO announced earlier this year an agreement to work more closely together.

Separately, Tero Varjoranta, director general of the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Institute, said in an interview in Vienna August 29 that experts looking at design issues during the CNS meeting had agreed on areas that need to be addressed in light of Fukushima.

He said there is agreement on measures needed, but that different countries have different timelines to implement them.
He gave no specific examples; the contents of the report from the working group on design issues, which Varjoranta chaired, are confidential.

But Varjoranta, who also chairs the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group, said he had delivered two messages to the group. First, he said, one should "never waste an opportunity" to learn lessons. But second, one should take the time needed to understand precisely what changes are needed rather than rush to make backfits without sufficient analysis.

"Haste makes waste," the Finnish regulator said.