AUDIO: crisis of dangerous radioactive trash at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant
it would make sense to just stop producing this radioactive trash
At Pilgrim — like Fukushima — spent fuel is stored in a pool high above the reactor. Tarantino says the pool contains all the nuclear waste ever produced by Pilgrim’s reactor.
“We have 40 years worth of spent fuel in the reactor building,” Tarantino said. “Fuel has never left the site.”…… Pilgrim is rapidly running of room. In two years there won’t be any space left in the pool and Pilgrim will have to shut down unless a new waste storage site can be built outside of the reactor building….
Workers have already begun constructing a road to transport huge containers — called dry cask storage — out of the reactor building to a special concrete pad nearby. This is this construction that opponents were trying to photograph with their kite camera……
AUDIO http://www.wbur.org/2013/07/10/pilgrim-nuclear-waste-permit Residents Challenge Pilgrim’s Permit For New Nuclear Waste Site By Bruce Gellerman July 10, 2013 PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Since 1972, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant here has generated prodigious amounts of electricity, tons of radioactive waste and plenty of controversy.
Wednesday night, the debate heats up as the Plymouth zoning board votes on whether to allow Entergy — the plant’s owner — to continue with construction on a new waste storage site. The vote could stall or even stop the nuclear power plant for good.
Security, And Public Scrutiny
A few weeks ago, anti-nuclear activists — with the help from the law firm EcoLaw — flew a kite with a camera over the plant. They wanted to see what Entergy was building on the 1,600-acre site along Cape Cod Bay.
“This is the first time in a long time that citizens have pulled back the blanket of secrecy that has allowed Entergy to operate without much public scrutiny on the local level,” said attorney Meg Sheehan, who was born and raised in Plymouth. Continue reading
Congress wants answers about nuclear waste transport through Las Vegas
Titus asks for disclosure of nuclear waste routes
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/jul/10/titus-asks-for-disclosure-of-nuclear-waste/ Associated Press July 10, 2013 LAS VEGAS (AP) — A frustrated congressional representative is asking for more disclosure about a plan to route nuclear waste through Las Vegas.
Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., sent a letter Tuesday to the head of the federal Department of Energy asking to discuss a plan to ship 403 canisters of bomb-grade nuclear waste through her home state.
The Las Vegas Sun (http://bit.ly/130TXZE ) reports that she berated the department for failing to provide Congress with adequate information about the plan to ship the canisters from the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee to a Nevada National Security Site. Continue reading
Deep burial a cheaper way than MOX to dispose of plutonium
Nuclear waste: DC has ignored a cheaper way to dispose of plutonium — until now Sentinel.com, Douglas Birch & R. Jeffrey Smith The Center for Public Integrity, 7 July 13,
For the past decade, Washington has known how to dispose of excess U.S. plutonium at a cost estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars less than what the Energy Department is spending on a South Carolina factory meant to transform plutonium into fuel for nuclear reactors.
Instead of burning the plutonium, the cheaper alternative mixes it with glass or ceramics and some other materials, so it can be buried deep underground. Continue reading
Nuclear waste experts reject Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel program
Nuclear waste: DC has ignored a cheaper way to dispose of plutonium — until now Sentinel.com, Douglas Birch & R. Jeffrey Smith The Center for Public Integrity, 7 July 13, “………Frank von Hippel, a White House science official in the early 1990’s who chaired a working group on Russia’s weapons plutonium, said he initially supported the MOX plant because the threat was high and MOX was the only solution Russia would support. But Russia’s decision since then to burn its new MOX fuel in reactors that can actually produce more plutonium was the last straw for von Hippel. As a result, he said, the MOX plant “[has] become from my point of view a pretty meaningless program” — one that’s cost billions of dollars so far.
Last May, von Hippel joined three other prominent scientists in a commentary published in Nature, entitled, “Time to Bury Plutonium,” in which they criticized Britain’s draft plans to dispose of its huge stockpile of surplus reactor plutonium by building a new MOX plant of its own. The four authors wrote that MOX programs worldwide have been plagued by extravagant expenses, technology breakdowns and design flaws.
In France, Areva’s recycling of plutonium from spent fuel for MOX adds about $750 million each year to the cost of electricity, according to a French study in 2000 cited by their article. Britain closed its Sellafield MOX plant in 2011, they pointed out, after it operated at just 1 percent of capacity for a decade.
The authors urged the country to “give plutonium immobilization another look … Although the technique has not been demonstrated at full scale, there is substantial literature on how to do it. Immobilization should be easier and cheaper than MOX production.” Von Hippel separately said that according to his calculations, it could be as much as seven times cheaper. Continue reading
The failure of the South Carolina Mixed Oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel plant
Nuclear waste: DC has ignored a cheaper way to dispose of plutonium — until now Sentinel.com, Douglas Birch & R. Jeffrey Smith The Center for Public Integrity, 7 July 13, “………..Unrealized ambitions
Although the White House has not allocated any additional funding for the South Carolina plant after 2014, the Energy Department claims it remains in contention as a solution to the plutonium disposal problem. But already it’s clear that the original U.S. goal for the program — reducing the world’s supply of nuclear explosive material by 68 tons – will not be realized.
Washington compromised repeatedly with Russia to pursue a program that even for some of its initial supporters has long since ceased to be a top nonproliferation priority. Meanwhile, the price of the MOX fuel factory soared far beyond the Energy department’s estimates, making it one of many, multi-billion dollar, Energy Department programs accused of being poorly run.
“MOX is just a sample of a larger problem,” says Gene Aloise, a senior federal auditor who tracked nonproliferation projects for the Government Accountability Office from 1994 to 2012.
The result is that Washington has spent at least $3.7 billion on a plant to manufacture reactor fuel no U.S. utility is eager to buy, after rejecting alternatives that likely would have been cheaper.
“The government’s plutonium plan is a pluperfect disaster,” Sen. Edward Markey, a newly-elected Massachusetts Democrat, told the Center for Public Integrity in a statement. “And all to produce $2 billion worth of reactor fuel at a cost of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars and damage to our global non-proliferation efforts.” Markey was the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, has long been active on nuclear safety issues, and in 1986 chaired hearings on the Chernobyl disaster.
The factory’s fate might be decided next year, as the administration prefers, after another $320 million is spent on its construction. Or Congress might decide to take swifter and more decisive action in budget legislation this summer……..And after twenty years of negotiations, promises and plans, and billions in spending, the U.S. appears no closer — in its principal plutonium disposal efforts — to the goal of making the world safer from a nuclear disaster.http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/070513_nuclear_waste/nuclear-waste-dc-has-ignored-cheaper-way-dispose-plutonium-until-now/
Secret promises to USA, by Japan, to burn plutonium
Mainichi: Japan’s secret promise with U.S. to burn plutonium — “It is abnormal for sure” — “Expected to stir up controversy” http://enenews.com/mainichi-japan-secretly-promised-to-burn-plutonium-it-is-abnormal-for-sure-expected-to-stir-up-controversy
Title: Japan made secret promise with U.S. to restart pluthermal nuclear program
Source: Mainichi
Date: June 25, 2013
A Japanese prime ministerial envoy secretly promised to the United States that Japan would resume its controversial “pluthermal” program, using light-water reactors to burn plutonium, according to documents obtained by the Mainichi.
The secret promise was made by Hiroshi Ogushi, then parliamentary secretary of the Cabinet Office, to Daniel Poneman, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, during Ogushi’s visit to the United States on behalf of then Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in September last year.
[…] The fact that a Japanese official promised to the U.S. to implement such a controversial project without a prior explanation to the Japanese public is expected to stir up controversy. […]
“It is abnormal for sure,” said one official with the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy. […]
See also: Plutonium-burning reactors to restart in Japan? — Gov’t forcing companies to use MOX fuel — Official: “We have no other choice”
Nuclear waste cleanup a financial bonanza for UK firm
Nuclear waste: Clean-up Quandary.FT, By Sylvia Pfeifer, 1 July 13, More reactors are to be built but a permanent solution for high-level waste remains elusive …….
More than 50 years after the world’s first commercial nuclear power plants started operating in the UK and the US, the tens of thousands of tonnes of spent nuclear fuel in the world still has to find a permanent home.
The absence of a permanent solution for high-level waste is one of the biggest challenges facing the industry as it tries to recover from the deadly disaster at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011. Several governments scaled back their expansion plans, with Germany announcing plans to close all its reactors. The International Energy Agency last year predicted that global nuclear generating capacity would reach 580GW in 2035 – a 10 per cent drop from its forecast a year before.
Yet new reactors, and more waste, are not far off…..
Alvin Weinberg, an American nuclear pioneer, famously said that atomic power represents a Faustian bargain: a valuable source of electricity that carries with it an obligation to deal with the waste. “New nuclear should not go ahead until we have sorted out the waste problem,” says Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, adding that the environmental organisation is “concerned about a new round of spent fuel set to be created”…..
“We have an obligation to get it right . . . We are like a shopfront for the nuclear industry,” admits Tony Price, brought in recently by Nuclear Management Partners (NMP),as the managing director of Sellafield Limited. “It’s time now to really focus on delivery,” he adds………
In the short term, the pressure is on NMP to deliver at Sellafield. Yet the potential prize is much bigger than just cleaning up one of the world’s most polluted sites. There are potential export contracts for companies involved in the decommissioning work and for west Cumbria it offers much-needed employment opportunities. Success at Sellafield would also mean success on a wider scale.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/77c177ba-dcba-11e2-b52b-00144feab7de.html#axzz2XvB1ouop
A bad idea, burning radioactive trash in Fukushima
Nuclear Information and Resource Service Now here’s a bad idea: Tepco building incinerator for Fukushima radwaste. Will spread radiation through the air. http://bit.ly/11YFs9M Fukushima waste incinerator takes shape Construction of an incinerator is underway at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to burn the low-level waste (LLW) being generated from the clean-up and decommissioning of the site. (Diagram of planned incinerator below)
Update:
Small fire reported at Fukushima nuclear plant
TOKYO —
A fire broke out in a rubbish pile at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex on Tuesday, the operator said, the latest in a series of incidents at the crippled plant.
Workers discovered flames licking at piles of cardboard boxes placed near an incineration facility shortly before 1 p.m., Tokyo Electric Power Co said.
The fire damaged an area of about four meters by two meters, but was put out in a hour, it said.
The fire did not affect radiation levels in the plant, and no one was injured, it said.
TEPCO has struggled with a growing number of incidents at the plant including several leaks of radioactive water, more than two years after the worst nuclear disaster in a generation.
Improvised fixes put in place since the disaster leave it vulnerable to problems and at the mercy of nature, with no immediate end in sight, critics say.
© 2013 AFP
Global nuclear radioactive trash problem – no solution in sight
it’s just plain stupid to keep on making the stuff
Nuclear waste: Clean-up Quandary.FT, By Sylvia Pfeifer, 1 July 13 “….Today, apart from Finland and Sweden, most countries have not agreed on a site for their high-level waste. In the US, the issue has stalled after President Barack Obama withdrew support for a facility in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada. Britain, too, has gone back to the drawing board after Cumbria voted against storing the waste this year.
France, meanwhile, which derives 75 per cent of its electricity from nuclear energy, is seeking to store its waste underground near Bure, a remote area in the east of the country. Public debates have had to be postponed because of local opposition.
For now, spent fuel from the UK’s reactors is transported to Sellafield in specifically designed flasks, removed and stored in big ponds to cool. It is dissolved in nitric acid and separated into uranium (96 per cent), plutonium (1 per cent) and waste products (3 per cent). The high-level waste is fused into borosilicate glass using a process called vitrification. The resulting mixture is poured into stainless steel canisters and stored pending availability of an underground repository.
Cleaning up the legacy of the past is a particular problem for western nations such as the US and the UK and, to a lesser extent, France, whose involvement in the arms race has left them with military as well as civil waste. In the US, the former plutonium production facility at Hanford in Washington is the subject of a big clean-up operation and political wrangling about rising costs and delays, as well as concerns about contamination of groundwater.
In Europe, the true scale of the challenge is laid bare at Sellafield, the continent’s most complex facility which employs about 10,000 people. Decades of mismanagement and a lack of urgency have dogged the site, which was passed from one government agency to another. During the miners’ strike of 1972, when the imperative was to keep the lights on, the site’s Magnox power reactors were run flat-out, resulting in a faster build-up of spent fuel than they could handle. Much was dumped in the silos and ponds…….http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/77c177ba-dcba-11e2-b52b-00144feab7de.html#axzz2XvB1ouop
A handsome dowry for an ugly bride – bribing communities to host nuclear wastes
On Nuclear Waste Bill, Senators Look to Public for Help By MATTHEW L. WALD. NYT 29 June 13After the Obama administration abandoned plans in 2009 to bury nuclear waste at a repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, a spot chosen by leading senators more than 20 years earlier, a study commission recommended that a new location be picked through “a consent-based process.”
On Thursday, a group of senators introduced a bill, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act, that would establish such a process, based in part on public comments solicited online by the bill’s sponsors — a practice generally reserved for rules proposed by federal agencies. Call it consent-based legislation.
“The Senate did something highly unusual,” said Per F. Peterson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a public policy expert. He said the way the legislation was developed resembled the process used by the study commission, which held hearings around the country. Taking public comment “establishes a strong foundation for the legislation to be successful if passed by the Senate and then by the House,’’ he said…….
Under the new bill, a new federal agency would be empowered to cut a deal with a state and local governments, subject to approval by Congress.
It does not define the elements of such a deal, but the expectation is that the government would offer what amounted to a handsome dowry for an ugly bride: money for roads, universities or other goodies.
In the interim, the bill would allow above-ground storage of nuclear waste in a central location, a temporary resolution to a problem that has arisen asreactors retire and the waste is orphaned.
The bill was introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development; Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican; Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee; and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the ranking Republican member.
Congress leaves town for the Fourth of July recess on Friday, but the Senate could take up the measure later this year. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/on-nuclear-waste-bill-senators-look-to-public-for-help/?_r=0
Germany’s nuclear waste “depository site law”
What to do with nuclear waste? DW 28 June 13 Fifty years after Germany began using nuclear power, the country is once again looking for a suitable nuclear waste storage facility. Search priorities include transparency, safety and scientific criteria.
The German government, together with the opposition, hopes to approve a so-called depository site law for nuclear waste ahead of federal elections in September. The Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, on Friday (June 28) will vote on the planned legislation.
After a nearly 35-year controversy over the suitability of a salt mine in Gorleben in northern Germany as a potential site for storing high-level nuclear waste, the search for a storage site will begin again. The bipartisan compromise is considered historic. Continue reading
A critical question – who pays for long term nuclear waste storage?
What to do with nuclear waste? DW 28 June 3 “……..Who pays? The forum Ecological-Social Market Economy has evaluated the Swiss study and, based on its findings, estimated the future costs for storing nuclear waste from Germany’s eight deactivated and nine active nuclear power plants. According to conservative calculations by the researchers, Germany can reckon with storage costs of about 18 billion euros in the future.
The German Atom Forum, comprised of all German nuclear power plant operators, intends to pay as little as possible for storage and rejected shouldering costs for the new site search. In their opinion´”there is no legal basis” for them to pay and all costs should be “financed by taxpayers.”
Environment Minister Peter Altmaier has a different view. He intends to have the nuclear plant operators take responsibility for the waste they generate. http://www.dw.de/what-to-do-with-nuclear-waste/a-16755844
Fear and loathing in USA over nuclear wastes
Stored fuel requires guards and other continuing expenses, which are significant if there is no reactor nearby. Those expenses eventually fall on federal taxpayers because the Energy Department has defaulted on contracts it signed in the 1980s to begin accepting the wastes for burial in 1998. As a result, financial penalties the federal government must pay to the nuclear utilities for failing to dispose of the waste now amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Quarrels Continue Over Permanent Repository for Nuclear Waste http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/business/energy-environment/quarrels-continue-over-permanent-repository-for-nuclear-waste.html?_r=0 By MATTHEW L. WALD June 27, 2013 WASHINGTON — As more nuclear reactors across the country are closed, the problem of what to do with their waste is becoming more urgent, government officials and private experts said at a conference here this week.
To address the problem, a bipartisan group of four senators introduced a bill on Thursday that would provide for temporary, centralized storage, even as House leaders remained focused on trying to revive plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository that the Obama administration has declared dead.
Nuclear waste is accumulating in steel and concrete storage casks at reactor sites around the country. But the casks — sealed boxes of many tons — cannot be sent to any repository because they are not compatible, said Jeff Williams, director of the Energy Department’s Nuclear Fuel Storage and Transportation Planning Project.
In addition, a growing number of the sites no longer have an operating reactor or the associated fuel-handling equipment, so they have no way to move the highly radioactive fuel to another storage package.
Experts say the amount of orphaned nuclear waste is mounting. Nuclear utilities have announced the retirement of an additional four reactors so far this year, which leaves three more sites without an operating reactor. Before that development, the Energy Department counted nine such sites, with about 2,800 tons of fuel in 248 casks and was hoping to establish a pilot-scale interim storage plant for that fuel. Continue reading
Us nuclear corporations regulate the regulators: Indian point has no license
“The regulators are basically being regulated by the corporations that they’re supposedly overseeing,”
GERIATRIC NUCLEAR REACTORS COULD KILL US ALL, VICE NEWS, By Peter Rugh 26 June 13 In America, you need a license to drive an automobile, to operate heavy machinery, to hunt and fish, but apparently not to run a nuclear reactor. Entergy Corp. is slated to become the first company in history to operate a reactor without a license this fall. The Louisiana-based energy corporation’s rogue reactor is located at its Indian Point Energy Center in 
Buchanan, NY—just 24 miles from Manhattan. Entergy Corp’s license to run its Indian Point 2 reactor expires on September 28. The regulations of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is charged with overseeing the civilian use of nuclear power, says it is prepared to grant the license but its hands are tied by legal challenges mounted by New York State and a federal court ruling last year. The ruling dismissed the agency’s radioactive waste management plans as inadequate.
Most of America’s nuclear plants were built in the 60s and 70s. They were given shelf lives of 40 years. It was assumed by the industry at the time of their construction that when the millennium rolled around there would be new plants up, running, and ready to replace the old fleet. But between then and now interest in nuclear power has waned due to cost and the public’s reaction to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and other nuclear calamities. Instead, the energy industry has sought to renew the licenses on the reactors they already operate, while keeping the cost of infrastructure improvements to a bare minimum. They’ve encountered little resistance from the NRC, which has approved 73 separate license renewals and only denied one single application in its history.
Meanwhile, the waste has piled up. The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry policy group, estimates that US’s 104 commercial reactors have generated 69,720 metric tons of radioactive waste (spent-fuel) over the past four decades, with each plant chipping in approximately 2,000 to 2,300 metric tons each year. Nobody knows what to do with it all. Plant operators are, in a sense, shitting where they eat at the moment by storing nuclear waste onsite at the plants where it is generated. ….. Continue reading
Savannah River Mixed Oxide Nuclear Fuel (MOX) a costly failure
Von Hippel last May joined three other scientists in advocating the burial alternative in a scientific journal article about Britain’s plutonium stocks. One co-author was Rodney Ewing, who Obama has since appointed to head a federal nuclear waste panel, and another was Allison MacFarlane, now chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The MOX plant, if it is completed, needs an NRC license……
Administration officials say the main purpose of their “strategic reassessment” is to reexamine the burial alternative. A DOE report in 2002 concluded it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars less than building the MOX plant.
Energy Department Nuclear Nonproliferation Program Plagued By Problems, HUFFINGTON POST , 24 June 13 A multibillion-dollar U.S.-led effort to stem the threat of a terrorist nuclear blast is slowly unraveling because of huge cost overruns at a federal installation in South Carolina and stubborn resistance in Moscow to fulfilling the program’s chief goal, according to U.S. officials and independent experts.
The 13-year old Energy Department program, authorized in agreements with Moscow spanning three presidents, is meant to transform excess plutonium taken from retired U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons into fuel for nuclear plants, so that it can’t be stolen and misused.
But that ambitious goal has been blocked by a tangle of technical, diplomatic and financial problems. The Obama administration is now considering cancelling the project, an idea that has provoked furious opposition from some Republican lawmakers who say it is vital to U.S. national security.
Its potential demise has provoked cheers from some leading arms control and nonproliferation experts, however. They say that as a result of little-noticed revisions to the underlying pact with Moscow on the plutonium’s disposal, the deal might actually wind up promoting Russia’s production of as much or more plutonium as it was supposed to eliminate. To keep its end of the bargain, the U.S. has spent more than a decade and $3.7 billion building a problem-plagued factory for making the plutonium-laced reactor fuel, located at the government’s Savannah River complex south of Aiken. Its construction and related costs have recently hit more than $680 million a year, but Congress is now considering a White House plan to shrink that spending substantially. Continue reading
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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