TEHRAN, Iran (AP) 12 June 18— President Hassan Rouhani says Iran will not be able to remain in the 2015 nuclear accord unless it benefits from the agreement’s provisions.
In a phone conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, Rouhani said the Europeans must find a way to compensate Iran if they want to preserve the landmark agreement, following President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal and restore sanctions.
Co-signers France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China want to preserve the accord, which limits Iran’s nuclear activities in return for lifting international sanctions.
Rouhani’s website quoted him as saying: “We must not let this great achievement of diplomacy be destroyed by others’ unilateral actions, which are unfaithful to their promises.”
Other Iranian officials have said nuclear activities could be resumed if the agreement collapses.
RICHLAND, Wash. — A Hanford watchdog group is objecting as the Department of Energy takes the first step toward a plan to fill underground, radioactive waste storage tanks with concrete-like grout and leave them permanently in place.
The C Tank Farm, which would be closed first, has not had enough radioactive waste removed to have tanks filled with grout, said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Seattle-based Hanford Challenge.
“This would be a serious setback for the cleanup at Hanford if the DOE is allowed to turn Hanford into the nation’s high-level nuclear waste dump,” Carpenter said. “This will be challenged.”
Geoffrey Fettus, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that “the people of the Pacific Northwest deserve better, and we’ll be there with them opposing this unsound and unsafe effort.”
DOE has completed a draft evaluation of the waste remaining in the C Tank Farm, concluding that radioactive waste has been removed to the extent possible and that the remaining waste, if grouted in place, would meet requirements for disposing of it as low-level radioactive waste.
The draft evaluation is a step toward classifying the waste as low-level to allow it to be left in place as tanks are filled with grout and then covered with an above-ground cap to prevent precipitation from infiltrating.
An all-day meeting is planned starting at 9 a.m. Monday at the Richland Public Library to explain the draft document and its findings. A public comment period started June 4.
DOE worked steadily to empty most of the waste in the 16 tanks of C Tank Farm from 2003 until late 2017.
The federal court-enforced consent decree requires DOE to get as much radioactive waste from the tanks as possible, with an overall goal of getting an average of 99 percent of waste removed from the 149 single-shell tanks at Hanford.
It is roughly the equivalent of a little less than an inch of waste if it were spread evenly across the bottom of a tank.
In the C Tank Farm, about 96 percent of the volume of the waste was removed, according to DOE.
The 16 tanks held 1.8 million gallons of mostly sludge and salt cake when retrieval of solids began. They now hold an estimated 64,000 gallons of waste.
DOE was required to use up to three different technologies at each tank until each technology was no longer able to remove waste under the terms of the federal court-enforced consent decree.
Technologies included various methods to spray high-pressure streams of liquid on the waste within the enclosed tanks and move it toward a pump for removal, different vacuuming systems, and soaking hardened waste in water or a caustic chemical.
Much of the remaining waste is difficult to retrieve safely without exposing workers to radiation or damaging the walls and floor of the tanks, which already are prone to leaking. Some of the remaining waste is clinging to the walls of the tank.
Hanford Challenge is not proposing that workers be put in harm’s way, Carpenter said.
In 10 to 20 years, there could be better technology to retrieve remaining waste, provided the tanks have not already been filled with grout to make that impossible, he said.
In the meantime, the solid waste in the tanks could be monitored and DOE could focus on the more pressing issue of removing waste from its other leak-prone, single-shell tanks, Carpenter said. Just one tank in addition to the 16 C Farm tanks has been emptied to regulatory standards.
Grout has not been shown to effectively contain nuclear waste for periods of more than 100 years, according to Hanford Challenge. Water can infiltrate grout, and grout can break down quickly in the presence of caustic materials such as nuclear waste, it said.
Plutonium would reach the groundwater and then the Columbia Point at some point in the future, Carpenter said.
The draft proposal would challenge the consensus that Hanford’s tank waste should be vitrified, or immobilized in glass, according to Hanford Challenge.
“Hanford is proposing shortcuts to the cleanup that will save money, but will in the end further damage the environment and impact human health and safety and future generations,” Carpenter said.
DOE said in its announcement of the draft report and public meeting that “closing the emptied tanks would be a significant achievement in DOE’s Hanford cleanup mission. DOE has a record of safely and successfully closing emptied underground waste tanks at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Idaho National Laboratory.”
Public comment will be accepted through Sept. 7 at WMACDRAFTWIR@rl.gov. It also can be mailed to Jan Bovier; DOE Office of River Protection; P.O. Box 450, MSIN H6-60; Richland, WA 99354.
For more information on the report, click on the revolving banner at www.hanford.gov.
Further steps in the regulatory process will be required before the C Tank Farm is closed.
DOE will have to make a decision on whether tanks could be filled with grout or must be dug up. The Washington state Department of Ecology, a Hanford regulator, also would have to agree that tanks could be grouted.
What a Secret Cold War Game of Nuclear Hide-and-Seek Teaches Us About North Korean Verification
Making sure that Pyongyang actually destroys its nuclear weapons may be impossible. FP, BYSHARON WEINBERGER|
In its simplest conception, Cloud Gap was an attempt to see if inspectors could find evidence of an arms control violation in a given area. The project, started in 1963 and run out of a small office near the White House, included field exercises at U.S. military bases, where a red team playing the role of the Soviets would hide objects associated with a clandestine nuclear test, and a competing team would try to find them.
It was a kind of spy world treasure hunt.
The test, of course, presupposed an arms control agreement that allowed for reasonably open, on-site inspections, something the Soviet Union resisted during the Cold War and North Korea would likely resist today.
But the program, jointly run by the Defense Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, drew mostly ridicule among Washington’s nuclear experts. Robert Frosch, then a senior official in charge of nuclear monitoring research at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, mocked the entire approach…….
Frosch’s concerns appear to have been at least partially borne out. A report written after one Cloud Gap exercise in 1967 reached the conclusion that inspectors would have difficulties distinguishing between the debris from real weapons and decoys. …….
While Cloud Gap’s existence was known, its findings were kept secret for decades. Many of the records were released just a few years ago in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Aftergood.
Former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who served in a senior position at the Pentagon during the time Cloud Gap was conducted, believes that the central difficulty of verification remains unchanged, even as the methods for on-site inspections have improved.
Belgian nuclear reactor Doel 4, just across the Dutch border, shut down automatically due to a fault on Saturday evening. The shutdown was an automatic procedure and there is no danger for the environment and the population, a Doel spokesperson said, ANP reports.
According to reports in Belgian media, the fault occurred in the non-nuclear part of the plant. The reactor was to be restarted on Sunday night, but that was postponed until Monday for unknown reasons.
Due to the shutdown, the nuclear power plant can not produce any electricity. A spokesperson told VRT Nieuws that this should not lead to power interruptions for the public. Operator Engie Elctrabel will import more electricity from abroad. This electricity mainly comes from the Netherlands and France, according to ANP.
The Doel nuclear power plant is located northwest of Antwerp, just across the Dutch border. The plant faced multiple problems in the past, causing unrest among local residents, both in the Netherlands and Belgium. In April nuclear reactor Doel 1 was shut down due to a leak in the nuclear part of the plant.
Brexit without trade deal is ‘worst-case scenario’ for nuclear industry, Utility Week 12 June 18 David Blackman
Withdrawing from the EU without a trade deal would be the “worst-case scenario” for the nuclear industry, Tom Greatrex has warned.
The Nuclear Industry Association chief executive told a conference in London, organised by Chinese atomic energy company Ocean Energy last week, that the Brexit transition period would be “crucial” to the sector, which depended in turn on whether the UK is able to strike a trade deal with the EU.
“No deal is the worst-case scenario for our industry because of the specific nature of the Euratom treaty,” he said, referring to the EU-wide framework for safeguarding nuclear materials and labour.
Greatrex also raised alarm bells over the impact of Brexit on the industry despite the steps taken by colleges in Somerset to train local people to work in the Hinkley Point C plant.
…….Labour peer Lord Hanworth echoed Greatrex’s concerns about the industry’s skilled labour pipeline, citing as a particular worry the government’s failure to make a decision so far on Rolls Royce’s bid to develop a small modular reactor programme.
Rolls Royce could “no longer sustain” the project in the face of “considerable uncertainty”, he said: “If they have to walk away from the project, Britain will lose part of its nuclear engineering competence. “
The peer also highlighted concerns expressed by Hinkley Point C’s developer EDF about the shortage of steel fixers and concrete pourers.
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