nuclear-news

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

Where will Connecticut’s nuclear waste go?

  Connecticut has been living more than half a century with what was supposed to have been temporary spent fuel storage.

On any day since the mid 1950s, there might be multiple reactors in or around the Thames River, welded into the nuclear powered submarines stationed at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in Groton

The Navy won’t discuss how it disposes of its spent nuclear waste.

It’s in question as the state pushes toward a green future, By Edmund H. Mahony, Hartford Courant, May 01, 2022, The federal government is jump-starting its long-stalled search for a place to store the tons of spent nuclear fuel piling up in Connecticut and other states.

 …… The U.S. Department of Energy is reviewing responses to a request for information it issued to nuclear industry stakeholders late last year as a first step in another attempt to resolve one of the thorniest challenges of the nuclear age: how and where to store the highly-radioactive, spent uranium that is the waste product of nuclear energy production.

The state legislature this session approved a bill requiring all electric power consumed in Connecticut to be produced from carbon free sources by 2040. Another bill, written with smaller, better reactors in mind, is pending. It would lift a state moratorium on new nuclear power production — a moratorium enacted decades ago over the same concerns about the state’s spent fuel stockpiles — but limit new production to the Millstone nuclear complex in Waterford, where Dominion Energy has what was intended to be a temporary nuclear waste storage facility.

The country’s inability to figure out what to do with waste stockpiles has become an impediment for nuclear-generating states like Connecticut…… That has power industry and private capital looking toward the development of a new generation of smaller [really?] safer, more efficient [really?] nuclear reactors — reactors that will continue to produce waste that needs to be disposed of someplace safe.

……………………….. “Disposal is absolutely an issue,”  State Sen. Norm Needleman   said. “That is why this is limited to a site that is a going plant today where they already are dealing with that problem. I would not at this moment support any expansion until the Department of Energy finds someplace. If you are going to build nuclear power plants and you are going to be siting 200 piles of nuclear waste, it is better to have it buried 2,000 feet below ground someplace, rather than having it spread all over.”

………………………   Connecticut has been living more than half a century with what was supposed to have been temporary spent fuel storage.

On any day since the mid 1950s, there might be multiple reactors in or around the Thames River, welded into the nuclear powered submarines stationed at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in Groton, or just down river at the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics where the ships are built. For years the Navy operated an experimental reactor in Windsor.

Beginning in the late 1960s, four commercial reactors produced power in Connecticut — one at the Connecticut Yankee plant on Haddam Neck, a peninsula stretching into the lower Connecticut River, and three on Millstone Point at the east end of Long Island Sound.

Two of the three Millstone reactors remain operational. Connecticut Yankee has been closed and decommissioned.

The Navy won’t discuss how it disposes of its spent nuclear waste. Because the federal government has not been able to find a politically acceptable commercial disposal solution, every bit of radioactive uranium expended in the production of commercial power in Connecticut remains under guard in what are designed as impregnable — but temporary — storage containers at the Millstone and Connecticut Yankee sites……………………………………

as much as 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel continues to pile up and remain stranded at what were supposed to be temporary sites around the country.

On Haddam Neck, there are 43 enormous concrete and steel storage casks containing radioactive material on the site of the decommissioned Connecticut Yankee plant. At the Millstone site in Waterford, waste is divided between a storage pool and 47 storage modules. Plant operator Dominion Energy says it has the capacity to store a total of 135 modules.

The storage costs, which involve protecting the spent fuel from hazards running from terrorist attacks to natural disasters, is enormous. The cost at Connecticut Yankee is about $10 million a year — at a plant that shut down in 1996 because it was no longer cost effective after 28 years of operation.

The federal government and, ultimately, taxpayers are picking up the cost. The law that was to make Yucca Mountain a national repository carried a provision obligating the Department of Energy to remove and store spent fuel from commercial reactors beginning in 1998. Without a repository, the department cannot meet its obligation. Plant operators sued, and the government has been held responsible for incurred storage costs.

There are intangible costs to temporary storage, too…………………………….  

May 2, 2022 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

This Is How the United States Could Help Bring Peace to Ukraine

Decisions by the U.S. will have a critical impact on whether there will soon be peace in Ukraine, or only a much longer and bloodier war.
https://7news.com.au/business/call-to-dump-nuclear-go-hydrogen-for-subs-c-6580633?fbclid=IwAR2rf7smDYvCgEnSKGxjYp0rNFExJe0Vv8zd7tt8S9aN1Jkdk3_t9WW0rqY

MEDEA BENJAMIN,  NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES, April 28, 2022

On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 billion.

The top priority of Russian airstrikes in Ukraine has been to destroy as many of these weapons as possible before they reach the front lines of the war, so it is not clear how militarily effective these massive arms shipments really are. The other leg of U.S. “support” for Ukraine is its economic and financial sanctions against Russia, whose effectiveness is also highly uncertain.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is visiting Moscow and Kyiv to try to kick start negotiations for a ceasefire and a peace agreement. Since hopes for earlier peace negotiations in Belarus and Turkey have been washed away in a tide of military escalation, hostile rhetoric and politicized war crimes accusations, Secretary General Guterres’ mission may now be the best hope for peace in Ukraine. 

This pattern of early hopes for a diplomatic resolution that are quickly dashed by a war psychosis is not unusual. Data on how wars end from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) make it clear that the first month of a war offers the best chance for a negotiated peace agreement. That window has now passed for Ukraine.

An analysis of the UCDP data by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that 44% of wars that end within a month end in a ceasefire and peace agreement rather than the decisive defeat of either side, while that decreases to 24% in wars that last between a month and a year. Once wars rage on into a second year, they become even more intractable and usually last more than ten year.

CSIS fellow Benjamin Jensen, who analyzed the UCDP data, concluded, “The time for diplomacy is now. The longer a war lasts absent concessions by both parties, the more likely it is to escalate into a protracted conflict… In addition to punishment, Russian officials need a viable diplomatic off-ramp that addresses the concerns of all parties.”

To be successful, diplomacy leading to a peace agreement must meet five basic conditions:

First, all sides must gain benefits from the peace agreement that outweigh what they think they can gain by war.

U.S. and allied officials are waging an information war to promote the idea that Russia is losing the war and that Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia, even as some officials admit that that could take several years.     

In reality, neither side will benefit from a protracted war that lasts for many months or years. The lives of millions of Ukrainians will be lost and ruined, while Russia will be mired in the kind of military quagmire that both the U.S.S.R. and the United States already experienced in Afghanistan, and that most recent U.S. wars have turned into.

In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a peace agreement already exist. They are: withdrawal of Russian forces; Ukrainian neutrality between NATO and Russia; self-determination for all Ukrainians (including in Crimea and Donbas); and a regional security agreement that protects everyone and prevents new wars.

Both sides are essentially fighting to strengthen their hand in an eventual agreement along those lines. So how many people must die before the details can be worked out across a negotiating table instead of over the rubble of Ukrainian towns and cities?

Second, mediators must be impartial and trusted by both sides.

The United States has monopolized the role of mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for decades, even as it openly backs and arms one side and abuses its UN veto to prevent international action. This has been a transparent model for endless war. 

Turkey has so far acted as the principal mediator between Russia and Ukraine, but it is a NATO member that has supplied drones, weapons and military training to Ukraine. Both sides have accepted Turkey’s mediation, but can Turkey really be an honest broker?

The UN could play a legitimate role, as it is doing in Yemen, where the two sides are finally observing a two-month ceasefire. But even with the UN’s best efforts, it has taken years to negotiate this fragile pause in the war.

Third, the agreement must address the main concerns of all parties to the war.

In 2014, the U.S.-backed coup and the massacre of anti-coup protesters in Odessa led to declarations of independence by the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The first Minsk Protocol agreement in September 2014 failed to end the ensuing civil war in Eastern Ukraine. A critical difference in the Minsk II agreement in February 2015 was that DPR and LPR representatives were included in the negotiations, and it succeeded in ending the worst fighting and preventing a major new outbreak of war for 7 years.

There is another party that was largely absent from the negotiations in Belarus and Turkey, people who make up half the population of Russia and Ukraine: the women of both countries. While some of them are fighting, many more can speak as victims, civilian casualties, and refugees from a war unleashed mainly by men. The voices of women at the table would be a constant reminder of the human costs of war and the lives of women and children that are at stake.   

Even when one side militarily wins a war, the grievances of the losers and unresolved political and strategic issues often sow the seeds of new outbreaks of war in the future. As Benjamin Jensen of CSIS suggested, the desires of U.S. and Western politicians to punish and gain strategic advantage over Russia must not be allowed to prevent a comprehensive resolution that addresses the concerns of all sides and ensures a lasting peace.    

Fourth, there must be a step-by-step roadmap to a stable and lasting peace that all sides are committed to.

The Minsk II agreement led to a fragile ceasefire and established a roadmap to a political solution. But the Ukrainian government and parliament, under Presidents Poroshenko and then Zelensky, failed to take the next steps that Poroshenko agreed to in Minsk in 2015: to pass laws and constitutional changes to permit independent, internationally-supervised elections in the DPR and LPR, and to grant them autonomy within a federalized Ukrainian state.

Now that these failures have led to Russian recognition of the DPR and LPR’s independence, a new peace agreement must revisit and resolve their status, and that of Crimea, in ways that all sides will be committed to, whether that is through the autonomy promised in Minsk II or formal, recognized independence from Ukraine.

A sticking point in the peace negotiations in Turkey was Ukraine’s need for solid security guarantees to ensure that Russia won’t invade it again. The UN Charter formally protects all countries from international aggression, but it has repeatedly failed to do so when the aggressor, usually the United States, wields a Security Council veto. So how can a neutral Ukraine be reassured that it will be safe from attack in the future? And how can all parties be sure that the others will stick to the agreement this time?

Fifth, outside powers must not undermine the negotiation or implementation of a peace agreement.

Although the United States and its NATO allies are not active warring parties in Ukraine, their role in provoking this crisis through NATO expansion and the 2014 coup, then supporting Kyiv’s abandonment of the Minsk II agreement and flooding Ukraine with weapons, make them an “elephant in the room” that will cast a long shadow over the negotiating table, wherever that is.

n April 2012, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan drew up a six-point plan for a UN-monitored ceasefire and political transition in Syria. But at the very moment that the Annan plan took effect and UN ceasefire monitors were in place, the United States, NATO, and their Arab monarchist allies held three “Friends of Syria” conferences, where they pledged virtually unlimited financial and military aid to the Al Qaeda-linked rebels they were backing to overthrow the Syrian government. This encouraged the rebels to ignore the ceasefire, and led to another decade of war for the people of Syria.

The fragile nature of peace negotiations over Ukraine makes success highly vulnerable to such powerful external influences. The United States backed Ukraine in a confrontational approach to the civil war in Donbas instead of supporting the terms of the Minsk II agreement, and this has led to war with Russia. Now Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavosoglu, has told CNN Turk that unnamed NATO members “want the war to continue,” in order to keep weakening Russia.

Conclusion 

How the United States and its NATO allies act now and in the coming months will be crucial in determining whether Ukraine is destroyed by years of war, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—or whether this war ends quickly through a diplomatic process that brings peace, security, and stability to the people of Russia, Ukraine, and their neighbors.

If the United States wants to help restore peace in Ukraine, it must diplomatically support peace negotiations and make it clear to its ally, Ukraine, that it will support any concessions that Ukrainian negotiators believe are necessary to clinch a peace agreement with Russia.

Whatever mediator Russia and Ukraine agree to work with to try to resolve this crisis, the United States must give the diplomatic process its full, unreserved support, both in public and behind closed doors. It must also ensure that its own actions do not undermine the peace process in Ukraine as they did the 2012 Annan plan in Syria.

One of the most critical steps that U.S. and NATO leaders can take to provide an incentive for Russia to agree to a negotiated peace is to commit to lifting their sanctions if and when Russia complies with a withdrawal agreement. Without such a commitment, the sanctions will quickly lose any moral or practical value as leverage over Russia and will be only an arbitrary form of collective punishment against its people, and against poor people everywhere who can no longer afford food to feed their families. As the de facto leader of the NATO military alliance, the U.S. position on this question will be crucial.

So policy decisions by the United States will have a critical impact on whether there will soon be peace in Ukraine, or only a much longer and bloodier war. The test for U.S. policymakers, and for Americans who care about the people of Ukraine, must be to ask which of these outcomes U.S. policy choices are likely to lead to.

April 30, 2022 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Girl’s Cancer Leads Mom to ‘Overwhelming’ Discovery of More Than 50 Sick Kids Near Closed Nuclear Lab

https://people.com/health/calif-girls-cancer-leads-mom-to-overwhelming-discovery-more-than-50-kids-near-closed-lab-were-also-sick/ By Johnny Dodd, 29 Apr 22,

“Pediatric cancer is rare — you’re not supposed to have neighbors whose children also have it,” says Melissa Bumstead, who “knew I had to do something”  

Melissa Bumstead made a terrifying discovery in 2014 as her four-year-old daughter Grace lay in a hospital bed battling a rare form of leukemia. While keeping vigil at the Los Angeles medical center where Grace was receiving treatment, Bumstead began meeting the parents of more than 50 children with equally rare cancers and was horrified to learn that they all lived near one another.

“I just kept meeting people who lived down the corner or around the block or behind the high school,” she tells PEOPLE during an interview in this week’s issue. “And that’s when the panic started to set in.”

Even more alarming, Bumstead soon learned that all their homes were located in a circle around a 2,850-acre former top-secret rocket engine and nuclear energy test site—built in 1947—that had long been contaminated with radioactive waste and toxic chemicals.

And for the past seven years the 41-year-old mother of two, who lives 3.7 miles west of the facility, has helped lead the fight to finally get the Santa Susana Field Laboratory property — run chiefly by the Department of Energy, Boeing and NASA before its closure in 2006 — cleaned up.

“This is a hugely contaminated site that contains a who’s-who of chemicals toxic to human health,” says Dr. Robert Dodge, a Ventura, Calif., family doctor and board member of the group Physicians for Social Responsibility. “They can cause cancers, leukemias, along with developmental, genetic, neurologic and immune system disorders.”

While caring for her daughter, whose acute lymphoblastic leukemia has been in remission since a bone marrow transplant five years ago, Bumstead and her group — Parents Against the Santa Susana Field Lab — has pressured California state officials to enforce a 2007 cleanup agreement, scheduled to have been completed in 2017, that they say has remained stalled. That agreement, among other things, called for the removal of contaminated topsoil that residents allege gets blown from the site into surrounding communities by high winds or washed offsite during rains.

Since 2015 Bumstead has immersed herself in scientific studies on the site, testifying at countless public meetings, launching a Facebook page (now with nearly 5,000 members) and creating a change.org petition on the issue (that has attracted over 750,000 signatures).

“It was frightening,” says Bumstead, who is featured in the 2021 documentary In The Dark of the Valley, “to read studies about how adults who lived within two miles from the lab had a 60 percent higher cancer rate than those living more than five miles away or that over 1,500 former workers at the site received federal compensation after being diagnosed with cancer.”

Even more frightening for Bumstead was learning that the lab was the location of one of the nation’s largest — and least known — nuclear accidents that occurred 1959 when one of the facility’s ten sodium nuclear reactors experienced a partial meltdown, releasing enormous amounts of radiation into the surrounding environment.   

“It’s exhausting, depressing and often overwhelming,” says Bumstead of her crusade to get the contaminated site cleaned up. “But the cancer was all around us. And I realized that kids are just going to keep getting sick. So I need to do something to make the situation better.”         

April 30, 2022 Posted by | health, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

USA and NATO pursuing a ”winnable war” to the ultimate end – World War 3

Ukraine is a pawn in this conflict, and its population is cannon fodder.

The Guns of April, WSWS Editorial Board 27 April 2022

The United States and the NATO powers of Europe have set into motion a chain of events that is leading to World War III. 

In her famed work on the outbreak of World War I, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman detailed how miscalculations, the ubiquitous belief in a brief and winnable conflict, and irreversible tactical maneuvers—the “ifs, errors, and commitments”—accumulated as the imperialist powers dragged the workers of Europe into the snarl of the trenches and the slaughter of the Great War.

A similar dynamic is unfolding in the US-NATO conflict with Russia. The US-supplied howitzers and massive deployment of weapons into Ukraine are sounding the Guns of April. 

In mid-March, US President Joe Biden repeatedly stated that he would not allow direct conflict between the United States and Russia, because “that would mean World War III.” A month later, this is precisely what the Biden administration is doing.

On Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin presided over a meeting of the representatives of forty nations in a council of war assembled by Washington on its Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe and the NATO Air Command. 

Austin, fresh from a visit to war-torn Kiev, confirmed that the war in Ukraine is a war between US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. He announced that Washington would be assembling every month going forward a comparable international gathering of high-ranking military figures—which he termed the Ukrainian Contact Group—to “focus on winning” the conflict with Russia.

The aims of the war are now clear. The bloodshed in Ukraine was not provoked to defend its technical right to join NATO, but rather was prepared, instigated and massively escalated in order to destroy Russia as a significant military force and to overthrow its government. Ukraine is a pawn in this conflict, and its population is cannon fodder.

The Ramstein war council was organized to plot the next stage in this scheme. Prior to and in the aftermath of the meeting, the US and other NATO powers announced the deployment of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles, tanks and tactical drones. 

The Contact Group, Austin declared, must “move at the speed of war.” In accordance with this direction, Germany announced Tuesday that it would deliver an unspecified number of Flakpanzer Gepard “anti-aircraft cannon tanks,” while Canada reported that it would be sending M777 howitzers, anti-tank munitions and armored vehicles. “The distinction limiting escalatory weapons,” which existed in the first weeks of the war, Air Force Magazine noted, “appears to have melted away.”

The pretense that the US and NATO are not at war with Russia has also “melted away.” Former US Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges stated on Sunday that the US aim in the conflict was “breaking the back” of Russia. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded, accusing the United States of pressuring the Ukrainian government to sabotage peace talks and of conducting a proxy war in Ukraine. He warned that there was a “serious, real” danger of nuclear war. Austin dismissed Lavrov’s warning as “dangerous and unhelpful.” 

What nonsense! Washington assembles a war camp and states that it aims to “break the back” of Russia. When Russia responds that such language and goals raise the danger of nuclear war, Washington declares this to be … unhelpful. 

The United States has made clear that it aims to crush Russia and topple its government. Faced with such an existential threat, the use of nuclear weapons becomes a tactic the Russian ruling class will weigh. Washington is determined to win the war, the Putin government is determined to prevent that from happening. There is no way out for either side but escalation. Lavrov is in fact correct: nuclear war is a real and serious danger.

The real driving forces behind the war have emerged in the course of the conflict. The US and NATO powers goaded Russia into invading Ukraine, refusing to negotiate over Russia’s demand that Ukraine not be made a member of NATO. Russia termed its invasion a special operation, signaling that it intended a contained, tactical maneuver to stabilize its position in the region.

The US, however, would not allow such a rearrangement and sought either to sink Russia in the quagmire of a “grinding occupation,” or to organize its defeat. To this end, Washington worked to undermine all efforts at a negotiated settlement. The rhetoric of Washington justifying this policy has deepened the conflict. Biden accused Putin of war crimes, then of genocide, and called for regime change in Moscow. Each new formulation had an irreversible, escalatory character, a click in the ratchet of war.  

Despite the massive and mounting infusion of military equipment into Ukraine—Washington has shipped more than $3.7 billion worth of weaponry since the beginning of the war—the regime in Kiev has not been able to orchestrate the decisive defeat of Russia. The danger, seen from the standpoint of the US and NATO, is that Russia will be able to consolidate its control over Eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea coast. If the Ukrainian forces do not drive forward, then the advantage, at least from a military standpoint, shifts to Russia.

The development of the conflict, set in motion in the Oval Office and deliberated in the Kremlin, is increasingly in the hands of military men and it is reaching a point of no return. A decisive defeat of Russia in the conflict requires the ever more direct involvement of the NATO powers themselves, up to and including the deployment of troops.

With its arms shipments, sweeping declarations and councils of war, the United States has staked its entire credibility on the defeat of Russia in this conflict. “The stakes reach beyond Ukraine and even beyond Europe,” Austin declared on Tuesday. The fate of American hegemony, including the credibility of its threats against China, hangs in the balance. The reckless decisions made by Washington have thus become the major premise in the logic of further escalation. 

Washington drags behind it the major powers of Europe, as it assembles, with the hubris of empire, a war camp on the continent. Britain has been deeply complicit in every escalatory step, and Germany and France are taking up their assigned roles. Washington gathers the military conspirators on a US airbase in Germany, the country which once launched Operation Barbarossa, holds the Germans as virtual bystanders, and plots its war with Russia…………. more https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/27/pszn-a27.html

April 30, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Safety concerns about NuScam’s much touted ”small nuclear reactor”

U.S. nuclear power agency seeks staff documentation of NuScale’s quake protection,   By Timothy Gardner,   WASHINGTON, April 27 (Reuters) – An official with the U.S. nuclear power regulator has ordered staff to supply documents that could lead to a review of a 2020 approval of a new type of nuclear power reactor after an engineer raised concerns about its ability to withstand earthquakes, documents showed on Wednesday. Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Chris Reese, Kenneth Maxwell and Lisa Shumaker .

 Dan Dorman, the executive director for operations at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), reviewed a complaint by John Ma, an engineer at the agency, about its approval of the design of NuScale’s nuclear power plant.

NuScale, majority owned by construction and engineering company Fluor Corp (FLR.N), which got approval for the design of a 50-megwatt small modular reactor (SMR), is hoping to build the Carbon Free Power Project with multiple reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory, with the first coming online in 2029 and full plant operation in 2030.

Some see SMRs such as NuScale’s as a way to cut emissions from fossil fuels and to potentially reduce Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas. NuScale also wants to build the plants in Poland and Kazakhstan.

In an internal document Ma wrote to NRC officials soon after the 2020 approval, he alleged the design of the building intended to enclose the reactor units and its spent fuel pool did not provide assurance it could withstand the largest earthquake considered without collapsing and may be vulnerable to smaller earthquakes.

“Collapse of the reactor building … could potentially cause an early and large release of radioactive materials into the atmosphere and ground, which could kill people,” Ma wrote.

In February, Dorman wrote to Ma that he concluded the NRC’s basis for accepting NuScale’s measure of strength for the reactor’s building design “was not sufficiently documented,” documents posted on the NRC website on Wednesday showed.

Dorman ordered the agency’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation to document its evaluation of NuScale’s “stress averaging approach” and, if necessary, to update the application and evaluate whether there are “any impacts” to the 2020 design approval.

It was uncertain whether the additional actions would affect the project’s timeline which has been delayed several times………….

A science advocacy group said the concerns Ma raised were troubling.

“NuScale’s business case is based on its assertion that it is a safer nuclear reactor. Now it’s time to prove it by addressing these safety concerns,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.   https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-nuclear-power-regulator-seeks-documents-nuscales-protection-against-quakes-2022-04-27/

April 30, 2022 Posted by | safety, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

For the first time, U.S. renewable energy output exceeds nuclear generation, EIA finds

Utility Dive, By Elizabeth McCarthy. 28 Apr 22,      

Dive Brief:

  • The growing number of large solar and wind energy projects resulted in renewable generation beating out nuclear energy last year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday. 
  • The nation has seen a steady rise in renewable generation, with the biggest share from solar, which is expected to continue because of the lower cost and greater safety of this intermittent power resource, clean energy advocates say. That is despite the Biden administration’s multi-billion dollar program to keep online baseload nuclear power plants scheduled to retire.
  • Natural gas supplies the biggest share of electricity in the county but its share is also expected to decrease over the next three decades. EIA projects solar will replace it as the dominant source of generation in the U.S. by 2050.
  • Dive Insight:Utility-scale renewable generation in the U.S. reached 795 million MWh in 2021, compared to 778 million MWh of nuclear generation.“This is a ‘good news’ story,” said Ralph Cavanagh, Natural Resources Defense Council energy program co-director.
  • The news gets better for renewables when considering that private investments in clean technology rose to over $27 billion in 2021, up from about $20 billion in 2020, according to a report by the American Investment Council released last week. Private equity companies over the last decade have invested close to $150 billion and backed more than 1,000 clean technology companies in the U.S., it added.
  • The biggest mover on the U.S. generation front has been solar as installation costs have dropped 70% over the last decade. That has led “the industry to expand into new markets and deploy thousands of systems nationwide,” according to a Feb. 11 joint statement by the Edison Electric Institute, NRDC and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Supply chain issues pushed up prices last year “but did not eliminate solar power’s competitive advantages in retail and wholesale markets,” the organizations wrote in their joint statement to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. EIA’s April 26 analysis does not include rooftop solar or other smaller renewables serving predominantly onsite demand. Factoring in just “end-use solar, the milestone for surpassing nuclear generation would have been reached earlier,” said Syne Salem, an EIA engineer. The tally also excludes small-scale wind and some industrial and commercial combined-heat-and-power systems.

April 30, 2022 Posted by | renewable, USA | Leave a comment

Poor outlook for Joe Biden’s $6 billion effort to keep old nuclear reactors going

Biden’s $6B nuclear plan hits ’24th hour’ roadblock

By Peter Behr, Hannah Northey | 04/28/2022  The Biden administration’s $6 billion effort to keep struggling nuclear plants operating is facing a barrier in Michigan and California.

A top energy executive yesterday confirmed that one of the first plants poised to qualify for financial support under the Energy Department’s newly unveiled lifeline — Michigan’s Palisades plant — remains on schedule to close May 31, throwing the Midwestern state’s climate goals into question.

Leo Denault, CEO of Entergy Corp., owner of the Palisades plant, told security analysts yesterday that a buyer who succeeded in acquiring the generator would also bear refueling costs and other expenses.

“We will work with any qualified party,” he said. But he added, “I do want to be very clear. Entergy is exiting the merchant nuclear business. The plant will have to stop operating in May. We’ll be out of fuel.”………………….

Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the Diablo Canyon owner, has also said the DOE offer does not change its intention to close the California facility. Diablo Canyon’s reactors 1 and 2 have planned closing dates of November 2024 and August 2025, respectively……….

A spokesperson for DOE said yesterday they were unable to speak about the unique challenges and closure decisions facing various nuclear plants, nor could they provide a precise number of struggling plants potentially eligible for financial assistance……………………………    https://www.eenews.net/articles/bidens-6b-nuclear-plan-hits-24th-hour-roadblock/

April 30, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA | Leave a comment

U.S. sees no threat of Russia using nuclear weapons despite rhetoric- official

WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) – The United States does not believe that there is a threat of Russia using nuclear weapons despite a recent escalation in Moscow’s rhetoric, a senior U.S. defense official said on Friday.,,,,,

Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart Editing by Frances Kerry   We continue to monitor their nuclear capabilities every day the best we can and we do not assess that there is a threat of the use of nuclear weapons and no threat to NATO territory,” the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday the West should not underestimate the elevated risks of nuclear conflict over Ukraine. read more

Russia said earlier this month that it plans to deploy its newly tested Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of mounting nuclear strikes against the United States, ……………….  https://www.reuters.com/world/us-sees-no-threat-russia-using-nuclear-weapons-despite-rhetoric-official-2022-04-29/

April 30, 2022 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Effort to stop banks financing nuclear weapons industry

PNC shareholders defeat proposal on nuclear weapons lending for second time

PATRICIA SABATINI, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 27 Apr 22,

Like the threat of nuclear war, the “Stop Banking the Bomb” campaign aimed at getting banks to stop financing companies involved in the nuclear weapons industry refuses to go away.

For the second year in a row, a proposal backed by a group opposed to such financing was defeated at PNC Financial Services Group’s annual shareholders meeting Wednesday.

Presented by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood in New York, the proposal asked that Pittsburgh-based PNC issue a report on the risks associated with lending to companies involved in making nuclear weapons.

The campaign has been targeting the bank for several years, demonstrating outside of PNC offices and shareholder meetings.

“PNC faces significant legal, financial and reputational risks if it continues to be linked to the nuclear weapons industry,” according to the proposal.

In addition, it said, the bank has a moral responsibility to address “adverse human rights impacts that it may cause, contribute to, or be directly linked to its business.”

PNC’s board recommended voting against the proposal, saying a review of the bank’s lending business concluded it did not pose a “material credit, legal or reputational risk to PNC,” and was properly vetted for potential environmental and human rights risks……………………

The proposal was defeated by a majority of shareholders. The exact vote count was not immediately available. ………………. https://www.post-gazette.com/business/pittsburgh-company-news/2022/04/27/pnc-financial-services-group-shareholders-nuclear-weapons-lending-banking-bomb/stories/202204270137

April 28, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Is New Mexico’s Nuclear Waste dump right now affected by wildfires?

Emergency declaration for multiple wildfires in New Mexico SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has signed emergency declarations as 20 wildfires continued to burn Sunday in nearly half of the state’s drought-stricken 33 counties.

One wildfire in northern New Mexico that started April 6 merged with a newer fire Saturday to form the largest blaze in the state, leading to widespread evacuations in Mora and San Miguel counties. That fire was at 84 square miles (217 square kilometers) Sunday and 12% contained. An uncontained wind-driven wildfire in northern New Mexico that began April 17 had charred 81 square miles (209 square kilometers) of ponderosa pine, oak brush and grass by Sunday morning north of Ocate, an unincorporated community in Mora County.

……….. https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article260711157.html#storylink=cpy

April 26, 2022 Posted by | climate change, safety, USA | 2 Comments

Fire training, equipment lacking at US nuclear dump in New Mexico

 https://www.knau.org/knau-and-arizona-news/2022-04-25/fire-training-equipment-lacking-at-us-nuclear-dump-in-new-mexico

KNAU News Talk – Arizona Public Radio | By Associated Press April 25, 2022  Independent federal investigators say there are significant issues related to fire training at the U.S. government’s nuclear waste repository in New Mexico.

The U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Inspector General also found that firefighting vehicles at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant were in disrepair from years of neglected maintenance.

Federal officials say they’re making changes to address the issues.

The repository is the backbone of a multibillion-dollar program for cleaning up tons of Cold War-era waste from past nuclear research and bomb making.

The safety concerns come as New Mexico’s governor and others voice opposition to expanding the types of radioactive waste that can be shipped to the repository.

April 26, 2022 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

America’s aim is not for Ukraine to win, It is to prolong the war and weaken Russia

US Makes It Clear Its Aim Is to ‘Weaken’ Russia Consortium News,  By Joe Lauria April 25, 2022

The U.S. makes plain its plan is not just to win its poxy war in Ukraine, but to continue flooding the country with weapons systems and ammunition, long enough to “weaken” Russia, reports JoeLauria. 

The United States on Monday gave away a bit more of its ultimate goals in Ukraine by saying for the first time that it aims to “weaken” Russia’s military capabilities as a result of the war.

………………………..  Russia says its aim was never to take control of Ukraine but to defend Russian-speakers in the eastern Donbass region who have fought an 8-year civil war of independence against Ukraine after it resisted the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in 2014.

Moscow says it “demilitarizing” Ukraine and “de-nazifying” it of neo-fascist groups that took part in the overthrow of the elected government in 2014, and in the Donbass war. The West has been saying that Ukraine is winning the war since it began at the end of February. It claims that the Ukrainian forces defeated a Russian attempt to takeover Kiev.

But Russia says it never had any intention of taking the capital and had only parked its forces outside the city as a diversion to pin down Ukrainian forces while Russia fought to gain control of Mariopuol in the south.  Russia says it withdraw its troops from near Kiev to join the battle for Donbass.

Austin’s remarks are the clearest indication of U.S. goals for Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine since President Joe Biden said in Poland on March 26, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” referring to Putin. Biden also said on two occasions that the reason for the economic sanctions on Russia was never to prevent an invasion but to get the Russian people to rise up against its government.  In fact the U.S. needed the invasion to launch its economic and information warfare against Russia. It got the invasion by dismissing Russia’s treaty proposals to remove NATO troops and missiles from Eastern Europe, even though Russia threatened war.  The U.S. did not stop Ukraine from beginning an offensive on Donbass, luring Russia to invade.

Prolonging the war as long as possible — Blinken said ten days ago it would last at least until the end of this year — is part of the trap the U.S. has set for Russia, similar to the one that former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted he set for Moscow in Afghanistan to bring down the Soviet Union by giving it its “Vietnam,” much as the U.S. is aiming to topple Putin. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/25/us-makes-it-clear-its-aim-is-to-weaken-russia/

April 26, 2022 Posted by | USA | Leave a comment

Just how dangerous are the nuclear wastes at WIPP waste dump in New Mexico, and at Los Alamos National Laboratory?

Report: Some Los Alamos nuclear waste too hazardous to move via Santa Fe New Mexican, The Atomic Age, By Scott Wyland  Oct 28 2017,  https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/2021/08/04/report-some-los-alamos-nuclear-waste-too-hazardous-to-move-via-santa-fe-new-mexico/comment-page-2/

Los Alamos National Laboratory has identified 45 barrels of radioactive waste so potentially explosive — due to being mixed with incompatible chemicals — that crews have been told not to move them and instead block off the area around the containers, according to a government watchdog’s report.

Crews have worked to ferret out drums containing volatile compounds and move them to a more secure domed area of the lab after the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board issued a scathing report last year saying there were possibly hundreds of barrels of unstable nuclear waste.

The safety board estimated an exploding waste canister could expose workers to 760 rem, far beyond the threshold of a lethal dose. A rem is a unit used to measure radiation exposure. In its latest weekly report, the safety board said crews at Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos, also known as N3B — the contractor in charge of cleaning up the lab’s legacy waste — have pegged 60 barrels with volatile mixtures and have relocated 15 drums to the domed area.

[…]

Officials at the U.S. Department of Energy’s environmental management office said they couldn’t comment on the report or on how the lab stores waste, citing lack of time to answer questions.

Volatile waste mixtures have received more attention since 2014 when a waste container from the Los Alamos lab packaged with a blend of organic cat litter and nitrate salts burst in an underground chamber of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. The radioactive release contaminated the storage site so extensively it shut down for three years and cost $2 billion to clean up.

Hirsch noted some radioactive vapors escaped from WIPP’s underground site to the open air amid the leak. Federal reports have described a small amount of radioactivity slipping through exhaust vents that have since been sealed.

The fact that any radiation was emitted from below ground illustrates how destructive a waste barrel blowing up above ground could be, Hirsch said.

In the October report, the safety board said lab personnel had failed to analyze chemicals present in hundreds of containers of transuranic nuclear waste, making it possible for incompatible chemicals to cause a container to explode. Crews also never sufficiently estimated how much radiation would be released by such an event.

Waste with that kind of hair trigger should only be analyzed in a “hot cell,” with walls several feet thick, blast-proof glass and robotic arms that a technician operates to handle the materials, Hirsch said.

Read more at Report: Some Los Alamos nuclear waste too hazardous to move

April 26, 2022 Posted by | safety, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

US Planned A Nuclear Explosion On Moon; Information Revealed From Intelligence Documents

 https://www.businessworld.in/article/US-Planned-A-Nuclear-Explosion-On-Moon-Information-Revealed-From-Intelligence-Documents/25-04-2022-426503/ Some intelligence documents have revealed that the US wanted to conduct a nuclear explosion on the moon. The purpose of this US mission was to make a tunnel on the moon and dig in its core. Huge expenditure was also spent on this campaign

There has been a big disclosure about America’s Moon Mission. Some intelligence documents have revealed that America’s plan was to conduct a nuclear explosion on the moon. Under the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the US spent a lot on this mission, but did not get the expected success.

The US was working on such a plan, which is very difficult to believe. Its mission included visibility cloaks, antigravity devices, traversable wormholes, and tunneling to the Moon by detonating nuclear weapons. However, now AATIP is inactive and currently this program is not working.

In the 1600-page document, there have been many revelations about the research being done by AATIP. Documents show that the AATIP was a secret organisation and information about it came to light when its former director Luis Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon in 2017. At that time it was claimed that about USD 22 million had been spent on this Moon mission.

This agency, which plans Nuke Explosion on the Moon, was funded by the US Department of Defense and has also been at the center of discussion about UFOs many times. According to the documents, America wanted to dig in the core of the moon.

The reason for this was the discovery of a metal as strong as steel, but 100,000 times lighter than that. It could be used to build spacecrafts. Scientists associated with the mission had plans to build a tunnel through the lunar crust and mantle with thermonuclear explosives to reach the Moon’s core. However, this plan could not be fully implemented.

April 26, 2022 Posted by | space travel, USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Take uranium contamination off our land, Navajos urge federal nuclear officials

By Marjorie Childress, New Mexico In Depth | April 23, 202

The gale-force winds that swept across New Mexico on Friday, driving fires and evacuations, gave Diné residents in a small western New Mexico community an opportunity to demonstrate first hand the danger they live with every day.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) members were in the Red Water Pond Road community, about 20 minutes northeast of Gallup, to hear local input on a controversial plan to clean up a nearby abandoned uranium mine. It was the first visit anyone could recall by NRC commissioners to the Navajo Nation, where the agency regulates four uranium mills. Chairman Christopher Hanson called the visit historic, and the significance was visible with Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and other Navajo officials in attendance.

As commissioners listened to 20 or so people give testimony over several hours Friday afternoon, high winds battered the plastic sheeting hung on the sides of the Cha’a’oh, or shade house, making it hard for some in the audience of many dozens to hear all that was said.  “This is like this everyday,” community member Annie Benally told commissioners, mentioning the dust being whipped around outside by the wind. “They say it’s clean, it’s ok. But we have more piles back there and you see it blowing this way.”

Benally was referring to piles of contaminated radioactive soil and debris at two adjacent abandoned uranium mines. One mine is near enough to the shade house that its gate is visible. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to move some of that waste to a mill site regulated by the NRC, where contaminated groundwater is still being cleaned up. To drive north of Church Rock to the Red Water Pond Road community is to appreciate how close that mill site is to the surrounding community. It sits one mile south of the shade house, on private land but right next to a highway driven every day by local residents.

After Friday afternoon’s listening session, the federal commissioners conducted a public meeting in Gallup in the evening where they heard from EPA officials. The NRC is expected to decide in June whether or not to permit the EPA to move the mine debris to the mill.

The swirling dust outside was a consistent theme during the Friday afternoon session as residents described a generational struggle with significant health risks from uranium contamination. 

…………………………….. The multiple hours of testimony concluded with remarks by Nez, who put a point on the message residents were sending: the mining waste should be moved completely outside of their community. 

“This is what the Navajo people live with, just imagine 500 open uranium mines on a windy day,” Nez said. “…the Navajo people in this area have lived with this for a very long time, so we plead with you, I plead with you, let’s get this waste, and get it way far away from the Navajo Nation.” 

The EPA cleanup plan wouldn’t move the contamination far, though, just to the nearby mill site. At the public meeting Friday evening, NRC commissioner Jeff Baran asked San Francisco-based EPA Region 9 Superfund and Emergency Management Director Michael Montgomery whether there are other disposal locations outside Indian country but still reasonably close.

Montgomery said current law only allows the EPA to go so far. It can’t site or create facilities for disposal, or ask a private party to do it either, he said. The agency is working to identify locations on federal land for other mine cleanups, Montgomery said, but for the Church Rock area there are no easy solutions for taking the waste out of Indian country.  Should the NRC not approve the current plan, the agency would be at an “impasse” that would take years to move beyond, he said. 

Montgomery suggested that Navajo aspirations to remove all uranium mine waste from their land would be difficult to achieve by the EPA alone. “If the solution for all the mines is to take all the waste off of tribal land, it’s going to require a dialogue that’s possibly outside our authority,” he said. 

Montgomery’s answers seemed to confound Baran. “Would EPA proceed with the mill site option if the community it is meant to benefit opposes it?” he asked. 

“There are a lot of perspectives within the community,” Montgomery said. “You can’t always get everyone to agree.” 

Nez challenged those remarks later in the meeting after Baran asked him if he wanted to respond to any of Montgomery’s comments. 

“I’ve heard a hundred percent of my Navajo relatives there say they didn’t want the waste. So I’m just wondering who are these individuals who can’t agree?” he asked.https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2022/04/25/take-uranium-contamination-off-our-land-navajos-urge-federal-nuclear-officials/

April 25, 2022 Posted by | indigenous issues, opposition to nuclear, USA | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »