BORING BUT IMPORTANT 7:51AM ET

Obama's new rule would make it harder for employers to deny you overtime

On Thursday, President Obama will reportedly direct the Labor Department to significantly broaden the number of American workers eligible for overtime pay. The new rules don't require congressional approval, but they won't take effect until after a public comment period. And there will be lots of comments.

Under the proposed rules, businesses would find it harder to avoid paying middle managers, shift supervisors, and other salaried "professional" workers overtime. The current rules were written by the George W. Bush administration in 2004. The new changes "would potentially shift billions of dollars' worth of corporate income into the pockets of workers," say Michael D. Shear and Steven Greenhouse at The New York Times.

The opponents and proponents of the measure fall along pretty predictable lines...

http://theweek.com/article/index/257848/speedreads-obamas-new-rule-would-make-it-harder-for-employers-to-deny-you-overtime

Nearly three years on from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the 25 oldest nuclear reactors in Europe have all passed 35 years of operation. More than two-thirds of US nuclear reactors have received extended licences permitting 60 years of operation, far beyond their original design lifetimes. We are entering a new era of nuclear risk.

At the time of writing (January 2014) the average age of European nuclear reactors has reached 29 years. An increasing number are reaching their design lifetimes of 30 or 40 years. New nuclear reactor construction in the EU is not capable of replacing all the reactors that are approaching the end of their design lifetimes, and the Fukushima disaster acted as a brake on new build programmes. Nevertheless we are seeing an increasing demand for new strategies to avoid a phase-out of nuclear energy, especially in countries that have not developed viable alternatives.

The current strategy of nuclear operators in much of Europe, including Switzerland, Ukraine and Russia, is targeted at a combination of extension of reactor lifetime (also called Long Term Operation) and power uprating. These factors taken together may have an important impact on the safety of the operational reactor fleet in Europe.

The design lifetime is the period of time during which a facility or component is expected to perform according to the technical specifications to which it was produced. Life-limiting processes include an excessive number of reactor trips and load cycle exhaustion. Physical ageing of systems, structures and components is paralleled by technological and conceptual ageing, because existing reactors allow for only limited retroactive implementation of new technologies and safety concepts. Together with ‘soft’ factors such as outmoded organisational structures and the loss of staff know-how and motivation as employees retire, these factors cause the overall safety level of older reactors to become increasingly inadequate by modern standards.

Measures to uprate a reactor’s power output can further compromise safety margins, for instance because increased thermal energy production results in an increased output of steam and cooling water, leading to greater stresses on piping and heat exchange systems, so exacerbating ageing mechanisms. Modifications necessitated by power uprating may additionally introduce new potential sources of failure due to adverse interactions between new and old equipment. Thus, both lifetime extension and power uprating decrease a plant’s originally designed safety margins and increase the risk of failures.

Given that the costs of a nuclear accident are potentially much higher than those covered in the limited liability coverage, liability limitation (capping) effectively gives the nuclear industry a two-fold subsidy: the limit itself, leading to lower insurance costs; and either top-up coverage by the state (in the case of Europe) or the opportunity to defer a portion of insurance costs to second-tier retrospective coverage (USA). These legal regimes thus protect nuclear operators and artificially decrease their risk costs, potentially creating three types of distortions:

1. The reduced cost of insurance gives nuclear energy an artificial competitive advantage because other electricity generation technologies (and market operators) have to internalise their full risk;

2. The liability cap reduces an operator’s economic incentive to reduce the risk of a nuclear accident.

3. The cap, coupled (in the case of Europe) with inadequate top-up coverage, may result in a lack of or insufficient compensation for victims in the event of an accident.

The increasing risk posed by nuclear ageing should lead to an increase in operators’ insurance premiums. With ageing nuclear reactors, adequate financial security to cover the costs of a potential accident becomes even more a necessity. It is important for society as a whole that objective calculations are made of the damage that a nuclear accident could potentially cause, and on that basis alternative systems of financing the coverage have to be investigated.

It is obviously important to accompany this with a mandatory financial security requirement for operators, but the higher resulting costs resulting from such an analysis should not be a reason to limit liability. Pooling of the financial security by operators may be a good alternative to the current European nuclear insurance pools.

Leak in massive Hanford nuclear waste tank getting worse
via King5.com

RICHLAND, Wash. — Workers have found more waste leaking between the walls of a nuclear storage tank on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

The waste was found in a new place between the walls of one of the 28 double shell tanks at the site. The US Dept. of Energy, which owns Hanford, says the waste is covering an area of 7 feet by 21 inches. The double shell tanks were built to be the most robust tanks at Hanford. They were constructed with the intent to be able to safely store the dangerous wastes until the technology to permanently dispose of the liquids is developed. A leak in a double shell tank is seen as one of the biggest setbacks to the cleanup program at Hanford in the last decade.

[...]
It’s been nearly two-and-a-half years since recently retired WRPS worker, Mike Geffre, found the first signs of the leak in October, 2011. To date, there is no solid plan on how to mitigate the leak or pump the contents of the tank to a safer holding vessel. Geffre says the company is stalling.

“Instead of being pro-active they become defensive. You need to handle everything as if it’s real. You may respond to a few false alarms but that’s the way it is. You cannot handle things, in the wait and see (mode). In the radiation world and the nuclear world that is extremely irresponsible,” said Geffre.

[...]
The Washington State Dept. of Ecology, which is a regulator at Hanford, has given the US Dept. of Energy until Friday, March 7, to submit a revised pumping plan for AY-102...

'Bizarre' Cluster of Severe Birth Defects Haunts Health Experts
BY JONEL ALECCIA

A mysterious cluster of severe birth defects in rural Washington state is confounding health experts, who say they can find no cause, even as reports of new cases continue to climb.

Federal and state officials won’t say how many women in a three-county area near Yakima, Wash., have had babies with anencephaly, a heart-breaking condition in which they’re born missing parts of the brain or skull. And they admit they haven't interviewed any of the women in question, or told the mothers there's a potentially widespread problem.

But as of January 2013, officials with the Washington state health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had counted nearly two dozen cases in three years, a rate four times the national average.

Since then, one local genetic counselor, Susie Ball of the Central Washington Genetics Program at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, says she has reported “eight or nine” additional cases of anencephaly and spina bifida, another birth defect in which the neural tube, which forms the brain and spine, fails to close properly.

“It does strike me as a lot,” says Ball.

And at least one Yakima...

U.S. Nuclear Agency Hid Concerns, Hailed Safety Record as Fukushima Melted
BY BILL DEDMAN

In the tense days after a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, staff at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission made a concerted effort to play down the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis to America’s aging nuclear plants, according to thousands of internal emails reviewed by NBC News.

The emails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, show that the campaign to reassure the public about America’s nuclear industry came as the agency’s own experts were questioning U.S. safety standards and scrambling to determine whether new rules were needed to ensure that the meltdown occurring at the Japanese plant could not occur here.

At the end of that long first weekend of the crisis three years ago, NRC Public Affairs Director Eliot Brenner thanked his staff for sticking to the talking points that the team had been distributing to senior officials and the public.

...

There are numerous examples in the emails of apparent misdirection or concealment in the initial weeks after the Japanese plant was devastated by a 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot tsunami that knocked out power and cooling systems at the six-reactor plant, eventually causing releases of radioactive material:

- Trying to distance the U.S. agency from the Japanese crisis, an NRC manager told staff to hide from reporters the presence of Japanese engineers in the NRC's operations center in Maryland.

- If asked whether the Diablo Canyon Power Plant on the California coast could withstand the same size tsunami that had hit Japan, spokespeople were told not to reveal that NRC scientists were still studying that question. As for whether Diablo could survive an earthquake of the same magnitude, "We're not so sure about, but again we are not talking about that," said one email.

- When skeptical news articles appeared, the NRC dissuaded news organizations from using the NRC's own data on earthquake risks at U.S. nuclear plants, including the Indian Point Energy Center near New York City.

- And when asked to help reporters explain what would happen during the worst-case scenario -- a nuclear meltdown -- the agency declined to address the questions.

As the third anniversary of Fukushima...

Feb 16 2012
Over 1 Million Bq/kg of Radioactive Cesium from the Mysterious Black Dust in Minami Soma City
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2012/05/minami-somas-black-dust-with-over-10.html

MONDAY, MAY 14, 2012
"Black Dust" in Tokyo? With 243,000 Bq/Kg of Radioactive Cesium

Freelance journalist Rei Shiva [Shiba] writing for Nikkan Spa, a daily tabloid in Japan (part; 5/15/2012):
...

It was this February when the super-radioactive and mysterious "black dust" found in Minami Soma City in Fukushima Prefecture was in the news.
...

Although 1.08 million Bq/kg was shocking, it was considered to be specific only to Minami Soma. However, I've been told that "black dust" exists everywhere in Tokyo.
...

"When I brought the radiation detector closer, it visibly responded. So I knew it might be highly contaminated, but didn't know it was this contaminated...", says Ayako Ishikawa incredulously. Ishikawa is the head of the citizens' group "No! to Radiation, Protect Children in Koto". [Koto-ku is one of the eastern Special Wards of Tokyo]. She says, "We found something that looked like "black dust" near the Hirai JR station in Edogawa-ku. We collected the sample and and asked Professor Tomoya Yamauchi of Kobe University to measure the radiation. The result was that it had the maximum 243,000 Bq/kg [of radioactive cesium]."
...

It is 2,430 times the clearance level [100 Bq/kg] specified by the Nuclear Reactor Regulation Law...

THURSDAY, MAY 17, 2012

Minami Soma's "Black Dust" with Over 10 Million Bq/kg of Radioactive Cesium, Says Assemblyman Ooyama (Just Don't Multiply by 65!)

He keeps finding "black dust" in his city with ever higher radioactivity. That's extremely high, even though Mr. Ooyama hasn't given the details as to the exact measurement or the location in his blog post.

But one thing the readers had better keep in mind: YOU DO NOT MULTIPLY THIS NUMBER BY 65 TO CONVERT TO BQ/M2.

As I said in the previous post on Tokyo's "black dust", the multiplier of 65 is only applicable if:
- The soil sample is taken from the surface to 5 centimeter deep; and
- The soil's relative density is about 1.3 gram/cm3 (cubic centimeter)....
....

Only 20% of municipalities will OK reactor restarts: poll
KYODO
MAR 2, 2014

Only about a fifth of the 156 local governments situated within 30 km of a nuclear power plant would give the nod to reactor restarts if regulators declared them safe, a survey says.

Of those 37 governments, 13 said they would do so unconditionally if reactors cleared the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s safety review, and 24 said they would attach conditions, the Kyodo News survey said Saturday.

Another 66, or about 40 percent, said they would be unable to make a judgment even if reactors cleared safety standards introduced after the Fukushima meltdowns in March 2011.

The poll also found that 32 would not endorse reactor restarts in their area even if they cleared the NRA screenings.

The results indicate widespread caution about restarting nuclear power plants even as the central government pushes for restarts ...

Photos: Is GE’s Space Frame Tower the Future of Wind Power?
GE goes back to the roots of wind power—but with a twist.

Herman K. Trabish
March 7, 2014


Greentech Media got an early look at GE's new space frame wind turbine tower in advance of the technology's official debut at next week’s European wind industry conference.

The space frame advances the potential of GE to deliver taller towers capable of more power production at a lower cost.

GE's enclosed-lattice, five-legged space frame prototype, sited at the company's Tehachapi, California facility, is 97 meters tall with a "brilliant" GE 1.7-megawatt, 100-meter rotor turbine on top. GE will introduce a 139-meter-tall space frame for its 2.75-megawatt, 120-meter rotor turbine on March 11 at the European Wind Energy Association conference.

A space frame is a three-dimensional structure built on struts that are locked together. These structures can accommodate very heavy weights with limited materials and supports.

Open-lattice towers were used for early utility-scale wind turbines...

Module Costs Dip Below 50 Cents per Watt in JinkoSolar’s Strong Q4

Module Costs Dip Below 50 Cents per Watt in JinkoSolar’s Strong Q4
JinkoSolar of China just hit the U.S. SunShot goal of sub-50-cents-per-watt solar modules.


Eric Wesoff
March 4, 2014

Vertically integrated Chinese solar manufacturer JinkoSolar announced its "third straight quarter of profitability" along with net profitability for 2013 with a Q4 gross margin of 24.7 percent. Even some Chinese module makers are seeing good days return.

The company had a great quarter with strong margin and geographical diversification -- but the more interesting news came from Arturo Herrero, Jinko's Chief Strategy Officer. During Monday's earnings call, Herrero noted, "Basically, if you look at our Q2 to Q4, our ASP is around $0.63. Our non-silicon cost is, I think, $0.39, and plus the silicon cost of $0.09, it is around the $0.48 mark."

Shyam Mehta, Senior Solar Analyst at GTM Research, notes, "I believe this is the first time in human history that a module company has recorded cost under 50 cents per watt -- although the cost may go back up a bit in 2014."

In fact, a forecast from one of Mehta's recent reports shows top Chinese manufacturers making solar modules for 36 cents per watt by 2017. "There was a reaction from some people that our projection for 36 cents per watt is crazy. To that, I offer the point that our forecast only implies an annualized reduction of 6.3 percent from 50 cents a watt today," he said. "It's not exactly a game-changer; it's 14 cents. But the industry has had a mental block because people didn't think we could produce modules for less than 50 cents per watt."