Archive for the ‘Waste Storage’ Category

February 23, 2011
Nuclear Townhall

 
 
One of the most persistent myths about nuclear power is that there is no residual value to spent fuel and that the costs of dealing with this supposedly intractable problem are foisted on the public’s coffers.
 
Disproving the latter thesis once again, the Wisconsin Electric Power Company settled this week for $45.5 million for its share of the government’s partial breach of contract for failing to acceptance commercial spent nuclear fuel beginning in 1998.  The utility won a lawsuit for $51 million in 2009 but the government had appealed.  Some industry estimates put the government’s overall liability at in excess of $50 billion ultimately.
 
“Now, WE Energies has revealed that the government initiated discussions with the utility in the second half of 2010 and offered to settle the lawsuit,” says this report on World Nuclear News. “Accordingly, on 8 February the parties signed an agreement in which the US has agreed to pay Wisconsin Electric $45.5 million in full and final settlement of the suit. Wisconsin Electric intends return the $31 million net proceeds after litigation costs to its customers, and has written to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission to enable it to set up the necessary mechanisms.”
 
Other states and utilities have indicated they will be asking for money back as well. In December, South Carolina Governor-elect told President Obama in a private meeting that “the federal government has reneged on its promise, and South Carolina wants a refund.”  Both South Carolina and Washington State have sued to block the NRC closedown of the Yucca project. Exelon collected the first $300 million refund in 2008 and other utilities are now following in its path. The payments do not come out of the Nuclear Waste Fund but out of general revenues.
 
Still, the unraveling of the federal effort casts a shadow over any attempt to build a permanent repository – or better yet initiate a reprocessing strategy. The situation may become clearer or cloudier when the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future makes its report sometime in the next several months.

Read more about it at Nuclear World News

Nuclear Townhall
January 5, 2011
From the Editors
 
 

Win some, lose some. Newsweek’s website features a run-of-the-mill horror story about how highly trained teams of commandos could break through the security system at a nuclear reactor, and do something-or-other that would set off the inevitable “nuclear holocaust.”  The feature mixes in apples and oranges adding the safety of spent nuclear fuel to the security smorgasbord 
 
Specially trained commando teams made up of military veterans actually mount such attacks periodically to test security systems. The news is that in 100 such attempts over the past five years, the commandos have succeeded in getting inside the perimeter eight times. Wonder how many times they could get into the White House?  David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Lawyers – no, sorry, Scientists – is on hand to announce the whole thing is really a cover-up:  “The industry is hiding behind the 9/11 tragedy to withhold information like which plants have failed tests and repairs that have been made.”
 
Remember, all this is to protect against a hostile civilization on the other side of the globe whose main accomplishments since 2001 have been to send one terrorist with a bomb in his shoe and another with a bomb in his underpants.
 
But no matter. “The improvement that many scientists favor,” Newsweek reports, “is one that has been made elsewhere ­including in China, France, Japan, Belgium, and the U.K. All have eliminated the need to store portions of used fuel. Instead, they reprocess the waste, a complex process that removes the remaining uranium from almost pure plutonium and other byproducts, and puts it back in the reactor to produce more power. `You’re actually destroying some waste by recycling it,’ says Denis Beller, a nuclear engineer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.”
 
Recycling spent fuel – what a great idea!  Wasn’t there something in the paper the other day about China developing a new recycling technology?  Maybe we should give them a call. We once had a reprocessing effort going in this country, didn’t we?  Then along came Jimmy Carter.

Read more at Newsweek

Nuclear Townhall
January 5, 2011

In a feature story right from the anti-nuclear playbook (“Flirting with Disaster…Every few years the defenses of the nation’s nuclear plants are tested. What’s scary is how often they fail”), Newsweek magazine reports that “eight times out of roughly 100 attempts over the past five years, … mock terror teams have successfully broken through … defenses” of U.S. nuclear plants.

Right on script, the article quotes a Union of Concerned Scientist spokesman accusing the industry of “hiding behind the 9/11 tragedy to withhold information—like which plants have failed tests and repairs that have been made—that should be available.”

Newsweek surmises that “worries are particularly acute because the nuclear-energy industry is experiencing a new era of growth” – citing positive support from President Obama for loan guarantees and Energy Secretary Chu’s recent public statement that nuclear energy was “clean energy.”
On a positive note, the feature concludes that “advanced technology has virtually eliminated the risk of accidental meltdowns, like the one at Chernobyl in 1986, adding repetitive safeguards that allow the plant to shut itself down if operators can’t.”

But Newsweek warns:  “The bigger problem is the highly radioactive waste that is left over once most of the energy-producing juice has been sucked out of it” – stuff that “will remain dangerously radioactive for about 10 millennia, until the year 12011.”

The features rebuts a pithy quote from American Nuclear Society President Andy Kadak that modern nuclear plants are like prisons opining that “prison breaks still happen from time to time”  and the “security measures that are in place result in very little transparency.”  Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko offers Newsweek a bureaucratic defense saying “we think in the end overall security is best achieved by keeping most of [our security information] protected.”  This prompts another rebuff from Newsweek, which observes that “yet as the Gulf Coast oil spill showed, an industry out of public view can get sloppy.”

Newsweek offers a new rationale not yet floated by the Obama Administration for the termination of the Yucca Mountain project, which it describes positively as “dry, desolate, not prone to natural disasters – the perfect location for a repository” saying the project was canceled “in pursuit of something less risky than concentrating millions of pounds of waste in one place.”

Not to worry, we’re told the Energy Department has a Blue Ribbon Commission “researching other ideas, such as burying it in the oceans, shooting it into space, or finding a new repository somewhere else in the world.” The Newsweek feature concludes with this oddity:  “That site’s defenses, however, would need to be foolproof,” an observation presumably not applicable to an outer-space-based repository.

Read more at Newsweek

Closing the nuclear fuel cycle has always made ultimate sense. When Lewis Strauss made his fateful remarks about “electricity too cheap to meter,” he was speaking with recycling in mind.
 
The promise turned out to be premature – and nuclear opponents have never let us forget it. But the possibility of extracting more than the 5 percent of the energy potential now consumed in commercial reactors still looms – not to mention clearing up the false problem of “nuclear waste.”
 
MOX fuel has always been an obvious starting point. France does it and now Japan and the United States are moving in that direction as well. MOX simply takes the plutonium and depleted uranium from a spent fuel rod and mixes them together to make a sustainable fuel mix. (It’s the presence of other isotopes that interfere with neutron capture that make a spent fuel rod useless.)
 
Plutonium, of course, is the bad actor of the bunch, relatively easy to convert to bomb material (although not that easy because it is contaminated with non-fissionable and too-fissionable plutonium isotopes). Recycle that plutonium as fuel and the whole problem is solved. We were on the right track back in the 1970s before nuclear opponents scared Jimmy Carter into giving up the whole process for fear that somebody might steal the plutonium and run off and make a bomb.
 
France has a MOX fabrication facility at Avignon and produces one-third of its fuel from recycling. “Our spent fuel rods are the new uranium mines,” says Jacques Besnainous, president of AREVA’s American operations. Over the last year, the French have also started recycling Japan’s spent fuel, which is sent back to burn in one of Japan’s four MOX-enabled reactors.
 
Now, as often happens, the Japanese are going to do the reprocessing for themselves. With an opening prayer ceremony, ground was broken for the new J-MOX facility in the Aomori Prefecture last week.
 
And things are happening in the United States as well. AREVA has contracted to build a MOX facility at Savanna River to reprocess plutonium left over from the weapons program. According to this report in World Nuclear News, AREVA will soon be sending 93 trainees to France to learn the technology.
 
Who knows?  After seeing all that weapons plutonium disappear transformed into useful energy, Americans may be persuaded that reprocessing commercial fuel might not be such a bad idea after all.

Read more at World Nuclear News

On the eve of a Congressional salvo against embattled U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko — and amid an unusual call for an investigation of Jaczko by former NRC Commissioner Kenneth C. Rogers — the agency has released documents showing a growing political division within Commission over the appropriateness of Chairman Jaczko’s direction to staff to terminate the technical review of the Yucca Mountain application.

In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the NRC Commission, the NRC released "vote sheets" on an "action memorandum" issued by Commissioner William Ostendorff to his fellow commissioners recommending in essence that they reconsider the directions given by the chairman to the NRC staff to stop work on the Yucca Mountain license application technical review.

As reported by the Commission Secretary, "A majority of the Commission declined to participate on this matter. In the absence of quorum, your proposal is not approved."Commissioner Kristine Svinicki apparently agreed with Commissioner Ostendorff, but the Republican-appointed Commissioners failed to attract  support from any of the Democratically-appointed commissioners.

The party-line split is extraordinary within a Commission that in the past has prided itself for a collegial, bipartisan approach to most regulatory issues.  This political divide is sure to have repercussions in the next Congress as House Republicans have already signaled their unhappiness  with Chairman Jaczko.  In a letter delivered this week, they strongly questioned the rationale and legal authority used by the Chairman in issuing the directive to the NRC staff to stop work on the Yucca review.

The lack of legal authority and consistency was in essence the over-arching theme of Ostendorff’s follow-up memorandum issued October 8 to his fellow commissioners, in which he laid out the lack of consistency and justification in the Chairman’s direction.

In a just released October 8 letter to NRC Inspector General Hubert Bell, former two-term (1987-97) NRC Commissioner Rogers  requested a review of Chairman Jaczko’s "recent unilateral actions to terminate the NRC Staff’s review of the DOE Yucca Mountain application in order to determine whether any legal or other improprieties have been committed."

"What we have is a Civil War among the Commissioners," said one long-time NRC observer.  "I think the NRC’s position as an independent regulatory agency has been greatly damaged by the Chairman’s escapade."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was within a month of releasing its long-awaited Volume 3 report on the million-year implications of storing spent fuel rods at Yucca Mountain. The long-term aspects formed one of the biggest roadblocks to opening the nation’s nuclear spent fuel and high-level waste repository.

The original environmental impact statement projected out 10,000 years but when a report from the 2005 National Academy of Sciences mentioned that some isotopes would not disintegrate for a million years, environmental groups succeeded in getting the District of Columbia District Court to raise the bar.

Platts was reporting on the story broken this week on Nuclear Townhall that NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko has unilaterally ordered the agency staff to close out the ten-year effort to review the Department of Energy’s application, based on a paragraph in the 2011 budget, which has not yet been adopted by Congress.

South Carolina, Washington State, Aiken County (SC) and several former DOE and NRC employees have objected to the chairman’s actions.

Read more about it at Platt’s

Responding to the story broken last Tuesday on Nuclear Townhall, Aiken County and other Yucca Mountain plaintiffs filed a formal motion yesterday alleging that Chairman Gregory Jaczko acted improperly in directing the staff to "begin an orderly closure of high level waste activities."

The motion called the chairman’s action an “end run” around the four other commissioners and charged, “The chairman’s unilateral decision to halt review of the license application violates NRC regulations." A Las Vegas Review-Journal report on the filing gives extensive detail on the amount of weapons-related waste that has piled up in Washington and South Carolina, the two states that are suing to block the Department of Energy’s decision to withdraw the Yucca application.

The Las Vegas newspaper also notes the “unconfirmed rumors . . . of palace intrigue [swirling] at the top levels of the agency” about the content of Volume 3 of the NRC’s application review and the possibility that the full commission may vote soon on the ALSB review. It also reports that Nevada politicians are praising Jaczko’s actions.

Read more at the Las Vegas Review Journal

This week, as reported first in Nuclear Townhall, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko instructed the agency’s staff to begin closing down the U.S. Department of Energy’s Yucca Mountain application, based on a subjective interpretation of a single paragraph in the agency’s proposed 2011 budget, which has not yet been enacted by Congress.

Closing down the application means that a purportedly near-complete Volume 3 of the NRC response may never see the light of day. Volume 3 deals with “post-closure safety” over the one-million-year time frame requirement. Word from NRC sources says that the report is favorable toward this critical facet of the Yucca Mountain project, but that may never be fully known.

Closing down the application in this fashion means the chairman is acting alone rather than with the consent of the other commissioners. The full commission (one of the five commissioners has recused himself) is supposed to be voting on whether to accept or reject the recommendation of the Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB), which voted unanimously in June to reject DOE’s license application withdrawal request, saying it was not justified under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

Closing down the application by fiat is an end run around the ASLB. It also means the NRC will be pulling the rug from under the lawsuits filed in opposition to termination of the Yucca project by Aiken County, S.C., the State of South Carolina and the State of Washington, where testimony has been temporarily suspended awaiting the Commission’s vote on the ASLB. In a filing with the NRC late yesterday, the parties asked the Commission to reverse the Jaczko action.

In brief, the chairman, acting alone, is short-circuiting the regulatory and legal process. It’s no secret that Jaczko owes his appointment to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has devoted much of his Senate career to keeping the nation’s nuclear waste repository out of Nevada. Is Jaczko simply facilitating the mission of his longtime benefactor? Or, as other Yucca Mountain detractors say, “What’s the difference?  Yucca Mountain is dead anyway. These are all legal niceties.”

Yet there’s far more at stake. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has built a reputation for fairness and transparency — an attribute that is critical to the future of the U.S. Nuclear Renaissance. Some of the loudest protests are coming from former employees and officials who say the NRC’s integrity is being compromised. So what’s the verdict?  Is Chairman Jaczko politicizing the NRC?  What are the implications?  Or is it naïve to expect that any federal agency won’t eventually be politicized?

The South Carolina Attorney General’s office has written the U.S. Department of Justice and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission querying the NRC’s recent moves to close out the Department of Energy’s license application for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository.

"In responding, we request that you honor the spirit of our question, rather than splitting any technical hairs in how our question is framed," said the letter, signed by Andrew A. Fitz, senior counsel for the attorney general’s office. "In our opinion, this information is relevant to our mutual obligation to continue to inform the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals of the status of the administrative matter before the NRC."

South Carolina is a principal plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the Department of Energy’s decision to withdraw its application for Yucca. Originally filed by Aiken Country, S.C., home of the Savannah River site, the suit has since been joined by the State of South Carolina and Washington State, home of the Hanford Reservation. Both Savannah River and Hanford house spent fuel and other nuclear by-products that would eventually be stored at Yucca Mountain. The suit alleges that DOE’s decision reneges on the federal government’s obligation to provide a
permanent repository under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

Fitz asked either the DOJ or the NRC to either confirm of deny reports that NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko has instructed the agency staff to start closing out the DOE application, as reported yesterday by Nuclear Townhall. Jaczko has initiated the action even though the full commission has not yet voted on the Atomic Safety Licensing Board’s decision rejecting the shutting down of Yucca, which was issued on June 29.

The letter is addressed to both Ellen J. Durkee, of the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of the Justice Department, and John F. Cordes, Solicitor for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "We are directing our inquiry to you, rather than the NRC directly, based in the fact that our question relates to a matter in litigation in which you represent the NRC, among other respondents," wrote Fitz.

Testimony in the D.C. lawsuit has been suspended pending a vote by the Commission on whether to accept or reject the ASLB’s finding.

Rumors are that Chairman Jaczko has been unable to assemble the votes for needed for a rebuttal. Jaczko has directed much of his attention toward closing down Yucca since being appointed chairman in 2009 under the championship of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, where the repository is located. Senator Reid is currently locked in a tight race for re-election against Republican challenger Sharon Angle, who holds a 4-point lead according to the latest poll.

The Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Energy Institute has announced a sweeping revamping of its fuel cycle organization “to address changing circumstances in the nuclear fuel cycle and related areas.”

The NEI announcement coincided with the shuttering of the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) on September 30.  The OCRWM was responsible for implementation of the Yucca Mountain program.
According to an internal communiqué, the Institute points to three developments in the nuclear fuel cycle prompting the changes, including the uncertain future of Yucca Mountain, the Obama Administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission and a conclusion that “it is clear that we will be storing used fuel in above-ground facilities for an extended period of time.”

The NEI actions include:
Focusing on central interim storage through a Senior Director of Special Projects reporting directly to Institute chief executive Marvin Fertel.
Creation of a new portfolio of Director of Non-Proliferation and Fuel Cycle Policy “in recognition of the fact that these two issues are inextricably connected.”

The NEI memorandum follows:

 From: FERTEL, Marvin 
Subject: Organizational Changes and Congratulations!!


Importance: High

We are making some organizational changes to position NEI to address changing circumstances in the nuclear fuel cycle and related areas.  As you know, the back end of the fuel cycle is in a state of flux from a federal policy perspective.  The future of the Yucca Mountain project is in question.  The administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission is examining a range of policy options.  And it is clear that we will be storing used fuel in above-ground facilities for an extended period of time.
As you  know, NEI is pursuing an integrated used fuel management strategy that consists broadly of three major elements – interim storage of used fuel, preferably at centralized sites in volunteer locations; development of permanent disposal capacity; and development of advanced fuel cycle technologies.  It is also clear that any discussion of fuel cycle technologies draws us into non-proliferation policy.

NEI must take a unified policy approach to fuel cycle and non-proliferation issues if we hope to pursue either issue successfully.  NEI and the industry must ensure a strong connection between the policy, political and communications strategies for managing these issues.  And we must focus concentrated attention on centralized interim storage, since it remains the industry’s primary, key near- and medium-term options for used fuel management.
Given these circumstances, we are reorganizing the used fuel issue area, currently managed in the Nuclear Generation Division, to enable us to focus on the policy-related issues and the technical/ regulatory issues.

First, Steve Kraft will now report directly to me as senior director, Special Projects, and will be responsible for coordinating NEI’s resources on the development of central interim storage.  Steve’s extensive experience and knowledge will give NEI the best opportunity to bring this project to a successful conclusion.  Steve’s responsibilities on this project and other related projects with which he will be supporting me will require his focused attention.  As such, we have freed him from the day-to-day management of the used nuclear fuel issues.
Second, we have created a new position of director of Non-Proliferation & Fuel Cycle Policy, in recognition of the fact that these two issues are inextricably connected.  This position  will be responsible for defining industry positions and policies on non-proliferation and fuel cycle issues, and representing those policies and positions before Congress, Executive Branch agencies, the media and other non-industry groups and individuals.  I am pleased to report that Everett Redmond has been promoted to this new position in the Policy Development Division.  Everett’s strong technical expertise and background  will position NEI as a credible participant with the non-proliferation community.

Rodney McCullum will assume responsibilities for all of the used fuel-related activities in the Nuclear Generation Division in a new role as Director, Used Fuel Programs.  In this role, he will lead the numerous technical and regulatory issues related to the fuel cycle, including used nuclear fuel acceptance, transportation, fuel criticality and container certification.  Rodney will apply his strong knowledge of the fuel cycle as well as his technical and policy expertise to this key position.
In a related area, we have hired Ted Jones as director of Supplier International Relations, reporting to Carol Berrigan in the Infrastructure Department.  In this role, Ted will be responsible for leading NEI’s efforts related to U.S. industrial policy in the nuclear energy sector, international trade, tax and regulatory issues and other issues affecting infrastructure and export promotion of domestic nuclear suppliers.  Ted comes to us from the U.S./India Business Council of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he managed trade missions to India with many of NEI’s supplier members and developed industry positions related to market development.  Ted will join NEI on Oct. 16.

These organizational changes will position NEI to support our industry in maximizing the value of our existing plants and creating the environment for new plants, and I know you will support Steve, Everett, Rodney and Ted in their new roles.
Marv