Free Republic

An alert has been declared at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County. Orange County Sheriff’s officials say that there was an incident at the plant at approximately 3:10 p.m. Tuesday, prompting an alert. Southern California Edison tells CBS 2 that the incident is “an ammonia leak that is being contained.” The leak occurred in a steam system used to drive the station’s turbines, SCE said. The leak is not nuclear. No radiation is currently escaping from the power plant, Lt. Roland Chacon said. The Orange County Emergency Operations Center has been activated. No evacuations have been...

Circulation cooling system hits another snag The newly installed reactor-cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has suffered another problem, as its water treatment equipment has stopped. The system that decontaminates and re-uses radioactive water from the facilities is believed to be the key to the stable cooling of the reactors. But Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says the decontamination equipment stopped automatically on Thursday afternoon when the alarm went off. TEPCO says the problem turned out to be a malfunction of a gas exhaust on a French-made device that removes radioactive material from the water. The...

N-reactor cooling failed before tsunami The Yomiuri Shimbun An emergency cooling system of the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant malfunctioned after the March 11 earthquake and before the tsunami hit, data released by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. have revealed. According to a large cache of data concerning plant operations from March 11 to 14 released Monday by TEPCO, the No. 1 reactor's isolation condenser, which operates on direct-current power, began to malfunction shortly after the Great East Japan Earthquake struck the Tohoku and Kanto regions. /snip According to the data, the No....

Fukushima seawater radioactivity rises inside containment fence TOKYO, April 16, Kyodo The level of radioactive substances in seawater increased sharply overnight inside a containment fence installed near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Saturday. /snip Meanwhile, the utility is considering installing circulating water cooling systems for reactors and spent fuel storage pools outside the reactor buildings at the plant in a bid to bring it under control, sources familiar with the matter said. The new systems would cool nuclear fuel inside the reactors and spent fuel pools in a stable manner. They would...