Japan nuclear crisis: Has the US industry learned something?

Do not think to much, do not speak to loud, our Hot New Today is about Japan nuclear crisis: Has the US industry learned something? You have to continue reading this information.

Japan nuclear crisis: Has the US industry learned something?

With Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant spreading trace amounts of radioactivity around the globe, senators on Capitol Hill quizzed nuclear experts Tuesday to find out what lessons from the Japanese nuclear crisis might help safeguard the US reactor fleet.

While nuclear-industry proponents sought to assure the senators that the US reactors are safe, industry critics emphasized that improvements are needed in the areas of spent-fuel storage, emergency backup power, and evacuation procedures.


The testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was the Obama administration's first formal accounting to Congress of its response to the Japanese nuclear crisis.

Officials from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) detailed how their agencies had supplied Japan with robots to probe radioactive areas of the Fukushima plant, technical advice from a team of about 40 experts, and 17,000 pounds of equipment.

How dangerous is nuclear power? Three lessons from Japan.

But what the senators really wanted to know was whether the DOE and NRC had drawn any early conclusions and were taking steps to prevent such a crisis from occurring in the United States. Repeatedly, they were told that those answers would be forthcoming only after the NRC concluded a 90-day review of US reactors – but that US reactors, which had benefitted from continuous upgrades, were safe.

“Are you fully confident that once we've reviewed all of that ... you will be in a position to evaluate whether – if the exact same set of environmental conditions that occurred there were presented here in US – whether or not we would be able to withstand it without a meltdown or release that occurred there?” asked Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah.

“In general, yes sir,” responded Peter Lyons, the DOE’s acting assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, who proceeded to detail the kinds of assessments nuclear plants undergo to be prepared for a natural disaster.
'Defense in depth'

“We can say with confidence that US nuclear plants continue to operate safely,” Bill Borchardt, executive director for operations at the NRC, told the commission earlier, noting that that confidence was based on a “defense in depth” that included multiple physical barriers to radiation leakage at every reactor and diverse emergency systems.

Senators, however, soon began probing arcane safety issues that had emerged in the press in recent weeks, including the number of hours of battery backup power US nuclear plants are required to have in the event of a station blackout – and the safety of spent-fuel pools at US reactors that have the same design as Japan's stricken reactor.

Nuclear safety: Five recent 'near miss' incidents at US nuclear power plants

That General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor design – 28 of the nation's 104 reactors are of that type – has spent-fuel pools that sit in the upper part of the reactor building, near the top of the reactors, so cranes can easily load and unload fuel.

Unlike the reactor vessels with their thick steel-and-concrete shells, those pools in the upper reaches of reactor buildings are the weakest part of a plant's “defense in depth” strategy for keeping high radioactivity from reaching the environment, nuclear industry critics say. If breached, the spent-fuel pools at a plant can pose as large, or even larger, threat depending on how much fuel is in them and the age of the fuel.
Improvements for spent-fuel pools.

Here is to get more detail information about Japan nuclear crisis: Has the US industry learned something?