ECA Update: February 3, 2012
Published: Fri, 02/03/12
The two chairmen of a study group established after the Obama administration killed a plan for a nuclear waste repository in Nevada appeared before a House subcommittee on Wednesday to explain a proposed solution to the enduring waste dilemma. They found their idea tough to sell.
Last week the so-called Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future released a report calling for a new approach to finding a site, based on local consent rather than Congressional dictate.
The two chairmen appeared before the Energy and Commerce committee's subcommittee on environment and the economy, whose members were quite deferential over all. One commission co-chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, is a former congressman from Indiana; the other is Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser under Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.
But the committee chairman, John Shimkus of Illinois, did not mince words in complaining about the Obama administration, denouncing its "interference' with an evaluation of the merits of the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. Campaigning in 2008, President Obama promised to halt the project if elected, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, of Nevada, worked hard to cut off funds for it.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday said that the United States will likely need more than one permanent repository for commercial nuclear fuel waste, even after a decades-long battle killed plans for a single repository site long-planned for Nevada.
The comment came in the wake of a final report last week from the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which was set up by Chu to examine what to do with spent nuclear fuel now languishing at commercial nuclear power plants around the country.
"You need several, in all probability, you need several repositories," Chu said during a meeting of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. Chu put together the 13-member SEAB in 2010, and it includes scientists, business leaders, university professors and former government officials.
U.S. Department of Energy won't help Georgia monitor radiation near Savannah River Site Rob Pavey, The Augusta Chronicle February 2, 2012 The U.S. Department of Energy will not honor its 2010 offer to help Georgia's Environmental Protection Division restore a program to monitor radiation levels in Georgia counties near Savannah River Site.
"Unfortunately due to budgetary constraints, the department cannot award every application and must therefore make difficult choices," said Jim Giusti, a department spokesman at SRS. "The Georgia Department of Natural Resources grant could not be awarded."
Georgia officials accepted an April 2010 DOE offer of federal funds to restore Georgia's independent monitoring program, which was administered through the state's Environmental Protection Division.
DOE supported that program from 2001-04 but discontinued funding in 2005, saying similar studies on the South Carolina side of the river were sufficient.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- There is a noticeable "buzz" around Oak Ridge.
In the Chamber of Commerce, at the Friday morning meetings of the East Tennessee Economic Council and in countless receptions around town, a frequent topic of conversation has been a series of significant accomplishments in environmental cleanup activities on the Oak Ridge Reservation.
The progress is welcome news to a community that for two decades has been trying to reverse the image created by the contamination of buildings, soil and water during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.
With a budget of more than $400 million for 2012, the commitment by the Department of Energy to remove these environmental legacies represents the largest clean-up project in Tennessee's history.
At stake is more than the city's environmental quality. DOE and local officials are working together on a plan that will transform hundreds of acres at the old K-25 complex into an industrial park with the resources needed to attract new companies and manufacturing plants, some potentially linked to technologies being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The possibility of disposing of Hanford's high-level radioactive waste while a solution continues to be worked out for spent commercial nuclear fuel was raised Thursday at a Senate hearing.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., questioned leaders of the Blue
Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future on its findings at a hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. On Wednesday, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., a candidate for governor, questioned commission leaders at a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Environment and Economy.
DOE Responds to Complaints About Its Commitment to Open Government Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic January 31, 2012 After a journalist called attention to the difficulty of finding documents about the prospective Yucca Mountain nuclear repository last week, the Department of Energy responded in near-record time. Cammie Croft, director of New Media & Citizen Engagement, addressed the concerns in a reasonable blog post on Energy.gov. She pulled together a specific list of Yucca Mountain documents and explained the general problem that governmental bodies have.
Ariz. State Senator suggests State as nuke dump
Howard Fischer, AZ Central January 27, 2012 State Sen. Al Melvin grants that not everyone thinks having a nuclear-waste-processing plant and burial site in Arizona is a great idea. So Melvin, a Republican from Tucson's far north suburbs, has a sweetener he believes will get some people to change their minds: money.
He is proposing to make Arizona the place where all nuclear plants in the U.S. send their spent nuclear fuel rods.
Next Up in Nuclear: Small Modular Reactors
Sarah Fecht, Popular Mechanics January 28, 2012 Today, one-fifth of America's electricity comes from nuclear power. The federal government wants to gradually expand that fraction in order to phase out greenhouse-gas-emitting coal-fired plants, which generate most of our energy. But nuclear power plants take a long time and a lot of money to build. That's why the Department of Energy is pushing a new technology called the small modular reactor (SMR). Last week, the department announced that it would invest $452 million toward developing and licensing a smaller and sleeker nuclear reactor. SMRs will be small enough to be pre-assembled in a factory and shipped to location. These easy-to-install reactors could potentially shave years and millions of dollars off the construction of nuclear power plants, and could make it economical to bring nuclear power to rural areas or developing countries that lack infrastructure. That's why SMRs are being hailed as the next generation in nuclear technology.
Quakes and U.S. Reactors: An Analytic Tool Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times Green Blog January 31, 2012 With the release of a computer model of all known geologic faults east of Denver, nearly all of the nuclear power plants in the United States are about to embark on a broad re-evaluation of their vulnerability to earthquakes. The new mapping is the first major update of the fault situation for plants since 1989.
The map has been in preparation since 2008, well before the earthquake and tsunami that caused three meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan last March or the quake near Mineral, Va., last summer that shook a twin-reactor plant beyond the degree expected. Still, those events have lent urgency to the effort to assess the American plants' ability to withstand quakes.
The new study does not calculate the risk of damage from an earthquake or even specify how much ground motion is likely at the reactor sites. That work is left to the plants' owners, supervised by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
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