ECA Update: January 31, 2012
Published: Tue, 01/31/12
Nuke Us: The Town That Wants America's Worst Atomic Waste Christopher Helman, Forbes January 25, 2012 Bob Forrest is known for a lot of things in Carlsbad, a quiet city of 25,000 on the edge of New Mexico's empty, endless Chihuahuan Desert. He was mayor here for 16 years. He's chairman of the local bank and owns the spanking new Fairfield Inn, which sits next to the new Chili's and the new Wal-Mart. And he helped bring 200,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste to town.
That's not a bad thing--at least not here. Unlike thousands of other places in America, where the thought of trucking in barrels of radioactive garbage from atomic weapons plants would lead to marches, face paint and, invariably, pandering politicians (witness Nevada's stalled Yucca Mountain project), Carlsbad has a different take. "It's really a labor of love," says Forrest. "We've proven that nuclear waste can be disposed of in a safe, reliable way."
This attitude--"Yes in my backyard," if you will--has brought near permanent prosperity to this isolated spot that until recently had no endemic economic engine. Unemployment sits at 3.8%, versus 6.5% statewide and 8.5% nationally. And thanks to this project--euphemistically known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP--New Mexico has received more than $300 million in federal highway funds in the past decade, $100 million of which has gone into the roads around Carlsbad. WIPP is the nation's only permanent, deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. The roads have to be good for the two dozen trucks a week hauling in radioactive drums brimming with the plutonium-laden detritus of America's nuclear weapons production.
Before WIPP the area's economy was mostly limited to potash mining, oil and gas drilling, and a passel of tourists stopping on the way to Carlsbad Caverns, an hour south. The Department of Energy's $6 billion program created 1,300 permanent jobs, many of them high-paid engineering positions. Energy's annual budget for WIPP is $215 million, much of which stays in the community as wages. The leaders of neighboring Lea and Eddy counties have doubled down on the nuke biz, establishing a 1,000-acre atomic industrial park. Already uranium fuel maker Urenco Group has built a $3 billion fabrication plant there, employing 300. More amenities followed, too: In November Carlsbad inaugurated the Bob Forrest Youth Sports Complex. "We are not blinded by the jobs," says John Waters, director of the department of economic development for Eddy County. "We know what we have. We know the risks. We have a very educated public." But if Carlsbad's story showcases the upside of being willing to do the nation's dirty work, it also demonstrates how difficult it can be to get the chance to do so. Since opening in 1999, WIPP has operated so smoothly and safely that Carlsbad is lobbying the feds to expand the project to take the nuclear mother lode: 160,000 more tons of the worst high-level nuclear waste in the country--things like the half-melted reactor core of Three Mile Island and old nuclear fuel rods--that are residing at aging nuke plants a short drive from wherever you're sitting right now.
Yet thanks to politics even more radioactive than the material itself, it hasn't happened yet and might not happen anytime soon. Though taxpayers have already spent some $12 billion mining out and engineering Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, power brokers in Nevada fought the congressionally approved project from the get-go. Bowing to Nimby--and Nevada's powerful Senator Harry Reid--two years ago President Barack Obama's Administration declared Yucca DOA. Contractors have since laid off some 1,000 workers there.
To seek some common ground Obama then set up the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. The BRC, as it's known, is tasked with looking at all the options. It likes WIPP--a lot. According to its draft report last summer the BRC will insist that a "consent-based approach" be applied to any future site selection. WIPP, it wrote, is a model of how that can be done.
NRC will host a public webinar today at 2:00 PM (EST) to discuss the draft report for long-term waste confidence update. From the NRC meeting notice:
The NRC staff is seeking to engage the public regarding the Agency's plans to develop a draft environmental impact statement for an update of the NRC's Waste Confidence decision and rule. The NRC is holding this webinar to walk through and answer questions about the draft report "Background and Preliminary Assumptions for an Environmental Impact Statement--Long-Term Waste Confidence Update." Energy Department rejects SRS advisory board request for nuclear waste inventory
Rob Pavey, The Augusta Chronicle January 30, 2012 The U.S. Department of Energy has rejected an oversight board's request that federal officials maintain a more comprehensive status report on Savannah River Site's growing volume and variety of stored nuclear waste.
"SRS was never intended, studied or tested to be a long-term repository for nuclear wastes and by-products," the SRS Citizens Advisory Board's request said. "Recent developments related to the Yucca Mountain Repository have raised the level of concern about how DOE plans to meet its commitments to SRS stakeholders; i.e., to expeditiously disposition waste from SRS to a designated national repository."
The 25-member board asked for a one-time preliminary report that would include more details on both nuclear and hazardous wastes in L Basin, the H and F area tank farms, K Area, Glass Waste Storage Building and other areas.
That initial report, the board said, would need to be updated periodically and should categorize those wastes by source, quantity and type of material; and list a disposition path for each material, including an estimated "final disposition" date.
What Sweden can teach us about nuclear waste Brad Plumer, The Washington Post WONKBLOG January 28, 2012 In 2010, the Energy Department set up a commission to figure out what to do with the country's nuclear waste, after a planned repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain was nixed. This week, the commission came back and advised a "consent-based approach" to choosing a new site. How would this work?
To understand why the United States still has no long-term plan to store it's nuclear waste, it's worth looking back at what happened with the controversial Yucca Mountain waste repository, which was finally squelched by President Obama in 2009. The problem, as it turned out, wasn't so much technical -- most scientists agree that it's feasible to design a storage facility that can last thousands of years -- as political. Yucca was unpopular because many Nevadans felt the waste site had been unfairly foisted on them by Congress. Back in 1987, the two other proposals for long-term repositories in Washington and Texas were vetoed by powerful politicians. That left Yucca, out in the Nevada desert. The fact that Nevadans never felt they had a choice in the matter made all the difference.
"What's obvious now, although it wasn't always, is that if a local community doesn't want you, there's not much you can do," Rod Ewing, a nuclear-waste expert at the University of Michigan, told me in an interview last year. "For a project that takes decades, the opposition only has to prevail once for everything to be put off track." And, while everyone loves to gripe about NIMBYs, Ewing argues that NIMBYs are a fact of life -- irrational or not, people get freaked out by nuclear waste.
When the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future was established two years ago, after the Obama administration killed a proposed repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, one of the items on its agenda was to determine whether spent nuclear fuel was in fact waste.
Among advocates of nuclear power, considerable disagreement exists about whether the spent fuel can be considered waste, given that it contains unused uranium as well as plutonium, which is created in nuclear reactors and can be used as fuel.
France and Japan have factories that chop up the fuel and chemically remove the uranium and plutonium for reuse. And on paper, there are designs for reactors that could take some of the most long-lived, troublesome materials in the spent fuel and transmute them into elements that would be easier to handle because they break down in centuries rather than millenniums.
But such reprocessing is also a path to making materials for nuclear weapons, so the United States discourages it abroad. Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter banned the technology here; President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban, but so far it has not mattered, because it is commercially unattractive to American utilities.
WASHINGTON - A federal oversight panel is raising new concerns to the Department of Energy about potentially serious flaws in the design of a first-of-its-kind, $12 billion waste treatment plant that is being built for the nation's largest radioactive cleanup.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board wants more tests and analyses to validate the designs for key components of the plant, which is meant to stabilize and contain 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at the Hanford Site, a former nuclear weapons production complex in Washington state. The concern is that the components could fail, crippling the plant long before its 30-year mission is done.
The warning adds hurdles to the government's 20-year effort to clean up the waste, which threatens to pollute the Columbia River, a major water supply in the Pacific Northwest.
House Yucca advocate won't target GOP candidates for opposing the waste dump
Andrew Restuccia, The Hill January 30, 2012 Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) has spent months calling out members of Congress for opposing now-abandoned plans to permanently store the country's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. But he said he has no immediate plans to target Republican candidates like Mitt Romney, who have said they oppose long-delayed plans to store nuclear waste at the Nevada site.
Shimkus, a vocal advocate of Yucca Mountain and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over the waste dump, said he believes that a Republican president will be better suited to resolve the fight over spent nuclear fuel.
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