President Donald Trump’s proposed $230 million cut to the budget for the federal Hanford Site nuclear cleanup will face bipartisan opposition in Congress.
By Gary Martin Review-Journal Washington Bureau, February 12, 2018, WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump renewed his commitment to restart licensing on the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in Nevada on Monday with a funding request tucked into a $4.4 trillion budget blueprint.
Trump included $120 million to restart licensing on the geologic site north of Las Vegas, as well as to establish an interim storage program to address the growing stockpile of nuclear waste produced by power plants in states across the nation.
The funds are just part of the $30.6 billion budget request for the Department of Energy for fiscal year 2019, which begins Oct. 1.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the $120 million would be used for the licensing application process. Application hearings must be held to hear challenges by Nevada and other stakeholders.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must determine whether Yucca Mountain is safe for long-term storage, and issue a license for Energy to build the repository…….
Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, the state’s two senators, Republican Dean Heller and Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, and Democratic Reps Dina Titus, Jacky Rosen and Ruben Kihuen oppose the Yucca Mountain project.
Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., and Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is located, and other rural Nevada counties, support continuing the licensing process.
Although the House has backed efforts to restart licensing on Yucca Mountain, the Senate did not approve funding last year.
“Despite Congress’ refusal to fund the Yucca Mountain project, the administration is once again prioritizing it,” Heller said. He claims the project poses a threat to the people of southern Nevada and could have a catastrophic impact on the tourism economy.
“I’ve made it clear why Nevada does not want to turn into the nation’s nuclear waste dump,” Heller said.
Bridgwater Mercury 12th Feb 2018, West Somerset Council not invited to key Hinkley C meeting. WSC was
‘unaware’ of a meeting in which the leader of Sedgemoor District
Council (SDC) travelled to Westminster to discuss uncertainty over Hinkley
C money with senior officials. Cllr Duncan McGinty met with MP Jake Berry,
parliamentary undersecretary for Housing, Communities and Local Government
to discuss the uncertainty surrounding ‘Community Benefit’ funding for
Sedgemoor and West Somerset from Hinkley C.
Trump seeks clean energy cuts, $2 billion nuclear spending boost for Energy Dept. WP, By Steven Mufson and Chris MooneyFebruary 12The Trump administration’s fiscal 2019 budget might never become law, but it’s a declaration of intent, and it would reshuffle priorities at the Energy Department, boosting outlays on nuclear security and slashing spending on renewables and energy efficiency.
Overall, the administration is asking Congress for $30.6 billion for the Energy Department, a 1.3 percent increase from fiscal 2017. That includes $1.6 billion added to the department’s budget after a last-minute spending deal was reached in Congress last week.
The administration wants a 17.5 percent increase for the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which safeguards the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. The NNSA makes up nearly half the department’s budget, and under the 2019 proposal, it would get $15.1 billion, up from $12.8 billion in fiscal 2017……..
Where might Trump go in a nuclear attack? BBC News, By Tara McKelveyBBC White House reporter, 11 Feb 18, “…….. US officials have made access arrangements for the president and a group of individuals deemed to be at the “top of the food chain”, according to Robert Darling, a Marine who spent part of 9/11 in the White House bunker. He has described who was allowed in.
As Darling pointed out, only a select few are allowed into a presidential bunker, turning social hierarchy into a matter of life or death. Still historians say bunker building is a necessary part of governmental business.
“You have to maintain a chain of command,” says Randy Sowell, an archivist at the Truman President Library in Independence, Missouri. “Or there’d be complete chaos.”
The construction of shelters and bunkers, whether for presidents or ordinary people, serves another purpose – they make it easier for Americans to talk about atomic or nuclear warheads and help make the unthinkable – global nuclear war – thinkable.
President Harry Truman oversaw the establishment of a federal civil defence administration in the 1950s. The overall message from the government, said Christian Appy, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, was that “nuclear war wasn’t necessarily an apocalypse for everyone”.
The civil defence agency helped create the idea of “nuclear citizenship”, says Appy. The US government wanted civilians to adjust to a new reality, he says, paving the way for their “acquiescence to the nuclear arms race”.
A US strategic bombing survey found about 30% of those who died immediately in the US atomic attack on Nagasaki would have been saved by fallout shelters, says Sowell, explaining the rationale behind Truman’s civil defence programme.
Officials at the agency tried to set up a nationwide shelter system. Some shelters were built for government employees and members of the public. Officials oversaw the construction of a large facility in Los Altos, California, in the 1960s, for example.
Mainly, though, private individuals built their own bunkers. Thousands were constructed, as Laura McEnaney, a history professor, discovered while researching her book on the subject. “Nuclear war,” she says, became “the responsibility of the nuclear family”.
One of them, an heiress named Marjorie Merriweather Post, built her bunkers under her estate – the Mar-a-Lago, in Florida.
In the early 1950s, Post was worried about the Korean War and its potential for escalation, and so she built underground shelters. They were dug into the earth below Mar-a-Lago’s main building, according to a US interior department surveyon historic buildings.
Trump bought the property along with the bunker in 1985. He later described the underground facility as sturdy, “anchored into the coral reef with steel and concrete”.
The ceilings are low, says Wes Blackman. The 6ft 5in former project manager had to duck while visiting the place with Trump years ago.
“It was like we were on an archaeological exploration,” he says………
Mount Weather, a 1,754-ft (534m) peak near Bluemont, Virginia, was turned into a giant bunker for the president, his advisers and others to hide in case of nuclear attack.
Members of Congress would be taken to a bunker at Greenbrier resort near White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The facility had a code name, Project Greek Island, and operated for decades – until its existence was revealed in the media in 1992 when the bunker was “decommissioned”.
Mount Weather is now run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and was “activated” after the al-Qaeda attacks in September 2001, a Fema director testified to Congress in October of that year. He didn’t provide details. …… In the autumn of 1961, construction began on another presidential bunker. This one was created for President John F Kennedy in Florida. It’s not far from Mar-a-Lago – the US Navy’s Seabees built the bunker on Peanut Island, a 10-minute journey from a Palm Beach house where Kennedy often stayed. The bunker was known as Detachment Hotel, and it cost $97,000 to construct, according to a 1973 report to Congress. …….http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42969877
Times 11th Feb 2018, Bringing Britain’s energy system back under public ownership is the best
way of tackling climate change, according to Jeremy Corbyn. In his most
pro-green speech to date, the Labour leader said his government would sweep
away the “centralised system” of energy delivery by private firms in favour
of “new sources of energy large and small”.
Speaking yesterday at a conference in London on alternative models of ownership, Corbyn said: “The
greenest energy is usually the most local but people have been queuing up
to connect renewable energy to the national grid. “With the national grid
in public hands we can put tackling climate change at the heart of our
energy system, committing to renewable generation from tidal to onshore
wind.” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/nationalising-energy-grid-will-help-fight-climate-change-says-corbyn-z93xvqm50
Platts 9th Feb 2018, The budget bill President Donald Trump signed Friday morning to avert a shutdown of the US government includes a broadening of production tax credits for nuclear projects critical for the completion of two reactors at Georgia Power’s Vogtle station and designed to spur development of the first commercial small modular reactors in the US.
The 2,300-MW Vogtle plant expansion in Waynesboro, Georgia, has experienced delays and cost overruns that threatened its completion. The Georgia Public Service Commission gave the go-ahead for rate recovery, which Georgia Power had said was crucial for completing the nuclear generating units. But the production tax credits were also a key element of the project’s economic case, Georgia Power officials have said. https://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/washington/us-budget-bill-includes-credits-for-georgia-nuclear-21293499
NJ Ayuk, who is widely recognised as one of the top influential businessman in the sector globally, said there was no reason for South Africa to consider nuclear energy and instead it should invest in clean renewable energy to create jobs and grow its economy.
Ayuk said the consideration for nuclear could lead to the country succumbing to external pressures.
“We need to stop having short-term fixes to our challenges. If we continue to look to other powers for solutions, we will have to succumb to what they want. Is that what South Africa wants?” he asked.
With South Africa’s bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN’s Security Council this year, Ayuk warned if the country were to consider nuclear energy and partner with another country, this would diminish its position on the influential body.
Speculation about South Africa seeking partnership with Russia has come to the fore over the past year, with the government denying that a deal had been made.
“Do you want a member of the Security Council that’s dependent on another country for its energy security and needs? Africa needs a representative that will articulate its views and not one that will be perceived to be captured by another strong power,” he said.
For decades South Africa relied on coal for electricity and synthetic fuel production but needs to look at other energy sources to meet its climate change commitments.
Recent studies have also shown a decline in global demand for coal.
“Renewable energy must be the core part of the energy mix as it has the potential to alleviate poverty. We need to put in the right investment in it. It will create jobs and allow small businesses to participate in the sector,” he said.
He said the country and other African countries endowed with mineral resources should start looking at establishing an enabling environment for investments and growth in the sector.
Ayuk said the political change in South Africa gave hope that there would be a re-focus on the energy sector and that “homegrown” solutions for energy problems would be found.
“We have to be futuristic. It doesn’t help any country to have big projects and the skills cannot be found within it because jobs are not created or if they are they are low skilled jobs”, Ajuk said.
He also advocated better management of mineral resources throughout the continent and better frameworks to “empower communities”.
“Africa needs to start thinking of sharing skills and expertise to create intra-trade. We have the technology in most of the countries, we need to enhance what we already have.”
– excitingly entitled “Central Government Supply Estimates 2017-18” – detailing changes to planned public expenditure since last Autumn’s
Budget 2017. At pages 162-64 you can find the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) extra expenditure requests and clarification of
perceived liabilities.
These include several covering the privately-owned commercial nuclear industry sector. Below are the sections on nuclear, and
the most common read-out message is how often the liabilities for which the taxpayer is expected to take long term financial responsibility are
described as “unquantifiable.”
That is accurate, but what is omitted is the numbers are – based on accumulated experience to date, likely to be astronomically huge. This worryingly unacceptable situation,- whereby one industry (nuclear) of the electricity generating sector is being promised a massive future bailout from its liabilities- really should be examined in detail by our elected Parliamentarians and peers in several relevant committees and in the Estimates Debate on the floor of the Commons. http://drdavidlowry.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/nuclears-unquantifiably-huge-future.html
President Trump has, last night, signed a budget deal to raise spending and reopen the government. In its current form, the biofuels and nuclear power industries are set to benefit from the compromise deal.
A two-year agreement would provide tax incentives for the two energy sectors as well as credits for energy efficient car purchases of models manufactured in 2017. Another $1-a-gallon tax credit applies to refiners who mix biofuel in their products. Cellulosic ethanol, produced from garbage, algae, and corn stover, will also get an extension on its $1.01 per gallon credit.
An energy production tax credit for Southern Co.’s nuclear plants in Georgia will help the facilities there get off the ground.
In the last 20 years, the U.S. has seen only one new nuclear reactor that is functional, constructed by a government entity – the Tennessee Valley Authority. Further, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shows that there are only four reactors currently under construction in the entire country. Two would be at the Alvin W. Vogtle station in Georgia, and two at the Virgil C. Summer plant in South Carolina.
These projects are implementing reactors manufactured by Westinghouse. Construction on all four are currently delayed over three years and are billions over-budget. Westinghouse itself was one of the last private companies to be commissioned for the manufacture of nuclear reactors—before over-budget, inefficient projects such as these pushed them into ruin. So far, Westinghouse remains committed to completing the projects.
Southern Co. also recently abandoned a coal-gasification plant project in Mississippi, which countered President Donald Trump’s plans to increase clean coal’s grip on the American energy mix.
“They’ve got the conundrum of having spent billions of dollars [on nuclear projects],” Glenrock Associates analyst Pail Patterson told Bloomberg over the phone. “That’s why abandonment in the middle of a project usually looks unattractive.”
Le Monde 7th Feb 2018 [Machine Translation]Can France catch up in renewables? A laggard compared
to many of its neighbors, the Hexagon must redouble efforts if it wants to
achieve the goals it has set in terms of “green” energies. “Let’s
accelerate the growth of renewable energies in the face of the climate
emergency. The theme chosen for the 19th annual conference of the Union of
Renewable Energy (SER), Thursday, February 8 in Paris, summarizes the
situation of an economic sector in the middle of the ford. A laggard
compared to many of its neighbors, France must redouble its efforts if it
wants to achieve the goals it has set in terms of “green” energy. http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2018/02/08/la-france-peut-elle-rattraper-son-retard-dans-les-renouvelables_5253487_3244.html
Trump’s environmental good news, Religion News, ByMark Silk | The good news out of Washington is that the White House has withdrawn the nomination of Kathleen Hartnett White to head the President’s Council of Environmental Quality. A leading shill for the carbon industry, the one-time chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would have joined Energy Secretary Rick Perry and EPA Administrator Greg Pruitt in a troika of climate change deniers driving the Trump Administration’s environmental policies.
Hartnett White’s confirmation hearing in November did not go well, and although President Trump resubmitted her nomination last month, it can be presumed that he reversed course in the face of threats from at least a couple of Senate Republicans to vote her down……….
while the cause of climate change is hardly restricted to religious folks, it is perhaps the most religiously motivated of all progressive social causes today. Leading the way has been Pope Francis, with his great 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. But it is a cause that has enlisted the full spectrum of the religious community — Jews and Muslims, Eastern Orthodox and Mainline Protestant, Hindu and Buddhist.
Except for white evangelicals. Outliers, they are now in thrall to a political party that over the past decade has increasingly opposed all efforts to address climate change. Their religious rationalization is that they are standing with a God who promised no more floods against pagan “Earth worshippers.”
“Slavery degrades the Religious Activity of the People,” preached Boston’s leading abolitionist minister Theodore Parker on July 4, 1858. Today it is climate change denial that is degrading the religious activity of the evangelical people. https://religionnews.com/2018/02/06/trumps-environmental-good-news/
Sen. Lindsey Graham wants ‘nuclear renaissance,’ thinks Republican memo has no Mueller consequence
He also said he would put up “one hell of a fight” to keep MOX at SRS, Aiken Standard, By Colin Demarest cdemarest@aikenstandard.com
Feb 5, 2018
U.S. Sen.
Lindsey Graham, a Republican heavyweight from South Carolina, made a stop in Aiken on Monday afternoon…….. ‘Nuclear renaissance’Graham, in the very first minutes of his speech, called for a South Carolina “nuclear renaissance.”
“We’re going to do more, not less, on the nuclear side,” Graham said. In a pre-speech interview, Graham said he’d like to “completely, fundamentally” redesign energy in the United States……..
Graham confirmed U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who spent last Thursday and Friday at SRS, toured MOX. Graham said Perry was “impressed.” Wilson said he is convinced Perry knows MOX is 70 percent along.
Graham also said SRS is in a position to grow, echoing Perry, who said SRS’s future is “very bright.”
Carlisle News and Star 7th Feb 2018,The £7.5 million National College for Nuclear is due to be officially
opened today. The college, at Lillyhall, near Workington, will train
thousands of technicians and engineers to support Britain’s future
nuclear programmes, create cleaner energy and provide a highly skilled
workforce.
