The National Nuclear Security Administration has decided a cache of plutonium sent from Japan years ago will be processed and disposed of for the foreseeable future at the Savannah River Site, a change of plans with local ramifications.
Up to 350 kilograms of stainless steel-clad plutonium from a Japanese reactor will be rid of using a slew of Savannah River Site facilities, tech and staff, recent federal documents show.
The Fast Critical Assembly fuel – already at the Savannah River Site – will be processed and dissolved at H-Canyon, a one-of-a-kind separations facility built in the 1950s. The material will then go to the tank farms, where millions of gallons of waste is stored.
After that, it will move to the Defense Waste Processing Facility, a mammoth plant that encases nuclear sludge in glass, making it safer to handle and stow long-term. The glass cylinders will ultimately go to an on-site storage building, where they will stay pending the availability of a dedicated depot, like Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The entire endeavor will take years. And Japan is helping defray the cost.
“NNSA had an agreement with Japan for us to dispose of Fast Critical Assembly” material, Savannah River Site manager Michael Budney said Monday. “And Japan is paying to put an electrolytic dissolver back in the canyon.” ……
By Victor Gilinsky, Henry Sokolski | March 15, 2021 The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), whose tenth review conference is coming up in August, is in trouble, and not only because of the crescendo of complaints about the failure of the nuclear-armed states to implement nuclear disarmament. The treaty is threatened with irrelevancy because its controls have not kept up with the times. It was drafted over 50 years ago, when it was widely believed that nuclear energy represented the future and would soon take over the generation of electricity. Not surprisingly, countries put few treaty restrictions on access to technology or materials other than to impose international inspection, and even that was circumscribed. We now have a more realistic view of the dangers of access to fuels that are also nuclear explosives (plutonium and highly enriched uranium) and also of the limited economic utility of these fuels for powering reactors. If we want an effective NPT, we have to eliminate these dangerous materials from civilian nuclear power programs. Dealing with uranium enrichment is complicated because nuclear power plants use enriched uranium fuel, but that should not hold us back from eliminating the danger we can eliminate—plutonium.
As soon as one mentions reinterpreting what the NPT allows, the treaty’s “originalism” crowd immediately pronounces the notion a non-starter. But we already have essentially eliminated an entire article (Article V) of the NPT that covered a technology—“peaceful” nuclear explosives—subsequently deemed both too dangerous and with negligible economic promise. That is exactly the situation with plutonium-fueled nuclear power reactors.
Separated plutonium in national hands leaves too little safety margin against possible use in warheads. At the same time, there is no economic penalty for doing without it. It should not be permitted in commercial use in all member countries. Existing civil stocks, like Japan’s nine tons, should be put under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision until their owners can safely dispose of the material.
This may sound radical, especially given the drumbeat of the US Energy Department and nuclear industry propaganda about a new generation of “advanced reactors” under development, most of them plutonium-fueled. But it is nothing more than President Gerry Ford’s common sense proposal in his 1976 Nuclear Policy Statement. He said we should forego using plutonium until “the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation.” We are nowhere within reach of such a condition.
The NPT’s laxity on plutonium stems from the widespread beliefs at the time it was negotiated in the 1960s. Nuclear power plants were then considered destined to take over electricity generation and were thus vital for powering national economies. The US Atomic Energy Commission estimated that “essentially all [US] generating capacity built in the 21st century would be nuclear.” Moreover, and this is key, the Atomic Energy Commission believed uranium was scarce. To stretch nuclear fuel supply, they believed it would be necessary to develop reactors that turned the 99 percent of non-fissionable uranium into plutonium and then use that as fuel—plutonium-fueled fast breeder reactors.
That became doctrine in nuclear bureaucracies throughout the world and the NPT was drawn up to facilitate that result. (Ironically, had the projections been fulfilled, and the world commercial channels been flooded with plutonium, the possibility of effective control would have vanished.) Given nuclear power’s then-imagined critical importance, it’s not surprising that the less advanced NPT signatories insisted on full access to nuclear technology, hence on Article IV of the NPT that famously states all members have “the inalienable right” to it.
It has since turned out that all of the “expert” thinking about plutonium-fueled fast breeder reactors taking over electricity production was wrong. Contrary to the projections of the 1960s, nuclear energy’s prospects are limited, uranium is not scarce, extracting plutonium from irradiated uranium fuel is hugely expensive, and the plutonium-fueled reactors are expensive to build, which eliminated the economic arguments for the so-called plutonium economy. This is now clear to all but messianic believers in nuclear energy.
But the vestiges of this technological archaism continue to animate national bureaucracies that deal with the NPT, including that of the US, and the IAEA, as well. Perhaps the most glaring examples of the residual attachment to plutonium is Japan, which accumulated an enormous stockpile of plutonium and China, which, like Japan, plans to open a large reprocessing plant to separate more for two large fast breeder reactors. The US Energy Department is planning an expensive fast reactor to test fuel (the Versatile Test Reactor) for a mythical future commercial generation of such reactors. These steps legitimate similar actions elsewhere and undermine effective nonproliferation controls.
With the diminished prospects of nuclear power, the amount of this plutonium-related activity is not going to be anything like what the nuclear community once projected. The essential point remains: Amounts of plutonium that are very small in commercial terms can be very large in military terms.
At a more fundamental level, the United States needs to speak clearly to dispel the myth—one that still grips some NPT member countries—that nuclear power is an essential technology without which a country cannot consider itself as advanced. To get into the details would take us too far afield. But, as an indication of current nuclear prospects, consider the collapse of the highly vaunted “nuclear renaissance” at the beginning of this century that was to lead to construction of dozens of plants in the United States. US nuclear operators filed license applications for 31 large units. They ultimately canceled all but two, and those two are years behind schedule and already double the original cost, which led the original contractor, once proud Westinghouse, to file for bankruptcy.
America’s utility sector has been consistent on this score: It is not going to build any additional large nuclear reactors and doesn’t extract plutonium from used nuclear fuel. This message presented at the 2021 NPT Review Conference would help clear the decks for an honest assessment of what is needed for protection against access to nuclear weapons. If plutonium and reprocessing (its separation technology) are generally permissible, and only barred when worries arise in special cases like Iran, the NPT will ultimately undo itself.
None of this is to suggest that the NPT members will be easily persuaded, or perhaps even persuaded at all, of the need to limit what is permissible under the treaty. The entrenched plutonium-fuel firms and laboratories, and their government backers, including those in the United States, will not easily let go of their subsidies. But we need to start.
Nation Cymru 15th March 2021, Proposals to dump hundreds of thousands of tonnes more mud from theconstruction of a new nuclear power plant two miles off the Cardiff coast
will be discussed in the Senedd tomorrow. Last year a petition opposing EDF
Energy’s application demanded a full Environmental Impact Assessment
(EIA) before the dump could be licensed. The petition gained almost 10,700
signatures and forced a Senedd debate. In 2018 EDF were granted permission
to dump at the Cardiff Deep Grounds inshore disposal site despite fierce
opposition and an earlier debate in the Senedd.
On March 11, 2011, a devastating offshore earthquake and ensuing tsunami rocked Japan and resulted in nuclear meltdowns in three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site. Until the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were placed on a one-year hiatus because of concerns over COVID-19, the Japanese government had portrayed these events as the “Recovery Olympics.” It had hoped to use the Olympics to showcase a claimed restoration of Japan since it was devastated in 2011. But has Japan really “recovered?”
Recently, corresponding author Marco Kaltofen (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), co-author Maggie Gundersen (Fairewinds Energy Education) and I published our second peer-reviewed journal article analyzing hundreds of radioactive samples from northern Japan that we collected with assistance from Japanese citizens and scientists. Our sampling on five occasions over almost a decade totaled 70 days on the ground. Here are four things we discovered.
1. Existing radiation maps ignore significant sources of radiological exposure.
Most of the radiation maps of northern Japan are based on external radiation detected in handheld instrument measurements by citizens and scientists, who then link the measurements to GPS coordinates while downloading that data into a massive database. This information about direct, external radiation is certainly important, but it has become the de facto criteria for decision makers in Japan to decide which cities and towns should be repopulated.
We found that this approach only provides limited policy alternatives and serves to minimize potential population exposure for two reasons. First, the Geiger counter data is for external radiation that was deposited on the ground external to human bodies and ignores radiation imbibed or inhaled as “hot particles” into the human body.
Secondly, the external radiation data frequently displayed for northern Japan is based on radiation emitted from only a single radioactive isotope, Cesium-137 (Cs-137), as measured externally. On the other hand, our papers show a wide variety of isotopes that are not detected by handheld Geiger counters or absorbed externally. We show that there is an extensive brew of various isotopes present in radioactive dust that is inhaled or imbibed. Our papers indicate that the radioactive concentration in these dust particles varies widely, by a factor of 1 million, with 5 percent (3 sigma) of these “hot particles” 10,000 times more radioactive than the mean. Our most radioactive dust particle was collected 300 miles from the site of the meltdown.
Furthermore, the data show that alpha, beta and gamma-emitting contaminants in radioactive fallout from the Daiichi meltdowns have not traveled together in lockstep. This means that measuring only beta-emitters like Cesium-137 or only total gamma (as you would with a Geiger counter) is not enough to map the full impact of the fallout. Alpha-emitters must also be measured to protect the public health. This is especially important because of the serious health impacts that can come from exposure to alpha radiation.
2. Northern Japan remains radiologically contaminated.
When a nuclear chain reaction stops, the hazardous remnants of the previously split uranium atoms, euphemistically called “fission products,” are left behind and remain radioactive for centuries. The triple meltdowns and explosions at Fukushima Daiichi Units 1, 2 and 3 in March 2011 released an enormous amount of these fission products into the environment. Wind currents pushed as much as 80 percent of this radiation over the Pacific Ocean, while 20 percent fell on northern Japan, forcing the evacuation of approximately 160,000 Japanese citizens from ancestral lands.
Absent any human intervention, short-lived fission products that originally accounted for more than half of this contamination have already decayed away during the last nine years, while even more has washed into the Pacific from storms and typhoons. Limited cleanup efforts by the Japanese government have further reduced the contamination in a fraction of the populated portion of the devastated Fukushima prefecture. Greater than 10 million tons of radioactive material have been collected and stored in 10 million individual large black bags at hundreds of locations. However, due to mountainous terrain, more than 70 percent of Fukushima prefecture will never be decontaminated.
Absent any human intervention, short-lived fission products that originally accounted for more than half of this contamination have already decayed away during the last nine years, while even more has washed into the Pacific from storms and typhoons. Limited cleanup efforts by the Japanese government have further reduced the contamination in a fraction of the populated portion of the devastated Fukushima prefecture. Greater than 10 million tons of radioactive material have been collected and stored in 10 million individual large black bags at hundreds of locations. However, due to mountainous terrain, more than 70 percent of Fukushima prefecture will never be decontaminated.
As the cost and effort to completely decontaminate the entire land mass of Fukushima prefecture would be prohibitive, the Japanese government has focused on cleaning only populated areas. It also increased the “allowable” radiation limit 20-fold, after an initial partial decontamination, from 1 milli-Sievert to 20 milli-Sieverts per year (100 millirem to 2 rem) to facilitate repopulation of abandoned villages. A 20-fold increase in radiation will create a 20-fold increase in radiation-induced cancers. A significant fraction of residents chose not to return, recognizing the increased risk that these higher approved limits present.
3. Previously “cleaned” areas are becoming radiologically contaminated yet again.
The city of Minamisoma was contaminated and evacuated at the height of the Fukushima disaster. After a period of several years, radiation in the city was remediated and citizens were allowed to return. Minamisoma City Hall was decontaminated, with a new epoxy roof applied after the meltdowns in 2011. The authors collected samples from this previously “clean” fourth-story roof in 2016 and again in 2017, finding high levels of alpha radiation in the relative absence of the normally ubiquitous Cesium isotopes. This can only imply that wind-borne contamination from uncleaned areas is recontaminating those areas determined habitable.
4. Olympic venues in Fukushima prefecture are more contaminated than in Tokyo Olympic venues.
Suburbs of Tokyo are approximately 120 miles from the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. We found particulate radiation at Olympic venues in Tokyo to be normal compared to other cities worldwide. We found that areas in Japan beyond the Olympic venues were seven times more contaminated than the venues themselves. Contamination at the Olympic venues in Fukushima prefecture, planned to showcase the region’s recovery, were also more contaminated than the Tokyo venues. We found that on average, these northern Olympic venues were two to three times more contaminated with “hot particles” than venues in Tokyo.
We also detected small but statistically significant levels of plutonium at the J-Village national soccer camp in Fukushima prefecture. Even though the Japanese government claims to have thoroughly decontaminated these Fukushima locations, it is not surprising that these Olympic venues remain contaminated. As discussed previously, since the entirety of the prefecture’s area will never be decontaminated, these areas will continue to have wind-borne contamination for centuries.
Science on a Shoestring
As Fukushima was melting down, nuclear advocates in the U.S. were testifying to the Washington State legislature, saying that Japan’s nuclear plants would not be a problem, and that working in a nuclear plant is “safer than working in Toys R Us.” Not surprisingly, those same zealots are now claiming that there will be no increase in cancer fatalities as a result of the three Fukushima meltdowns. However, not including the hot particle contamination my colleagues and I have identified, the UN estimates that thousands of fatalities will occur. Others, including myself, believe the actual cancer increase could result in upwards of 100,000 increased deaths as a result of the radioactive microparticles strewn into the environment.
There is no doubt that radiological conditions in Japan have improved in the decade since the triple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. However, our data show that Japan has not “recovered,” nor can it ever return to pre-meltdown norms. Public relations campaigns by interested parties cannot obscure the recontamination of populated areas in northern Japan that will continue to occur.
Hasegawa, the former head of Maeda Ward in Fukushima prefecture at the time of the Fukushima disaster, sums up the sentiment of most of Japanese citizens in northern Japan: “The nuclear plant took everything.… We are just in the way of the Olympics. In the end, the radiation-affected places like us are just in the way. They are going ahead just wanting to get rid of these places from Japan, to forget.”
There is an old laboratory adage that says, “The best way to clean up a spill is not to have a spill,” and this applies on a much larger scale to the entirety of northern Japan, where cleanup will remain economically unfeasible. Our future plans to further support our hypothesis that Japan remains contaminated will involve testing the shoestrings of Olympic athletes and visitors to northern Japan. Shoestrings are useful, as their woven fabric traps dust which may assist in determining the extent of contamination into populated areas in northern Japan compared to that in Tokyo.
Climbing Without a Map: Japan’s Nuclear Clean-Up Has No End in Sight, U.S. News, By Reuters, Wire Service Content March 12, 2021, BY SAKURA MURAKAMI AND Aaron Sheldrick TOKYO (Reuters) – For one minute this week, workers at the Fukushima nuclear station fell silent to mark the 10-year anniversary of a natural disaster that triggered the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Then they went back to work tearing down the reactors melted down in the days after a tsunami on March 11, 2011.
The job ranks as the most expensive and dangerous nuclear clean-up ever attempted. A decade in, an army of engineers, scientists and 5,000 workers are still mapping out a project many expect will not be completed in their lifetime.
Naoaki Okuzumi, the head of research at Japan’s lead research institute on decommissioning, compares the work ahead to climbing a mountain range – without a map.
“The feeling we have is, you think the summit’s right there, but then you reach it and can see another summit, further beyond,” Okuzumi told Reuters.
Okuzumi and others need to find a way to remove and safely store 880 tonnes of highly radioactive uranium fuel along with a larger mass of concrete and metal into which fuel melted a decade ago during the accident.
The robotic tools to do the job don’t yet exist. There is no plan for where to put the radioactive material when it is removed.
Japan’s government says the job could run 40 years. Outside experts say it could take twice as long, pushing completion near the close of the century……..
It wasn’t until 2017 that engineers understood how complicated the clean-up would become. By that point, five specially designed robots had been dispatched through the dark, contaminated waters pumped in to cool the uranium. But radiation zapped their electronics.
One robot developed by Toshiba Corp, nicknamed the “little sunfish”, a device about the size of a loaf of bread, provided an early glimpse of the chaotic damage around the cores.
Kenji Matsuzaki, a robot technician at Toshiba who led development of the “sunfish”, had assumed that they would find melted fuel at the bottom of the reactors.
But the sunfish’s first video images showed a tumult of destruction, with overturned structures inside the reactor, clumps of unrecognizable brown debris and dangerously radioactive metal.
“I expected it to be broken, but I didn’t expect it would be this bad,” Matsuzaki said.
The delivery of a robotic arm to start removing fuel, developed in a $16 million programme with the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, has been delayed until 2022. Tepco plans to use it to grab some debris from inside reactor 2 for testing and to help plan the main operation………….
But the cleanup has been delayed by the buildup of contaminated water in tanks that crowd the site. The melted cores are kept cool by pumping water into damaged reactor vessels.
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Nearly ‘Ended The Japanese State’, Radioactive Waste Specialist Explains, Sputnik News, by Mohamed Elmaazi 12 Mar 21,……….How is it that nuclear waste safely managed and disposed of so that it no longer poses any danger?
Kevin Kamps: Well, it’s not. We don’t know what to do with it. High-level radioactive waste is stored in indoor wet storage pools. That’s where the majority of American high-level radioactive waste is stored. What almost happened at Fukushima Daiichi, another lucky break, was that the wet indoor storage pool at unit four nearly caught fire, and it was sheer luck that it did not. And just to give you an idea of what that could have meant for Japan, there have been 160,000 nuclear evacuees due to the meltdowns, the failures of the containments.
If that pool had caught fire, and pools are not even inside containment, the Japanese prime minister serving at the time, Naoto Kan, a year after the disaster began, admitted that he had a secret contingency plan, if that pool had caught fire, to evacuate 35 million to 50 million people from North-eastern Japan and metro Tokyo. He said it would have been the end of the Japanese state.
Here in the United States where the majority of our high-level radioactive waste is still in this vulnerable indoor wet pool storage, our pools are much more densely packed than Fukushima Daiichi Unit four was on March 11th, 2011. So, we don’t have an answer. We do not have deep geologic disposal repositories. Yucca mountain, Nevada, has proven to be a failure. Besides the Western Shoshone Indians [Native Americans] did not consent, it violated their treaty rights to that site, but it’s also scientifically unsuitable. So, we’re right where we began in 1942, when Enrico Fermi first split the atom, created the first high-level radioactive waste during the Manhattan Project race for the atomic bomb. We don’t know what to do with the first cup full of high-level radioactive waste in this country. https://sputniknews.com/interviews/202103111082310108-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-nearly-ended-the-japanese-state-radioactive-waste-specialist-explains/
By Robert Alvarez | March 8, 2021 In the early decades of the atomic age, using the enormous energy in plutonium atoms for the peaceful generation of electricity became a multibillion-dollar quest that shaped US energy research and development policies. In 1970, Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium and then-chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, declared that “within the lifespan of a single generation this newcomer plutonium born on a humble research budget and cradled in a cigar box will have become the energy giant of the future.”
Seaborg and the AEC projected the growth of nuclear-powered electricity would be so great that global supplies of uranium would be exhausted, paving the way for the recovery of plutonium from spent power reactor fuel for the next generation of power plants, which would dot the global landscape. Seaborg estimated by the end of the 20th century, power reactors would cumulatively produce 1,600 metric tons of plutonium with the potential to fuel half the nation’s electrical generation.
With this much plutonium flowing through commerce, the possibility that some of it might be diverted for nefarious purposes was not lost on prominent members of the US national security establishment. Losing track of just .0003 percent of the amount estimated by Seaborg would be enough to fuel a Nakasaki-sized nuclear weapon. Opposition by America’s Cold War nuclear policy makers was galvanized following India’s nuclear weapons test in May 1974. India’s bomb was fueled with plutonium produced from “peaceful atom” technology provided by the United States and Canada. Albert Wohlstetter, a prominent American nuclear strategist and cold warrior, concluded that the U.S. pursuit of plutonium fuel could result in “life in an armed nuclear crowd.
In response to the Indian test, the Carter administration banned chemical separation of plutonium from irradiated power reactor fuel—the process known as reprocessing—in 1977.
The US “plutonium economy” was also dealt a major blow by the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which underscored the Carter Administration’s non-proliferation goals by giving priority to the direct geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel, without reprocessing. President Reagan lifted the ban and President George W. Bush attempted to revive reprocessing, but those efforts collapsed in the United States under the weight of the expense, safety problems, and security risks of a widespread reprocessing program. Since the early 1980s, the US Congress has shown little appetite for resuming support of the commercial development of plutonium as a reactor fuel.
In response to the Indian test, the Carter administration banned chemical separation of plutonium from irradiated power reactor fuel—the process known as reprocessing—in 1977.
The US “plutonium economy” was also dealt a major blow by the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which underscored the Carter Administration’s non-proliferation goals by giving priority to the direct geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel, without reprocessing. President Reagan lifted the ban and President George W. Bush attempted to revive reprocessing, but those efforts collapsed in the United States under the weight of the expense, safety problems, and security risks of a widespread reprocessing program. Since the early 1980s, the US Congress has shown little appetite for resuming support of the commercial development of plutonium as a reactor fuel.
As of the end of 2018, US spent power reactor fuel contained about 824 metric tons of plutonium—the world’s largest single inventory of that element. The intense radiation of used nuclear fuel assemblies makes them essentially impervious to theft or diversion to weapons use. But after 300 years, a great deal of the radiation barrier protecting them will have decayed. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act lays out a process for geologically directly disposing of spent nuclear power fuel in an underground repository, rather than allowing plutonium to be separated from it. Reprocessing “would incur a substantial cost penalty,” concluded an industry study in 2006 and would be far more costly more expensive than direct spent nuclear fuel disposal. “[Re]processing would have to be accompanied by deployment of fast reactor plants. But demonstration fast reactor plants to-date has mostly proved expensive and unreliable, which aggravates [re]processing’s economic handicap.”
But nearly 40 years later, geologic disposal of spent power reactor fuel remains uncertain after President Obama’s cancellation in 2010 of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository site in Nevada.
By the mid-21st century, the amount of plutonium in spent power reactor fuel could grow to more than 1,400 metric tons. The 300-year clock measuring off the time until the radiation barrier diminishes to the point that this vast amount of weapons-usable plutonium can be readily obtained is still ticking.
In a meeting on environmental regulation yesterday, Waste Control Specialists said they would not be moving high-level nuclear waste into the Permian Basin without the state’s approval. By Kate Porter Mar. 10, 2021 ANDREWS, Texas (KOSA) – In a meeting on environmental regulation yesterday, Waste Control Specialists said they would not be moving high-level nuclear waste into the Permian Basin without the state’s approval.
Texas lawmakers, such as Representative Brooks Landgraf, have presented legislation that would shut the door on WCS ever bringing high-level nuclear waste to Andrews county.
Representative Landgraf tells CBS 7 that the nuclear waste facility here in Andrews houses rubber gloves and hospital gowns.
Landgraf says WCS proposed a plan to bring higher-level nuclear waste like rods used at nuclear testing sites.
That proposal spurred representative Landgraf into action – he presented a bill to block all high-level waste being stored or disposed of here in Texas. I reached out to WCS several times today for comment but have not heard back as of right now.
This thinking isn’t isolated to the Republican party.
Midland County Democrat, David Rosen, agrees that high-level nuclear waste does not have a place in the Permian Basin.
The bottom line for Andrews residents: WCS will still store nuclear waste There, but it’s up in the air about the level of radioactivity.
The need for a long-term commitment to plutonium disposal. The Energy Department faces the daunting and unprecedented task of geologically disposing of tens of tons of weapons-grade plutonium, so it can never be used again, while ensuring its toxic dangers do not threaten the environment over a time period longer than the existence of human civilization.
Can the Energy Department store 50 tons of weapons-grade plutonium for 10,000 years? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Robert Alvarez | March 8, 2021 The nuclear age is undergoing a paradigm shift. During much of the latter half of the past century, the nuclear enterprise was ascendant; now, it has entered a period of decline and uncertain long-term custodianship. This reversal of fortune is especially apparent in the United States’ efforts to rid itself of its unwanted reserves of plutonium. It’s been more than 75 years since a blinding flash lit up the pre-dawn sky at Alamogordo in the Chihuahua Desert of New Mexico. On July 16, 1945, a single gram of the grapefruit-size sphere of plutonium at the center of the world’s first nuclear explosion released three times the destructive force of the largest conventional bomb used during World War II. [1]
Thereafter, the United States government built a grossly oversized nuclear arsenal and never envisioned having to stop building it. Between 1944 and 1994, the Energy Department and its predecessors produced 99.5 metric tons of plutonium for use in an estimated 70,000 nuclear weapons. (An additional 11 tons were produced or acquired for research and development purposes.)
The perverse logic of the nuclear arms race reached a point of ultimate absurdity during the early Reagan presidency, when it was asserted that the winner of a nuclear war would be the one with the most weapons left afterward. Now, 80 percent of the US nuclear arsenal has been discarded, and the United States is still struggling with the strategic mistake of producing so much fissile material to begin with. Currently, a total of 61.2 tons of plutonium is declared excess to the needs of the US government, of which 53.4 tons is designated for nuclear weapons.
The Energy Department faces the daunting task of geologically disposing of this huge cache of weapons-grade plutonium, so it can never be used again, while ensuring that its does not threaten the environment over a time period longer than human civilization has existed. Achieving safe plutonium disposal will be a multifaceted challenge requiring both long-term commitments and large financial investments at a time when nuclear modernization programs are also competing for federal funding. But arms control and disarmament will not progress as they should unless the excess plutonium problem is solved.
The scope of the problem. Safely ridding the nation of one of the world’s largest excess stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium will be no minor feat. At issue is the US Energy Department’s 2016 decision to dilute and dispose of, all told, about 48.2 metric tons of plutonium, including 26.2 tons of components, known as “pits,” from several thousand dismantled thermonuclear warheads and 22 metric tons in other forms. These massive quantities of plutonium are destined for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the nation’s only geologic burial site for radiological waste, dug into a deep-underground salt formation near Carlsbad New Mexico. WIPP was opened in 1999, originally for disposal of equipment, clothing, and soil contaminated with dilute amounts of transuranic elements, mostly plutonium, somewhere in the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. If one gram of soil contains as little as 1.587 micrograms of plutonium, the Energy Department is required by federal standards to geologically isolate it from the environment for at least 10,000 years at WIPP.
The site is not without its problems. In 2014, a drum burst open deep underground, shooting contamination to the surface and leading to a three-year closure of the facility that cost about $2 billion.
During the Cold War, the Energy Department facilities involved in weapons productions recovered residual plutonium from production processes—for example, the lathe turnings produced when spherical plutonium bomb cores were shaped—when the cost of doing so was less than the cost of making new plutonium in production reactors. After the downsizing of its Cold War warhead stockpile, in 1998 the Energy Department reclassified residues from the Rocky Flats Plant— some 3.5 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium, or enough to fuel some 900 weapons—as waste that should also be disposed of in the WIPP. In fact, as of September 2019, more than two thirds of 5.36 metric tons of plutonium 239 placed in the repository originally had been set aside to make bombs. An additional 5.29 metric tons of this residual plutonium is awaiting disposal, and amount that is separate from and above what is generally considered as excess fissile material from the weapons stockpile.
The government has not publicized the formidable challenges of protecting thousands of workers and members of the public during the process necessary to geologically dispose of this enormous stockpile of nuclear explosives. To put it bluntly, if not done with extreme care, plutonium is a waste-disposal nightmare. The isotope used in American nuclear weapons, plutonium 239, has a specific activity (that is, an amount of radiation produced per unit of mass) that is about 200,000 times greater than uranium 238’s, and plutonium 239 has a radioactive half-life of 24,110 years. Alpha particle emissions from plutonium and other transuranic elements are considered to be about 20 times more carcinogenic than x-rays.
Particles of plutonium less than a few microns in diameter can penetrate deep in the lungs and lymph nodes and also be deposited, via the bloodstream, in the liver, on bone surfaces, and in other organs. If inhaled, extremely small amounts can lead to cancer.
Stringent procedures—many involving large number of workers with specialized skills—are required to ensure that even small amounts of plutonium are properly processed. That processing often must be done by hand, using gloveboxes, to prevent the creation of a critical mass that initiates a nuclear chain reaction and the resulting highly dangerous bursts of energy and radioactivity. While technologies have existed for years to process plutonium, they come out of the Cold War era when safety was secondary to production. Over the years, dozens of workers around the world have been killed or seriously over- exposed from criticality accidents. Various safeguards—including a security system that carefully accounts for all plutonium and protects against theft and diversion—add another costly dimension to handling this nuclear explosive.
Plutonium production ends, but problems continue. Years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the growing cost of plutonium production led to its gradual cessation. By the 1980s, half of every dollar spent to make plutonium at the aged Energy Department nuclear complex went for its burgeoning waste-management and environmental-restoration problems. By 1988, production costs compelled Energy Secretary John Herrington to declare: “We’re awash with plutonium. We have more than we need.”
By 1992, the United States had stopped making new nuclear weapons as the industrial base for producing them began to collapse; about 80 percent of the Energy Department’s sprawling nuclear weapons production complex was shuttered a few years later. This left behind a legacy of radioactive waste and human suffering, one that is still unfolding. The Energy Department’s recent baseline cost estimates for waste management and environmental remediation are about $435 billion for the two main plutonium production facilities, the Hanford Reservation in Washington and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The single largest portion of the entire US government’s environmental liability in 2019, including the Defense Department, is due to plutonium production at these two sites. In terms of the human legacy, 22,459 sick workers at three major plutonium and fabrication sites have been granted more than $4.2 billion in compensation and medical care…………….
The need for a long-term commitment to plutonium disposal. The Energy Department faces the daunting and unprecedented task of geologically disposing of tens of tons of weapons-grade plutonium, so it can never be used again, while ensuring its toxic dangers do not threaten the environment over a time period longer than the existence of human civilization. Sustaining a full-time, 30-year effort to process and dispose of this vast amount of plutonium, at the same facilities that have been designated to produce new plutonium warheads for the US nuclear arsenal, inevitably will lead to an intense competition for space, funding, and skilled workers.
Geological disposal of separated weapons-usable plutonium should not be subordinated to resuming new weapons production and other planned disposal schemes. The safe geological disposal of this highly dangerous and toxic nuclear explosive requires a long-term commitment from the US government to build new, costly infrastructure and to provide the knowledge and skills needed for such a vast disposal effort to generations of workers, who deserve greater protection than currently allowed by a great deal of hands-on work. Such a commitment will put the country on the path of irreversibility—the rendering of excess weapons-grade plutonium unusable for weapons purposes, a key element of nuclear disarmament.
The end of the Cold War led to deep cuts in the US and Russian nuclear arsenals, and in 1993 President Clinton issued a directive declaring that the United States is “committed to eliminating, where possible, the accumulation of stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and plutonium.” In September 2000, the United States and Russia signed the Plutonium Management Disposition Agreement, under which 34 metric tons of plutonium from weapons would be blended with uranium and serve as mixed-oxide or MOX reactor fuel to produce electricity.
Construction on the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Plant at the Savannah River Site began in 2007, but the United States abandoned the project because of delays and estimated cost overruns of $30 billion to $50 billion. After a “Red Team” expert review in 2015, the Energy Department decided to pursue a “dilute and dispose” option for storing plutonium, which, the team reported, would cost about half as much as the MOX project. Plutonium from weapons and other forms would be converted from metal to oxide, diluted with a secret adulterant, and then placed a special container for shipment and disposal at WIPP.
In April of that year, Russian President Vladimir Putin took issue with the US decision, saying it “is not what we agreed on.” The dilute-and-dispose option for excess plutonium does not meet the same level of proliferation resistance as the 300-year radiation barrier provided by the “spent fuel standard”; within a few decades after emplacement, radiations levels could fall low enough to allow the plutonium to be recovered, in theory. But the salt formation at WIPP is expected to slowly collapse and seal off the drums of waste. Just the same, in October 2016 Putin suspended implementation of the plutonium disposition agreement “due to Washington’s unfriendly actions toward Russia.”
The dilute and dispose project.
The Energy Department optimistically estimates that its dilution and disposal project will start up in 2027 and store 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium by 2049, at a cost of $18 billion. That time estimate seems likely to be unrealistic; according to the Institute for Defense Analysis, “we could find no successful historical major project that both costs more than $700 million and achieved [Energy Department project startup] … in less than 16 years.”
The dilute and dispose project i
The Pantex weapons assembly and disassembly plant near Amarillo, Texas, where thousands of pits and other forms of plutonium have to be prepared for safe and secure shipment to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. The majority of the plutonium at Pantex is stored in facilities at that were built in the 1940s. In 2010 and 2017, unexpected 2,000-year rains flooded a major plutonium storage area with several inches of water, which shut down the plant. It cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with about 1,000 containers affected by the flooding.
At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, pits will be converted from metal to an oxide that resembles a yellow-to-olive-green talcum-like powder, which is highly dispersible if it escapes from leaking glove boxes. The conversion process takes place at the PF-4 facility, a 69-year-old complex where the Energy Department has a major multibillion-dollar project underway to upgrade aged processes to produce new plutonium bomb triggers. In 2020, a panel of the National Academies of Science warned that “LANL may be a major bottleneck” impacting the plutonium disposal mission. The disposal and production projects could be on a collision course by the middle of this decade, when both are planned to scale up by 10 times.
Once Los Alamos produces plutonium oxides, they will be sent to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where the plutonium will be diluted and mixed with a secret adulterant, sometimes via the use of mortars and pestles. About 166,000 specially designed drums will be filled with the dilute fissile material. This task is a tall order for the Savannah site, where the round-the-clock work is expected to scale up by 10 times in a facility that officially exceeded its design life years ago. The facility will be almost 100 years old by 2049 when the dilute and disposal project is expected to be completed.
Once the drums are filled, commercial trucks are expected to transport them across the country, from South Carolina to New Mexico and WIPP, in more than 3,888 shipments.
As it plans to dispose of its excess plutonium, the Energy Department has, notably, paid little attention to inspections and verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a key element of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As noted by the report of an expert panel of the National Research Council, “IAEA monitoring and inspections are an important component of the [Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement with Russia] requirements, and they could also provide enhanced public and international confidence that the material is properly accounted for and emplaced in WIPP.”
Plutonium disposal beyond dilute and dispose.
Over the past three years, WIPP and the nearby area have become ground zero for several storage and disposal plans for the bulk of civilian and military radioactive wastes. In addition to trans-uranic wastes set for WIPP and plutonium related to weapons production, the Energy Department seeks to dispose of six tons of fuel-grade plutonium from its research and development program, sludge from 15 of Hanford’s high-level radioactive waste tanks, trans-uranic waste generated from the production of new plutonium pits, and other radioactive waste.
Even after the Energy Department recently recalculated its excess plutonium and other radioactive wastes, resulting in a 30 percent reduction in the total volume to be sent to WIPP, the federal statutory limit set in the Land Withdrawal Act, which authorized the opening of WIPP, will be exceeded by these planned disposal efforts. Congress would have to amend the law to expand the volume, set for WIPP at 175,564 cubic feet, by as much as than 50 percent to accommodate all the waste. Moreover, it appears that new plutonium pit production is projected to generate huge amounts more waste.Lurking in the shadows, 71 miles from the WIPP, sits an Energy Department effort to dispose of as much as 500,000 gallons of grouted wastes from Hanford’s high-level radioactive waste tanks at the Waste Control Specialists landfill in Andrews County Texas.
That firm is also seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to establish centralized interim storage of spent nuclear fuel from the nation’s power reactor fleet. So, too, is the Holtec Corporation with a proposed spent nuclear fuel storage site 16 miles from WIPP in Lea County, New Mexico.If these interim storage efforts succeed, by mid-century up to 10,000 spent fuel cannisters containing nearly the entire US commercial spent nuclear fuel inventory will be transported across the country for storage near WIPP. They may sit there for more than 100 years. (See sidebar: “The long-term problem of “peaceful” plutonium.) If these plans are realized, WIPP and the nearby area will have become the recipients of an enormous, decades-long, radioactive-waste-transport funnel directing the bulk of the nation’s commercial and military radioactive detritus to New Mexico and far West Texas……… https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/can-the-energy-department-store-50-tons-of-plutonium-for-10000-years/#.YEa37PTkUIk.twitter
Decade After Fukushima Disaster, Greenpeace Sees Cleanup Failure, Bloomberg Green, By Aaron Clark,
Land identified for cleanup remains contaminated: Study
Long-term threat to human and environmental health remains
Ten years after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, land Japan identified for cleanup from the triple reactor meltdown of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi atomic power plant remains contaminated, according to a report from Greenpeace.
In addition, Greenpeace said its own radiation surveys conducted over the last decade have consistently found readings above government target levels, including in areas that have been reopened to the public. The lifting of evacuation orders in places where radiation remains above safe levels potentially exposes people to an increased risk of cancer, the report said.
On average, just 15% of land in the “Special Decontamination Area,” which is home to several municipalities, has been cleaned up, according to the environmental advocacy group’s analysis of government data. That’s despite the government’s claims that the area has largely been decontaminated, the group said.
……..While the government has been steadily lifting evacuation orders on towns since 2014, roughly 36,000 people are still displaced.
Nuclear Engineering International 3rd March 2021, REPORTS IN THE UK THAT EDF Energy’s Hinkley Point B station would close ‘early’, in 2022, sounded a strange note for nuclear industry veterans. They knew that the venerable advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) on the west coast, on its startup in 1979, was originally expected to have a lifetime of around 25 years.
But in fact, it has been in operation for 40 years and could have more than one more year remaining, if owner EDF Energy takes it to its final end date in mid 2022. But those newspapers had noted that EDF had hoped to delay final shutdown until 2023. For longstanding opponents of the plant, however, closure comes not a moment too soon — and they believe equally that operation should end at the UK’s remaining AGRs.
At issue is the interlocking graphite blocks that in the AGR design form the reactor core. Opponents argue that years of irradiation have caused so much damage to the blocks that the plants should be out of operation. This is indeed one of the ageing issues that affects AGRs, but the situation, and the decision on whether to close the plant, is more complicated.
Seattle Times 3rd March 2021,The head of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant says there’s no need to extend the current target to finish its decommissioning in 30-40 years despite uncertainties about melted fuel inside the plant’s three reactors.
Ten years after meltdowns of three of its reactors following a massive March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi plant has stabilized but faces new challenges.
Nuclear regulators recently found fatal levels of contamination under the lids of two reactors, a test removal of melted fuel debris from one reactor has been delayed for a year, and a recent earthquake may have caused new damage to the reactors.
About 900 tons of melted fuel debris remain inside the plant’s three damaged reactors, and its safe removal is a daunting task that its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, and the government say will take 30-40 years to finish. The removal of spent fuel units from cooling pools is already being delayed for up to five years. But Akira Ono, who as head of the plant is also its chief decommissioning officer, said he doesn’t plan to change the current goal to finish decommissioning between 2041 and 2051.
NFLA 4th March 2021, The UK & Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) has submitted a
number of concerns to the Environment Agency with an application by Cyclife Ltd to store 40 shipping containers, which includes within them low levels of radioactively contaminated scrap metal, at the Port of Workington in Cumbria.
The NFLA have been concerned for many years over the large international market that remains with the recycling of scrap metal from the nuclear sector, and the potential for such material, containing low levels of radiation, returning to be used in steel for consumables or buildings.
It is concerned to find out in this case that this market is growing exponentially from the EDF / Cyclife (formerly Studsvik) recycling plant at Lillyhall in Cumbria.
State wants Biden to overturn Trump rule on Hanford nuclear waste, By ANNETTE CARY of the Tri-City Herald , 1 Mar 21,
The state of Washington and other groups are asking the Biden administration to overturn a Trump administration rule that would allow the federal government to potentially clean up the Hanford nuclear reservation to less stringent standards.
A letter sent Friday to Jennifer Granholm, just a day after she was confirmed as energy secretary, was signed by leaders of Washington state, the Yakama Nation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Hanford Challenge and Columbia Riverkeeper.
They call the Department of Energy’s decision in 2019 to allow the reclassification of some Hanford site and other radioactive waste “a matter of extraordinary concern.”
The new DOE rule, which was adopted to relax the interpretation of what is defined as high level radioactive waste, “lays the groundwork for the Department to abandon significant amounts of radioactive waste in Washington state precipitously close to the Columbia River,” the letter said.
It would create a long-term risk of harm to the residents of the Pacific Northwest and the natural resources critical to the region, it said. However, some Tri-Cities area interests have supported the revised interpretation of high level radioactive waste, saying it could save billions of dollars in environmental cleanup money across the nation, making more money available for some of the most pressing environmental cleanup at the Hanford nuclear reservation. …….
DOE’s new policy allows the agency to reclassify radioactive waste if it determines it does not exceed certain radionuclide concentrations for low level waste or does not need to be disposed of in a deep geological repository, such as the one proposed at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Previously, high level waste could be reclassified, but under a more involved process that relies on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Hanford watchdogs have said that giving DOE authority to reclassify high level waste could lead to grouting waste inside Hanford’s underground tanks, rather than retrieving the waste and properly treating it for disposal.
DOE began building the $17 billion vitrification plant in 2002 to turn some, but not all, of the tank waste into a stable glass form for disposal. Turning some of the excess waste into a concrete-like grout for disposal rather than glassifying it has been proposed.
The Washington state Department of Ecology has maintained that any treatment of tank waste must produce a waste form that is “as good as glass” to protect the environment and prevent contaminants from leaching into the soil and reaching groundwater.
Those who signed the Friday letter agree that “trying to change Hanford’s high level tank waste to low-level waste through the stroke of a pen is no solution, and this Trump-era rule has to go,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Seattle-based Hanford Challenge, which advocates for Hanford workers.
The new interpretation of high level waste gives DOE unilateral authority to redefine high level radioactive waste with no opportunity for input, oversight or consent by state regulators or the public, the letter said.
“And it fails to hold the Department and the federal government accountable for adequately cleaning up the legacy waste that is left over from the establishment of the United States’ nuclear arsenal,” the letter said.
The new interpretation of the definition of nuclear waste conflicts with a Biden administration order that agencies should follow science, improve public health and protect the environment, the letter said.
Those signing the letter on behalf of Washington state include Attorney General Bob Ferguson and the director of the Department of Ecology, Laura Watson.
The nuclear industry and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission are threatening to restart Pennsylvania’s permanently closed and decommissioning Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear power station. Three expert speakers will present the resistance to this dangerous misadventure in a webinar hosted by the Clamshell Alliance, Beyond Nuclear and Massachusetts Peace Action.
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