Engie demands close scrutiny of French nuclear power deal to ensure competition.
A recent deal regulating French nuclear power risks making
electricity more expensive and must be carefully monitored to ensure the
new rules do not strengthen EDF’s dominant position, power group Engie’s
CEO said on Wednesday. Vigilance will be needed to ensure EDF’s producer
and supplier activities are strictly separated, said Engie (ENGIE.PA),
which is the second largest electricity supplier in the country behind
state-owned EDF.
Reuters 22nd Nov 2023
Xcel’s Prairie Island nuclear plant will be out of commission until January
An equipment issue at the Prairie Island plant near Red Wing hasn’t impacted electric service, but it could lead to higher fuel costs that are passed down to Xcel’s customers on their monthly bills.
By Walker Orenstein Star Tribune, NOVEMBER 22, 2023
An equipment problem at Xcel Energy’s nuclear power plant near Red Wing has shut down the facility likely until January, causing a three-month outage for one of the utility’s biggest power sources.
The issue at the Prairie Island plant hasn’t affected electric service, but it could lead to higher fuel costs that are passed down to Xcel’s customers on their monthly bills.
On Oct. 19, one of two units at the plant shut itself down after an issue between the turbine and the electric grid, said Xcel spokesman Kevin Coss. The company said repairs are underway as it replaces cabling between the unit and the substation at the plant.
…………………………………Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer formerly with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the issue sounded like “an aging problem.” Other plants down for that long have had issues with their electric distribution systems, he said, and often with the generator itself.
“Things do wear out,” Lochbaum said.
…………………………………………………………… This is the second unplanned outage at an Xcel nuclear plant in recent months. Xcel’s Monticello nuclear plant shut down Sept. 27 after an issue with pressure control valves in the turbine during scheduled testing. Xcel told federal regulators that all safety systems functioned properly and there were no environmental or health impacts. Xcel made repairs to the plant, which is now running………… more https://www.startribune.com/xcels-prairie-island-nuclear-plant-will-be-out-of-commission-until-january/600321701/
Etopia Report: the nuclear problem – economic realities
Selected quotes for from the eTopia report 2023 (translated from the French)
“4.5. The pharaonic cost of accidents and uninsurability of Nuclear
For their part, the potential costs of nuclear incidents and accidents are difficult to take into account in the cost of the mWh, even if they are very real. Thus, the sabotage (still not clarified) in 2014 of one of the reactors at Doel cost Engie nearly 100 million euros. And in case largest accident, no insurance company in the world will agree to cover nuclear power plants.
The maximum amount of damage up to which liability of the operator is incurred, amounts to €1.2 billion for each accident nuclear ! The additional costs would therefore be borne by the taxpayers (see on this subject the Price Anderson Act, American legal framework of irresponsibility of operators on which the legislation is based today (European).
As an example – and scale – the cost of the disaster of Chernobyl is estimated, at a minimum, at more than 200 billion euros, that of Fukushima today exceeds 170 billion, while the counter still running… The Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) studied the economic cost of a nuclear accident, if it occurred in France. A serious accident would cost on average 120 billion euros, a major accident, 430 billion euros… or the GDP of Belgium.
In a recent interview, Patrick Pouyanné, boss of Total Energies, explains why the company will not go into nuclear power. Acknowledging that they had studied the issue very seriously, he concluded: “it’s very capital intensive and the risk cocktail is too important to a private company”. Too expensive and too dangerous, therefore. In Germany, a study commissioned by the Versicherungsforen Leipzig, a service provider for insurance companies, calculated in 2011 that if an insurance wanted to constitute sufficient premiums to a nuclear power plant within 50 years, for example, it should ask for 72 billion euros per year for civil liability!
In practical, the reactors cannot therefore be insured, unless that the price of electricity is multiplied by… twenty. The study explains years of market distortion in favor of nuclear energy and to the detriment of competition. Uwe Leprich from the University of Sciences applied sciences of Saarbrücken, demonstrates that “nuclear energy is not competitive when considered from an economic point of view appropriate in terms of regulatory policy. »
ETOPIA is a Center for animation and research in political ecology. Founded in 2004, based in Namur, our think tank brings together environmental activists, associate researchers, trainers and change agents.
Link eTopia Nuclear 2023 Report: https://rep.etopia.be/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/LIVRE_PROBLEME_NUCLEAIRE_WEB.pdf
The Russian nuclear industry during wartime, 2022 and early 2023
Bellona has published a new report that analyze the new footing on which
Rosatom, Russia’s power state nuclear corporation, has found itself as the
the war in Ukraine grinds on. It’s clear that the putatively civilian
corporation is now a direct participant in and beneficiary of Russia’s
seizure of Ukrainian nuclear infrastructure.
In the early days of the war,
Moscow’s troops marched into Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear
accident and now the host of numerous industrial scale activities aimed at
cleaning it up. Days later, it then overran the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power
plant — Europe’s largest such facility — making it the world’s first
nuclear power station to be taken as prize as the result of an armed
attack. Click here to download the report: The Russian nuclear industry during wartime, 2022 and early 2023
Bellona 21st Nov 2023
Finland extends nuclear reactor outage, pushing up power price
November 20, 2023 —by Essi Lehto and Nora Buli for Reuters
HELSINKI, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Finnish power company TVO said on Monday it had extended an outage at Olkiluoto 3, Europe’s largest nuclear power generator, while it undertakes repairs, likely boosting electricity prices.
The 1,600 megawatts (MW) unit, known as OL3, on Sunday suffered an unexpected outage due to a turbine problem, TVO and Nordic power bourse Nord Pool said.
“We are looking into a fault on the turbine side and when we find out what it is, we can say what caused it and when we can return to electricity production,” said a TVO spokesperson.
“We will issue a statement as soon as we know more.”
The outage was expected to drive up short-term power prices in Finland and the Nordic region, an LSEG market analyst said.
TVO had initially predicted a return to full production capacity on Monday morning, but in a regulatory filing said it was instead aiming for a partial restart to take place on Tuesday…………………… https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/finland-extends-nuclear-reactor-outage-pushing-up-power-price
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U.S. Bets on Small Nuclear Reactors – But major obstacles loom.
U.S. Bets on Small Nuclear Reactors to Help Fix a Huge Climate Problem.
The dream of reviving nuclear power in the U.S. rests on a new generation
of smaller reactors meant to be easier to build.
But major obstacles loom.
Nearly a dozen companies are developing reactors that are a fraction of the
size of those at Vogtle, betting that they will be quicker and cheaper to
build. As the United States looks to transition away from fossil fuels.
But the push to expand nuclear power, which today supplies 18 percent of
electricity, faces enormous hurdles. In a major setback last week, the
first serious effort to build small reactors in the United States was
abruptly cancelled amid soaring costs. While other projects are still
moving forward, the industry has consistently struggled to build plants on
time and on budget. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the
safety of the nation’s nuclear fleet, is less experienced with novel
reactor technologies.
And the problem remains of how to dispose of
radioactive waste. “These nuclear megaprojects had just gotten way too
complex,” said Jay Wileman, president of GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, which
is designing a slimmed-down version of its boiling-water reactor that is
only 300 megawatts — one-quarter the size of the 1,117-megawatt units at
Vogtle. Ontario Power Generation plans to deploy four of them in Canada,
hoping to bring down costs as it builds the same design again and again.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is considering at least one.
Other companies
are exploring radically new reactor designs that, in theory, can’t melt
down and don’t require big containment domes or other expensive
equipment. Some might be manufactured in factories and assembled on-site,
potentially lowering costs.
The approval process can be slow. To date, the
N.R.C. has certified only one small reactor design, developed by NuScale
Power. NuScale’s light-water technology is similar to existing plants,
but the company argued that smaller reactors required different safety
rules, such as smaller evacuation zones in case of accidents.
Securing approval took a decade and cost $500 million.
Last week, NuScale announced
it was cancelling plans to deploy six 77-megawatt reactors in Idaho by
2030, which would have been the nation’s first small nuclear plant. The
problem was that it couldn’t sign up enough customers. Soaring costs
didn’t help: In January, NuScale said the price of building the reactors
had jumped from $5.3 billion to $9.3 billion, citing higher interest rates
and materials costs. On a per-megawatt basis, the project had become as
expensive as Vogtle.
“The small reactors being hyped by the nuclear
industry and its allies are simply too late, too expensive, too uncertain
and too risky,” said David Schlissel, an analyst for the Institute for
Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who has urged utilities to pursue
alternatives like solar and geothermal power. Other challenges loom. The
United States isn’t yet producing enough of the specialized fuel for
advanced reactors. There’s no long-term plan for nuclear waste. Siting
new plants can be contentious: Last year, officials in Pueblo County,
Colo., withdrew plans to replace a retiring coal plant with a reactor after
local backlash.
New York Times 12th Nov 2023
Consortium green lights European NuScale style (!) small nuclear reactors
Construction Europe By Mike Hayes, 15 November 2023
Industrial bodies from Romania, Italy and Belgium have formed a consortium to advance nuclear energy technology in Europe.
Romanian and Belgian nuclear research centres RATEN and SCK CEN, Italian nuclear company Ansaldo Nucleare and engineering and energy R&D agency ENEA, will take part in the initiative, in collaboration with the US-based nuclear technology company Westinghouse Electric.
The primary objective of the consortium is to develop a small modular lead-cooled fast neutron reactor (SMR-LFR…….
The proposal was reportedly to mirror the efforts of the US NuScale project – a project which has now been cancelled, following a doubling of construction costs.)………………………………https://www.construction-europe.com/news/consortium-green-lights-european-small-nuclear-reactors/8033034.article
Are staff shortages at Sellafield nuclear power plant affecting safety at the site?
QUESTIONS have been asked over whether a staff shortage at Sellafield
nuclear power plant is affecting safety at the site. The issue was raised
at this month’s meeting of the west Cumbria sites stakeholder group at
Cleator Moor Civic Hall. Neil Crewdson, Sellafield’s site director, was
presenting a progress report on various developments at the site where he
highlighted recruitment issues and a difficulty in attracting staff. But he
outlined a number of ways in which they are hoping to tackle the situation
and turn things around. He said there used to be 200 vacancies a year and
it had risen to 900. He added: “Post Covid we had a step change in people
leaving. With salaries we are trying to make sure they are more
competitive.”
Carlisle News & Star 14th Nov 2023
https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/23923195.rising-number-vacancies-sellafield-covid/
America’s first SMR fizzles out as uranium continues to ride high
SMR developer NuScale has, predictably, rebutted a short seller’s report from Iceberg Research on its operations last month.
Its stock is down 81% over the past year.
Yet enthusiasm for the nuclear renaissance is still strong
Stockhead, Josh Chiat, 14 Nov 23
Small modular reactors — they’re the technology the nuclear power industry hopes will mainstream the controversial energy sector and prove it can expand without the massive scale of traditional nuclear energy.
But the emerging market has been dealt a blow just as enthusiasm for a nuclear renaissance hits a new level of intensity.
It came in the form of a decision from the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems and advanced SMR developer NuScale to dump a plan called the “Carbon Free Power Project”.
That would have been the first SMR rolled out in the States, six minireactors due to be constructed in Idaho Falls from 2026. But NuScale and UAMPS deemed it unviable after subscriptions fell well below the level required to underwrite the project’s construction.
It came despite strong political support, including from the Biden Administration, amid long delays and cost overruns for conventional plants.
Wood Mackenzie vice-chair of Americas Ed Crooks said it was a serious setback for the SMR industry.
“But while the end of the Carbon Free Power Project was not entirely unexpected, it is still a serious setback for nuclear power in the US, and for hopes of reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally,” he said in a note.
“It is increasingly likely that no new SMRs will be built in the US or Europe in the 2020s.”
According to Crooks the levelised cost of energy for the power to be delivered by the dumped project was over double that of utility-scale solar and materially higher than gas turbines.
“Estimates published in January set a target levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for the plant of US$89 per megawatt hour, up from an earlier estimate of US$58/MWh, including the benefit of tax credits and federal government support,” he wrote.
“But even that revised target relied on some favourable assumptions. Hitting that US$89/MWh target depended on cutting US$700 million from the Carbon Free Power Project’s estimated cost of US$5.1 billion.
“Without that, the LCOE would be US$105/MWh, and there were clear risks that it could rise higher.
“Wood Mackenzie calculated last year that the average LCOE from a combined-cycle gas turbine power plant in the US was US$58/MWh, while utility-scale solar was US$43/MWh.
“That makes the Carbon Free Power Project’s cost estimates seem expensive, even before any additional overruns.”
Enthusiasm for nuclear continues
Despite that news, SMR developer NuScale has, predictably, rebutted a short seller’s report from Iceberg Research on its operations last month.
Its stock is down 81% over the past year.
Yet enthusiasm for the nuclear renaissance is still strong, …………………………………………………………. https://stockhead.com.au/resources/ground-breakers-americas-first-smr-fizzles-out-as-uranium-continues-to-ride-high/
Deal to build pint-size nuclear reactors canceled, ‘avoiding a giant financial debacle.’
NuScale Power’s small modular reactors promised cheaper nuclear power, but costs soared and utilities balked
Science, NOV 2023 BY ADRIAN CHO
A plan to build a novel nuclear power plant comprising six small modular reactors (SMRs) fell apart this week when prospective customers for its electricity backed out. Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a coalition of community-owned power systems in seven western states, withdrew from a deal to build the plant, designed by NuScale Power, because too few members agreed to buy into it. The project, subsidized by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), sought to revive the moribund U.S. nuclear industry, but its cost had more than doubled to $9.3 billion.
“We still see a future for new nuclear,” says Mason Baker, CEO and general manager of UAMPS, which planned to build the plant in Idaho. “But in the near term, we’re going to focus on … expanding our wind capacity, doing more utility-scale solar, [and] batteries.” NuScale, which was spun out of Oregon State University in 2007, declined to make anyone available for an interview. But David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says, “The communities and their ratepayers have avoided a giant financial debacle.”
To some observers, the plan’s collapse also raises questions about the feasibility of other planned advanced reactors, meant to provide clean energy with fewer drawbacks than existing reactors. NuScale’s was the most conventional of the designs, and the closest to construction. “There’s plenty of reasons to think [the other projects] are going to be even more difficult and expensive,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist and director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The U.S. nuclear industry has brought just two new power reactors online in the past quarter-century. In a deregulated power market, developers have struggled with the enormous capital expense of building a power reactor. Two new reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, one of which came online in May, cost more than $30 billion.
To whack down cost, engineers at NuScale decided to think small. Each NuScale SMR would produce just a fraction of the 1.1 gigawatts produced by one of the new Vogtle reactors. As originally conceived in 2014, the plant would contain 12 SMRs, each producing 60 megawatts of electricity, for $4.2 billion.
Small reactors are not an obvious winner. Basic physics dictates that a bigger nuclear reactor will be more fuel efficient than a smaller one. And a big nuclear plant can benefit from economies of scale. However, a small reactor can be simpler. For example, NuScale engineers rely on convection to drive cooling water through the core of each SMR, obviating the need for expensive pumps. SMRs also can be mass-produced in a factory and shipped whole to a site, reducing costs.
Size aside, NuScale’s SMR is relatively conventional. Whereas other advanced reactor designs rely on exotic coolants, NuScale’s sticks to water. It also uses the same low-enriched uranium fuel as existing power reactors. Those features helped the NuScale design win approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in September 2020—the only advanced reactor to have done so.
DOE agreed to host the plant at its Idaho National Laboratory, bypassing the long site permitting process commercial reactors ordinarily face. Still, by the time NRC approved the design, the cost for the project has risen to $6.1 billion. That led DOE to chip in $1.4 billion and developers to reduce the design to six modules, each pumping out 77 megawatts. In January, an analysis revealed that the cost had increased by an additional $3 billion. It suggested power from the plant would cost $89 per megawatt-hour, roughly three times as much as power from wind or utility-scale solar.
Why the costs sky-rocketed remains unclear. Lyman notes that NuScale’s first plant was always going to be expensive, as the company’s production lines still need to be developed. Even so, he says, NuScale designers overestimated how much they could save with a simpler design. “They never demonstrated that you could compensate for that penalty in economies of scale with these other factors.”
Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the NuScale design has an Achilles’ heel. Each reactor’s core resides within a double-walled steel cylinder, with a vacuum between the walls to keep heat from leaking out. The reactor modules sit in a big pool of water, which in an emergency can flood into the vacuum space around a reactor to prevent it overheating. Compared with a conventional reactor’s building, the pool requires more reinforced concrete, the price of which has soared, Buongiorno says. “In terms of tons of reinforced concrete per megawatt of power, NuScale’s design is off the chart.”
UAMPS’s members balked at the cost of that power. UAMPS had to line up agreements to buy 80% of the plant’s 462 megawatt output before early next year, Baker says, but it had commitments for only 26%. On 7 November the 26 of the 50 UAMPS members that had signed up for the project voted to terminate it, Baker says.
Other, more ambitious nuclear projects are in the works. DOE has agreed to help a company called Terrapower develop a reactor that will use molten sodium as a coolant. It will also help another company, X-power, develop an SMR cooled by xenon gas. Both plants would use novel fuel enriched to 20% uranium-235. That fuel is not yet commercially available, and it could make those designs even more expensive, Lyman says………………………….. https://www.science.org/content/article/deal-build-pint-size-nuclear-reactors-canceled
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The First Small-Scale Nuclear Plant in the US Died Before It Could Live
“One of the stories they’ve kept telling people was that the SMR was going to be a lot cheaper than large-scale nuclear,” David Schlissel, an analyst at the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, told WIRED last month. “It isn’t true.”
Wired. 10 Nov 23
Six nuclear reactors just 9 feet across planned for Idaho were supposed to prove out the dream of cheap, small-scale nuclear energy. Now the project has been canceled.
The plan for the first small-scale US nuclear reactor was exciting, ambitious, and unusual from the get-go. In 2015, a group of city- and county-run utilities across the Mountain West region announced that they were betting on a new frontier of nuclear technology: a mini version of a conventional plant called a “small modular reactor” (SMR).
Advocates said the design, just 9 feet in diameter and 65 feet tall, was poised to resurrect the US nuclear industry, which has delivered only two completed reactors this century. It was supposed to prove out a dream that smaller, modular designs can make splitting atoms to boil water and push turbines with steam much cheaper. But first that reactor, the Voygr model designed by a startup called NuScale, had to be built. A six-reactor, 462-megawatt plant was slated to begin construction by 2026 and produce power by the end of the decade.
On Wednesday, NuScale and its backers pulled the plug on the multibillion-dollar Idaho Falls plant. They said they no longer believed the first-of-its-kind plant, known as the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) would be able to recruit enough additional customers to buy its power.
Many of the small utilities underwriting the pioneering project, members of a group called the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) saw the pint-sized nuclear plant as a potential solution to pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. The Department of Energy, which was due to host the plant at Idaho National Lab, awarded $1.4 billion to the project over 10 years.
But as WIRED reported in February, the utilities backing the plant were spooked late last year by a 50 percent increase in the projected costs for the project—even after factoring in substantial funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. The Idaho Falls reactors’ chances of survival began to look slimmer.
At the time, commitments in place to buy the reactor’s future power covered less than 25 percent of its output. UAMPS set itself a year-end deadline to bump that figure to 80 percent by recruiting new customers. Reaching that number was seen as key to ensuring the project’s long-term viability. As the project moved into site-specific planning and construction, its costs were poised to become more difficult to recoup if the plant ultimately failed, heightening the risks for the members.
Atomic Homecoming
As recently as last month, local officials returned to their communities from a UAMPS retreat with a reassuring message that the Idaho Falls project was on track to secure the new backers it needed, according to local meetings reviewed by WIRED.
That appeared to be good news in places like Los Alamos, New Mexico, where an official this spring described the project as a “homecoming” for atomic technology. The project was due to arrive just in time to help the county meet its goal of decarbonizing its electrical grid and adjusting to the retirement of aging fossil fuel plants nearby. At the time, locals expressed concern about where they would find clean and consistent power if the first-of-its-kind plant was to go away, given limited capacity to connect to new wind and solar projects in the region.
Now that the project is dead, SMR skeptics say the municipalities should find those cleaner power sources and focus on proven technologies. “One of the stories they’ve kept telling people was that the SMR was going to be a lot cheaper than large-scale nuclear,” David Schlissel, an analyst at the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, told WIRED last month. “It isn’t true.”
UAMPS spokesperson Jessica Stewart told WIRED that the utility group would expand its investments in a major wind farm project and pursue other contracts for geothermal, solar, battery, and natural gas projects………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.wired.com/story/first-small-scale-nuclear-plant-us-nuscale-canceled/
NuScale shares plunge as it cancels flagship small nuclear reactor project
BY DAVID MEYER, November 10, 2023
Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, yesterday warned that nuclear energy has to be part of the energy shift away from fossil fuels. However, while the UN agency is increasing its forecasts for nuclear energy production, Grossi also said this was contingent on “a better investment playing field.”……………. (behind a paywall, of course) more https://fortune.com/2023/11/09/nuscale-shares-smr-small-modular-reactor-cfpp-utah-rolls-royce-microsoft/ #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
Disputes over safety, cost swirl a year after California OK’d plan to keep last nuke plant running
Disputes over safety, cost swirl a year after California OK’d plan to keep
last nuke plant running. More than a year after California endorsed a
proposal to extend the lifespan of its last nuclear power plant, disputes
continue to swirl about the safety of its decades-old reactors, whether
more than $1 billion in public financing for the extension could be in
jeopardy and even if the electricity is needed in the dawning age of
renewables.
Daily Mail 10th Nov 2023
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-12733339/Disputes-safety-cost-swirl-year-California-OKd-plan-nuke-plant-running.html #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
No American money left for Ukraine – USAID
USAID’s help has enabled Ukraine to spend all of its own government revenue on its defense, including soldier salaries.
https://www.rt.com/news/586853-us-ukraine-humanitarian-funding-runs-out/ 10 Nov 23
Kiev faces economic collapse if new funding isn’t approved, an official has warned US lawmakers
The US government agency overseeing Washington’s humanitarian relief program for Ukraine has warned lawmakers that funding has run out, putting Kiev at risk of economic ruin if more money isn’t allocated amid the former Soviet republic’s conflict with Russia.
“We have no more direct budget support,” Erin McKee, an assistant administrator for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), testified on Wednesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington. “The last tranche was disbursed at the end of the fiscal year. This jeopardizes, particularly over the coming months, Ukraine’s ability to maintain its economic stability while it continues to fight the war. It’s urgent.”
The US government’s latest fiscal year ended on September 30. Ukraine has relied on Washington not only as its biggest provider of weaponry, but also for money to meet its non-military expenses. President Joe Biden has proposed a $106 billion emergency spending bill that combines aid to help Ukraine fight Russia and Israel fight Hamas. It also includes $9.2 billion in humanitarian aid tied to both conflicts.
McKee said USAID’s help has enabled Ukraine to spend all of its own government revenue on its defense, including soldier salaries. “That means they don’t have any resources to take care of their own people and govern,” she added.
Such outlays as paying teachers, police and health care workers would be suspended without new US funding being approved, McKee said. A prolonged funding disruption would cripple the Ukrainian economy, she claimed, giving Russian President Vladimir Putin the upper hand in the ongoing conflict. “If their economy collapses, Putin will have won.”
Congressional opposition to Biden’s Ukraine policy has grown in recent months. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a $14 billion aid bill for Israel alone last week, leaving new funding for Ukraine to be decided separately. The Democrat-controlled Senate blocked the House bill on Tuesday, demanding that Biden’s bundled aid package be approved instead.
Congress previously approved $113 billion in Ukraine aid in four rounds of legislation. McKee warned that without the approval of a new tranche of funding, Ukraine’s government “would need to use emergency measures, such as printing money or not paying critical salaries, which could lead to hyperinflation and severely damage the war effort.”
Chess, cards and catnaps in the heart of America’s nuclear weapons complex
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, workers collect full salaries for doing nothing
Across those decades, the notion of keeping secrets from adversaries has simultaneously morphed into keeping secrets from the American public — and regulators.
| by Alicia Inez Guzmán. Searchlight New Mexico, 8 Nov 23 |
| A few days after beginning a new post at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Jason Archuleta committed a subversive act: He began to keep a journal. Writing in a tiny spiral notebook, he described how he and his fellow electricians were consigned to a dimly lit break room in the heart of the weapons complex. “Did nothing all day today over 10 hrs in here,” a July 31 entry read. “This is no good for one’s mental wellbeing or physical being.” |
“I do hope to play another good game of chess,” noted another entry, the following day.
A journeyman electrician and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 611, Archuleta had been assigned to Technical Area 55 back in July. He had resisted the assignment, knowing that it was the location of “the plant,” a sealed fortress where plutonium is hewn into pits — cores no bigger than a grapefruit that set off the cascade of reactions inside a nuclear bomb. The design harks back to the world’s first atomic weapons: “Gadget,” detonated at the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico in 1945, and “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki shortly afterward.
It has been almost that long since LANL produced plutonium pits at the scale currently underway as part of the federal government’s mission to modernize its aging stockpile. The lab, now amidst tremendous growth and abuzz with activity, is pursuing that mission with single-minded intensity. Construction is visible in nearly every corner of the campus, while traffic is bumper to bumper, morning and evening, as commuters shuttle up and down a treacherous road that cuts across the vast Rio Grande Valley into the remote Pajarito Plateau on the way to the famous site of the Manhattan Project.
But from the inside, Archuleta tells a different story: that of a jobsite in which productivity has come to a standstill. With few exceptions, he says, electricians are idle. They nap, study the electrical code book, play chess, dominoes and cards. On rare occasions, they work, but as four other journeymen (who all requested anonymity for fear of retaliation) confirmed, the scenario they describe is consistent. At any given time, up to two dozen electricians are cooling their heels in at least three different break rooms. LANL officials even have an expression for it: “seat time.”
The lab recognizes that the expansion at TA-55, and especially the plant, presents challenges faced by no other industrial setting in the nation. The risk of radiation exposure is constant, security clearances are needed, one-of-a-kind parts must be ordered, and construction takes place as the plant strives to meet its quota. That can mean many workers sit for days, weeks, or even, according to several sources, months at a time.
“I haven’t seen months,” said Kelly Beierschmitt, LANL’s deputy director of operations, “It might feel like months,” he added, citing the complications that certain projects pose. “If there’s not a [radiation control technician] available, I’m not gonna tell the craft to go do the job without the support, right?”
Such revelations come as red flags to independent government watchdogs, who note that the project is already billions of dollars over budget and at least four years behind schedule. They say that a workplace filled with idle workers is not merely a sign that taxpayer money is being wasted; more troublingly, it indicates that the expansion is being poorly managed.
“If you have a whistleblower claiming that a dozen electricians have been sitting around playing cards for six months on a big weapons program, that would seem to me to be a ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’ moment,” said Geoff Wilson, an expert on federal defense spending at the independent watchdog Project on Government Oversight.
Given the secrecy that surrounds LANL, it is virtually impossible to quantify anything having to do with the lab. That obsession is the subject of Alex Wellerstein’s 2021 book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.” Wellerstein, a historian of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, traces that culture of secrecy from the earliest years of the Manhattan Project into the present. Across those decades, the notion of keeping secrets from adversaries has simultaneously morphed into keeping secrets from the American public — and regulators.
“What secrecy does is it creates context for a lack of oversight,” said Wellerstein in a recent interview. “It shrinks the number of people who might even be aware of an issue and it makes it harder — even if things do come out — to audit.”
The code of secrecy at LANL is almost palpable. The lab sits astride a forbidding mesa in northern New Mexico some 7,500 feet above sea level, protected on the city’s western flank by security checkpoints. Its cardinal site, TA-55, is ringed by layers of razor wire and a squadron of armed guards, themselves bolstered by armored vehicles with mounted turrets that patrol the perimeter day and night. No one without a federal security clearance is allowed to enter or move about without an escort — even to go to the bathroom. Getting that clearance, which requires an intensive background investigation, can take up to a year.
Sources for this story, veterans and newcomers alike, said they fear losing their livelihoods if they speak publicly about anything to do with their work. Few jobs in the region, much less the state (one of the most impoverished in the nation), can compete with the salaries offered by LANL. Here, journeyman electricians can earn as much as $150,000 a year; Archuleta makes $53 per hour, almost 70 percent more than electricians working at other union sites.
Nevertheless, in late September, Archuleta lodged a complaint with the Inspector General’s office alleging time theft. He and two other workers told Searchlight New Mexico that their timesheets – typically filled out by supervisors – have shown multiple codes for jobs they didn’t recognize or perform. To his mind, the situation is “not just bordering on fraud, waste and abuse, it’s crossing the threshold.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………“By all the normal measures our society uses to evaluate cost, benefit, risk, reliability, and longevity, this latest attempt has now already failed as well,” said Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), a respected nonprofit that has been monitoring LANL for 34 years. “Federal decision makers will have to ask ‘Will the LANL product still be worth the investment,’” Mello said, referring to the plant, which will have exceeded its planned lifetime of 50 years by 2028.
The cogs of this arms race have been turning for years. In May 2018, a few months after President Donald Trump tweeted that he had a much “bigger & more powerful” nuclear button than North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the Nuclear Weapons Council certified a recommendation to produce plutonium pits at two sites.
That recommendation was enacted into law by Congress, which in 2020 called for an annual quota of plutonium pits — 30 at LANL and 50 at the Savannah River plutonium processing facility in South Carolina — by 2030. According to the LASG, the cost per pit at LANL is greater than Savannah River. The organization estimates that each one will run to approximately $100 million.
Whether such production goals are achievable is another question: Just getting those sites capable of meeting the quota will cost close to $50 billion—and take up to two decades from the project’s start. After that, another half a century may pass before the nation’s approximately 4,000 plutonium pits are all upgraded, according to the calculations of Peter Fanta, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Plutonium is one of the most volatile and enigmatic of all the elements on the periodic table. It ages on the outside like other metals, while on the inside, “it’s constantly bombarding itself through alpha radiation,” as Siegfried Hecker, a former LANL director and plutonium metallurgist put it. The damage is akin, in his words, to “rolling a bowling ball through [the plutonium’s] crystal structure.” Most of it can be healed, but about 10 percent can’t. “And that’s where the aging comes in.”
The renewed urgency dodges the most resounding “unanswered question at the heart of the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal,” Stephen Young, the Washington representative for the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in “Scientific American.” “What is the lifetime of a pit?” And why hasn’t the NNSA — the federal agency tasked with overseeing the health of the nuclear weapons stockpile — dedicated the resources to finding out?
“It seems entirely possible that this was not an oversight on the part of NNSA but reflects that the agency does not want to know the answer,” Young went on. With novel warhead designs on the horizon, it was entirely plausible, he posited, that the NNSA wasn’t merely seeking to replace old pits but instead wanted to populate entirely new weapons — a desire driven less by science than by politics.
Booms and blind spots
This uncertainty has worked in LANL’s favor, propelling the mission forward and all but securing the lab’s transformation. As Beierschmitt, the deputy director of operations, publicly described the lab’s goals this summer: “Keep spending and hiring.”
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office, which investigates federal spending and provides its findings to Congress, has pointed to a gaping blind spot in the mission. A January report detailed how the NNSA lacked a comprehensive budget and master schedule for the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex — essential for achieving the goal of producing 80 pits per year. The agency, in other words, has thus far failed to outline what it needs to do to reach its target — or what the overall cost will be, the GAO concluded.
“How much they’ve spent is pretty poorly understood because it shows up in so many different buckets across the budget,” said Allison Bawden, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment. “We tried to identify these buckets of money ultimately tied to supporting the pit mission. But it’s never presented that way by NNSA, so it’s very difficult to look across the entire pit enterprise and say, ‘this is how much has been spent, and this is how much is needed going forward.’” The GAO includes the DOE on its biennial list of federal agencies most vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse — and has done so since 1990. A major reason is the Möbius strip of contractors and subcontractors working on DOE-related projects at any given time.
The DOE, for instance, oversees the NNSA, which oversees Triad National Security — a company owned by Battelle Memorial Institute, the Texas A&M University and the University of California. Triad oversees its own army of subcontractors on lab-related projects, including construction, demolition and historic preservation. And many of those subcontractors outsource their work to yet other subcontractors, creating money trails so byzantine they defy tracking.
But one thing is known: Subcontractors will rake in billions of dollars. “We expect to be executing at least $5.5 billion in construction over the next five years and $2.5 billion in subcontracting labor and materials,” Beierschmitt said at a 2019 forum.
“Most people think that for something so giant and so supposedly important to the nation, there would be some kind of well-thought through plan,” said Mello of LASG. “There is no well-thought through plan. There never has been.”
Secrets on the plateau
……………………………………………….. Over time, systems at LANL and across the U.S. weapons complex have ossified into “their own little universes,” said Wellerstein, the science historian. “And when you combine that with the kind of contractor system they use for nuclear facilities, you create the circumstances where there’s very little serious oversight and ample opportunities and incentives for everybody to pat themselves on the back for a job well done…………………………………………………….. https://searchlightnm.org/chess-cards-and-catnaps-in-the-heart-of-americas-nuclear-weapons-complex/?utm_source=Searchlight+New+Mexico&utm_campaign=77629f0906-11%2F08%2F2023+-+Chess%2C+cards+and+catnaps&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8e05fb0467-77629f0906-395610620&mc_cid=77629f0906&mc_eid=a70296a261 #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes #radioactive
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