Oswego County reaches tax agreement with nuclear plants, WRVO, ByPAYNE HORNING 3 July 19,Exelon, the company that owns and operates the nuclear power plants in Oswego County, has reached an agreement with the county on a $69 million tax agreement.
The Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) agreement will provide a steady stream of revenue to the county through 2023. Each year, the Mexico Central School District will get $9 million, the county will get $4 million, and the Town of Scriba will get $500,000. That’s about $2 million more per year than under the previous PILOT agreement……
The bill would amend the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA. It provides restitution to many people known as “downwinders,” along with uranium mine workers throughout the West.
However, residents in some areas of the Navajo Nation, Arizona, New Mexico and other states aren’t covered, along with miners who worked during much of the 1970s. Many are tribal members who suffer from lung disease, cancer and other health problems they attribute to working in the mines and being exposed to radiation.
The current Senate bill would broaden eligibility for compensation and medical benefits. Navajo President Jonathan Nez and a group of former tribal uranium miners are pushing for its approval.
The U.S. tested nearly 200 atmospheric nuclear weapons between 1945 and 1962. About 30 million tons of uranium ore was mined on or near the Navajo Nation until the mid-1980s.
(Reuters) – FirstEnergy Solutions said on Monday it hopes Ohio lawmakers will pass a bill by July 17 to prevent the early closure of the state’s two nuclear power reactors but cannot buy fuel for the units at this time without legislative certainty.
FirstEnergy Solutions, a bankrupt subsidiary of Ohio energy company FirstEnergy Corp, had said it would shut the Davis-Besse and Perry reactors on Lake Erie in 2020 and 2021 if it did not get some financial help from the state for the money-losing plants by the June 30 fuel purchase deadline for Davis-Besse.
The Midwestern state’s House of Representatives passed a nuclear bailout bill in May, known as “House Bill 6” (HB6).
The Ohio Senate worked on its own version of HB6 over the weekend and was still working on it early on Monday, according to a legislative aide.
State legislators were now working toward final passage of HB6 by July 17, FirstEnergy Solutions said.
“Should we receive the long-term certainty that comes with an affirmative vote within this timeframe, we will immediately re-evaluate our options,” FirstEnergy Solutions said in a statement, noting the company remains “on path for a safe deactivation and decommissioning” of Davis-Besse.
“Given the expectation that the legislation will be passed in the coming weeks, we have communicated our commitment to doing everything possible to accommodate this process, which will come with increased financial burden associated with missing the June 30th fuel purchasing deadline,” it said.
The House version of HB6 would provide FirstEnergy Solutions with about $150 million a year from 2020 to 2026, according to local newspaper reports.
A version of the Senate bill last week also included subsidies for a couple of coal plants owned by Ohio Valley Electric Corp (OVEC) like the House version of the bill.
OVEC is owned by several utilities, including units of American Electric Power Co Inc and Duke Energy Corp.
Cheap and ample gas from shale fields like the Marcellus and Utica in Ohio has depressed electricity prices nationwide over the past several years, making it uneconomical for generators to keep operating some nuclear- and coal-fired power plants.
State and top fed official at odds over Hanford high level radioactive waste, Tri City Herald, ANNETTE CARY,
A top Department of Energy official is fighting what he says are misconceptions about a new policy on which Hanford and other nuclear weapons complex waste must be treated and disposed of to the stringent standards required for high level radioactive waste.
“We’re proposing nothing here,” he said. “We don’t have any plans to propose anything in Washington state.”
But key state of Washington officials are not buying his explanation……..
When the new DOE policy on classifying high level waste was announced earlier this month, Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a joint statement that all options would be considered to stop “this reckless and dangerous action.”
STATE: HANFORD WASTE COULD BE RECLASSIFIED
Bellon said after the meeting with Dabbar that he claimed the new interpretation for high level waste currently only applies to certain waste in South Carolina.
But there was no exclusion for Hanford in the policy change as announced by DOE in the Federal Register, she said. “So as it stands, the Federal Register notice could be used to make substantial and potentially harmful changes to the ongoing cleanup at Hanford,” she said.
She and other state leaders “are concerned that the Department of Energy’s high level waste reinterpretation will be a mechanism for it to do less than what is legally required,” she said.
Congress has passed laws that define high level waste that results from processing irradiated nuclear fuel if the waste is “highly radioactive.”
At Hanford, chemicals were used to separate plutonium from irradiated fuel at huge reprocessing plants for the nation’s nuclear weapons program from World War II through the Cold War.
The fuel reprocessing left 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous chemical waste stored in underground tanks until it can be treated for disposal, which is now handled as high level waste. In addition, an estimated 1 million gallons of the processing waste leaked or spilled into the ground in central Hanford.
DOE’s change of policy would allow waste from fuel reprocessing to be classified as low level waste if it can meet radioactive concentration limits set for low level waste and could be safely disposed of at a site other than a deep geological repository, as required for high level waste……..
DOE now is moving forward with an initial look at whether up to 10,000 gallons of recycled wastewater at Savannah River could be classified as low level radioactive waste rather than high level radioactive waste. As high level waste it must be turned into a stable glass form and stored until the nation has a deep geological repository, such as proposed at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
If the waste is classified as low level, it could be turned into a concrete-like grout form and disposed of off site, possibly at the Waste Control Specialists site for low level waste in Texas.
Dabbar said risk would be reduced by disposing of the waste sooner………..
FUTURE OF HANFORD ADVISORY BOARD
Protecting the Columbia River from the radioactive sludge has been one of the priorities of the Hanford Advisory Board, a board with representatives of Hanford workers, local residents, local governments, environmental groups and others that provide advice to DOE and its regulators on environmental cleanup.
It is among the federal advisory boards that DOE will be evaluating after a June 14 order by the president that all federal agencies evaluate the need for each of its federal advisory committees and disband at least a third of them to reduce costs and improve government efficiency.
Dabbar has had no DOE conversations on which of the many DOE boards may be cut, he told the Herald.
The only suspense: How much per month the subsidy bill, House Bill 6, will force each Ohio electricity customer to pay to keep open Lake County’s Perry and Ottawa County’s Davis-Besse nuclear plants, built by what’s now FirstEnergy Corp., but owned by the utility’s FirstEnergy Solutions unit, which plans to become an independent company.
Ohioans required to pay subsidies wouldn’t just be FirstEnergy customers, but also every Ohioan who gets electricity from DP&L, Duke or American Electric Power (AEP).
Some HB 6 backers claim that because the bill (depending on the version discussed) would cut some renewable energy, etc., costs that Ohio consumers already pay, it could make the nuclear subsidy, at worst, a wash for consumers – maybe even net savings. (Voters might want to get that in writing.) Still, these factors make HB 6’s passage a decent bet:
* The Republican-run House has passed it – with some Democratic votes.
* The bailout is pending in the GOP-run Senate, which, after ending its Hamlet act, will pass the bill.
* Gov. Mike DeWine, a Cedarville Republican, favors a bailout.
* Nuclear bailouts are underway in Democratic-run Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, arguably making bailouts cross-party.
The bill started in the House, led by Speaker Larry Householder, a Republican from Perry County’s Glenford. Politically speaking, he owes FirstEnergy big-time.
To pass HB 6, Householder crafted it to (a) appeal to as many House members possible and (b) persuade other electric utilities to support, or at least not fight, HB 6.
As to (a), the House-passed bill is said to net out the nuclear subsidy’s cost by stripping renewal energy, etc., mandates from current Ohio law. As to (b), the House-passed bill would help AEP, DP&L and Duke extend Ohio customers’ subsidies (now set to expire in four to six years) of two coal-burning power plants – one in Appalachian Ohio’s Gallia County, the other in Indiana.
Trouble is, the Senate’s (currently proposed) rewrite of HB 6 pulls the rug from under House tweaks – so much that AEP no longer supports HB 6, it told the Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee. If that’s the bill senators send back to Householder, he’d have his hands full trying to win House agreement in Senate changes. Likelier, he’d call for a Senate-House conference, but Senate-House relations appear less than cozy right now.
Not that the Senate’s version is pro-consumer: “Fundamentally the bill remains a bailout of aging nuclear power plants, at public expense, for bankrupt FirstEnergy Solutions and its big Wall Street creditors,” Michael Haugh, of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, told the committee Thursday. The Consumers’ Counsel is the state agency that represents Ohio’s residential utility consumers.
But facts don’t necessarily kill bills. Some General Assembly members are all but duty-bound to side with contributors. After all, if someone takes you to the prom, you’re more or less expected to dance with him or her. Same thing happens in Columbus. FirstEnergy and Ohio’s other electric utilities are generous contributors to Statehouse campaigns. Whether your name is Fido or Rep. John Doe, it’s never a good idea to bite the hands that feed you. So legislators don’t.
And if you think otherwise, look at the Ohio Revised Code. Or agricultural pollution in the Maumee valley. Or the looming (and likely successful) bid by big retailers and plastic bag peddlers to forbid local governments from banning single-use plastic bags. Legislators may respect Old Glory and motherhood. But campaign donors they revere.
That’s why, at the Statehouse, when utilities and other big-ticket political players want favors, things can suddenly get … “bipartisan.” That calls to mind what Louisiana kingfish Huey P. Long said. He likened the two parties to a limited-menu restaurant: “They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.”
BEIS 27th June 2019 The final policy is published in Implementing geological disposal: working
with communities, which updates and replaces the 2014 white paper,
Implementing Geological Disposal in England.
This consultation was on
behalf of the UK government and the Department of Agriculture, Environment
and Rural Affairs (DAERA) in Northern Ireland. The Department of
Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) has published separately
a summary of responses from respondents in Northern Ireland.
Future policy decisions in relation to geological disposal in Northern Ireland would be a
matter for the Northern Ireland Executive, which is currently suspended.
Accordingly, the summary of the responses and consequential final policy
decisions referred to in this document, apply solely to England. The Welsh
Government consulted in parallel with the UK government on policy proposals
for working with communities as part of a consent-based approach to finding
a location for a GDF for higher activity radioactive waste. The Welsh
Government will publish its response to the consultation shortly.
ON THURSDAY SENATORS tackled the radioactive question of the nation’s nuclear waste, this time with a new plan to circumvent the hot-potato politics that doomed Yucca Mountain and other proposals. A combination of new legislation that spreads out the nuclear waste burden and perhaps new technology could offer a new way forward.
Everyday, the Department of Energy sends $2.2 million to the nation’s electric utilities to store spent nuclear fuel that has nowhere to go. Under a 1982 law, the federal government was supposed to pick up the nuclear industry’s waste and put it in a safe place underground for the next few hundreds of thousands of years (the half-life of some radioactive isotopes). That deadline passed in 1998, and after more than two decades of lawsuits and political delays, there’s still no permanent location to put the nasty stuff. Instead, spent fuel rods are sitting at 95 nuclear plants around the country in either “fuel pools,” where the waste cools down for a few years after the rods finish producing energy, or in special steel-and-concrete casks that sit above ground like nuclear garbage cans.
Pretty much everyone—utility industry leaders, environmentalists, nuclear engineers, and local mayors—knows the status quo isn’t working. Nobody wants to invest in an industry that can’t deal with its waste (even if it’s carbon-free); and nobody likes the idea of these nuclear-rod-carrying casks multiplying ad infinitum.
The place that the government picked to store all the nuclear waste back in 1987, a repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was canceled in 2009 by the Obama administration. Since then, the project has been in a bureaucratic limbo. The Trump administration moved to take another look at Yucca Mountain and restart the licensing process, but Congress removed funds to do that from last year’s budget.
Despite these obstacles, there’s a glimmer of bipartisan hope on Capitol Hill that this nuclear logjam might be broken, although maybe not at Yucca Mountain.
“It is long, long past time to figure this out, and the sooner we find a path the better,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) as she opened a hearing on the issue Thursday in the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski is sponsoring a bill that would both create a new agency in charge of handling nuclear waste and develop a way for local consent to become part of the decision-making process, although insulated from pressure by members of Congress. That means that the local residents living near a selected site—either temporary or permanent—would get some say in the matter, although perhaps not a veto.
At the hearing, experts testified that without some kind of storage facility, the nuclear industry will continue its slow decline. Nearly all of the nation’s plants were built in the early 1970s. Five are scheduled to shut down by 2025. Plans for two new nuclear reactors in South Carolina got scrapped in 2017 after contractors ran over budget and locals were forced to spend $9 billion to dig a hole in the ground and then fill it back up. A new plant under construction in Georgia has been tied up in contractor fights and court battles.
Murkowski’s bill would set up a new agency outside of Congress to pick a place for a new temporary nuclear waste site to take the spent fuel right away (well, within 10 years). The big holdup is “consent.” While some local communities or native tribes might want the money or jobs that go along with hosting a nuclear waste site, state politicians have blocked such attempts in Nevada, Utah, and Tennessee.
Senator Angus King (I–Maine) asked perhaps the most probing question of the two-hour hearing. “What if every state says no?” King said. “Where are we then?”
Geoffrey Fettus, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed that the stalemate will continue unless Congress changes the process of who gets to decide. “We have a higher chance of states getting to yes if they don’t have to take the entire burden” of all the nuclear waste, Fettus said. Fettus says the burden and the costs should be shared among states, with perhaps several smaller interim disposal sites in different parts of the country rather than a single facility.
West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin wanted to know if the fuel casks could just stay where they are for awhile, and perhaps the fuel could be recycled. France and Japan, for example, reprocess spent fuel to squeeze out more energy. France then converts the twice-used fuel into glass logs that are awaiting a final burial.
Congress has banned nuclear reprocessing since the Carter administration because of fears that it can be turned into nuclear weapons material. Steven Nesbit, head of nuclear policy for Duke Energy and the American Nuclear Society, which represents nuclear scientists and engineers, says uranium is so cheap and plentiful that it doesn’t make economic sense to reprocess spent fuel. ………. https://www.wired.com/story/senators-tryagainto-solve-the-nuclear-waste-debacle/
Belgium unprepared for phasing out nuclear power by 2025: grid operator https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belgium-nuclearpower/belgium-unprepared-for-phasing-out-nuclear-power-by-2025-grid-operator-idUSKCN1TT233Daphne Psaledakis, Bate Felix, BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgian grid operator Elia has warned the country could face serious power shortages after it phases out nuclear power in 2025 if the government does not act to speed up investment in alternative energy supplies.Belgium’s nuclear reactors are set to be phased out from 2022 to 2025. Elia, in a study released on Friday, estimates the country will need an additional 3.9 GW of capacity from 2025 to replace the power generation from its seven nuclear reactors.
That is higher than its previous forecast of 3.6 GW, made in a similar study in 2017.
Neighboring countries, including Germany, are accelerating an exit from coal while others are cutting back on nuclear power generation, reducing Belgium’s ability to import electricity.
The Belgian parliament passed legislation in April aimed at spurring investment in gas-fired power generation and building 4,000 megawatt of new offshore wind farm capacity by 2030. The study, co-sponsored by Elia and energy agencies, said more efforts are needed.
While some action has been taken over the past year, “we are not yet ready for any scenario. It is still five minutes to midnight,” Elia said.
Lithuania to purchase 4 mln iodine tablets to use in case of BelNPP accident, Belsat, 28 June 19 The Lithuanian Ministry of Health will spend about one million euros on 4 million iodine tablets to be used in case of an accident at the Belarusian NPP. This year they should be distributed to residents of the Belarusian-Lithuanian borderland and Vilnius, ru.delfi.lt reports.
Minister of Internal Affairs of Lithuania Eimutis Misiūnas assures that the state institutions are ready for a possible accident at the nuclear power plant in Astravets. But he is not hiding the fact that the agency lacks coordination….
According to him, in case of “the worst scenario”, when the wind blows from east to west, Lithuania will have to evacuate about 20 thousand people in the 30 km zone of the nuclear power plant. Misiūnas believes that this is unlikely, as such weather conditions happen on average 16 days per year.
Opinions on nuclear project at SC plant clash at public forum, Post and Courier, By Colin Demarest cdemarest@aikenstandard.com, Jun 28, 2019 NORTH AUGUSTA — Vocal support for producing nuclear weapon cores at the Savannah River Site sharply contrasted with questions, criticism and pushback Thursday night at a government-led public forum.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration wants to produce 50 of the weapon components each year at the sprawling complex near Aiken. The cores, known as plutonium pits, use one of the world’s most dangerous substances to trigger a series of explosions that unleash the deadly potential of nuclear weapons.
Supporters tout the economic benefits of the project, which would create about 1,000 jobs and provide a new anchor for SRS after the government abandoned its long-delayed efforts to finish a facility designed to turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for nuclear power plants.
Critics, however, remain skeptical of the proposed mission and worry about the potential risks to the environment and workers’ health.
A slew of officials, including Aiken Mayor Rick Osbon, Aiken County Council Chairman Gary Bunker and Jim Marra of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, voiced support for the effort, offering their takes on why SRS is the correct fit for the looming weapons-oriented mission.
Encouragement also came from several chambers of commerce, University of South Carolina Aiken, and state and federal lawmakers.
……… Nuclear watchers and other groups, however, took aim at the effort’s multibillion-dollar projected cost, as well as potential dangers from exposing the environment and workers to plutonium.
“What is the environmental impact of a nuclear weapon?” Glenn Carroll, with Nuclear Watch South, said Thursday. “The absolute and wholesale destruction of the environment. Every human, every animal. Every plant.”
The anticipated costs of pit production have raised eyebrows in Washington, D.C. A congressional budget report published this year estimated pit production would cost $9 billion over the next decade.
Among other things, SRS Watch Director Tom Clements said the pit production process was off to a “rocky start.”
“The project is not funded by Congress, it’s not authorized by Congress,” he said.
Clements, alongside Tri-Valley CAREs and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, hosted a pit production forum earlier this month at the Aiken Municipal Building. He and others urged opponents to push back against the plan.
The public “can be effective against bad Department of Energy ideas, like the pit production one,” Clements said at the time.
One Aiken resident on Thursday described the pit production effort at SRS as hurried, and a woman representing The Human Family organization expressed concerns about earthquakes and becoming a target of terrorism.
………. The NNSA terminated the MOX project — which was over-budget and congressionally controversial — on Oct. 10, 2018. The government had shoveled almost $8 billion into the effort by that point, but it remained years and billions of dollars away from completion.
Clements on Thursday told the audience the Energy Department and others are attempting to “sweep the MOX debacle under the rug.”
June 28 (Reuters) – A committee in the Ohio Senate could
vote on a nuclear bailout bill this weekend that would enable
the full state legislature to pass legislation over the weekend
to prevent the state’s two power reactors from early retirement,
sources familiar with the bill said on Friday.
FirstEnergy Solutions, the bankrupt unit of Ohio energy
company FirstEnergy Corp , has said it would shut the
money-losing reactors in 2020 and 2021 if the state did not
adopt a plan to provide some money for the plants by June 30.
Officials at FirstEnergy Solutions and several legislative
offices were not immediately available for comment.
The House and Senate have sessions available to vote on the
bill if needed on Saturday and Sunday, sources said.
“We expect the legislature will move quickly to get multiple
votes on the bill ahead of (FirstEnergy Solutions’) June 30
deadline,” analysts at Height Capital Markets in Washington,
D.C., said in a report on Thursday.
The Ohio Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee
adopted amendments on House Bill 6 (HB 6) earlier this week and
may add more amendments before the vote on Saturday, sources
said.
State lawmakers have just days to agree on legislation that would give a financial lifeline to the nuclear plants near Cleveland and Toledo.
The plant operators say they must know soon whether the state will add a fee onto every electricity bill in Ohio to raise millions each year for the plants. A Senate committee could vote on the plan this weekend.
Some lawmakers say they shouldn’t bail out the nuclear plants that are struggling and costly to operate.
Environmental groups are upset that the latest proposal includes changing a mandate that says utilities must find some of their power from renewable energy.
Proposed nuclear storage consent bill excludes Yucca Mountain, Las Vegas Sun, By John Sadler (contact) June 27, 2019A proposed Senate bill requiring local and state consent for a nuclear waste repository excludes Nevada’s Yucca Mountain site from the process.
The Nuclear Waste Administration Act would require a state’s governor, affected tribes and local governments to OK any proposed site. But it would not apply to “any proceeding or any application for any license or permit pending,” which would exempt Yucca Mountain, said Robert Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
“Specific provisions would exclude Nevada from the newly created consent-based siting process that would apply to all other potential repository host states,” Halstead said in a letter to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which held a hearing on the bill today…… https://lasvegassun.com/news/2019/jun/27/proposed-nuclear-storage-consent-bill-excludes-nev/
Anti-Nuclear Platform: ‘We Won’t Get Carried Away Until Project is Officially Canceled’
President Erdoğan admitted for the first time that the construction of the nuclear power plant in Sinop has been halted. Bianet, Hicran Cengiz, İstanbul – BIA News Desk28 June 2019, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said yesterday (June 27) the nuclear power plant project in the Black Sea province of Sinop has been halted, in an interview with a newspaper from Japan.
Zeki Karataş from the Sinop Anti-Nuclear Platform told bianet that they don’t want Sinop to be a subject of international negotiations.
“There similar claims and statements before but a statement on the essence of the matter did not come…….
