Japan restarting nuclear reactor – but what about Japan’s intractable problem of wastes?
Nuclear restart highlights government dilemma over lack of waste disposal sites, Japan Times BY KAYO MIMIZUKA KYODO AUG 11, 2015 With an unpopular return to nuclear power generation, Japan can no longer ignore the elephant in the room: where is the country’s highly radioactive nuclear waste going?
The reboot Tuesday of a reactor at Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai plant in Kagoshima Prefecture comes as the government struggles to find a final disposal site for high-level nuclear waste.
Currently, around 17,000 tons is sitting in temporary storage pools across the country, and the restart means the generation of even more.
Spent fuel pools at some nuclear plants will reach their capacity in as soon as three years.
A spokeswoman at Kyushu Electric said the Sendai plant’s storage pools “still have enough room,” suggesting the utility is not planning to immediately take further measures. But they are expected to become full in roughly 11 years, according to official data.
International concerns are also growing over the increase in Japan’s possession of plutonium due to its potential for falling into the wrong hands and being used to make nuclear weapons. As of the end of 2014, Japan had 47.8 tons of plutonium, up 0.7 tons from a year earlier.
Under Japan’s nuclear fuel recycle policy, plutonium extracted by reprocessing conventional uranium fuel is consumed by reactors in the form of plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel, known as MOX. But its feasibility remains uncertain, given public concerns after the Fukushima disaster.
Currently, the government plans to store nuclear waste at a final repository more than 300 meters underground. It would sit there for up to 100,000 years until radiation levels fall low enough and there is no harm to the environment……
In May, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced a scheme allowing the government to choose candidate sites based on scientific grounds, including resistance to earthquakes……
Hideyuki Ban, co-director of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, said finding a location to build a disposal site in Japan is even more difficult than in other countries due to the public’s sensitivity to nuclear power given the Fukushima crisis.
“For now, there is no national consensus at all on what to do with nuclear power generation down the road,” Ban said. “As the majority of people oppose nuclear power, surely there will be a backlash” against the government’s plan.
Since May, the government has been briefing municipalities on how it selects candidate sites.
Such meetings have been held in all 47 prefectures except Fukushima, but officials from some communities refused to take part out of fear their attendance might be considered a sign of their intention to accept a disposal site.
Questions have also arisen over the transparency of the process……http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/08/11/national/nuclear-restart-highlights-government-dilemma-lack-waste-disposal-sites/#.VcrZ3LKqpHx
Japan’s govt pursuing nuclear power, while having no effective plan for wastes
It was bureaucrats who made the plan to demand each prefecture to build it. There has been no viable explanation why each prefecture has to be responsible for the solution.
This is a typical example of negative aspect of top-down style bureaucracy in Japan
No Exit for Radioactive Wastes http://hitaku7664.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/no-exit-for-radioactive-wastes.html While Government of Japan promotes nuclear policy of resuming some nuclear power plants, the people in the area suffered from radioactive materials emitted by broken First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant are still living with great amount of contaminated soil, grass or trees. Although the government decided that those contaminated wastes should be treated by each prefecture, programs to build processing facilities are deadlocked by firm opposition by the residents. The government is facing a necessity for changing their plan.
Ministry of Environment designated radioactive waste, caused by the accident in Fukushima, with 8,000 Becquerel per kilogram or more as necessary to be under control of public sector. Concerning firm opposition from Fukushima, if those waste would be concentrated to Fukushima, the ministry decided that the disseminated waste should be processed in each prefecture.
Among five prefectures around Fukushima in need of building processing facility, Miyagi and Tochigi have been seeing strong protest of the residents. In Tochigi, although the ministry determined the place for the facility in Shioya Town, the people there organized broad movement against the plan. They pointed out fundamental contradiction of Ministry of Environment that it was building environmentally harmful facility in the place close to a water source which the ministry had formerly registered as a pure water source to be protected.
Chiba has been regarded as the place where the facility would be build first. Tokyo Electric Power Company offered an unused land in Chiba city for the facility. But, residents started protesting activities, arguing that the reason of selecting the place was unclear or liquidation caused by great earthquake would be concerned. Two thousand metric tons of radioactive waste in Chiba has still no way to go.
Now, the question is whether the decision of Ministry of Environment to process radioactive waste in each prefecture was right or wrong. The lawmakers passed a law which determined that national government would deal with radioactive waste caused by Fukushima accident. But the law did not require each prefecture to build processing facility. It was bureaucrats who made the plan to demand each prefecture to build it. There has been no viable explanation why each prefecture has to be responsible for the solution.
This is a typical example of negative aspect of top-down style bureaucracy in Japan. The key is whether bureaucrats would admit their wrong decision and change the course to plan B.
Postponed indefinitely – the opening of U.S. government’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
The opening of an underground nuclear waste dump in New Mexico just got delayed indefinitely http://www.businessinsider.com.au/r-officials-delay-reopening-of-new-mexico-nuclear-waste-site-2015-8 JOSEPH J. KOLB ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (Reuters) – The planned March 2016 reopening of an underground nuclear waste dump in New Mexico has been pushed back indefinitely because of unanticipated challenges, U.S. officials said.
A radiation leak at the U.S. government’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant that originated in a disposal chamber half a mile (1 km) below ground at the center near Carlsbad, New Mexico, exposed more than 20 workers to small amounts of radiation in February 2014, officials have said.
The accident led to the suspension of key operations at the site, the Energy Department’s only permanent underground repository for certain types of radiological waste tied to U.S. nuclear labs and weapons sites.
Dana Bryson, acting manager for the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office, said in a statement on Friday: “We are disappointed that we will not meet the original target date for beginning waste emplacement.”
He did not provide a date for reopening the facility.
“While the WIPP recovery program continues to make significant progress, the original target date of March 2016 for resuming waste emplacement operations is no longer viable due to a variety of unanticipated issues,” said a news release from the U.S. Department of Energy that contained Bryson’s statement.
Key challenges that remain include the need to implement heightened safety standards from the Department of Energy and to resolve problems with the ventilation system, officials said.
“The department is committed to resuming operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant as soon as it is safe to do so,” Bryson said.
(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis)
Local anxieties in Germany, over French nuclear waste plan
French nuclear waste plan irks Germans near site, DW, 4 Aug 15 France wants to build a permanent nuclear waste storage facility not far from the German border. The plan has irked many in the region, but the government in Berlin sees no need for action.
Nuclear power plants produce radioactive waste, which emits radiation for thousands of years. Even Germany, which is set to phase out nuclear power, is looking for a final repository for its spent nuclear fuel, but has not yet decided on the location. Finding a geologically suitable site is not the problem, but rather, the protests over the location. Nobody wants to live with a nuclear waste dump at their doorstep.
For many decades, France has focused and relied on nuclear power, and now, plant operators are under pressure to find repositories for the radioactive waste.
The French government seems to have its sights set on Bure, a town in eastern France, around 120 kilometers (74 miles) from the German border. There, scientists have spent years investigating whether highly and moderately radioactive waste can be disposed of 500 meters underground. ANDRA, the French national agency for radioactive waste, believes that Bure offers what a repository requires: Nuclear waste can be stored there for 100 years; then, the site can be closed off and ultimately, the nuclear waste can decay there for 100,000 years until the radiation no longer poses a threat to humans.
‘Unbearable coup’
Opponents of the site feel less bothered by the repository itself then by the decision-making process that led to choosing it. In mid-July, the government added a last minute clause to a legislative package promoting business development but did not hold a debate or vote in parliament. And since no other potential nuclear waste sites have been explored in France, critics believe that the Bure location was practically predetermined. The Green party group in the French national assembly calls the procedure an “unbearable coup,” while the nation’s nuclear regulatory body and the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Reactor Safety (IRSN) have expressed “numerous reservations” about the plans………http://www.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-waste-plan-irks-germans-near-site/a-18627896
Dispute in Spain about where to put radioactive trash
Row threatens Spain’s first nuclear graveyard, The Local, Jul 2015 Spain’s conservative government and the central region of Castilla-La Mancha locked horns Thursday over plans to build the nation’s first-ever temporary storage facility for highly radioactive waste. The country’s nuclear security council on Monday approved a report that gives the green light for the facility to be built near the village of Villar de Cañas in Castilla-La Mancha.
Enresa, the state-owned company responsible for Spain’s nuclear facilities, in 2011 chose the site from a list that included eight other communities which bid to house the nuclear dump.
But on Tuesday the new Socialist government of Castilla-La Mancha moved to block the construction of the facility by approving the expansion of a protected area for birds so it includes land earmarked for the radioactive waste site.
“This will protect an area where endangered species live,” regional government spokesman Nacho Hernando told a news conference. The Socialists took power in the region on July 4th following May local elections, ousting the conservative Popular Party which rules at the national level.
Energy Minister Jose Manuel Soria warned on Thursday that Spain would have to abandon nuclear power if the facility is not built………The government wants to store all the spent fuel produced at Spain’s eight nuclear power stations at the site.
Each power station currently stores the spent fuel which they produce in on site storage pools that are starting to fill up.
Spain has since 2008 stored low to medium-grade nuclear waste at a facility at El Cabril in Cordoba province in the southwest……..
environmental groups including Greenpeace accuse the dump’s supporters of putting money before safety and have lobbied to have the project shelved. http://www.thelocal.es/20150731/row-over-plans-for-spains-first-nuclear-graveyard
UK’s Slow Progress on Plutonium Stockpiles.
NuClear news August 2015 Since the Government confirmed in December 2011 that its preferred management option for the UK’s plutonium stockpile was to convert the ‘asset of zero value’ into Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel, further progress on the option has been conspicuous by its absence, says Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE). (1)
US State and federal agencies agree on plan to demolish southern Ohio uranium plant
Demolition plan OK’d in southern Ohio uranium plant cleanup, WT, By KANTELE FRANKO – Associated Press – Friday, July 31, 2015
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – State and federal agencies have agreed on a plan for demolishing huge buildings and other facilities from a Cold War-era uranium plant in southern Ohio.
It is the latest development in the lengthy decontamination and decommissioning process for the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, which was built in the 1950s and produced enriched uranium for defense and commercial uses until 2001. Its shutdown left old buildings, chemicals and radioactive areas that must be addressed……..the structures slated for demolition include the three process buildings, each with more than 30 acres under one roof. The cleanup plans allow for recycling of equipment and building materials if that can be done in a safe, cost-effective way…….. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/31/demolition-plan-okd-in-southern-ohio-uranium-plant/
No idea what to do with the radioactive trash, but Japan still plans to make more of it
While moves are being made to restart nuclear reactors in Japan, the weaknesses in nuclear power that have led to nuclear plants being likened to “apartments without toilets,” remain unsolved.
Despite moves to restart reactors, Japan lacks nuclear waste disposal site http://mainichi.jp/english/english/perspectives/news/20150708p2a00m0na018000c.html
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a news conference on July 7 that the government would restart nuclear reactors that met new safety standards established by the nation’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA).
The same day, Kyushu Electric Power Co. began loading fuel into a reactor at its Sendai Nuclear Power Plant in Kagoshima Prefecture. The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan released a statement saying, “This is one important step. Preparation for reactivation is progressing step by step.” Within the electric power industry, hopes are spreading that if one reactor is restarted, then the screening of other reactors will move ahead more smoothly.
Later this month, the government will formally adopt a proposal stating that nuclear power account for 20-22 percent of Japan’s energy mix by fiscal 2030. Based on this, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made an international declaration that Japan will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent from 2013 levels.
It is evident that the long-term idling of nuclear reactors has strained electric power companies financially, and both power companies and the government are aligned in seeking to restart these reactors, but the process is not all smooth sailing.
Under the Nuclear Reactor Regulation Law, the life of nuclear reactors is set at 40 years in principle. To extend this period, reactors must pass stringent NRA guidelines before this 40-year mark is reached. In fiscal 2030, there will be just 22 reactors in Japan that have been operating less than 40 years. To have nuclear power account for 20-22 percent of the nation’s energy mix, around 35 reactors would need to be in operation, according to Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yoichi Miyazawa. This would mean the life of a dozen or so reactors would need to be extended.
And yet the problem of nuclear waste remains. About 17,000 tons of spent fuel sits in Japan, and the pools for spent fuel at the nation’s nuclear power plants are nearly full. In the case of the Genkai Nuclear Power Plant, which Kyushu Electric Power Co. is hoping to get back online together with the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant, the pools for spent fuel would be full after just three years of operation. Finding a place to store this fuel is an urgent task.
The government has positioned the “nuclear fuel cycle,” under which spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed, allowing uranium and plutonium to be reused as nuclear fuel, as a central part of the nation’s energy policy. However, the Rokkasho Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Facility in Aomori Prefecture has been plagued with problems, with the schedule for its completion being delayed 21 times. Moreover, the fast-breeder reactor Monju, which uses plutonium, has hardly operated at all over the past 20 years, effectively leaving the cycle broken.
Furthermore, there is currently no prospect of settling on a final disposal site for the highly radioactive waste that is produced after reprocessing. In May this year, the government switched to a policy of naming scientifically “promising” disposal sites, preparing the way to reactivate nuclear reactors.
From the same month, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has held explanations for workers of local government bodies across Japan, but about 30 percent of these bodies have not attended. One in Tokushima Prefecture argued that attending would give local residents the impression that it has accepted disposal site plans.
The explanations have been held behind closed doors, sparking criticism at a ministry meeting of experts that it appears things are being done in secret.
While moves are being made to restart nuclear reactors in Japan, the weaknesses in nuclear power that have led to nuclear plants being likened to “apartments without toilets,” remain unsolved.
Summary of the issues in “Low Level” Nuclear Waste
“Low Level” Nuclear Waste Summary by NIRS-Sierra Club-SEED: Comment to US NRC by one minute to midnight, NYC-DC-ET, tonight USNRC Comment: Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal (aka nuclear waste burial) ID: NRC-2011-0012-0077 Due Jul 24 2015, at 11:59 PM EThttp://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=NRC-2011-0012-0077Document for comment: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2015-03-26/pdf/2015-06429.pdf Docket ID: NRC-2011-0012 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 10 CFR 60 and 61
The US is burying deadly, long-lived nuclear waste, including plutonium and depleted uranium, in Utah and west Texas. As discussed yesterday, the cost charged is so outrageous that it could be put in good quality containers, in proper above ground facilities, making this burial deadly highway robbery.
The following excellent summary of the so-called “low level” nuclear waste problem was submitted by NIRS, SEED and Sierra Club of South Carolina, for a similar comment period last September. These are some important highlights: “Obviously the NRC is fully committed to deregulating nuclear waste. The public, however, is more committed to preventing it. We ask NRC to stop pushing all the many creative forms of Below Regulatory Concern or BRC.
After NRC’s BRC policies were overturned by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 1992, NRC sought international nuclear agency assistance to set clearance standards could be used to force the US to deregulate nuclear waste. The public has fought repeated efforts by NRC and other agencies in various forms over a dozen times in the past 29 years. Cities, counties, states, community, religious and environmental groups, labor unions and individuals have passed resolutions, petitioned, written, demonstrated and in every other democratic way expressed opposition to the deliberate release of manmade radioactive waste from regulatory control.”
“We call in NRC to stop wasting its resources trying to come up with more ways to let nuclear waste out of control and to charge those who make the wastes with whatever costs are needed to isolate and regulate them for at least 10 to 20 half-lives of the radionuclides present.”……………….https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/low-level-nuclear-waste-summary-by-nirs-sierra-club-seed-comment-to-us-nrc-by-one-minute-to-midnight-nyc-dc-et-tonight/
Safety concerns about the San Onofre site as a long-term waste-storage site
Nuke storage by the sea http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2015/jul/21/ticker-nuke-storage-plan-san-onofre/# Aguirre equates Southern California Edison to “drunken frat boys” By Dave Rice, July 21, 2015 Concerns over nuclear waste generated by the now-defunct San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station expressed by environmental activists for years took another turn in the spotlight on Monday (July 20), as local activist attorney Mike Aguirre called attention to what he terms “SCUD,” or Southern California Uranium Dump.
Today, July 21, county supervisors are considering a $1.6 million agreement with San Onofre operator Southern California Edison to provide offsite emergency planning in the event of an on-site catastrophe. The specter for such an event looms as long as spent nuclear fuel, which remains highly volatile for millions of years, remains stored at the former power-generating facility.
Concerns about the San Onofre site as a long-term waste-storage site include several nearby earthquake faults. Experts have called for the fuel to be stored in dry casks after an initial five years’ cooling-off period in open pools of water, which Edison officials say they’ll do. Still, the casks are only expected to safely contain radioactive waste for about 25 years, though no long-term waste-storage facility exists and, even if one were cleared for construction immediately, it could be decades before waste is ready to leave the seaside locale near a public beach and within a potential evacuation zone that could displace millions of residents in a worst-case scenario.
“It is ludicrous that the same company that created the disaster by skirting safety rules is now responsible for the cleanup,” decried Aguirre in a release Monday afternoon. “They have behaved like drunken frat boys, leaving a mess on the beach for the adults to clean up. Can we really trust them to do it properly?”
Nuclear power station running out of space for radioactive trash fuel rods
Peach Bottom nuclear power plant could run out of spent fuel storage space in 2019 There is no available off-site storage for spent fuel rods, ydr.com Local News, By Brett Sholtis bsholtis@ydr.com @BrettSholtis on Twitter 07/18/2015 Most
people will never get a chance to stare down at nuclear fuel rods submerged in the eerie blue water of a spent fuel pool.
For Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station employees, however, working near tens of thousands of used fuel rods — still lethally radioactive — is business as usual.
Some of those rods have been in the fuel pool since 1976, according to Krista Connelly, spokeswoman for the southern York County power plant.
But with nowhere off-site to store the fuel, Connelly said Peach Bottom is running out of places to put it. Continue reading
21 years after shutdown, USA’s Experimental Breeder Nuclear Reactor-II (EBR-II) is entombed
USA’s Experimental Breeder Reactor-II now permanently entombed, World Nuclear News
01 July 2015 The main clean-up contractor at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Idaho Site, has entombed an historic nuclear reactor in place and treated the reactor’s remaining sodium coolant….CH2M-WG, Idaho, LLC (CWI) said yesterday that crews with the Decontamination and Decommissioning (D&D) Program recently completed pouring more than 3400 cubic yards of concrete grout into the basement of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) building to fill in any remaining void spaces and effectively entomb the reactor.
Workers also removed and treated the last of the sodium coolant from the reactor’s nine heat exchangers. The exchangers were used to cool the liquid metal and direct the steam to a generating turbine to produce electricity when the reactor was operating.
The EBR-II was the basis of the US Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) program…….. The reactor was shut down in 1994 and its fuel was removed and transported to another site facility for safe storage.
The DOE grouted the reactor in place instead of removing it to protect workers from industrial hazards and radiological risks, CWI said. Crews filled the reactor vessel with grout over two years ago and recently completed the remainder of grouting at the facility under CWI’s contract.
New impediments to plans for Yucca nuclear waste storage
The Plan for Storing US Nuclear Waste Just Hit a Roadblock Wired 16 July 15 AMERICA’S FAVORITE PROBLEM to ignore—what to do with radioactive waste—just got worse. Since 1987, the grand (and controversial) idea was to put it all in one place, a series of tunnels deep below Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Well, last week America got three new national monuments, including the 704,000 acres of the Basin and Range National Monument. And guess what? The train that was supposed to carry all that nuclear guck to Yucca Mountain runs right through it.
“It’s another nail in the coffin for Yucca Mountain,” says Timothy Frazier, a former Department of Energy official who now works on nuclear waste for the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It certainly adds time, and would require more money to resolve.”………
radioactive waste doesn’t disappear if you ignore it. The US has 75,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste—spent reactor fuel and the byproducts of processing it—that now sit in pools or dry casks at nuclear power plants, facilities never intended for long-term storage. The risk of leaks is high. Because the stuff stays radioactive for millennia, the safest course of action is supposed to be entomb ingit in rock like at Yucca Mountain, where it can remain inaccessible to future humans.
Now, Yucca Mountain plans have dragged on so long that all the high-level radioactive waste in the country exceeds its storage capacity. The Department of Energy hasn’t even built the repository yet, and the country already needs a second…….http://www.wired.com/2015/07/plan-storing-us-nuclear-waste-just-hit-roadblock/
The staggeringly huge problem of Los Alamos’ radioactive contamination
‘Los Alamos will never be clean’, Local News, Santa Fe New Mexican, By Staci Matlock 13 July 15 “……….The scientists knew this canyon was contaminated back in the 1950s and ’60s,” said Greg Mello, a former inspector with the state Environment Department and now a partner in the nuclear watchdog Los Alamos Study Group with his wife, Trish. “Their children played here.”
As people this year commemorate the 70th anniversary of the first atomic bomb, which helped lead to the end of World War II, often left out of the conversation is the legacy of environmental waste left behind from the making of that bomb and the thousands that followed.
Acid Canyon is among more than 2,000 dumpsites around the lab’s 43-square-mile property and thousands of other dumpsites at 108 locations in 29 states around the nation where waste from the Manhattan Project and subsequent nuclear weapons research was discharged, tossed or buried.
Efforts to clean up the contamination have taken decades and billions of dollars. The work isn’t finished yet, and it may never be complete in some places. Millions of cubic meters of hazardous waste still await cleanup, along with hundreds of contaminated buildings demolished or awaiting demolition at Savannah River in South Carolina, the Hanford plutonium processing plant along Washington’s Columbia River, Los Alamos and a dozen other sites.
A legacy of waste
Air, land, water and people all were exposed to hazardous and radioactive waste products while scientists and engineers were producing the Trinity test bomb and subsequent nuclear weapons.
Uranium miners, scientists, lab technicians and people living near research facilities or test sites around the United States during the heyday of the Manhattan Project were exposed to the highest immediate levels of radiation. They’ve sought compensation from the federal government for a litany of maladies and cancers related to their work on nuclear weapons.
The waste dumped in canyons, buried in unlined trenches or discarded in out-of-the-way places has represented longer-term hazards to people living in or near places where the components of nuclear weapons were processed. In the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Army Corps of Engineers began cleaning up the waste sites around the country.
The danger from the waste depends on its radioactivity and how much of it people or animals are exposed to. People regularly are exposed to some level of radiation, which occurs naturally in the environment, such as uranium in soil and radon gas. The legacy waste adds to natural radiation levels in the environment and, left untreated, can increase the risks of cancers and other health problems.
At Los Alamos, lab workers dumped waste in trenches and pits, including those at Area G, a 63-acre dumpsite that opened in 1957. This includes thousands of cubic feet of low-level and mixed transuranic waste such as old lab coats, tools and other debris.
Nuclear waste is exempt from many federal environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act. The New Mexico Environment Department, after a court battle, gained some measure of regulatory control over the lab’s legacy waste only because it is mixed with other hazardous chemical waste. Under an agreement with the state, the lab in 2014 was on track to remove 3,706 cubic meters of hazardous and radioactive waste stored in above-ground containers and ship it to the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad when a lab container ruptured at the underground facility, halting operations.
A lab official said last year LANL still had thousands of cubic feet of contaminated waste left in 35 pits and 200 shafts at Area G. “The main concern is that Area G is smack dab over the regional aquifer,” said Scott Kovac, of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, noting the groundwater table is between 900 and 1,000 feet below the surface.
The Department of Energy and state environment officials are grappling with whether the increasing costs of cleanup at the lab and at other legacy waste sites outweighs the health risks of leaving waste where it is and capping it. Mello, who issued the first notice of violation to the lab for noncompliance with federal hazardous waste regulations in 1984, contemplated the trade-off: “Los Alamos will never be clean. It will always have tons of buried waste. Whether the waste is a health hazard is debatable.”
Costs of nuclear cleanup
The legacy costs of the Trinity Site test and the Cold War can be counted in human and environmental price tags……….
“It is costing a lot of money, taking a lot of time, and we’re leaving behind a lot of workers who have suffered,” Alvarez said.
Uranium miners and millers developed lung cancer and kidney cancers, among other illnesses. Scientists and other workers exposed to radiation from above-ground tests developed cancers of the lung, thyroid, esophagus, stomach and pancreas, as well as leukemia and other maladies.
More than 107,141 nuclear research workers and their families have received some of more than $11.6 billion in compensation and medical coverage as of July 5, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. More than a fourth of workers filing claims have cancer types recognized by the federal government as ones that can be caused by exposure to radioactive materials.
More than 4,900 former Los Alamos National Laboratory workers from World War II to the present have received $566 million for health problems related to their work at the lab……..
The costs of cleaning up legacy waste continue to climb. The Department of Energy’s life-cycle environmental liability for thousands of contaminated facilities and management of massive quantities of radioactive waste rose to $427 billion in 2014 from $297 billion in 2006, according to the agency’s fiscal report. The life cycle includes all of the department’s liabilities until the waste is finally cleaned up to federal standards — a process still years away in some locations.
The estimated liability for the legacy waste is higher than the combined state budgets of New Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona and Colorado.
The total life-cycle costs of managing environmental cleanup of legacy waste at Los Alamos were estimated at $2.9 billion in the Department of Energy’s fiscal year 2016 budget request to Congress. For Hanford, it is $63 billion, and for the Savannah River site, it is $71 billion.
“We keep on spending and yet the estimated environmental liability keeps growing,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico…………. Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com. Follow her on Twitter @StaciMatlock. http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/los-alamos-will-never-be-clean/article_a3cc7ce1-8af0-5113-8f38-5d4aa673fd7a.html
Southern Ohio’s Piketon enriched uranium plant will get on-site radioactive trash disposal
On-site Piketon uranium disposal OK’d in decades-long plan Columbus Dispatch, By Kantele FrankoAssociated Press • Monday July 13, 2015 Waste from the decontamination and decommissioning of a Cold War-era uranium plant in southern Ohio will go to an on-site disposal facility under a U.S. Department of Energy plan approved by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon produced enriched uranium until 2001, and the shutdown left behind old buildings, industrial chemicals and radioactive areas……..The disposal plan had support from local officials and lawmakers representing the area. Pike County Commissioner Blaine Beekman said the long-awaited decision is critical to get the cleanup rolling and to support lawmakers’ efforts to secure continued federal funding for the project.
But unanswered questions remain, including which types of waste will go where, said United Steelworkers local president Herman Potter, who represents hundreds of Piketon workers……..Some area residents and environmental activists also have objected.
U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican from southwestern Ohio, said the community agreed to on-site disposal to accelerate the cleanup but remains concerned about the site’s future now that the Energy Department estimates the work will take another three decades. http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/07/13/on-site-disposal-okd-in-decades-long-plan.html
1 This Month
petition to oppose the rapid increase of space-military industry threatening Jeju Island and the region.
[Petition by April 19th (KST)] Stop the joint military-Hanwha Systems-Jeju Provincial Government Sea Launch!
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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