Japan: New emergency standards for nuclear power plants

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan is updating their emergency standards, in their effort to avoid such incidents from ever taking place. The Tokai Daini nuclear plant showed off their new preparedeness measures this week during a training exercise that assumed a complete and total loss of external power in the event that the plant was hit by a 32-foot-high tsunami (a situation much like what occurred at the Fukushima plant).

The Tokai plant has 20-foot-tall walls to prevent a tsunami from knocking out its pump system. To prevent the same situation occurring at the Tokai plant, its owner, Japan Atomic Power Company, has bought a portable truck-mounted electric generator that can be hooked into the system to restore cooling capacity. In the scenario where the plant's pumps are also disabled, the training included workers using pump vehicles to draw water directly from the ocean into the plant's cooling system to cool reactors in an emergency.

Old technology in Iranian nuclear plant may repeat the March 11 disaster

Iran started the construction of a nuclear plant in an earthquake stricken area of Busher 17 Km (11 miles) from Busher in 1975, together with Germany and further finalized by the Russians. Although it is not ready and is not producing energy yet, the nuclear fuel has been loaded into the plant in November 2010, technically making it a nuclear facility. Fears appeared that the old German components (of which 10% are still in use) and the ones delivered by Russia that took over the construction in 1990 can no longer guarantee the nuclear safety.

Problems have already been reported early this year when one of the reactor’s four main cooling pumps originally delivered by Germany was damaged by metal particles improperly cleaned inside that imposed the removal of the fuel core. Russian and Iranian experts are not worried that a disaster similar to the one in Japan could repeat and consider that 1975 components in the Busher plant cannot be compared with 50 years old parts of the Fukushima equipments. Nevertheless, many doubt that Russian designed nuclear plants could resist better than the Japanese ones in case of a serious tremor. Fukushima uses a “Chernobyl type” technology and after the partial melting of the uranium rods in the aftermath of the earthquake, the metallic glasses it used to increase safety were destroyed. Busher uses a totally different technology, more reliable.

In several months time the nuclear plant will be fully functional and the Russian specialists are supposed to leave Iran. Nobody knows if the Iranian engineers are ready to take over and keep the nuclear plant at the needed level of security.