The THTR Circulars from 2009

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THTR Circular No. 126, April 2009

Content:

Renaissance of a bankruptcy:
The THTR also failed in South Africa!

THTR in Jülich massively contaminated!

WDR film: Nuclear power for Africa

Chernobyl warns: Nationwide demonstration in Münster

Laurenz Meyer, episode 20: At the bottom

Renaissance of a bankruptcy:

The THTR also failed in South Africa!

While the NRW state government and its innovation minister Pinkwart have not only renewed their commitment to nuclear power in the past few weeks, but have even raved about new generation IV nuclear power plants (including high-temperature reactors), the criticism of this reactor line has not only increased significantly, it has also been abandoned of the building preparations in South Africa! This clearly shows how far from reality the CDU and FDP act in energy policy. The fairy tale of "inherent security" was refuted. In November 2007, an investigation commissioned by the Austrian Ministry of Life (!) Criticized ("Science or Fiction. Does nuclear energy have a future? " by Antonia Wenisch, editor: Austrian Ecology Institute, Vienna. November 2007) the planned new reactors in the ground. At the beginning of 2008, cancer cases in the vicinity of the THTR in Hamm made headlines in numerous daily newspaper reports. In June 2008, the English-language Moormann study from Jülich, where the THTR was developed 40 years ago, marked the global breakthrough in the international discussion. When the mini-THTR was dismantled in Jülich, it became apparent that the radioactive bullet fracture was in places where it was never thought possible. On the basis of this contamination, the scientist uncovered countless constructive defects of the entire generation of reactors, which the previous propaganda of the "inherent safety" relegated to the realm of fairy tales.

South Africa moves away from THTR construction!

The thorium high-temperature reactor (THTR), also known as the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) in South Africa, is not being built in Koeberg near Cape Town, although the spherical fuel element factory in Pelindaba, which is necessary for THTR operation and built with German help, is already producing the nuclear fuel has. This emerges from the magazine "Nucleonics Week" on February 5, 2009. The financially troubled PBMR company in South Africa is giving up the planned 165 MW reactor in Koeberg near Cape Town in favor of coupling this reactor line with the application of process heat. - However, this should not be realized in South Africa, but in the USA! On February 3, 2009, it was announced in South Africa that it intends to further develop the planned THTR line for use in the process heating market in the USA (Idaho). However, it will be many years before tangible results can be expected there or even a prototype has been completed. In any case, it is questionable whether these visions are realistic at all.

BRD daily newspapers do not report

The nuclear industry tries to hide its embarrassment by presenting this process of breaking off construction preparations as a reorientation in the energy-political research landscape. And the government in South Africa will not be so stupid as to officially admit a few weeks before the elections on April 22, 2009 (in which it is already threatened with major losses) that it has made disastrous mistakes over the past 15 years and has made tons of financial resources for one Dealt the flop. Therefore all sorts of convoluted formulations can only be heard about a continuation of the HTR development, among other things, omens in the USA. And the media in the FRG have not received an official government statement on the PBMR-Aus - so they do not even report about it (exception: TAZ). You can't really trust a press release from a citizens' initiative that has passed through ...

A billion dollars wasted on failure!

The PBMR company has already put certain production orders for the THTR on hold from January 2009. A spokeswoman emphasized that although no contracts have been terminated, in order to avoid unnecessary expenses, there is a discussion about which important orders still have to be fulfilled. PBMR spokesman Tom Ferreira said the South African government will not provide any additional money after 2010. By then, South Africa will have poured $ 980 million into the PBMR project!

The state energy supply company Eskom had originally planned to order a total of 24 modules of the new reactor type and wanted to export additional reactors to other countries. Last year, PBMR and Eskom had to admit that only one demonstration reactor was planned to be built in 2010. The bureaucratic machinery is still running somehow - albeit haltingly - for the time being: the environmental impact assessment for the reactor, which is no longer being built. In any case, the safety check has not yet been requested from the Reactor Safety Commission. The safety report has been behind schedule for years.

The global financial crisis also forces Eskom to forego the planned pressurized water reactors with a capacity of 3.500 MW. The PBMR company began in 1999 with a hundred employees, quickly grew to 800 and finally comprised 1.000 employees, including external specialists and the PR department. The radioactive spherical fuel elements with an enrichment level of 9,6 percent uranium-235 for the previously planned THTR have already been manufactured in a new factory at Pelindaba with the help of Nukem / Hanau. The know-how came mainly from the FRG. The first uranium fuel elements produced for the PBMR are now useless in South Africa and were shipped on January 5th, 2009. The goal was the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Idaho National Laboratory in the USA to use the fuel elements for research experiments. Outlook: irrationality or alternative energy

The South African PBMR company is thus a partner of the large US reactor company Westinghouse, which is now mostly owned by Japanese shareholders. Since Westinghouse wants to deliver its large light water reactors to South Africa in a few years, they may not drop PBMR entirely and use the South African design work for the HTR line for the process heat market in the USA (!).

In order to stay in business with Westinghouse, the ANC government announced on February 11, 2 on East Coast Radio that it would spend 2009 million euros on PBMR development for the next three years. According to the latest research, these 90 million euros each are no longer earmarked for PBMR development in South Africa's budget for the next three years. As things stand, it would expire in December 90. That would not be 2010 months, just 36 months! However, you can no longer build a reactor with it, you can only continue research on a very small flame.

Despite these successes, the environmental movement must be vigilant in every respect and stay on the ball! It is to be hoped that those forces will be heard more in South Africa who want to take advantage of the nuclear respite and rely more on environmentally friendly alternative energy!

It is seldom that critical opinions and independent analyzes find their way into specialist publications on atomic energy. The general test reactor (AVR) in Jülich - a small THTR - has been dismantled for several years. There were many complications and costs of hundreds of millions of euros. In addition, the dismantling workers were confronted with some extremely unpleasant facts: The reactor is massively contaminated. The scientist R. Moormann from Jülich named the problems and facts in a comprehensive study. His findings are now being discussed around the world when it comes to the safety of high-temperature reactors. They have led many scientists to reassess the overly optimistic assumptions made in this reactor line. An English-language, fourteen-page article has now appeared in the magazine "Kerntechnik" No. 74, (2009), 1-2 (Carl Hanser Verlag). We document the short German-language summary here:

“The pebble bed reactor AVR (46 MWth) was operated from 1967 to 1988 at cooling gas temperatures of up to 9900 C, which are suitable for process heat. The AVR is a model for future pebble bed reactors, as there are no other sufficiently reliable experiences. The present work deals with some insufficiently published, but safety-relevant problems of the AVR operation and draws conclusions for future reactors.

Although the AVR has only been operated for 4 years at cooling gas temperatures above 900 C, the AVR cooling circuit is heavily contaminated with dust-bound meltallic fission products (90Sr, 137Cs), which make the current dismantling much more difficult. These contaminations amount to a few percent of a core inventory. They were primarily caused by impermissibly high core temperatures and not, as previously assumed, exclusively by inadequate fuel elements.

The high core temperatures, which are difficult to measure in the pebble bed, are probably due to the poorly known pebble bed mechanics. In addition to gas-tight containment, the safety of future reactors requires either extensive R&D work or a reduction in the requirements for useful temperatures and combustion. "

Right at the beginning, after the cooling tower was blown at the THTR, a resolutely optimistic demonstration by our citizens' initiative from the 80s, followed by the chanting of black opponents of the PBMR in South Africa today. The filmmaker Martin Herzog even traveled to the other continent in search of the nuclear connection lines between North Rhine-Westphalia and South Africa. On September 13, 9, WDR broadcast its eight-minute film about the history of the THTR under the heading “So wars”, in which the missing cancer study in the Hamm area also played a role. On February 2008, 7, the very informative 2-minute program “Atomstrom für Afrika” followed on WDR (two repetitions followed on March 2009, 30 on Phoenix). Longer stops were Jülich, Hamm, Cape Town and Pelindaba.

In Jülich, the film team visited the mini-THTR, which was shut down in 1988 and which is soon to be completely dismantled. It is interesting that two dozen former employees from this nuclear power plant are now working on the PBMR development in South Africa and that Forschungszentrum Jülich is benefiting financially to a not inconsiderable extent from the nuclear cooperation with South Africa. We in the FRG then call this "nuclear phase-out".

Anyone who wants to report objectively about the situation in South Africa cannot avoid visiting the majority of the poor black people in the townships, who are happy to have electricity in their tin stalls. And they don't care where he's from. The dressed up students and teachers of the small black middle class in the pompous “information center” for the PBMR are different. For them and their government, the miracle reactor is a national prestige object, with which South Africa wants to catch up with the industrialized countries. As if in a daze, they swarm in front of the camera.

The technology of the PBMR is a relic from the nuclear stone age of North Rhine-Westphalia, when in the 50s and 60s former Nazi scientists, brought back from exile in Argentina and Brazil by Franz-Josef Strauss, set about building the nuclear research center Jülich and the THTR to develop. These activities were observed very suspiciously by the Western powers because they feared the secret construction of nuclear weapons and the FRG at that time violently opposed international controls (similar to Iran today!).

The "Meiler aus der Mottenkiste" (Die Zeit) was given the perfect figure in the film with Prof. Heiko Barnert from Germany, who was always proud of the THTR. Now the kindred South Africans are continuing this work. All white scientists who built atomic bombs under the brutal apartheid regime. They posed confidently and unabashedly in front of the camera again and praised themselves and their reactor. How embarassing.

At the time of the WDR interview with the PBMR scientists at the end of January 2009, it was already clear behind the scenes that South Africa had speculated on the miracle reactor. One billion US dollars in costs, problems and delays in its further development and significant international doubts about its safety. The government had to pull the emergency brake. Already on January 5th, 2009 the PBMR spherical fuel elements produced in advance were on their way to the USA, which obviously still have enough money to deal with the phantom reactor. - What the South African scientists were showing the TV team from the FRG at that time was a brazen comedy! Not a word about the discontinuation of the construction project. Because these gentlemen are only too happy to take a few more billions away from the poor people in South Africa in order to screw them up for their nuclear games. You can sell your great know-how to the USA at a profit. Or try to somehow reverse the decision you made. But where is all this money supposed to come from?

The Jülich scientist Moormann behaves completely differently in the WDR interview. He pointed out safety problems with the PBMR in an emphatically cautious and objective manner. During the dismantling of the mini-THTR in Jülich, which was shut down in 1988, massive contamination was discovered, which led to a safety-related reassessment of this reactor line. He does not think the new reactor is ready for construction and is therefore marginalized by his colleagues.

The German-speaking Belgian Jan van der Ecken, who lives near the planned building site for the PBMR, also has his say in the film. Using a typical traffic jam in the Cape Town conurbation, he points out the major problems that would arise from evacuations in the event of a disaster. And: Here the sun shines very often, the wind blows - why is so little done in South Africa for alternative energy? He had to work through a number of files for the PBMR approval process within just 50 days. No doubt; The nuclear industry and the state wanted to whip through the process as quickly as possible.

Filmmaker Martin Herzog also visits Uhde in Dortmund and BHR (formerly Mannesmann), which have already manufactured components for the PBMR in the Ruhr area. They sensed big business. Even if there is a purely formal “nuclear phase-out” in the FRG, they had no qualms about enriching themselves by building an unsafe reactor on the Cape. After the PBMR bankruptcy, they will probably have to step back a little, because follow-up orders are no longer coming in anytime soon.

Finally, the film team is still in Pelindaba to visit the committed nuclear power opponent Dominique Gilbert, who used to work in the nuclear industry. Here is the nuclear center of South Africa. This is where the defused atomic bombs from the apartheid era are stored, and this is where the dubious attack on the guards took place two years ago. And here the German and Swiss engineers acted as unscrupulous accomplices in the largest nuclear weapons smuggling of all time on behalf of the Pakistani "father of the atomic bomb" Quadeer Khan. The film could only briefly mention this problem. It would certainly have gone beyond the 30 minutes available.

With this film, German television viewers received an excellent overview of the nuclear cooperation between North Rhine-Westphalia and South Africa. For many people it must have been quite surprising and new information. Hopefully in the coming arguments they will draw the right conclusions and interfere.

For several years now, the nuclear industry in Germany and elsewhere has been trying hard to force a “renaissance” of the use of atomic energy. Nuclear companies such as Essen-based RWE and Düsseldorf-based EON want longer running times for nuclear power plants in Germany. In North Rhine-Westphalia, too, the nuclear industry and the state government are unscrupulous in expanding the nuclear facilities:

Ahaus: From 2010 onwards, several hundred atomic barrels with highly contaminated nuclear waste are to be brought to Ahaus from the French plutonium factory La Hague and the decommissioned Jülich nuclear research facility. Even the storage of unpackaged nuclear waste has been applied for - the Münster district government responsible for the permit and the Federal Office for Radiation Protection still refuse any public participation!

Gronau: The nationwide only uranium enrichment plant is being massively expanded and is to supply 35 large nuclear power plants with uranium fuel in the future. The German shareholders of the operating company Urenco are RWE and EON. Up to 60 tons of depleted uranium waste are to be "temporarily" stored in a new nuclear waste hall in Gronau, which has already been approved.

Hamm: A demolition of the decommissioned bankruptcy reactor THTR in Hamm will cost several hundred million euros. Although a THTR successor reactor can no longer be realized even in South Africa due to technical and financial problems, the NRW state government is investing many millions in further development and even wants to build new high-temperature reactors in NRW after the federal elections!

Jülich: The interim storage facility of the nuclear research center is to be cleared by 2013 - to Ahaus! But the lightweight construction hall in Ahaus is not a solution, it conceals the basic problem: There is no long-term safe final storage of nuclear waste anywhere in the world!

Krefeld / Duisburg / Mülheim: These three cities also have important facilities for the nuclear industry. In Krefeld, the Siempelkamp company produces castor containers, among other things, in Duisburg the AREVA subsidiary ANF produces pipes for nuclear power plants and in Mülheim GNS is busy with the production of castors. Uranium transport: across North Rhine-Westphalia, natural uranium is transported from southern France by truck and train to Gronau. Since 1996 Gronau has been by train - right through Münster! - brought more than 28 t of uranium waste to Russia for final storage in the open air. This uranium waste export is extremely cheap for RWE and EON - the people in Russia have to suffer. Uranium waste has recently also been brought to the south of France!

We'll meet in Hamm from 9.30 a.m. at the main train station and take the train to Münster with a group ticket at 9.59:10.22 a.m. Arrival is XNUMX:XNUMX am. We then go to Hindenburgplatz (Schlossplatz) together.

“You can do that” (WA 28/2/09) thundered the Hammer CDU district chairman Oskar Burkert at the confused Laurenz when he submitted his gift wishes for the next legislative period: A nice new Bundestag mandate, garnished with the usual expenses and one pretty new secretary in the parliamentary office, as well as ad libitum electricity for his lobbying work on behalf of the nuclear industry are not asking too much. You could talk about the post of economic policy spokesman for the CDU parliamentary group later ...

But at the CDU base, the escapades of "party-goers" Laurenz with his "Carnival kissing" (WA 16. 3. 09) did not go down so well and that is why he has to go deep down into the dark cellar as a punishment - in 35th place in the NRW- Reserve list. And so that everyone can savor his shame with relish, he was put on the pillory direct candidate place in Hamm. He can kiss seniors during the election campaign until he blacks out.

That shock ran deep. But already the urbane Michel Glos said of our Laurenz: "You know your way around in life" (WA February 18, 2). He thought feverishly. Was there nothing that could stop his threatened social decline? - A surprising turn or a furious change of strategy had to bring salvation. He, the proud German king of the regulars, was inspired for his latest coup by a Greens of Turkish descent, of all people! Cem Özdemir, advocate of the Hartz IV laws during the red-green coalition, happened to be visiting the Hammer Tafel - and none of the “customers” there threatened him with a beating, not a single bad word!

“I need exactly such masochists for my plans” thought Laurenz. Now he works twice a week at the Hammer Tafel. Friendly and always ready for a chat, he hands the small parcels over to those in need, pretending to have paid for everything out of his own pocket. That's how you know him. Discreetly and as if by chance, he slips the poor and the disenfranchised with a small package insert with his completely new demands on labor market policy. Among other things, discounts on electricity purchases for Alg.II recipients when new nuclear power plants are built and the increase in the additional income limit at Hartz IV from 100 to one hundred thousand euros per month. - He probably thought of himself first again.

He's already made new friends here. For example with the now unemployed Rita, the nationwide known Schlecker saleswoman, who was fired by her management because she (just like Laurenz once ...) had cheated 1,30 euros. Such people now have my sympathy. “I want to be very close to the people who need me,” he told an RTL reporter into the microphone. How much the new relationships deepen, what his newest wife says about it and whether Laurenz still manages to avert his fall to the bottom in one final spurt, we will report in the next episode.

Other episodes of this popular series in older editions:

THTR Circular No. 103

THTR Circular No. 96

THTR Circular No. 95

THTR Circular No. 87

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