Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant have Problems Due to Jelly Fish

In Japan, it was a monstrous earthquake and tsunami that brought down the Fukushima nuclear plant. In California, it’s a tiny, jellyfish-like sea creature called salp that’s causing problems at the Diablo Canyon atomic plant.
An invasion of salp has prompted Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to temporarily shut down a nuclear reactor at Diablo Canyon, in Avila Beach, San Luisa Obispo County, on the central California coast.
A giant swarm of the transluscent barrel-shaped organisms this week clogged intake screens that are used to keep marine life out of the seawater that is used as a coolant for the nuclear plant.

---

On Wednesday, PG&E officials reduced power output at the Unit 2 reactor, then decided to shut it down altogether “until conditions improve at the intake structure.” The plant’s other reactor, Unit 1, had already been shut down earlier in the week for a planned refueling and maintenance outage.

Advertise | AdChoices

“Safety being the number one priority, there was such an influx of salp and you need ocean water to cool the reactors,” PG&E spokesman Tom Cuddy told msnbc.com on Friday. “At that point we made a conservative decision to safely shut down the unit.”
PG&E owns and operates the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, whose two reactors together produce approximately 2,300 net megawatts of electricity – enough to serve nearly 3 million northern and central California homes.
Cuddy said he wasn’t sure when the Unit 1 reactor would come back online.
“We’ll turn the unit on to full power when it’s safe to do so – when the salps leave,” he said. “The bottom line is we’re taking a methodical and conservative approach.”
Lara Uselding, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees reactor safety and security, said the plant is not in any danger.
“It’s not a normal operation condition, but the plant is safe and all the systems operated as designed,” she said.
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/27/11432974-diablo-canyon-nuclear-plant-in-california-knocked-offline-by-jellyfish-like-creature-called-salp?lite

Iran Haults sale of Oil to French and British Companies

Iran has halted oil sales to British and French companies, the nation's oil ministry has said.

A spokesman was reported as saying on the ministry's website that Iran would "sell our oil to new customers".

European Union member states had earlier agreed to stop importing Iranian crude from 1 July.

The move is intended to pressure Tehran to stop enriching uranium, which can be used for civilian nuclear purposes but also to build warheads.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful, but the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency says it has information suggesting Iran has carried out tests "relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device".

Sunday's statement on the oil ministry website was attributed to spokesman Ali Reza Nikzad Rahbar.

BBC world affairs correspondent Peter Biles says it appears to be another act of retaliation in the showdown between Iran and the West.

The French news agency AFP says the decision is not expected to have a big impact. Last year France bought only 3% of its oil - 58,000 barrels per day (b/d) - from Iran and the UK imported even less Iranian oil. A UK government official told the BBC there would be "no impact on UK energy security".

Some Iranian media had announced on Wednesday that Iran had stopped oil exports to the Netherlands, Greece, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy in retaliation for the EU's oil embargo, but this was later denied by the oil ministry.

The EU oil embargo, agreed last month, was phased so member states that were relatively dependent on Iranian crude - notably Greece, Spain and Italy - had enough time to find alternative sources.

The bloc currently buys about 20% of Iran's oil exports, which account for a majority of government revenue.

However, Iran's Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi said that a cut in exports to Europe would not hurt Tehran.

Oil industry sources quoted by Reuters news agency say Iran's top oil buyers in Europe have already started reducing purchases of Iranian crude.

Last year Iran supplied more than 700,000 barrels per day (b/d) to the EU and Turkey, but by the start of this year that had dropped to about 650,000 b/d, Reuters reported on Thursday.

France's energy giant Total has stopped buying Iranian crude and Royal Dutch Shell, one of the biggest purchasers of Iranian oil, has cut back sharply, market sources told Reuters.

According to Reuters estimates, Tupras of Turkey was the biggest European customer for Iranian oil in 2011, taking about 200,000 b/d, followed by Total (100,000 b/d), Shell (100,000 b/d), Hellenic of Greece (80,000 b/d) and Cepsa of Spain (70,000 b/d).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17089953

Nuke Plant in Minnesota Leaks Tritium

Xcel Energy Inc.’s Prairie Island nuclear plant in Minnesota released radioactive water in a leak from its condenser system.

The 27 gallons (102 liters) of condensate was released from a steam system overflow vent Feb. 3 and return pumps failed, causing a spill onto the ground at the plant 40 miles (64 kilometers) southeast of Minneapolis, Mary Sandok, a spokeswoman for Xcel, said in an e-mail. The 551-megawatt Unit 1 and the 545-megawatt Unit 2 are operating at full power.

The release contained 15,000 picocuries per liter of tritium, a low-level radioactive form of hydrogen, according to a filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Environmental Protection Agency’s drinking water standard for tritium allows 20,000 picocuries per liter, the NRC says on itswebsite.

“Plant management has shut down the steam heating system while it investigates the matter, identifies the cause of the pump failure and corrects the equipment deficiencies,” Sandok said. “The overflow did not impact operations at the plant and there was no risk to the public or employees.”

The condenser system turns steam, which is heated by the reactor to drive turbines that produce electricity, back into water. The incident, which occurred in a warehouse being heating by the steam, follows a leak of sodium hypochlorite and other chemicals at the plant Jan. 1. Bleach is a solution of sodium hypochlorite.

The release also included methoxypropylamine, ammonia and hydrazine, the filing showed. The plant near Red Wing generates enough to power nearly 1 million homes, according to Xcel.

Tritium is produced in the upper atmosphere and falls to the ground in rain water, according to the NRC. It is also a byproduct of nuclear plants, a weak type of radiation that doesn’t penetrate the skin, the federal agency said.

Critics of nuclear energy say tritium causes cancer and gets into drinking water from leaky pipes at nuclear plants.

Nuclear Plants Pose threat to Illinois Drinking Water

CHICAGO — The drinking water for 652,000 people in Illinois could be at risk of radioactive contamination from a leak or accident at a local nuclear power plant, says a new study released Jan. 24 by the Illinois Public Interest Research Group Education Fund (Illinois PIRG).
Brian Imus, Illinois PIRG state director, explained: “The danger of nuclear power is too close to home. Nuclear power plants in Illinois pose a risk to drinking water for more than 600,000 Illinoisans. An accident like the one in Fukushima, Japan, or a leak could spew cancer-causing radioactive waste into our drinking water.”
The nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, last year drew a spotlight on the many risks associated with nuclear power. After the disaster, airborne radiation left areas around the plant uninhabitable, and even contaminated drinking water sources near Tokyo, 130 miles from the plant.
According to the new report, “Too Close to Home: Nuclear Power and the Threat to Drinking Water,” the drinking water for 652,00 people in Illinois is within 50 miles of an active nuclear power plant — the distance the Nuclear Regulatory Commission uses to measure risk to food and water supplies.
Dr. Sam Epstein, a medical doctor and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, said: “This is an important study that underscores the dramatic risks nuclear plants pose to our health. Any radiation from a nuclear plant in Illinois would increase the risk of cancer and other serious illnesses.”
Radiation from a disaster like the one in Fukushima can contaminate drinking water and food supplies, as well as harm our health. But disaster or no disaster, a common leak at a nuclear power plant can also threaten the drinking water for millions of people. As our nuclear facilities get older, leaks are more common. In fact, 75 percent of U.S. nuclear plants have leaked tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that can cause cancer and genetic defects.
In December 2005, investigators found tritium in a drinking water well at a home near Braidwood Nuclear Generating Station in Illinois. Levels of tritium above the safe drinking water standard were found near the plant, and much higher levels were detected on the plant grounds. The leak was eventually traced to a pipe carrying normally non-radioactive water away for discharge.
David Kraft, director of the Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, a nuclear power watchdog organization, said: “Tritium should be considered a major problem issue with nuclear plants. Especially among the Great Lakes region’s 33 nuclear reactors, and especially with the Canadian CANDU reactors, which belch out many more times the tritium than do the U.S. reactors.”
Local bodies of water also play a critical role in cooling nuclear reactors and are at risk of contamination. In the case of the Fukushima meltdown, large quantities of seawater were pumped into the plant to cool it, and contaminated seawater then leaked and was dumped back into the ocean, carrying radioactivity from the plant with it. The Mississippi River provides cooling water for the Quad Cities Nuclear Plant in Illinois and could be at risk.
“With nuclear power, there’s too much at risk and the dangers are too close to home,” Imus said. “Illinoisans shouldn’t have to worry about getting cancer from drinking a glass of water.”
The report recommends the United States moves to a future without nuclear power by retiring existing plants, abandoning plans for new plants, and expanding energy efficiency and the production of clean, renewable energy such as wind and solar power.
To reduce the risks nuclear power poses to water supplies immediately, the report recommends completing a thorough safety review of U.S. nuclear power plants, requiring plant operators to implement recommended changes immediately and requiring nuclear plant operators to implement regular groundwater tests to catch tritium leaks, among other actions.
“There are far cleaner, cheaper and less-risky ways to get our energy,” said Max Muller with Environment Illinois. “Illinois and the United States should move away from nuclear power immediately and invest in safer alternatives such as efficiency and wind and solar power.”

http://rockrivertimes.com/2012/01/25/nuclear-plants-pose-risks-to-drinking-water-for-illinois/

Iran Leader Warns of War with U.S

(CNN) -- The supreme leader of Iran issued a blunt warning Friday that a war would be detrimental to the United States.
"You see every now and then in this way they say that all options are on the table. That means even the option of war," Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said during Friday prayers in Tehran. "This is how they make these threats against us.
"Well, these kinds of threats are detrimental to the U.S.," he said. "The war itself will be 10 times as detrimental to the U.S."
His comments came after stern comments Friday from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
"Today, unlike in the past, there is a broad global understanding that it is crucial to stop Iran becoming nuclearized and that no options should be taken off the table," he said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has come to the conclusion there is a growing likelihood Israel could attack Iran sometime this spring in an effort to destroy its suspected nuclear weapons program, according to a senior administration official.
The official declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the information.
The United States and its allies have warned that Iran is trying to make a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/03/world/meast/iran-warning/

Iranian nuclear scientist killed

On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.

Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.

"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes."

These "men on motorbikes" have been described as "assassins". But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: not just assassinations but terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.

Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance ("such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim"); moral distance ("the kind of intense belief in moral superiority"); and mechanical distance ("the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim").

Thus western liberals who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers – who have, incidentally, had the benefit of lawyers, trials and appeals – as state-sponsored murder fall quiet as their states kill, with impunity, nuclear scientists, terror suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands. Yet a "targeted killing", human-rights lawyer and anti-drone activist Clive Stafford Smith tells me, "is just the death penalty without due process".

Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terror suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified. Crippled by fear and insecurity, we have sleepwalked into a situation where governments have arrogated to themselves the right to murder their enemies abroad.

Nor are we only talking about foreigners here. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaida supporter – and US citizen. On 30 September 2011, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another CIA-led drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both US citizens were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law").

An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be "placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions … There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate."

Should "secret panels" and "kill lists" be tolerated in a liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law? Did the founders of the United States intend for its president to be judge, jury and executioner? Whatever happened to checks and balances? Or due process?

Imagine the response of our politicians and pundits to a campaign of assassinations against western scientists conducted by, say, Iran or North Korea. When it comes to state-sponsored killings, the double standard is brazen. "Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them," George Orwell observed, "and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side".

But how many more of our values will we shred in the name of security? Once we have allowed our governments to order the killing of fellow citizens, fellow human beings, in secret, without oversight or accountability, what other powers will we dare deny them?

This isn't complicated; there are no shades of grey here. Do we disapprove of car bombings and drive-by shootings, or not? Do we consistently condemn state-sponsored, extrajudicial killings as acts of pure terror, no matter where in the world, or on whose orders, they occur? Or do we shrug our shoulders, turn a blind eye and continue our descent into lawless barbarism?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/16/iran-scientists-state-sponsored-murder?newsfeed=true