Hurricane Irene left millions without power this weekend, but thankfully none of the dozen or so nuclear power plants on the east coast were significantly damaged. The hurricane, which has caused roughly is currently is slowing down and passing into Canada.

Despite affecting 65 million people, estimated to be the largest amount of Americans affected by a single storm, Irene caused only two nuclear power plant shut downs. According to nuclear energy ,  New Jerseys Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant shut down at 5 p.m. on Saturday before Irene hit the area. Constellation’s Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland did not shut down before Irene came blustering through. When the storm hit the area, a piece of aluminum siding was ripped off a building by 90 mph winds and hurled into one of the plant’s transformers, shutting down one of its reactors. Other nuclear plants in North Carolina and Connecticut reduced power production as a preventative measure.

Though this is largely great news, thanks no doubt to the robust emergency plans nuclear power plants are mandated to follow in the case of natural disasters, Yurman did note this unsettling fact in his blog:

The NRC reported that none of the plants in areas hit by the storm on Saturday lost offsite power from the grid. However, several plants reported some of their emergency sirens were knocked offline by power outages. All plants have back-up options for such a situation.”

I’m sure it’s under control. I just hope those “back-up options” kicked in before nuclear sludge spilled into the Atlantic only to form mutated monster lobsters that are plotting an amphibious invasion at this moment. But just like some feared that the storm would cause nuclear meltdown across the eastern seaboard, I doubt the monster lobsters’ nefarious plans will come true.

Photo by via Flickr

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A nuclear power plant in Nebraska is the latest fission-based power source to be surrounded by water, much to the the chagrin of those who like neither radiated water or nuclear meltdowns. Thankfully, the plant seems to be safe for the time being and the core is intact. So, no corn-fed Godzilla for the moment.

New York Times reporter Matthew L. Wald today that the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant is still surrounded by Missouri River flood water. Flooding started June 6, and by June 14, much of the plant was surrounded by water. Despite the deluge, the plant has been stabilized.

“The plant faces two other challenges, however. One is that the flowing water, four feet deep in some spots around the plant, may have undermined some structures. Already, plant workers have stopped moving heavy vehicles over paved surfaces because they may have been weakened, the managers say,” wrote Wald.

For a flyover video of the plant shot yesterday, click .

– Peter Beland

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The recent earthquake in Japan and subsequent nuclear plant crisis has come at a time when, for the first time since Three Mile Island in 1979, companies are proposing construction of new nuclear power reactors in the U.S. While the hazards of nuclear power play out in Japan, researchers at Oregon State University say that new reactor designs could provide safer, simpler and cheaper ways to harness nuclear energy.

Kathryn Higley, professor and head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State University, is one of the researchers looking into a new reactor design called Westinghouse AP1000. Higley’s group conducted the integral system testing on the AP1000, which demonstrates a large shift from the types of designs used throughout the world since the beginning of the nuclear power industry.

The AP1000 uses “passive cooling,” in which a water tank is positioned above the core of the reactor, allowing gravity to do the heavy lifting in the cooling of the reactor’s core. This means that the reactor is able to function without power – even without staff – for several days.

“In Japan, that would have made all the difference,” Higley said.

OSU has a one-quarter-scale test facility that includes all of the AP1000’s design features, with the exception of nuclear fuel; electric heater rods are used instead.

Higley believes the AP1000 design is 100 to 1,000 times safer than those in place at current facilities in the U.S. It is one of five advanced designs recently certified or pending certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The AP1000 was approved in 2006, but certification for design amendments is still pending.

One hiccup in the verification process was a recent letter that U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Markey raised concerns about the AP1000’s shield building – the outer protective shell over the reactor. Because this building must support the weight of the water tanks, Markey was concerned that the structure may be too brittle to withstand a large earthquake or aircraft strike, according to his letter.

Higley said Monday that she had not yet seen the letter, but she predicted that, in view of Japan, concerns about earthquake safety would be given extra attention.

“You can bet that people are really taking a hard look at how the lessons from Japan apply to the United States,” Higley said.

Recent power reactor designs, however, reflect decades of research into safety and efficiency. But the industry, at least in the U.S., isn’t yet reaping such benefits.

“A lot of this hasn’t been able to be put into practice because there haven’t been new plants built,” Higley said.

The last nuclear power reactor to go online in the U.S. was the Watts Bar nuclear plant in Spring City, Tenn., in 1996. That plant was already in the works before the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979.

In other parts of the world, newer nuclear reactors are already being constructed. China is in the process of installing new reactors, including some featuring the AP1000 design.

As a result, Higley said, “the Chinese will have a fleet of extraordinarily safe nuclear facilities.”

In the U.S., 16 applications have been submitted for licenses to construct and operate new reactors, many at existing plant sites.

Melanie Lyons, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said her organization was encouraged by remarks made by President Obama last week. Obama announced that he had asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to perform a comprehensive review of the safety of U.S. nuclear plants. He said that U.S. nuclear plants were safe, however, and that nuclear energy would be a continued part of the country’s energy future.

“Here at home, nuclear power is also an important part of our own energy future, along with renewable sources like wind, solar, natural gas and clean coal. Our nuclear power plants have undergone exhaustive study, and have been declared safe for any number of extreme contingencies.”

Earlier, the NEI had released a statement saying all U.S. plants will verify that they meet safety requirements, including the ability to function without power and to withstand flood conditions.

This safety verification harkens back to 2001, when the country’s nuclear plants were all required to institute new safety measures after 9/11. All of the country’s 104 nuclear plants had to demonstrate that they could exist safely without any power, from external, backup or even backup-backup generators, said Rochelle Olson, a spokesperson for Energy Northwest, which operates the only nuclear power plant in the Pacific Northwest, near Richland, Wash.

Higley expects the upcoming conversation in the industry to not be about whether nuclear power is safe, but whether companies will choose to keep updating the safety features on existing reactors, or expend capital to build new ones. Such discussion, however, will have to wait until the dust settles overseas.

“Right now, people are very concerned about what’s going on in Japan. Once the situation there is brought more under control … I think people will come back to talking about nuclear as a viable option,” Higley said.

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The amount of plutonium at the Hanford nuclear waste site near Richland, Wash., is almost twice what was last reported and could seep into the Columbia River within the next 1,000 years, according to a report released earlier this week.

Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and a former Department of Energy employee, determined that 4 metric tons of plutonium was discarded at Hanford between 1944 and 2009, nearly two times the amount last reported by the DOE in 1996.

Of the 4 metric tons, Alvarez is most concerned about plutonium waste buried in the ground before 1973, before the Atomic Energy Commission required the waste be encased inside an underground repository. The cancer-causing material is migrating at a faster-than-anticipated rate toward the site’s subterranean groundwater, Alvarez said.

“The Department of Energy has been finding plutonium contamination at depths of 120 to 130 feet,” Alvarez said. “The groundwater starts at 200 feet. This dumped plutonium is likely to reach the shore of the Columbia River in less than 1,000 years at concentrations 238 times the federal limit for drinking water. It could render the near shore of the Columbia uninhabitable.”

After the federal government decommissioned the nuclear reactors at Hanford in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the DOE in the late 1980s began a cleanup effort at Hanford to reduce contamination at the site and stabilize the hazardous materials stored there.

CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Co., the contractor in charge of cleanup at the site, is working with subcontractor Skanska USA to build a multimillion-dollar groundwater treatment facility to treat water at a 5-square mile contaminated area  known as the Central Plateau, where a waste reprocessing facility once operated. The plan is to draw groundwater from 30 wells drilled at the site in 2009 and send the water to the groundwater treatment facility to be cleansed. Once the water is clean, it will be pumped back into the ground.

Despite pumping and treating 85 million gallons of groundwater per month, CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Co. estimates it will take 25 years of facility operations to treat all of the contaminated groundwater. Because the migration of the contaminated groundwater is far deeper than previously thought, Alvarez said that proper treatment of the area would require more equipment and money. Dee Millikin, spokeswoman for CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Co. said that for now, the cleanup plan is the same.

“Our work schedule has not changed,” Millikin said. “We plan to continue to support the (Department of Energy’s) plan and goals at Hanford.”

The Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future is visiting Hanford this week to tour the site and meet with elected officials and community groups to receive input on what to do with used nuclear fuel and waste at Hanford, according to John Kotek, staff director for the commission.

Alvarez also is at Hanford this week to give input and answer questions about his report, which was compiled using the DOE’s own documents on Hanford. When environmental cleanup at Hanford concludes, the DOE plans to leave in the ground approximately 0.7 metric tons of plutonium disposed before 1970. But Alvarez said that action is highly inadvisable, and added that all of the waste should be removed from the site and stored at a geological disposal site in New Mexico.

“I’m not certain this is something the Department of Energy wants to undertake,” Alvarez said. “It’s going to mean the cleanup is more expensive, and there is bureaucratic pressure to keep expenses down. I’d like to engage in a dialogue with them about how we can do this.”

“The figures presented in (Alvarez’s) paper are being reviewed,” said Geoffrey Tyree, spokesman for the DOE’s Richland operations office. “It’s too soon to know what, if any, impact it could have on the cleanup.”

Gerry Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, a Hanford watchdog group, agrees with Alvarez that the waste cannot remain at Hanford in the long term. He too is at Hanford this week to appeal to the commission to find a stable resting place for Hanford’s hazardous materials.

“This stuff has a half-life of 24,000 years,” Pollet said. “You don’t just put it back in a shallow landfill.”

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It was only three words in an hour-long State of the Union speech last Wednesday, but President Obama’s mention of “nuclear power plants” materialized this week as a request for the Department of Energy‘s Office of Nuclear Energy to receive an $844.6 million chunk of the federal energy budget.

About half of that money would go toward research and development. That is good news for universities such as Oregon State University, which is currently constructing a new nuclear reactor test facility to study the effects of cooling reactors with helium instead of water.

But Oregonians may have hard time swallowing the idea of the nation’s use of nuclear energy being expanded, according to Robert Grott, executive director of the Northwest Environmental Business Council. The state hasn’t had an active nuclear reactor since 1992, when operations ceased at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant.

“The move to explore nuclear energy is going to go forward, and fairly strongly so, in the U.S.,” Grott said. “But I don’t think we’ll see it in Oregon. There’s too much popular resistance.”

It is illegal for any new reactors to be built in Oregon. Voters in the 1980s approved a ballot measure to ban construction of any new nuclear power plants in the state without federally approved waste facilities. This followed the discovery of major building construction errors at Trojan, Oregon’s only commercial nuclear power plant. And after documents were leaked from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that said Trojan may be unsafe to operate, the plant was shut down and its 499-foot-tall cooling tower was demolished.

But Brian Woods, professor of nuclear engineering at OSU, said that even though construction of new nuclear reactors in Oregon is unlikely, nuclear energy shouldn’t be ruled out completely.

“Nuclear should have a place at the table as an environmentally friendly alternative energy,” Woods said. “It produces no greenhouse gases. It shouldn’t be all nuclear, because we should have a diverse energy portfolio.”

“On the surface (nuclear energy is) attractive for a lower state carbon footprint,” Grott said. “But what does it look like on a life cycle? Dealing with the implications of mining and disposing uranium could lessen some of the positive estimates.”

Nevertheless, research into potential uses for nuclear power continues in Oregon. OSU’s radiation center is home to a 1.1-megawatt TRIGA Mark II research reactor. Reed College also has a research reactor, which is run mostly by students. But much of the research taking place at university reactors has to do with other uses for nuclear power, not just energy production.

This year, the OSU’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics will construct a new building to house a one-quarter-scale reactor cooled by helium. The reactor won’t use nuclear fuel, but its use of helium could lead to a safer, more efficient reactor in the future, according to Woods.

“The advantage of using helium instead of water is you could run the reactor at higher temperatures and make electricity more efficiently,” Woods said. “Traditionally, reactors are cooled by water.”

Reactors cooled by water can achieve only 33 percent efficiency, while a helium cooled reactor could achieve 45 percent efficiency, Woods said. And the process of using helium has another welcome side effect.

“We may be able to use the higher temperatures from the reactor to make hydrogen relatively cheaply,” Woods said. “Hydrogen production is fairly expensive to do on a large scale, but using hydrogen in lieu of gasoline in vehicles means no greenhouse gases.”

Woods hopes the federal government’s new focus on nuclear energy will mean more money for his program, even if it doesn’t mean more nuclear power in Oregon.

Grott said Oregon will be in dire need of a new energy source in the not-so-distant future. Portland General Electric plans to phase out the use of coal at its Boardman Power Plant by 2020. The plant generates 15 percent of the power PGE delivers to its customers.

“It’s going to be hard for us to turn our backs on any sources of energy, especially if we reject coal,” Grott said. “I don’t think people realize how dependent we are on coal. We can’t get enough renewable energy fast enough to meet our needs. We haven’t had to make any hard choices yet.”

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