USA secretly building two underground plutonium production labs
US to build two secret underground plutonium production labs: Analyst Press TV, 24 Dec 13 The United States is planning to build two new underground plutonium production labs that will expand plutonium production for the next decades, an analyst says.
“The Senate two days ago voted to authorize the creation of two new huge secret underground plutonium production labs that will expand plutonium production for the next 150 years,” Brian Becker, national coordinator of the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, told Press TV on Saturday.
“That is a very important fact and I think the world is not yet learning about it or just learning about it,” he added.
Becker also said the location of the new labs is in Los Alamos. “This was going to be in Los Alamos, the nuclear facility in New Mexico and the US government has just announced in spite of environmental impact statements, in spite of everything, to rush forward for the creation of two new plutonium factories, modules that will be producing plutonium for as decades and decades to come,” the analyst said.
“That is to enrich and enhance nuclear weapons. The United States is moving nuclear weapons into outer space that is one of the big projects. They see nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons possession as a form of creating dominance. It is not keeping the world safe,” he explained.
Becker pointed out to President Barack Obama’s plans for the US nuclear weapons complex that will cost the country about $355 billion over the next decade….http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/12/22/341316/us-building-secret-labs-to-enhance-nukes/
New agreement on decommissioning Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station
Vermont, Entergy Announce Deal On Nuclear Power Plant Decommissioning http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/12/23/vermont-entergy-announce-deal-on-nuclear-power-plant-decommissioning/ December 23, 2013 MONTPELIER, Vt. (CBS) — The state of Vermont and Entergy have announced a deal on decommissioning the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.
Gov. Peter Shumlin, Attorney General Bill Sorrell and Bill Mohl, president of Entergy Wholesale Commodities, announced a settlement agreement Monday between the state and the owner and operator of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee LLC and Entergy Nuclear Operations Inc., the company said in a prepared statement.
The deal brings more certainty to the plant’s operation through next year and its transition — including commitments related to economic development, timely decommissioning and site restoration, the company reported. The pact also helps set a path for a constructive and transparent working relationship between Entergy and the state as they continue to work on long-term issues related to the decommissioning of the nuclear power plant. Continue reading
Danger in transporting Canadian radioactive trash to South Carolina
“The concerns are in transport, adding waste to the system and also opening the door for receipt of unusual nuclear waste materials that would end up being dumped in South Carolina,”
Canadian nuclear waste heading for SC, Greenville Online , 22 Dec 13
Critics say it’s unusual to ship weapons-grade uranium so far COLUMBIA — Sometime next year, a convoy is expected to begin delivering shipments of highly radioactive liquid waste containing weapons-grade uranium from Canada to the Savannah River Site near Aiken.
It’s not so unusual for SRS, once home to the manufacture of nuclear weapons parts, to receive nuclear materials or to process radioactive waste.
What makes these shipments controversial, and according to one environmental activist, unprecedented, is that they are being shipped so far and with such a lethal cargo. Continue reading
Edison and NRC have No plans for removing nuclear wastes from San Onofre plant
I have attended nearly every Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing on San Onofre for nearly 20 years. For more than a decade we were told by Southern California Edison (with no objection from the NRC) that the waste problem was essentially solved because the waste would go to Yucca Mountain. But Yucca Mountain is an imperfect solution: Before the federal government stopped the project (or at least slowed it to a crawl), one of the last problems they could not be sure they had any good science about was “drip shields” which were to protect the fuel rods — that were to be permanently entombed at the site — from water dripping from above. The shape, material, thickness, and expected durability of the shields were all undecided, but my recollection is that the last design was an upside-down flattened out V shape made out of 4-inch thick titanium. And no one knew how long it would last, but 300 years was an outside estimate, or at least the hope. After that, good luck.
What the transport vehicles would look like, and whether they would use rail or roads or both, was all undecided when the project was stopped, despite 10s of billions of dollars having been spent.
Geologic storage, if we choose that route, will not be easy and will not be risk free. And we’re nowhere near it at this point. Continue reading
Sea level rise, storm surges, not factored in to NRC’s nuclear waste policy
CCCL also argued that the discussion of sea level rise was insufficient. The DGEIS relied on dated sources that did not account for uncertainty in sea level rise projections and may underestimate risk. Also, the DGEIS merely looks at static sea level rise, which ignores risks due to more frequent and severe flooding. CCCL pointed to data showing that a number of coastal nuclear power plants potentially subject to sea level rise and storm surge, are located in highly populated areas of the countryCenter For Climate Change Law December 19th, 2013 by Ethan Strell The Columbia Center for Climate Change Law (CCCL) submitted comments today on the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s “Waste Confidence Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement” (DGEIS), which concerns the storage of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel at individual power plants beyond the duration of each plant’s operating license. CCCL’s comments focus on the DGEIS’s lack of analysis of how future climate conditions could affect the safety of these high level nuclear waste storage facilities.
“Waste Confidence” refers to the Commission’s confidence that permanent disposal of nuclear waste can be accomplished when it is needed.
Currently, spent nuclear fuel is stored on-site at nuclear reactors beyond the duration of plants’ operating licenses. The Waste Confidence Rule stems from a 1976 petition by NRDC to halt the licensing of nuclear plants until the Commission could guarantee the permanent, safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Continue reading
Hearings on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposed Generic Environment Impact Statement (GEIS) for nuclear waste
San Clemente wants to get rid of San Onofre radioactive trssh
San Clemente Doesn’t Want San Onofre’s Nuclear Waste Sticking Around By David Wagner Http://Www.Kpbs.Org/News/2013/Dec/18/San-Clemente-Doesnt-Want-San-Onofres-Nuclear-Waste/ Without a national repository for nuclear waste, plants scattered throughout the country will have to keep waste on site for decades, possibly even centuries. Elected officials in San Clemente are expressing concern about how long waste will be stored in their own backyard. With San Onofre Nuclear Generating System just a few miles down the coast, nuclear waste sits close to home. The San Clemente City Council voted Tuesday to take a stronger stance on waste storage at the plant, which was permanently shut down earlier this year.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission believes waste could safely remain on site for as long as 300 years. Gary Headrick of the environmentalist group San Clemente Green thinks it’s a dangerous plan for Southern California.
“That is just absurd because we expect a huge earthquake anytime,” Headrick said. “We’re long overdue.”
In passing this resolution, the city is requesting more time for the public to weigh in on the future of San Onofre’s waste. The NRC’s period for public comment is scheduled to end on Friday.
Japanese govt to select places for nuclear waste permanent dump
Japan Takes Nuclear Storage Hunt Into Own Hands http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230394950457926348056235159 4 Regional Governments Express No Interest By MARI IWATA Dec. 17, 2013 TOKYO—Japan has decided to take matters into its own hands to find appropriate domestic locations to permanently store highly radioactive nuclear waste, after waiting in vain for more than a decade for an offer from a regional government. “The government will play an active role in choosing a permanent place,” Industry Minister Toshimitsu Motegi told reporters at a regular news conference Tuesday. “We’ll abandon the current system of waiting for volunteers to raise their hands.”
Japan, which currently doesn’t have any final disposal sites for high level radioactive waste, has 17,000 metric tons of domestically spent nuclear fuel that dates back to the 1970s. Continue reading
Controversial entombment of Illinois nuclear power plant
state regulators will not have authority to question how the dismantling is performed or EnergySolutions’ spending decisions.
A group of local citizens has filed suit over the financial handling of the project, claiming there are no safeguards to ensure that EnergySolutions isn’t wasting ratepayer money.
How Zion’s nuclear waste will be entombed on site http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-1215-zion-fuel-20131215,0,7912496.story Third-party EnergySolutions to embark on unprecedented, yearlong process By Julie Wernau, Chicago Tribune reporter December 15, 2013
In January, EnergySolutions will begin the most crucial part of its 10-year dismantling of the shuttered Zion nuclear power plant: Safely removing its radioactive fuel rods.
The project is the largest in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry and the first in which a plant’s owner has turned over its license to a third party for the purpose of dismantling it. Utah-based EnergySolutions is staking its future on the project. How it handles the most expensive and risky phase of the project will be crucial to it winning other such work going forward.
The Zion plant, owned by Chicago-based Exelon Corp., the parent of Commonwealth Edison, generated electricity on the shores of Lake Michigan for close to a quarter of a century. By the time the project is complete, it will have taken nearly as long to destroy it. Continue reading
US politicians and indigenous people fight Lake Huron nuclear waste dump
Saugeen Ojibwe and U.S. Politicians Oppose Nuclear Waste Burial Near Lake Huron, Indian Country, Martha Troian12/12/13
A controversial proposal to bury nuclear waste a half mile from Lake Huron’s shoreline in Ontario is proceeding over indigenous objections in a plan that has repercussions on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border.
Opposition to the plan, which would inter low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste about 2,230 feet underground in solid rock, is sparking opposition from Indigenous Peoples and U.S. politicians alike. …… Continue reading
Fracking as a solution for nuclear waste – not really feasible
Scientist sees fracking as the way to dispose of nuclear waste Tia Ghose LiveScience 13 Dec, SAN FRANCISCO — Nuclear waste could one day be disposed of by injecting it into fracking boreholes in the Earth, at least if one scientist’s idea takes hold.
The method, presented here Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, would mix nuclear waste with other heavy materials, and inject it a few miles below the Earth’s surface into drilled holes. …….But the idea is still theoretical, and at least one expert thinks there are too many practical and safety concerns for the scheme to work.
“I can’t see it being a feasible concept, for many reasons,” said Jens Birkholzer, head of the Nuclear Energy and Waste Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. Continue reading
Japan’s expensive problem – 132,738 tonnes of radioactive soil
Japan to spend $970 mn on nuclear soil store Phys Org News 12 Dec 13 Japan is planning to earmark 100 billion yen ($970 million) for a storage facility for tens of thousands of tonnes of soil contaminated with radiation from the Fukushima disaster, a report said Wednesday.
The government will set aside the cash to buy some 3 to 5 square kilometres (1.2 to 2 square miles) of land somewhere near the crippled plant, the Asahi Shimbun reported.
But finding a candidate site for the facility, which the government envisages using for 30 years, is a political challenge as no local authority has so far raised its hand.
Tokyo would like to use land in three heavily contaminated towns near the plant, said the paper, adding environment minister Nobuteru Ishiara will speak with local officials this weekend.
The mayors of the towns—Futaba, Okuma and Naraha—along with the governor of Fukushima prefecture Yuhei Sato, are believed to be concerned that the temporary site could easily become permanent………No one from the environment ministry was available for comment on the report.
As of the end of August, the total amount of contaminated soil and debris collected through decontamination efforts, in which the top layer of soil is stripped from the land, stood at 132,738 tonnes, about 80 percent of which is from Fukushima prefecture.
This contaminated waste is currently stored at waste incineration plants, sewage treatment plants and agricultural and forestry facilities nationwide.
Experts say a more long-term solution needs to be found because storage capacity at these facilities is reaching its limits. http://phys.org/news/2013-12-japan-mn-nuclear-soil.html#jCp
Inconvenient questions in Parliament about Sellafield’s £70bn clean-up costs
Talk of building a new mixed-oxide (Mox) fuel reprocessing plant has been undermined by a report out this summer that concluded a previous Mox facility, which closed two years ago, had left taxpayers with a £2.2bn bill rather than the healthy profit that had been promised when it was first constructed.
Sellafield executives to face MPs as nuclear clean-up bill rises over £70bn http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/01/sellafield-nuclear-clean-up-cost-rises Public accounts committee to scrutinise private consortium accused of spending cash ‘like confetti’ Terry Macalister The Guardian, Monday 2 December 2013 The bill for cleaning up the huge Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria will rise even higher than its current estimated level of £70bn as operators struggle to assess the full scale of the task, according to sources close to the project.
The warning comes just days before private sector managers face a grilling from the public accounts committee, which is investigating activities at the facility.
It was hoped that the huge bill – eight times the cost of staging the London Olympics – would be capped at £70bn, but well-placed sources have told the Guardian that the operators are convinced they are still “not at the top” of the cost curve.
Sellafield is regarded as the most dangerous and polluted industrial site in western Europe, not least because it houses 120 tonnes of plutonium, the largest civilian stockpile in the world.
The cost of decommissioning the Calder Hall reactor plus a magnox fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield has been rising steeply, but the biggest task comes from “ponds” and “silos” filled with old equipment and deteriorating, highly toxic waste. Continue reading
Anxiety surrounds plan to clean up Hanford’s radioactive trash
serious questions were raised last year after Walter Tamosaitis, one of the scientific chiefs of the project, disclosed that the innovative technology for mixing the waste in processing tanks could cause dangerous buildups of explosive hydrogen gas and might allow plutonium clumps to form.
Doubts grow about plan to dispose of Hanford’s radioactive waste, LA Times 28 Nov 13 Experts raise concerns about the complex technology intended to turn 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge at the former Hanford nuclear facility into glass and prepare it for safe burial. By Ralph Vartabedian November 29, 2013, RICHLAND, Wash. — On a wind-swept plateau, underground steel tanks that hold the nation’s most deadly radioactive waste are slowly rotting. The soil deep under the desert brush is being fouled with plutonium, cesium and other material so toxic that it could deliver a lethal dose of radiation to a nearby person in minutes.
The aging tanks at the former Hanford nuclear weapons complex contain 56 million gallons of sludge, the byproduct of several decades of nuclear weapons production, and they represent one of the nation’s most treacherous environmental threats.
Energy Department officials have repeatedly assured the public that they have the advanced technology needed to safely dispose of the waste. An industrial city has been under development here for 24 years, designed to transform the sludge into solid glass and prepare it for permanent burial.
But with $13 billion already spent, there are serious doubts that the highly complex technology will even work or that the current plan can clean up all the waste. Alarmed at warnings raised by outside experts and some of the project’s own engineers, Department of Energy officials last year ordered a halt to construction on the most important parts of the waste treatment plant.
“They are missing one important target after another,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “It feels like we are going around in circles.”……….
Many of the problems stem from the decision to launch construction of the plant even before engineers had completed the design. The job of turning waste as thick as peanut butter into glass is at the leading edge of nuclear chemistry, a job made difficult by the complex mixture of wastes that were fed into the underground tanks by some of the nation’s largest industrial corporations under a cloak of government secrecy.
The basic plan is to pump the waste into a pre-treatment plant, a factory larger than a football field and 12 stories tall, that would filter and chemically separate the waste into two streams of high- and low-level radioactivity. Then, two other plants would “vitrify,” or glassify, the waste. One would produce highly radioactive glass destined for a future geological repository, and the other a lower radioactive glass that could be buried at Hanford.
But serious questions were raised last year after Walter Tamosaitis, one of the scientific chiefs of the project, disclosed that the innovative technology for mixing the waste in processing tanks could cause dangerous buildups of explosive hydrogen gas and might allow plutonium clumps to form……. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-hanford-nuclear-risks-20131130,0,5013027.story#axzz2m8Dynzbj
Radioactive soil storage needing 15-sq.-km track around Fukushima No. 1 plant
Fukushima land grab eyed State wants to purchase 15-sq.-km track around No. 1 plant for waste storage sites JAPAN TIMES, KYODO NOV 23, 2013 The state plans to buy 15 sq. km of land around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant to build facilities to store radioactive soil and other waste generated by decontamination operations, government sources said….. (registered readers only) http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/11/23/national/fukushima-land-grab-eyed/#.UpJz29Jwo7p
1 This Month
23 April – WEBINAR – Why new nuclear reactors are the wrong tools for decarbonization Thursday, April 23 • 1 AM – 2 AM AEST
World Nuclear Power. Reactors 1951-2026, 75 Years of Nuclear Power.
Interactive Map– https://dv.worldnuclearreport.org/
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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