ECA Update: September 16, 2016 |
IN THIS UPDATE:
Department of Energy Draft Summary of Public
Input Report Available for Public Comment
Fail-Safe Nuclear Power
LANL Clean Up Estimate Still Lacks Details
Department of Energy Draft Summary of Public
Input Report Available for Public Comment DOE-NE September 14, 2016 Hello,
The draft report titled "Designing a Consent-Based Siting Process: Summary of Public Input" is now available on the Department of Energy consent-based siting website here.
To launch the consent-based siting effort, DOE issued an "Invitation for Public Comment to Inform the Design of a Consent-Based Siting Process for Nuclear Waste Storage and Disposal Facilities" in the Federal Register on December 23, 2015. The comment period was open through July 31,
2016.
Comments received throughout the Invitation for Public Comment and public meetings are summarized in a draft report, titled "Designing a Consent-Based Siting Process: Summary of Public Input." The draft report will be available for public comment for 45 days via a Federal Register Notice beginning September 15, 2016 and concluding on October 30, 2016. In addition, public comments received on the December 23rd Invitation for Public Comment are now publicly posted here and comments received via
regulations.gov are available here.
Thank you to everyone who attended our public meetings, provided comments, and participated in this important first step.
John Kotek
Acting Assistant
Secretary for Nuclear Energy
U.S. Department of Energy
Fail-Safe Nuclear PowerMIT Technology Review August 2, 2016 Cheaper and cleaner nuclear plants could finally become reality—but not in the United States, where the technology was invented more than 50 years ago.
In February I flew through the interior of a machine that could represent the future of nuclear power. I was on a virtual-reality tour at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics in China, which plans in the
next few years to build an experimental reactor whose design makes a meltdown far less likely. Inside the core—a super hot, intensely radioactive place where no human will ever go—the layers of the power plant peeled back before me: the outer vessel of stainless steel, the inner layer of a high-tech alloy, and finally the nuclear fuel itself, tens of thousands of billiard-ball-size spheres containing particles of radioactive material.
Given unprecedented access to the inner workings of China’s advanced nuclear R&D program, I was witnessing a new nuclear technology being born. Through the virtual reactor snaked an intricate system of pipes carrying the fluid that makes this system special: a molten salt that cools the reactor and carries heat to drive a turbine and make electricity. At least in theory, this type of reactor can’t suffer the kind of catastrophic
failure that happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima, making unnecessary the expensive and redundant safety systems that have driven up the cost of conventional reactors. What’s more, the new plants should produce little waste and might even eat up existing nuclear waste. They could run on uranium, which powers 99 percent of the nuclear power plants in the world, or they could eventually run on thorium, which is cleaner and more abundant. The ultimate goal of the Shanghai Institute: to build a
molten-salt reactor that could replace the 1970s-era technology in today’s nuclear power plants and help wean China off the coal that fouls the air of Shanghai and Beijing, ushering in an era of cheap, abundant, zero-carbon energy.
Over the next two decades China hopes to build the world’s largest nuclear power industry. Plans include as many as 30 new conventional nuclear
plants (in addition to the 34 reactors operating today) as well as a variety of next-generation reactors, including thorium molten-salt reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (which, like molten-salt reactors, are both highly efficient and inherently safe), and sodium-cooled fast reactors (which can consume spent fuel from conventional reactors to make electricity). Chinese planners want not only to dramatically expand the country’s domestic nuclear capacity but also to become the
world’s leading supplier of nuclear reactors and components, a prospect that many Western observers find alarming.
LANL Clean Up Estimate Still Lacks Details
Los Alamos Daily Post September 14, 2016 A delegation from the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities is visiting Washington, D.C. this week to
attend a National Cleanup Conference.
In scheduled talks on Capitol Hill and with Department of Energy officials, they will not have the benefit of some missing information that has been blamed for inadequate funding of environmental cleanup efforts at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The delegation, including Los Alamos County Councilor Kristin Henderson and Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales will be discussing budget issues before Congress returns to the home front for the
final leg of the national elections.
The still-missing information is called the Lifecycle Baseline Cost Estimate and it is supposed to be a detailed statement of what needs to be done in each of DOE’s contaminated sites, how much that will cost and how long it will take to do the work.
The last time a comprehensive baseline cost estimate was completed was in 2008, according to Doug Hintze, DOE’s Environmental Management field office manager for Los Alamos. But that
schedule soon went out of date because of a series of setbacks that included two frightening wildfires, a thousand year flood and the unexpected discovery of a $200 million hexavalent chromium plume problem that has been seeping contamination into the regional aquifer for 60 years and is threatening the neighboring Pueblo of San Ildefonso
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| November 2016 | | 16-18 | INVITATION ONLY 2016 Intergovernmental Meeting with DOE in New Orleans, LA
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