Tories, Labour clash over Milton Keynes nuclear waste claims
Claims that Milton Keynes is being considered as a site to store nuclear
waste have sparked a war of words between the Labour and Conservative
parties. The Labour Leader of Milton Keynes City Council Peter Marland
claimed that a site in the north of the city had been identified as a
potential dumping ground for nuclear waste.
He said that Nuclear Waste
Services, the body responsible for managing the nuclear waste generated
from UK power stations, has contacted the council about an “interested
party” looking for a site. Nuclear Waste Services has been approached for
comment. In an email seen by the BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service
(LDRS) a council official said they had been contacted by a member of the
government body who “confirmed that they will ‘close out’ with the
interested party, meaning the initial assessment of a site in MK will go no
further”.
Milton Keynes Labour said it had launched a petition to oppose
the “plans” that will be sent to the Secretary of State for Energy
Security and Net Zero, Claire Coutinho.
Bucks Free Press 21st Nov 2023
UK Has £10 Billion Per Nuclear Reactor Decommissioning Bottomless Pit
estimate in late 2022 was that the program was likely to cost £260 billion given the cost trends. That’s £10.4 billion per reactor, an order of magnitude higher than the industry average of three years ago.
Whether £6 billion or £10 billion, these numbers should be giving national energy policy makers pause. After all, those costs are going to be paid in the future in future value dollars that will be inflated. They won’t be getting magically smaller due to discounting, but should be included in cost cases with the discounting rates built in.
Clean Technica, , Michael Barnard
The decommissioning costs for the UK’s nuclear generation are coming home to roost, and they are laying golden eggs for the firms that won the business. For UK citizens, not so much. Despite the very high costs of both the new nuclear reactors at Hinkley Site C, the rapidly rising costs of clean up and the much cheaper alternatives available, the country’s current administration remains committed to the technology. Something is likely to give.
The UK is like the USA and France, a western nuclear military power. They built and operated four nuclear powered submarines with nuclear missiles and two nuclear powered aircraft carriers. That gave them one of the preconditions for success for commercial nuclear electricity generation.
They built all of the 14 shut down and 9 currently operating nuclear generation plants between 1957 and 1995, satisfying the conditions of success of a three to four decade build out to maintain master builders, creation of a nuclear construction industry with skilled, certified and security validated resources, and building a couple of dozen reactors to amortize the national program across.
They built all reactors with a very narrow set of designs, first the Magnox which also created weapons grade plutonium and then the AGR which was a modified Magnox optimized for electricity generation, not plutonium manufacturing. The high similarity and only two designs across all 23 reactors satisfied another criterion for success of a nuclear program…………….
Naturally, the nuclear program was a national strategic priority for the UK with bi-partisan support between the Conservatives and Labour, satisfying another condition of success.
This was a blueprint for a successful nuclear electrical generation program, and why nuclear generation is a poor fit for free market economics.
Despite no longer having the obvious conditions for success for a new nuclear program, the British government got behind the Hinkley Point C construction of two new EPR reactors with their unproven design. That program is years late and 50% over budget as a result. The reactors are GW scale, with 3.2 GW between the two reactors so have one condition for success out of six. The UK government also have planned two EPRs at the Sizewell site, with one of the innumerable Conservative Prime Ministers of the past decade committing £100 million of governmental money in a vain attempt to get any private investors interested. No schedule has been set for construction of those reactors.
But now the reactors are shut down or about to be shut down. Most of the remaining operating reactors will be off the grid by 2028, with only Sizewell B hanging on until 2035. All reactors had roughly a 40 year lifespan, not the 60 to 80 years often claimed by the industry, including the 60 year claim for Hinkley Point C.
How much will it cost to decommission those 23 reactors and the two Hinkley Point C reactors still under construction? The last time I looked at nuclear decommissioning costs and duration was three years ago. At the time, the average was roughly a billion US dollars and a century of duration per site.
Well, the UK’s nuclear program is definitely exceeding that. As of late 2022, the official estimate of the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) was £149 billion. Assuming Hinkley Site C was rolled into that number, that would be a cost of £6 billion per reactor, or more than many nuclear advocates claim new nuclear can be built for.
However, Stephen Thomas, a professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich and a regular analyst of the nuclear industry with a publication history on energy and nuclear programs with a global reach stretching back to 2004, has a slightly different expectation. He first published on the UK’s NDA in 2005 and has been tracking costs closely since, including with freedom of information requests to get accurate numbers.
His estimate in late 2022 was that the program was likely to cost £260 billion given the cost trends. That’s £10.4 billion per reactor, an order of magnitude higher than the industry average of three years ago.
Whether £6 billion or £10 billion, these numbers should be giving national energy policy makers pause. After all, those costs are going to be paid in the future in future value dollars that will be inflated. They won’t be getting magically smaller due to discounting, but should be included in cost cases with the discounting rates built in.
Given the magnitude of the costs, effectively every MWh generated by the UK fleet of reactors cost substantially more than its official stated cost. The price will be paid, after all.
If there were no alternatives to nuclear generation, then this wouldn’t be a problem compared to global warming. But, of course, this is 2023 and there are proven, effective, efficient and reliable forms of low-carbon electrical generation that do compete with nuclear energy, wind and solar. ……………………………………
The full lifecycle costs of nuclear energy are fairly well established now, and they are much higher than for renewables, transmission and storage. The conditions for success for nuclear programs are well established as well, and there isn’t a single country in the world that has fulfilled them in the 21st Century. Even China has failed, in my assessment as their industrial policy of exporting nuclear reactors of any type foreign buyers might want overrode energy policy requirements to build only a single design.
It’s unclear to me what blend of ideology, tribalism and magical thinking are combining to make countries think that their nuclear programs are unique, and that they will succeed at them when there are clear alternatives. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/19/uk-has-e10-billion-per-nuclear-reactor-decommissioning-bottomless-pit/
The Deeper Dig: A plan for what’s left of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant
Vermont’s only nuclear plant is about two years away from being fully decommissioned.
VT Digger By Emma Cotton and Sam Gale Rosen, November 20, 2023
For decades, Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power plant in Vernon, was the largest producer of electricity for the state.
The plant has been shut down since 2014, and the company that now owns it is in the process of deconstructing it. That company, NorthStar, has recently submitted a plan that describes in detail the final steps of decommissioning, which is projected to be completed ahead of schedule, by 2026.
However, national developments mean that radioactive spent fuel on the site is likely to stay where it is for the foreseeable future.
Host Sam Gale Rosen spoke to VTDigger environmental reporter Emma Cotton, who has been covering the decommissioning process.
Emma:………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… In 2010, Vermont lawmakers voted in favor of denying that 20-year license renewal. They had safety concerns, particularly after the plant had a tritium leak, which is a radioactive substance. That decision became the subject of a federal lawsuit about whether the state or the feds had authority over the plant. But soon enough, that issue was of little consequence. In 2013, citing the economic environment, Entergy announced that it plans to shut Vermont Yankee down
It officially disconnected from the grid and shut down on Dec. 29, 2014. And then the private company NorthStar — which decommissions nuclear plants and other energy facilities like coal plants around the country — they bought Vermont Yankee in 2019, and they are using funds set aside by Entergy to complete this decommissioning work…………………
Vermont’s only nuclear plant is about two years away from being fully decommissioned, at which point the site will look a lot like an open lot, with the exception of 58 spent fuel casks, which will remain there, likely, for a long time……………………………………………………………………………………….
Sam: So they’re on track to have the facility disassembled before 2026. But the other thing you’ve been covering is what happens to the spent fuel, right?
Emma: Yeah, this is kind of the elephant in the room, I think, for Vernon, the town where this is located. So after the fuel rods were used to heat water, they were transferred to cooling towers, and the process of cooling brought their radioactivity down. For a long time nuclear plants around the country were designed to temporarily store spent fuel this way, in cooling pools, and then they would be transferred to one or more federally designated areas for permanent storage.
But the federal government has not found a permanent place to store spent fuel. There has been a lot of conversation about a site in Nevada — Yucca Mountain — but there has been strong local opposition to storing the entire country’s nuclear waste there.
So nuclear plant owners had to find another storage solution. And so they started storing spent fuel in what are called dry casks, which are metal or concrete cylinders that form shells outside of the fuel rods. And according to the NRC, that shell shields people pretty effectively from this highly radioactive spent fuel. So Entergy transferred all of their spent fuel into dry casks, and now there are 58 of those that remain on the site. It’s a 2-acre part of the parcel.
NorthStar does ship some radioactive material to a facility in Texas, but it doesn’t have anywhere to send its spent fuel. So according to Northstar CEO, Scott State, the fuel will remain there until the feds come up with another plan. And that could be a while. So NorthStar will own the spent fuel until it’s removed from the property……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://vtdigger.org/2023/11/20/the-deeper-dig-a-plan-for-whats-left-of-vermont-yankee-nuclear-power-plant
Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs
The workers who make pits face these risks every day
The U.S. is ramping up construction of new “plutonium pits” for nuclear weapons
Scientific American, BY SARAH SCOLES 1 Dec 23 [excellent illustrations]
This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.
Within every American nuclear weapon sits a bowling-ball-size sphere of the strangest element on the planet. This sphere, called a plutonium pit, is the bomb’s central core. It’s surrounded by conventional explosives. When those explosives blow, the plutonium is compressed, and its atoms begin to split, releasing radiation and heating the material around it. The reaction ignites the sequence of events that makes nuclear weapons nuclear.
In early nuclear bombs, like the ones the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II, the fission of plutonium or uranium and the fatal energy released were the end of the story. In modern weapons, plutonium fission ignites a second, more powerful stage in which hydrogen atoms undergo nuclear fusion, releasing even more energy. The U.S. hasn’t made these pits in a significant way since the late 1980s.
But that is changing. The country is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, making upgrades to old weapons and building new ones. The effort includes updated missiles, a new weapon design, alterations to existing designs and new pits. To accomplish the last item, the National Nuclear Security Administration has enacted a controversial plan to produce 50 new pits a year at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and 30 pits a year at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. The first pits will be designed for a weapon called W87-1, which will tip the new intercontinental ballistic missile, called Sentinel. After that the complex will produce pits for other bomb designs.
Not everyone believes this work is necessary. Pit production foments controversy because it’s costly and potentially risky and because the existing pits might still work for a while. The physics of plutonium is complex, and no one knows when the original pits will expire. The details of how the pits are made and how they work are among America’s most closely guarded secrets. Yet in June 2023 Los Alamos officials invited a group of journalists to tour the facility for the first time in years.
We were there as the lab and the broader National Nuclear Security Administration Complex were embarking on a charm offensive to support the new plutonium work. They have to win over the tax-paying public and recruit some 2,500 new employees for the job. Some of those workers must do high-hazard work that requires expertise the country has largely let slip since the last days of the cold war. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
…………………..The plutonium used for weapons exists only because people made it.
……………………………………………….. …….Plutonium’s genesis was repeated in reactors for decades. In fact, scientists made so much that no new plutonium is required for the new pits at Savannah River and Los Alamos—the current supply can be repurposed, reshaped, reborn.
None of those actions, though, will be simple because plutonium is not simple……………………………………………………………………………………….. Its most famous trick, of course, is its propensity for radioactive decay, through which it transforms itself out of existence.
This tendency is also what makes it so dangerous. Inhaled plutonium decays in the body, releasing alpha particles (helium nuclei) that can wreak havoc. The isotope plutonium 238, used as a heat and power source but not in weapons, exhibits other strange behaviors. “If you spill it in the laboratory, it will move around on its own,” Martz says. The oomph from a plutonium atom’s decay sends it shooting across a surface. “It can get everywhere,” he adds.
Plutonium’s strangeness comes from its arrangement of electrons……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
In the excitement of these early scientific discoveries, the point of the work would sometimes get lost: it was all in the service of creating a deadly superweapon. In 1945 the U.S. dropped a uranium fission bomb on Hiroshima and then sent a plutonium bomb—essentially a pit encased in explosives—to devastate Nagasaki. The bombs killed tens of thousands of people immediately and more after the fact. As Manhattan Project physicist I. I. Rabi had feared, according to a quotation in the 2005 book American Prometheus, “the culmination of three centuries of physics” was a weapon of mass destruction.
Soon after the war, production of plutonium pits migrated to a facility outside Boulder, Colo. Called Rocky Flats, it could churn out thousands of pits a year—a level of productivity perhaps enabled by its violation of environmental regulations, which in 1989 resulted in a federal raid and then a permanent shutdown. “The public wasn’t considered at the time,” says Bob Webster, deputy director of weapons at Los Alamos. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
How aging affects a pit is the subject of contention, but some things are certain: As the plutonium atoms in a pit decay, their products damage the crystal structure of the plutonium that remains, creating voids and defects. These decays also contaminate the pit with helium, americium, uranium and neptunium, among other things. In 50 years a kilogram of plutonium will amass around 0.2 liter of helium. As pits change, their performance and safety in any conditions—including just sitting on a shelf—become questionable.
Scientists still don’t know the lifetime of a plutonium pit. …………………………………………………….. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s own studies have suggested the pits will last at least 150 years but also that their degradation could result in surprise defects. And scientists may never know exactly what those defects do or how they would affect an explosion because the ostensible point of nuclear weapons is to never use them.
So far restarting American pit production is proving challenging. Los Alamos’s efforts are at least a year behind schedule, and Savannah River’s are more like five years delayed.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and other critics have claimed that PF-4 isn’t resilient enough against the kind of earthquake geologists now know could occur in Los Alamos. Such significant shaking and the fires it could cause, the board alleged at a hearing last year, could result in plutonium contamination that reaches the public.
……………………… Other safety concerns have come up recently, though. In May the National Nuclear Security Administration released an investigation about four 2021 incidents: one criticality safety violation, one breach that resulted in skin contamination for three workers, and two flooding events that sent water toward fissionable materials. The agency determined that the contractor that manages Los Alamos had violated safety, procedural, management and quality-assurance rules.
………………………………………………………………………………………….. On the tour, we are forbidden from setting our notebooks down lest potential contamination stick to them. Should we drop them, a radiological control technician—who has been following us the whole time and scans our hands and feet for radioactivity anytime we leave a room—would measure each page before returning them.
…………………… In some rooms, radioactive waste is packaged and waiting to go to a storage facility, with the dosage one might receive from standing near it written on the ground. We are never allowed to forget that this is a dangerous place.
The workers who make pits face these risks every day………………………………………………………………………………
All of this effort and investment is being made in the hopes that the pits never serve their active purpose. The U.S., like all nuclear nations, stockpiles weapons in a delicate game of deterrence, the idea being that the existence of our equally or more capable weapons will stop others from using theirs. In this strategy, the pits’ true purpose is to sit idly as a threat. But for the strategy to work, the country must be willing to follow through on that threat.
……………………………………. The fear people feel when confronted with plutonium has degraded over time. But the atomic age is renewing, and we will all have to grapple afresh with the coiled terror of these powerful weapons. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-scenes-at-a-u-s-factory-building-new-nuclear-bombs/
Uncharted waters: Navy navigating first-ever dismantling of nuclear-powered carrier
The challenges for the Navy to dispose of the former USS Enterprise have driven the service to stand up a new office to deal both with “The Big E” and the pipeline of Nimitz-class carriers to come.
Breaking Defense, By JUSTIN KATZon November 15, 2023
WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, the US Navy has considered the former Enterprise (CVN-65) no longer operational. In fact, since 2018, the 1,101-foot behemoth has been mostly floating pier side in Newport News, Va., awaiting final dismantlement and disposal.
Ships come and go in the Navy, but their disposal is not usually such a prolonged and complicated affair. They can be used as target practice for what the Navy calls a “SINKEX” or handed over to scrapping and salvaging companies, among other options.
But for a host of reasons, those routes are non-starters for the service’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Instead, after studying the problem for years, the service has finally settled on a path forward: enlisting commercial industry for a job it has historically done itself, and likely creating a new norm for how all nuclear-powered carriers will be disposed of going forward.
To lead that charge, Breaking Defense has learned the Navy has set up a new office just to focus on the inactivation and disposal of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers…….
Whatever the service ends up doing, both analysts and the Navy have said it will likely set precedents for future carriers facing disposal, and the clock is ticking. The longer it takes, the more likely it is the Pentagon will risk a buildup of older carriers taking up various private and public ports around the country.
Even if everything goes according to the Navy’s preliminary plans, time is not on the service’s side. Public Navy documents show that Enterprise will not begin dismantlement until 2025, and the work will continue through 2029 — meaning even if everything stays on track, the work will be ongoing when the second nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Nimitz (CVN-68), is scheduled to leave the operational fleet in 2026. The USS Eisenhower (CVN-69) will follow suit not long after.
“The Navy has really had a tough time figuring out … what’s the process we’d go about dismantling this thing,” said Bryan Clark, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and retired submariner. “That’s why the Enterprise in particular has been sitting around waiting to be dismantled. And we’re going to have the same problem with the Nimitz.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://breakingdefense.com/2023/11/uncharted-waters-navy-navigating-first-ever-dismantling-of-nuclear-powered-carrier/
Who will clean up America’s nuclear wastes in Greenland?
Maine Voices: Long-buried U.S. nuclear waste would complicate any bid for Greenland https://www.pressherald.com/2019/08/24/maine-voices-long-buried-u-s-nuclear-waste-would-complicate-trumps-bid-for-greenland/
Would the U.S. or Denmark be responsible for cleaning up over 47,000 gallons of Cold War-era radioactive waste?
Collective calls on Pacific leaders to oppose Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge
The Pacific Collective on Nuclear Issues has denounced once again the dumping of radioactive wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, calling on Pacific leaders to suspend Japan’s status as a Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) dialogue partner.
The Collective, composed of civil society groups, non-governmental organizations and movements in the Pacific, issued a statement this week, during which the 52nd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting was held in the Cook Islands.
The statement condemned the Japanese government and the facility operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), for insisting on this flawed and dangerous course of action.
“The findings of the independent panel of scientific experts commissioned by the Pacific Islands Forum were unequivocal – the data provided so far, to support Japan’s claim that the treated wastewater is safe, is inconsistent, unsound and therefore far from reliable,” the statement said, adding that “if the Japanese government and TEPCO believe the radioactive wastewater is safe, they should be prepared to safely dispose of it within terrestrial Japan.”
The Collective also declared that such dumping into the Pacific Ocean is a direct violation of human rights.
Aside from being a brazen violation of international law, the Collective said, Japan’s behavior and handling of this matter is an affront to the very sovereignty of Pacific states and unbecoming of a dialogue partner of the PIF.
Founded in 1971, the PIF is the region’s premier political and economic policy organization which comprises 18 members.
The Collective called on the Pacific leaders to reaffirm the long-held position of the Pacific to keep their region nuclear-free and to review diplomatic relations with Japan at the next Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in 2024.
They also called on the international community not to turn a blind eye to the threat that dumping radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean poses to Pacific peoples, their livelihoods, safety, health and well-being.
Japan conducted the third round of release of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean earlier this month, despite numerous and repeated objections by governments and communities, environmental groups, NGOs, and anti-nuclear movements in Japan and the Pacific
Russia raises alarm about nuclear waste storage in Ukraine reaching unsafe levels
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova warns of high chance of approximately 12 million tons of radioactive waste entering Dnieper river, groundwater
Elena Teslova |10.11.2023 – https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/russia-raises-alarm-about-nuclear-waste-storage-in-ukraine-reaching-unsafe-levels/3049929
Russia raised the alarm on Friday about nuclear waste storage in Ukraine reaching unsafe levels, warning of a high chance of approximately 12 million tons of radioactive waste entering the Dnieper river and groundwater.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the “situation with dangerous nuclear waste storage in Ukraine is taking a disastrous character.”
In a statement published on the ministry’s website, Zakharova said the volume of nuclear waste at the Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant, located in the city of Kamianske, has reached 42 million tons.
“The plant was constructed during the Soviet era, and it is processing wastes that are presently stored in nine open-air dumping grounds containing sand-like low-radioactive residue.
“These wastes are a significant and dangerous source of environmental pollution. There is a high probability of about 12 million tons of radioactive waste entering the Dnieper (river) and groundwater as a result of possible erosion of the dam at one of the storage facilities located 800 meters from the river and its tributary Konoplyanka,” Zakharova warned.
Also, she added, about 14 tons of radioactive dust is blown throughout the area every year, contaminating agricultural land.
“According to our information, Kyiv does not allocate funding to ensure the environmental safety of the facilities of the Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant, which, ultimately, can lead to an environmental disaster not only in the territory controlled by the Kyiv regime but also beyond its borders,” she said.
Concerns over the plant’s poor condition have been raised for many years with no response from officials.
Chess, cards and catnaps in the heart of America’s nuclear weapons complex
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, workers collect full salaries for doing nothing
Across those decades, the notion of keeping secrets from adversaries has simultaneously morphed into keeping secrets from the American public — and regulators.
| by Alicia Inez Guzmán. Searchlight New Mexico, 8 Nov 23 |
| A few days after beginning a new post at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Jason Archuleta committed a subversive act: He began to keep a journal. Writing in a tiny spiral notebook, he described how he and his fellow electricians were consigned to a dimly lit break room in the heart of the weapons complex. “Did nothing all day today over 10 hrs in here,” a July 31 entry read. “This is no good for one’s mental wellbeing or physical being.” |
“I do hope to play another good game of chess,” noted another entry, the following day.
A journeyman electrician and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 611, Archuleta had been assigned to Technical Area 55 back in July. He had resisted the assignment, knowing that it was the location of “the plant,” a sealed fortress where plutonium is hewn into pits — cores no bigger than a grapefruit that set off the cascade of reactions inside a nuclear bomb. The design harks back to the world’s first atomic weapons: “Gadget,” detonated at the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico in 1945, and “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki shortly afterward.
It has been almost that long since LANL produced plutonium pits at the scale currently underway as part of the federal government’s mission to modernize its aging stockpile. The lab, now amidst tremendous growth and abuzz with activity, is pursuing that mission with single-minded intensity. Construction is visible in nearly every corner of the campus, while traffic is bumper to bumper, morning and evening, as commuters shuttle up and down a treacherous road that cuts across the vast Rio Grande Valley into the remote Pajarito Plateau on the way to the famous site of the Manhattan Project.
But from the inside, Archuleta tells a different story: that of a jobsite in which productivity has come to a standstill. With few exceptions, he says, electricians are idle. They nap, study the electrical code book, play chess, dominoes and cards. On rare occasions, they work, but as four other journeymen (who all requested anonymity for fear of retaliation) confirmed, the scenario they describe is consistent. At any given time, up to two dozen electricians are cooling their heels in at least three different break rooms. LANL officials even have an expression for it: “seat time.”
The lab recognizes that the expansion at TA-55, and especially the plant, presents challenges faced by no other industrial setting in the nation. The risk of radiation exposure is constant, security clearances are needed, one-of-a-kind parts must be ordered, and construction takes place as the plant strives to meet its quota. That can mean many workers sit for days, weeks, or even, according to several sources, months at a time.
“I haven’t seen months,” said Kelly Beierschmitt, LANL’s deputy director of operations, “It might feel like months,” he added, citing the complications that certain projects pose. “If there’s not a [radiation control technician] available, I’m not gonna tell the craft to go do the job without the support, right?”
Such revelations come as red flags to independent government watchdogs, who note that the project is already billions of dollars over budget and at least four years behind schedule. They say that a workplace filled with idle workers is not merely a sign that taxpayer money is being wasted; more troublingly, it indicates that the expansion is being poorly managed.
“If you have a whistleblower claiming that a dozen electricians have been sitting around playing cards for six months on a big weapons program, that would seem to me to be a ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’ moment,” said Geoff Wilson, an expert on federal defense spending at the independent watchdog Project on Government Oversight.
Given the secrecy that surrounds LANL, it is virtually impossible to quantify anything having to do with the lab. That obsession is the subject of Alex Wellerstein’s 2021 book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.” Wellerstein, a historian of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, traces that culture of secrecy from the earliest years of the Manhattan Project into the present. Across those decades, the notion of keeping secrets from adversaries has simultaneously morphed into keeping secrets from the American public — and regulators.
“What secrecy does is it creates context for a lack of oversight,” said Wellerstein in a recent interview. “It shrinks the number of people who might even be aware of an issue and it makes it harder — even if things do come out — to audit.”
The code of secrecy at LANL is almost palpable. The lab sits astride a forbidding mesa in northern New Mexico some 7,500 feet above sea level, protected on the city’s western flank by security checkpoints. Its cardinal site, TA-55, is ringed by layers of razor wire and a squadron of armed guards, themselves bolstered by armored vehicles with mounted turrets that patrol the perimeter day and night. No one without a federal security clearance is allowed to enter or move about without an escort — even to go to the bathroom. Getting that clearance, which requires an intensive background investigation, can take up to a year.
Sources for this story, veterans and newcomers alike, said they fear losing their livelihoods if they speak publicly about anything to do with their work. Few jobs in the region, much less the state (one of the most impoverished in the nation), can compete with the salaries offered by LANL. Here, journeyman electricians can earn as much as $150,000 a year; Archuleta makes $53 per hour, almost 70 percent more than electricians working at other union sites.
Nevertheless, in late September, Archuleta lodged a complaint with the Inspector General’s office alleging time theft. He and two other workers told Searchlight New Mexico that their timesheets – typically filled out by supervisors – have shown multiple codes for jobs they didn’t recognize or perform. To his mind, the situation is “not just bordering on fraud, waste and abuse, it’s crossing the threshold.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………“By all the normal measures our society uses to evaluate cost, benefit, risk, reliability, and longevity, this latest attempt has now already failed as well,” said Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), a respected nonprofit that has been monitoring LANL for 34 years. “Federal decision makers will have to ask ‘Will the LANL product still be worth the investment,’” Mello said, referring to the plant, which will have exceeded its planned lifetime of 50 years by 2028.
The cogs of this arms race have been turning for years. In May 2018, a few months after President Donald Trump tweeted that he had a much “bigger & more powerful” nuclear button than North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the Nuclear Weapons Council certified a recommendation to produce plutonium pits at two sites.
That recommendation was enacted into law by Congress, which in 2020 called for an annual quota of plutonium pits — 30 at LANL and 50 at the Savannah River plutonium processing facility in South Carolina — by 2030. According to the LASG, the cost per pit at LANL is greater than Savannah River. The organization estimates that each one will run to approximately $100 million.
Whether such production goals are achievable is another question: Just getting those sites capable of meeting the quota will cost close to $50 billion—and take up to two decades from the project’s start. After that, another half a century may pass before the nation’s approximately 4,000 plutonium pits are all upgraded, according to the calculations of Peter Fanta, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Plutonium is one of the most volatile and enigmatic of all the elements on the periodic table. It ages on the outside like other metals, while on the inside, “it’s constantly bombarding itself through alpha radiation,” as Siegfried Hecker, a former LANL director and plutonium metallurgist put it. The damage is akin, in his words, to “rolling a bowling ball through [the plutonium’s] crystal structure.” Most of it can be healed, but about 10 percent can’t. “And that’s where the aging comes in.”
The renewed urgency dodges the most resounding “unanswered question at the heart of the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal,” Stephen Young, the Washington representative for the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in “Scientific American.” “What is the lifetime of a pit?” And why hasn’t the NNSA — the federal agency tasked with overseeing the health of the nuclear weapons stockpile — dedicated the resources to finding out?
“It seems entirely possible that this was not an oversight on the part of NNSA but reflects that the agency does not want to know the answer,” Young went on. With novel warhead designs on the horizon, it was entirely plausible, he posited, that the NNSA wasn’t merely seeking to replace old pits but instead wanted to populate entirely new weapons — a desire driven less by science than by politics.
Booms and blind spots
This uncertainty has worked in LANL’s favor, propelling the mission forward and all but securing the lab’s transformation. As Beierschmitt, the deputy director of operations, publicly described the lab’s goals this summer: “Keep spending and hiring.”
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office, which investigates federal spending and provides its findings to Congress, has pointed to a gaping blind spot in the mission. A January report detailed how the NNSA lacked a comprehensive budget and master schedule for the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex — essential for achieving the goal of producing 80 pits per year. The agency, in other words, has thus far failed to outline what it needs to do to reach its target — or what the overall cost will be, the GAO concluded.
“How much they’ve spent is pretty poorly understood because it shows up in so many different buckets across the budget,” said Allison Bawden, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment. “We tried to identify these buckets of money ultimately tied to supporting the pit mission. But it’s never presented that way by NNSA, so it’s very difficult to look across the entire pit enterprise and say, ‘this is how much has been spent, and this is how much is needed going forward.’” The GAO includes the DOE on its biennial list of federal agencies most vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse — and has done so since 1990. A major reason is the Möbius strip of contractors and subcontractors working on DOE-related projects at any given time.
The DOE, for instance, oversees the NNSA, which oversees Triad National Security — a company owned by Battelle Memorial Institute, the Texas A&M University and the University of California. Triad oversees its own army of subcontractors on lab-related projects, including construction, demolition and historic preservation. And many of those subcontractors outsource their work to yet other subcontractors, creating money trails so byzantine they defy tracking.
But one thing is known: Subcontractors will rake in billions of dollars. “We expect to be executing at least $5.5 billion in construction over the next five years and $2.5 billion in subcontracting labor and materials,” Beierschmitt said at a 2019 forum.
“Most people think that for something so giant and so supposedly important to the nation, there would be some kind of well-thought through plan,” said Mello of LASG. “There is no well-thought through plan. There never has been.”
Secrets on the plateau
……………………………………………….. Over time, systems at LANL and across the U.S. weapons complex have ossified into “their own little universes,” said Wellerstein, the science historian. “And when you combine that with the kind of contractor system they use for nuclear facilities, you create the circumstances where there’s very little serious oversight and ample opportunities and incentives for everybody to pat themselves on the back for a job well done…………………………………………………….. https://searchlightnm.org/chess-cards-and-catnaps-in-the-heart-of-americas-nuclear-weapons-complex/?utm_source=Searchlight+New+Mexico&utm_campaign=77629f0906-11%2F08%2F2023+-+Chess%2C+cards+and+catnaps&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8e05fb0467-77629f0906-395610620&mc_cid=77629f0906&mc_eid=a70296a261 #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes #radioactive
300 scientists call for finding safe site to store nuclear waste
By EISUKE SASAKI/ Senior Staff Writer, October 31, 2023 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15044716
Earth science specialists hold a news conference on Oct. 30 to express their opposition to a plan to bury spent nuclear fuel as a final storage method. (Eisuke Sasaki)
About 300 earth science specialists have released a statement calling for a fundamental review of the Japanese government’s plan for storing spent nuclear fuel.
The process for finding a final storage site in Japan has been proceeding “while keeping a lid on scientific discussions,” said Junji Akai, a professor emeritus of earth science at Niigata University, who signed the statement, at an Oct. 30 news conference.
The current plan is to bury the highly radioactive waste deep underground.
But the statement about 300 scientists signed, including a number of former chairmen of the Geological Society of Japan, said there was no place in Japan where such waste could be kept safe for the 100,000 years or so needed for the radiation to dissipate.
A law passed in 2000 regarding the final handling of nuclear waste stated that the spent nuclear fuel should be buried deep underground.
But the statement released on Oct. 30 noted that several tectonic plates converge on the Japanese archipelago, a mobile belt with active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes.
It went on to say that under the current circumstances, it would be “impossible” to choose a location that would not be affected by such tectonic activity for 100,000 years.
The statement called for abolishing the law on the final storage of nuclear waste and setting up a third-party organization to reconsider how such waste should be stored, including temporarily storing it aboveground.
Two small municipalities in Hokkaido are in the first of a three-stage process to determine their suitability as a site for the final storage of nuclear waste. #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNuke
“Enhanced regulation” as Aurora – new £2.5bn plutonium facility – is added to UK”s AWE Aldermaston
Project Aurora, a new plutonium manufacturing facility at AWE Aldermaston
was added to the government’s 2023 list of major projects, and is
currently estimated to cost between £2bn and £2.5bn. The facility, which
was originally planned as part of the Nuclear Warhead Capability
Sustainment Programme (NWCSP) at AWE, will likely replace the current A90
facility at Aldermaston, which was built in the 1990s.
Nuclear Information Service 31st Oct 2023
The Chief Nuclear Inspector’s 2023 annual report has revealed that AWE
Aldermaston and the Devonport Royal Dockyard (DRDL) are to remain under
enhanced regulatory attention. Aldermaston has been under enhanced
attention since 2013 and Devonport since 2014. Of the three categories of
regulatory attention used by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR),
enhanced is the second highest. The highest category is used only for the
four most hazardous facilities at Sellafield. ONR said that for both sites
the decision for them to remain in this category was due to “longstanding
issues”.
Nuclear Information Service 31st Oct 2023 #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes #plutonium
Magnox rebrands to Nuclear Restoration Services as its decommissioning portfolio expands
Magnox has become Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS) ahead of taking
ownership of closing EDF nuclear sites. NRS, part of the UK’s Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority (NDA) group, is responsible for safely
decommissioning first generation nuclear reactor and research sites across
the UK and restoring them for future use.
As Magnox, the company was
responsible for safe and secure cleanup of 12 nuclear sites. In April, it
additionally took on the decommissioning of the Dounreay nuclear site in
Scotland when it merged with Dounreay Site Restoration (DSR).
The site is owned by NDA, but DSR was contracted to deliver its decommissioning
programme. Two years ago, it was agreed that NDA would become responsible
for decommissioning EDF’s seven advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs), once
power generation had ended and defueling had been completed. Hunterston B
was the first AGR to come offline in January last year, followed by Hinkley
Point B in August 2022. EDF expects all the sites will stop operating by
2028. Ownership of Hunterston B is expected to transfer in 2026, with the
others to follow on a rolling basis over the next decade.
The Chemical Engineer 2nd Nov 2023
https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/magnox-rebrands-to-nuclear-restoration-services-as-its-decommissioning-portfolio-expands/ #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNuke
Book review of “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste”
This is a book review of “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level
Nuclear Waste” and the best book I’ve read on the topic, as well as
additional research on the topic. Now that world wide production of
conventional and unconventional oil probably peaked in 2018 (coal in 2013,
and perhaps natural gas in 2019), our top priority should be to bury
nuclear wastes as soon as possible. Once severe shortages arrive, remaining
oil will to to agriculture and other essential needs. This short window of
time now may be our only chance to bury nuclear wastes — our descendants
certainly won’t have the energy, diesel equipment, or technology. Yucca
mountain is the best possible place to put nuclear waste in the U.S. The
only place to put it actually, a $15 billion facility that models put
through thousands of permutations of multiple calamities such as
earthquakes, volcanoes, flooding and more. Yucca was found to be a safe
place to put nuclear waste.
Energy Skeptic 1st Nov 2023 https://energyskeptic.com/2023/book-review-nuclear-waste-too-hot-to-touch/ #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
Deb Katz: There’s no end in sight to the crisis in nuclear waste
Clean water, clean air, clean land, and a safe place to live are our right. We must fight for the cleanup of all communities and stop the targeting of Black, brown and white communities alike to nuclear contamination.
November 1, 2023, by Deb Katz, executive director of the Citizen Awareness Network, based in Shelburne, Mass. https://vtdigger.org/2023/11/01/deb-katz-theres-no-end-in-sight-to-the-crisis-in-nuclear-waste/
What remains at the site of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant? Millions of curies of high-level waste on the banks of the Connecticut River with no destination, no solution.
The NorthStar plan? To ship its problem 2,000 miles away to Andrews County in Texas for “temporary storage.” The 5th Circuit shot down NorthStar’s plans to shuffle its toxic waste problem off on a working poor Hispanic community. This waste will be dangerous for a million years.
This is the colossal failure of nuclear power. There is no present solution to deal with the legacy of Vermont Yankee or any other reactor. This is the abject failure of the nuclear industry and the federal government.
The nuclear industry promised a solution by the time reactors shuttered. Sixty years later, there is no solution and no permanent solution forthcoming. There is waste with nowhere to go.
The industry routinely engages in environmental racism to deal with its waste problems. It is reprehensible. The industry targets working poor, people of color, and Indigenous tribes for its nuclear fuel chain. It pits reactor and targeted communities against each other over who will suffer nuclear power’s final solution.
Citizens Awareness Network opposes these false solutions. Without a permanent repository, any establishment of centralized interim storage is merely a way to make the industry’s waste problem disappear. Potentially it will de facto become the industry’s “permanent” solution.
We can’t accept that another community will suffer to clean our community up. We accept that the waste must remain onsite until the government does its job. This isn’t easy.
Dangers remain, whether from acts of malice or climate disruption. Vermont Yankee’s canisters sit in the open on a pad on the banks of the river.
The National Governors’ Council stated that the high-level nuclear waste at reactor sites were pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction. It urged Congress to take action to protect these sites. Congress has yet to act.
Then there is climate change. The National Academy of Science in February began a study to address what it calls “probability of maximum precipitation” events. The study focuses on infrastructure, dams and energy generation including nuclear sites. It addresses their vulnerability to PMP events. Included in the study are representatives from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both acknowledged that there is no guidance in place to direct their actions to address these events and the vulnerability of these sites.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Geological Survey acknowledged that they were 20 years behind the curve in addressing these issues. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that the agency concerns were raised in response to the Fukushima accident.
For all its claims, nuclear power is neither clean nor green. It is a dirty, toxic technology. It relies on its invisibility to keep its lies going.
Clean water, clean air, clean land, and a safe place to live are our right. We must fight for the cleanup of all communities and stop the targeting of Black, brown and white communities alike to nuclear contamination.
Nuclear Waste Management market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 1.4% by 2034: Visiongain
Yahoo! Finance, Visiongain Reports Ltd, Mon, October 30, 2023
Visiongain has published a new report entitled Nuclear Waste Management Market Report 2024-2034: Forecasts by Solutions (Waste Sorting, Waste Treatment and Conditioning, Waste Storage and Disposal), by Type (Very-Low-Level Waste (VLLW), Low-Level Waste (LLW), Intermediate-Level Waste (ILW), High Level Waste (HLW)), by Disposal Method (Transmutation, Seabed Disposal, Space Disposal, Encapsulation and Burial, Synthetic Rock Formations), by Source (Decommissioning/Remediation, Reactor Operations, Military and Defence Programs, Nuclear Applications, Fuel Reprocessing, Fuel Fabrication/Enrichment) AND Regional and Leading National Market Analysis PLUS Analysis of Leading Companies AND COVID-19 Impact and Recovery Pattern Analysis.
The global nuclear waste management market was valued at US$4,864.0 million in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 1.4% during the forecast period 2024-2034.
Economic Viability: Balancing Costs and Long-term Commitments
Economic viability is a crucial factor in nuclear waste management endeavours. Companies must strategically balance initial investments in advanced technologies with long-term costs associated with waste containment and disposal. Effective financial planning ensures the availability of funds for continuous research, facility maintenance, and adherence to evolving regulatory requirements. Finding cost-effective solutions without compromising safety and environmental integrity is essential for the industry’s sustained growth and for ensuring that nuclear waste management remains both efficient and financially feasible………………………………………………………… more https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nuclear-waste-management-market-projected-090000621.html #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
1 This Month
18 March Webinar @ 1 PM EST: An Assessment of SMR Projects: The Case of Canada
register for the zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_o8BIIOUvQ2ONJR1nta65DQ#/registration
of the week – STOP SMALL MODULAR REACTORS IN CANADA
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