Plutonium waste too much for WIPP, Albuquerque Journal, By Maddy Hayden / Journal Staff Writer,, September 8th, 2017 This story has been updated to reflect that a change in the amount of waste stored at WIPP would need a congressional amendment.
Southeastern New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant won’t have room for the 34 metric tons of excess plutonium the Department of Energy hopes to permanently dispose of there.In fact, a report by the Government Accountability Office released this week says that even the current amounts of waste planned for storage at the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository won’t fit.
The report, “Proposed Dilute and Dispose Approach Highlights Need for More Work at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” recommends the DOE develop a plan to expand storage capacity at the facility.
“DOE does not have sufficient disposal space at WIPP to dispose of all defense TRU waste already planned for disposal, and future sources of waste could exceed WIPP’s statutory capacity,” the report reads. “While DOE officials stated that they recognize expansion of WIPP’s disposal space may be necessary in the future, they have not analyzed or planned for expanding the facility because their focus has been on resuming waste emplacement operations at WIPP.”……..
A 2000 agreement between the United States and Russia stipulated that each nation would dispose of 34 metric tons of excess plutonium — enough to create 17,000 nuclear weapons.
While Russia suspended its participation in the agreement in October due to perceived threats from the U.S., the United States is continuing steps toward disposing of the waste.
One of the options being considered for the plutonium is a downblending process which renders the material inert. It would then be disposed of at WIPP.
That would be in addition to waste generated by DOE sites around country; those have around 71,000 cubic meters of waste waiting to be emplaced underground
The regulatory limit of waste that can be stored at WIPP is 175,565 cubic meters, as designated in the 1992 Land Withdrawal Act.
New emails obtained by the Charleston Post & Courier show a deteriorating relationship between the owners of the V.C. Summer nuclear plant in South Carolina and lead contractor Westinghouse Electric in the months leading up to the abandonment of an expansion plan for the facility.
The emails build on past messages that indicate officials at Santee Cooper and South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. were aware of financial and construction difficulties at the plant as early as last summer, but kept the knowledge out of the public eye and continued to push for its completion.
The new emails demonstrate that plant owners communicated directly with Toshiba, parent company of Westinghouse, about problems at the plant. In one, the CEO of SCANA wrote to Toshiba’s chief executive, saying “we have no doubt that we have been the victim of financial malfeasance by [Westinghouse] and Toshiba.”
Dive Insight:
The Post & Courier’s diligent coverage of the V.C. Summer fallout continues to raise questions about what the plant owners knew of project problems and when they knew it.
As early as last summer, both SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh and Santee Cooper CEO Lonnie Carter made it clear they suspected Westinghouse and Toshiba were unable to pull off the project — and told the companies that in no uncertain terms.
“Deceit and non-transparency” — words not often tossed around by electric utilities — was how Carter put it in one email. In an October 2016 note to Marsh, he said Santee Cooper had hired bankruptcy lawyers in June to “help us think through Toshiba/Westinghouse insolvency scenarios.”
The upshot is that the South Carolina utilities appear to have suspected to project was in trouble, but didn’t inform regulators or other officials. The utilities abandoned the project in July after spending more than $14 billion to construct two new reactors.
The new emails come in the wake of an audit of the project recently released at the demand of South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R). Prepared by contractor Bechtel in February 2016, the report outlines numerous problems at the plant, including flawed engineering documents, low morale at the work site, frequent construction changes, high turnover and generally slow progress.
The report was completed in early 2016 — months before SCE&G informed regulators that its share of the development costs had risen more than $800 million, and about a year and a half before the utilities agreed to scrap the project.
The emails also show SCE&G and Santee Cooper were already considering in June of last year that Westinghouse might fall into bankruptcy. The company went bankrupt in March of this year.
Originally proposed in 2007, the two-reactor expansion of the Summer plant was supposed to be completed by 2017 and 2018, respectively. Issues with Westinghouse’s reactor design led to delays, cost overruns and ultimately the company’s failure.
When the project was scrapped, officials said costs to complete could reach over $25 billion.
In advertising blitz, nuclear industry seeks reset, AXIOS.com ,Amy Harder, Sep 5 17
The beleaguered nuclear industry is launching an advertising campaign Tuesday that casts the decades-old electricity resource in a new light…. The campaign, by the Nuclear Energy Institute, will try to reset nuclear’s appeal in Washington as an electricity source but also more broadly, such as its role in space exploration and medical care.
Advertising on social media sites, radio and TV will run in the Washington, D.C., area, though the group is considering expanding to states later.
The group isn’t buying any print advertisements, in a sign of the changing media landscape.
The campaign costs about $800,000, which the group says will go further than advertising in prior stints because the buy is hyper targeted. NEI will bid for space in real time on digital platforms, a spokesman said……
Between the lines: Most of the headlines these days are about how the industry is struggling to compete against cheap natural gas and, to a lesser extent, renewable energy. Nothing is pending in Washington that would drastically improve the outlook for nuclear power, but as lawmakers consider new policies, the industry’s leaders hope this campaign helps brighten their perspectives on the fuel.
Bigger picture: The Trump administration has positive words to offer about nuclear energy, but is unlikely to push any policies that could really provide a boost to the sector, like a carbon tax that would make carbon-emitting energy sources more expensive. The industry is also not asking for anything like that, realizing it’s a non-starter with this administration….https://www.axios.com/in-advertising-blitz-nuclear-industry-seeks-reset-2479707165.html
Consortium News Israel and the neocons still seek an excuse to bomb Iran, now citing false claims about its supposed noncompliance with the nuclear deal. The new water carrier is U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.By Paul R. Pillar
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement that limits Iran’s nuclear program, is for Donald Trump one more of the Obama administration’s achievements to be trashed. It goes alongside the Affordable Care Act, the Paris climate change agreement, and other measures (most recently the “dreamers” program involving children of illegal immigrants) as targets for trashing because fulfilling campaign rhetoric is given higher priority in the current administration than whether a program is achieving its purpose, whether there are any realistic alternatives available, or what the effects of the trashing will be on the well-being of Americans and the interests and credibility of the United States.
Nikki Haley, whose foreign policy experience has consisted of these past few months as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, has assumed the role of chief public trasher of the JCPOA for the administration. Evidently no demands on the time of the U.S. ambassador in New York, from the issue of North Korea (which has real, not imagined, nuclear weapons) to the war in Syria were too important to keep her from giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute that represented the administration’s most concerted and contrived public effort so far to lay groundwork for withdrawing from the JCPOA.
Haley has warmed to this cause both because of her own previous parochial interests, including those associated with financial contributions she has received, and because it is a convenient vehicle for playing to Trump’s urges. Haley evidently feels no obligation to perform as one of the “adults” in the administration to whom the country looks to contain those urges.
The speech at AEI was Trumpian in some of the tactics it employed. The performance should cement the ambitious Haley’s place on Trump’s short list of candidates to become Secretary of State once Rex Tillerson’s unhappy and probably short tenure in the job ends. The speech also used more twisted versions of familiar rhetorical twists that have been heard before from diehard opponents of the JCPOA…….https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/06/nikki-haley-falsely-accuses-iran/
Bradly Keck, who was assistant director of health physics at IU Health in Indianapolis, is alleging job discrimination in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Southern Indiana.
He has named IUPUI and the Indiana University Board of Trustees in his filing.
According to his lawsuit, there was a highly radioactive nuclear spill on Jan. 11. Keck blames two female technicians, one a student and the other an employee, for contaminating the lab.
Keck and another co-worker began assisting the co-worker performing cleanup. Keck addressed the contamination of the technicians by scanning them with a meter and found them contaminated with radioactive isotopes.
He ordered them to go to a women’s locker room, remove their clothes and shower individually.
He claims that failure to remove the contamination could have resulted in serious health risks. Each showered between two and four times.
Keck again ran the meter over contaminated areas of their skin. He told them to go back into the shower where he washed their calves to remove any remaining contamination, he says.
He provided them with clean lab scrubs.His lawsuit alleges that the women thanked him as did his supervisor. He alleges that the director of environment health and safety said, “That’s emergency response. You trade a little nudity for safety.”
However, he was suspended pending an investigation. On Jan. 25, he notified the university that he was alleging sex discrimination. He was fired Jan. 31.
Keck is asking that he be reinstated to his job and be paid compensatory damages.
Indiana University has not responded to the lawsuit.
DOE Advanced Nuclear Reactor Program Deemed Ineffective, American Institute of Physics , 7 Sept 17 According to a new report, the Department of Energy’s program to develop advanced nuclear reactors has shifted priorities too often and overspent on facility upkeep. After $2 billion in expenditures, no advanced design is ready for deployment.This article was first published in the Politics and Policy section of Physics Today.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) is unlikely to fulfill its mission of developing and demonstrating one or two advanced nuclear reactor technologies by mid-century, according to a new review of the program. In a report published in Environmental Research Letters in August, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Brookings Institution, and the University of California, San Diego, found fault with, among other things, NE’s overemphasis on light-water-reactor technologies…….
For advanced reactor and advanced fuel research over the 1998 to 2015 period reviewed by the authors, NE spent $2 billion, an amount they said is insufficient to ready even one advanced reactor design for commercial deployment. The authors estimated the cost of designing and licensing an advanced reactor to be $1 billion; demonstration at full scale would cost between $4 billion and $13 billion.
The report blamed NE’s ineffectiveness on a lack of “programmatic discipline.” The program’s funding focus has shifted frequently over the 18-year span, supporting a dozen different technologies at funding levels that were “too low to be relevant to actual commercialization.” Many of those efforts were discontinued during the review period………
Advanced reactor and fuel test facilities at Idaho National Laboratory consume up to half of NE’s budget. Some of those facilities, the report argued, are defense related and only marginally support NE’s core mission. But Lyons says NE doesn’t fund defense programs, and he notes that the U.S. Navy pays half the cost of operating Idaho’s Advanced Test Reactor.
The largest sustained NE R&D program during the review period was the $750 million Nuclear Power 2010, which supported development of two enhanced light-water-reactor designs through licensing and siting. Funding for that program was 57 percent greater than what was devoted to the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP), NE’s largest non-light-water advanced reactor program. The NGNP has effectively been terminated due to disputes over site location and the selection of a private-sector partner. ….
Lyons points out that the NGNP was conceived at a time when natural gas prices were at twice today’s levels and the economics of nuclear power was more compelling. He says the project failed mainly due to the unwillingness of industry to share its cost.
Most of the advanced reactor designs that NE has funded couldn’t use the tristructural-isotropic (TRISO) nuclear fuels that the DOE office spent $450 million to develop during the review period, the report stated. Consisting of tiny pellets of low-enriched uranium oxide encapsulated in four layers of carbon, pyrolytic carbon, and silicon carbide, TRISO fuel is more resistant to melting or rupture than today’s fuels are. But TRISO isn’t coupled to a specific reactor R&D program, and it is unclear what role the fuel would play in a transition to advanced reactors, the report said……https://www.aip.org/fyi/2017/doe-advanced-nuclear-reactor-program-deemed-ineffective
FT 6th Sept 2017, Hackers have entered the operational systems of energy companies in the US
and Europe, lying in wait with the ability to switch off the power and
sabotage computer networks, according to a report by cyber security company
Symantec.
The group of hackers, known as Dragonfly, Energetic Bear or
Berserk Bear, infiltrated energy companies by tricking employees into
opening Microsoft Word documents that harvest usernames and passwords, with
the number of attacks rising in recent months.
LA Times, Sep 6, 2017 at 7:40 PM EDT: [T]he Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was getting ready to shut down two Florida nuclear plants…Miami Herald, Sept 6, 2017 at 2:00 PM EDT (emphasis added): Two South Florida nuclear power plants lie in Irma’s path… projections on Wednesday showed [Irma] headed straight for South Florida… But neither Turkey Point nor the St. Lucie plant farther up the coast had made the call yet to shutting down the plants… “If we anticipate there will be direct impacts on either facility we’ll shut down the units,” [spokesman Peter Robbins] said.
Bloomberg, Sep 6, 2017 at 1:10 PM EDT: Nuclear Plants in Irma’s Path Plan Shutdowns Ahead of Storm… Two of the Sunshine State’s nuclear facilities are in the Category 5 storm’s path… NextEra Energy Inc. will shut the plants “long before” the onset of hurricane force winds, spokesman Peter Robbins told Bloomberg…
Washington Post, Sep 6, 2017 at 7:50 PM EDT: This could be The Big One, again, and everyone knows it… Hurricane Irma is about as big as a tropical cyclone can possibly get, and the latest computer models show it aimed at South Florida as if following directions by GPS… This hurricane’s 185-mph maximum sustained winds are the strongest recorded for a landfalling hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean… Storm preparations also were underway at two nuclear sites in Florida… NextEra said that it will shut down its four nuclear reactors before Irma makes landfall… NextEra also said that its reactors could weather a loss of electricity of the sort that caused a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi reactors…
PBS, Sep 6, 2017 at 6:50 PM EDT: Sustained winds are still blowing at a record 185 miles an hour, with gusts up to 225 miles an hour. One forecaster watching the assault today said this thing is a buzz saw…
The Times, Sep 7, 2017: Caribbean islands devastated by ferocity of Hurricane Irma, the worst Atlantic storm on record… The storm, at 480 miles wide and with gusts up to 225mph, is the most powerful recorded in the Atlantic — Hurricane Irma… left “apocalyptic” damage across Caribbean islands yesterday, inundating coastal areas and devastating buildings with 185mph winds… Officials on Barbuda said more than 90 per cent of the island had been destroyed. “Barbuda is literally rubble,” Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said after visiting the island. “The entire housing stock was damaged. It is just total devastation,” he said…
Mattis reportedly threatened Sweden with retaliation over signing a nuclear-weapons ban, Business Insider CHRISTOPHER WOODY, SEP 6, 2017 US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis reportedly warned Sweden of severe consequences if the country followed through on signing a UN treaty banning nuclear weapons.
The Scandinavian country is one of 122 states backing the treaty, and Stockholm also recently signed a statement of intent to increase military cooperation with the US.
But a letter from Mattis reportedly warned Sweden’s defence minister, Peter Hultqvist, that signing on to the treaty could affect US-Sweden military cooperation as well as US military support in the event of war.
Mattis’ letter also suggested signing the treaty could have an impact on the country’s ties to NATO, of which it is a Gold Card program member, meaning it has some privileges within the defence alliance even though it is not a full member.
Sweden’s Gold Card program status faces renewal in October, and Mattis warned his Swedish counterpart that signing the treaty would foreclose the option of joining NATO, according to Defence News…….
The US, which adheres to a policy of nuclear deterrence, has criticised the nuclear-weapons ban, but Mattis’ letter is seen as an unusual step in bilateral relations, particularly between the US and Sweden.
A Pentagon spokesman told Defence News that while the US “values its defence relationship with Sweden,” it has discouraged countries from signing on to the ban, which has measures that “could potentially affect our ability to cooperate with parties to the treaty on issues of mutual interest.”…..
Long-secret report details ‘significant’ problems at failed nuclear reactor project, The State, BY SAMMY FRETWELL AND AVERY G. WILKS, 5 SEPT 17 sfretwell@thestate.com, awilks@thestate.com The doomed V.C. Summer nuclear project suffered from flawed construction plans, faulty designs, inadequate management of contractors, low worker morale and high turnover, according to a lengthy and long-secret report released Monday by S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster’s office.
The report, completed by the Bechtel Corp. about 18 months before the project was shut down in July, also notes strained relationships between the project’s contractors, as well as a lack of shared vision and accountability among the major companies involved.
Bechtel’s report, which senior partner SCE&G did not want released, might answer questions from lawmakers about what went wrong with the project. Many lawmakers want to know whether the fiasco could have been prevented.
Cayce-based SCE&G and state-owned Santee Cooper spent nine years and $9 billion on the Fairfield County project before pulling the plug July 31. Ratepayers at both companies have been charged at least $2 billion for two nuclear reactors that won’t be completed. The utilities have said rising costs, construction delays and the bankruptcy of chief contractor Westinghouse led them to walk away……..
The Bechtel report cited “significant issues” facing the project that needed addressing.
Among the problems, the report says, was that plans and schedules for the project did not reflect actual circumstances; the construction contract did not appear to be serving Santee Cooper, SCE&G or Westinghouse well; and construction designs often were “not constructable,” which caused significant changes and delays.
Construction modules, built off site and touted as a way to ensure the project’s success, were a “detriment to the project progress and consequently the budget,” Bechtel wrote.
A key finding in the report addresses the utilities’ plan to use the AP 1000 reactor, a technology that had not been used in U.S. nuclear plants before. The report said challenges were to be expected because of the reactor type and because no nuclear plants had been built in the U.S. in decades. But it also said the V.C. Summer project “suffers from various fundamental” contract and management problems that needed resolution for the effort to succeed.
The report said contractors had not been transparent or accurate to the utilities about the project’s progress, and the utilities did not have an appropriate project team to assess or verify those contractors’ progress reports…..
Investor-owned SCE&G did not want the report released. In a Sunday letter to McMaster, the utility pleaded with the governor to keep the report confidential if Santee Cooper, the project’s minority owner, gave it to him.
If released, the report could hurt SCE&G in lawsuits, the company said. The letter also said releasing the document could hurt SCE&G and Santee Cooper in their efforts to recover “potentially billions” of dollars from Westinghouse.
Denying Hurricane Harvey’s climate links only worsens future suffering, The variables in the climate change formula are mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. Denying the problem loads up on the suffering. Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli, 5 Sept 17, Human-caused climate change amplified the damages and suffering associated with Hurricane Harvey in several different ways. First, sea level rise caused by global warming increased the storm surge and therefore the coastal inundation and flooding from the storm. Second, the warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which intensifies extreme precipitation events like the record-shattering rainfall associated with Harvey. Third, warmer ocean waters essentially act as hurricane fuel, which may have made Harvey more intense than it would otherwise have been.
There are other possible human factors at play about which we have less certainty. ……
Other human activities also worsened Harvey’s impacts. For example, Houston suffers from urban sprawl, covering a larger area (nearly 600 square miles) than the cities of Chicago, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, Manhattan, and Santa Barbara combined. With urban sprawl and poor planning came expansive impervious surfaces – absorbent soil covered instead by concrete and asphalt, increasing flood risks. Houston’s lack of zoning laws combined with the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) also encouraged development in flood prone areas.
We’re subsidizing risky behavior
Private insurance companies don’t want to insure homes that face a significant risk of flooding, but with a lack of regulation and/or government insurance offered by NFIP, development in relatively high-risk flood areas can be profitable. That is, until a flood strikes. 85% of Houston homeowners don’t have flood insurance and will be unable to recover most of their losses from Hurricane Harvey. Others are covered by NFIP, which was already $24 billion in debt before Harvey. That’s because NFIP hasn’t been charging sufficiently high premiums, in large part because it has underestimated flood risks based on maps and projections that are sometimes decades out of date. And climate change is amplifying those flood risks…….
the government is effectively subsidizing the costs associated with living in high-risk flood areas. Between 1978 and 2005, NFIP paid out $5.5 billion (9.6% of paid claims) to just 30,000 properties (0.6% of the total covered by flood insurance) that each flooded an average of five times. Because the NFIP premiums are too low, taxpayers end up footing billions of dollars of those payouts.
The situation is analogous to climate change. Without a price on carbon pollution, industries and individuals can dump carbon in the atmosphere for free. But that carbon pollution has costs that we eventually pay, in the form of increased property damage due to amplified storms like Hurricane Harvey, for example. Or from higher food prices when farmers are struck by an intensified drought, or decreased worker productivity in heat waves, or valuable coastal property lost to encroaching sea levels, or homes lost to bigger wildfires and increased costs to fight them – the list of climate costs goes on and on.
Those costs are eventually paid by taxpayers, but we’re picking up the tab for the polluters. It’s effectively a subsidy for the fossil fuel industry to the tune of trillions of dollars every year, and as with artificially cheap flood insurance premiums, we’re subsidizing risky behavior that ultimately causes severe damages.
The Trump administration is in denial
Ten days before Hurricane Harvey hit, the Trump administration rolled back the Federal Flood Risk Mitigation Standard. The policy was implemented by the Obama administration, and required taxpayer-funded public infrastructure projects to plan for future flooding risks. Much infrastructure within and around Houston is now underwater, and accounting for future flooding risks when replacing it would be smart. But the Trump administration considered this policy a burdensome regulation, claiming that the infrastructure permitting process has too many “inefficiencies.” Apparently those “inefficiencies” include saving taxpayer money by reducing future flood losses.
Allies seek to deploy aircraft carrier, strategic bomber in response to N.K. nuke test, Yonhap News, 2017-09- SEOUL, Sept. 4 — South Korea and the United States will seek to deploy a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, strategic bombers and other powerful assets to the Korean Peninsula as a response to North Korea’s latest nuclear test, Seoul’s defense ministry said Monday.
In its report to the National Assembly’s defense committee, the ministry also said that its military will stage a unilateral live-fire drill, which involves Taurus air-to-surface guided missiles mounted on its F-15K fighter jets, this month. The missile with a range of 500 kilometers is capable of launching precision strikes on the North’s key nuclear and missile facilities.
“We will push for the option of deploying strategic assets such as the U.S. carrier strike group and strategic bombers after consultation with the U.S.,” the ministry said.
The show-of-force measures were unveiled a day after Pyongyang conducted what it claims to be a test of a hydrogen bomb mountable onto an intercontinental ballistic missile, sharply raising military tensions.
At the parliamentary session, Defense Minister Song Young-moo said that during his recent talks with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, he demanded that the U.S. deploy its strategic assets to Korea on a “regular” basis. He made the demand, citing local politicians’ calls for the redeployment of U.S. tactical nukes.
Florida officials begin ordering evacuations as Hurricane Irma intensifies to a Category 5 storm, WP
By Francisco Alvarado, Mark Berman and Sandhya Somashekhar September 5 KEY WEST, Fla. — Another monster storm is hurtling closer to the United States, this time threatening Florida, where officials announced mandatory evacuations Tuesday in advance of what forecasters say could be the most powerful hurricane to strike the Atlantic coast in more than a decade.
Even as millions across Texas picked up the pieces after Hurricane Harvey, which battered that region with record-setting rain last week and was blamed for at least 60 deaths, Hurricane Irma gathered strength in the ocean, registering as a Category 5 with winds in excess of 180 miles per hour.
Concern centered particularly on the Florida Keys, a chain of islands at the southern tip of the state that is a tourist hot spot and home to more than 80,000 residents. It is in the direct path of the storm as currently forecast, leading local officials there to announce that the area would be under mandatory evacuation orders beginning Wednesday.
Haley: Trump ‘has grounds’ to say Iran violating nuclear deal, Politico, By NAHAL TOOSI, 09/05/2017
Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador says the president “has grounds” to declare that Iran is not complying with the 2015 nuclear deal, stoking doubts about whether Trump intends tokeep an international agreement and core legacy achievement for former President Barack Obama.
Nikki Haley, speaking Tuesday in Washington, said she did not know what Trump plans to do next month when he is due to certify to Congress whether Tehran is complying with the agreement. But she appeared to lay the groundwork for Trump to declare that Iran is in violation of the deal……..http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/05/trump-iran-violate-nuclear-deal-nikki-haley-242331
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