nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Fukushima nuclear clean-up hugely affected by discovery of lethal radiation levels

January 2, 2021 Posted by | decommission reactor, Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment

USA is not facing up to the climate threats to its nuclear wastes

US is Ill-Prepared to Safely Manage its Nuclear Waste from Climate Threats.   More than 150 sites across the country have to be managed for radioactive waste for centuries or millennia. But there’s no plan in place for how this will be done, says GAO report.  Earth Island Journal , CHARLES PEKOW, December 29, 2020    The Cold War never erupted into the nuclear nightmare that the world feared for decades. But the legacy of the never-used nuclear weapons remains a ticking time bomb that could endanger countless people and lead to environmental catastrophe any time.

In the United States, there are more than 150 sites that have to be managed for nuclear waste for centuries or millennia. But, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the US Department of Energy (DoE) — which is charged with managing dangerous, radioactive waste and contaminated soil and water leftover from weapon construction — appears to lacks the capacity for the task.
DoE’s Office of Legacy Management (LM) manages 100 nuclear waste dumps with 51 or 52 more sites expected to fall under its jurisdiction by 2050 (one site remains in question). The sites range all over the country, from Amchitka in the western Aleutians to El Verde on the east side of Puerto Rico. The Legacy Management office takes over maintenance of dangerous sites after other managers — including DoE’s Office of Environmental Management, US Army Corps of Engineers, and private licensees — have cleaned them up.

The GAO report, “Environmental Liabilities: DoE Needs to Better Plan for Post-Cleanup Challenges Facing Sites” (pdf), issued earlier this year, found, among other things, that the DoE doesn’t have a plan for how to address challenges at some sites that may require new cleanup work that is not in the scope of LM’s expertise.

Nor, says the report, does it have a strategy in place to assess and mitigate the effects of climate change on these sites, that need to be safeguarded against increasingly frequent and severe rainfall, tornadoes, hurricanes and accompanying flooding and forest fires. It foresees that the DoE will need yet-to-be-developed technology and untold billions of dollars to keep the stored nuclear waste from contaminating air, soil and water. 
The report notes that the Office of Legacy Management has not developed agreements or procedures in collaboration with the Office of Environmental Management (EM) or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to figure out how to contain the radioactive waste. The Legacy Management office estimated its liabilities (in the 2019 fiscal year) at 503.3 billion – but that could be a vast underestimate as it doesn’t know what hazards or costs may develop. The cost estimates go only 75 years out and don’t include estimates for the cost of protecting the 50 plus sites it will have to take over in the next few decades. For instance, these estimates don’t account for the Elemental Mercury Storage Facility near Andrews, Texas, which DoE hasn’t inherited yet, but where the department has decided to store up to 6,800 metric tons of elemental mercury — a major environmental pollutant………..

some of these sites have already been creating serious problems.

At Rocky Flats, which has become surrounded by suburban development since its 1992 closure, excessive rain damaged the facility in in 2013. The soil, sediment, groundwater, and surface water of the former nuclear weapons manufacturing site had been contaminated with hazardous chemicals and radioactive constituents as a result of “manufacturing activities, accidental industrial fires and spills, support activities, and waste management practices,” according to EPA.
Even after cleanup, several ponds and landfills remained contaminated. In recent years, excessive rainfall and erosion has damaged the site again in the past few years. The office Legacy Managment considers Rocky Flats as its biggest liability ($452 million). In 2016, the estimated cost of just maintenance and surveillance of the site totaled $269 million………

Among the many other problem sites, the Legacy Management office is struggling to figure out what to do with contaminated groundwater at the Shiprock nuclear waste dump on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation in northwest New Mexico. Contaminated water, the legacy of uranium mining for nuclear power plants and weapons, is being pumped to an evaporation pond there.

Compounding the problem, most of these nuclear waste sites were created before key environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Resource Conservation & Recovery Act, were enacted. So the laws don’t apply…………..
Now climate change is adding a new level of complication to an already complex waste management issue that can have serious environmental and public health impacts……….

nuclear watchdog groups aren’t satisfied with the slow progress on this front. The nation needs “a reverse Manhattan project,” to figure out how to safely diffuse the radioactive waste, says Schaeffer of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.  https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/us-is-ill-prepared-to-safely-manage-its-nuclear-waste-from-climate-threats

December 31, 2020 Posted by | climate change, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Hanford’s dangerous collection of nuclear waste sites, including 177 underground leaky tanks

Washington’s new nuclear waste lead takes on Hanford’s aging tanks, OPB, By Anna King (Northwest News Network), Dec. 30, 2020.

David Bowen is charged with holding the U.S. Department of Energy accountable for its cleanup of a site that once produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.

At the Hanford site in southeastern Washington, along the Columbia River, millions of gallons of radioactive sludge are cradled in aging underground tanks.

Nearly 2,000 capsules filled with cesium and strontium rest unquietly in an old, glowing-blue pool of water. Two reactors along the Columbia still need to be sealed up and cocooned.

And those are just some of the bigger waste sites out of hundreds at the 580-square-mile cleanup site.

177 underground tanks filled with radioactive waste   It’s a lot to ponder and a steep learning curve for freshly hired David Bowen. …..He started his new job Dec. 16 as the Nuclear Waste Program lead for Washington’s Department of Ecology in Richland.

he’ll hold the U.S. Department of Energy accountable for its cleanup at the site using the Tri-Party Agreement. That’s a 1989 document struck between Ecology, the federal Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Hanford houses leftovers from World War II and the Cold War, when it was the nation’s factory for plutonium. Trenches, pits and buildings are all contaminated with loads of chemicals and radioactive waste generated at breakneck speed.

The stickiest problem: 177 tanks — some of them leakers — filled with radioactive waste.

“Some of [the underground tanks] are 50-plus years old,” Bowen said. “And they weren’t designed to last this long. There are still fluids in them, millions of gallons, in sludge, et cetera. So, there’s the opportunity for that to escape and get into the Columbia River — or the groundwater is high.”

A massive waste treatment plant is being built in the desert at Hanford to treat that tank waste. But the cleanup timeline has been pushed back several times since the 1980s. It could be pushed back more because of the pandemic.

……. Aging infrastructure, aging expertsHanford is much like a complex small city: thousands of commuting workers, miles of highways and intertwining roads.

Then there are all the stakeholders: multiple tribes, Seattle-based Hanford watchdog groups, salmon and Columbia River advocates and multiple government agencies. Losing Hanford experts to retirement or attrition to other agencies is a big problem — and a growing one. Some key Ecology experts have recently been lured away to federal posts or to work as Hanford contractors. And many have already retired. Bowen said he’s well aware he needs to work fast……… https://www.opb.org/article/2020/12/29/washington-nuclear-waste-program-manager-hanford/

 

December 31, 2020 Posted by | Reference, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Storage of Chernobyl nuclear waste – in reality unsafe for 1000s of years

Tsunami-crippled Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant No.4 (R) and No.3 reactor buildings are seen in Fukushima prefecture February 28, 2012. Members of the foreign media were allowed into the plant on Tuesday ahead of the first anniversary of the March 11, 2011 tsunami and earthquake which triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. REUTERS/Kimimasa Mayama/Pool (JAPAN – Tags: DISASTER ENVIRONMENT ENERGY) – RTR2YKOE

Paul Waldon  Fight to Stop a Nuclear Waste Dump in South Australia, 28 Dec 20, 

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has been tasked by the international community to manage funds, financing the efforts to transform Chernobyl into a safe and secure state. In a recent address to the public there have been interesting points of claim.
1: Chernobyl has reached a milestone in nuclear safety.
2: The first spent reactor fuel from the infamous nuclear power plant has been securely stored at last.
3: The risk of an accident is being mitigated.
4: The fuel will safely be stored for at least a century.
“My take on the subject is”
1: A nuclear plant that has a reactor meltdown is not safe.
2: The reactor’s main function is to manufacture radioactive waste, fuel is not spent but used!
3: As long as the waste remains, the risks remain.
4: 100 Year storage is but a respite in the timeline of radioactive fuel when we look back at the first nuclear reactor that was fired up by Enrico Fermi 78 years ago and that waste is still with us today. Chernobyl’s first reactor was completed 43 years ago, then a meltdown gave birth to Chernobyl’s place in history nearly 35 years ago. So to imply that 100 years is an adequate time to manage fuel, waste and debris from reactors is nothing short of irresponsible.   https://www.facebook.com/groups/344452605899556

December 28, 2020 Posted by | Ukraine, wastes | Leave a comment

USS Calhoun County sailors dumped thousands of tons of radioactive waste into ocean

December 24, 2020 Posted by | employment, Reference, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Nuclear waste plan spells doom for a Hokkaido fishing community

Hokkaido fishing villages face tough decision over nuclear disposal sites, Japan Times, HOKKAIDO SHIMBUN, Dec 18, 2020

A frosty wind was blowing in from the Sea of Japan at the Suttsu fishing port in Hokkaido in late November. There, catching anglerfish with a grim look on his face was 77-year-old fisherman Kyozo Kimura.

“The haul of fish has been decreasing to the point where we can’t even make ends meet. It has been tough,” said Kimura.

In 1977, Kimura, a native of the town of Matsumae, married into a family whose fishing business had been around for five generations since the Meiji Era (1868-1912). Longline fishing of trout prospered at the time, and he reminisced about the time when he got a new 29-ton ship, funded by his father-in-law, and was filled with hope that he could go out fishing anywhere with it.

But that dream did not last long.

An international regulation took effect later that year restricting fishermen to operating within 200 nautical miles of a nation’s shores.

Despite various efforts including changing to smaller ships aiming to catch Alaskan pink shrimp in coastal waters, hauls continued to drop. To make ends meet, Kimura ventured into scallop farming, learning the ropes from acquaintances.

Though the stable revenue from scallop farming has supported the family for years, the increase in sea temperatures in the past few years and other factors have led to the recurrent deaths of scallops, cutting hauls to a third of their heyday. The impact of coronavirus this year has also kept the price low amid declining demand.

Then, in August, local residents saw shocking headlines that Suttsu was considering applying for preliminary research into being a final disposal site for high-level radioactive waste produced from nuclear power plants.

Hearing the news, Kimura was upset, worrying that harmful rumors about radiation could potentially bring down the price of scallops. Local fishermen were split, and Kimura has heard about families arguing over the topic. Soon, people started avoiding it altogether.

In the 60 years or so since he graduated from high school, Kimura has worked as a fisherman, taking pride in his profession. But he is also aware of the importance of the town’s subsidies. For him to run a steady scallop farming business, any help, including municipal subsidies for fishing materials, makes a difference.

“I can’t go on by myself. If the lives of people won’t improve, we won’t have any more younger generations in the town,” said Kimura.

While showing some understanding of the need for a preliminary survey — for which Suttsu will receive government subsidies — he does not see the need for building a nuclear waste disposal site in the town.

On Nov. 17, the government launched preliminary surveys for the towns and villages of Suttsu and Kamoenai in Hokkaido, where herring fishing used to flourish.

According to the histories of the municipalities, wajin, or Japanese migrants to Hokkaido, made a hamlet and started fishing there in the Meiji Era. The industry became so lucrative at the time that there even remains a “herring palace” in Suttsu, which symbolizes the successful fishing business back then.

Although once a thriving industry, herring fishing began its steep decline around the late Meiji Era, and it was a shadow of its former self by the onset of the Showa Era (1926-1989).

After the end of World War II, fishermen began to seek ways to increase their catch, such as switching to pelagic fishing, but they were soon hit by the 200-nautical-mile fishing regulation. Though they have shifted to catching atka mackerel inshore and scallop farming as alternatives for survival, the hauls have been on the decline.

According to a fishery cooperative in Suttsu, there was about ¥2 billion worth of transactions in fiscal 1978, the oldest figures available on record. But transactions are now about ¥1 billion to ¥1.5 billion annually.

The Furuu fishery co-op also reports that there were 270 members in total in fiscal 2009 when three co-ops, Furuu, Kamoenai and Tomari, were merged together, but the number had shrunk to 126 in fiscal 2019.

Nobushige Miura, a 57 year-old fisherman in Kamoenai village, saw the industry dwindling first hand.

“In the offshore area, there aren’t many fish in the sea and prospects for fish farming are bleak. In the past decade, fishermen have been quitting one after the other saying they cannot hand down the business to their kids,” said Miura.

Miura is neither for nor against the village accepting the government’s preliminary survey. But he knows that the village’s future is bleak.

“If we don’t do anything, the village will disappear in the future,” he said.

Miura has been farming scallops for the past 30 years but recently he has seen the number of dead scallops on the rise, a trend also seen in Suttsu.

Miura’s family business started in the Edo Period (1603 to 1868), and is now in its fifth generation. Despite its long history, though, he realizes that the business will come to a halt in his generation due to the absence of successors. That is why Miura hopes all the more for the village to thrive, even for a short time.

Nihonkai Shokudo, a restaurant that sits along the national highway in Suttsu, serves local seafood throughout spring and summer. Owner Sumio Kawachi, 58, is a fourth-generation fisherman.

After graduating from Suttsu high school, he ran a construction business in Sapporo before becoming a fisherman when he was 37 years old due to an injury at his former workplace.

Amid the difficulties in the fishing business, he has been offering fishing classes to tourists in a bid to survive.

“Combining fishing with tourism is creating new business opportunities,” said Kawachi.

Kawachi’s mother was born into a family of fishermen in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, where a nuclear reprocessing plant is located. His mother used to tell him about the divide among fishermen over the construction of the facility.

Having visited Rokkasho multiple times since his childhood, he has seen the fishing industry decline despite the help of government subsidies.

Reflecting on his experience, his hope is for everyone to think twice about the potential consequences of constructing a nuclear disposal site.

“I am fishing in a sea that I have succeeded from my ancestors. Will we be able to hand down the sea to future generations given the preliminary research for the nuclear disposal site?”

December 20, 2020 Posted by | Japan, wastes | Leave a comment

Mutsu Mayor Soichiro Miyashita made it clear that spent nuclear fuel facility will not go ahead.

December 19, 2020 Posted by | Japan, politics, wastes | Leave a comment

The cover-up of workers’ illnesss in radioactively polluted clean-up of Kingston coal ash spill

A Legacy of Contamination, How the Kingston coal ash spill unearthed a nuclear nightmare, Grist By Austyn Gaffney on Dec 15, 2020  This story was published in partnership with the Daily Yonder.

………………………………….The apparent mixing of fossil fuel and nuclear waste streams underscores the long relationship between the Kingston and Oak Ridge facilities………… .

……….In 2017, a former chemist named Dan Nichols stumbled upon a news story that revealed the existence of the additional health problems TVA feared. High levels of uranium had been measured in the urine of a former cleanup worker named Craig Wilkinson. Like Thacker, Wilkinson had worked the night shift. After dredges piped the coal ash back onshore, Wilkinson used heavy equipment to scoop, flip, and dry the wet ash along the Ball Field.

Although Wilkinson worked at the Kingston site for less than a year, he quickly developed health issues, including chronic sinus infections and breathing problems that eventually led to a double-lung transplant. Frustrated by his sudden decline in health, Wilkinson shelled out over $1,000 for a toxicology test because he wanted to know what occupational hazards might be lingering in his body.

After reading Wilkinson’s story, Nichols sat stunned. Though he was not associated with the spill, he’d been unable to shake his obsession with the Kingston disaster. Nichols had worked as a Memphis-based field chemist for a wastewater technology company, and he was used to studying lab reports on industrial water supplies and samples. For years he’d been trying to solve a mystery that no one else seemed to be aware of: why Kingston regulators deleted and then altered a state-sanctioned report showing extremely high levels of radiation at the cleanup site.

Roughly a month after the spill, Nichols read a Duke University press release stating that ash samples collected at Kingston by a team led by Vengosh, the geochemist, showed radium levels well above those typically found in coal ash. Nichols knew that the state environmental regulator, the Tennessee Department for Environment and Conservation, or TDEC, was also testing soil and ash samples at the site. After seeing Vengosh’s high radium readings, he wondered if TDEC’s report would also show high levels of either radium or uranium. (Radium is a decay element of uranium.) Later that spring, Nichols visited TDEC’s website and discovered the test results.

“I opened it up and went to uranium, and it was just off the charts,” Nichols recalled. In a 2020 affidavit, Nichols reported that these levels were “extremely high so as to be alarming.” At least 27 soil and ash samples were collected from at least 20 different sites surrounding Kingston beginning January 6, 2009. The levels ranged from 84 parts per million (ppm) to 2,000 ppm. The average level was over 500 ppm, as much as 50 times the typical uranium content found in coal ash.

The next morning, when Nichols slumped back into his computer chair and refreshed TDEC’s website, he saw that the report had been changed. The high uranium readings had plummeted. Now the average uranium levels in the ash were 2.88 ppm, a tenth of the typical uranium content found in coal ash and illogically, below levels naturally occurring in soil. Luckily, Nichols had downloaded the unaltered report the night before.

A month later, Nichols sent the two lab reports to one of the attorneys representing Tennessee residents affected by the spill in a lawsuit they’d brought against TVA. According to Nichols, the lawyers weren’t interested. Nevertheless, Nichols was determined to find more proof of the unusually high levels of on-site radiation. In between cutting hay and spraying weeds on his family farm, he spent years poring over information online about TVA, coal ash, and uranium before he stumbled across Wilkinson’s story.

Back in 2014, Wilkinson’s urine tested for unusually high levels of both mercury and uranium. The mercury is more easily explained: The most common cause of mercury contamination, according to the EPA, is coal-fired power plant emissions, which account for 44 percent of all man-made mercury pollution. The 2008 spill released 29 times the mercury reported at the Kingston site for the entire decade before it, and TVA documents show high levels of additional legacy mercury were present in the Clinch River and could have migrated into the Emory. Today, Wilkinson has symptoms attributable to methylmercury poisoning including blurry vision, fatigue, a hearing impairment, memory loss, and loss of coordination that caused him to fall out of the machines he operated until retiring on disability in 2015.

But most shocking to Nichols was the high level of uranium in Wilkinson’s body — it was 10 times the U.S. average, and identical to the median levels that one study found in workers exposed to the substance. Prolonged occupational exposure to uranium is strongly linked to chronic kidney disease, which Wilkinson suffers from. Because Wilkinson’s toxicology results were taken four years after he left Kingston, they likely show lower uranium levels than what he and other cleanup workers initially had.

Wilkinson’s results left no doubt in Nichols’ mind that the original uranium readings he’d saved were significant. A reporter for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Jamie Satterfield, contacted him after the report he saved showed up in court proceedings. Satterfield published a story about the altered uranium readings in May of this year.

In response to her story, TDEC told the News-Sentinel that its updated uranium readings, which plummeted by 98 percent, were due to a change in the sampling method used for the tests. (Satterfield also reported that radium levels had been lowered between the initial TDEC report Nichols downloaded and the updated one; the department attributed this to a “data entry error.”) In an email response to Grist and the Daily Yonder, a TDEC spokesperson elaborated that the sampling lab, which was neither staffed nor supervised by TDEC, “discovered there were interferences in the analysis of soil and ash samples for uranium” and subsequently changed the method of analysis from one EPA-approved protocol to another. The new results were then published without public notice of the alteration.

“Changing lab reports is a very serious thing,” Nichols said. “But I can assure you data entry errors don’t cause a man to test for unusually high levels of uranium. That’s [TDEC’s] big problem.”

Unbeknownst to Nichols, Russell Johnson, the district attorney with jurisdiction over Roane County, where Kingston is located, had informed TDEC’s commissioner in 2017 that he was beginning a criminal probe into the Kingston cleanup. “I am deeply concerned with the apparent intentional conduct of the cleanup contractors and their supervisors, actions that took place in Roane County, conduct that may indeed have caused serious bodily injury or possibly even death to a number of people,” Johnson wrote in a letter to TDEC.

In concert with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Johnson began investigating whether TVA or its contractors “suppressed information” as part of the coverup alleged in the 2013 worker lawsuit against Jacobs. They now have Nichols’ evidence as well. But despite this ongoing investigation, it’s unclear if workers will ever learn for certain whether or not they were exposed to dangerous substances besides the coal ash itself. (Bob Edwards, an assistant district attorney working under Johnson, told Grist and the Daily Yonder that the district attorney’s office could not comment on a pending investigation.)………………….https://grist.org/justice/tva-kingston-coal-ash-spill-nuclear/

December 17, 2020 Posted by | employment, health, incidents, investigative journalism, Legal, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Uranium, wastes | Leave a comment

British government’s “perpetual” lack of knowledge about £130bn clean-up of 17 old nuclear sites.

MPs attack ‘lack of knowledge’ over UK nuclear power clean-up
Public accounts committee calls for ‘clearer discipline’ in managing sites,   Nathalie Thomas in Edinburgh Ft.com  NOVEMBER 27 2020   MPs have warned there is a “perpetual” lack of knowledge in government about the state of Britain’s 17 earliest nuclear power sites, which are expected to cost taxpayers about £130bn to clean up over the next 120 years.

 This lack of knowledge about the retired facilities, which include Sellafield in Cumbria and 12 early nuclear power sites known as the “Magnox” stations, has already wasted hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer money and “continues to be a major barrier to making progress” with the clean-up, according to the House of Commons’ public accounts committee.
 The spending watchdog called for “clearer discipline” in managing the 17 sites, which were all built before privatisation of the electricity system in the 1990s and are the responsibility of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a public body overseen by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
  Decommissioning of the earliest nuclear power reactors and research facilities has been a long-running and torturous saga in Britain.
 Responsibility for cleaning up the two Magnox research sites and 10 Magnox nuclear power stations was brought back in-house last year following a bungled tender process in 2014, which handed a lucrative contract to a joint venture between UK-based Babcock International and Fluor of the US but was later challenged in the courts.
 That botched process cost the taxpayer more than £140m, including settlements with unsuccessful bidders, legal costs and staff time, but MPs warned the NDA still did not have “full understanding of the condition” of those Magnox plants as well as other sites under its responsibility, including the Dounreay nuclear power research facility in Scotland.
The latest estimate for cleaning up all of the 17 earliest sites stands at £132bn, the MPs said, the lion’s share of which falls on Sellafield — where the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall, was developed in the 1950s and housed major civil nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities.
The committee is pressing the NDA to “exploit” opportunities to reduce the amount of time it will take to clean up sites and reduce costs to the taxpayer, including prioritising plans to find a location for a permanent “geological disposal facility” for nuclear waste deep under ground, which would replace current storage at Sellafield and elsewhere and would be designed to prevent the release of harmful quantities of radioactivity to the surface.
The UK went from leading the world in establishing nuclear power to this sorry saga of a perpetual lack of knowledge about the current state of the UK’s nuclear sites. With a project of this length and cost we need to see clearer discipline in project management,” said Meg Hillier MP, chair of the committee…….
Nuclear industry executives are hoping the government will soon agree to enter negotiations over financing a new nuclear power plant, Sizewell C in Suffolk, although the plans are contested by environment campaigners. Developers of new nuclear power plants are now required to pay towards the eventual decommissioning of their sites. https://www.ft.com/content/6f6ef7c2-84cf-4f2c-ab80-34eeab954e71

December 12, 2020 Posted by | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Trying to test for cracks in nuclear waste containers that have to last for over a million years

Waste from nuclear fuel must be stored for more than a million years/

“Salt can be present in the ambient air and environment anywhere, not just near the ocean. We need to be able to plan for extended long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel at nuclear power plants for the foreseeable future — it’s a national reality,”

Sandia to put nuclear waste storage canisters to the test,   https://www.newswise.com/articles/sandia-to-put-nuclear-waste-storage-canisters-to-the-test, Scientists will explore science of cracks caused by corrosion, 10-Dec-2020 , by Sandia National Laboratories    Newswise — ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories is outfitting three 22.5-ton, 16.5-feet-long stainless-steel storage canisters with heaters and instrumentation to simulate nuclear waste so researchers can study their durability.

The three canisters, which arrived in mid-November and have never contained any nuclear materials, will be used to study how much salt gathers on canisters over time. Sandia will also study the potential for cracks caused by salt- and stress-induced corrosion with additional canisters that will be delivered during the next stage of the project.

Currently there is not an operating geologic repository in the U.S. for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. As a result, spent fuel is being stored at commercial nuclear power plants in both storage pools and dry storage canisters. The storage canisters currently holding the spent nuclear fuel were designed to have a useful life of a few decades but will now likely need to be used longer than planned, said Tito Bonano, Sandia’s nuclear energy fuel cycle senior manager.

Data is urgently needed to validate and guide how industry should manage storage canisters for longer than originally anticipated, Bonano said.

“Salt can be present in the ambient air and environment anywhere, not just near the ocean. We need to be able to plan for extended long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel at nuclear power plants for the foreseeable future — it’s a national reality,” he said.

The researchers expect the project could have long-reaching implications for public health and safety, industry practices, regulatory framework and defining future research paths, said Bonano.

The three-year project is funded by the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy office. Overall, fifteen never-used, never-irradiated DOE-owned canisters are being distributed for large scale testing to Sandia and two other national laboratories, an industry research institute and an independent storage facility at an existing nuclear power plant.

Waste from nuclear fuel must be stored for more than a million years

Nuclear power plants use uranium pellets inside a metal-cladded tube, called a fuel rod, to power reactors to create the heat needed to make electricity. After the fuel rods can no longer be used in the reactor, they need to be stored onsite until they are taken offsite to another facility and eventually permanently disposed because they will be radioactive for a long time, said Samuel Durbin, a mechanical engineer and Sandia’s canister project lead.

“When fuel is removed from a reactor, it’s very hot, both in temperature and radioactivity” Durbin said. “The utility loads it into a pool for about five years to cool down. After that, the spent fuel can be offloaded into a dry storage canister.”

A storage canister starts as a flat piece of stainless steel that is rolled into a cylinder and then welded where the seams come together. The heat from the welding creates heat-affected zones in the seams of the canister that experience tensile, or pulling, stress. This stress makes these areas around the welds more susceptible to corrosion from salt over time, said Durbin.

Research will test how much salt deposits on canisters over time

Sandia received three canisters Nov. 13. The research team will outfit each of them with 32 electrical heaters to simulate the decay heat, which is heat released as a result of radioactive decay, from the 32 spent fuel assemblies that would typically be stored in this type of canister. No radioactive materials will be used in the testing, Durbin said.

Instruments called thermocouples, which measure temperature, and other sensors for diagnostic testing and surface sampling also will be added, he said.

Once the outfitted canisters have been tested and repacked for transport at Sandia, the team plans to move them to a storage pad at an independent spent fuel storage installation on the West Coast where they will experience the same real-life conditions of in-use canisters. The Sandia team, led by managers Sylvia Saltzstein and Geoff Freeze, Durbin, and chemists/corrosion scientists Charles Bryan and Rebecca Schaller, along with partners from other national laboratories will monitor the test canisters and record surface deposits, especially chloride-bearing salts, for three to more than 10 years, depending on how much the data varies over time.

“Sodium-chloride, or salt, that settles on the surface of spent nuclear-fuel canisters can lead to chloride-induced stress corrosion cracking, and right now there is inadequate data on these surface deposits,” said Durbin.

In real-life storage of nuclear waste, Durbin said the decay heat from the spent fuel creates natural convection around the storage canisters, causing outside air to be drawn over the canister surface. This process helps cool the spent fuel over time. As ambient air is drawn in, salt and other particulates in the air are drawn in as well and can settle on the canister surface. During the test, the electrical heaters installed inside the canisters at Sandia will replicate this decay heat-driven convection without using nuclear materials.

In hot, dry conditions, Durbin said salt deposits alone don’t cause any issues, but over time, as the decay heat decreases and the canister cools, water can condense on the canister surface and a brine can form.

“These conditions can occur nationwide and are seen as precursors to chloride-induced, stress-corrosion cracking. Back when these canisters were being designed, people weren’t thinking about this as an issue because we had a plan for permanent disposal. The current national nuclear waste situation forces canisters to be stored onsite for the foreseeable future, which could be 100 years or longer, so stress corrosion cracking becomes more of a concern,” Durbin said.

In addition to the long-term heating and surface deposition test, Sandia will use up to another three canisters for laboratory-based tests to conduct fundamental research on cracking caused by salt and stress, especially on the welded seams and intersections of the canisters. Researchers will measure the effectiveness of commercially available crack repair and mitigation coatings.

To test these seams, the team will cut the canisters into small segments and test pieces with and without welded seams to study the pre-cursor conditions for salt and stress to cause the corrosion that leads to cracks, he said.

December 12, 2020 Posted by | Reference, safety, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Japan’s power companies consider opening up Aomari nuclear waste site to other utilities

Aomori spent nuclear fuel site may be opened up to other utilities, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/11/national/shared-nuclear-fuel-facility-a    Dec 11, 2020

The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan is considering a plan for member power suppliers that have nuclear power plants to jointly use a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in the city of Mutsu, Aomori Prefecture, sources said Thursday.

The Mutsu facility is held by Recyclable-Fuel Storage Co., which is jointly owned by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. and Japan Atomic Power Co. Recyclable-Fuel Storage aims to start facility operations in fiscal 2021, which starts next April.

The federation is in talks with parties including Tepco on allowing power firms other than Tepco and Japan Atomic Power to use the temporary spent fuel storage facility if they pay fees, informed sources said.

The joint use initiative is partly aimed at supporting Kansai Electric Power Co., according to the sources. The Fukui Prefectural Government is urging Kansai Electric, which has nuclear plants in the prefecture, to show by the end of this year a candidate site outside of the prefecture for temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel.

Selecting a candidate location early is a key challenge for Kansai Electric, which heavily relies on nuclear power generation, because it is a condition for local authorities to decide whether to approve the restart of the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors at the firm’s Takahama nuclear plant and the No. 3 reactor at its Mihama plant, all of which have seen more than 40 years pass since the launch of their operations.

“There’s been no contact” from the power industry group about the shared use plan for the temporary storage facility, Mutsu Mayor Soichiro Miyashita told reporters Thursday. “If they are proceeding with the plan within themselves, that shouldn’t be the case.”

A media report said in 2018 that Tepco was considering a joint use of the facility with Kansai Electric and others. The reported plan went nowhere after the mayor opposed it.

Shared use of the facility requires approval by the Aomori Prefectural Government and the city of Mutsu. But it remains to be seen at the moment if such local permission can be obtained.

As of the end of September this year, the amount of spent fuel from nuclear power stations in Japan stood at about 19,000 tons.

Of the total, about 16,000 tons have been kept at locations including storage pools at nuclear power plants. The amount is about 75% of storage capacity as work to reprocess spent nuclear fuel has stalled, a situation stoking concerns among nuclear plant host municipalities.

December 12, 2020 Posted by | wastes | Leave a comment

Three Mile Island – radiation is forever – will nuclear waste storage withstand flooding?

December 7, 2020 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Texas and New Mexico reject interim nuclear waste storage

December 7, 2020 Posted by | opposition to nuclear, wastes | Leave a comment

Hokkaido’s ski areas could lose popularity, due to plans to house nuclear wastes

December 7, 2020 Posted by | Japan, wastes | Leave a comment

Shortfalls in planning mean that the USA Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could become full

Weather Channel 2nd Dec 2020, The only underground nuclear waste dump in the United States is suffering from shortfalls in planning and staffing that could lead to disruptions at the facility, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. The report published last month indicated that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, could become full if the amount of waste shipped to the facility keeps expanding or if a new way of measuring waste is rejected in a pending court challenge, according to the Associated
Press.

The plant, known as the WIPP, was built in the 1980s for the disposal of defense-related nuclear waste, including clothing, tools, rags,
debris, soil and other items contaminated with radioactive elements, according to a fact sheet from the facility. The WIPP’s disposal rooms were carved out of ancient salt beds 2,150 feet below ground.

https://weather.com/news/news/2020-12-02-underground-nuclear-waste-dump-carlsbad-new-mexico

December 4, 2020 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »