Nuclear Safety Convention Meeting Commits to Learn Lessons from Fukushima Nuclear Accident

The 5th Review Meeting of the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS), being held in Vienna, Austria, concluded on 14 April 2011.

During the 10 days of meetings, delegations from 61 of the 72 countries that are "Contracting Parties" to the Convention discussed long-term safety issues, as well as the unfolding nuclear emergency at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan.

As a result of the Japanese disaster, the contracting parties are carrying out safety reviews of their nuclear installations, including reexamining the nuclear power plants' safety measures that defend against extreme external events.

The Contracting Parties stated that the learning process following the Fukushima accident will continue as more information is acquired and analyzed.

They also welcomed IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano's initiative to convene a Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety in June, and pledged their support.

Although the CNS is scheduled to meet every three years, it was agreed that they would convene an extraordinary meeting next year to analyse the Fukushima accident.

A General Review

The Review Meeting's conclusions also included detailed technical discussions about enhancing safety culture; overcoming challenges in recruiting a new generation of nuclear professionals; managing ageing nuclear facilities and safely extending their lifetimes; nuclear power plant designs; siting of new plants; periodic safety reviews; countries new to nuclear power; international cooperation; as well as networking on emergency management and operating experience.

In addition, the Conference attendees discussed country reports on nuclear safety that every Contracting Party is obliged to submit. All countries with operating nuclear power plants are among the CNS' Contracting Parties.

Background

The Convention, which entered into force on 24 October 1996, was designed to enhance nuclear safety. Its objectives are to achieve and maintain a high level of nuclear safety worldwide, to establish and maintain effective defenses in nuclear installations against potential radiological hazards, and to prevent accidents having radiological consequences.

The Convention on Nuclear Safety is an incentive instrument. It does not compel Parties to adhere to certain safety standards, but is, instead, based on their common interest to achieve higher levels of safety.

The IAEA is the depositary for the Convention and its role is to provide the secretariat for the Review Meetings by convening, preparing and servicing these meetings, as well as transmitting relevant information to the Contracting Parties.

See Story Resources for more information.

-- By Sasha Henriques, IAEA Division of Public Information

IAEA Operational Safety Team (OSART) Reviews Progress at Fessenheim Nuclear Power Plant, France

11 February 2011 | Fessenheim, France -- An international team of nuclear installation safety experts, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has evaluated the French Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) at Fessenheim to assess how the facility has followed up on an Operational Safety Review Team (OSART) mission undertaken in 2009.

The IAEA assembled a team of experts at the request of the Government of France to conduct the mission. Follow-up missions are standard components of the OSART programme and are conducted 18-24 months after the initial OSART mission. Under the leadership of the IAEA´s Division of Nuclear Installation Safety, the team performed its review from 7 to 11 February 2011. The team assessed how the Fessenheim NPP has addressed the recommendations and suggestions made during the 2009 OSART mission. The team was made up of experts from Slovakia, Switzerland and the IAEA.

The review covered the areas of Management, Organization and Administration; Training and Qualifications; Operations; Maintenance; Technical Support; Operating Experience; Radiation Protection; Chemistry and Emergency Planning and Preparedness. The conclusions of the follow-up review are based on the IAEA´s Safety Standards and proven good international practices.

There were 21 issues raised by the 2009 mission. During the follow-up mission, the team assessed that six issues had been resolved, thirteen had made satisfactory progress to date and two had made insufficient progress to date. "Resolved" describes action plans for improvement that have been fully implemented; "satisfactory progress to date" describes action plans that have been developed but are not yet fully implemented; and "insufficient progress to date" describes situations where additional consideration or strengthening of improvement plans is necessary.

Examples of issues falling into different resolution categories include:

The plant has resolved the suggestion to establish a process to review initial training materials on a regular basis. A systematic three-year training course revision program is in place now which ensures that the latest operating experience is used for learning purposes;
The plant has reached satisfactory progress in eliminating industrial safety hazards. Actions include installation of protective screens over hot pipes or equipment, installation of guards on rotating equipment and elimination of tripping hazards particularly due to loose extension cords; and
Insufficient progress has been made on the recommendation to have a person on the site at all times who is authorized to initiate an appropriate on-site response plan promptly and without consultation. It is noted that the practice at Fessenheim NPP is the same as the practice applied at other EDF plants and it is agreed by the French regulatory body ASN.
The team delivered a draft of its findings to Fessenheim management in the form of "Technical Notes" for factual comments. These notes, along with any comments from Fessenheim NPP and the French nuclear regulatory authority, will be reviewed at IAEA headquarters. The final report will be submitted to the Government of France within three months.

The IAEA conducts approximately six OSART follow-up missions each year and this was the 102nd follow-up mission conducted to date.

Light Z' Bosons at the Tevatron

New gauge bosons with Standard Model-like couplings to leptons are constrained by collider searches to be heavier than approximately ~1 TeV. A Z' boson with suppressed couplings to leptons, however, could be much lighter and possess substantial couplings to Standard Model quarks. In this article, we consider a new leptophobic Z' gauge boson as a simple and well motivated extension of the Standard Model, and discuss several of its possible signatures at the Tevatron. We find that three of the recent anomalies reported from the Tevatron - in particular the top-quark forward-backward asymmetry and excesses in the 3b and W + 2 jets final states - could be explained by a new Z' with a mass of approximately 150 GeV, relatively large couplings to quarks, and suppressed couplings to electrons and muons. Moreover, we find that such a particle could also mediate the interactions of dark matter, leading to potentially interesting implications for direct detection experiments
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)

Dark Energy Survey Poised to Probe Cosmic Speed-Up

Scientists announced that the Dark Energy Survey soon expects to make a substantial leap forward in our understanding of why the universe is accelerating and the nature of dark energy.

Members of the DES collaboration will give an overview of the survey at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 11, at a Special Session of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. Dark Energy Survey Director Josh Frieman will highlight the project and how it will advance our understanding of dark energy at a AAS press conference at 9 a.m. PST on Thursday, Jan. 13.

The international DES collaboration of physicists and astronomers has built the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera that will be mounted later this year on the 4-meter (158-inch) telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

"The camera is now undergoing final tests on a specially built telescope simulator at Fermilab,” said Brenna Flaugher, Dark Energy Camera project manager and a Fermilab scientist.

Improved photo-sensors based on charged-coupled devices (CCDs) designed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will provide the camera with enhanced sensitivity to carry out the largest galaxy survey of its kind.

“The Dark Energy Survey data will be an unprecedented legacy for astronomers and will have unique scientific reach until the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope comes along at the end of the decade,” said DES Deputy Director Rich Kron of the University of Chicago.

The telescope has been improved in preparation for installing the camera this year.

"The Dark Energy Camera will be a remarkable facility for the astronomical community in addition to its use by the DES collaboration," said CTIO astronomer Alistair Walker.

During five years of operation, DES will create deep, color images of one-eighth of the sky, or 5,000-square degrees, to measure 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters, and 4,000 new supernovae. It will construct the largest map of the cosmic web of large-scale structure traced by galaxies and by dark matter.

"The DES combination of survey area and depth will far surpass what has come before," Frieman said.

DES will take advantage of the excellent atmospheric conditions in the Chilean Andes to deliver images with the sharpest resolution yet for such a wide-field survey. This will enable the team to probe dark energy using a technique called weak gravitational lensing, said Bhuvnesh Jain, a DES collaborator at the University of Pennsylvania.

DES will combine weak lensing with three other probes of dark energy – galaxy clusters, supernovae, and large-scale structure – the first time this will be possible in a single experiment. During the Tuesday session on DES, these measurements will be described by scientists Chris Miller of the University of Michigan, Masao Sako of the University of Pennsylvania, and Enrique Gaztanaga from the Catalan Institute of Space Studies in Barcelona.

Over the course of the survey, each part of the sky will be viewed multiple times through five different filters, creating a very large amount of data. The camera will capture more than 300 images a night, resulting in about 200 gigabytes of compressed, raw data, or roughly a million gigabytes of processed data by the end of the survey, said Joe Mohr of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. The data will be processed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Urbana, Illinois, and delivered to collaboration scientists and to the public.

DES's survey area is selected to overlap with other sky surveys that can provide additional data about the galaxies and clusters it views. These surveys include the South Pole Telescope, which sees galaxy clusters as cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the European Southern Observatory’s Vista Hemisphere Survey, which will observe the same sky region in infrared light.

DES is supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, funding agencies in the United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, and Germany, and the participating DES institutions.

About the Dark Energy Survey and Dark Energy Camera:
Astrophysicists assembled and are testing the Dark Energy Camera at Fermilab using a new state-of-the-art facility specially built for this purpose. The first parts have been shipped to Chile and the rest will be shipped this year as testing is completed. "First light" for the camera on the telescope is scheduled for late 2011.

The Dark Energy Survey will use the camera to understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating and to probe the dark energy thought to be causing this cosmic speed-up. Dark energy, a mysterious source of anti-gravity that has been found to dominate the energy density of the universe, will determine the fate of the universe. If the expansion continues to speed up, in 100 billion years the observable universe could be nearly empty of galaxies.

The Dark Energy Camera will peer into space to trace the history of the universe roughly three-quarters of the way back to the time of the Big Bang, capturing images of 300 million distant galaxies about 10 million times fainter than the dimmest star you can see from Earth with the naked eye.

The Dark Energy Camera will have the largest optical survey power in the world. Its 2.2 degree field of view is so large that a single image will record data from an area of the sky 20 times the size of the moon as seen from earth. This wide field of view requires that DECam use a system of five lenses, each one uniquely shaped to correct a variety of optical aberrations, with the biggest of these lenses being almost 1 meter in diameter.

More information about the Dark Energy Survey, including the list of participating institutions, is available at the project website: http://www.darkenergysurvey.org.

AHI Applauds Rep. Sarbanes’ Letter to State Department on FYROM’s NATO Aspirations

Panayoti Karousos with U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD)
WASHINGTON, DC—U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) sent a letter to Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs Philip H. Gordon on November 8, 2010 on the matter of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s (FYROM) continued insistence to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) irrespective of NATO’s legal framework on the eve of the upcoming NATO Summit in Lisbon. The American Hellenic Institute (AHI) applauds Rep. Sarbanes’ letter, which also expressed appreciation to Assistant Secretary Gordon for his “recent statement affirming that resolution of the name dispute must occur before FYROM can join the NATO Alliance.”

“We thank Congressman Sarbanes for emphasizing that the sole basis for decision-making in NATO is done by consensus and for stating numerous examples of FYROM’s irredentist ambitions against, and nationalistic hate propaganda toward, NATO member Greece,” said Executive Director Nick Larigakis.

Rep. Sarbanes wrote: “FYROM certainly knows that, under the governing rules of the Alliance, its admission to NATO is impossible as long as NATO member Greece objects, which it does so rightly based on FYROM’s refusal to comply with the United Nations brokered Interim Agreement. The Interim Agreement requires Skopje to negotiate a mutually acceptable name for the country with Athens. Nevertheless, Skopje ignores its legal obligations, treats Greece’s valid objections as irrelevant, and cynically invites others to take the same position – flouting in ever respect the letter and spirit of NATO’s fundamental protocols.”

Rep. Sarbanes’ letter reinforces AHI’s October 26, 2010 letter to President Barack Obama on the same issue. AHI’s letter strongly disagreed with a congressional letter signed by 19 legislators who claimed FYROM’s NATO membership should not be “negatively affected by bilateral issues with Greece.”
The American Hellenic Institute AHI is a non-profit Greek American public policy center that works to strengthen relations between the United States and Greece and Cyprus, and within the Greek American community.

The 9th Annual "Future of Hellenism" Conference takes place in Los Angeles

Los Angeles, CA - Nov 23, 2010

On Saturday, November 20 th , 2010, the American Hellenic Institute held its 9 th Annual “Future of Hellenism” conference in at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. The conference was well attended by both members of the local Greek-American Community as well as by active Greek-Americans who flew in from all corners of the country to exchange ideas and information about various subjects.

The conference, which was co-sponsored by local organizations such as the American Hellenic Council, AHEPA District 20 and the Greek Heritage Society of Southern California addressed issues regarding politics, education, business, entertainment, culture, religion & the youth.

Honorary guest of the conference was acclaimed actor John Aniston, who received the AHI Hellenic Heritage Achievement Award.

The conference opened with a general overview of where Greek-American organizations are heading. The attendees were addressed by 2010 Ahepan of the Year Costa “Chachi” Tzavaras, who spoke about the necessity and importance of grass roots revitalization of our local communities by fostering meaningful interpersonal relations. Mr. Paul Kotrotsios, publisher of the Hellenic News and organizer of the annual Hermes Expo mentioned the need for cooperation among all organizations and involvement of the youth.

Greek-American Congressman Gus Bilirakis & AHC President Michael Galanakis discussed the need for more political involvement at the grass-roots level on behalf of the community and stressed the fact that Greek-Americans should be more involved in the political process by fundraising and holding officials accountable when it comes to issues of concern to the community.

HBO Miniseries President Kary Antholis and Mr. John Aniston discussed the role of the community in the Entertainment Industry and how we can promote our values, ideals and culture through film to the broader world.

Keynote speaker Professor Dan Georgakas discussed the development of modern technology and how it affects our relations with Greece, our families in Greece, our contact with the mother country, our language and identity. He stressed that the radical developments in transportation and telecommunications encourage multiculturalism more than ever before while at the same time, they allow us to be constantly informed and updated about developments hundreds of miles away.

The first topic covered in the afternoon session was Greek-American education. AHI President Aleco Haralambides spoke in detail about the Greek Charter School that his father founded in Miami, Florida and how it has been used and should be used as a model for future endeavors. Dr. Thomas Gallant and Professor Demetrios Liappas spoke about the state and future of the Greek language and culture (both Ancient and modern) in US higher educational institutions, while Ms. Helen Dumas discussed the challenges faced by elementary and secondary Greek schools in America.

Following that, cultural and religious Identity issues were extensively discussed by a panel comprised of Rev. John Bakas of Saint Sophia Cathedral, Professor of Archeology and Classics at UCLA John Papadopoulos, Dr. Angelyn Balodimas-Bartolomei & AHI Board member Nick Karambelas.

The next subject addressed by the conference was a variety of Study Abroad programs that exist between the US and Greece. Dr. Jim Dimitriou, Director of the AHEPA “Journey to Greece” program, Mr. Art Dimopoulos, coordinator of the National Hellenic Society Study Abroad Program and AHI Director Nick Larigakis shared with the audience the experiences, challenges and benefits of maintaining study abroad programs and stressed that such programs are the most critical elements in keeping first and second generation Greek-Americans linked to their roots.

This view was shared by actual past American-born attendees of these programs such as Mr. Michael Savvas of San Diego and Joseph Skarzenski of Los Angeles. Both of them, together with Radio Neo & Neo Magazine Contributor Ms. Joanna Xipa spoke highly of how their trips to Greece provided a once-in-a-lifetime experience that made them truly connect to their heritage, connect with the motherland and even better relate to their parents and grandparents.

Other key participants included Mr. Kyriakos Tsakopoulos of AKT Development who gave the opening remarks for the conference and Mr. Demetrios Boutris of the Boutris Group. The event was also attended by active young Greek American students, members of the National Hellenic Student Association of America and of the Hellenic Business Network.

While the conference concluded with the remarks of acclaimed writer, Professor Van Coufoudakis around 6 pm, many of the attendees stayed longer extending the discussions in private gatherings.

Mr. Aniston receiving the award together with several AHI Board Members
American Hellenic Council

The American Hellenic Council applauds Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for her positions on Cyprus and religious Freedom in Turkey

n January, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Florida will be the next Chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, a position now held by CA Congressman Howard Berman.

The Congresswoman, who has been busy meeting with several representatives of foreign governments, recently met with both the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and the Turkish Ambassador to the United States.

During both meetings, Ms Ros-Lehtinen stressed the issue of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the need for more religious freedom in Turkey. She specifically asked for re-opening of the Halki Seminary and the removal of the strict criteria for Patriarchical Succession.

She also expressed her dissatisfaction to the Turkish Ambassador about the lack of progress towards a resolution to the Cyprus problem. In a press release from her office after her meeting, she stated that "Turkey's position on the conflict in Cyprus , which has divided that country for almost four decades is deeply concerning. Turkey must fully support a Cypriot solution to reunification of the island and immediately withdraw its troops from northern Cyprus".

Ms. Lehtinen also raised her concern about Turkey's support of Iran and stated that "if Turkey does not make progress on all of the above issues soon, there is risk for permanent damage to its relationship with the United States."

In a statement following the communications we received from the Congresswoman, Alexander Mizan, Executive Director of the American Hellenic Council said that "we are applauding the fact that the Ranking Republican Member (and soon to be Chairman) of the Foreign Affairs Committee is raising these important issues with the Turkish Foreign Minister and the Turkish Ambassador. These are issues that need to be brought to the forefront of the debate and get addressed. Turkey is an ally of the United States and it should behave by protecting the human rights of its very own citizens as well as adhere to international law and treaties".

We believe that the statements made by Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen are very encouraging for the issues that concern us as Greek-Americans. She has proven to be a good friend of the community and a supporter of our issues. We hope that as Chairman she leads the Foreign Affairs Committee into taking further action towards pressing Turkey to resolve those issues soon.
American Hellenic Council