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50 years of shocking neglect- the danger of UK’s Sellafield nuclear site

The plant is the UK’s largest and most hazardous nuclear site, storing enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Sellafield nuclear waste storage poses ‘intolerable risk’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-20228176  7 November 2012 Sellafield is the UK’s largest and most hazardous nuclear site An “intolerable risk” is being posed by hazardous waste stored in run-down buildings at Sellafield nuclear plant, a watchdog has found.

The National Audit Office (NAO) also said that for 50 years, the operators of the Cumbria installation failed to develop a long-term plan for waste. Costs of plant-decommissioning has also spiralled out of control, it said. Operator Sellafield Ltd, said it welcomed the report’s findings and was “making improvements”. Continue reading →

November 7, 2012 Posted by | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Haphazard storage of radioactive rubble in Japan

local officials are breaking the law by failing to inform residents and ensure the sites are properly monitored.

 Koriyama’s case illustrates that much related to nuclear power – and its very powerful business interests – remains hidden from an increasingly distrustful public.

 Laws don’t require signs to be posted at these sites or ground water nearby to be monitored

“I’m very angry,”   “The city isn’t protecting us.”

Japan’s nuclear dilemma: What to do with all that nuclear waste?
Japanese citizens are balking at the lack of information and supervision of waste stored in public places, such as playgrounds. By Winifred Bird | Christian Science Monitor, 5 Nov 12, The small sandy square in front of Yasushi Takemoto’s apartment in Koriyama, a city of 328,000 about 150 miles north of Tokyo , looks like a normal public park. On a recent weekday morning, a group of children played on the swings while the retired dentistry professor strolled under the trees.

Beneath the soil in one unmarked, unfenced corner, however, lie hundreds of bags packed with radioactive dirt, sludge from drainage ditches, and other contaminated debris. Continue reading →

November 6, 2012 Posted by | Japan, wastes | Leave a comment

USA -Questions arise about shuttering of Kewaunee Nuclear PP -Waste storage problems!

According to that report, about 3,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel is in storage at nine sites across the country where commercial reactors have been shuttered.

“This all came as an awful surprise,” said Paplham. “That waste may be sitting there for 200 years.”

In the meantime, the residents around the Kewaunee plant are preparing for life without one of the area’s biggest employers and an indeterminate number of years living next to an impromptu nuclear waste storage facility.

“They were going to bury those rods under a mountain,” said Hardtke. “And yet now they are just going to let them sit there. I have kids here and grandkids, and we’re leaving them a mess.”

WSJ, 4 Nov 12 Residents who live near the Kewaunee Power Station with its 556-megawatt nuclear reactor still are absorbing the recent news that the plant will shut down in May, taking with it 655 jobs and leaving behind — possibly for decades — scores of concrete canisters filled with spent nuclear waste.

The loss of the jobs as well as the hundreds of thousands of dollars Dominion Resources pays locally in lieu of property taxes is unsettling enough, local officials say. More disturbing, they say, are the 42 containers of nuclear waste that will remain sitting just off the shore of Lake Michigan.

“We’ve been lied to for 35 years,” Dave Hardtke, chairman of the town of Carlton, said of the waste. “When they built that plant, the federal government said they were going to move the waste. That was 35 years ago, and look where it is sitting.”

The impending shutdown of the plant renewed attention on the national impasse over the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. And it is not just an issue at Kewaunee. More than 300 assemblies of spent nuclear fuel rods are submerged in a cooling pool on the site of the now-closed nuclear reactor at the Genoa Generating Station on the banks of the Mississippi River near La Crosse. The small reactor, adjacent to a traditional coal plant, was closed in 1987 but the fuel rods, with no central federal storage available, remain.

Continue reading →

November 4, 2012 Posted by | Reference, wastes | Leave a comment

Will the USA again make a ridiculous nuclear “Waste Confidence” rule?

Nuclear-Waste Rule Rewritten by September 2014, NRC Staff Says http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-19/nuclear-waste-rule-rewritten-by-september-2014-nrc-staff-says.html By Kasia Klimasinska – Oct 19, 2012 The staff of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said new court-ordered rules on storage of spent nuclear fuel to be completed by September 2014.

NRC’s staff plans to continue reviewing license applications and holding hearings, and final action is “the only licensing milestone that the staff will be unable to complete” before the waste rule is issued, according to documents posted today on NRC website.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington  ruled on June 8 that NRC rules on storage failed to fully evaluate risks and new standards must be drafted. The agency on Aug. 7 suspended final decisions pending the reassessment.

October 20, 2012 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

New Texas radioactive waste dump raises questions on water safety

“Our biggest concern of all is the water, and the risk of radioactivity getting into the water,” she said, adding that dumps are too close to the Ogalla Aquifer, which provides drinking water and farming water across a large band of the central-west United States

Nuclear waste dump opens offers a “Texas Solution” to nuclear waste. Courier Journal  October 19, 2012 by James Bruggers It’s not every day that one gets to stand in the bottom of a nuclear waste dump.

But yesterday I did just that, along with about a dozen other journalists one of the new low-level nuclear waste landfills operated by Waste Control Specialists  in West Texas,….At the federal dump, we went down 90 feet and were standing atop several feet of natural
and designed protective barrier, including concrete, plastic, clay and caliche, a sedimentary rock. Continue reading →

October 20, 2012 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Plutonium a nuclear servant that will become a nuclear killer

five years of meetings between Soviet and American scientists from the Federation of American Scientists about what to do with the separated plutonium. There is a tremendous pressure to use it. . . . It is as if we don’t know what to do with this unless we make it serve us, and that is exactly what I am beginning to think, that we cannot ask of the poison fire. If we want to make it serve us, it will kill us

Nuclear Guardianship The Search for New Perspectives  Lecture by Joanna Macy reprinted with permission from Poison Fire, Sacred Earth,  TESTIMONIES, LECTURES, CONCLUSIONS,  THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992 pages 256-258

To call this stuff “waste” is a misnomer, it is hardly an accurate term, because the strange and almost mythic character of the poison fire — uranium — and our processing of it has been that at every stage of the fuel cycle, everything that we have employed, every glove, every boot, every truck, every reactor, every facility, every mine, every heap of mill tailings, everything becomes not only contaminated, but contaminating.

And governments and industry and scientists themselves don’t know what on earth to do with it. They don’t know what to do with this stuff, and it is our most enduring legacy. They say they have a final solution to bury it in the ground in deep geological disposal, hiding it out of sight and out of mind, as if the earth were dead, as if the earth were not a living being, shifting with underground waters and seismic activities, as if the containers themselves could outlast a generation, which they cannot!

For nothing lasts as long, no container lasts as long as the poison fire itself. And it will leak out and out to contaminate. Continue reading →

October 19, 2012 Posted by | - plutonium, 2 WORLD | Leave a comment

MIchigan -Calls for temporary ‘hardened on-site storage’ of nuclear waste

“Users pay as taxpayers, too – for dry storage,” AP said. “Utilities that have run out of storage space in pools successfully sued the federal government for breach of contract, because it failed to keep to the 1998 deadline to establish long-term storage. By law, the money for dry casks cannot come from the nuclear waste fund, and must come from the federal budget.”

“We can’t keep generating more and more of this waste,” said Jackson, “It’s not socially responsible.”

Published: Monday, October 15, 2012

By Jim Bloch, Voice Reporter

Anti-nuclear activists like Brennain Lloyd of Northwatch and John Jackson of Great Lakes United, who spoke at St. Clair County Community College earlier this fall, oppose storing nuclear waste in deep geologic repositories like the one proposed by Ontario Power Generation a half-mile inland from Lake Huron near the Bruce Peninsula, 120 miles north-northeast of Port Huron.

They oppose reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods. They are critical of current methods of storing high level nuclear waste in cooling pools and dry casks.What do they propose to do with the more than 68,000 tons of spent fuel in the U.S. as of 2009, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is growing by 2,000-2,400 tons per year?

The short answer is hardened on-site storage of used fuel rods.

Eternal danger

The problem with high level nuclear waste is that it remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of years.

“Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium,” said a 2011 AP report. “About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life” – the time it takes to lose half its radioactivity – “(and) some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency. The rest, about 4 percent, is a cocktail of byproducts of fission that break down over much shorter time periods, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, which break down completely in about 300 years.”

Cesium-137 and strontium-90 are two of the isotopes that blanketed the countryside around the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine, which melted down in 1986, creating a zone of exclusion the size of New Jersey for the next three centuries.
Continue reading →

October 17, 2012 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Beautiful Lake Karachay – world’s most radioactively poisoned waterway

Meet the lake so polluted that spending an hour there would kill you http://grist.org/list/meet-the-lake-so-polluted-that-spending-an-hour-there-would-kill-you/ By Jess Zimmerman, 3 Oct 12,  Welcome to beautiful Lake Karachay, a Russian lake so tainted by nearby nuclear facilities that it’s considered the most polluted place on the planet. In 1990, just standing on the shore for an hour would give you a radiation dose of 600 roentgen, more than enough to kill you. On the plus side, lakefront property is probably really, really cheap. Continue reading →

October 10, 2012 Posted by | Russia, wastes | Leave a comment

East Kazakhstan’s 812 million tonnes of highly radioactive uranium tailings

Josef Stalin’s nuclear legacy remains in East Kazakhstan Scotsman.com, 9 October 2012  “…..It was over 20 years after the end of atomic testing in the Polygon that the world began to take notice, but Stalin’s legacy may yet have an impact that could threaten future generations across the globe. The mining of uranium to manufacture the atomic weapons tested in the Polygon has left a staggering 812 million tonnes of highly radioactive uranium tailings (waste byproduct). They lie in dilapidated dumps in four of the five Central Asian republics, posing not just an imminent threat to the environment but a potential flashpoint for violence and conflict. Continue reading →

October 9, 2012 Posted by | Kazakhstan, Reference, Uranium, wastes | Leave a comment

UK’s Cumbrian nuclear waste site dilemma

About 1,000 construction workers would take an estimated 15 years to complete it at a projected cost of between £12bn and £20bn.

Nuclear waste disposal: Where in Cumbria to bury it? BBC News 8 Oct 12 The need for deep underground nuclear waste storage is becoming crucial Arguments over nuclear waste disposal have been raging for decades, especially in Cumbria where the search continues for a site suitable for storing waste for tens of thousands of years.

Nuclear and scientific experts disagree about geological issues and, combined with Cumbrian public concerns at having an underground repository for nuclear waste, the dilemma continues. Continue reading →

October 9, 2012 Posted by | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Powerful opposition growing against nuclear waste in Saskatchewan

The Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women’s Circle Corporation of Saskatchewan also passed a resolution last year, opposing the transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan. The resolution was then adopted by the Native Women’s Association of Canada at its annual general assembly held in Saskatoon in August 2012.

Stopping Nuclear Waste in its Tracks Communities, Indigenous organizations pass resolutions against transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan The Dominion,  by SANDRA CUFFE, 8 Oct 12, Growing numbers of communities in Saskatchewan are vowing to block nuclear waste from being transported through their territory BEAUVAL, SK—Three places in northern Saskatchewan may be on the map in Canada’s search for a high-level radioactive waste dump site, but the spent nuclear fuel bundles may be stopped in their tracks.

 

Communities and Indigenous organizations along potential transport routes and
beyond have been passing resolutions against nuclear waste. Continue reading →

October 9, 2012 Posted by | Canada, opposition to nuclear, wastes | Leave a comment

UK’s nuclear waste burial problems – geology and public acceptance

Criteria for site selection include relatively flat rock where groundwater moves slowly in simple formations which avoids complex, potentially leaky faultlines.

UK limits nuclear waste disposal options MENAFN – Arab News – 08/10/2012 Britain risks eroding support for nuclear power if it buries long-term waste near an existing processing facility without considering wider, potentially safer options. Continue reading →

October 9, 2012 Posted by | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Japan’s proposed nuclear waste dump, close to cultural icon

Fukushima  Nuclear Crisis Update for October 2nd to October 4th, 2012 Greenpeace International,  by Christine McCann – October 5, 2012 “…Waste Removal and Storage Joining the chorus of voices opposing the government’s recent decision to build a nuclear waste depository in a national forest in Ibaraki Prefecture, the Tokugawa Museum is protesting the location choice, which is only 3 km from a forest it owns. That forest is home to a mountain villa built in 1886 by the 11th lord of the Mito domain and the brother of the last Tokugawa shogun. The museum plans to have it designated as a national important cultural asset. “We’re worried about all sorts of rumors [about radioactivity] ahead of our plan to have the villa designated an important cultural asset. We’ll strongly oppose construction.” http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/fukushima-nuclear-crisis-update-for-october-2/blog/42456/

October 6, 2012 Posted by | Japan, wastes | Leave a comment

Nuclear wastes- deep burial is the only option

Worldwide, 240,000 tonnes of spent fuel from nuclear reactors is in storage, mostly in surface facilities, according to Alexander Bychkov of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The pile of spent fuel — which remains dangerously radioactive for several hundred thousand years — continues to grow at a rate of 11,000 tonnes a year.

“Wait and see is not an option; you would put an undue burden on future generations.”

Nuclear waste: bury it deep, say the planners The Star.com,  October 01, 2012
 John Spears Business Reporter Don’t expect the cut and thrust of debate when nuclear waste planners gather to discuss what to do with the world’s tonnes of radioactive spent fuel.

That argument is over, an international conference heard Monday. We have to bury it deep, delegates were told. And we have to do it now. “There is no alternative to geological disposal,” bluntly declared Luis Echavarri, of the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency. Continue reading →

October 3, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, wastes | 3 Comments

Radioactive wastes in space – oh what a lovely idea!

Nuclear waste to fuel Neptune mission THE AUSTRALIAN BY: JONATHAN LEAKE  The Times September 30, 2012 BRITAIN’S burgeoning stockpile of nuclear waste may finally be put to good use – as fuel for Europe’s future missions to the solar system’s most distant and exotic planets such as Uranus and Neptune.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and Britain’s National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) want to use radioactive isotopes harvested from the waste to make the nuclear batteries essential to power such space probes. Continue reading →

October 1, 2012 Posted by | EUROPE, technology, wastes | 1 Comment

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