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Scandal in South Korea Over Nuclear Revelations

August 3, 2013 by

Now, a snowballing scandal in South Korea about bribery and faked safety tests for critical plant equipment has highlighted yet another similarity: experts say both countries’ nuclear programs suffer from a culture of collusion that has undermined their safety. Weeks of revelations about the close ties between South Korea’s nuclear power companies, their suppliers and testing companies have led the prime minister to liken the industry to a mafia.

The scandal started after an anonymous tip in April prompted an official investigation. Prosecutors have indicted some officials at a testing company on charges of faking safety tests on parts for the plants. Some officials at the state-financed company that designs nuclear power plants were also indicted on charges of taking bribes from testing company officials in return for accepting those substandard parts.

Worse yet, investigators discovered that the questionable components are installed in 14 of South Korea’s 23 nuclear power plants. The country has already shuttered three of those reactors temporarily because the questionable parts used there were important, and more closings could follow as investigators wade through more than 120,000 test certificates filed over the past decade to see if more may have been falsified.

In a further indication of the possible breadth of the problems, prosecutors recently raided the offices of 30 more suppliers suspected of also providing parts with faked quality certificates and said they would investigate other testing companies.

“What has been revealed so far may be the tip of an iceberg,” said Kune Y. Suh, a professor of nuclear engineering at Seoul National University.

With each new revelation, South Koreans — who, like the Japanese, had grown to believe their leaders’ soothing claims about nuclear safety — have become more jittery. Safety is the biggest concern, but the scandals have also caused economic worries. At a time of slowing growth, the government had loudly promoted its plans to become a major builder of nuclear power plants abroad.

The scandal, Professor Suh said, “makes it difficult to continue claiming to build reliable nuclear power plants cheaply.”

South Koreans say they are already suffering for the industry’s sins. The closing of the three reactors, in addition to another three offline for scheduled maintenance, has led the country’s leaders to order a nationwide energy-saving campaign in the middle of a particularly muggy summer. At university campuses, students have deserted the libraries for cooler Internet cafes, and major corporations have turned down air-conditioning.

President Park Geun-hye has kept off her own air-conditioning even when she hosted foreign guests, including Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. And some entrepreneurs have capitalized on the troubles, selling “cool scarves” made of a special fabric that, after being dipped in water, keeps wearers cool for hours. But the modeling and creativity have not stopped the grousing, or alleviated anger at the industry.

Critics of South Korea’s nuclear industry say there were plenty of warning signs.

Last year, the government was forced to shut down two reactors temporarily after it learned that parts suppliers — some of whom were later convicted — had fabricated the safety-test certificates for more than 10,000 components over 10 years. But the government emphasized at the time that those parts were “nonessential” items and that the industry was otherwise sound.

As it turned out, the problems went much deeper.

The investigation that began this spring suggested that the oversight within the supply chain may also be more deeply compromised. A company that was supposed to test reactor parts skipped portions of the exams, doctored test data or even issued safety certificates for parts that failed its tests, according to government investigators. And this time the parts involved included more important items. Among the parts that failed the tests were cables used to send signals to activate emergency measures in an accident.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/world/asia/scandal-in-south-korea-over-nuclear-revelations.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Special Report: Energy: China Marches On With Nuclear Energy, in Spite of Fukushima

October 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan last March have put a chill on much of the world’s nuclear power industry — but not in China.

The German Parliament voted this summer to close the country’s remaining nuclear power plants by 2022, while the Swiss Parliament voted this summer to phase nuclear power out by 2034. Economic stagnation in the United States and most other industrialized economies since 2008 has produced stagnant electricity demand, further sapping interest in nuclear power.

In Japan itself, the government has put on hold its plans to build further nuclear power plants, and the government faces a political battle to continue operating existing reactors. Emerging economies like Brazil and particularly India are still planning nuclear reactors. But the Indian leaders introduced legislation on Sept. 7 that is supposed to increase the independence of nuclear regulators from the industry, though critics are skeptical.

That leaves China poised to build more nuclear reactors in the coming years than the rest of the world combined. But questions abound whether China will be a savior for the international nuclear power industry, or a ferocious competitor that could create even greater challenges for nuclear power companies in the West.

Chinese regulators performed a four-month review of safety at all existing nuclear reactors and reactors under construction after the Fukushima meltdowns and declared them safe. Safety reviews continue at reactors where construction had not yet started at the time of the Fukushima accident.

Jiang Kejun, a director of the Energy Research Institute at the National Development and Reform Commission, the top Chinese economic planning agency, said that the government was sticking to its target of 50 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2015, compared to just 10.8 gigawatts at the end of last year.

Mr. Jiang said in an interview that nuclear power construction targets for 2020 had not yet been set and might end up slightly lower than they would have been without the meltdowns in Fukushima. But he and other Chinese officials say that China’s rapidly rising electricity consumption makes nuclear power essential. They even try to portray the Fukushima incidents as salutary for the nuclear power industry, a view seldom heard elsewhere.

“Globally, I think Fukushima could be a good thing for nuclear power,” Mr. Jiang said. “We can learn a lot from that. We can’t be smug or too clever.”

China allowed existing reactors to continue operating during the safety review from March to July and allowed construction to continue at reactors where it had already begun. Chinese regulators have also encouraged electric utilities to continue planning future nuclear power plants.

But one category of reactor has been delayed by the Fukushima incident. At reactors that had been approved before the Fukushima accident but where construction had not yet begun, the government still has not allowed construction to start while continuing to study whether further safety improvements can be made, said Xu Yuanhui, one of China’s top nuclear engineers for the past half century.

The delay applies to several conventional nuclear reactors plus Beijing’s project to build two reactors in northeastern China, using a new generation of technology known as a pebble-bed design. Critics and advocates describe it as safer than current reactors, though its cost-effectiveness unclear.

The two reactors in Shidao, in Shandong Province in northeast China, were approved days before the Fukushima nuclear accident began with an earthquake and tsunami March 11. But the 50-month timetable for building them cannot start until the government lifts its hold on construction.

“By the end of this year, maybe we’ll have some information from the government side,” Dr. Xu said.

Nuclear power represented only 1.1 percent of China’s electricity generation capacity at the end of last year. With wind turbines and coal-fired power plants being installed at rates that far surpass those in any other country, nuclear power is on track to account for no more than 4 percent of electricity capacity by 2015.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/business/energy-environment/china-marches-on-with-nuclear-energy-in-spite-of-fukushima.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Officials in Germany Support Closing 7 Nuclear Plants

May 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

FRANKFURT — Seven nuclear power plants in Germany that were shut down after the Fukushima disaster in Japan are likely to be closed permanently after a decision Friday by state environment ministers.

A government agency warned, however, that without the seven plants Germany could have trouble coping with a failure in some part of the national power grid.

The shutdown “brings networks to the limit of capacity,” the Federal Network Agency, which regulates utilities, said in a report published Friday.

Meeting in Wernigerode, in eastern Germany, the state environment ministers recommended that the seven plants be closed. The decision rests with Chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet, which will consider the issue on June 6.

Mrs. Merkel is under heavy political pressure to speed Germany’s exit from nuclear power after public alarm about the nuclear disaster in Japan cost her party votes in recent elections. In late March, a few weeks after the tsunami and earthquake hit Japan and led to the crisis at Fukushima, the Green Party, representing environmentalists, drove Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats from power in Baden-Württemberg, a state the conservatives had dominated for decades.

The Green Party is pushing for Germany to close all of its plants by 2020 if not sooner. “An exit during this decade is very doable,” Franz Untersteller, the environment minister in Baden-Württemberg, said in a statement Friday.

But businesses have expressed concern that the price of electricity could rise because Germany does not yet have enough other sources of energy to compensate.

The Federal Network Agency, in its report Friday, said Germany had transformed from energy exporter to energy importer since the nuclear plants were shut down.

When weather is ideal, Germany can generate almost as much power from wind and solar energy as 28 nuclear reactors, the agency said. The renewable energy fluctuates significantly, however, often requiring German utilities to buy power from other countries and creating problems for neighbors that had depended on German power.

The Federal Network Agency acknowledged that so far there had been no serious power failures since the seven plants were closed.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/business/global/28nuclear.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Spain’s Governing Party Suffers Heavy Losses

May 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Conceding defeat on Sunday night, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said that his Socialist Party had been understandably punished by voters for overseeing an economic crisis that had left Spain with a 21 percent jobless rate, more than twice the European average.

“These results are very clearly related to the effects of the economic crisis that we have been suffering for almost three years,” Mr. Zapatero said in a televised address. “Almost two million jobs have been destroyed and I know that a lot of Spaniards are facing serious problems. Today, without a doubt, they have expressed their discomfort.”

Meanwhile, underscoring how they have unexpectedly seized the initiative from established political parties, trade unions and other institutions, thousands of protesters gathered Sunday for an eighth consecutive day in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid as well as the main squares in other cities.

The youth-led movement, the first to manifest in any meaningful way since austerity began to bite in Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, has caught Spain’s traditional politicians flat-footed. At the same time, some of the campaign’s participants have been struggling to come to terms with their own success and grappling with the need to give more coherence to their wide-ranging grievances in order to keep their campaign alive beyond the election.

The demonstrators, who insist that they have no party affiliation, want a more representative democratic system and are demanding an end to political corruption. Their anger toward established parties has been fueled by the debt crisis and the surge in joblessness, but their grievances also include a call for a cut in military spending, the closing of nuclear power plants and the end of some laws, like recent legislation aimed at punishing digital piracy.

The groups that have turned Madrid’s Puerta del Sol into the epicenter of the nationwide movement plan to remain there until at least next Sunday. The protests in Barcelona, the second-largest Spanish city, are expected to culminate in a major march on June 15, to end in front of the Catalan Parliament.

“If you had told me a few months ago that thousands of people would take to the streets to complain about our political system,” said one protester, María Subinas, “I would have found it hard to believe, because it looked like we were an apathetic generation that was incapable of responding to a crisis even when it was destroying our jobs like a tsunami.” Ms. Subinas, 33, who has been in Puerta del Sol since last Sunday, added, “The message has surely gone through to politicians that they can’t just keep ignoring our frustrations and pretend that nothing has changed.”

The Popular Party won 37.6 percent of the votes on Sunday, compared with 27.8 percent for the Socialists, according to preliminary results released at midnight with 98 percent of the votes counted. Despite popular discontent with established parties, turnout rose to 66 percent from 63 percent four years earlier.

Mr. Zapatero, who has been in office since 2004, announced in April that he would not seek a third term, and the extent of the Socialists’ loss suggests that, even with a new leader, the party will struggle to hold on to power in the general election, expected next March.

Among smaller parties to make notable gains on Sunday was Bildu, a Basque independence party, which won 1.4 percent of the national vote and could secure control of San Sebastián and some other Basque town halls. Bildu was allowed to take part in the election only after a court ruling, amid concerns over its suspected links to ETA, the violent separatist group.

The Socialists lost control in Barcelona and Seville, two of the nation’s largest cities.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d8d0a6521afc751f8c74a72e3b4ae055

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