Boston Edison Company, now known as NSTAR Electric Company sues US Dept of Energy
DOE Sued for $40M Over Nuclear Waste Storage, Courthouse News Service By LORRAINE BAILEY CN), 19 May 16 — Blaming the government for not settling on a nuclear-waste storage scheme, a nuclear energy company has filed a federal complaint to recover $40 million.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required the U.S. Department of Energy to accept and dispose of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste by Jan. 31, 1998, in return for fees paid by owners of such waste.
It also effectively made it mandatory for nuclear utilities to enter into contracts for such disposal.
When the Department of Energy failed to meet the 1998 deadline, however, utilities began to incur substantial costs for storage and management of the waste accumulating at reactor sites.
By 2006, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims had found that the Department of Energy partially breached its contractual obligations to Yankee Atomic Electric Co., Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., and Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co., all of which are now decommissioned, to the tune of $235 million
It sued the U.S. in the Court of Federal Claims Wednesday over its continued obligation to pay for highly reactive waste storage.
Boston Edison says it paid Entergy $40.3 million to cover the cost to store spent nuclear fuel through 2012, the expected decommissioning date for the plant.
That fuel would have been disposed of by the government had it kept its pledge.
But now, Entergy has stated that operations at Pilgrim will continue through 2019, and there is still no government plan for a permanent repository for high level nuclear waste.
Most nuclear power plants continue to keep their reactor waste on-site in steel and concrete casks……. The Department of Energy has expressed the urgency need to find a permanent repository, but the Congress has taken no action since abandoning the Yucca Mountain project.
Boston Energy seeks damages for breach of contract, and breach of the covenant of good faith. http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/05/19/doe-sued-for-40m-over-nuclear-waste-storage.htm
Growing opposition in both Canada and USA to nuclear waste dumping near the Great Lakes
Opposition to the project, though, has swelled. More than 180 county boards, city councils and other local elected bodies near the Great Lakes in both countries have passed proclamations urging a veto of the plan.
Plan to store nuclear waste near Great Lakes proves radioactive, WP By Steve Friess May 16 KINCARDINE, Ontario — If there was an off-key moment during the otherwise flawlessly executed trip to the U.S. Capitol this spring by the new Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, it might have come when he was cornered by Rep. Debbie Dingell.
“We never want to see nuclear waste in the Great Lakes,” the freshman Democrat from Michigan sternly told Trudeau during a visit to the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Continue reading
America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission set to exempt nuclear corporations from safety costs and liabilities
US nuclear industry’s plan thanks to NRC: let taxpayers carry the can for closed power plants, Ecologist Linda Pentz Gunter13th May 2016 With five reactors closed in the last three years, the US nuclear industry is in shutdown mode, writes Linda Pentz Gunter – and that means big spending on decommissioning. But now the nuclear regulator is set to exempt owners from safety and emergency costs at their closed plants – allowing them to walk away from the costs and liabilities, and palm them onto taxpayers.
Aging and dangerous nuclear power plants are closing. This should be cause for celebration. We will all be safer now, right? Well, not exactly.
US nuclear power plant owners are currently pouring resources into efforts to circumvent the already virtually non-existent regulations for the dismantlement and decommissioning of permanently closed nuclear reactors.
And sad to say, many on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the industry’s ever compliant lapdog, are trotting happily by their side.
There is an occasional lone critic. NRC Commissioner Jeff Baran, observed that the“NRC does not currently have regulations specifically tailored for this transition from operations to decommissioning. As a result, licensees with reactors transitioning to decommissioning routinely seek exemptions from many of the regulations applicable to operating reactors.”
The inevitable result is that reactor owners will successfully avoid spending money now on decommissioning as they seek to delay beginning the actual cleanup work for the next half century and maybe longer. Later, when it comes time to finish the job, the owners – and the money – could well be long gone.
US reactor owners rely on ‘decommissioning trust fund’ investments to pay for decommissioning activities. But these are failing to accrue adequate funds to do the job. Many of the trusts are incurring annual losses on their investments.
In fact, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found the NRC’s financing formula for decommissioning trust funds to be fundamentally flawed, resulting in the utilities ability to accrue only 57% to 75% of the needed funds……..http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987679/us_nuclear_industrys_plan_thanks_to_nrc_let_taxpayers_carry_the_can_for_closed_power_plants.html
The options for decommissioning a nuclear plant
US nuclear industry’s plan thanks to NRC: let taxpayers carry the can for closed power plants, Ecologist Linda Pentz Gunter13th May 2016 “…….There are currently three decommissioning options when a reactor closes. They are known by apparent acronyms that are really just capitalized slogans, masking the flaws behind all three.
DECON refers to prompt dismantlement. This sounds promising for all sides, dispensing with the whole decommissioning process and its attendant costs, headaches and liabilities in about 10 years.
In principle DECON is supported by environmental and anti-nuclear groups, but with one giant caveat: the radioactive waste that remains on site after decommissioning of the reactor, must be adequately safeguarded.
Under the current regulatory scheme, the NRC allows the licensee to offload the irradiated nuclear fuel from the spent fuel storage pools into dry storage casks. These are not adequately protected from security threats. Nor is there any contingency to re-contain nuclear waste should it begin leaking from one of these casks.
Current casks designs are qualified for on-site nuclear waste storage for only 20 years and re-certified for four additional cycles. Some of these cask designs have already experienced degradation of protective seals and concrete shielding after less than a decade of use.
Of greatest concern, the casks are situated outside, closely congregated, on open tarmacs raising security concerns for their vulnerability to attack.
Consequently, the anti-nuclear and environmental groups that support DECON insist on the implementation of enhanced security called ‘Hardened On-Site Storage’, or HOSS to minimize these risks.
Rather than storing dozens of vulnerable dry-casks right next to each other in the open air, HOSS better secures the nuclear waste in above-ground individualized casks. These casks are fortified within modules of concentric capped silos of concrete and steel surrounded by earthen mounds.
The HOSS canisters would be dispersed over a wider area than traditional cask storage and would be better positioned to withstand a range and combination of weapons, explosives, and attacks, including anti-tank missiles, aircraft impacts, and car bombs.
Currently, reactor owners are not permitted to spend decommissioning funds on nuclear waste management as part of the DECON process. Nor do utilities want to go to the added expense of HOSS, which is not currently being considered by federal agencies, despite hundreds of petitioning groups and thousands of signatories to make HOSS a nuclear security priority at operating reactors as well as decommissioned sites.
A small number of reactors across the world have already used DECON (but without HOSS.) According to the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, of the nearly 150 nuclear power reactors that have ceased operation worldwide to date, only 16 units have completed the ‘DECON’ decommissioning process with 10 of those units in the United States taking on average 10 years to complete.
What ‘SAFSTOR’ really means: ‘mothball’ and walk away
The second option, euphemistically-named SAFSTOR, or ‘safe store’, allows owners to take up to 60 years from the day the reactor closes to complete decommissioning. This would effectively enable owners to delay the start of decommissioning for 50 years, leaving the reactor and fuel pools mothballed until then and the local communities at risk.
Unsurprisingly, this is the option that is increasingly favored by reactor owners, who are petitioning the NRC for across-the-board cost cutting under SAFSTOR, regardless of the specific conditions of the individual reactor sites.
Entergy Vice President, Michael Twomey, even told Vermont state legislators in reference to the decommissioning of its Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor, that if the process is not complete in 60 years the company is fully within its rights to simply walk away, and if challenged, would litigate. Vermont Yankee closed on December 29, 2014.
The third option is ENTOMB. Without any regulatory guidance or legal framework, it allows utilities to essentially avoid decommissioning altogether. It is the option when no other options exist, as is the case at Chernobyl.
The exploded Chernobyl containment was eventually shrouded in a giant concrete sarcophagus at great expense and resulting in radiological exposure to hundreds of thousands of laborers. That structure is now being encased with a new, high-tech “Arch”, again at vast expense. However, for regular decommissioning activities, ENTOMB should be viewed as a last resort and not as a strategy for escaping liability.
Waste management is nuclear power’s most painful Achilles’ heel
The waste management aspect of the decommissioning process remains the industry’s most painful Achilles’ heel. Despite successfully suing the Department of Energy for failure to remove the waste, as promised, to a final repository site, utilities are seeking to avoid using those funds for waste management.
Instead, utilities are seeking to siphon off decommissioning trust funds to build and manage the necessary on-site Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) to house irradiated fuel from a closed reactor. An ISFSI is not currently considered part of a legitimate decommissioning process covered by the trust fund.
The delays wrought by such wrangling means that irradiated fuel sits in densely packed storage pools inside the reactor – and in the case of the 30 remaining GE Mark I and II reactors in the US, on the roof. (The GE designs are the same as those that melted down and exploded at Fukushima.)
The fuel pools are over-packed because of inadequate existing on-site storage facilities. But delays in offloading them, even while the reactor is still running, never mind when it closes, represent one of the greatest risks to public health, safety and security. A catastrophic fire, aircraft impact or other disaster that released vast amounts of radioactive fallout from the high-density storage pools could contaminate entire regions potentially indefinitely.
“The four ongoing disasters at Fukushima Daiichi have clearly shown the vulnerability of nuclear power plants that have spent nuclear fuel stored in these overcrowded and unprotected spent fuel pools”, Gundersen wrote in his comments to the NRC.
Fuel pools at closed US nuclear plants are a Fukushima waiting to happen
This is the principle reason to oppose SAFSTOR, safety experts say. Not only will the fuel remain in the pools, and in poorly protected waste casks, but protections and safety measures will be reduced. This is already exemplified in Vermont where the NRC has allowed Entergy to dismantle its emergency plan around Vermont Yankee and reduce inspections on the ventilation system near the spent fuel pool.
As Gundersen points out, the Vermont Yankee fuel pool still “contains more highly radioactive waste than was held in any of the fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi.”
With a Fukushima-scale disaster is a real possibility even at closed reactors, critics are urging the NRC not to rubber stamp exemption requests. In the event of a nuclear catastrophe, evacuations downwind and downstream cannot be assumed to go well if emergency preparedness was discontinued months, years, or even decades earlier.
Even plans for site cleanup and decontamination are inadequate and have been watered down by the NRC itself. Site release criteria currently mandate clearing away surface soil down to three feet. But strontium-90 has been found far deeper on the Vermont Yankee site already. The NRC limit would open the way for strontium and potentially other isotopes resting deeper than three feet to migrate down into groundwater and potentially later to drinking water.
Instead, there should be more thorough post-decommissioning environmental analyses of where and how much residual radioactivity has been left behind in soil and water before power companies are allowed to walk away from accountability and liability.
To do decommissioning right, Gundersen argues that the state ratepayers should control decommissioning funds not the utility, because it is their money.
And, he says, decommissioning should be undertaken in such a way that operators “assure that those plants are promptly and safely decommissioned without unwarranted radiological contamination of the environment and extended cleanup and mitigation costs passed on to ratepayers or taxpayers.”
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a Takoma Park, MD environmental advocacy group. http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987679/us_nuclear_industrys_plan_thanks_to_nrc_let_taxpayers_carry_the_can_for_closed_power_plants.html
Fears that South Carolina is to become a nuclear waste import hub
Not only are tons of highly radioactive waste still stored at SRS, the federal government continues to ship nuclear material from foreign nations to the site
Don’t let SRS serve as nuclear dump site, Post & Courier, May 15 2016
The U.S. Department of Energy made some serious promises to South Carolina when it needed a place to bring tons of highly radioactive plutonium back in 2002. And now the DOE wants to renege in nearly every way.
State officials are right to fight it all the way down the line.
Last month, DOE lawyers went to court to insist that the agency isn’t liable for a $100 million penalty owed to South Carolina for the DOE’s failure to remove nuclear waste from Savannah River Site on schedule. The federal agency contends that the agreement with the state was based on goals, not mandates.
The DOE says that its agreement with the state isn’t binding even though it is codified in federal law. In that view, the feds don’t have to pay a penalty for failing to live up to the deal’s requirement to turn weapons grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel or to send the plutonium elsewhere.
No one who observed the intense stand-off between South Carolina and the federal government over its plans to send 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium to Savannah River Site would characterize those requirements as optional.
At the time, state leaders strongly opposed the plan, having reasonably concluded from past experience that the federal government would be more than willing to shift its nuclear waste problems permanently to South Carolina.
At one point, then-Gov. Jim Hodges threatened to stand in the middle of the highway to stop nuclear material from being trucked into South Carolina. He also ordered the S.C. National Guard to close the highways to waste shipments, if necessary.
Those histrionics were intended to underscore the state’s resolve not to willingly permit Savannah River Site to become the nation’s nuclear waste dump.
The crisis passed after the federal government pledged that the nuclear waste would be neutralized and shipped out of state on a firm timetable.
If that agreement allayed the fears of state officials in then, the situation now only intensifies the skepticism by which the DOE’s promises should be viewed in South Carolina.
Not only are tons of highly radioactive waste still stored at SRS, the federal government continues to ship nuclear material from foreign nations to the site…….http://www.postandcourier.com/20160515/160519614/dont-let-srs-serve-as-nuclear-dump-site-
Armenia might have stockpiles of radioactive trash
Armenia may have stockpiles of highly radioactive materials – Ex-CIA analyst http://en.azvision.az/Armenia_may_have_stockpiles_-37406-xeber.html#.VzWPutP6fH8
| Date: 12.05.16, Even talking about nuclear things is dangerously destabilizing, the former analyst at the CIA and the US Department of State, publicist Paul Goble exclusively told Trend May 12.
He was commenting on the statement earlier made by Armenia on possession of a nuclear weapon. “The Soviet Union had so many places where such things were kept that it is unlikely there isn`t some in Armenia,” he said. |
Citizens’ Juries (IF FAIR AND TRANSPARENT) could help solve South Australia’s nuclear waste dilemma
The role of Citizens’ Juries in decision-making on nuclear waste importation, Online opinion, By Noel Wauchope 13 May 2016 On May 10th South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill announced the process by which the state will decide whether or not to host a global nuclear waste import industry, as recommended by the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission.
The first step will be to set up a “Citizens’ Jury” of 50 participants randomly selected from 25,000 invitees statewide, to be followed later by another one of 350 participants.
I think that Weatherill might have mistaken his terms here, as a Citizens’ Jury, by definition, means a group of 10 to 12 participants. The Weatherill plan sounds more like a “Deliberative Poll”, which involves a much larger group.
A properly constituted Citizens’ Jury can be a valuable process in participatory democracy. The group of 10 or 12 people serves as microcosm of the public. …… The process depends on having the oversight of a neutral but well informed advisory panel. Questions need to be framed in a way that does not risk influencing the response. Transparency is important, and complete audio or video recordings of all jury hearings should be publicly available, although the actual jury room deliberations should be private.
The citizen jury process can be an empowering one for the participants, and, as long as it is perceived to be fair and transparent, can be a valuable democratic option for assessing public opinion. It also has the advantage of being cost-effective.
The “Deliberative Poll” method is potentially another very useful form of participatory democracy. It is a lot more expensive, and more complicated. The biggest disadvantage of the Deliberative Poll method is probably its cost. Wikipedia notes:
“Imagine how much money is needed to pay for the trips, the hotel and the food for each participant, hiring the research crew and moderators, booking a venue, etc. Additional costs can include paying for participants’ compensation so that people that are randomly selected can put aside their duties to attend the events (i.e. hiring someone to milk a participant’s cow and providing child care”
Some critics insist that funding for either of these processes should not come from on single body.
“Multiple sources of funding help to ensure that the jury’s organisers are not seen as having a financial interest in producing a verdict that supports the interests of a single funding body. To maximise the scrutiny they provide, the two or more funders should have somewhat opposing interests regarding the subject likely to be under discussion.”……
In Japan, in 2012, a Deliberative Poll formed the guide to government decision-making. The Japanese government used the Center for Deliberative Democracy’s Deliberative Polling method to both inform participants and allow them to influence policymakers about the public’s will with regard to energy production issues. As a direct result of the deliberative polling process, Japan’s national government pledged to have zero percent dependency on nuclear energy after 2030. (This decision was overturned by a later government).
The South Australian government’s decision to start with a participatory democracy process is a welcome one, provided that it is done fairly and properly. Neither a Citizens Jury nor a Deliberative Poll can be a substitute for a fully democratic process like a referendum, but either could be a valuable contributor to a wider process of decision making. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=18230
Germany’s biggest power utility in financial problem about nuclear wastes costs
Eon warns on capital raise to cover extra €2bn nuclear waste bill Guy Chazan in Berlin Ft.com 12 May 16 Shares in Eon, Germany’s biggest power producer, fell 5 per cent after it said it might have to raise capital to pay its share of the cost of storing Germany’s nuclear waste.
Eon has provisioned €8bn for waste storage, but under a proposal published by a government commission last month it would have to pay an extra €2bn into a special waste storage fund. Altogether, Germany’s four big utilities have been told they have to contribute a total of €23.3bn into the pool.
Michael Sen, Eon’s chief financial officer, said the company could pay the money, but doing so would reduce its equity capital and could hurt its credit rating.
He said Eon would be forced to postpone investments, cut more costs and potentially sell off marginal assets to cover the €10bn. A company presentation also said it could trigger unspecified “capital measures”.
Eon’s share price was trading down nearly 5 per cent at €8.14 on Wednesday……
The nuclear issue is just one of the problems weighing on Eon’s stock. Like its rival, RWE, Eon has been hit by Germany’s radical shift to renewables, which has squeezed electricity from fossil fuels out of the energy market.
It reported its biggest annual loss last year after writing down the value of its coal and gas-fired power plants by €8.8bn.
The company has responded by splitting itself in two: Eon is grouping its conventional power generation assets and energy trading in a new company, Uniper, while the new-look Eon will focus on renewables, networks and customer solutions. ……http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/52d0c36e-173d-11e6-b8d5-4c1fcdbe169f.html?siteedition=uk#axzz48VIfeQb0
Continuing nuclear waste leak at Hanford
Nuclear Waste Leak Continues at ‘America’s Fukushima“ https://weather.com/news/news/nuclear-waste-leak-continues
The government has requested help from private contractors to construct a new, permanent facility that will have the capacity to hold the waste. However, the project to cover up “America’s Fukushima” will cost an estimated $100 billion and take at least 50 years to complete, according to Newsweek. 33 Left Ill by Radioactive Fumes By Andrew MacFarlane weather.com May 4 2016 A nuclear waste leak at the Hanford Site in Washington state that rapidly intensified last month has left 33 workers ill from possible exposure to chemical vapors, while others scramble to pump the remaining waste out of the storage facility.
Back in 2011, a leak was found on the inner hull of one of the site’s 28 double-wall storage tanks. The previous leak posed an insignificant threat, but workers came across an even larger leak in recent weeks while attempting to clear the inner hull of its remaining waste.
The number of those who have been reported ill as a result of the leak climbed into the 30s after six workers sought medical evaluation Monday, suspecting exposure to radioactive fumes left them unwell, according to the Tri-City Herald. A majority of the affected have been cleared to return to work, but voice a fear of suffering from long-term or neurological sickness.
Crews at the United States Department of Energy’s storage site in Hanford were alerted by leak detection alarms the morning of April 17, and after lowering a camera into the affected area, the staff found 8.4 inches of radioactive and chemically toxic waste had poured between the inner and outer walls of the tank, KING 5 reported.
This is catastrophic,” former site employee Mike Geffre said soon after the leak was found. “This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double-shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors.”
However, a State Representative in Seattle argued that the of the 56 million gallons of radioactive chemicals stored at the Hanford site, two-thirds of the total substance is radioactive waste being held in unfit tanks made sometime between 1940 and 1970.
The tanks “were not supposed to last more than 10 to 20 years, 20 years was a dream in the first place,” Gerry Pollet told RT.com. “Some of them didn’t last twenty years and we had a small explosion in the 1950s where hot waste boiled, created a steam explosion under the tank, and we were lucky we didn’t have half of Eastern Washington permanently evacuated.”
The large puncture causing the devastating leak is thought to have occurred while the three-week long pumping was taking place. An estimated 20,000 gallons of waste remain in the 800,000-gallon AY-102 tank, Q13 FOX reports.To make matters worse, a second double-shelled tank has been reported with a leak. AY-101, a tank very similar to AY-102, has had “higher-than-expected radioactivity readings” from the tank’s continuous air monitor, according to a recent KING 5 report. The new leak is an unsettling find, considering the 45-year-old AY-101 was built with thicker steel and with advanced construction methods.
“Simply put, Hanford is nearly out of double-shell tank space,” said Hanford Challenge executive director Tom Carpenter. “[There] is no other realistic option but to begin building new tanks immediately.”
Nuclear shipwreck still highly radioactive over 60 years later
Details Emerge from Cold War-Era Nuclear Shipwreck, New Historian, David DeMar May 01, 2016 More details have emerged regarding the wreck of the USS Independence, a US Navy vessel deliberately sacrificed in 1946 at the Bikini Atoll nuclear weapons tests at the very inception of the Cold War…….
NOAA and Boeing used a combination of high-resolution sonar imaging and an unmanned submersible known as “Echo Ranger” to locate and safely survey the still-irradiated wreck of the Independence. The resultant case study, plus newly declassified files on the Navy ship straight from the US National Archives, concerning its time as a nuclear weapons testbed, have been published in theJournal of Maritime Archaeology (JNA)……
merging documentary evidence with a study of the physical remains of a maritime archaeological site is a goal that can and should be pursued…….
The infamous tests at Bikini Atoll, The Bikini tests, conceived and undertaken just one year after dropping not one but two nuclear weapons on Japan, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end the Second World War, was one of the most visible and noteworthy events to signal a fundamental shift in postwar history.
In one of the newly-declassified reports dating from the era, it was suggested that the awesome power of nuclear weaponry represented a new era where the utter destruction of man had become possible, scouring the Earth of nothing but vestigial traces of humanity. http://www.newhistorian.com/details-emerge-cold-war-era-nuclear-shipwreck/6397/
A second double-shell tank leaking radiation at Hanford?
Signs emerge of a second double-shell tank leaking at Hanford , Susannah Frame, KING 5.com 27 Apr 16, Radioactive particles have been measured at elevated levels for the first time in the outer safety space of the Hanford double-shell tank known as AY-101. The contractor that manages the tank told employees “we recently discovered higher-than-expected radioactivity readings” from filters that are part of the tank’s continuous air monitor (CAM).
“The filter contained traces of radioactive americium, cesium and plutonium, raising the possibility that the material is from tank waste that has escaped from the primary shell of the double-shell tank,” wrote Rob Gregory, chief operating officer of Washington River Protection Solutions.
Sources tell KING 5 that alarms went off last week to alert staff of the presence of “hot” (radioactive) particles trapped in filters of the tank’s continuous air monitor (CAM). The sources say this is the first time readings of this sort have been detected in AY-101.
The U.S. Department of Energy confirmed to the state that radioactive particles had been detected by filters circulating air from inside AY-101, according to officials with the Washington Department of Ecology.
But DOE’s Office of River Protection, which oversees the tank farms at Hanford, said no alarms went off indicating radioactive particles had been detected………
The citizen watchdog group Hanford Challenge also said sources of its own confirmed the detection of elevated radiation levels outside the primary liner of AY-101. The group’s sources say the by-products confirmed include Cesium-137, plutonium, and a high-beta emitter (most likely Strontium-90) that are all constituents commonly found in Hanford’s underground tanks.
The executive director of Hanford Challenge, Tom Carpenter, said this recent event has “serious implications” for the Hanford Site.
“Simply put, Hanford is nearly out of double-shell tank space, especially after pumping out AY-102 and emptying some of the shakier single-shell tanks…This is no other realistic option but to begin building new tanks immediately,” said Carpenter.
Elevated radiation and radioactive materials found in the CAM filters was the first indication that AY-102 was leaking. This was a red flag for the Department of Energy (DOE), which owns Hanford, 15 years before confirmation of the leak. Those high CAM filter readings in the 1990s were dismissed by DOE and its contractors at the time……..http://www.king5.com/mb/news/local/investigations/signs-emerge-of-a-second-double-shell-tank-leaking-at-hanford/154338445
Idaho in danger from nuclear waste, and must be protected
Idaho must be protected from nuclear waste HTTP://WWW.IDAHOSTATESMAN.COM/OPINION/READERS-OPINION/ARTICLE74125087.HTML BY WENDY WILSON, 28 Apr 16, Houston, we have a problem.” Although engineers and workers at the Idaho National Laboratory in Southeast Idaho have always tried to handle nuclear material safely, it doesn’t always work. Since 2005, accidents and inadvertent releases have happened with alarming regularity. In 2012, Department of Energy investigators told the Snake River Alliance that they had significant concerns and that INL was not handling plutonium safely.
Although the DOE has failed to meet countless deadlines to clean up what is already here, new proposals to import spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants have swept safety concerns under the rug. DOE’s reputation for missed deadlines once led former Gov. Cecil Andrus to compare the agency to the Boise used car dealership “Fairly Reliable Bob’s.”
The most current missed deadline is that the DOE has failed to treat 900,000 gallons of intensely radioactive liquid waste stored at INL. Recent failures at the plant have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and the system may never work.
In the meantime, this extremely dangerous waste is stored in buried tanks decades old. INL’s tanks have never leaked, as far as we know, but the pipes and valves connecting them have. The waste from those leaks may never be cleaned up and may always be in our soil and groundwater.
The McClatchy News Agency, parent company of the Idaho Statesman, recently reported that there have been nearly 400 nuclear-related deaths associated with the INL. Far more people have been sickened by their work there.
Twenty-five years ago, a Magic Valley fish farmer raised the alarm about plutonium shipments from Colorado to be buried on top of the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer. The public was outraged. Former Gov. Andrus stepped up and Gov. Phil Batt forged a nuclear waste agreement with the DOE banning future imports of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants until specific timetables for clean up were met.
Today, the Byron nuclear waste proposed to come to INL falls under this ban. It is being stored safely in Indiana and it is unfathomable why Idaho would sign a “waiver” to allow the feds to bring it here and put Idahoans at risk.
Our land and water will continue to be contaminated until our political leaders put the health and safety of Idahoans ahead of DOE’s broken promises. There is still plutonium buried above the Snake River Aquifer, perhaps till the end of time. Let’s not forget.
Idahoans shouldn’t become lab animals for nuclear malfunction. Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden is doing the right thing forcing the DOE to follow its own deadlines. Without a permanent national repository for nuclear waste, what comes to Idaho will stay here for decades, if not forever. Idahoans should stand together and tell the federal government to focus on INL’s existing nuclear experiment — cleaning up what is already here.
Wendy Wilson is interim executive director of the Snake River Alliance, Idaho’s nuclear watchdog and advocate for clean energy, found at www.snakeriveralliance.org.
California State Senate demands removal of stored nuclear waste from San Onofre power plant
State Senate approves removing stored nuclear waste from San Onofre power plant http://www.cbs8.com/story/31842881/state-senate-approves-removing-stored-nuclear-waste-from-san-onofre-power-plantPosted: Apr 29, 2016 SAN ONOFRE (CNS) – A resolution demanding that the U.S. Department of Energy remove stored nuclear waste at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was approved by the state Senate Thursday.
The resolution authored by Sen. Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, urges President Barack Obama and Congress to approve a bill in the House of Representatives that would consolidate the storage of nuclear waste. The bill is in the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.
“It’s way past time for the federal government to move the nuclear waste stored at San Onofre to a location away from densely populated and environmentally sensitive areas,” Bates said. “I’m pleased that my state Senate colleagues have endorsed my call to Washington D.C. to approve pending legislation that would help make Orange and San Diego County residents safer.”
The San Onofre plant has been shut down since a small, non-injury leak occurred in a steam generator in January 2012. Operator and majority owner Southern California Edison later decided to retire the plant’s two reactors,
rather than follow a costly start-up process.
Closing the facility is expected to take a couple of decades, however, so Edison recently received permission to expand nuclear waste storage tanks at San Onofre, despite opposition from environmental groups and local politicians.
Germany’s compromise plan to make power companies pay for nuclear waste disposal
German utilities to pay for nuclear waste disposal, DW, 28 Apr 16 In October, Germany set up a high-level commission to decide how to finance the country’s nuclear phase-out. It has now recommended that power companies pay into a multi-billion euro fund managed by the government.
In October, Germany set up a high-level eleven-member commission, KFK, to review the financing of the nuclear phase-out. The government’s goal was to ensure comprehensive safety, decommissioning and waste disposal processes, and see to it that their costs would be borne by nuclear power companies, not by taxpayers.
“The tasks of interim storage of radioactive waste, manufacturing of waste containers, and construction and operation of final repositories, and transfer of waste from interim storage to final repositories should be transferred to the state,” the KFK said in a statement released Wednesday in Berlin.
The estimated costs are to be covered by power companies paying a total of 23.3 billion euro ($26.4 billion) into a state-owned fund, with partial payments to be made in tranches over the next few years. In exchange, the state will take on all the residual financial risks associated with radioactive waste management – so if disposing of radioactive waste ends up costing more than 23.3 billion euro, the government, not the companies, will be on the hook for those cost overruns.
The 23.3 billion euro is composed of the current all-in 4.7 billion euro cost estimate of processing, enclosing and transferring high-level waste to final repositories, plus a 12.4 billion euro estimate for the costs of selecting, building and operating final repositories, plus a 35 percent “risk premium” – which is less than the risk premium of at least 50 percent that environmental groups had proposed, but more than the companies want to pay.
Compromise deal
The deal was characterized by the KFK’s three co-chairs as a compromise aimed at ensuring decommissioning costs wouldn’t lead to the insolvency of the four power companies that own nuclear reactors in Germany. Their balance sheets have been under heavy pressure in recent years due to price competition from solar and wind power suppliers in wholesale electricity markets.
The four large power-generation companies that own Germany’s 17 commercial nuclear reactors are E.ON, RWE, EnBW, and Vattenfall, a company owned by the Swedish state. Eight of the 17 reactors are still in operation, but the last of them is due to be shut down by the end of 2022. Nuclear power accounted for 14 percent of Germany’s total electricity production in 2015.
The 23.3-billion-euro deal only covers interim storage, transport and final disposal of high-level radioactive waste – including the spent fuel rods currently sitting in pools at nuclear reactor sites, as well as low- and medium-level radioactive waste such as machinery and buildings from decommissioned reactors. Packaging the waste for interim storage as well as dismantlement of reactor buildings and equipment and site remediation will remain the technical and financial responsibility of the four power companies.
Until now, the companies had been given the option of either removing reactor equipment and buildings, disposing of waste, and remediating reactor sites, on the one hand, or securely and permanently fencing off the sites and preventing unauthorized access. The KFK has now recommended that fencing-off will no longer be an option: All sites are to be dismantled and remediated. The commission said the government should speed up the permitting process to enable faster site decommissioning……….http://www.dw.com/en/german-utilities-to-pay-for-nuclear-waste-disposal/a-19218042
Germany wrestles with the dilemma of disposing of dead nuclear reactors and thier toxic wastes
Nuclear reactor sites: Dismantle or fence off? http://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-reactor-sites-dismantle-or-fence-off/a-19111969, 26 Apr 16, Three decades after the Chernobyl disaster, Germany is preparing to go nuclear-free. Industry plans to dismantle and dispose of radioactive waste. But some green campaigners say it’s safer to leave reactor sites as-is.
Thirty years ago, the Chernobyl disaster released radioactivity that spread across much of the northern hemisphere into the atmosphere. It also spurred social movements around the world to demand an end to nuclear power.
In Germany, that end is finally in sight ,as the country prepares to go nuclear-free by 2022. But the task of safely decommissioning and dismantling nuclear power stations promises to be expensive and controversial, and will take many years.
Debate rages over how to dispose of highly radioactive spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear power stations. But there is less awareness around how the dissolving industry and its regulators must also decide what to do with disused reactor sites.
Masses of equipment and a variety of buildings at the sites were exposed to nuclear fission reaction products for years, and have become slightly or moderately radioactive as a result. Therein lies the crux of the disposal problem.
Big money, long time
The consultancy ADL has estimated it will take about two decades to fully dismantle Germany’s 17 nuclear reactor sites, and cost at least 18 billion euros – not including the cost of subsequent radioactive waste disposal.
Why will it take so long and cost so much? DW posed this question to E.ON, Germany’s largest electricity utility and owner of 11 nuclear power stations – most of them already shut down.
An E.ON spokesperson said dismantling of reactor sites must take place in stages. First, spent uranium fuel rods must be transported off-site, to interim storage elsewhere. This can’t happen until four or five years after a reactor is shut down, because the fuel rods’ radioactivity first needs to decrease sufficiently for their safe handling to become possible.
Dismantling equipment is then expected to take 10 to 15 years. Final demolition of remaining buildings and site remediation will take another two to three years after all radioactive materials have been removed from the former reactor site.
Radioactive waste materials can be treated by a variety of means – compression, desiccation, enclosure in cement, or burning to ash – to reduce total volume prior to packing, shipping, and final disposal in an approved secure long-term storage site, E.ON said.
Put it in a deep, dry hole
Schacht Konrad, a disused iron-ore mine shaft near the German town of Salzgitter, is under consideration as the national site for the final disposal of low- to medium-grade radioactive materials.
The mine was chosen because it is particularly dry inside – reducing the risk of radioactive materials dissolving and entering into the groundwater. It’s meant to take in around 90 percent (by volume) of all the radioactive rubble from decontaminated nuclear sites in Germany – but only the mildly radioactive stuff.
German law specifies a threshold of very low radioactivity below which materials are deemed safe. Materials that fall below the threshold can legally be disposed of through the regular waste disposal system. But some anti-nuclear campaigners insist there’s no safe threshold, however low.
In contrast to low-level, mildly radioactive waste from former reactor sites, highly radioactive waste – including spent fuel rods – will be left in cooling ponds on closed-down reactor sites for some decades. Ultimately, they’ll be disposed of in one or more special high-security repositories. The location of those repositories is highly contentious, and has not yet been settled.
Leave them where they’re standing?
While the government and nuclear industry are keen to get on with dismantling and removing reactors soon after they’re shut down, Jörg Schmid and Henrik Paulitz of the German division of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) think perhaps they shouldn’t be dismantled at all.
“Dismantling nuclear reactors is expensive and poses health dangers,” according to an IPPNW report in German published in January of this year.
In the report, Schmid and Paulitz say that serious consideration should be given to the option of securely fencing off old nuclear reactor sites and allowing low-level radioactivity from contaminated buildings and equipment to recede over decades.
The IPPNW’s preferred solution would see heavily contaminated elements such as spent fuel rods be removed immediately, while the less-contaminated buildings and equipment would be left in situ indefinitely.
This would avoid dispersing the radioactive material more widely, and minimize risk to human populations, the study’s authors argue.
E.ON told DW that fencing off sites was neither more nor less safe than dismantling them – but argued that dismantling is a better solution in terms of the labor market consequences.
“IPPNW’s option would mean that 300 to 400 people who work at a nuclear site would abruptly lose their jobs,” the spokesperson said.
But Paulitz countered: “The nuclear industry must answer the question: is the proposed dismantling of the reactor sites a necessary measure, or is it just a new multi-billion-euro industry?”
Radioactive steel in children’s bedrooms?
About 99 percent of the total mass of material at a former nuclear site is radioactive at such a low level that it is deemed safe – so the material is no longer covered by nuclear safety regulations and can be released into the environment, according to IPPNW’s Schmid, who is a medical doctor.
But Schmid said that what matters is total radiation exposure over time. If very large amounts of very weakly radioactive material are dispersed through the environment, for example by being reintroduced into material supply chains, that represents a significant amount of broadcast radiation exposure over time.
Dismantling nuclear power plants, Paulitz said, leads to a problem: “The great majority of the site’s materials won’t be classified as nuclear waste, and will instead be disposed of in ordinary household waste streams, or even recycled into normal supply chains.”
“From a health and safety perspective, we see this as irresponsible.” Paulitz said, as weakly radioactive steel taken from a dismantled nuclear site could end up built into a radiator in a child’s bedroom, for example.
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