Nuclear Reactor

From the shah through the ayatollahs and into the elected regime now battling theocrats to rule Iran, Iranians' quest for nuclear power has been a constant for 30 years. In a country with so much oil, their explanation that they need commercial reactors to generate electricity for homes and factories warrants skepticism, if not disbelief.

Southern California Edison built San Onofre's two nuclear reactors in about nine years, but tearing them down will be a technically complex, multibillion-dollar job completed over decades. It is likely that Edison first will mothball the plant, which under federal rules could keep its imposing imprint on the Orange-San Diego County coastline for another half-century. When the plant does come down, it will be a massive job. Tons of highly radioactive fuel now stored in pools will have to cool before the rods can be moved to concrete pads outdoors.

Another nuclear reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 facility in Japan has lost its emergency cooling capacity, according to the Associated Press, bringing to three the number of reactors at that facility to fall prey to Friday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake and tsunami. Added to failure of three reactors at Fukushima No. 2, the count is now six overall. So far, the only reactor that seems to pose an immediate risk of widespread danger is one of the two shut-down reactors at Fukushima No. 1, also known as Fukushima Daiichi, which was disabled by an explosion overnight that destroyed the building housing the reactor and the backup cooling system.

Re "Snubbed by Obama?," Opinion, Sept. 30 David Aaron Miller's apology for Obama not meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week is a clear indication of how Obama views Israel's predicament of not knowing what the U.S. will do regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions. Although the U.S. and the world would be adversely affected by a nuclear-armed Iran, Israel is more immediately and directly affected. The world castigated Israel for bombing Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, but many leaders later came to believe Israel did the right thing.

Iran on Tuesday began loading nuclear fuel rods into the core of its first nuclear power plant, bringing the facility a step closer to producing electricity, Iranian state television reported. The start of the weeks-long process lends credence to Iranian claims that a high-profile computer virus attack this year did not significantly postpone the launch of the nuclear plant near the southern city of Bushehr. After years of delay, the facility, built in part by Russian engineers, is scheduled to produce electricity early next year, after all 163 of its fuel rods are moved into the reactor core and undergo tests.

Attempts to control a nuclear reactor that exploded after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in northern Japan continued Sunday using sea water injections and steam releases to cool the reactor, authorities said. Photos: Scenes from the earthquake Friday's quake and tsunami left the No.1 reactor at Tokyo Electric Power Co's Fukushima Daiichi power plant with a crippled cooling system, causing the reactor temperature and pressure to increase. "We are doing the two things at the same time - venting air out of the reactor and supplying water into the reactor," Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said during a Sunday press conference broadcast and streamed live online by NHK. "Radiation released in the process is low enough not to affect people's health," Edano said.

Japan's Kansai Electric Power Co. said it restarted a nuclear reactor for commercial operation today for the first time since it was shut down after a fatal August 2004 accident. The No. 3 reactor at Mihama Nuclear Power Plant had been shut down after a corroded pipe ruptured and sprayed plant workers with boiling water and steam. Five were killed and six others injured, although no radiation was released.

France will build a second new-generation nuclear reactor, President Nicolas Sarkozy said, pledging a "new industrial revolution" in an era in which fossil fuels have grown too expensive. France, the country most reliant on nuclear power, has been building its first European Pressurized Reactor, or EPR, on the Normandy coast, and it is expected to go into service in 2012. EPR reactors are intended eventually to replace the aging reactors around the world.

PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas & Electric unit, California's largest utility, will extend refueling of a nuclear reactor by five days to check for leaks in steam-generator tubes, a spokesman said. Diablo Canyon 2 was taken out of service for refueling on Feb. 3. The plant, which can produce 1,100 megawatts, or enough power for 900,000 U.S. homes, is in Avila Beach, between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A decommissioned 1,000-ton nuclear reactor vessel finished its voyage up the Columbia River in Richland, Wash., docking safely just miles from a burial site for radioactive waste. It took about 36 hours for two tugs to bring the vessel, emptied of its uranium fuel, up 270 miles of river from the dismantled Trojan Nuclear Plant west of Portland, Ore.

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details. There's a party in the Asia Pacific, and the United States wants India to be its date. As U.S. foreign policy "pivots" away from the Middle East and Europe and toward Asia, U.S. officials are doing everything they can to cozy up to the nation that Mark Twain once called "the cradle of the human race. " America's courtship - a bipartisan effort - has included the great-power equivalent of sending flowers (civil nuclear technology underGeorge W. Bush)

KLEINENSIEL, Germany - When the German government shut down half the country's nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, followed two months later by a pledge to abandon nuclear power within a decade, environmentalists cheered. A year later, however, criticism of the nuclear shutdown is emerging from a surprising source: some of the very activists who pushed for the phaseout. They say poor planning of the shutdown and political opportunism by the government have actually worsened the toll on the environment in Germany, and Europe, at least in the short term.

The prospect of power shortages in Japan this summer, of stifling city apartments and manufacturing slowdowns, has divided a country still reeling from the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl over whether to restart some of its idled reactors. The government contends that the country can't afford not to resume nuclear energy production. The last operating nuclear reactor in Japan, on the northernmost main island of Hokkaido, will be taken off line May 5 for stress tests and safety improvements.

A consortium of utilities in the South won government approval Thursday to construct two new atomic energy reactors at an estimated cost of $14 billion, the strongest signal yet that the three-decade hiatus of nuclear plant construction is finally ending. Several new projects will test whether new technology and streamlined government licensing can help the industry avoid the economic and safety disasters that have tainted its past, nuclear experts say, though critics condemned the action by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

More than four months after it was crippled by an earthquake-generated tsunami, Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has stabilized and workers are on track to achieve a "cold shutdown" within six months, government and utility officials say. Officials made a positive prognosis this week after scaling several hurdles in decommissioning the facility, which was damaged March 11 when the tsunami disabled the plant's cooling system. The flooding led to partial meltdowns of the reactors, which released radioactivity into the atmosphere and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of nearby residents.

As a matter of fact, he is a nuclear engineer. And through all of the titles Albert Carnesale has taken on in the upper reaches of academia -- professor and provost of Harvard and dean of its Kennedy School, chancellor of UCLA, where he is still a professor -- one thread has been a constant: his work on the science and the political science of matters nuclear, both peaceable and belligerent. He now serves on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which presents its draft report to President Obama at the end of this month.

A Canadian nuclear reactor that normally supplies about a third of the world's technetium-99m for medical imaging came back online this week after a 15-month shutdown for repairs that severely impaired physicians' ability to perform many needed tests. The situation was made even worse by the shutdown of a second reactor in the Netherlands that also produced significant amounts of the radioisotope. That reactor is expected to reopen next month. The National Research Universal reactor in Chalk River, Canada, produces radioactive molybdenum-99, which has a half-life of only 66 hours and must be shipped immediately to hospitals and dispensing pharmacies throughout North America.

Iranian and Russian technicians Wednesday began testing the Islamic Republic's first nuclear reactor 35 years after on-and-off work started at the site near the Persian Gulf port city of Bushehr. Iranian state news media said the 1,000-megawatt plant was being tested without the enriched-uranium fuel rods that Russia had shipped for the controversial facility over the last year and a half.

After Svetlana Ivanova and her husband moved to this village in southwestern Russia 17 years ago, they laughed when they found out what locals called the $4 monthly payment for living in the contaminated Chernobyl zone: funeral money. Then one warm spring afternoon three years ago, her husband, Pyotr Ivanov, came home from a job-seeking trip to Moscow, put on a clean white shirt, stepped out into the garden "for a smoke" and hanged himself. "I remembered this sad joke when I buried my husband," she said.

Since the nuclear plant disaster in Fukushima in Japan, the stock of the company that designed the reactors, General Electric, has fluctuated less than $1 a share. Meanwhile, the operator of the facility, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has seen its share price plunge more than 70%. The explanation: Japanese law reportedly limits liability to the operator, not the designer, of a nuclear power plant. A year ago, we heard similar arguments about the limited exposure of BP in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.