ECA Update: March 6, 2012
Published: Tue, 03/06/12
Budget Hearing - National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Nonproliferation & Naval Reactors
House Energy and Water Appropriations Committee
March 6, 10:00 AM (this hearing will not be webcast)
Witnesses:
Thomas D'Agostino, Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration
Testimony Anne Harrington, Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, National Nuclear Security Administration
Admiral Kirkland Donald, Director, Naval Reactors
Testimony Budget Hearing - Department of Energy, Nuclear Energy & Nuclear Regulatory Commission House Energy and Water Appropriations Committee
March 7, 10:00 AM (this hearing will not be webcast) Witnesses:
Dr. Peter Lyons, Assistant Secretary, Office of Nuclear Energy
Gregory Jaczko, Chairman, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
The FY 2013 DOE Budget House Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the Energy and Commerce Committee March 8, 10:00 AM Witness:
Hon. Steven Chu, Secretary, Department of Energy
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Sharon Stover remembers the stories her mother used to tell about what life was like when Los Alamos National Laboratory first opened during World War II.
The jobs that flooded this impoverished swath of northern New Mexico, the government men who made the small hilltop town their home, the prideful sense that the secret work being done here would surely keep America's enemies at bay.
Nearly 70 years later, a cloud of uncertainty has drifted in over the hallowed national laboratory, which helped give birth to the Manhattan Project and has been a crucible of the nation's nuclear weapons research and development.
Last month, the Obama administration decided to defer construction of a new plutonium research facility at the laboratory for at least five years because of budget constraints.
On Feb. 21, the lab announced that it would need to lay off up to 11 percent of its 7,600 permanent employees, a target that officials hope can be reached through volunteers.
On Thursday, the lab's director, Charles F. McMillan, met with employees to explain the terms of buyouts, which they can apply for beginning Monday.
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, March 1, 2012--A plan to reduce the Laboratory workforce by between 400 and 800 employees this spring through a voluntary separation program has been approved by the National Nuclear Security Administration, LANL Director Charlie McMillan announced today.
Eligible employees from the regular workforce of about 7,600 may begin applying for voluntary separation on March 5th. The process is scheduled to complete with employees departing by April 5th.
"We're very pleased with NNSA's quick approval of the plan," McMillan said. "Taking this action now mitigates the risk of involuntary layoffs and helps shape the Lab to complete our missions in the coming years."
The plan calls for a severance package based on years of service, ranging from 1 to 39 weeks.
Luján Fights for LANL in Hearing with Department of Energy Secretary Chu Rep. Ray Luján Press Release March 1, 2012 Washington, D.C. - Congressman Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico's Third District expressed his concerns with budget cuts to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in a Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing with Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Below are Luján and Secretary Chu's remarks during the hearing.
Rep. Luján. Dr. Chu, in your prepared testimony you state that with the new START treaty, "the science, technology and engineering capabilities within the nuclear security enterprise will become even more important to sustaining the U.S. nuclear deterrent."
President Obama during his State of the Union this last year said, "Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched.' He goes on to say that we shouldn't 'gut these investments in our budget. Don't let other countries win the race for the future."
I'd like to focus on this theme of nurturing the scientific and engineering capabilities of the NNSA laboratories. With the 2013 budget request NNSA's budget will have increased about 10 percent from 2011. Yet over this same two-year time frame the budget to Los Alamos National Laboratory will have decreased by about 10 percent. This is about a $300 million decrease in just two years and chokes the scientific and engineering capabilities at the lab.
The US Department of Energy has signed memorandums of understanding with three companies that could lead to the construction of several small modular nuclear reactors on its Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the agency said Friday.
Under the agreements, DOE, the Savannah River Site and the Savannah River National Laboratory will provide expertise to the companies in choosing locations at the site for SMRs and help develop land use and site service agreements for reactor siting.
The companies -- Hyperion Power Generation, Holtec International and NuScale Power -- have not built small modular reactors, but are part of growing industry interest in the technology.
Partnerships advance plans for SRS to make reactor technologies Anna Dolianitis, Aiken Standard March 3, 2012 Partnerships with three private companies announced by the Department of Energy on Friday are intended to be a step toward making small modular nuclear reactor technologies at a future energy complex at the Savannah River Site a reality.
The three agreements - with Hyperion Power Generation Inc., Holtec International subsidiary SMR Inc. and NuScale Power LLC - are to move toward SMR reactor siting at SRS and start the process for land use, power purchase and security agreements, among other discussions.
"Small modular reactor technology development is an excellent example of how we are capturing our nuclear knowledge for the future and leveraging the best-of-our-best to renew the true value of SRS for decades to come," said DOE-SR Manager Dave Moody. In late 2010, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions signed two Memoranda of Understanding, with Hyperion and GE Hitachi, to begin discussions about bringing SMR technology to the site, and DOE - Savannah River Site spokesperson Jim Giusti said Hyperion's inclusion in the partnership is a move to the next phase.
SRNS spokesperson Barbara Smoak said that the MOU with GE Hitachi is still in place, and SRNS is in discussion with the company to move to a Memorandum of Agreement, like the partnerships announced Friday.
"We're moving beyond those agreement, and we're starting to actually look at committing federal land for this project," Giusti said.
Frank Munger: Oak Ridge projects get high-level attention Frank Munger, Knoxville News March 5, 2012 High-level visits don't always translate into high-level funding, but sometimes they can help.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu was in Oak Ridge Feb. 15 to promote the administration's support for nuclear energy. He visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, where scientists and engineers are using the lab's super-powerful computers to create a virtual reactor that may help fix real-time problems in real-life reactors.
Perhaps more importantly, from an Oak Ridge perspective, was a separate, unconnected visit on the same day by DOE Undersecretary Tom D'Agostino, who took a close look at some of the neediest cleanup projects.
D'Agostino, who also holds the position of administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, last year acquired oversight of DOE's Environmental Management Program. EM is an area where Oak Ridge has historically been underfunded compared to some other DOE cleanup sites. His up-close and dedicated review of Oak Ridge projects is considered a good sign.
The Department of Energy plans to try a new way to "cocoon" its next defunct Hanford reactor, putting up a steel building around it.
DOE already has made significant progress toward putting eight of Hanford's plutonium production reactors into temporary storage to let radiation decay to more manageable levels over 75 years. The ninth reactor, B Reactor, will be saved as a museum.
To cocoon the C, D, DR, F and H reactors, DOE tore down reactor structures to the radioactive shield walls around radioactive cores, sealed any openings and reroofed them before welding shut the doors. Work on a similar cocoon almost is complete at N Reactor.
But now DOE is planning to try building an enclosure around the K East Reactor, the next reactor scheduled to be cocooned.
Worker safety is the main reason to switch to the new plan, said Tom Teynor, DOE project director.
The K East Reactor is larger than some of the earlier reactors that were built along the Columbia River as part of the nation's nuclear weapons program. Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012 Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Press Release March 1, 2012 Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) today introduced legislation to modernize our nation's power sector and guide it toward a future in which more and more electricity is generated with cleaner and cleaner energy.
The Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012, or CES for short, employs a straightforward, market-based approach that encourages a wide variety of electricity-generating technologies. It sets a national goal for clean energy and establishes a transparent framework that lets resources compete based on how clean they are, then gets out of the way and lets the market and American ingenuity determine the best paths forward.
Bingaman said that the CES seeks to make sure that "as we continues to grow and power our economy, we leverage the clean resources we have available today, and also provide a continuing incentive to develop the cheaper, cleaner technologies that we'll need in the future. We want to make sure that we drive continued diversity in our energy sources, and allow every region to deploy clean energy using its own resources. And we want to make sure that we do all of this in a way that supports home-grown innovation and manufacturing and keeps us competitive in the global clean energy economy."
Bingaman's design for the CES draws on extensive Energy Information Administration (EIA) modeling done at his request last year, and EIA's results showed that a properly designed CES would have almost zero impact on GDP growth, and little to no impact on national electricity rates for the first decade of the program.
Under the plan, all generators of clean energy are given credits based upon their carbon emissions; greater numbers of credits are given to generators with lower emissions per unit of electricity. This flexible framework naturally allows a wide variety of sources (solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas, coal with carbon capture and storage, etc.) to be used to meet the standard, allows market forces to determine what the optimal mix of technologies and fuels should be, and makes it easy for new technologies to be incorporated.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the typically mild-mannered chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, let fly Wednesday at what he sees as the decline in civility when it comes to energy policy.
"Because of the heightened level of partisanship in energy over the last five years, we've seen an unraveling of what, up until recently, was a fairly strong bipartisan consensus on energy policy," Bingaman said at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Maryland. Energy laws passed on a bipartisan basis over the past seven years are "now under sustained attack."
"All I have to do is say the word 'Solyndra' and you know that the bipartisan consensus on energy project financing has evaporated," he added. "It's evaporated in favor of an attempt to paint the loan guarantee program as some sort of big government scandal for use in the upcoming election."
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