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Radioactive material below Louisiana’s giant sinkhole

Newspaper: Officials concerned about radioactive material below giant Louisiana sinkhole http://enenews.com/newspaper-controversy-over-radioactive-material-stored-below-giant-louisiana-sinkhole November 27th, 2012

Update Here: People need to know if radioactive waste is coming up from the ground in area of giant sinkhole -Legal Expert

Title: Radioactive material handling probed 

Author: DAVID J. MITCHELL
Date: November 27, 2012

State officials are investigating how Texas Brine Co. LLC handled naturally occurring radioactive material [NORM] in Assumption Parish — where a large sinkhole was found Aug. 3 — and whether it was illegally disposed of inside the Napoleonville Dome in the mid-1990s. […]

Texas Brine officials, in a statement last week, said they did not put NORM in the caverns […]

The statement contradicts detailed comments from company officials on Aug. 10 that a small amount of NORM was disposed of in the Napoleonville Dome […]

Sonny Cranch, spokesman for Texas Brine, said last week that officials “misspoke” then in their attempt to respond to questions about NORM and that it was never put in the cavern.

Statements by Texas Brine VP Bruce Martin

“We submitted a request to DNR to place this material, this normally occurring radioactive material, that was actually about a little bit less than a cubic yard, to place it back in the well […] We did that work. That material was solid dirt, dirt with some NORM in it, and it was placed in the bottom of the well, and it would be my guess and firm belief that that’s where it sits today.”
The dirt had a radioactivity of 20 to 40 micro-rems per hour

Watch an expert discuss radioactivity around the sinkhole here

November 28, 2012 Posted by | environment, USA | Leave a comment

16 USA nuclear power plants vulnerable to flooding from dam failure

List of Reactors Potentially at High Risk of Flooding due to Dam Failure

Alabama:                          Browns Ferry, Units 1, 2, 3

Arkansas:                         Arkansas Nuclear, Units 1, 2

Louisiana:                         Waterford, Unit 3

Minnesota:                         Prairie Island, Units 1, 2

Nebraska:                         Cooper;  Fort Calhoun

New Jersey:                          Hope Creek, Unit 1;  Salem, Units 1, 2

New York:                         Indian Point, Units 2, 3

North Carolina:             McGuire, Units 1, 2

Pennsylvania:             Beaver Valley, Units 1, 2; Peach Bottom, Units 2, 3;

Three Mile Island, Unit 1

Tennessee:                         Sequoyah, Unit 1;  Watts Bar, Unit 1

Texas:                                     South Texas, Units 1, 2

South Carolina:             H.B. Robinson, Unit 2;  Oconee, Units 1, 2, 3

Vermont:                         Vermont Yankee

Virginia:                         Surrey, Units 1, 2

Washington:                         Columbia

(Source: Perkins, et al., “Screening Analysis,” July 2011)  http://www.nationofchange.org/whistleblower-nuclear-regulators-suppress-facts-break-law-1354009225

Whistleblower: Nuclear Regulators Suppress Facts, Break Law, Nation of Change, William Boardman,  27 November  “…….Event Unlikely, Would Be Sure Disaster  South Carolina’s Oconee plant on Lake Keowee has three reactors, located 11 miles downstream from the Jocassee Reservoir, an 8,000 acre lake.  As HuffPo put it:

…the Oconee facility, which is operated by Duke Energy, would suffer almost certain core damage if the Jocassee dam were to fail. And the odds of it failing sometime over the next 20 years, the engineer said, are far greater than the odds of a freak tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear plant in Japan….  Continue reading →

November 28, 2012 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Over 60,000 homes near Illinois nuclear plants to get Potassium Iodide pills

IEMA Offering Potassium Iodide to Residents within 10 Miles of Nuclear Power Plants SPRINGFIELD (WIFR) 27 Nov 12-– The Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) today announced plans to begin offering free Potassium Iodide (KI) pills to residents living within a 10-mile radius of the state’s six operating nuclear power plants. Continue reading →

November 28, 2012 Posted by | health, USA | Leave a comment

A warning on Mixed-Oxide Fuel (MOX) nuclear fuel plan

MOX stands for “Mixed-Oxide Fuel.” It is a nuclear power reactor fuel made from plutonium mixed with uranium. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) wants to make experimental MOX fuel using plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons.

Use of MOX fuel fails as a means of getting rid of plutonium. Instead, the plutonium just becomes part of the lethal soup of ingredients termed “high-level nuclear waste”

What is MOX? http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/basicmoxinfo.htm The giant French nuclear firm Cogema, Duke Power and Virginia Power have formed a consortium to create and use plutonium MOX fuel in civilian atomic reactors in North and South Carolina and Virginia.

If their effort is successful, plutonium would be trucked from nuclear weapons depots in the west to the Savannah River Plant on the South Carolina/Georgia border, where new plutonium processing plants would be built. This new MOX fuel would then be trucked to commercial reactors in the Southeast, in order to turn this plutonium into high-level radioactive waste.

The MOX program is dangerous and unnecessary. More than 200 environmental and other organizations across the world have signed an International NIX MOX statement and have pledged to work to stop this program in the U.S. and similar programs in Russia, France and England.

What is MOX? Continue reading →

November 27, 2012 Posted by | - plutonium, Reference, technology, USA | Leave a comment

American justice in question, as USA cracks down on hacker Jeremy Hammond

The bigger story is what they’ve done in this country to Jeremy Hammond, Bradley Manning, and what they have proposed to do to Julian Assange, and that’s really say that they’re going to come down as heavily as they can on people who expose government secrets, whistleblowers,”

Anonymous hacker behind Stratfor attack faces life in prison, Rt  : 23 November, 2012, A pretrial hearing in the case against accused LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond this week ended with the 27-year-old Chicago man being told he could be sentenced to life in prison for compromising the computers of Stratfor.
Judge Loretta Preska told Hammond in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday that he could be sentenced to serve anywhere from 360 months-to-life if convicted on all charges relating to last year’s hack of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a global intelligence company whose servers were infiltrated by an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.
Hammond is not likely to take the stand until next year, but so far has been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Continue reading →

November 27, 2012 Posted by | civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Angst in USA over who’s to host all that nuclear waste

Spent fuel is currently stored at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants, including Plant Vogtle in Burke County. The nationwide inventory of 75,000 tons could expand to 150,000 tons by 2050, not including spent fuel from new reactors.

 

SRS role in future of spent nuclear fuel disposal unclear
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2012-11-26/srs-role-future-spent-nuclear-fuel-disposal-unclear?v=1353950504 By Rob Pavey, Nov. 26, 2012   The U.S. Energy Department is looking for businesses to design a demonstration project for large-scale and long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel. In a notice posted last week by the Office of Nuclear Energy, the department said its intention is simply to identify resources, and that no formal project has been announced or funded.

The announcement, however, could indicate the government – which is preparing a new spent fuel strategy for Congress – is leaning toward consolidated storage options that could affect South Carolina, said Tom Clements with the Alliance of Nuclear Accountability.

“This solicitation is being put out in advance of DOE delivering the spent fuel strategy report to Congress, which will likely affirm consolidated spent fuel storage,” he said. “Thus, DOE has set the stage for a fight in states that may be targeted for spent fuel dumps,
like South Carolina and Savannah River Site.” Continue reading →

November 27, 2012 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) sides with nuclear company: ratepayers to pay up

Florida PSC screws over ratepayers again, approves more rate hikes for new nukes that aren’t being built  26 Nov 12  http://www.cleanenergy.org/index.php?/Press-Update.html?form_id=8&item_id=335#.ULUkZuR9JLv     In spite of another year of significant cost increases and scheduling delays, it was business-as-usual at the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) today with the Commission once again siding with the big power companies over the interests of Florida customers. The PSC approved nearly $300 million in advanced cost recovery charges for new nuclear power generation projects. The PSC accepted all of the PSC staff recommendations issued earlier this month—an unfortunate trend of rubber-stamping that we have seen year after year in spite of major obstacles and pitfalls that have made new reactor proposals in Florida less and less feasible.

Progress Energy Florida (PEF), which recently merged with Duke Energy, was approved to recover over $142 million and Florida Power and Light (FPL) for over $150 million from their customers for new nuclear generation via a “nuclear tax,” including significant costs for four proposed, yet-to-be-licensed, nuclear reactors that neither utility has even committed to actually build and whose estimated combined costs exceed $40 billion.

The Commission granted all the utilities requests on top of the more than $1 billion in cost recovery that was already approved over the past several years. This is an extremely unfortunate situation for utility customers in Florida who are being forced to pay this “nuclear tax” up front for electricity that will very likely never be produced from proposed new reactors.
Today’s vote again underscores the unfairness of the nuclear cost recovery statute that was passed by the Florida legislature back in 2006. Because the Florida State Legislature, the Governor and the PSC have failed to protect Florida’s families and businesses from this “nuclear tax” scheme, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy challenged the statute’s constitutionality before the Florida Supreme Court. Oral argument occurred in early October and we await the Court’s decision. We remain hopeful that the Court will rule in favor of better protections for Florida’s utility ratepayers.

November 27, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, USA | 1 Comment

The Murdoch media octopus to grab more power in USA

Will the FCC Give Rupert Murdoch the Powerful Gift of Media Consolidation?, 26 November 2012   By Mike Ludwig, Truthout |   Just in time for the holidays, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering changes to media cross-ownership rules that watchdogs say could good give Rupert Murdoch’s massive conglomerate News Corporation the go-ahead to acquire more big media outlets.

The proposal could also keep women and minorities out of the media market, according to civil rights groups.

Reports suggest Murdoch has recovered from the British phone hacking scandal and is ready to jump back into the media consolidation game. Both the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times are on the list of potential targets. Continue reading →

November 27, 2012 Posted by | media, USA | Leave a comment

Stunning growth in solar energy employment in USA

The three year Census series paints a stunning picture of solar job growth. Since 2010, employment in the U.S. solar industry has grown 27percent – eight times faster than the overall economy during the same period

The Solar Foundation’s National Solar Jobs Census 2012 Finds Installers Leading the Way More than 8,500 installation jobs created in the past year, continued industry wide growth expected in 2013 ALBANY, N.Y. (PRWEB) November 14, 2012 The Solar Foundation (TSF), an independent nonprofit solar education and research organization, today released the full version of its third annual National Solar Jobs Census at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council’s Clean Energy Workforce Education Conference. In early November, TSF announced that the Census found that the U.S. solar industry now employs 119,016 Americans, a figure which represents the addition of 13,872 workers and a 13.2 percent employment growth rate over the previous year.

The three year Census series paints a stunning picture of solar job growth. Since 2010, employment in the U.S. solar industry has grown 27percent – eight times faster than the overall economy during the same period, Continue reading →

November 27, 2012 Posted by | renewable, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear spacecraft in the sky – (hope they don’t crash)

Proposed nuclear reactor could power future space flights By Mark Morgenstein, CNN, 27 Nov 12 For potential power sources on space flights beyond the horizon, scientists are looking back to the future.

A team of NASA and Department of Energy researchers has shown that a reliable nuclear reactor based on technology that’s been around for decades could be used in spaceships, according to a news release from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where some of the researchers are
based…..
“A small, simple, lightweight fission power system could lead to a new and enhanced capability for space science and exploration,” said Los Alamos project lead Patrick McClure. “We hope that this proof of concept will soon move us from the old frontier of Nevada to the new frontier of outer space.” http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/26/proposed-nuclear-reactor-could-power-future-space-flights/

November 27, 2012 Posted by | technology, USA | 1 Comment

USA’s conservative think-tanks out to crush renewable energy

 in the United States, the forces of greed, profit, and power are at work with no regard to the consequences of their actions.

Conservatives in U.S. trying to reverse renewable energy standards in the states, Examiner, NOVEMBER 25, 2012 BY: ROBERT BOWEN   As world leaders begin discussions in Qatar Monday on an agreement to reduce carbon pollution, oil companies in the United States are out to repeal the renewable energy standards in the 29 states that have them. They are funding conservative groups to do their dirty work according to an article published Saturday in the Washington Post.

The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank that denies climate change science, has joined with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to write model legislation aimed at reversing state renewable energy mandates across the country. The Electricity Freedom Act, adopted by ALEC’s board of directors in October, would repeal state renewable energy standards (RES) which require utilities to get a portion of their electricity from renewable sources. ALEC and Heartland are using a tried and true tactic calling it “essentially a tax on consumers of electricity’ and bringing in “freedom.” Continue reading →

November 26, 2012 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

USA taxpayers to pay up for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

“The Obama Administration continues to believe that low-carbon nuclear energy has an important role to play in America’s energy future,” DOE Secretary Steven Chu stated

Small nuclear reactors eyed for Oak Ridge site, Oakridger.com By Donna Smith/Staff Nov. 25, 2012 The former Clinch River Breeder Reactor site in Oak Ridge may become the home for four small modular nuclear reactors that could be operational by 2022.  Continue reading →

November 26, 2012 Posted by | politics, technology, USA | Leave a comment

Need to remember that coal ash, too, contains radioactive dust

NIRPC committee wants radiation study in The Pines Duneland Community.com November 24, 2012    Lauri Harvey Keagle A Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission Environmental committee wants the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate radiation levels in The Pines after hearing concerns from residents
over coal ash from a facility in their community. Continue reading →

November 26, 2012 Posted by | environment, USA | Leave a comment

Martinsville City Council to stand against uranium mining in Virginia

City to oppose lifting uranium mining ban , November 22, 2012 Martinsville Bulletin, By MICKEY POWELL – Bulletin Staff Writer Martinsville City Council is ready to take an official stand against allowing uranium mining in Virginia.

The city’s proposed legislative agenda for 2013 asks the General Assembly to continue the current moratorium on uranium mining because allowing mining “would result in highly damaging effects on all other economic development efforts in the region, excluding the jobs created by a mine itself.”
“If it makes us a less attractive community,” said Councilman Gene Teague, the need to keep the mining ban is “something we should weigh in on.” He said residents have asked the council to support continuing the ban.

State lawmakers will reconvene in Richmond in January. The council will consider adopting its legislative agenda at its meeting at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the municipal building on West Church Street uptown. In 1983, the General Assembly banned uranium mining statewide.
Scientists have voiced concerns that the mining could harm the environment and public health….. http://www.martinsvillebulletin.com/article.cfm?ID=35649

November 23, 2012 Posted by | opposition to nuclear, Uranium, USA | Leave a comment

Another blow to the Small Modular nuclear reactor (SMR) pipe-dream

“I think they were trying to use cleanup funds, which weren’t intended to be used for nuclear energy projects,” said Tom Clements, the non-proliferation policy director for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.

“The whole SMR thing has always appeared very premature and rather half-baked; since these reactors don’t even exist the companies don’t have money to pursue them,” “So it’s all very highly speculative.”

SRS suspends portable reactor development, The Augusta Chronicle, By Rob Pavey, Nov. 10, 2012 Savannah River Site can no longer use its increasingly limited environmental management resources to pursue the development of small, portable nuclear power reactors.

The ambition to create a “small, modular reactor” farm, where a new generation of SMRs
could be perfected for the commercial market, is a key facet of Enterprise SRS, a futuristic strategy designed to create jobs and future missions for the 310-square-mile site.

Although the U.S. Department of Energy announced agreements in March with three firms that are hoping to use SRS as a home base to study and develop mini reactor technology, site contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions received a directive from headquarters to “stand down” and devote no further funds or resources to the effort. Continue reading →

November 22, 2012 Posted by | politics, technology, USA | Leave a comment

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