NEI Nuclear Notes

World Nuclear News reports what happened after this morning’s earthquake in Japan. The Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (Meti) said that seawater pumping to cool the reactor cores of Fukushima Daiichi 1, 2 and 3 continued after a brief evacuation on a tsunami warning. That’s good. The single reactor at Higashidori is offline for maintenance and its full core load of fuel is within the used fuel pond. When power from the grid was disrupted, cooling was maintained by emergency diesel generators. The Rokkasho reprocessing plant also lost grid power and is currently maintained by its diesels. And that’s what’s supposed to happen in these circumstances. All good. --- Polls have been showing some, but not dire, slippage in support for nuclear energy. One should always wait until a crisis is over before polling the crisis, because attitudes are going to be all over the place. It’s hard to really pin down attitudes while the news is full of both fully and half-baked...