NEW ECA EXECUTIVE BOARD ELECTED

ECA Staff | 11/15/2023

On Tuesday, 11/14 the ECA Board members voted in the new ECA Executive Board for 2024-2026. We would like to congratulate the new Executive Board and look forward to the great work that will be done in the coming years.  The 2024-2026 Executive Board is listed below:

ECA Chair: Mayor Brent Gerry (West Richland, WA)

ECA Vice-Chair: Mayor Rebecca Casper (Idaho Falls, ID)

ECA Secretary: Councilmember Chuck Hope (Oak Ridge, TN)

ECA Treasurer: Councilmember Randall Ryti (Los Alamos County, New Mexico)

ECA Member-At-Large: Councilmember Jason "JJ" Chavez (Carlsbad, New Mexico)

We look forward to their leadership and guidance as we continue to move forward towards our goals and priorities.

CELEBRATING 8 YEARS OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK

ECA Staff | 11/15/2023

This week week in 2015, U.S. Department of Energy and the National Park Service came together to sign the agreement that resulted in the creation of the three Manhattan Project National Historical Parks. These parks preserve the history of these three World War II-era sites where the U.S. developed the world's first atomic weapons. 

The first of the sites is Los Alamos, New Mexico where Robert Oppenheimer developed and tested the first atomic bomb. Over 6,000 scientist and support staff worked at this remote mesa to design and build the atomic bomb. The Los Alamos park site includes three sites, the Gun Site (includes three bunkered buildings), guard shack, the Pond Cabin and more. 

Hanford, Washington is home to the nuclear reactor that produced the material for the first atomic test. This site was built to create large quantities of plutonium with more than 51,000 workers.The park now includes, the B Reactor National Historic Landmark, the Hanford High School, the Hanford Construction Camp Historic District and other historic places that provide a glimpse into the history of Hanford prior to the Manhattan Project.

The third site is in Oak Ridge, Tennessee which served as the administrative and military headquarters for the Manhattan Project. Oak Ridge is home to the Y-12 Complex which is where electromagnetic separation process for uranium enrichment occurred, as well as the K-25 building where the pioneering of gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment technologies occured. The park includes all these sites and many others that also show the important work that occured at Oak Ridge. 

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park is unique not only in its historic background, but also because it represents a partnership between the National Park Service and the Department of Energy. Together, both agencies work together to ensure that these sites are safe and secure for visitors, but they also work together to help tell the complete story of the Manhattan Project and its legacy. 

To visit the park or learn more visit these links: 

NPS - Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park Brochure 

U.S. BETS ON SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS TO HELP FIX A HUGE CLIMATE PROBLEM

The New York Times | 11/13/2023

Towering over the Savannah River in Georgia, the first nuclear reactors built from scratch in the United States in more than 30 years illustrate the enormous promise of nuclear power — and its most glaring weakness.

The two new reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant will join two older units to create enough electricity to power two million homes, 24 hours a day, without emitting any of the carbon dioxide that is dangerously heating the planet.

But those colossal reactors cost $35 billion, more than double the original estimates, and arrived seven years behind schedule. That’s why no one else is planning to build large reactors in the United States.

Instead, the great hope for the future of nuclear power is to go small.

Nearly a dozen companies are developing reactors that are a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle, betting that they will be quicker and cheaper to build. As the United States looks to transition away from fossil fuels that have underpinned its economy for 150 years, nuclear power is getting renewed interest, billions of dollars from the Biden administration and support from Republicans.

One reason is that nuclear plants can run at all hours, in any season. To those looking to replace coal and gas with wind and solar energy, nuclear power can provide a vital backstop when the air is calm or the sky is cloudy.

“The United States is now committed to trying to accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy,” John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, said in September. “It’s what we believe we absolutely need in order to win this battle.”

But the push to expand nuclear power, which today supplies 18 percent of electricity, faces enormous hurdles.

In a major setback last week, the first serious effort to build small reactors in the United States was abruptly canceled amid soaring costs. While other projects are still moving forward, the industry has consistently struggled to build plants on time and on budget. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the safety of the nation’s nuclear fleet, is less experienced with novel reactor technologies. And the problem remains of how to dispose of radioactive waste.

The clock is ticking. Governments, companies and utilities want to slash their carbon emissions to near-zero within a few decades.

“This is the best period of support I’ve ever seen for nuclear power in my 20-year career,” said Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But the industry has to deliver. If they can’t, there’s a real risk that this moment of opportunity could slip away.”

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INSIDE THE $1.5-TRILLION NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF

Scientific American 

The point of the thing was to forever change our concept of power. When the U.S. military assembled a team of scientists, led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, to build a nuclear bomb during World War II with the hope of beating the Nazis to such a terrible creation, many of those involved saw their efforts as a strange kind of civic destiny. The Manhattan Project, wrote Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was “compelled from the beginning not by malice or hatred but by hope for a better world.” Oppenheimer himself once said, “The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”

We live in that different country now, one in which it is assumed that the presence of nuclear weapons makes their use impossible. If one nation strikes, the thinking goes, we are all obliterated.

As recently as 15 years ago, the sentiment of nonproliferation seemed durable. Even American secretaries of state who held office during the cold war were advocating for the final drawdown of atomic weapons. Former president Barack Obama, when he took office in 2009, wanted a world without them and pushed a new treaty with Russia to limit the number of deployed warheads in each country's arsenal. But after decades of efforts to disarm global powers and reduce tensions, the screw is now tightening again. Russia has suspended its participation in the treaty, and it's believed that China is increasing the size of its arsenal.

And even while the U.S. was preparing to draw down its total number of nuclear warheads, it sought to replace its existing weapons and modernize its delivery mechanisms. The weapons, which had been designed decades ago, were aging, and their upkeep cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In 2010 Congress authorized an update to the U.S. nuclear triad, the weapons systems deployable by land, sea and air.

No leg of the triad is as controversial as the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, the arsenal of hundreds of weapons spread across 450 underground silos in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. Because the missiles sit in fixed locations—unlike submarines or aircraft—they are seen as potentially vulnerable to attack; because they are considered first-strike weapons, concerns linger that one could be inadvertently launched; because of their geographic sprawl, they have an outsize impact on land use and energy policy. In 2015, two years before General James Mattis was confirmed as U.S. secretary of defense, he suggested to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the military consider removing land-based missiles altogether.

But around the same time, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center requested the design and construction of a new missile. The contractor Northrop Grumman bid on it and won, and by 2021 Congress had authorized the first investments in an updated nationwide ICBM system, which is now called Sentinel. Like the Minuteman III missiles currently in the ground, the Sentinel missiles will be capable of making a graceful parabolic arc through the heavens to any place on Earth in order to destroy it. The $100 billion that will go to Sentinel represents only the first step of what is anticipated to be a $1.5-trillion investment in the triad, all of which is predicated on ramping up production of new plutonium pits, the deadly metallic hearts of nuclear warheads.

ECA Member Highlight

If the communities surrounding Los Alamos have a fraught relationship with America's nuclear weapons industry, matters are less politically complex where Los Alamos's plutonium goes to rest. The final repository for much of the U.S.'s transuranic nuclear waste is a mine, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, located in the southern part of New Mexico, between Carlsbad and the oil town of Hobbs. “WIPP is the community,” says Carlsbad city councilman JJ Chavez, who also happens to work at WIPP as an environmental support supervisor, “and the community is WIPP.”

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UPCOMING EVENTS

NEW MEDIA

Gone Fission Nuclear Report: A CRO Closes

The Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee (CROET) recently announced its plans to close after three decades of successfully representing the Oak Ridge community with the Department of Energy. Why now? And what does this decision mean for the CROs that continue to operate in other DOE communities? Learn the answers in this week’s episode of the Gone Fission Nuclear Report podcast.

Gone Fission Nuclear Report: A DOE View: Community Support is Essential

In our last episode, the Gone Fission Nuclear Report podcast examined the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee’s decision to close in two years. This week, Department of Energy officials at Headquarters and two sites discuss the continuing need for CROs and the importance of community support in the success of DOE’s cleanup mission. 

Check out ECA's latest report! 

DISPOSAL DRIVES CLEANUP: RE-ENERGIZING MOMENTUM FOR DISPOSAL SOLUTIONS FOR RADIOACTIVE WASTE

This report calls on the Department of Energy to launch the initiative to develop the actual waste disposition approaches. The Department could potentially save hundreds of billions of dollars in cleanup costs by using its available tools and implementing the report’s recommendations.