Chernobyl 2? Watching the world’s aging power plants

Satellite imagery from May 2013 of the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center in North Korea.DigitalGlobe

The Kalinin nuclear power plant in Russia.IAEA

North Korea’s aging Yongbyon nuclear power plant will probably not lead to a nuclear catastrophe, despite an alarming report calling it the next Chernobyl -- but the danger posed by the world’s aging reactors is real nonetheless.

The defense publication Jane’s recently detailed efforts to bring the small Yongbyon reactor back online, saying they could lead to a meltdown like the  Chernobyl incident in 1986. According to the article, Yongbyon uses obsolete technology that was responsible for a 1957 accident in the United Kingdom and “could lead to a disaster worse than the Ukrainian one."

But Joel Wit, a former U.S. State Department official who manages the 38 North blog for the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told FoxNews.com he disagreed strongly with the Jane’s report. And when Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a scientist-in-residence with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, ran an analysis, he concluded that the scale of the reactor posed a far smaller threat than Jane’s suggested.

“In the worst case scenario, the accident would release a dose 500,000 times lower than Chernobyl,” Dalnoki-Veress said.

'The Russians are running into this, the French are running into this, the Japanese are running into this. It’s a big issue.'

- Jon B. Wolfsthal, deputy director of California’s James Martin Center

Nonetheless, the average nuclear power plant is more than 20 years old and is anticipated to last no more than 30 or 40 years, leaving the world facing a potential crisis: How safe are aging nuclear power plants?

No country has a greater reliance on nuclear power than the U.S., which had 104 reactors online in 2011. But all of them have been online since 1990, and most since 1980.

“By far the largest problem is here in the U.S.,” said Jon B. Wolfsthal, deputy director of California’s James Martin Center.

“But the Russians are running into this, the French are running into this, the Japanese are running into this. It’s a big issue.”  

France had 58 nuclear reactors connected to the power grid in 2011, according to a 2012 reference work by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Fifty-six of them have been operating since 1990, and 43 have been online since 1985, making them around 30 years old. Japan is in a similar situation, with 51 plants online in 2011 (not including the Fukushima plant), nearly all of which were in operation 20 years earlier.

There were 435 nuclear power plants online worldwide as of New Year’s Eve, 2011. As of that date, 138 others had been permanently shut down, though only 11 cited obsolescence as the reason.

Plot construction of nuclear plants on a grid and you’ll see a near perfect bell curve; most of the world’s power plants were built during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, peaking between 1974 and 1976, a three-year span that saw construction begin on 118 plants worldwide. By comparison, ground was broken on just 29 plants throughout the ’90s.

But nuclear power is seeing a renaissance. China has 42 power plants planned for construction, according to the IAEA, and Russia has 35. As of Dec. 31, 2011, 114 were planned, and an additional 65 reactors were under construction.

Yet Chris Englefield, a senior manager in radioactive substances regulation for the U.K. Environment Agency, noted in a 2012 paper that there are no nuclear security specialists. He says there is a need to professionalize security and to facilitate minimum standards of competence and regulatory procedures.

The U.N.’s IAEA acts as a nuclear watchdog at times, but it also helps to do just that, aiding member countries in maintaining power plants to tease extra years from them while preventing incidents.

“One of the IAEA’s key missions is to support its member states in their efforts to improve nuclear safety,” said IAEA spokesman Serge Gas. “In that context, the agency does not single out individual nations, but rather encourages all of them to improve all the time.”

Jeremy A. Kaplan is Science and Technology editor at FoxNews.com, where he heads up coverage of gadgets, the online world, space travel, nature, the environment, and more. Prior to joining Fox, he was executive editor of PC Magazine, co-host of the Fastest Geek competition, and a founding editor of GoodCleanTech.

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Stormy sun could knock out power grids: report

By Ethan Bilby

LONDON | Fri Dec 2, 2011 12:40pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - An upcoming cycle of stormy solar activity risks causing damage to electrical transformers and threatening vulnerable energy infrastructure around the globe, a report by an insurance group says.

The sun follows a predictable 11 year activity cycle, with the next period of stormy activity expected to begin in 2012-13.

The report by German insurance group Allianz said a high impact solar storm, not easily predicted due to its recorded rarity, could cause blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion and that the worst case scenario would be even worse.

"What we're coming into at the moment is the bad (space)weather period," Jim Wild of Britain's Lancaster University, an expert in solar plasma physics, told Reuters.

A large explosion on the surface of the sun could release billions of tones of superheated magnetically charged gas at a speed of a million miles per hour, and when that gas hits the earth's magnetic field, it can trigger a big solar storm.

The severity of a potential disruption has made experts at insurance and national security institutions take notice.

"When you start to imagine not having electricity in a sizeable fraction of a country or a continent for weeks or even months ... it's serious business," Wild said.

SMALL LEAD TIME

The difficulty lies in predicting how often serious solar type events occur.

The small lead time given by satellites is also a problem for preventing solar storm damage, as currently no satellite is close enough to the sun to give more than an hour's warning, Wild said.

Updating the satellites to give the earth more preparation time would cost around $1 billion, he added.

Space weather is a relatively new area of study, with sophisticated observations going back only 50 years and lacking an international coordinated tracking system such as that found with normal meteorological weather.

"We have very little on a solar time scale," Wild said.

The most damaging storm in recent memory was a 1989 outage in Quebec, Canada, which affected six million people.

The first scientific recording of a large solar storm was made in 1859 by English astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed a white light explosion on the surface of the sun.

Wild said: "what they didn't know back then was why about two or three days later you could see the northern lights over Cuba and all of the telegraph system was disrupted by geomagnetic activity."

According to the Allianz report, an event on the same scale today would cause extensive damage to electrical infrastructure.

(Editing by Henning Gloystein and James Jukwey)

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Power companies prepare as solar storms set to hit Earth

NEW YORK | Sat Aug 6, 2011 1:04pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three large explosions from the Sun over the past few days have prompted U.S. government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to prepare for possible disruptions over the next few days.

"The magnetic storm that is soon to develop probably will be in the moderate to strong level," said Joseph Kunches, a space weather scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center, a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He said solar storms this week could affect communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin.

An aurora, called aurora borealis or the northern lights in northern latitudes, is a natural light display in the sky in the Arctic and Antarctic regions caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere.

Major disruptions from solar activity are rare but have had serious impacts in the past.

In 1989, a solar storm took down the power grid in Quebec, Canada, leaving about six million people without power for several hours.

The largest solar storm ever recorded was in 1859 when communications infrastructure was limited to telegraphs.

The 1859 solar storm hit telegraph offices around the world and caused a giant aurora visible as far south as the Caribbean Islands.

Some telegraph operators reported electric shocks. Papers caught fire. And many telegraph systems continued to send and receive signals even after operators disconnected batteries, NOAA said on its website.

A storm of similar magnitude today could cause up to $2 trillion in damage globally, according to a 2008 report by the National Research Council.

"I don't think this week's solar storms will be anywhere near that. This will be a two or three out of five on the NOAA Space Weather Scale," said Kunches.

SOLAR SCALE

The NOAA Space Weather Scale measures the intensity of a solar storm from one being the lowest intensity to five being the highest, similar to scales that measure the severity of hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

The first of the three solar explosions from the sun this week already passed the Earth on Thursday with little impact, Kunches said, noting, the second was passing the Earth now and "seems to be stronger."

And the third, he said, "We'll have to see what happens over the next few days. It could exacerbate the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the second (storm) or do nothing at all."

Power grid managers receive alerts from the Space Weather Prediction Center to tell them to prepare for solar events, which peak about every 12 years, Tom Bogdan, director of the center said.

He said the next peak, called a solar maximum, was expected in 2013.

"We're coming up to the next solar maximum, so we expect to see more of these storms coming from the sun over the next three to five years," Bogdan said.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by Alden Bentley)

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