Inspectors Pierce Iran’s Cloak of Nuclear Secrecy

The nine-page report raised questions about whether Iran has sought to investigate seven different kinds of technology ranging from atomic triggers and detonators to uranium fuel. Together, the technologies could make a type of atom bomb known as an implosion device, which is what senior staff members of the I.A.E.A. have warned that Iran is able to build.

Weapons based on implosion are considered advanced models compared with the bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. In these devices, the detonation of a sphere of conventional explosives creates a blast wave that compresses a central ball of bomb fuel into a supercritical mass, starting the chain reaction that ends in a nuclear explosion.

Implosion designs, compact and efficient by nature, are considered necessary for making nuclear warheads small and powerful enough to fit atop a missile.

Iran has dismissed charges that it is pursuing such technologies as lies based on fabricated documents or real ones taken out of context. It insists that its atomic program is meant exclusively for such peaceful objectives as producing medical isotopes and electric power. The result has been a tense standoff.

Last week’s report said the director general of the I.A.E.A., Yukiya Amano, recently wrote to Iranian officials to reiterate the agency’s concerns about the arms evidence and request “prompt access” to a wide range of Iranian facilities and individuals.

The report said Mr. Amano “urges Iran to respond positively” in order to establish “the exclusively peaceful nature” of its program.

Official doubts about Tehran’s ambitions emerged publicly in 2002 and have resulted in four rounds of United Nations sanctions. To date, the penalties have failed to stop Iran from enriching uranium, which can fuel both reactors and atom bombs.

In 2009, senior staff members of the I.A.E.A. concluded in a confidential analysis that “Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device” based on highly enriched uranium.

The new report includes some of the technical evidence behind that charge. It describes the sources of the information as “many member states” as well as its own efforts. Nuclear experts assume that much intelligence comes from Israel, the United States and Western Europe, though the I.A.E.A. in total has 151 member states.

The report cites concerns about undisclosed nuclear activities “past or current,” implying that the agency believes the Iranian arms program may still be moving ahead despite reports of its onetime suspension.

The seven categories of technology all bear on what can be interpreted as warhead design: how to turn uranium into bomb fuel, make conventional explosives that can trigger a nuclear blast, generate neutrons to spur a chain reaction and design nose cones for missiles.

Two diplomats familiar with the evidence, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity under the usual protocol, emphasized that no single one of the technologies stood out as indicating bomb work. Some, they conceded, have peaceful uses.

But the totality of the evidence, they said, suggested that Iran has worked hard on multiple fronts to advance the design of nuclear arms.

“It’s the whole variety of information,” one of the diplomats said. “You have to look at the whole thing.”

View the original article here

Disaster Plan Problems Found at U.S. Nuclear Plants

In addition, the staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that the agency’s current regulations and disaster plans did not give enough consideration to two factors that had greatly contributed to the continuing Fukushima Daiichi crisis in Japan: simultaneous problems at more than one reactor and a natural disaster that disrupts roads, electricity and other infrastructure surrounding a plant.

The briefing was part of a review requested by the commissioners to evaluate the vulnerability of American reactors to severe natural disasters like the ones that hit the Japanese plant in March.

Marty Virgilio, the deputy executive director of the agency, told the five commissioners that inspectors checked a sample of equipment at all 104 reactors and found problems at less than a third of them. The problems included pumps that would not start or, if they did, did not put out the required amount of water; equipment that was supposed to be set aside for emergencies but was being used in other parts of the plants; emergency equipment that would be needed in case of flood stored in places that could be flooded; and insufficient diesel on hand to run backup systems.

Many of the emergency systems were put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Officials said the problems that had been found were addressed immediately but not everything had been inspected. Mr. Virgilio said he expected to have a fuller picture soon.

He said an entire category of new procedures, called “severe accident mitigation guidelines,” had been adopted voluntarily by the nuclear industry and thus was not subject to commission rules.

R. William Borchardt, the commission’s chief staff official, said some of the preparations for severe accidents “don’t have the same kind of regulatory pedigree” as the equipment in the original plant design.

The two-hour briefing given to the five-member commission was an early assessment, 30 days into a 90-day review being conducted by an N.R.C. task force.

Charlie Miller, the staff member leading the effort, said the staff was considering “enhancements” to its disaster plans and procedures. But as laid out by the staff, some of the changes under consideration could be far-reaching.

For example, the N.R.C. now looks at how well a plant’s design can handle a problem at just one reactor, even if there is more than one reactor at the site.

“You have to take a step back and consider what would happen if you had multiple units affected by some ‘beyond design basis’ events,” Mr. Miller said.

Another problem, staff members acknowledged, is that they have never paid much attention to the issues posed by handling an emergency when there is widespread damage to surrounding roads, power systems and communications links. In the past, the commission has explicitly rejected the notion that it should consider such combined events when reviewing a plant’s safety preparations.

Simultaneous with the commission’s meeting, Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, released a report arguing that a variety of other shortcomings existed at nuclear plants, including the frequent failure of emergency diesel generators, which are essential to plant safety if the power grid goes down. He also criticized the commission for not requiring plants to have a backup power source for spent fuel pools while the reactor is shut for maintenance or refueling.

The Fukushima accident has cast new attention on spent fuel pools; the reason the United States government recommended that Americans stay 50 miles from the plant was damage to the spent fuel pool of Fukushima’s Unit 4, a reactor that was shut down before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Mr. Markey pointed out that in the last eight years, the commission had received 69 reports of inoperable diesel generators at 33 plants, with six of those generators out for more than a month. The diesels provide power for water pumps that allow removal of “decay heat,” the heat that fuel generates even after a reactor shuts down. The Fukushima plants shut down successfully but decay heat wrecked their cores.

The N.R.C. said it was aware of the reports. But on Wednesday, attention was called to that problem by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, an industry group formed after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 to provide peer-to-peer safety reviews. That group said one of the few safety measures that was getting worse was the reliability of diesel generators.

Mr. Markey also complained that the commission had allowed some plant operators to remove equipment that eliminates hydrogen produced by overheating fuel. In addition, there is no requirement for equipment to remove hydrogen in the rooms where spent fuel is stored; the building surrounding Fukushima Unit 4 was destroyed by the explosion of hydrogen that came from the spent fuel pool.

Commission officials said they were reviewing their previous decision to permit very heavy loading of the spent fuel pools. Thinning them out would reduce the amount of heat production that had to be dealt with in case of a severe accident, they said.

 

Panel on Nuclear Waste Disposal to Propose Above-Ground Storage

A draft recommendation for such sites is to be discussed on Friday at a meeting of the panel, which was set up last year by the Department of Energy after President Obama canceled a longstanding plan to bury waste at Yucca Mountain, a site in the Nevada desert.

The commission will also recommend opening a new effort to find a burial site, members said, and suggest that it be led by an organization that is independent of the Department of Energy, which has been working on the waste disposal effort for decades.

Commission members say they will suggest securing the assent of local and state governments before a burial site is chosen. With a selection process that is based more on science than politics and the promise of local economic benefit, a host site could potentially be found, some of them said. Yucca Mountain was chosen by Congress in 1987 after a battle driven by not-in-my-backyard politics.

Friday’s meeting will be the first public discussion of draft recommendations by the panel, which is scheduled to issue a draft report this summer and a final report next year.

The quest for a national repository for spent fuel has been a festering issue for decades but gained higher visibility after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. The disaster not only damaged reactors but led to the loss of cooling water in at least one pool of spent radioactive fuel, raising the risk of the release of radioactive materials.

At nuclear plants in the United States, pools of spent fuel are far more heavily loaded. The National Academy of Sciences warned in a study in 2005 that the presence of vast stores of radioactive fuel could make the plants an attractive target for terrorists.

For now, members of the waste commission say, the panel is unlikely to make a recommendation for starting work on two controversial disposal methods: reprocessing the spent fuel to recover plutonium for reuse, as France and Japan do, or building a new class of reactors that would break up the most troublesome wastes into materials that are easier to handle. Instead, it will recommend more research, the members said. “Neither the technology nor the economics are ready to compel us to make a decision on that at this point,” said Phillip A. Sharp, an Indiana Democrat on the commission.

The 2005 study by the National Academy of Sciences, ordered by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made a variety of recommendations for nuclear waste disposal, some of which were kept secret. One obvious approach has been moving the fuel into dry casks, or steel and concrete structures in which the fuel is cooled by the natural circulation of air rather than any moving parts. Such casks are already in use at a variety of reactor sites.

The commission will recommended that storage of such casks be centralized at a handful of sites, starting with “orphan” sites where the reactors have been retired and torn down. The number of orphaned nuclear sites will grow significantly before the United States can establish a permanent burial place, commission members predict.

Some nuclear industry experts have been hoping for a stronger commitment to recycling, in which the fuel is chopped up and the plutonium that was created during reactor operations is scavenged and purified for use in new fuel. Leftover uranium is purified and could also be reused, but most of it is stockpiled. But recent studies argue that there is plenty of virgin uranium and thus no reason to recycle. And American utilities have been reluctant to use the plutonium fuel, even when asked by the Energy Department in an effort to help dispose of surplus plutonium from the weapons program.

Areva, the French nuclear company, has been arguing that recycling cuts the cost of disposal and eliminates the need to mine uranium, which itself is environmentally damaging. If the fuel is moved to above-ground casks, said David C. Jones, a senior vice president of the company, “We’re essentially back to where we were 30 years ago,” when Congress first told the Energy Department to look for a burial site.

The draft recommendations to also include a plan to provide steady financing for the site selection and development process from money collected by utility companies that generate nuclear waste. Congress has been intermittently stingy in appropriating money, prodded partly by one of the opponents of the Yucca project, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader. Citing Senator Reid’s stance, Republicans in Congress have in recent months stepped up their criticism of President Obama’s decision to

Japan to Cancel Plan to Build More Nuclear Plants

 

Mr. Kan’s announcement came as Japan allowed residents of evacuated areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to briefly revisit their homes for the first time since the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March caused the nuclear accident at the plant.

Tuesday’s decision will mean the abandonment of a plan that the Kan government released last year to build 14 nuclear reactors by 2030 and increase the share of nuclear power in Japan’s electricity supply to 50 percent. Japan currently has 54 reactors that before the earthquake produced 30 percent of its electricity.

The cancellation of the planned nuclear plants is the second time that Mr. Kan has suddenly announced big changes in Japanese nuclear policy without the usual endless committee meetings and media leaks that characterize the country’s consensus-driven decision-making process. Mr. Kan appears to be seeking a stronger leadership role after criticism of his government’s sometimes slow and indecisive handling of the Fukushima accident.

Last week, Mr. Kan asked a utility company to suspend operations at the Hamaoka nuclear plant, which sits atop an active earthquake fault line, about 120 miles southwest of Tokyo. After three days of delays, the utility, the Chubu Electric Power Company, finally agreed Monday to shut down the plant until a wave wall could be built and other measures taken to strengthen its defenses against earthquakes and tsunamis.

The announcement Tuesday came just days after Mr. Kan said Japan remained committed to nuclear power. His apparent pull- back may be driven partly by public opinion, which has significantly soured on nuclear power since the Fukushima accident.

Even before the announcement, the disaster had damped the nuclear industry’s hopes for a worldwide revival of reactor building. With demand for electricity and concerns about global warming both growing, the industry had projected rapid expansion, but Japan’s nuclear crisis had already caused several countries to become skittish about nuclear power. Germany, for instance, declared a temporary moratorium on building new plants.

Still, several experts and nuclear industry representatives said Tuesday that they expected demand in two important markets — China and India — to remain strong even though those counties had said they would proceed more cautiously. Both nations have rapidly growing demand for electricity, and neither has nearly enough domestic fuel to meet its needs.

Nils J. Diaz, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a consultant for companies that want to build reactors, said he did not think the prime minister’s announcement would cause “a domino effect.” And Jonathan Hinze, vice president for international operations at the Ux Consulting Company in Roswell, Ga., which tracks the market for reactors,?added that Japan’s suspension of new reactor building?was less damaging than it seemed because many in the industry?had doubted that Japan would have the demand to justify that much construction.

A downturn in reactor construction would hurt Japanese companies that export nuclear plant designs and components, including Toshiba, which owns Westinghouse, and Hitachi, which is in a worldwide partnership with General Electric. Companies in France and South Korea also have a big stake in reactor building.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kan said Japan would retain nuclear and fossil fuels as energy sources, but vowed to add two new pillars to Japan’s energy policy: renewable energy and conservation. While Japan has been a global leader in energy conservation, it lags behind the United States and Europe in adopting solar and wind power, and other new energy sources.

“We need to start from scratch,” Mr. Kan told reporters. “We need to make nuclear energy safer and do more to promote renewable energy.”

The wording seemed to at least leave open the possibility that some new nuclear plants could be built in the future.

On Tuesday, Japan was reminded of the human costs of the Fukushima disaster, when the first group of 92 people paid two-hour visits to their homes in Kawauchi, within the 12-mile zone around the plant that was evacuated after the nuclear crisis.

The residents wore white antiradiation clothing and traveled in buses under tight supervision by nuclear officials. They retrieved belongings like photo albums and the tablets traditionally used in Japan to honor dead relatives in household Buddhist shrines, according to local media reports.

The government appeared to agonize for weeks over whether to allow even brief trips. Officials were concerned about whether civilians could be kept safe from exposure to potentially high radiation doses near the plant.

Complicating their decision was the lack of scientific knowledge on the health effects of the radiation doses now found in many of the evacuated areas. Some scientists say radiation levels even in many evacuated areas are too low to cause immediate illness, while others worry that the incidence of cancer could rise over the long term.

Last week, the government staged a trial run; officials played the role of returning residents to see if the trips could be made safely. Screened for radiation on their return, those participating were found to have been exposed to a dose of up to 25 microsieverts during the two-hour visit.

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington, and Andrew Pollack from Los Angeles.

Japan’s Nuclear Sites Raised U.S. Concerns, Cables Show

The cables from the United States Embassy in Tokyo were sent in 2006 and 2007, and recount warnings from American diplomats who visited Japanese nuclear plants and observed security drills. The Americans were raising concerns about Japan’s readiness for guerrilla-style attacks by groups like civilian terrorists or North Korean commandos.

In a cable dated Feb. 26, 2007, American officials expressed concern about the absence of armed guards at a nuclear facility in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, which they described as “a major plutonium storage site.” But the Ministry of Science and Education, which oversees Japan’s nuclear sites, said “there was not a sufficient threat to justify armed police,” the cable said.

The Japanese explained that the site was protected by civilian guards, who cannot be armed under Japanese law, the cable said.

Other cables described the placement of fences, security cameras and motion detectors, and the readiness of Japan’s coast guard to protect nuclear plants near the ocean from seaborne attacks.

In the 2007 cable, the Americans also asked the ministry to conduct background checks of workers with access to sensitive areas of the Tokaimura site, as is standard practice in the United States. Ministry officials replied that while such checks were conducted “unofficially,” constitutional restrictions and privacy concerns prevented the government from making them routine.

While the cables noted that Japan was becoming more aware of threats to its nuclear facilities, they also faulted some countermeasures, particularly antiterrorism training drills, characterized as unrealistic.

A cable dated Jan. 27, 2006, describes an antiterrorism drill at the Mihama nuclear plant in central Japan as “a bit too scripted and perfect.” A cable dated Nov. 2 of the same year faults a drill at the Tokaimura facility at which participants had been given “advance copies of the scenario.”

 

Japan Reaffirms Nuclear Energy Use

TOKYO — Japan remains committed to nuclear power despite the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Prime Minister Naoto Kan indicated Sunday, as workers moved closer to repairing the crippled plant by opening the doors of a damaged reactor building.

The view on Sunday from an observation deck at the Hamaoka nuclear plant, which the government wants to shut down until protections can be built.

Japan's Prime Minister reaffirmed the country's commitment to nuclear energy on Sunday, although the Hamaoka plant near Tokyo will be temporarily shut down.

The move is intended to air out the building that houses Reactor No. 1 to ensure that radiation levels are low enough to allow workers to enter. The plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the procedure would release little radiation into the atmosphere because an air filtering system installed last week had already removed most of the dangerous particles.

Eight hours after the doors were opened, workers entered the building to test radiation levels. The next step is to begin replacing the reactor’s cooling system, which was destroyed by the tsunami on March 11.

The company has said it will take at least six months to stabilize the plant, in which three of the six reactors were damaged by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami. Hydrogen explosions spewed radiation into the atmosphere, causing the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine.

Despite the crisis in Japan, Mr. Kan indicated Sunday that his government was not rethinking the nation’s energy policy. There had been speculation that the government might seek to shut down more nuclear plants after Mr. Kan requested last week that the Hamaoka nuclear plant in central Japan be temporarily closed because of safety concerns.

Mr. Kan told reporters on Sunday that he would not seek to close any more of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors. He said the Hamaoka plant, 125 miles west of Tokyo, was “a special case” because it sat atop a major fault line. Government seismologists say there is an almost 90 percent chance of a major earthquake on the fault line within the next 30 years.

Critics have long warned of a possible accident at the Hamaoka plant, which is upwind of Tokyo. Mr. Kan asked that the plant be closed until a tsunami-resistant wall could be built and backup systems could be installed to strengthen the plant against earthquakes.

The Hamaoka plant’s operator, the Chubu Electric Power Company, accepted the prime minister’s request on Monday. The company’s board did not reach a decision at a meeting on Saturday, when some board members expressed concern about summer power shortages if the plant were shut down.

The utility company supplies power to central Japan, including Aichi Prefecture, the home of Toyota. In Tokyo, residents face the prospect of electricity shortages because of the loss of the power supplied by Fukushima Daiichi and other plants in earthquake-damaged northern Japan.

Despite the setbacks, Yoshito Sengoku, the deputy chief cabinet secretary, said Japan was not reconsidering its dependence on nuclear power, which supplies about a quarter of the nation’s electricity.