Antinuclear

It creates a legal precedent and could fuel resistance to restarts, throwing into question whether the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be able to push ahead with them as swiftly as planned.

The government earlier asserted that the ruling, by the Fukui District Court, would have no impact on its plans.

Kepco announced Thursday it has appealed the lower court’s decision to the Kanazawa branch of the Nagoya High Court. There, the case could take two or three years to be decided……….

Kepco came under intense criticism from the Fukui court, which said the utility had made optimistic safety projections with no clear evidence. But in a move that could have ramifications nationwide, the court also ruled that 166 plaintiffs living within a 250-km radius of the Oi plant faced concrete dangers from the operation of nuclear power stations.

That could open the door to lawsuits from anyone living within 250 km of a nuclear plant, if the Fukui court’s decision is used as the basis for a claim that other utilities, as well as the Nuclear Regulation Authority, have created inadequate safety measures to deal with the possibility of an accident.

The entire Kansai region, most of Chubu, including Nagoya, much of Chugoku, including Hiroshima, and roughly a third of Shikoku lies within 250 km of the Oi plant.

Plaintiffs were particularly happy the court ruling included language that said providing electricity via nuclear plants is a mere economic activity, and as such has a lower priority than personal rights……..ww.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/05/22/national/oi-ruling-may-fuel-anti-nuclear-push/#.U4PbrnJdWik

Early thorium optimism. The energy potential of the element thorium was discovered in 1940 at the University of California at Berkeley, during the very early days of the US nuclear weapons program. Although thorium atoms do not split, researchers found that they will absorb neutrons when irradiated. After that a small fraction of the thorium then transmutes into a fissionable material—uranium 233—that does undergo fission and can therefore be used in a reactor or bomb.

By the early 1960’s, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had established a major thorium fuel research and development program, spurring utilities to build thorium-fueled reactors. Back then, the AEC was projecting that some 1,000 nuclear power reactors would dot the American landscape by the end of the 20th century, with a similar nuclear capacity abroad. As a result, the official reasoning held, world uranium supplies would be rapidly exhausted, and reactors that ran on the more-plentiful thorium would be needed.

With the strong endorsement of a congressionally created body, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the United States began a major effort in the early 1960s to fund a two-track research and development effort for a new generation of reactors that would make any uranium shortage irrelevant by producing more fissile material fuel than they consumed.

The first track was development of plutonium-fueled “breeder” reactors, which held the promise of producing electricity and 30 percent more fuel than they consumed. This effort collapsed in the United States in the early 1980’s because of cost and proliferation concerns and technological problems.  (The plutonium “fast” reactor program has been able to stay alive and still receives hefty sums as part of the Energy Department’s nuclear research and development portfolio.)

The second track—now largely forgotten—was based on thorium-fueled reactors. This option was attractive because thorium is far more abundant than uranium and holds the potential for producing an even larger amount of uranium 233 in reactors designed specifically for that purpose. In pursuing this track, the government produced a large amount of uranium 233, mainly at weapons production reactors. Approximately two tons of uranium 233 was produced, at an estimated total cost of $5.5 to $11 billion (2012 dollars), including associated cleanup costs.

The federal government established research and development projects to demonstrate the viability of uranium 233 breeder reactors in Minnesota, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. By 1977, however, the government abandoned pursuit of the thorium fuel cycle in favor of plutonium-fueled breeders, leading to dissent in the ranks of the AEC. Alvin Weinberg, the long-time director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was, in large part, fired because of his support of thorium over plutonium fuel.

By the late 1980’s, after several failed attempts to use it commercially, the US nuclear power industry also walked away from thorium. The first commercial nuclear plant to use thorium was Indian Point Unit I, a pressurized water reactor near New York City that began operation in 1962. Attempts to recover uranium 233 from its irradiated thorium fuel were described, however, as a “financial disaster.” The last serious attempt to use thorium in a commercial reactor was at the Fort St. Vrain plant in Colorado, which closed in 1989 after 10 years and hundreds of equipment failures, leaks, and fuel failures. There were four failed commercial thorium ventures; prior agreement makes the US government responsible for their wastes.

Where is the missing uranium 233? As it turned out, of course, the Atomic Energy Commission’s prediction of future nuclear capacity was off by an order of magnitude—the US nuclear fleet topped out at about 100, rather than 1,000 reactors—and the predicted uranium shortage never occurred. America’s experience with thorium fuels faded from public memory until 1996. Then, an Energy Department safety investigation found a national repository for uranium 233 in a building constructed in 1943 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The repository was in dreadful condition………

Uranium 233 compares favorably to plutonium in terms of weaponization; a critical mass of that isotope of uranium—about 6 kilograms, in its metal form—is about the same weight as a plutonium critical mass. Unlike plutonium, however, uranium 233 does not need implosion engineering to be used in a bomb. In fact, the US government produced uranium 233 in small quantities for weapons, and weapons designers conducted several nuclear weapons tests between 1955 and 1968 using uranium 233. Interest was renewed in the mid-1960s, but uranium 233 never gained wide use as a weapons material in the US military because of its high cost, associated with the radiation protection required to protect personnel from uranium 232, a highly radioactive contaminant co-produced with uranium 233.

For a terrorist, however, uranium 233 is a tempting theft target; it does not require advanced shaping and implosion technology to be fashioned into a workable nuclear device. The Energy Department recognizes this characteristic and requires any amount of more than two kilograms of uranium 233 to be maintained under its most stringent safeguards, to prevent “onsite assembly of an improvised nuclear device.” ……

The end of an unfortunate era. ………So ends America’s official experience with thorium, the wonder fuel. http://thebulletin.org/thorium-wonder-fuel-wasnt7156

China’s protracted crackdown on civil dissent deters local activists from taking the lead publicly on sensitive projects. Opposition can thus quickly turn into street protests despite new government initiatives to allow public feedback and that could prove a problem if public opinion sours on nuclear power.

Local governments often welcome the investment and jobs nuclear projects bring but disagreement among local officials can fuel protests. City officials’ unease over oil company Sinopec’s long-delayed paraxylene plant was a factor http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a6f10e96-e41c-11e3-a73a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz32rprEjFF