Russia begins cleaning up the Soviets’ top-secret nuclear waste dump https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/02/russia-begins-cleaning-up-the-soviets-top-secret-nuclear-waste-dump
When the Soviet Union collapsed a vast store of spent nuclear fuel was abandoned in the Russian Arctic – an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Decades later an international clean-up has finally begun, Guardian, Shaun Walker in Andreyeva Bay, 2 July 17,
As the Rossita pulled away from the pier at Andreyeva Bay, sounding a long boom of its horn, a military band struck up a jaunty march. On board the ship were nine sealed metal casks, each four metres high and weighing 45 tonnes, containing canisters of spent nuclear fuel. Dozens of Russian and foreign nuclear specialists looked on applauding, as the chilly rain of a northern summer fell on the bay deep inside the Russian Arctic.
The ceremony, held on Tuesday afternoon, marks the culmination of a long international project to begin removing nuclear fuel from the site, formerly a top-secret Soviet installation. Nuclear specialists say Andreyeva Bay contains the largest reserves of spent nuclear fuel in the world, in fragile conditions that have disturbed the international community for years.
During the Cold War period, nuclear submarines were refuelled at sea, and the spent nuclear fuel was then shipped to Andreyeva Bay, where it was placed in a special storage facility to cool off before being transported to a reprocessing plant at Mayak, in the Urals. But in the early 1980s, leaks sprung up in the storage system, causing high levels of radioactive contamination.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, transfers of the spent fuel ceased, and about 22,000 spent nuclear fuel caskets were left at Andreyeva Bay in leaky dry storage units, creating the potential for an environmental catastrophe.
“I’ve been all over the world to pretty much every country that uses nuclear power and I’ve never seen anything so awful before,” said Alexander Nikitin, a former naval officer and environmentalist who has been monitoring the site for years.
“With nuclear material, everything should be done very carefully, and here they just took the material and threw it into an even more dangerous situation.”
In the decade after the Soviet collapse, the main concern was that poorly maintained facilities could lead to an onsite disaster. Nearly 250 nuclear submarines were decommissioned in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, and facilities such as Andreyeva Bay were left in a perilous state.
“There wouldn’t have been a big explosion, but it could still have been something serious,” said Nikitin. “With nuclear fuel, once processes start, you have no way of knowing how they will develop.”
Over the next decade, security fears also increased. “Before 9/11, nobody would really think anyone would be crazy enough to try to handle spent nuclear fuel, but with the new type of terrorist threat we face, this became a bigger worry,” said Balthasar Lindauer of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which has managed the donor funds from western countries to help with the clean-up.
The facility at Andreyeva Bay was one of many top-secret installations in the Soviet Arctic. A two-hour drive from the regional centre of Murmansk along a road cut out of mossy rocks, still dusted with snow in late June, the entire area around Andreyeva Bay is closed to all foreigners and even Russians who are not registered there. A heavily armed military checkpoint on the outskirts of town keeps out all those who do not have security clearance . This is partly because Russia has a working nuclear submarine base on the other side of the bay at Zaozyorsk.
It might seem odd that, as Russia ploughs more money into its current military budget, western nations who see Moscow as a military threat are helping to fund the clean-up of the mess the Soviet military left behind. 13 countries have provided €165m in funding since 2003 for nuclear decommissioning in Russia’s north-west. There have also been a number of bilateral projects, with Britain, Norway and other countries funding a long project to help clean up Andreyeva Bay.
The Norwegian foreign minister, who was present at Tuesday’s ceremony, said the funding for the project was committed nearly two decades ago, when Russia was in no economic state to deal with the problems alone. He also pointed out that the Andreyeva Bay facility is only about 40 miles from the Norwegian border, making the decommissioning issue one in which Norway has long taken a strong interest.
“Nuclear challenges recognise no borders, and it is in our common interest to deal with nuclear waste now rather leaving the problems to future generations,” said the Norwegian foreign minister, Børge Brende.
A suite of new buildings has been constructed around the area where the spent nuclear fuel caskets are kept, replacing the decaying structures that stood there previously. Work to load canisters into the giant protective casks can now be done using specially commissioned machinery.
The Rossita, a ship constructed for the task, will take the huge fuel casks to Murmansk, where they will be put on fortified trains which will proceed under armed guard on the long journey from the Arctic to the Mayak reprocessing site. At the Mayak facility, the spent fuel will be recycled and the Russians say they will turn it into fuel to be used in civilian nuclear reactors.
Specialists at the plant estimate it could take 10 years to remove all the fuel. About half of the caskets have some kind of surface damage to their containers and will be dealt with after the non-problematic batches have been removed.
“This is the end of a long process, but also the beginning of another long stage in the clean-up,” said Marina Kovtun, the governor of Murmansk region. “Despite international tensions, work went on every day. Everyone who was working on this project understood that they were doing this for all of humanity and for protecting our environment.”
Indeed, in the current climate of hostility between Russia and the west, it was an unusual tale of bonhomie and cooperation, as the ceremony included the flags of 10 western nations as well as the Russian tricolour.
“The Barents Sea is maybe the cleanest sea in the world, and if something had happened here, it would have affected the whole Arctic,” said Brende. “This process is not completely without risk, but compared to doing nothing, the risks are now much lower.”
July 3, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Russia, wastes |
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1,800 tons of radioactive waste has an ocean view and nowhere to go, LA Times, By RALPH VARTABEDIAN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLEN J. SCHABEN 2 July 17 [good photographs and graphs] The massive, 150-ton turbines have stopped spinning. The mile-long cooling pipes that extend into the Pacific will likely become undersea relics. High voltage that once energized the homes of more than a million Californians is down to zero.
But the San Onofre nuclear power plant will loom for a long time as a landmark, its 1,800 tons of lethal radioactive waste stored on the edge of the Pacific and within sight of the busy 5 Freeway.
Across the site, deep pools of water and massive concrete casks confine high-power gamma radiation and other forms of radioactivity emitted by 890,000 spent fuel rods that nobody wants there.
And like the other 79,000 tons of spent fuel spread across the nation, San Onofre’s nuclear waste has nowhere to go.
The nation’s inability to find a permanent home for the dangerous byproduct of its 50-year-adventure in nuclear energy represents one of the biggest and longest running policy failures in federal government history.
Now, the Trump administration and Congress are proposing a fast track fix. The new plan aims, after decades of delays, to move the waste to one or more temporary central storage sites that would hold it until a geologic repository can be built in Nevada or somewhere else.
But the new strategy faces many of the same challenges that have dogged past efforts, leaving some experts doubtful that it can succeed.
America’s nuclear waste failure The shuttered San Onofre facility — not withstanding its overlook of prime surf breaks — is similar to about a dozen other former nuclear power plants nationwide that now have to babysit waste to prevent natural disasters, human errors or terrorist plots from causing an environmental or health catastrophe.
Though utilities and government regulators say such risks are remote, they have inflamed public fear at least since 1979’s Three Mile Island reactor accident in Pennsylvania.
The sites are located on the scenic shores of northern Lake Michigan, along a bucolic river in Maine, on the high plateau of Colorado and along the densely populated Eastern Seaboard — each environmentally sensitive for different reasons.
No one wants that waste near them — including officials in the sleepy beach town of San Clemente, just north of San Onofre. Even Southern California Edison Co. officials, while insisting the waste is safe, agree it should be moved as soon as possible.
“It doesn’t make any sense to store the fuel at all these sites,” said Thomas Palmisano, chief nuclear officer at the Southern California Edison plant. “The public doesn’t want the spent fuel here. Well, the fuel is here.”
But every attempt to solve the problem almost instantly gets tangled in complex federal litigation and imposes enormous expense on taxpayers.
The Energy Department was legally bound to haul away the waste by 1998 under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, making the agency about 20 years late in fulfilling its promise. That has saddled utilities with multibillion-dollar costs to store the waste onsite.
As a result, every nuclear utility, including Southern California Edison, has sued to recover its waste storage costs. So far, they have won judgments and settlements of $6.1 billion, and the Energy Department has projected that it may be liable for up to $25 billion more.
But the new plan is fraught with complex legal, political and financial questions, and has yet to be fully defined or vetted among powerful interest groups or receive approval by Congress or survive inevitable court challenges.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee last week overwhelmingly approved legislation that could clear up many legal questions. Similar bills have been introduced in recent years and failed to move ahead, but this legislation has strong bipartisan support and is backed by the White House.
Still, a lot could go wrong with the plan, as it has for every plan for decades.
Two little-known privately held companies, New Jersey-based Holtec International and Texas-based WCS, have unveiled plans and begun licensing applications with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for interim storage sites on each side of the New Mexico-Texas border. Officials in the area, a booming center of oil production, are enthusiastic about the potential economic benefits. And nuclear utilities have offered encouragement.
Company officials and other proponents say such temporary dumps could be opened in as little as three or four years, assuming the licensing goes smoothly. But other nuclear waste experts expect a timetable of 10 to 15 years for a temporary dump and much longer for a permanent repository.
Two dozen antinuclear activist groups and leading environmental nonprofits already have signaled in letters to the NRC that they will dispute the idea of creating temporary consolidated storage sites.
The groups, along with many longtime nuclear waste technical experts, worry that temporary storage will weaken the government’s resolve to build a permanent repository. And they assert the plan would require transporting the fuel twice, first to the temporary site and then to a permanent dump, magnifying transportation costs and the fuel’s exposure to accidents or attacks by terrorists.
“These trains hauling nuclear waste would go right by Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas,” said Marta Adams, a now-retired deputy attorney general in Nevada who is consulting with the state on its renewed legal battle.
Serious business problems cloud the plan. Among the most important is who would own and be legally responsible for the waste once it leaves the utility plant sites.
The federal government promised in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 to take ownership at a government-owned dump, but it never authorized such ownership at a temporary private facility — one of the legal questions that the Energy and Commerce Committee’s legislation would clear up.
A temporary facility by Holtec or another organization is intended as a segue to a permanent dump at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles north of Las Vegas. Along with an interim storage site, the Trump administration wants to restart licensing of Yucca Mountain, which President Obama suspended.
But reviving Yucca Mountain is a long shot………. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-stranded-nuclear-waste-20170702-htmlstory.html
July 3, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
USA, wastes |
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1,800 tons of radioactive waste has an ocean view and nowhere to go, LA Times, By RALPH VARTABEDIAN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLEN J. SCHABEN 2 July 17 [good photographs and graphs] “…..A decade ago, the Energy Department estimated Yucca Mountain would cost nearly $100 billion, a figure that has undoubtedly increased. The cost could be a problem for deficit-minded Republicans.
The Energy Department collected a tiny monthly fee from utility customers to build the dump, and currently a so-called trust fund has $39 billion reserved for the purpose.
But a little known clause in federal budget law 20 years ago decreed that contributions to the trust fund would count against the federal deficit. There are no securities or bonds that back up the fund, unlike the Social Security Trust Fund. As a result, every dollar spent on Yucca Mountain will have to be appropriated, and the money will add to the national debt.
“The money was collected for one purpose and used for another,” said Dale Klein, a former NRC chairman who is now associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Texas. “There is a moral obligation to address the issue. It will be a challenge to get Congress to pay for it.”
The Trump plan has also rekindled the strident bipartisan political opposition of Nevada officials, including the governor, senators, representatives and attorney general, among others. They vow to erect every legal and political obstacle to delay or kill the Yucca Mountain dump.
The state filed nearly 300 formal objections to the plan before the Obama administration suspended licensing. They must be individually examined by the NRC, a process that could take five years.
Then, the design and construction of the underground dump will require construction of about two dozen big industrial buildings and 300 miles of new railroad track. It could cost $1 billion or more every year, ranking among the largest federal operations.
A permanent repository could take 10 years to 20 years by most estimates.
On the beach
Nowhere is the nuclear waste problem more urgent than at shuttered power plants like San Onofre.
After utilities dismantle the reactors, haul away the concrete debris and restore the sites to nearly pristine condition, the nuclear waste remains. Security officers with high-powered automatic weapons guard the sites round the clock.
About five years after the spent fuel rods cool off in a 40- to 50-foot-deep pool, they are transferred to massive steel and concrete dry casks about 20 feet tall. Almost every government and outside nuclear expert considers the dry casks much safer than the pools.
The 3 Yankee Cos., which are safeguarding dry casks at three former New England reactors, spend about $10 million annually per site for maintenance and security, company officials say. The costs could be higher at San Onofre if the waste is left in place, Palmisano said.
Edison is building a massive concrete monolith for more storage, using a Holtec design called Hi-Storm UMAX. It will hold about two-thirds of the plant’s spent fuel in 73 stainless-steel canisters about 125 feet from the ocean. The 25-foot structure is about half-buried with the underground foundation just above the mean high-tide line. Tall cranes and swarms of hard hats are moving construction ahead.
The crucial question is whether it will be safe, especially if congressional inaction or litigation by opposition groups keeps it on-site for years.
“The top has four feet of steel-reinforced concrete,” said Ed Mayer, program director at Holtec. “It is remarkably strong. The … steel lids are designed to take an aircraft impact.”
NRC officials say the design is safe and meets all federal requirements. Although nuclear issues are within the NRC’s jurisdiction, the Coastal Commission also examined the potential for a tsunami, sea level rise or an earthquake to undermine the facility.
“Under our authority, which is limited, the commission approved the permit, and behind that is the evaluation that it is safe for a period of 20 years,” said Alison Dettmer, deputy director of the commission.
But suspicion lingers. San Clemente city officials have demanded that the fuel be removed as soon as possible. An activist group, Citizens’ Oversight, has sued Edison for starting construction and the California Coastal Commission for approving it.
The waste “is right down by the water, just inches from the high-tide line,” said Ray Lutz, the group’s founder. “It is the most ridiculous place they could find.”
In an effort to assuage local concerns, Edison participates in a “community engagement panel” that meets at least quarterly, led by UC San Diego professor David Victor.
“Early on, I was surprised by how many people did not understand there was no place for the fuel to go,” he said. Over the last year, the possibility of a temporary storage site has raised people’s hopes for a quicker solution, he said.
The history of nuclear waste, however, is replete with solutions that seem plausible but succumb to obscure and unanticipated legal, technical or financial issues.
Decades of delay
Two decades ago, the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians sought to create an interim storage facility for nuclear waste on its reservation about an hour out of Salt Lake City.
The NRC spent nine years examining the license application and approved it. But Utah officials and a broad swath of major environmental groups opposed the plan. Eventually, the state blocked shipping routes to the reservation.
Michael C. Layton, director of the NRC’s division of spent fuel management, said a temporary facility would use the same technology as existing dry cask storage sites, like San Onofre.
But Layton said it is unclear how long it will take to license a consolidated storage site. The formal review is scheduled for three years, but the Skull Valley license that took nine years is the only actual licensing effort to compare it to, he added. Palmisano, the Edison executive, estimates that an off-site temporary storage facility could be operating in 10 to 15 years.
Problems have already delayed WSC, which wants to build a storage site in Andrews, Texas. It asked the NRC in April to suspend its license application.
The $7.5-million cost of just the license application review “is significantly higher than we originally anticipated,” the company said, noting that it is under additional financial stress because the Justice Department has sued it to block a merger.
Holtec officials say that WCS’ problems haven’t deterred their plans for an underground storage site, saying interim storage could save the federal government billions of dollars, particularly if the Yucca Mountain plan is again postponed.
The company has strong support in New Mexico, which already has a dump for nuclear weapons waste, a uranium enrichment plant, a nuclear weapons armory and two nuclear weapons laboratories.
“We are very well-informed,” said Sam Cobb, mayor of nearby Hobbs, rejecting arguments by antinuclear groups that the industry preys on communities that need money and don’t understand the risk.
“It is not a death grab to get money,” he said. “We believe if we have an interim storage site, we will be the center for future nuclear fuel reprocessing.”
Transportation to an interim site would cost the federal government billions of dollars under the pending legislation. Aides at the House Energy and Commerce Committee said those costs would be recovered when the federal government no longer has to pay for legal settlements for failing to take the waste in the first place.
Even if an interim site is built, it is uncertain who would get to ship waste there first. The timing of waste shipments to a permanent site is determined by the so-called standard contract queue, a legal document so complex that federal bureaucrats have dedicated their entire careers to managing it.
The queue was structured so that the oldest waste would go into a future dump first. In the unlikely event that Yucca Mountain were opened in 2024, Edison’s fuel would be in line to start shipping in 2028 with the last bit of waste arriving in 2049, Palmisano said.
Whether that queue would apply to an interim site is unclear, even under the pending legislation.
The dry casks are designed to keep spent fuel confined only for decades, while the health standard for a permanent repository covers hundreds of thousands of years — longer than humans have roamed Earth. If the radioactive waste sits around in temporary storage for hundreds of years, it could be neglected and eventually forgotten.
So one outcome that nobody seems to want is for a temporary site to eventually become permanent by default.
“It would derail momentum for a permanent repository,” said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This issue has always pitted one community against another and those in between.”http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-stranded-nuclear-waste-20170702-htmlstory.html
July 3, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Reference, USA, wastes |
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Safety problems at a Los Alamos laboratory delay U.S. nuclear warhead testing and production A facility that handles the cores of U.S. nuclear weapons has been mostly closed since 2013 over its inability to control worker safety risks, Science, By The Center for Public Integrity, R. Jeffrey Smith, Patrick Malon Jun. 30, 2017 “……..A unique task, unfulfilled for the past four years
Before the work was halted in 2013, those overseeing the U.S. nuclear arsenal typically pulled six or seven warheads from bombers or missiles every year for dismantlement and invasive diagnostic testing. One reason is that the unstable metals that act as spark plugs for the bombs — plutonium and highly-enriched uranium — bathe themselves and nearby electrical components in radiation, with sometimes unpredictable consequences; another is that all the bombs’ metallic components are subject to normal, sometimes fitful corrosion.
Plutonium also slowly decays, with some of its isotopes becoming uranium. And the special high explosives fabricated by nuclear scientists to compress the plutonium cores in a deliberate detonation also have an unstable molecular structure.
Invasive testing provides details vital to the computer modeling and scientifically simulated plutonium behavior that has replaced nuclear testing, said DOE consultant David Overskei. He compared the pit — so named because it is spherical and positioned near the center of a warhead — to the heart of a human being, explaining that destructive testing is like taking a blood sample capable of exposing harmful maladies.
The aim, as Vice President Joe Biden said in a 2010 National Defense University speech, has been to “anticipate potential problems and reduce their impact on our arsenal.” Weapons designers say it’s what anyone would do if they were storing a car for years while still expecting the engine to start and the vehicle to speed down the road at the sudden turn of a key.
Typically, warheads selected for testing are first sent to the Energy Department’s Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Technicians there gently separate their components — such as the detonators — at that site; they also send the pits — used in a primary nuclear explosion — to Los Alamos, and the highly-enriched uranium — used in a secondary explosion — to Oak Ridge, Tenn. The arming, fusing, and firing mechanisms are tested by Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque and other locations.
At Los Alamos, the pits are brought to Plutonium Facility-4 (PF-4), a boxy, two-story, concrete building with a footprint the size of two city blocks. Inside are hundreds of special “glove boxes” for working with plutonium, a series of individual laboratories, and a special vault, in which containers hold plutonium on racks meant to ensure that escaping neutrons don’t collide too often with other atoms, provoking them to fission uncontrollably. Only a small portion of the building is normally used for pit surveillance, while about a fifth is used for pit fabrication, and another seven percent for analytical chemistry and pit certification. Budget documents indicate that annual federal spending for the work centered there is nearly $200 million.
“The Los Alamos Plutonium Facility is a unique and essential national security capability,” McMillan, the lab’s director, said last September during a visit by then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who watched as technicians — attempting to restart their work after the lengthy hiatus — used pressing machines and other equipment to fabricate a mock pit, rather than a usable one.
The building lies in the middle of a 40-acre campus in the mountains above Santa Fe hastily built during World War II to coordinate the construction of the two nuclear bombs used in Japan. Los Alamos is still considered the foremost U.S. nuclear weapons facility — where six of the nine warheads currently in the U.S. arsenal were designed, and where plutonium-based power supplies for most of the nation’s deep-space probes are fabricated. Hundreds of nuclear physicists work there.
Unfortunately, it also has an active seismic zone beneath the PF-4 building, producing persistent worries among the staff and members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a congressionally-chartered oversight group, that if it experienced a rare, large earthquake, the roof could collapse and toss chunks of plutonium so closely together a chain reaction would ensue, spewing radioactive, cancer-causing plutonium particles throughout nearby residential communities.
Millions of dollars have already been spent to diminish this risk, which until recently exceeded federal guidelines, and the Trump administration last month proposed spending $14 million in 2018 alone to strengthen the building’s firewalls and sprinkler systems. The government has also sunk more than $450 million into preparations for construction of a modern and more seismically durable pit production facility at Los Alamos, projected to have a total price tag between $1.5 billion and $3 billion.
Making new pits involves melting, casting, and machining the plutonium, while assessing how well or poorly the pits are aging requires using various instruments to withdraw small pieces for detailed chemical and material analysis. These operations are typically done in the glove boxes, by specialists whose hands are inserted into gloves attached to the side of sealed containers meant to keep the plutonium particles from escaping. But the work is messy, requiring constant vigilance to be certain that too much of the metal doesn’t pile up in a compact space. The byproducts include “chunks, shards, and grains of plutonium metal,” all of it radioactive and unstable, according to a 2015 Congressional Research Service report.
Notably, a 2013 Los Alamos study depicted leaks of glove boxes at PF-4 as frequent — averaging nearly three a month — and said they were often caused by avoidable errors such as inattention, improper maintenance, collisions with rolling storage carts, complacency and degradation from the heat that plutonium constantly emits. It said that sometimes those operating or supervising the equipment “accepted risk” or took a chance, rushed to meet a deadline, or otherwise succumbed to workplace production pressures.
“Operations always wants it yesterday,” the lab’s current criticality safety chief and the lone NNSA expert assigned to that issue in the agency’s Los Alamos oversight office warned in a private briefing for their colleagues at Sandia labs last month. Managers “must shield analysts from demands” from production personnel, they said.
Besides posing a serious health risk to those in PF-4, glove box releases of radioactive material each cost the government $23,000 to clean up, on average, the Los Alamos study said.
An acute shortage of criticality experts
Calculating exactly “how much material can come together before there’s an explosion” — as the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman once put it — is a complex task. While visiting the production site for highly-enriched uranium in
Oak Ridge, Tenn., during the 1940’s, for example, Feynman was surprised to see stocks of that fissionable material deliberately stored in separate rooms, but on an adjoining wall that posed no barrier to collisions involving atoms of uranium and escaping neutrons on both sides. “It was very dangerous and they had not paid any attention to the safety at all,” Feynman wrote years later.
Plutonium work is so fraught with risk that the total mass of that metal allowed to be present in PF-4 is strictly limited. A decade ago, the limit was increased without an appropriate understanding of the risks, according to an NNSA technical bulletin in February. But with pieces of it strewn and stored throughout the normally busy building, partly because the vault is typically full, its managers have labored for years to systematically track down and remove excess stocks. They had some success last year, when they got rid of nearly a quarter of the plutonium on the building’s “main floor,” according to recent budget documents.
Criticality specialists are employed not only to help set these overall mass limits but to guide technicians so they don’t inadvertently trigger chain reactions in their daily work; those specialists are also supposed to be the first-responders when too much dangerous material is found in one place.
“The weird thing about criticality safety is that it’s not intuitive,” Don Nichols, a former chief for defense nuclear safety at the NNSA, said in an interview. He cited an instance in which someone operating a stirring machine noticed that fissionable liquids were forming a “critical” mass, so the operator shut the stirrer off, not immediately realizing that doing so made the problem worse. In other instances, analysts had judged a plutonium operation was safe, but then more workers — whose bodies reflect and slow neutrons — wound up being present nearby, creating unanticipated risks.
Those doing the weapons disassemblies and invasive pit studies are typically under “a big level pressure” to complete a certain number every year, Nichols added. They are expected to do “so many of these in this amount of time,” to allow the labs to certify to the president that the stockpile is viable. Meanwhile, the calculations involved in avoiding criticality — which depend on the shape, size, form, quantity, and geometric configuration of material being used in more than a dozen different industrial operations — are so complex that it takes a year and a half of training for an engineer to become qualified and as many as five years to become proficient, experts say.
“It’s difficult to find people who want to do this job,” particularly at the remote Los Alamos site, said McConnell, the NNSA safety chief. With plutonium use mostly confined to creating the world’s most powerful explosives, “there are…very few public-sector opportunities for people to develop these skills,” he added. As a result, he said, many NNSA sites lack the desired number of experts, which slows down production.
At the time of the 2013 shutdown, after numerous internal warnings about the consequences of its mismanagement, Los Alamos had only “a single junior qualified criticality safety engineer” still in place, according to the February NNSA technical bulletin. Nichols, who was then the NNSA’s associate administrator for safety and health, said McMillan didn’t “realize how serious it was until we took notice and helped him take notice.”
Without having adequate staff on hand to guide their operations safely, technicians at PF-4 were unable to carry out a scheduled destructive surveillance in 2014 of a refurbished plutonium pit meant for a warhead to be fit atop American submarine-launched ballistic missiles. It’s been modernized at a cost of $946 million since 2014, with total expenses predicted to exceed $3.7 billion. Generally, up to 10 of the first pits produced for a new warhead type are set aside for surveillance to assure they’re safely constructed and potent before they’re deployed. But the planned disassembly was cancelled and the NNSA hasn’t scheduled another yet, because of the shutdown.
The lab also hasn’t been able to complete planned invasive studies of the aging of plutonium used in a warhead for an aircraft-delivered nuclear bomb, now being modernized at an estimated cost of $7.4 billion to $10 billion.
Former deputy NNSA director Madelyn Creedon told an industry conference in March that if new funds are given to the agency in President Trump’s new budget, she knows where she’d advise it be spent. “One of the things that doesn’t take a huge amount of money but it’s one that has been cut back over the last couple of years, is surveillance — enhanced surveillance” of existing warheads, Creedon said……..http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/safety-problems-los-alamos-laboratory-delay-us-nuclear-warhead-testing-and-production
July 1, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
- plutonium, employment, Reference |
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House panel votes to advance Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, The Hill, BY TIMOTHY CAMA – 06/28/17 A House committee voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to advance a bill meant to move along the stalled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
June 30, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
politics, USA, wastes |
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Clacton & Frinton Gazette 27th June 2017, A CAMPAIGN group has described process used to dissolve the FEDs at
Bradwell as an “outrage” and an “insult”. Members of the Blackwater
Against New Nuclear Group (BANNG) had their say on the process which saw
radioactive waste dissolved in acid at the site.
Chairman, Andy Blowers said: “It is nothing short of an outrage and an insult to the Blackwater
environment and communities that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
(NDA) persisted despite all the signs that dissolution with nitric acid was
a failing technology.” BANNG Secretary, Varrie Blowers added: “The NDA
obviously believes that the end justified the chaotic means. While FED
dissolution may not have finished, it is hard to imagine that anyone can
think that the FED at Bradwell has been dealt with successfully, given all
the operational difficulties and the outages experienced.”
BANNG believe the reason the process has now been completed is because of the
re-characterisation of the waste, rather than it being fully dealt with.
They point to only one third of Intermediate Level Waste being treated, as
opposed to the full amount, with two thirds being reclassified as Low Level
Waste. Barry Turner, Vice-Chair of BANNG, said: “The Bradwell FED
dissolution plant has turned out to be an expensive one-off and has been
used to dissolve only one-third of the waste and not the originally
expected 100 per cent.” http://www.clactonandfrintongazette.co.uk/news/north_essex_news/15372952.Process_used_to_remove_radioactive_waste_an__outrage__and__insult__to_the_area__says_campaign_group/
June 30, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
UK, wastes |
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http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/jun/27/nuclear-expert-slams-edisons-san-onofre-nuclear-wa/, June 27, 2017, By Amita Sharma, Talks continue to find a storage site for radioactive waste away from San Onofre nuclear power plant. Unless there is an agreement, millions of pounds of the toxic material will be partially buried near the shoreline at San Onofre. KPBS Investigative Reporter Amita Sharma recently spoke to Tom English on the beach near San Onofre. He is a one-time advisor to former President Jimmy Carter on high-level nuclear waste disposal.
Q: You’re a nuclear waste expert who’s given talks at the White House on this topic. You think Edison’s plan is a bad idea, why?
A: Several reasons. One is they’re basically going to put the stuff in a thin storage container which probably will have some problems with corrosion given this ocean environment here. The second idea is they’re going to store it such that it will be about 100 feet from the water and a few inches above the groundwater table which is totally ridiculous. As the sea level rises, what will happen is the bottom of the containers will corrode.
Q: Why do you think Edison wants to use this dry cask storage method and actually got the backing to do it from the California Coastal Commission?
A: What happened is our attitude toward storage of spent fuel in a fuel pool changed with Fukushima. We had two pools melt down completely. And this scared everybody and caused a big furor and caused them to want to do something better. So it is a very good idea to take the fuel out of the pool and put it into dry storage. It’s just the choices that they made here were awful, far worse than leaving it in the spent fuel pool.
Q: You’re also worried about Edison’s San Onofre nuclear waste storage plan because you think it’s especially vulnerable to terrorism. Tell me about that.
A: If you leave the spent fuel in the spent fuel pool, you have two large concrete structures surrounding the spent fuel pool that will partially protect it against an attack. When you bring it out here near the ocean on the beach, what you have is no real protection. So a terrorist could find this to be a fairly easy target and if something were to happen here we would evacuate about 50 miles worth of people around San Onofre which would basically shut down the economy of Southern California.
Q: Dr. English, what are some of the alternatives to storing the waste at San Onofre?
A: There are three main ones. One is to simply move it to another Southern California Edison site like in Arizona. That way you’d at least be away from the beach. And it’s already licensed for this sort of thing. Another alternative would be to move it across the street to Camp Pendleton where it’s surrounded by a bunch of Marines and you wouldn’t have any overflights of airplanes so it would be much safer there from any kind of terrorist attack. A third alternative would be to go to Yucca Mountain where we know a lot about the geology of the area and basically make a part of it into temporary interim storage. And you could take all this waste and store it there for 100 years while they figure out how to solve the long-term problem and I think the three of those are much better than what we have here.
Q: If a storage site away from San Onofre can’t be found and the waste ends up being stored here for the long haul, there’s the matter of sea level rise. Projections show that San Onofre will be inundated by seawater by the turn of the century. What kind of threat does that pose to humans and to the sea?
A: Well, if you have these canisters sitting in seawater it’s much the same as dumping the high-level waste into the ocean. And so this has a severe threat on both the aquatic life and human life.
June 28, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
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WIPP continues to receive shipments, June 26, 2017, By KEVIN TREVELLYAN, ktrevellyan@postregister.com
Shipments of transuranic waste continue to leave Idaho, though not nearly fast enough to meet a looming cleanup milestone.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., has accepted 17 waste shipments from Idaho since April, U.S. Department of Energy-Idaho Assistant Manager Jim Malmo said Thursday during an Idaho National Laboratory Citizens Advisory Board meeting in Idaho Falls.
The WIPP repository temporarily closed in 2014 after a pair of accidents resulted in a low-level release of radioactive material. The closure put into jeopardy a 1995 Settlement Agreement stipulation that DOE ship 65,000 cubic meters of stored transuranic waste from Idaho before the end of 2018.
Since reopening, WIPP has accepted shipments at a much slower pace because of ongoing facility repairs……..
Most of Idaho’s transuranic waste was generated at the Rocky Flats Plant outside Denver. The waste, buried in Idaho in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, includes plutonium-laced sludges, graphite materials and filters.
If DOE fails to meet the 1995 Settlement Agreement milestone, the state can block INL from receiving shipments of spent fuel for research.
Fuel shipments already have been blocked because of delays in getting the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit operating.http://www.postregister.com/articles/news-daily-email-todays-headlines/2017/06/26/wipp-continues-receive-shipments
June 28, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
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Judge Rules Against WCS – EnergySolutions Merger http://www.ladailypost.com/content/judge-rules-against-wcs-energysolutions-merger, by Chris Clark June 24, 2017 , CCNS News: Federal District Judge Sue L. Robinson entered her sealed opinion Wednesday in favor of the U.S. Department of Justice and prohibited Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and EnergySolutions from moving forward with the proposed $367 million merger of the two-nuclear waste storage and disposal companies.
The judge’s decision was based on anti-trust law.
In a written statement, Andrew Finch, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said, “Substantial evidence showed that head-to-head competition between EnergySolutions and Waste Control Specialists led to better disposal services at lower prices.”
He continued, “
Today’s decision protects competition in an industry that is incredibly difficult to enter. While EnergySolutions’ preference was to buy its main rival rather than continue to compete to win business, today’s decision ensures that customers will benefit from the competitive process.”
In anticipation of the antitrust trial and the growing expenses involved in expanding WCS’s business to include the storage of plutonium fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants, in April, WCS asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to temporarily suspend review of its application.
WCS applied for a 40-year license to build and operate a consolidated interim storage facility for 44,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. WCS planned to build the de facto parking lot dump on its 14,900 acres on the New Mexico-Texas border, five miles east of Eunice, New Mexico.
June 26, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Legal, USA, wastes |
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some of the biggest dangers still lie ahead, and many of them come back to that small green train of so many years ago. An updated and safer versions of it will be hauling Andreyeva Bay’s waste south from Murmansk, but that shouldn’t belie the fact that transporting spent nuclear fuel over such distances is always dangerous.
More dangerous still is the location where the spent fuel will end up, which is one of the most radioactively contaminated spots in the world.
Decades of piled up nuclear fuel bids farewell to Andreyeva Bay http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2017-06-decades-of-piled-up-nuclear-fuel-bids-farewell-to-andreyeva-bay Two decades ago, a green four-car train would make the rounds every few months to Russia’s snowy Kola Peninsula to cart nuclear fuel and radioactive waste more than 3000 kilometers south from the Arctic to the Ural Mountains. June 23, 2017 by Charles Digges charles@bellona.no
Two decades ago, a green four-car train would make the rounds every few months to Russia’s snowy Kola Peninsula to cart nuclear fuel and radioactive waste more than 3000 kilometers south from the Arctic to the Ural Mountains.
At the time, the lonely rail artery was the center of a logistical and financial bottleneck that made Northwest Russia, home of the once feared Soviet nuclear fleet, a toxic dumping ground shrouded in military secrecy.
More than a hundred rusted out submarines bobbed in the icy waters at dockside, their reactors still loaded with nuclear fuel, threating to sink or worse. Further from shore and under the waves laid other submarines and nuclear waste intentionally scuttled by the navy. Still more radioactive spent fuel was piling up in storage tanks and open-air bins, on military bases and in shipyards.
One of those places was Andreyeva Bay, a run down nuclear submarine maintenance yard just 55 kilometers from the Norwegian border. Since the birth of the nuclear navy in the 1960s, the yard came to be a dumping ground for 22,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies offloaded from hundreds of submarines. Cracks in storage pools made worse by the hard Arctic freeze threatened to contaminate the Barents Sea. At one point, experts even feared the radioactive morgue might spark an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
Infrastructure, technology and the Kremlin were failing to keep up with the mushrooming catastrophe. The nuclear fuel train could only bear away 588 fuel assemblies at a time three or four times a year – little more than the contents of one nuclear submarine per trip. Even if the train ran on schedule, removing broken or deformed nuclear fuel elements at Andreyeva Bay was still seen as impossible.
Yet even mentioning the environmental and security storm clouds was taboo: While the Navy begged the public to donate potatoes to feed sailors it was too broke to pay, the Kremlin prosecuted environmentalists who drew attention to the mounting desperation as spies.
In the bleak and politically chaotic late 1990s, many experts, like Bellona’s Andrei Zolotkov, thought that the carcinogenic remains of the Cold War would lie neglected at Andreyeva Bay for decades – or at least until Russia somehow woke up wealthy enough to deal with them.
Now, Russia is only slightly better off, yet the first containers of spent nuclear at Andreyeva Bay will begin to be bourn away by sea on June 27, marking the culmination of a multi-million dollar international effort sparked by Bellona in 1995.
The first container was packed last month. It and the 2999 that will follow will leave Andreyeva Bay on specially outfitted ships like the Rossita – itself a bit of expertise donated by Italy under the Northern Dimensions Environmental Partnership, an enormous Russian nuclear cleanup fund managed by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
The transport ships will join a railhead at Atomflot, Murmansk’s nuclear icebreaker port, and from there, the fuel containers will go by train to the Mayak Chemical Combine, near the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, for reprocessing.
It’s a mammoth effort. A total of about 40 ship-to-train transports will have to be made before the bulk of the fuel is cleared out over the coming five years. But when it’s done, one of the most deviling radiation threats in the Arctic will be history.
Bring the waste out of the shadows
“The Andreyeva Bay project has shown that international projects aimed at liquidating nuclear and radioactive threats can be successful,” said Alexander Nikitin, the Bellona expert who was charged with espionage and later acquitted for bringing to light the embarrassing truth of Russia’s northern nuclear fleet more than 20 years ago. “This is proof that such projects must continue.”
The success hasn’t necessarily loosened the grip of the Soviet-era mindset. Russian nuclear officials have so far denied Norwegian television cameras access to film the first nuclear waste departure from Andreyeva Bay, an event that will be attended by the country’s foreign minster, Børge Brende, Russian officials and Bellona staff.
It also hasn’t eased Kremlin paranoia toward Bellona and its efforts to spur international attention and bring foreign funding to bear on Cold War nuclear relics. Zolotkov’s Bellona Murmansk, which helped dislodge Andreyeva Bay’s troubles from the shadows, was targeted by Russia’s foreign agent law in 2015 and closed down. The Environmental Rights Center Bellona, headed by Nikitin, followed this year.
But Zolotkov said the progress transcends politics.
“Even in complex political circumstances, international cooperation in nuclear and radiation safety in Russia’s North continues,” he said.
Cracks and contamination
Andreyeva Bay had been piling up spent nuclear submarine fuel for more than two decades when its troubles began in earnest in 1982. That year, a crack developed in its now-notorious Building 5, a storage pool for thousands of spent fuel assemblies. The ensuing leak threatened to dump a stew of plutonium, uranium and other fission products into Litsa Fjord, fouling the Barents Sea.
The water was drained and the fuel painstakingly moved, but that revealed other problems. The fuel elements from Building 5 needed somewhere to go, so they were rushed into hastily arranged storage facilities that were supposed to be only temporary. Technicians stuffed the fuel elements into three dry storage buildings and cemented them in. The temporary storage solution has now spanned the last 30 years. Meanwhile the leaking radioactive water contaminated much of the soil around Building 5.
It took the government years to catch up to the problem. In 1995, the Murmansk regional government paid it first visit to the secretive military site and, based on what it saw, shut down its operations. Five years later Moscow finally got involved, taking Andreyeva Bay out of the military’s hands and giving it to the mainly civilian Ministry of Atomic Energy, now Rosatom.
Rosatom helped coalesce a nuclear waste-handling agency in Murmansk, called SevRAO, to deal with the problem. Yet even in 2000, SevRAO was essentially working from scratch. Anatoly Grigoriev, a Rosatom nuclear safety official said last year that there weren’t even documents detailing what waste and fuel was stored where, much less an infrastructure to help safely get rid of it.
Bellona leads the charge
Norway, at Bellona’s urging, led the charge to pitch in.
Finally, in 2001, an enclosure was built over the three storage buildings to prevent further contamination while technicians worked to remove the spent fuel and load it into cases. Roads were built and cranes were brought in. Personnel decontamination posts went up, along with a laboratory complex and power lines.
A host of nations pumped funding into the burgeoning city whose central industry was safely packing up decades of nuclear fuel from Russia’s past nuclear soldiers. Starting in 2003, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and Great Britain, joined by Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and the European Commission pooled resources for a total contribution of $70 million over several years.
But Norway has led the pack by far, contributing some $230 million over the past 20 years toward safely removing Andreyeva Bay’s spend nuclear fuel – a national movement spawned when Bellona published its first report on Northwest Russia’s nuclear hazards in 1996.
“For Bellona, this event is a very important development,” said Zolotkov. “Bellona was the first group to speak openly about the problems of Andreyeva Bay, and Bellona stepped forward with a report on the developing situation.”
Nikitin agreed. “This is very important for the outlook of our work in Russia because all now see that we are capable of achieving a result, and not simply criticizing and protesting.”
In many ways, however, some of the biggest dangers still lie ahead, and many of them come back to that small green train of so many years ago. An updated and safer versions of it will be hauling Andreyeva Bay’s waste south from Murmansk, but that shouldn’t belie the fact that transporting spent nuclear fuel over such distances is always dangerous.
New dangers to bring to light
More dangerous still is the location where the spent fuel will end up, which is one of the most radioactively contaminated spots in the world.
The Mayak Chemical Combine, the birthplace of the first Soviet atomic Bomb, is the one facility in Russia capable of reprocessing spent fuel from submarines. It also gave the country its first nuclear disaster. In 1957, a tank holding nuclear waste exploded, sending a cloud of radioactivity from Chelyabinsk to Yekaterinburg and forced the evacuation of 17,000 people. Called the Kyshtym Disaster, the accident came to be regarded as Chernobyl’s more secretive older brother.
Since Mayak ramped up fuel reprocessing at its RT-1 facility in 1977, contamination has only intensified. Radioactive byproducts arising from the chemical separation of plutonium and uranium have been dumped into local rivers and lakes. Cancer rates among the local population continue to rise. The government has partially acknowledged the issue and has made stutter-step attempts to move a number of small villages away from the radioactively polluted Techa River. In the end though, those efforts only displaced villagers from one contaminated spot to another, solving nothing.
Some activists have noted that moving Andreyeva Bay’s legacy of Cold War reactor fuel 3,000 kilometers south to Mayak is a similar exercise in displacement.
Nadezhda Kutepova, a long time advocate for those afflicted by Mayak’s pollution, who was run out of the country on manufactured espionage suspicions, said Norway’s contribution to moving Andreyeva Bay’s fuel was a waste of money.
She and others recently told the Independent Barents Observer they thought the Norwegian government would be lessening the woes of one radioactively contaminated area in the country at the expense of another.
While Niktin acknowledged that Mayak was far from ideal, he noted that it was the only place in Russia that had the technology to handle the Andreyeva fuel.
But he said that shipping the fuel to Mayak also ratchets up Bellona’s responsibility for bringing to light yet newer stages of dealing with Russia’s radioactive legacy.
“The task of the public, and Bellona with it, is to ensure that Mayak doesn’t use any dirty technologies that end up throwing radioactive waste into the environment,” he said. “We must also step up to liquidate the injuries that have already happened to the environment as a result of Mayak’s work and the accident.”
In other words, if Andreyeva Bay is a measure of Bellona’s success, Mayak could repeat that history.
June 24, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
EUROPE, Reference, Russia, wastes |
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Perry says no decision made on interim nuclear waste storage in Nevada, Las Vegas Review Journal June 21, 2017 WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Rick Perry clarified a previous statement on interim nuclear waste storage, telling a Senate subcommittee Wednesday that no decisions have been made on temporary sites for spent fuel in Texas, New Mexico or Nevada.
Private companies in New Mexico and Texas have submitted applications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to store nuclear waste on an interim basis.
Perry created a firestorm Tuesday when he suggested to the House Appropriations subcommittee on energy that the Nevada National Security Site could store waste temporarily.
The suggestion brought an avalanche of criticism from Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and members of the state’s congressional delegation who called the proposal ill-conceived and likely illegal because of restrictions involving the former nuclear test site northwest of Las Vegas.
Before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy, Perry clarified the statement to note that no decision has been made on interim storage and that any such plan would require coordination with Congress.
“I think it is appropriate to say, there are no plans at this particular time for interim storage in New Mexico, Nevada or Texas or any other site,” Perry said…..https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15cd262afeb49316?compose=15cd3e0979cb83a3
June 23, 2017
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Perry repeats desire to store nuclear waste in Nevada; state officials respond, News 4 , by Tony Garcia, LAS VEGAS (KSNV News3LV) —
Nevada’s state and national elected officials reacted swiftly Tuesday after Energy Secretary Rick Perry said he wants to build interim nuclear waste facilities at the Nevada National Security Site and called constructing a long-term repository at Yucca Mountain a “moral obligation.”
“Today’s comments by Secretary Perry suggesting he would consider storage of high-level nuclear waste at the Nevada National Security Site come as a complete blindside, and I view this as a total disregard and failure to honor the historical process,” Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval said in a statement.
“The idea of storing high-level nuclear waste at the National Security Site is ill-conceived, irresponsible, and likely illegal. This is a prime example of federal overreach, and Nevada will pursue every legal option at our disposal.”
Sandoval added that he has asked Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt to review the proposal and identify legal avenues to stop it.
“Let me be clear – no part of Nevada will be home to the world’s most toxic waste and we will fight every effort that puts our citizens at risk,” Sandoval said.
“Secretary Perry’s comments today are irresponsible, reckless, and show a blatant disregard for the state of Nevada,” U.S. Sen. Dean Heller (R) said in a statement. “As I have repeatedly told the Secretary, Nevada will not serve as our nation’s nuclear waste dump. The only viable solution to our country’s nuclear waste problem is one that is rooted in consent, and Nevada has said ‘no.’….
“I am appalled to see how tone-deaf this administration is in refusing to listen to the collective voice of an entire state,” said U.S. Rep. Jacky Rosen. “The only moral obligation we have is to keep Nevadans safe from nuclear waste. If Secretary Perry thinks that he alone can restart Yucca Mountain with the flip of a switch, he is mistaken. Since the 1980s, Nevada has voiced its opposition to Yucca Mountain based on legitimate safety concerns.
“Today’s comments by Secretary Perry are wrong and dangerous. Reviving Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump would place Nevada and communities around the country in harm’s way by green-lighting daily regular shipments of high-level nuclear waste by train or by truck for over 50 years.” http://mynews4.com/news/local/sandoval-and-other-officials-respond-to-perrys-desire-to-store-nuclear-waste-in-nevada
June 23, 2017
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http://www.fairewinds.org/newsletter-archive//oegf127i8zwvkcg5koxzivdipspzk9, June 22, 2017, Demystifying Nuclear Power, Atomic Power and a Just Transition for ‘Host Communities’ By Maggie Gundersen &Ben Shulman-Reed, Atomic power plants are shutting down faster than they are being built. These reactors conceptualized in the 1960s are failing because they are old and they are being closed because they are not competitive with renewables and therefore economically unfeasible. People around the world understand that a Fukushima-like disaster can happen anywhere, anytime. The nuclear power industry that dreams of building a new nuke every twelve days for the next 35 years) – totaling 1000 new rectors by 2050) are facing the harsh reality that atomic energy is not needed and is no longer wanted.
In the United States (U.S.), where largest amount of atomic power reactors in the world are located, Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Indian Point outside New York City, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, Diablo Canyon in California, and most recently Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania have recently announced their intent to close in the near future. While the shutdown of American nukes is good for our economy as well as the planet’s environment, decommissioning is a costly and complicated process that takes a toll on the local communities that hosted these giant facilities. When a nuclear power reactor shuts down, an incredible amount of work must be done to ensure a just, smooth financial transition for the local economy and also to create long-term viable storage for its toxic radioactive waste, which the U.S. Government has failed to provide. In addition to hosting the physical radioactive carcass of the power reactor for decades, the local community must restructure its economy to make it more diverse and self-sufficient as well as creating a more healthy and sustainable energy future.
Unfortunately, the usually small and economically stifled cities and towns, often referred to as ‘host communities’ to these atomic power reactors are not always given a voice at the table when it comes to deciding plans for their future – yet they are the true stakeholders. Fairewinds has continuously monitored and reported upon the challenges and defects of the Vermont Yankee atomic reactor and the lack of stakeholder respect given to its Windham County host. When it came time to close reactor in 2014, the Vermont Legislators and State Officials found themselves having to stand up to both Entergy (Vermont Yankee’s parent corporation), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) the alleged federal regulator for the nuclear power industry, for the Vermont’s own State’s rights and for the rights of all Vermont citizens.
Vermont is still negotiating the terms of the decommissioning process for Vermont Yankee – the state’s lone nuclear power plant and is becoming a leading example for nationwide regarding how to advocate for a smooth and just transition from atomic power operations to decommissioning and dismantlement. Vermont is seeking a just transition that will protect all the stakeholders, not only the profit interests of the power plant’s corporate owners.
The real question for all nuclear power plant host communities is: who is protecting and advocating for the rights of the ratepayers, for the level of decontamination at the site, nearby aquifers and watersheds, and an orderly economic transition for all the people in the impacted surrounding communities? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), while the controlling interest in radiological standards and decommissioning processes on each site, does not examine or consider any of these critical human rights issues. All the environmental justice and human rights issues of assuring ongoing open access to clean air, safe water, and uncontaminated food from the remaining carcass of a shutdown atomic power reactor falls upon local and state governments throughout the US. Vermont is leading the way in creating an open and transparent process for local communities to self-advocate in creating a safer and more transparent decommissioning process and transition to a safe and permanently uncontaminated dismantlement of these highly radioactive nukes.
By opening a wide dialogue as we all advocate for an open and transparent decommissioning process, we believe the U.S. can shed its title of founding nuclear energy and instead become a global leader in cleaning up the mess we started. By following Vermont’s of paying close attention to the interests of our local governments, ratepayers and host communities, we all will begin to achieve just and safe transitions from the glut of toxic radioactive nuclear power plant carcasses coming our way as atomic power continues to become economically unviable.
It is Fairewinds’ goal to help communities work together to achieve a safer transition in their energy futures by shifting energy paradigms to an economically feasible and environmentally compatible model for the health and survival of our species and our planet.
June 23, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
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VERNON, Vt., 22 June 17, — Vermont and three other states that host Entergy Nuclear power plants scheduled for shutdown can expect to keep spent radioactive fuel for the foreseeable future, a top Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said Tuesday.
John Lamb, project manager from the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, told a gathering of officials from Vermont, Massachusetts, New York and Michigan there appears to be little interest in Congress to pay for additional studies into Yucca Mountain, the proposed national depository for highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel in the Nevada desert.
“Yucca Mountain is basically in a stall,” Lamb said in response to a series of questions from Massachusetts antinuclear activists during a conference call. He said legislation to breathe new financial life into the Yucca Mountain site, which is about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, had gone nowhere so far.
“Dry cask (storage) is going to stay until some solution,” Lamb said……http://www.recorder.com/NRC-Vermont-Yankee-waste-remaining-in-Vernon-10850130
June 23, 2017
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Proposed nuclear waste dump draws Congressional ire http://www.voicenews.com/news/proposed-nuclear-waste-dump-draws-congressional-ire/article_743d7c7d-d48f-5d35-bcaa-1ab7c08496c8.html OPG appears to sidestep Canada’s request for more details By Jim Bloch | For The Voice Jun 14, 2017
Ontario Power Generation’s latest submission to the Canadian government about its proposed nuclear waste dump on the shores of Lake Huron continues to be evasive and overly broad, according to critics of the project.
In OPG’s Dec. 28, 2016, response to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, the power company chose two enormous geological formations comprising about 75 percent of the entire province: The crystalline rock of the Canadian Shield, which is about a billion years old, and the sedimentary rock formations of southern Ontario, which are 354 million to 543 million years old.
The CEAA also requested further analysis of the cumulative effects that the dump could have on the environment, especially if a high-level waste dump is built nearby, and an updated list of OPG’s commitments to reduce “each identified adverse impact” of the deep geological repository on the environment.
Despite its 144 pages, OPG’s new report did not satisfy opponents.
Congressional delegation responds
U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, of Michigan’s 12th District, and Rep. Dave Trott, of Michigan’s 11th District, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on June 7, urging him to enter the fray against the dump.
“We write to urge you to do everything in your power – through both diplomatic and legal channels – to protect our Great Lakes and to convince the Canadian government to require OPG to select an alternative site that will not place the health, safety, and economic security of Americans at risk,” said Dingell and Trott in the letter.
Thirty-two bipartisan Congressional representatives from the Great Lakes states co-signed the letter, including Paul Mitchell, the Republican representing the 10th District, covering Michigan’s Thumb – all of St. Clair, Huron, Lapeer and Sanilac counties and most of Macomb County. The only member of Michigan’s Congressional delegation who did not endorse the letter was Justin Amash, the Cascade Township Republican.
The lawmakers said that OPG had “doubled down” on the dump “for two inconvenient facts for the company: that they believe an alternative site would be more expensive and take longer to construct.”
In its report, OPG pegged the baseline cost of a Deep Geological Repository at the proposed site in Kincardine, Ontario, Canada, or the alternative sites in the Canadian Shield or in southern Ontario, Canada, at $2.4 billion. The company said that transporting low and intermediate nuclear waste from the province’s 20 reactors to a location in Southern Ontario would add $381 million to $493 million to cost of the project; transportation of waste to a location in the Canadian Shield would add $452 billion to $1.424 billion. Incidental costs would grow by $832 million in southern Ontario and $2.056 billion in the Canadian Shield. OPG labeled the additional transportation and incidental costs as “unacceptable.”
On April 13, Fred Kuntz, Manager of Corporate Relations and Communications for OPG in Bruce County, told Bruce County stakeholders that a shift to a new location could add 15 years to the construction timeline.
“We cannot let cost be the sole driving factor in this critical decision, as storing nuclear waste in the Great Lakes basin bears far too great a risk that would be fundamentally devastating to an entire region,” said the Congressional reps in their letter to Tillerson.
June 19, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
politics international, wastes |
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nuclear-news 