ECA Update: March 13, 2012
Published: Tue, 03/13/12
Energy secretary to look at Hanford land transfer
The Tri-City Herald March 9, 2012 Energy Secretary Steven Chu will look at speeding the transfer of 1,600 acres of Hanford nuclear reservation land for industrial development in response to a request by Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash.
Inslee, who is running for governor, asked the energy secretary to expedite the process at a hearing Thursday of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power.
The Tri-City Development Council partnered with local governments to request transfer of the acreage planned for industrial use just north of Richland, which the Department of Energy no longer needs.
Industrial development, including for clean energy projects, could create thousands of jobs to help replace those that are lost as environmental cleanup at Hanford is gradually completed.
DOE action could take 18 months, but companies are interested in the land now, Inslee said.
Inslee also asked Chu about locating a commercial-scale biorefinery in Washington. Biofuels development has great potential, Chu said, and he would consider locating a biorefinery in Washington.
NMED Secretary calls for LANL cleanup funds Associated Press March 8, 2012 ALBUQUERQUE - New Mexico Environment Secretary David Martin and a delegation of New Mexico leaders were in Washington this week pushing for more money to cleanup toxic waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Martin says the delegation stressed the need for more federal funding to ensure the lab can meet its promise to remove thousands of barrels of radioactive waste that is stored above ground on lab property by 2014. The potential dangers of the waste made national headlines last summer when the Las Conchas fire raged near the lab.
Martin and the newly formed Regional Coalition of LANL Communities met with the New Mexico congressional delegation, National Nuclear Security Administrator Tom D'Agostino and others on Monday and Tuesday.
US DOE would resume Yucca work if court tells it to do so: Chu
Platts March 8, 2012 Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu said before a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing Thursday that DOE would resume the Yucca Mountain repository program it dismantled in 2010 if there is a court order to do so.
Chu's comment was in response to a question from Representative John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican and long-time supporter of the Yucca Mountain repository project in Nevada. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power hearing focused on DOE's budget request for fiscal 2013, which starts October 1.
A lawsuit filed against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at a federal appeals court in Washington challenges NRC's termination of its review of the Yucca license application. The US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments in that case May 2.
Chu sidestepped Shimkus' question on whether DOE would begin benefit negotiations with Nye County, Nevada, which notified Chu on Tuesday that it wants the repository proposed for Yucca Mountain, which is in the county.
Nye officials give consent to burying nuke waste
Steve Tetreault, Stephens Washington Bureau March 9, 2012 WASHINGTON -- With the federal government embarking on a new "consent-based" search for someplace to dispose of nuclear waste, officials in Nye County sent a reminder this week that they still consent to burying it at Yucca Mountain.
The county remains interested to work with the Department of Energy, even as the state has taken official positions against the proposed Yucca repository, and most elected leaders up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have fought against it.
"We want to explore and define potential incentives, and move this urgently needed program forward as promptly as possible," County Commission Chairman Joni Eastley said in a letter sent Tuesday to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
As a reminder, Eastley attached four resolutions the Nye County Commission had adopted over the years in support of the repository.
The rural county has staked its economic development on the jobs and other federal payments that would accompany the $100 billion nuclear waste site on the southwest corner of the Nevada Test Site. Its hopes fell flat when President Barack Obama, urged by Reid, terminated the program in 2009.
Preserving the 'unique' history of Oak Ridge
Beverly Majors, The Oak Ridger March 12, 2012 OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- Oak Ridge is a unique city with a unique history -- and many people believe that unique history should be saved.
That's one of the things state Rep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, and Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett learned Friday when they visited the Oak Ridge Public Library and its unique Center for Oak Ridge Oral History.
Library Director Kathy E. McNeilly gave an overview of the city's efforts to become part of the Manhattan Project National Park effort and said the Park Service "understands the three parts of the story."
However, she said the Park Service has never administered a three-way park. Again, something that makes Oak Ridge part of something unique.
The three-way park is because Oak Ridge, Richland, Wash., and Los Alamos, N.M. are all key parts of the Manhattan Project and are expected to also be key parts of the Manhattan Project National Park.
Nuclear agency chief seeks to accelerate post-Fukushima disaster safety reforms Ben Geman, The Hill March 11, 2012 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko hopes to speed up safety reforms planned after the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant after acknowledging recently that the five-year schedule had slipped.
"That's something that we really need to focus on and figure out if there aren't ways we can accelerate that work and really get it all done within five years," Jaczko said in an interview broadcast Sunday, the one-year anniversary of the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan.
"Nobody wants to be dealing with the lessons learned from Fukushima in six years from now, seven years from now, in eight years from now, there will be other things that come up, other issues that need to be identified and dealt with, and if we are still working on the Fukushima things, it will make it all that much more challenging to deal with these other issues," he told Platts Energy Week TV.
The NRC has consistently maintained that U.S. power plants are safe. But the regulators are also moving ahead with efforts to strengthen safety in the wake of last year's earthquake and tsunami, which caused a disastrous loss of cooling and meltdowns at the Japanese plant.
Concerns raised about freezing waste in transfer lines at Hanford tank farms Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald March 7, 2012 The Hanford tank farm contractor has received a letter of enforcement related to the possible freezing of radioactive waste in transfer lines.
However, the Department of Energy Office of Enforcement and Oversight, which issued the letter, did not issue a notice of violation or take enforcement action.
Washington River Protection Solutions, which operates the tank farms for DOE, discovered the potential problem in late summer and reported it to DOE. The tank farms include 172 underground tanks holding 56 million gallons of radioactive waste from the past production of weapons plutonium.
It discovered that no analysis had been done to see if radioactive waste, moved between tanks in above-ground lines, could freeze and potentially causing pipes to burst or damaging valves.
RICHLAND, Wash. - The Department of Energy is releasing the fifth chapter of The Hanford Story video series to the public today. ―Future‖ offers perspectives and ideas for potential uses of the government's former plutonium production site in southeast Washington State as environmental cleanup is completed.
From land use plans and preservation to economic development and tourism opportunities, the Future chapter touches on a variety of local economic, cultural and environmental perspectives. The video features representatives of the Wanapum Band of Indians, the State of Oregon, and the Tri-City
Development Council. The best thing to do with nuclear waste is to stash it away, not reprocess it
The Economist March 10, 2012 Of all the difficulties nuclear power is heir to, that of waste has most fired the public imagination. Building power plants that last a century is one thing; creating waste that will be dangerous for 100 times as long is another. For decades America has failed to create a long-term repository for the waste from its civilian reactors at its chosen site, Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Most other countries have similarly failed, so the waste from today's reactors piles up.
As it happens, long-term waste disposal is among the more tractable nuclear problems. Temporary storage is a good start. Once fuel has cooled down in spent-fuel pools for a while, it can be moved to "dry cask" storage. Such storage appears robust (dry casks at Fukushima, hit by the tsunami, show no sign of having leaked) and can be maintained indefinitely. It takes space and needs to be guarded, but it can provide an adequate solution for a century or more.
That is if you do not want to reprocess the fuel to recover the plutonium inside it. If you are a nuclear engineer you may find reprocessing rather appealing, partly to show that your nuclear programme is as sophisticated as any and partly because it gets around the offensive inefficiency of light-water reactors. If all the uranium in reactor fuel was either split or turned into plutonium which itself was then split, you would get 170 times more energy than you get from just using the fuel once, and would have opened the way to technically intriguing breeder systems.
Nuclear Explosion Could Save Earth From Asteroid: LANL Study
Sangeetha Seshagiri, International Business Times March 13, 2012 A nuclear explosion could save the earth from a big asteroid, according to a new study.
Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy facility in New Mexico, used a supercomputer to model a nuclear weapons anti-asteroid effectiveness, reported Space website.
They used a 3-D modelling study run on 32,000 processors of the Cielo supercomputer and dealt a 1,650-foot-long (500-metre) space rock using a one-megaton nuclear weapon - about 50 times more powerful than the US blast inflicted on Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II.
They found that the nuclear weapon disrupts all of the rocks in the rockpile of this asteroid successfully. "Ultimately this one-megaton blast will disrupt all of the rocks in the rockpile of this asteroid, and if this were an earth-crossing asteroid, would fully mitigate the hazard represented by the initial asteroid itself," Los Alamos scientist Bob Weaver said in a recent video released by the lab.
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