NRC Approves Transfer of Nuclear Plant Operating Licenses From FirstEnergy Solutions to Energy Harbor,
On November 25, FES announced that it will change its corporate name to Energy Harbor when its restr
completed…..https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nrc-approves-transfer-nuclear-plant-140000164.html
Support candidates in 2020 who will work for nuclear disarmament
 Support candidates in 2020 who will work for nuclear disarmament, https://www.thetimesnews.com/opinion/20191202/letter-support-candidates-in-2020-who-will-work-for-nuclear-disarmament?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter Anne Cassebaum It was good to hear Mikhail Gorbachev given some air time to speak of the unspoken. Current tension and permanent war, he warned, make the danger of nuclear weapons “colossal.”Nuclear weapons rarely make the news; recent worry about ours in Turkey was fleeting, so the danger is pushed back in many Americans’ consciousness. The result: Pentagon spending balloons, and the Trump administration carries forward President Obama’s plan to modernize our nuclear forces.
Modernization may sound good and even inevitable; it is neither. In fact, it will set off a new arms race of smaller nuclear weapons that are, imagine, “more usable.” And smaller means reduced to Hiroshima and Nagasaki-sized bombs that killed more than 200,000 people. The price tag for this 30-year modernization is $1.2 trillion and rising. The beneficiaries will be weapons producers, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, for whom the Pentagon budget acts as an ATM, as one researcher quipped. We could be pursuing disarmament treaties and diplomacy. Money siphoned for endless oil wars and weapons buildup could instead create jobs in green energy and deal with climate change, which, like radioactivity, respects no borders. Any nuclear exchange would be a climate crisis of its own. As Gorbachev put it, ” … nuclear weapons should be destroyed. This is to save ourselves and our planet.” The 2020 elections offer a time to consider candidates who see a new arms race as insanity, not security.
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Prominent Americans to wage ‘World War Zero’ against climate change
John Kerry Launches Star-Studded Climate Coalition, NYT, By Lisa Friedman, Nov. 30, 2019 WASHINGTON — John Kerry, the former senator and secretary of state, has formed a new bipartisan coalition of world leaders, military brass and Hollywood celebrities to push for public action to combat climate change.
The name, World War Zero, is supposed to evoke both the national security threat posed by the earth’s warming and the type of wartime mobilization that Mr. Kerry argued would be needed to stop the rise in carbon emissions before 2050.
The star-studded group is supposed to win over those skeptical of the policies that would be needed to accomplish that.
Former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are part of the effort. Moderate Republican lawmakers like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, and John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, are on the list. Stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting and Ashton Kutcher round out the roster of more than 60 founding members.
The star-studded group is supposed to win over those skeptical of the policies that would be needed to accomplish that.
Former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are part of the effort. Moderate Republican lawmakers like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, and John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, are on the list. Stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting and Ashton Kutcher round out the roster of more than 60 founding members.
“We’re going to try to reach millions of people, Americans and people in other parts of the world, in order to mobilize an army of people who are going to demand action now on climate change sufficient to meet the challenge,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview.
The launch of the new group on Sunday comes as diplomats gather in Madrid on Monday for global climate negotiations aimed at strengthening the 2015 Paris Agreement, from which President Trump has vowed to withdraw next year. Earlier this week the United Nations found that the world’s richest countries, responsible for emitting more than three-fourths of planet-warming pollution, are not doing enough to keep Earth’s temperature from rising to dangerously high levels. Net carbon emissions from the two largest polluters, the United States and China, are expanding……….. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/climate/john-kerry-climate-change.html?smid=tw-nytclimate&smtyp=cur
USA will send no senior government official to COP25 climate conference
US will ‘protect its interests’ at COP25 climate conference, No senior members of Donald Trump’s administration will attend COP25. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/us-will-protect-its-interests-at-cop25-climate-conference 2 Dec 19, The US will send a diplomatic team but no senior members of Donald Trump’s administration to a global climate change conference starting in Spain on Monday, according to a statement.However, in an effort to raise the US profile in Madrid, House speaker Nancy Pelosi will led a 15-member congressional delegation to “reaffirm the commitment of the American people to combating the climate crisis”.
The US, at Mr Trump’s direction, is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, which set a goal of limiting global temperature rises to well within two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.
Spain stepped in to host the COP25 meeting, which seeks to boost commitments to fight climate change, after Chile pulled out due to civil unrest.
“The United States will continue to participate in ongoing climate change negotiations and meetings – such as COP25 – to ensure a level playing field that protects US interests,” the US State Department said Saturday.
The US team will be headed by ambassador Marcia Bernicat, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs.
Ms Pelosi, calling climate change “the existential threat of our time,” announced a delegation of Democrats drawn from both the House and the Senate, with no members of Mr Trump’s Republican party.
The president has cast the Paris climate accord as elitist and unfair to the US, saying when announcing his decision to withdraw that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”.
But scientists say the accord is vital to check the worst damage from global warming, such as increasing droughts, rising floods and intensifying storms.
The US is the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, and is the only country to pull out of the Paris agreement.
The final US withdrawal from the landmark accord is scheduled for 4 November, 2020, a day after the next presidential election.
Several Democratic presidential aspirants have said that, if elected, they would immediately return to the agreement.
No president should have the absolute authority to launch nuclear weapons
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Joseph Cirincione is a nuclear weapons policy expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. Impeachment has a way of bringing out a president’s worst instincts — and the world could end up paying the price. As impeachment hearings intensified, an increasingly erratic president appeared to finally snap. “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone,” he told visiting lawmakers, “and in 25 minutes, 70 million people will be dead.” It was 1974, and the president was Richard Nixon. He was right. U.S. policy, then and now, gives the president absolute authority to launch nuclear weapons whenever they want, for whatever reason. No consensus is required. No one else need approve. Indeed, no other official even need know. The president, on their own, can simply summon the “nuclear football,” open binders of attack options and relay orders to the National Military Command Center. The orders would be sent down to missile control officers — where intercontinental ballistic missiles are primed on “hair-trigger” alert — and 30 minutes later you’d have nuclear explosions over the targets, just as Nixon claimed.
It was 1974, and the president was Richard Nixon. He was right. U.S. policy, then and now, gives the president absolute authority to launch nuclear weapons whenever they want, for whatever reason. No consensus is required. No one else need approve. Indeed, no other official even need know. The president, on their own, can simply summon the “nuclear football,” open binders of attack options and relay orders to the National Military Command Center. The orders would be sent down to missile control officers — where intercontinental ballistic missiles are primed on “hair-trigger” alert — and 30 minutes later you’d have nuclear explosions over the targets, just as Nixon claimed……
Procedures adopted in the fearful days of the Cold War — including the first use of nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict, the sole authority of the president to fire these weapons and keeping our missiles ready to launch in minutes — combine now to present an unacceptable risk of nuclear disaster. Little can be done now to reduce these risks. If we do escape catastrophe, it should be the first order of business in a new administration to declare new nuclear guidance and adjust nuclear alert postures accordingly. Legislators, including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), have already introduced bills to prevent presidents from acting solely on their own to launch nuclear weapons and to make it official policy that America will never initiate a nuclear war. These provide a sound basis for a new president to revamp nuclear doctrine and to prevent, as President John F. Kennedy said, that slender thread holding the nuclear sword of Damocles from being cut by “accident or miscalculation or madness.” We must prepare to do all we can to ensure that no one individual — sane or insane — can ever start a nuclear war on their own. This column was produced in collaboration with The WorldPost, a publication of the Berggruen Institute. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/01/no-president-should-have-absolute-authority-launch-nuclear-weapons/ |
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Nuclear waste Bill in U.S. House of Representatives – resistance in New Mexico to nuclear waste dump
Nuclear waste bill advances to House, could push forward storage site in New Mexico Adrian Hedden, Carlsbad Current-Argus Nov. 27, 2019 A federal bill to alter policy for nuclear waste advanced to the full U.S. House of Representatives and could support the case for temporary storage of temporary storage of high-level waste at a facility like the one Holtec International proposed to build in southeast New Mexico.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act was advanced by a unanimous voice vote to the House by the Energy and Commerce Committee on Nov. 20.
The bill, if passed, would move forward with safety licensing for a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, while providing the U.S. Department of Energy the authority to proceed with a program for consolidated interim storage (CIS) while the Yucca Mountain project progresses.
It also prioritized the transportation of spent nuclear fuel from generator sites in seismically active areas, and ensured the DOE has the funds to build and operate a repository
U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), the only representative from New Mexico who sits on the committee, introduced an amendment that was approved to create a grant program to study the impacts radiation exposure including family members and non-workers resulting from uranium mining.
“Though we have a responsibility to address the waste issues that result from our country entering the atomic age, I am deeply concerned that this bill makes it more likely that a future interim storage site — potentially one in New Mexico — becomes a permanent home for nuclear waste,” he said.
One such interim facility, proposed by Holtec to be built in a remote, desert area near the Eddy-Lea county line, drew concerns from New Mexico environmentalist groups as it could put local communities at risk as well.
Don Hancock, nuclear waste program director at the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque cited a clause in the bill that required the governor of a state that would host a CIS facility to consent before moving forward.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham voiced her opposition to the Holtec project earlier this year, calling it “economic malpractice” as it could negatively impact two of the state’s biggest industries: oil and gas and agriculture.
“The bill says you must have approval from the state’s governor,” Hancock said. “New Mexico would be a non-starter. She (Lujan Grisham) has said she’s opposed to it.”
Hancock said he also opposed the project and the bill over the suggestion of transporting the waste hundreds or thousands of miles away from generator sites where it is currently stored.
Even if the waste approved to be shipped to a remote location like southeast New Mexico, Hancock argued it would take years for the infrastructure to be built and the waste to be moved.
“This approach doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why not do it in places that already have storage sites? It’s going to sit there for years. Let’s make that less dangerous. It can be done without massive transportation around the country.”…….. https://www.currentargus.com/story/news/local/2019/11/27/nuclear-waste-bill-advances-house-may-support-new-mexico-holtec-site/4297822002/
Persistent outages plaguing Grand Gulf nuclear plant are adding millions to the bills of New Orleans customers
Grand Gulf is supposed to run almost every single day at full capacity, acting as a foundational “base load” plant in the region’s energy system. It represents roughly one-fifth of all the generation that Entergy New Orleans owns or has purchase agreements for.
But over the last few years, Grand Gulf has been beset by a series of planned and unplanned outages that have made it the least reliable nuclear generator in the US, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. In fact, the plant was in the middle of an outage this week.
These outages cost New Orleans residents millions of dollars, according to figures Entergy has provided the City Council…. …..https://thelensnola.org/2019/11/27/persistent-outages-plaguing-grand-gulf-nuclear-plant-are-adding-millions-to-the-bills-of-new-orleans-customers/
US Bishops stand with the Pope calling for a world without nuclear arms
A statement issued by the Chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops calls for action on the path to nuclear disarmament. Vatican News, By Linda Bordoni , 27 Nov 19, In the wake of Pope Francis’s powerful appeal for a world that is free from atomic warfare, and his affirmation that not only the deployment, but also the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral, the Catholic Bishops of the United States issued a statement calling on their nation “to exercise global leadership for mutual, verifiable nuclear disarmament”……. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2019-11/us-bishops-statement-nuclear-weapons.html
Further debunking of the conspiracy nonsense about a nuclear explosion in the South China Sea
A nuclear detonation in the South China Sea? No, more Twitter conspiracy nonsense, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Matt Field, November 25, 2019 The Twitter account @IndoPac_Info pushes out news at a relentless pace; it’s a seemingly good feed to follow for those interested in military issues in Asia. By Friday afternoon last week, the account had posted dozens of tweets over a 36-hour-or-so period linking to stories from outlets such as Reuters and Foreign Policy on topics ranging from US naval activity in contested waters to Pentagon drone policy. Oh yeah, and then there was the one about a nuclear detonation in the South China Sea.
The big news that China had perhaps exploded a tactical nuclear weapon in the ocean originated with a man labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a former federal convict, white supremacist, and FBI informant named Hal Turner. Turner posted the story on his website and touted the supposed scoop further on his nighttime AM radio show, attributing the information to military sources. On Friday, a Pentagon spokesperson called Turner’s article “silly fiction.” And the man behind @IndoPac_Info himself—he describes himself as a Spanish man living in Vietnam—now seems to agree. “Without further evidence or independent corroboration of Hal Turner’s article, it may not be credible at this point,” he tweeted. “Apologies.”
A laudable course correction, no doubt, but it came after one of @IndoPac_Info’s tweets on the Turner story was retweeted almost 2,000 times. And in an age when online disinformation campaigns like the Russian government effort to sway the 2016 US presidential election are a major feature of public discourse, it’s an open question: Could an online conspiracy theory about nuclear weapons gain traction and have a real-world impact?
The @IndoPac_Info account helped give Turner traction, but as far as impact goes, the radio host’s nuclear story failed to launch, in part because it was so easily debunked.
The idea that a 10 to 20 kiloton explosion, possibly a nuclear one, could have occurred in the busy and contested South China Sea and not been widely observed was laughable to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board chair Bob Rosner. The physicist and former director of the Argonne National Laboratory told Gizmodo, “There is so much surveillance that it would be stunning if no one had noticed that.”……..
Despite Turner’s serious dearth of credibility, he was able to piggyback on @IndoPac_Info’s. That account, after all, is followed, by journalists, academics, and others from reputable organizations like Reuters and the University of Pennsylvania. Indeed, the @IndoPac_Info account user was concerned that he’d helped promote Turner’s wild story. “I was not aware of his record,” he said.
“A follower sent me his story and I went with it.” https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/a-nuclear-detonation-in-the-south-china-sea-no-more-twitter-conspiracy-nonsense/
Nuclear deterrence is weakened by the absence of diplomacy, and the demise of arms control.
Trump’s Track Record Of Nuclear Deterrence Without Reassurance Is Dangerous, Forbes, Michael Krepon, 25 Nov 19, The first time President Ronald Reagan announced that “A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought” was before the Japanese Diet on November 11, 1983. Reagan was sensitive to public concerns over the rocky state of U.S.-Soviet relations. His speech came nine days before the airing of an ABC movie, “The Day After,” depicting the impact on Lawrence, Kansas, of a nuclear strike against nearby Kansas City. The “Day After” was watched by 100 million viewers. Reagan had an advance screening. It’s hard to identify a television program that has had a more dramatic impact on public and presidential consciousness of nuclear danger.
There is only one sane policy, for your country and mine, to preserve our civilization in this modern age: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.”
When Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly repeated this formulation at their Geneva summit in 1985, skeptics began to take notice. The canonical affirmation by then had congealed into “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” When Reagan and Gorbachev began to act in accordance with this belief, scales fell from before our eyes. Defenders of deterrence orthodoxy became alarmed. Both men meant what they said.
USA’s “Senate Climate Caucus” full of climate deniers, funded by dirty industries
New Senate Climate Caucus Is Filled With Climate Deniers and Climate “Delayers”, BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout, 14 Nov 19, What’s climate change to a senatorial non-believer? The new Senate Climate Solutions Caucus might soon answer that question.
Formed late last month, the caucus’s aim is to hold hearings with climate experts, educate fellow senators and introduce unanimously agreed-upon legislation. The caucus’s founders — Delaware Democrat Christopher Coons and Indiana Republican Mike Braun — boast of the mandated bipartisanship of the caucus. For every Democrat, there must be a Republican, and vice versa.
Floridian Sen. Marco Rubio, a former hardline climate denier, is the group’s latest addition. He joins fellow Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney (a former climate waffler) and Lindsey Graham, who once said that greenhouse gas emissions are bad but probably don’t warm the planet all that much.
“In its current state, our national conversation on this issue is too polarized, toxic, and unproductive,” Braun and Coons said in an op-ed about the caucus for The Hill. “Our caucus seeks to take the politics out of this important issue.”
Setting aside that the climate conversation isn’t as polarized among voters as Coons and Braun might think — in fact, an overwhelming majority of voters agree that global warming is happening — it’s strange that they think that bipartisanship on climate can be apolitical. For the last couple of decades, the Republican Party has been nearly united on the climate change denial front, and, in the name of compromise, Democrats have largely been hesitant to move to the left on climate — or make any moves at all.
RL Miller, political director of Climate Hawks Vote, a grassroots climate super PAC, calls bipartisanship in the caucus “a joke.”………
the biggest threat to any progress for the caucus isn’t necessarily the Republicans on it. The biggest threat may be the amount of fossil fuel money accepted by members on both sides of the aisle. Only one member so far has signed the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge: Colorado’s Michael Bennet, a Democratic presidential candidate, non-supporter of the Green New Deal, and recipient of over $320,000 worth of oil and gas money in his time in Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The other three Democrats in the caucus – Jeanne Shaheen, Angus King and Coons — have received over $200,000 combined. Meanwhile, the Republican members of the caucus have received over $9.5 million combined, $7 million of which went to Romney alone.
the biggest threat to any progress for the caucus isn’t necessarily the Republicans on it. The biggest threat may be the amount of fossil fuel money accepted by members on both sides of the aisle. Only one member so far has signed the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge: Colorado’s Michael Bennet, a Democratic presidential candidate, non-supporter of the Green New Deal, and recipient of over $320,000 worth of oil and gas money in his time in Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The other three Democrats in the caucus – Jeanne Shaheen, Angus King and Coons — have received over $200,000 combined. Meanwhile, the Republican members of the caucus have received over $9.5 million combined, $7 million of which went to Romney alone.
A starting point for bipartisan legislation would be some sort of carbon fee — an idea legislators on both sides of the aisle have been bouncing around for a while –which environmental experts consider to be a bare minimum requirement for the path to net-zero emissions. Considering all of the members of the caucus have to agree on any policy they write, however, even a carbon fee will likely be an uphill battle. Rubio derides the idea of a carbon tax and conflates it with the Green New Deal in a recent op-ed for USA Today; Murkowski has refused to endorse a carbon tax; and Graham has supported one in the past, but reneged on that view earlier this year. Even Braun says that he doesn’t want a carbon fee to be a focus of the caucus.
To say that the country needs to act on climate and then reject the most basic policy to address climate change appears to be a new form of climate denial among centrists and the right — they may not outright deny the existence of climate change, but refuse to acknowledge the all-encompassing scale of the problem. In March, when a video clip of Sen. Dianne Feinstein shows her dismissing Sunrise Movement activists circulated, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that Feinstein was a “climate delayer.”……..
Even if the caucus does produce legislation, “the very existence of something like this, with so many senators that have taken money from the fossil fuel industry — it risks locking us into inadequate policies,” Billings says. For instance, not only would a carbon tax alone be insufficient climate policy, but it may also contain covert fossil fuel riders. There’s a reason that ExxonMobil, BP and Shell have been pushing for the passage of a carbon tax; Exxon’s carbon tax proposal last year contained a liability waiver, granting the company immunity for any climate change lawsuits brought against it.
Most of the Republicans in the caucus and at least one of the Democrats have shown to be susceptible to fossil fuel industry messaging that’s disguised as “climate-friendly.” Climate plans with an emphasis on carbon capture are a dead giveaway on this. In the current political sphere, carbon capture primarily refers to a technology that, yes, captures carbon as it’s emitted, but also sequesters that carbon in depleted oil wells, helping the fossil fuel companies to extract more oil. Funding carbon capture research is bipartisan, too, but as its used currently, it’s as useful for the climate as using kerosene to put out a fire.
Some may hail the bipartisanship of this climate caucus as a step forward. But as long as the majority of the committee is taking fossil fuel money, any supposed progress is dubious at best, and stifling at worst. After all, there’s no way of telling what’s happening behind closed doors. https://truthout.org/articles/new-senate-climate-caucus-is-filled-with-climate-deniers-and-climate-delayers/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=5dfc1357-c5ab-4a92-a995-92190dbe348e
For the 8th time this year, a Hanford worker exposed to nuclear radiation
The 324 Building sits over a leak of radioactive cesium and strontium into the soil beneath it at the site about one mile north of Richland and about 300 yards west of the Columbia River.
“Although individually the contamination levels (on workers) have been low and no dose has been assigned to workers, collectively the number of personnel contamination events indicate a negative trend in contamination control that corrective actions taken to date have been inadequate to address,” the Department of Energy wrote in a Nov. 14 letter to its contractor on the project, CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co.
Earlier the same day that DOE sent the letter, CH2M had stopped work at the Hanford nuclear reservation’s 324 Building — one of several temporary halts to at least some of the work there this year.
Joe Franco, the DOE deputy manager at the DOE Richland Operations Office, told CH2M in the letter that he would not allow work to resume in the highly contaminated areas of the 324 Building until the company had developed a plan of correction and DOE had agreed on the path forward……. https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article237601614.html?fbclid=IwAR2PEXSoItPKGXYQxV0lOc3NJ2-KFlstPIvbdexqiIgP_i23UgMl9bBqGg4
Safety problems with Holtec’s dry canisters for nuclear wastes
Georgia’s Nuclear Plant Vogtle behind schedule, with costs escalating
State staff: Georgia Power nuclear timeline ‘significantly challenged’ AJC CONTINUING COVERAGE Nov 23, 2019, By Matt Kempner
Georgia Power’s nuclear expansion of Plant Vogtle is falling further behind schedule, according to a filing Friday by Georgia Public Service Commission staff and consultants.
Unless performance improves considerably, the latest deadlines for commercial operation of two new reactors by November 2021 and November 2022 are “significantly challenged,” according to the filing. It also flagged safety risks for workers.
The project is already years behind its original schedule and billions of dollars over budget. More delays could add costs. And if the price tag rises, electric consumers in much of Georgia could be at risk of increases in their monthly bills. Ultimately, elected members of the PSC will decide how much of the costs get passed along to Georgia Power customers. Many electric membership corporations and city utilities in Georgia are also connected to the project and will have to make decisions about how to recoup costs.…….
Georgia Power already has spent 10 years and incurred billions of dollars in costs to get as far as it has. That includes $2 billion in financing costs already recovered from customers through a special fee in monthly bills, years before the new reactors produce power. https://www.ajc.com/news/state-staff-georgia-power-nuclear-timeline-significantly-challenged/i1Ff7BnBp6grU5ht1WBHeO/
New Mexico not keen to take South Carolina’s plutonium wastes
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LETHAL LEGACY, The US wants to bury SC’s plutonium stockpile forever. Its new home isn’t sure it wants it. Post and Courier, By Thad Moore tmoore@postandcourier.com Nov 23, 2019 In the time it will take for South Carolina’s stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium to decay, you could repeat most of human history, starting back in the Stone Age.
By the time its byproducts lose the explosive potential to be used in nuclear weapons, some 7 billion years will have passed. The Earth itself will have doubled in age, and then some. The U.S. government will officially decide in the next few years where the plutonium — the metal used to trigger nuclear weapons — will spend that eternity. And when it does, it will ask another part of the country to bear a profound burden: to house thousands of barrels filled with scraps of the Cold War and America’s nuclear arms race, a legacy that may well outlast our civilization.
That question will soon be posed to New Mexico, where the U.S. Department of Energy has excavated cavernous vaults deep below the ruddy soil in the state’s southeastern corner. The government hopes it will eventually hold tons of plutonium it has decided it no longer needs — enough to build a few thousand bombs the size of the one dropped over Nagasaki, Japan.
If it says yes, trucks will carry the plutonium load by load down Interstate 20 for the next three decades, and workers will lower it almost half a mile underground, where it will await its final fate: the mine’s slow collapse, and salt entombing it forever.
If New Mexico says yes, the Energy Department will bury some 20,000 steel drums deep underground there, in a ribbon of salt as thick as Charleston’s Ashley River is wide. And if New Mexico says yes, South Carolina will secure a new home for a nuclear stockpile it was wary of taking in the first place. The problem is, New Mexico isn’t sure if it will say yes. A new path The U.S.’s policy for disposing of plutonium has been in limbo for years. Congress had long planned to burn the material in commercial power plants, altering its atomic structure and making it harder to use in bombs. But the Energy Department’s project to convert plutonium into reactor fuel was deeply flawed: It started building a factory to do that work before it had a complete design, and it later discovered that finishing the plant would cost billions more than expected and stretch into the middle of the century. So the department proposed an alternative. It would convert its plutonium into a fine powder, and it would hire dozens of people in South Carolina to dilute it by hand, working in shifts around the clock. They would blend it with a secret combination of chemicals called “stardust,” designed to make it difficult to get the plutonium back out. When mixed with plutonium, stardust is said to foam up, create a gel and harden like concrete. Department officials have said the final product looks like sand on the beach. They’ve said it would save billions of dollars………. A long decay The Department of Energy grappled in the early 1990s with just how long WIPP’s legacy would survive. It hadn’t decided yet that plutonium should spend an eternity in the New Mexico desert, but it knew that America’s other nuclear waste would persist as long as anyone could comprehend. And it worried that some far-off civilization would find WIPP without understanding the invisible danger of radiation inside………When the calendar reaches the year 12000 — around the end of the team’s 10,000-year mandate — the plutonium underground will be less than halfway through its first half-life. The stockpile that currently sits in South Carolina will still be more than 200,000 years from completing its transformation into a potent type of uranium that is capable of powering cities or destroying them…… https://www.postandcourier.com/news/the-us-wants-to-bury-sc-s-plutonium-stockpile-forever/article_cbe6029e-07eb-11ea-9622-639a44471d1a.html |
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1 This Month
26 September – International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons
PLEASE OPPOSE HR 8255 AND S.3639 – bills would accelerate satellite deployment, with no environmental review or safeguards – https://ncstd5li.quorum.us/campaign/169331/
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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