nuclear-news

Following the withdrawal of seven Utah cities from the Carbon Free Power Project before the October deadline, the Southern Utah cities have passed resolutions to cap financial obligation for the first phase of licensing……..

Not all are completely sold on the safety of this power plant.

Scott Williams, the executive director of Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, told St. George News that one of the major issues with this project has to do with the lack of transparency, as UAMPS is exempt from the Open and Public Meetings Act.

“We don’t get minutes. We don’t get agendas.” he said…….

The next off-ramp for cities to withdraw will be near the end of the 2021 or early 2022 after the next licensing phase.

UAMPS has also talked about possibly downsizing the project from 12 modules to four or six modules…….

Environmentally devastating’

When it comes to potential environmental impacts, Williams said the number one problem is highly radioactive waste.

“We’ve been building nuclear reactors around the country since the 60s, and all of that highly radioactive fuel is just sitting at those power plants with nowhere to go.”…..

“We just think we shouldn’t generate anymore high-level nuclear waste until we have a safe, environmentally responsible way to deal with it.”

Second to this, he said, is the whole process of creating nuclear fuel. All of the stages – mining, milling and enrichment – present health hazards to people.

“Southeastern Utah is full of abandoned uranium mines that create radioactive exposure to the populations down there, and they’re not being cleaned up,” he said, adding that these mines are almost all in San Juan County.

“The entire Navajo Nation is full of them. In fact, we’re just putting a map together; There’s hundreds of them on the Navajo Reservation.”

Much of the mine tailings were put near Moab, he added, and for some 40 years they have been in the process of moving these tailings away from the Colorado River up to a place near Interstate 70, which has cost billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.

This project, the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project, is being administered by the U.S. Department of Energy and is about 68% complete with efforts to move 16 million tons of uranium tailings from the banks of the Colorado River to a permanent disposal site 32 miles north, near Crescent Junction.

The final possible implication of the project, Williams said, would be in the case of an accident at the facility, which would be “environmentally devastating.”

“UAMPS and NuScale say this plant is meltdown-proof, but they’ve never actually built one of these modules before, so it’s all theoretical at this point.”

So if not nuclear, what’s the best option?

Aside from wind, solar and hydro (that’s already established), he said there is new technology coming to the scene that will be here before this power plant is finished. This technology includes utility-scale or home-based battery storage for intermittent power sources. Investing in energy efficiency is also integral, as well as making use of wasted power through grid integration.

But what it really comes down to, he said, is a shift in public perception.

“A lot of the people who are proponents of this nuclear plant are still thinking about energy the way we’ve been producing it in the past, and they say, ‘Battery storage will never be economically competitive.’ But they said that about solar 10 years ago, and it’s become cheaper faster than any of them could have predicted.”https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2020/11/21/asd-environmentally-devastating-or-really-really-safe-southern-utah-cities-set-financial-caps-for-nuclear-power-project/#.X7rBxGgzbIU