Radioactive gas escaped from a pipe in a building located next to the reactor on Tuesday evening, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said.

Since the equipment-housing building into which the gas leaked is not airtight, it is possible a "very, very low level," of radioactive material escaped into the environment, said NRC spokesman Victor Dricks.

Those traces would be "barely measurable against (existing) background levels," and would pose no danger to the public, he added.

The operator of the California nuclear plant, Southern California Edison Co. (SCE), said it was investigating the exact cause of the incident and that the reactor would not be used for several days.

At the time of the incident the other reactor at the California site was shut down for essential maintenance, but SCE said it had sufficient supplies to service its customers.

San Onofre produces enough energy to power 1.4 million homes, according to SCE.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Tokyo (AFP) Jan 31, 2012 - The UN's nuclear watchdog on Tuesday gave its seal of approval to Japan's reactor safety checks, but said utilities should beef up plans for managing disasters in the wake of the Fukushima meltdowns.

A delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is in the country at the government's invitation as officials look for ways to convince a deeply sceptical population that idled nuclear plants are safe to restart.

With just a handful of Japan's 54 reactors still operational, officials are nervously eyeing possible electricity shortfalls unless reactors are brought back online -- something that can only be done if local communities consent.

The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) asked the IAEA to assess the stringency of the so-called stress tests to which all reactors are subjected before being given the green light to resume operations.

"The conclusion of the team is that NISA's instructions and review process for the comprehensive safety assessments are generally consistent with IAEA safety standards," the delegation said in a statement.

But the watchdog said further tests of the reactors should also look at how the utilities operating them would deal with a worst-case scenario.

"NISA should ensure that in the secondary assessment the provisions for mitigation of severe accidents should be addressed more comprehensively," the report said.

NISA should make sure companies "develop comprehensive accident management programmes ... in the area of severe accident management," it said.

The mission also urged Tokyo to engage with people living in the shadow of nuclear plants as it tries to convince them the technology is safe.

The stress tests were introduced as a way of determining how reactors would cope with the impact of large-scale natural disasters after meltdowns and explosions at Fukushima Daiichi caused by last March's earthquake and tsunami.

Radiation was scattered over a large area and made its way into the oceans, air and food chain in the weeks and months after the disaster, reversing the mood among Japan's once nuclear-friendly public.

"In any of these processes, the more information can be exchanged with the people in the local vicinity, the better," the delegation's team leader James Lyons told a news conference.

But he noted that Japan, not the IAEA, has to decide on whether to restart nuclear power plants in the country, saying: "That's not part of our decision making process."

The energy-hungry nation has virtually no natural resources of its own and relied on atomic power for around a third of its electricity before March 11.

Since the disaster the vast bulk of nuclear plants have been shut down as local authorities blocked their being restarted following routine safety checks or maintenance.

Japan has instead had to massively ramp up imports of fossil fuels and curb power useage as it tries to make up the shortfall in power generation.

More than 19,000 people died in the natural disaster, but the nuclear emergency -- the world's worst since Chernobyl a quarter of a century ago -- has not directly claimed any lives.

However, tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes around the plant as radiation levels rocketed, with many not knowing when -- or even if -- they will be allowed to return.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Paris (AFP) Jan 31, 2012 - Dismantling France's nuclear reactors and storing their radioactive waste will eventually cost around 79 billion euros ($103.5 billion), the national audit office said on Tuesday.

It put the cost of dismantling France's 58 electricity-generating reactors, run by the state firm EDF, at 18 billion euros.

Storing their highly radioactive waste at a long-term site deep underground would cost an additional 28.4 billion euros.

Annual maintenance costs will more than double, from 1.5 billion euros on average in 2008-10, to 3.7 billion euros by 2025, partly as a cost of incorporating post-Fukushima safety measures, it said.

France derives three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear, the highest proportion of any country in the world.

Debate over its nuclear programme has been spurred by the Fukushima disaster and the future of reactors built after the 1970s oil shocks, most of which are now 30 years old or more.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Davis CA (SPX) Jan 30, 2012 - Japan used seawater to cool nuclear fuel at the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant after the tsunami in March 2011 - and that was probably the best action to take at the time, says Professor Alexandra Navrotsky of the University of California, Davis.

But Navrotsky and others have since discovered a new way in which seawater can corrode nuclear fuel, forming uranium compounds that could potentially travel long distances, either in solution or as very small particles. The research team published its work Jan. 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is a phenomenon that has not been considered before," said Alexandra Navrotsky, distinguished professor of ceramic, earth and environmental materials chemistry. "We don't know how much this will increase the rate of corrosion, but it is something that will have to be considered in future."

Japan used seawater to avoid a much more serious accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, and Navrotsky said, to her knowledge, there is no evidence of long-distance uranium contamination from the plant.

Uranium in nuclear fuel rods is in a chemical form that is "pretty insoluble" in water, Navrotsky said, unless the uranium is oxidized to uranium-VI - a process that can be facilitated when radiation converts water into peroxide, a powerful oxidizing agent.

Peter Burns, professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame and a co-author of the new paper, had previously made spherical uranium peroxide clusters, rather like carbon "buckyballs," that can dissolve or exist as solids.

In the new paper, the researchers show that in the presence of alkali metal ions such as sodium - for example, in seawater - these clusters are stable enough to persist in solution or as small particles even when the oxidizing agent is removed.

In other words, these clusters could form on the surface of a fuel rod exposed to seawater and then be transported away, surviving in the environment for months or years before reverting to more common forms of uranium, without peroxide, and settling to the bottom of the ocean. There is no data yet on how fast these uranium peroxide clusters will break down in the environment, Navrotsky said.

Navrotsky and Burns worked with the following co-authors: postdoctoral researcher Christopher Armstrong and project scientist Tatiana Shvareva, UC Davis; May Nyman, Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, N.M.; and Ginger Sigmon, University of Notre Dame. The U.S. Department of Energy supported the project.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Tokyo (AFP) Jan 29, 2012 - The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog said the agency will open a branch office in Fukushima to monitor efforts to contain the world's worst atomic energy accident since Chernobyl, a report said Saturday.

The government has struggled with public trust over the nuclear energy issue since the March 11 disaster and had asked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to open an office, which will help share information on the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

"We have told the Japanese government that the IAEA stands ready to cooperate," the agency's chief Yukiya Amano told Kyodo News on Saturday in the Swiss resort of Davos, where the World Economic Forum meeting is being held.

"While the headquarters in Vienna will continue to deal with issues related to the decontamination and disposal of spent nuclear fuels, we'll be able to have close contact (with people in Fukushima by opening a local office)."

The IAEA intends to open the office by the end of this year, he added.

Tokyo wants an international seal of approval for the energy-hungry country's nuclear industry to bolster its faltering efforts at reassuring the public it is safe to resume atomic operations.

The vast majority of Japan's 54 commercial nuclear reactors are offline because popular opposition has prevented them being restarted in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The disaster, triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, contaminated the environment and forced tens of thousands of residents around the Fukushima nuclear site, in northeast Japan, to evacuate their homes.

Many still do not know if or when they will be able to return.

Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba, whose parliamentary constituency is in Fukushima, told residents last week that he was pushing for an office after requests from local leaders.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Albuquerque NM (SPX) Jan 27, 2012 - Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste.

The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. "This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture," said chemist Tina Nenoff of Sandia's Surface and Interface Sciences Department.

The discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents. A characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel can be reprocessed to recover fissile materials and provide fresh fuel for nuclear power plants. Countries such as France, Russia and India are reprocessing spent fuel.

The process also reduces the volume of high-level wastes, a key concern of the Sandia researchers. "The goal is to find a methodology for highly selective separations that result in less waste being interred," Nenoff said.

Part of the challenge of reprocessing is to separate and isolate radioactive components that can't be burned as fuel. The Sandia team focused on removing iodine, whose isotopes have a half-life of 16 million years, from spent fuel.

They studied known materials, including silver-loaded zeolite, a crystalline, porous mineral with regular pore openings, high surface area and high mechanical, thermal and chemical stability. Various zeolite frameworks can trap and remove iodine from a stream of spent nuclear fuel, but need added silver to work well.

"Silver attracts iodine to form silver iodide," Nenoff said. "The zeolite holds the silver in its pores and then reacts with iodine to trap silver iodide."

But silver is expensive and poses environmental problems, so the team set out to engineer materials without silver that would work like zeolites but have higher capacity for the gas molecules. They explored why and how zeolite absorbs iodine, and used the critical components discovered to find the best MOF, named ZIF-8.

"We investigated the structural properties on how they work and translated that into new and improved materials," Nenoff said.

MOFs are crystalline, porous materials in which a metal center is bound to organic molecules by mild self-assembly chemical synthesis. The choice of metal and organic result in a very specific final framework.

The trick was to find a MOF highly selective for iodine. The Sandia researchers took the best elements of the zeolite Mordenite - its pores, high surface area, stability and chemical absorption - and identified a MOF that can separate one molecule, in this case iodine, from a stream of molecules. The MOF and pore-trapped iodine gas can then be incorporated into glass waste for long-term storage.

The Sandia team also fabricated MOFs, made of commercially available products, into durable pellets. The as-made MOF is a white powder with a tendency to blow around. The pellets provide a stable form to use without loss of surface area, Nenoff said.

Sandia has applied for a patent on the pellet technology, which could have commercial applications.

The Sandia researchers are part of the Off-Gas Sigma Team, which is led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and studies waste-form capture of volatile gasses associated with nuclear fuel reprocessing. Other team members - Pacific Northwest, Argonne and Idaho national laboratories - are studying other volatile gases such as krypton, tritium and carbon.

The project began six years ago and the Sigma Team was formalized in 2009. It is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy.

Sandia's iodine and MOFs research was featured in two recent articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society authored by Nenoff and team members Dorina Sava, Mark Rodriguez, Jeffery Greathouse, Paul Crozier, Terry Garino, David Rademacher, Ben Cipiti, Haiqing Liu, Greg Halder, Peter Chupas, and Karena Chapman. Chupas, Halder and Chapman are from Argonne.

"The most important thing we did was introduce a new class of materials to nuclear waste remediation," said Sava, postdoctoral appointee on the project.

Nenoff said another recent paper in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research shows a one-step process that incorporates MOFs with iodine in a low-temperature, glass waste form. "We have a volatile off-gas capture using a MOF and we have a durable waste form," Nenoff said.

Nenoff and her colleagues are continuing their research into new and optimized MOFs for enhanced volatile gas separation and capture.

"We've shown that MOFs have the capacity to capture and, more importantly, retain many times more iodine than current materials technologies," said Argonne's Chapman.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Paris (AFP) Jan 26, 2012 - French nuclear energy giant Areva said Thursday its order book increased by 3.1 percent last year to 45.6 billion euros ($59.8 billion) despite Fukushima nuclear disaster hitting sales.

Sales in 2011 dipped by 2.6 percent to 8.87 billion euros, with canceled orders in the wake of the disaster at the Japanese nuclear plant totalling 464 million euros, Areva said in a statement.

Fourth quarter sales held up even better, showing just a 0.5 percent decline to 2.9 billion euros.

However the reactor fuel unit took a 12.6 percent hit over the year due to the halting of operations at several Japanese nuclear plants following the March 2011 Fukushima disaster.

The services unit also saw sales drop 3.6 percent as design and construction projects were slowed in several countries.

The sales results were broadly in line with guidance Areva provided last month when the company said it expected to end with an operating loss of 1.4 to 1.6 billion euros.

Areva announced last month 2.4 billion euros in provisions, said it planned to sell 1.2 billion euros in assets, slash investments by one-third over the next five years to 7.7 billion euros and squeeze costs to regain its competitive footing.

'No radiation fears' in Fukushima for Louvre works
Tokyo (AFP) Jan 26, 2012 - A Fukushima museum official on Thursday played down concerns in France about the possible contamination of artworks soon to be loaned to the nuclear hit region by the Louvre.

The Paris museum plans to send 24 pieces to Japan, including to Fukushima prefecture, home to the stricken nuclear plant, in a show of solidarity with the disaster-hit country.

The touring exhibition will run from April 27 to September 17 in Japan's Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, a Louvre official told a joint news conference with Japanese museum officials at the French embassy in Tokyo.

The artworks -- paintings, sculptures, drawings and other works from different eras and civilizations -- will arrive on July 28 at the Fukushima prefectural Museum of Art some 60 kilometres (37 miles) away from the tsunami-hit nuclear power plant.

Tetsuo Sakai, head of the Fukushima museum, said radiation levels inside the exhibition room averaged 0.05 microsieverts per hour -- a long way below government-mandated evacuation levels.

However, he acknowledged radiation levels outside the facility have been much higher, still hovering at around 1.0 microsievert per hour.

Museum officials are now removing a contaminated lawn as part of their efforts to reduce levels of radioactivity ahead of the exhibition, he added.

"With these efforts, radiation levels will decline further and further," Sakai told the news conference.

The show was organised as a gesture of solidarity with the Japanese, after last year's massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the northeast of Japan, sparking the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Louvre official said.

"The proposed project is going to encourage Fukushima people, telling them, 'You are not alone'," the Fukushima museum chief said.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Mexico City (AFP) Jan 25, 2012 - Mexican environmental activists on Wednesday slammed the alleged threat from a Canadian gold mining project that would lie only two miles (three kilometers) from a nuclear power plant.

"We're worried to see the 'White Horse' open mine project, which threatens national security by being situated only three kilometers from the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant ... which could increase the risk of a nuclear accident," said a statement from several environmental groups, including Greenpeace Mexico.

The project also threatens cultural, historical and natural heritage in the area, located between the towns of Alto Lucero and Actopan in eastern Veracruz state, according to the groups.

Financed by Canada's Gold Group via its subsidiary Candymin S.A., the mine project still needs approval from Mexico's environment ministry.

Plans are for the mine to stretch over 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares) and produce some 100,000 ounces (2.8 million grams) of gold per year.

Laguna Verde, Mexico's only nuclear power station, produces 4,782 gigawatts per year or around three percent of national electricity consumption.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Washington (AFP) Jan 24, 2012 - The Barack Obama administration has shifted policy on planned international nuclear cooperation agreements by withdrawing a demand that Jordan and Vietnam give up their rights to produce nuclear fuel, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting senior US officials, said Obama's administration took the decision during advanced negotiations with those countries because it feared the demand would undermine US interests.

Not only could US firms lose the chance to build nuclear reactors overseas but Washington could find it harder to influence the nonproliferation policies of developing countries, according to the officials quoted by the daily.

The decision is a shift in policy from 2009 when the Obama administration signed a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), it said.

Under the terms of the deal, the UAE was barred from enriching uranium domestically or reprocessing spent plutonium fuel, both of which can be used to produce atomic weapons.

Obama had cited the arrangement as the "gold standard" for future nuclear cooperation agreements.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Tokyo (AFP) Jan 23, 2012 - Japan is asking the UN's nuclear agency to set up a permanent office in Fukushima to monitor its efforts to contain the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

The International Atomic Energy Agency was "carefully considering" the request, said James Lyons, who is leading a team of IAEA experts reviewing Japan's safety tests for idled reactors.

Tokyo wants an international seal of approval for the energy-hungry country's nuclear industry to bolster its faltering efforts at reassuring the public it is safe to resume atomic operations.

The vast majority of Japan's 54 commercial nuclear reactors are offline because popular opposition is preventing their being restarted in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The disaster, triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, contaminated the environment and forced tens of thousands of residents around the Fukushima nuclear site, in northeast Japan, to evacuate their homes.

Many still do not know if or when they will be able to return.

Utility companies say Japan will experience severe power shortages if nuclear electricity production is not re-started.

"We are making contact with the International Atomic Energy Agency to see what's possible after we received requests from Fukushima that it hoped IAEA will have a permanent presence in the area," a Japanese diplomat told AFP, under customary condition of anonymity.

Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba, whose parliamentary constituency is in Fukushima, told residents on Sunday that he was making the push after requests from local leaders.

"We are calling on IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano for the international agency's constant presence," he said in a speech, according to Jiji Press.

The announcement coincided with a visit by a 10-member team of IAEA experts led by Lyons, the agency's director of nuclear installation safety.

"That's a very important request that we received and it's something that is going to take careful consideration by the IAEA," Lyons told Japanese reporters. "That consideration is underway now."

At the request of the Japanese government, his team will review the methodology of Japan's "stress test" before Tokyo approves any nuclear reactor re-starts.

The Vienna-based IAEA has offices around the world -- including in Tokyo -- but it does not normally have permanent bases to monitor commercial reactor sites.

Tokyo has struggled with public trust on the nuclear issue since the disaster.

It appeared to have suffered a further setback on Monday when it was revealed the body set up to manage the unfolding atomic catastrophe at Fukushima kept no records of its meetings.

The government's nuclear disaster task force, headed by then prime minister Naoto Kan and including all of his ministers, has no minutes of the meetings that approved the evacuation of people living near the crippled reactors.

The Cabinet Office, in charge of keeping all public records, said it has told the agency to study what it can do to create a written record of the decision-making processes.

]]> Fri, 03 FEB 2012 13:08:10 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D