March 28, 2012 - Windsor Star -
Ukraine to build new case over Chernobyl - The construction of a new sarcophagus above the defunct Chernobyl Atomic Power Station will begin on April 26, the 26th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster, Ukraine said Tuesday. Preliminary work on the 20,000-ton structure designed to contain threats from radioactivity began earlier this year. The disaster contaminated large parts of Europe, especially the then-Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko said the new enclosure should "be completed and installed above the damaged reactor in mid-2015 as expected." After the disaster, the Soviet authorities put up a supposedly temporary concrete shelter to protect the destroyed reactor, but there were persistent doubts as to its durability. The new structure is estimated to cost $2 billion.
March 28, 2012 - Los Angeles Times - San Onofre: Report blames generator design changes for shutdown - Advocacy group Friends of the Earth released a report Tuesday claiming design changes in newly installed steam generators at the San Onofre nuclear plant led to issues that have shut down the plant for the last two months. The report prepared by Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry executive and chief engineer of the energy consulting company Fairewinds Associates, who is critical of the nuclear power industry, also suggested that San Onofre's operator, Southern California Edison, sidestepped federal review of the new generators. The four steam generators at San Onofre were replaced in the last two years in a $671-million project to be paid for by ratepayers. The new equipment was intended to last until the plant's license expires in 2022, but in recent months officials have discovered unexpected wear on hundreds of steam generator tubes that carry radioactive water in both of the plant's working reactors. One tube in Unit 3 sprung a small leak, releasing a small amount of radioactive steam, and eight more failed pressure tests. Tubes in the other reactor, Unit 2, also showed unusual wear, and 192 were plugged as a precautionary measure. Edison and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials are trying to determine what is causing the tubes to wear out but have not said what they think the root of the problem is.
March 28, 2012 - Bloomberg News - LNG-Soaked Japan Burns Oil as Nuclear Reactors Sit Idle - Japan, turning to alternative sources of energy after last year’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster, is boosting its reliance on oil at a time when supply concerns from Sudan to Iran are already roiling markets. Brent crude has jumped 16 percent this year to trade near a three-year high, stoking speculation governments will be forced to release oil from emergency stockpiles. "In a global market characterized by supply-side constraints, we think sustained incremental demand of nearly 400,000 barrels a day from Japan would help keep crude prices well supported," Michael Hsueh, a London-based analyst at Deutsche Bank, said in a report. "These are non-trivial numbers at a global level." Japan, the world’s biggest buyer of LNG, has imported record amounts of the fuel in response to the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami that wrecked three reactors at the Fukushima plant northeast of Tokyo, triggering the worst radiation leak since Chernobyl in the 1980s. The country relied