Countries around the world are producing in depth reports of the Fukushima accident in Japan but all seem to concentrate on the bad news and ignore the good. So here is some of the good news.
When the largest earthquake in history with a force of nearly ten on the Richter Scale sent a huge seismic shock wave through the earth the elderly boiling water reactors at Fukushima detected it and automatically shut down with control rods inserted from below the reactors. Hurrah! This would have reduced the power in the core of the reactors immediately to about 6% of the operating power and down to a modest 0.2% by the next day. Hurrah! The shock was followed an hour later by a devastating tsunami estimated as a 15 to 19 m high wave of solid water which killed about 15 000 to 25 000 people and damaged many hundreds of thousands of homes. But it did not damage the main reactor buildings.
The consortium behind plans to build a new nuclear power plant on the island of Anglesey in north Wales has completed the purchase of land earmarked for the units.
Russia is likely to join the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), following an official announcement from the Paris-based organisation that it has applied for membership.
Operators of the world’s commercial nuclear power plants have unanimously approved wide-ranging new commitments to nuclear safety developed following the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan.
Demand for Russian nuclear power plants has remained strong despite the Fukushima-Daiichi accident in March 2011 and Russia is now looking to strengthen its international presence further, the head of Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation has said.
