ECA Update: March 19, 2012
Published: Mon, 03/19/12
US senator urges DOE to move quickly on nuclear waste storage
Platts March 14, 2012 The top lawmaker on the US Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Department of Energy budget said Wednesday she would back funding for DOE to mount a "full-court press" on finding and developing a permanent repository for spent commercial nuclear fuel.
Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat-California, and chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, said during a hearing with Energy Secretary Steven Chu that she is frustrated by the slow pace of dealing with spent nuclear fuel.
"If there is anything that you need in this budget to do it quicker, faster and make the decisions quicker and faster, I want to advocate for it," Feinstein said.
Chu told Feinstein that the Nuclear Waste Act would have to be changed to allow DOE to move forward quickly and effectively. Meanwhile, the agency is using its current authority to consolidate spent nuclear fuel now stored at decommissioned nuclear reactors around the country and to standardize spent-fuel shipping containers, among other things.
"We share your sense of urgency," Chu said. "Within our jurisdiction now, we are not sitting idly by. The things that we hope Congress will allow us to act on, we are moving forward on these things. ... The details need to be spelled out."
POJOAQUE, N.M. (WTW) -- Budget cuts at the nation's premier nuclear facility are expected to cost northern New Mexico businesses more than $30 million in lost contacts, an official said this week.
Los Alamos National Laboratory Executive Director Richard Marquez told an audience at the Cities of Gold Hotel and Casino that's how much in loses the area should expect. The more than $30 million in losses is about one-third of all lab contracts, Marquez told a group of about 40 people, including lab employees, union leaders and organization directors.
Lab officials last month announced plans to reduce the permanent full-time workforce by between 400 and 800 employees this spring, or as much as 11 percent. Under the program, the lab says about 7,600 workers are eligible for a buyout.
Almost $2.8 billion would be required in fiscal 2014 to keep environmental cleanup on pace at the Hanford nuclear reservation, according to the first look at the budget released Thursday.
That's up from about $2.2 billion in both the current Hanford budget and also the Obama administration's request for next year's Hanford budget.
However, big questions remain, including the effects of possible sequestration triggered by the failure of a special congressional deficit committee to reach agreement and a proposal to create a new cost and schedule for the Hanford vitrification plant based on lower spending.
As sequestration stands now, $1.2 trillion would be held back from federal spending to use for deficit reduction during a decade. It is set to cut defense spending, which could include defense cleanup programs like Hanford, 10 percent starting three months into fiscal 2013.
"DOE has done no scenarios or analyses for any sequestration," said Stacy Charboneau, deputy manager of the Department of Energy Hanford Office of River Protection, at a public meeting to discuss the fiscal 2014 Hanford budget proposal Thursday in Richland.
However, she personally believes that those deep cuts will be so unacceptable that Congress will not let them happen, she said.
Savannah River Site MOX project costs too high, environmentalists contend Rob Pavey, The Augusta Chronicle March 13, 2012 The government's mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River Site will become far more expensive than planned because of increased operating costs, the need to modify older facilities to process plutonium pits and other factors, according to comments filed Tuesday by 15 environmental groups responding to a reopened environmental impact statement.
The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, Sierra Club chapters, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and other groups contend the $4.8 billion plant's construction costs prompted a change in the government's original plan to build a separate facility to disassemble surplus nuclear bomb components to recover plutonium to use as MOX feedstock.
The plant's mission is to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium by blending small amounts with uranium to make fuel rods for commercial power reactors - a process that forever renders the plutonium unusable for weapons.
As an alternative to building a disassembly plant on-site, the National Nuclear Security Administration is evaluating the use of other facilities - including the H Canyon area within SRS - to process the pits. The groups contend the MOX program's operating costs will exceed $10 million.
The draft environmental impact statement is expected to be issued in the summer, and hearings are expected to be held in the same cities in which earlier hearings on the document's previous version were held, including Aiken.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- When you hear terms like "Project Wipeout" or "Operation Clean Sweep," your mind may conjure images of military or law-enforcement operations, or maybe an extreme sporting event or contest.
In this instance, however, those phrases refer to locating, identifying, and removing a variety of legacy waste material scattered in numerous locations on the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation. DOE Environmental Management Contractor URS/CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) is applying available resources to address these areas, which vary in size and composition, but all require active surveillance and maintenance to ensure the material remains in a stable condition and is properly accounted for.
At the onset of the UCOR contract, management looked for opportunities to improve efficiencies in the General Maintenance organization. Although all personnel and resources were fully deployed most of the time, there was some down time between peak work demands and during slower periods.
Improved planning and scheduling reduced the down periods, but to close the gap further, "Project Wipeout" was initiated at East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) and "Operation Clean Sweep" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to dispose of wood, scrap and debris piles, orphan drums, unneeded equipment, and other material that required surveillance but otherwise had no useful purpose.
Cheap Natural Gas Unplugs U.S. Nuclear-Power Revival
Rebecca Smith, The Wall Street Journal March 15, 2012 The U.S. nuclear industry seemed to be staging a comeback several years ago, with 15 power companies proposing as many as 29 new reactors. Today, only two projects are moving off the drawing board.
What killed the revival wasn't last year's nuclear accident in Japan, nor was it a soft economy that dented demand for electricity. Rather, a shale-gas boom flooded the U.S. market with cheap natural gas, offering utilities a cheaper, less risky alternative to nuclear technology.
"It's killed off new coal and now it's killing off new nuclear," says David Crane, chief executive of NRG Energy Inc., NRG +2.19% a power-generation company based in Princeton, N.J. "Gas has come along at just the right time to upset everything."
Across the country, utilities are turning to natural gas to generate electricity, with 258 plants expected to be built from 2011 through 2015, federal statistics indicate. Not only are gas-fired plants faster to build than reactors, they are much less expensive. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says it costs about $978 per kilowatt of capacity to build and fuel a big gas-fired power plant, compared with $5,339 per kilowatt for a nuclear plant.
The EIA has forecast that the nation will add 222 gigawatts of generating capacity between 2010 and 2035--equivalent to one-fifth of the current U.S. capacity. The biggest chunk of that addition--58%--will be fired by natural gas, it said, followed by renewable sources, including hydropower, at 31%, then coal at 8% and nuclear power at 4%.
"What utility doesn't want cheap fuel?" says Steve Piper, associate director of energy fundamentals at SNL Financial, a research company. He predicts natural gas will remain the "default fuel" for as long as gas production remains high and prices stay low.
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