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Germany’s nuclear phase-out enters final stretch

Germany shuts down atomic plant as nuclear phase-out enters final stretch, DW, 1 Jan 2020, The Philippsburg power station is one of the only plants still operating in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg. Germany has vowed to start decommissioning every nuclear power facility by the end of 2022.Operators began shutting down the Philippsburg nuclear power plant in southern Germany on Tuesday, as the country puts into motion its plan to begin decommissioning all 17 of its atomic energy facilities by the end of 2022. …..

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan led to widespread anti-atomic-power protests across Germany. Two months after the accident, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that all plants would be closed over the next decade, making Germany the second country after Italy to shut down all of its atomic energy stations.

The German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) welcomed the news. A BUND spokesman said the group hoped to see the end of nuclear power being “conjured up again and again as a supposed healing charm and climate savior.”

However, Wolfram König, who heads the German government’s office for the nuclear phase-out, warned that the country still faced the great “challenge” of trying to phase out both coal and atomic energy at the same time.https://www.dw.com/en/germany-shuts-down-atomic-plant-as-nuclear-phase-out-enters-final-stretch/a-51845616

January 2, 2020 Posted by | decommission reactor, Germany, politics | Leave a comment

U.S. Congress Demands Investigation Into the U.S.’s Nuclear Coffin, The Runit Dome

December 28, 2019 Posted by | OCEANIA, oceans, wastes, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA’s Hanford nuclear site could suffer the same fate as Russia’s Mayak – or worse

Comment from Dtlt 21 Dec 19, TRUMP IS CUTTING THE BUDGET TO MONITOR AND TRY TO CLEAN THE HANFORD MESS IN HALF
Massive Nuclear Explosion similar to Kyrshtym by Mayak Can Happen at Hanford if the site is not Monitored and tanks not taken care of.

A Ten Thousand Gallon Tank at Mayak Exploded from Heat Decay. The Heat Deacy was from Strontium 90, Cesium 137, Cobalt 60 and Plutonium Stored in the Underground Tank. The explosion was equivalent to 100 tons of TNT. There are 55 million gallons of the same Radionuclide Mix stored at Hanford, in UnderGround Tanks. They used nitic acid to extract radionuclides at hanford as they did at Kyahym, by Mayak. The nitrates mixed with heat decaying rand hydrogen gas generating radionuclides are very much like the explosive brew that went off in Kyshtym in 1957 and there are 55 million gallons of the explosive brew at Hanford. The heat decay, heat emitting Radionuclides and Hydrogen gas generating explosive mix and the nitrates in the brew are very much at risk for a massive catastrophic chemical-radionuclide explosion . The Kyshtym disaster was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site in Russia for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant of the Soviet Union.

If the exlplosive stew becomes too concentrated and hot, the same thing will Happen there, contaminating a Great Portion of the Pacific NW USA and southe western Canada.

Medvedev, Zhores A. (4 November 1976). “Two Decades of Dissidence”. New Scientist.
Medvedev, Zhores A. (1980). Nuclear disaster in the Urals translated by George Saunders. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-394-74445-2. (c1979)
In 1957 the cooling system in one of the tanks containing about 70–80 tons of liquid radioactive waste failed and was not repaired. The temperature in it started to rise, resulting in evaporation and a chemical explosion of the dried waste, consisting mainly of ammonium nitrate and acetates (see ammonium nitrate/fuel oil bomb). The explosion, on 29 September 1957, estimated to have a force of about 70–100 tons of TNT,[10] threw the 160-ton concrete lid into the air.[8] There were no immediate casualties as a result of the explosion, but it released an estimated 20 MCi (800 PBq) of radioactivity. Most of this contamination settled out near the site of the accident and contributed to the pollution of the Techa River, but a plume containing 2 MCi (80 PBq) of radionuclides spread out over hundreds of kilometers. Previously contaminated areas within the affected area include the Techa river, which had previously received 2.75 MCi (100 PBq) of deliberately dumped waste, and Lake Karachay, which had received 120 MCi (4,000 PBq).
In the next 10 to 11 hours, the radioactive cloud moved towards the north-east, reaching 300–350 km (190–220 mi) from the accident. The fallout of the cloud resulted in a long-term contamination of an area of more than 800 to 20,000 km2 (310 to 7,720 sq mi), depending on what contamination level is considered significant, primarily with caesium-137 and strontium-90. This area is usually referred to as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace EURT

December 21, 2019 Posted by | incidents, Reference, wastes | 8 Comments

A quarter of Russia’s Andreeva Bay’s spent nuclear fuel stack removed, with Norway’s help

Norway helps pay for transporting old Russian navy nuclear waste
A shipment of 14 containers with spent nuclear fuel from Andreeva Bay to Atomflot in Murmansk took place this week. Barents Observer By Thomas Nilsen December 20, 2019

December 21, 2019 Posted by | Russia, wastes | Leave a comment

Idaho nuclear waste processing project to close – not commercially viable

US to shut down Idaho nuclear waste processing project,  https://dentondaily.com/us-to-shut-down-idaho-nuclear-waste-processing-project/   by Denton Staff Contributor — December 14, 2019

Federal officials will shut down an Idaho nuclear waste treatment project after determining it would not be economically feasible to bring in radioactive waste from other states.

The U.S. Department of Energy in documents made public this week said the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project that employs 650 workers will end next year.

A $500 million treatment plant handles transuranic waste that includes work clothing, rags, machine parts and tools that have been contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says transuranic wastes take much longer to decay and are the most radioactive hazard in high-level waste after 1,000 years.

The Energy Department said that before the cleanup began, Idaho had the largest stockpile of transuranic waste of any of the agency‘s facilities. Court battles between Idaho and the federal government culminated with a 1995 agreement requiring the Energy Department to clean up the Idaho site.

The Idaho treatment plant compacts the transuranic waste, making it easier to ship and put into long-term storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

Federal officials earlier this year floated the idea of keeping the $500 million treatment plant running in Idaho with waste from other states. The bulk of that would have been 8,000 cubic meters (6,100 cubic meters) of radioactive waste from a former nuclear weapons production area in Hanford in eastern Washington.

Local officials and politicians generally supported the idea because of the good-paying jobs. The Snake River Alliance, an Idaho-based nuclear watchdog group, said it had concerns the nuclear waste brought to Idaho would never leave.

A 38-page economic analysis the Department of Energy completed in August and released this week found “it does not appear to be cost effective due to packaging and transportation challenges in shipping waste” to Idaho.

“As work at the facility will continue into 2019, no immediate workforce impacts are anticipated,” the agency said in an email to The Associated Press on Friday. The Energy Department “recognizes the contribution of this facility and its employees to DOE‘s cleanup mission and looks forward to applying the knowledge gained and experience of the workforce to other key activities at the Idaho site.”

The agency said it would also consider voluntary separation incentives for workers.

With the Idaho treatment plant scheduled to shut down, it‘s not clear how the transuranic waste at Hanford and other sites will be dealt with.

The Energy Department “will continue to work to ensure a path forward for packaging and certification of TRU (transuranic) waste at Hanford and other sites,” the agency said in the email to the AP.

The Post Register first reported the closure.

December 17, 2019 Posted by | business and costs, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Spent mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel to be removed from Ikata nuclear reactor

December 14, 2019 Posted by | Japan, wastes | Leave a comment

U.S. Congress members call on Trudeau to stop nuclear waste dumping near Great Lakes

December 12, 2019 Posted by | Canada, environment, opposition to nuclear, USA, wastes | 4 Comments

2 nuclear reactors in Fukui Prefecture to be shut down

Nuclear watchdog OKs decommissioning plan for two reactors at Kepco’s Oi plant in Fukui   https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/12/11/national/nuclear-watchdog-oks-decommissioning-kepco-fukui/#.XfFJqegzbIUKYODO   The nation’s nuclear watchdog approved a plan Wednesday to decommission two reactors in Fukui Prefecture, a move their operator decided to take rather than shoulder the high cost of implementing safety upgrades.

Kansai Electric Power Co. will spend ¥118.7 billion to dismantle the Nos. 1 and 2 units at the Oi nuclear power plant, with work expected to wrap up in the fiscal year ending March 2049.

The units, which each have an output capacity of more than 1 million kilowatts, are the most powerful reactors to be approved for decommissioning by the Nuclear Regulation Authority since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused a meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 plant in March 2011.

Following the disaster, the government placed a 40-year limit on the lifespan of reactors in the country, with a possible 20-year extension if strict safety standards are met.

As both units came online in 1979 and were approaching the 40-year limit, Kansai Electric had a choice of applying for the extension or scrapping them.

In December 2017, the utility announced it would scrap the aging reactors, citing the high cost of implementing additional safety measures. Kansai Electric submitted the decommissioning plan to the authority in November 2018.

The plant’s Nos. 3 and 4 units came online in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and are currently active.

Around 23,000 tons of low-level radioactive waste will be remain following the dismantling process, according to the plan, along with another 13,200 tons of nonradioactive waste.

The plan does not state where the waste will be stored.

December 12, 2019 Posted by | business and costs, decommission reactor, Japan | Leave a comment

The Santa Susana nuclear waste scandal

December 09, 2019 Caroline Reiser I grew up in Los Angeles and work on nuclear safety, but I just learned recently that a nuclear reactor melted down in our area. In a shocking reminder of the perils of nuclear energy, that radioactive release (and releases from other nuclear work and rocket engine tests at the site) has left behind a toxic legacy. Federally-funded studies have found that contaminants have migrated offsite and there are markedly elevated rates for key cancers associated with proximity to the site.

The Santa Susana Field Laboratory was established seventy years ago as a remote site for work too dangerous to conduct near communities. It’s situated on a rise on the north-west end of the Los Angeles Valley. What was once sparsely inhabited is now a packed community of 150,000 living within five miles of the site and more than half a million people living within 10 miles.

To the north, the community of Simi Valley. To the south-west, Thousand Oaks. And to the east, Chatsworth, Canoga Park, and West Hills. From these suburban streets, the hills around Santa Susana provide a beautiful backdrop of round sandstone and golden grass. But the picturesque view hides a secret—the fact that Santa Susana Field Laboratory is one of the most contaminated sites in California.

The site is no longer active; that doesn’t mean it’s benign. Over the years Santa Susana hosted a variety of activities, including ten nuclear reactors, a rocket engine testing facility, and multiple open-air “burn pits” where radioactively and chemically contaminated items were “disposed of” through burning. These activities left their mark. In 1959, one of the nuclear reactors partially melted down, an incident that scientists estimate may have released more radioactive iodine than Three Mile Island. And rocket-engine testing released toxic chemicals like TCE, dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals. Wind and rain, and fires like the Woolsey Fire that burned 80 percent of the site in 2018, continue to carry contaminates from the site into the neighborhoods that have grown up around it.

All of this history is known, and really, none of these facts are in dispute. That’s why community members like Melissa Bumstead and Lauren Hammersley (both of whose daughters had rare forms of cancer), community organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility–Los Angeles and Committee to Bridge the Gap, and celebrities like Kim and Kourtney Kardashian have all been advocating on this issue. The Santa Susana Laboratory must be cleaned up, and cleaned up quickly. But the Trump administration is trying to walk away from its commitments, and that’s a clear danger to nearby residents.

Today, responsibility for the site is shared by Boeing, the Department of Energy, and NASA. Back in 2010, the Energy Department and NASA both signed legally binding agreements with California setting strict levels of cleanup to “background levels.” Essentially, this means cleanup to the condition the site was in before all of the pollution. The agreements also require the federal agencies obtain approval from California for all aspects of the cleanup. This was the right deal to make; NRDC strongly supported the deal then, and still does to this day.

But now the Department of Energy and NASA seem to be trying to shirk their obligations.

First, the Energy Department issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement for remediation of the areas of the Field Lab it is responsible for. This is a legally required document designed to set forth the harms for the public, as well as the plan to mitigate those harms. In this document, the Department acknowledges that most of what it is considering violates its agreement with California, but it provides one-sided assurance that it will negotiate these points with California. Then in September, the Energy Department issued decisions to demolish multiple buildings without California’s consent, directly contradicting the cleanup obligations spelled out in the agreement.

NASA seems to be taking a similar course; in October it published a supplemental environmental impact statement proposing alternatives that would leave most of the contamination not cleaned up, in violation of its agreement with California. Absurdly, NASA argues that each of the alternatives it considers provides the same health benefits even though all but one of the alternatives would abandon in place most of the contaminated soil. It presented this information at “public meetings” in November but called the police when members of the public tried to share their concerns that NASA’s alternatives would breach the agreement to reach the required “background levels.” In short, NASA is setting itself up to violate the binding cleanup standards set by California and doesn’t seem to want the public to know that’s what it’s doing.

But under their agreements with California, and also under the primary hazardous waste law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Energy Department and NASA don’t have the authority to choose how much they must clean up and how much contamination they can abandon in place. This authority is California’s alone.

Luckily, the state of California is on top of it, closely monitoring the situation. Both the California EPA and the Department of Toxic Substances Control strongly reminded the Energy Department of its obligations and that the state would enforce the cleanup agreement. Should NASA follow through on any of the alternatives it has considered that would ignore its obligations, we are hopeful California stands ready again.

But enough is enough for all of this. The cleanup agreements are well thought out documents, have broad public support, and it’s readily apparent that the neighbors of Santa Susana Field Laboratory will continue to be at risk until the Department of Energy, NASA, and Boeing meet their full obligations to clean up the site. We stand beside California, local organizations, and community members to ensure that these toxic remnants will be removed and the site cleaned up so the nearby residents can live in safety and peace.

December 10, 2019 Posted by | USA, wastes | 2 Comments

It’s time to reset US nuclear waste policy

December 10, 2019 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

To store Canada’s nuclear wastes close to Lake Huron – the worst of the worst

December 8, 2019 Posted by | Canada, wastes | Leave a comment

New ship to handle all nuclear waste from Rosatom’s Arctic operations.

Barents Observer 5th Dec 2019, New ship to handle all nuclear waste from Rosatom’s Arctic operations.
The new special purpose vessel will serve the new icebreakers and the
floating nuclear power plants and possible other reactor installations.

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2019/12/new-ship-will-take-care-all-nuclear-waste-rosatoms-arctic-operation

December 7, 2019 Posted by | ARCTIC, Russia, wastes | Leave a comment

Paducah, Kentucky – its nuclear waste tragedy is compounded by climate change

“I never said a bad thing about the plant the whole time I was growing up,” Lamb said. “It made the economy good. But then we got sick.”  

“People who were not highly educated could make really good money working in these industries

“Not only that but the government was saying, this is your patriotic duty. We need this. So everybody just went along because the compensation was pretty good.”

a GAO report released in November showed that 60 percent of U.S. Superfund sites are at risk from the impacts of climate change.

Instead of focusing on cleanup plans, some state lawmakers and federal agencies are loosening regulations on hazardous sites…… Last year, the DOE also moved to relax restrictions on the disposal and abandonment of radioactive waste

December 5, 2019 Posted by | climate change, investigative journalism, Reference, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Germany must now face up to its nuclear waste problem

Germany is closing all its nuclear power plants. Now it must find a place to bury the deadly waste for 1 million years

By Sheena McKenzie, [excellent diagrams]. CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/30/europe/germany-nuclear-waste-grm-intl/index.html   When it comes to the big questions plaguing the world’s scientists, they don’t get much larger than this.

Where do you safely bury more than 28,000 cubic meters — roughly six Big Ben clock towers — of deadly radioactive waste for the next million years?
This is the “wicked problem” facing Germany as it closes all of its nuclear power plants in the coming years, according to Professor Miranda Schreurs, part of the team searching for a storage site.
Experts are now hunting for somewhere to bury almost 2,000 containers of high-level radioactive waste. The site must be beyond rock-solid, with no groundwater or earthquakes that could cause a leakage.
The technological challenges — of transporting the lethal waste, finding a material to encase it, and even communicating its existence to future humans — are huge.
But the most pressing challenge today might simply be finding a community willing to have a nuclear dumping ground in their backyard.

Searching for a nuclear graveyard

Germany decided to phase out all its nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, amid increasing safety concerns.
The seven power stations still in operation today are due to close by 2022.
With their closure comes a new challenge — finding a permanent nuclear graveyard by the government’s 2031 deadline.
Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy says it aims to find a final repository for highly radioactive waste “which offers the best possible safety and security for a period of a million years.”
The country was a “blank map” of potential sites, it added.
Currently, high-level radioactive waste is stored in temporary facilities, usually near the power plant it came from.
But these facilities were “only designed to hold the waste for a few decades,” said Schreurs, chair of environmental and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich, and part of the national committee assisting the search for a high-level radioactive waste site.
As the name suggests, high-level radioactive waste is the most lethal of its kind. It includes the spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants. “If you opened up a canister with those fuel rods in it, you would more or less instantly die,” said Schreurs.
These rods are “so incredibly hot, it’s very hard to transport them safely,” said Schreurs. So for now they’re being stored in containers where they can first cool down over several decades, she added.
There are dozens of these temporary storage sites dotted across Germany. The search is now on for a permanent home at least 1 kilometer underground.

Between a rock and a hard place

The location will need to be geologically “very very stable,” said Schreurs. “It can’t have earthquakes, it can’t have any signs of water flow, it can’t be very porous rock.”
Finland, which has four nuclear power plants and plans to build more in the future, is a world leader in this field. Work is well underway on its own final repository for high-level waste — buried deep in granite bedrock.
Germany’s problem is “it doesn’t have a whole lot of granite,” said Schreurs. Instead, it has to work with the ground it’s got — burying the waste in things like rock salt, clay rock and crystalline granite.
Next year the team hope to have identified potential storage sites in Germany (there are no plans to export the waste). It’s a mission that stretches beyond our lifetimes — the storage facility will finally be sealed sometime between the years 2130 and 2170.
Communications experts are already working on how to tell future generations thousands of years from now — when language will be completely different — not to disturb the site.
Schreurs likened it to past explorers entering the pyramids of Egypt — “we need to find a way to tell them ‘curiosity is not good here.'”

People power

For now, nobody wants a nuclear dumping ground on their doorstep.
Schreurs admitted public mistrust was a challenge, given Germany’s recent history of disastrous storage sites.
Former salt mines at Asse and Morsleben, eastern Germany, that were used for low- and medium-level nuclear waste in the 1960s and 1970s, must now be closed in multibillion-dollar operations after failing to meet today’s safety standards.
The fears around high-level waste are even greater.
For more than 40 years, residents in the village of Gorleben, Lower Saxony, have fought tooth-and-nail to keep a permanent high-level waste repository off their turf.
The site was first proposed in 1977 in what critics say was a political choice. Gorleben is situated in what was then a sparsely populated area of West Germany, close to the East German border, and with a high unemployment rate that politicians argued would benefit from a nuclear facility.
Over the decades, there have been countless demonstrations against the proposal. Protesters have blocked railway tracks to stop what they described as “Chernobyl on wheels” — containers of radioactive waste headed for Gorleben’s temporary storage facility.
An exploratory mine was eventually constructed in Gorleben, but it was never used for nuclear waste. And in the face of huge public opposition, the government in recent years decided to start afresh its national search for a dumping ground.

December 2, 2019 Posted by | Germany, wastes | Leave a comment

Plans for nuclear waste disposal, but there’s no long term solution

The Staggering Timescales Of Nuclear Waste Disposal,  Christine Ro  https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/#621facec29cf

High-level nuclear waste consists largely of spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Though it makes up a small proportion of overall waste volumes, it accounts for the majority of radioactivity. This most potent form of nuclear waste, according to some, needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yes, 1 million years – in other words, a far longer stretch of time than the period since Neanderthals cropped up. This is an estimate of the length of time needed to ensure radioactive decay.

Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often 10,000 or 100,000 years. These are still such unimaginably vast lengths of time that regulatory authorities decide on them, in part, based on how long ice ages are expected to last. To some extent all of these figures are little better than educated guesses.

They’re also such mind-bogglingly long periods that in 1981, the US Department of Energy established the Human Interference Task Force to devise ways to warn future generations of the dangerous contents of nuclear repositories. This was a challenging task then, and nuclear semiotics remains the stuff of science fiction. Written language has only existed for about 5,500 years, so there’s no guarantee that Earth’s inhabitants, tens of thousands of years from now, would understand any of the writing systems currently in use. The meanings of visual signs also drift over time. The more whimsical “ray cat solution,” of genetically engineering cats to glow in the presence of radioactive material, is even less reliable.

Even stopping nuclear power operations is a necessarily drawn-out process. Decommissioning a single nuclear reactor typically takes about 20 years. Most countries grappling with nuclear waste are planning for at least 40 to 60 years just to implement their repository programs.

After brief flirtations with amusingly bad ideas including shooting nuclear waste into space, the consensus among nuclear scientists is that the best option for dealing with high-level nuclear waste is deep geological disposal. One of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s conditions for such a geological site is low groundwater content, which has been stable for at least tens of thousands of years, and geological stability, over millions of years. Thus, Japan, with its seismic instability, is unlikely to have any suitable candidates for deep geological disposal.

Like many countries, Japan is relying on interim storage of high-level waste while hoping that longer-term solutions will present themselves eventually. In fact, no country even has an operational deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel. (The US has a deep disposal site in New Mexico for “transuranic” waste from nuclear weapons, which is long-lived and intermediate-level waste whose elements have higher numbers than uranium in the periodic table.)

It’s challenging to find a site that ticks all of the geological boxes (including relatively impermeable material with little risk of water infiltration), and that isn’t politically controversial. To take two notable examples, communities in Nevada, US and Bure, France have hotly opposed plans to establish repositories. Given the history of environmental justice globally, it’s likely that any future locations approved for nuclear waste dumps will be found in poor areas.

Only one country, Finland, is even building a permanent spent-fuel repository. Even in Finland, however, it’s estimated that a license won’t be issued until 2024. Similar licenses for other European countries scouting out possible locations likely wouldn’t be available until 2050 in Germany and 2065 in the Czech Republic. And these countries are outnumbered by those that don’t even have an estimated timeframe for licensing, as they’re so far back in the process of searching for a site.

Strategies remain worryingly short-term, on a nuclear timescale. Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor no. 4, for instance, was moved in July 2019 into a massive steel and concrete “sarcophagus” that will only last 100 years. Not only will containers like this one fall short of the timescales needed for sufficient storage, but no country has allotted enough funds to cover nuclear waste disposal. In France and the US, according to the recently published World Nuclear Waste Report, the funding allocation only covers a third of the estimated costs. And the cost estimates that do exist rarely extend beyond several decades.

Essentially, we’re hoping that things will work out once future generations develop better technologies and find more funds to manage nuclear waste. It’s one of the most striking examples of the dangers of short-term thinking.Check out my website.

November 28, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, wastes | Leave a comment

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