ECA Update: April 23, 2012
Published: Mon, 04/23/12
Fiscal Year 2013 budget markups this week
Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee
Subcommittee markup of the draft FY13 Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Bill Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 AM Notice House Appropriations Committee
Full committee markup of the draft FY13 House Energy and Water Appropriations Bill Wednesday, April 25 at 1 PM The markup will not be webcast Senate Appropriations Committee
The full committee tentatively plans to mark up the draft FY13 Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Bill, CQ reports Thursday, April 26, TBD Check the committee website for updates House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces
FY13 Defense Authorization Bill Markup Thursday, April 26, 1 PM Notice No US nuclear waste program, no fee, attorney tells court
Platts April 20, 2012 The US Department of Energy does not have a spent fuel disposal program and should suspend its collection of a nuclear waste fee until there is a program to spend that money, attorney Jay Silberg told a federal appeals court Friday.
"There is no program, no costs, but DOE wants to continue to collect this fee," Silberg told the three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Silberg presented oral arguments on behalf of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the Nuclear Energy Institute, which sued DOE in 2011 after the department refused to suspend collection of the fee even though it did not have a program to spend it on.
Nuclear utility customers now pay roughly $750 million a year into the Nuclear Waste Fund, a federal trust, based on a one-tenth of a cent fee for every kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity sold. Congress created the fund in 1982 to pay for the disposal of utility spent fuel.
Restore commitment to nuclear modernization
Senators John Kyl, Bob Corker, and Kelly Ayotte April 22, 2012 President Barack Obama's fiscal year 2013 budget request to modernize our nation's aging nuclear weapons and laboratories falls about $370 million short of what the Senate deemed necessary when it supported the 2010 New START treaty.
In explaining this, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Thomas D'Agostino, told Congress, "the reality I have to deal with is the appropriation I received from Congress last December, ... which reduced our budget by over $400 million."
This perceived lack of congression-al support led the administration to delay, from two years to seven years, refurbishing our aging nuclear weapons and building a critical plutonium handling facility. But Congress can alter this "reality." It can restore the commitment to nuclear modernization basic to New START and avoid some of the schedule delays that the military regards as risky.
Indeed, restored funding could be achieved with a combination of administrative reforms across the nuclear weapons complex, execution of the $125 million transfer authority granted to the defense secretary in the FY2012 National Defense Authorization Act and a measured increase in the FY2013 appropriation for the national nuclear administration from lesser priorities.
B&W Announces $1.3 Billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Management Contract Award
B&W Press Release April 23, 2012 Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W)is pleased to announce that Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Energy for management and operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Group, Inc. (B&W TSG) is a team member of Nuclear Waste Partnership, which is led by URS.
The contract has an estimated value of $1.3 billion over a 10-year period, which includes an initial five-year period in addition to a potential five-year extension.
READ MORE Phasing out nuclear
The Washington Post Editorial Board April 23, 2012 CAN THE WORLD fight global warming without nuclear power? One major industrialized country -- Germany -- is determined to find out, and another -- Japan -- is debating whether to try. Both illustrate how hard it would be.
To date, nuclear is the only proven source of low-emissions "baseload" power -- that is, electricity that's always on, day or night, powering round-the-clock elevators in Tokyo or office buildings in Munich. Yet both Germany and Japan are poised to prematurely shutter their large nuclear sectors, giving up all of that guaranteed, low-carbon electricity generation in an anti-nuclear frenzy, on a bet that they can multiply their generation of renewable electricity within a decade or two.
Before the Fukushima Daiichi disaster last year, Japan derived a third of its electricity from nuclear power. Now, with all but one reactor offline, the country's consumption of crude and heavy fuel oil for power generation has roughly tripled. Even with that backup fossil-fired power, though, the government worries that the electrical system will fail during peak summer demand if utilities don't switch on reactors. The Financial Times' Gerrit Wiesmann reports a similar situation in Germany, which has committed to closing all of its reactors, even as its power grid teeters and its electricity sector emits more carbon than it must after eight reactors shut down last year.
George Cowan, nuclear scientist on Manhattan Project, dies at 92 Martin Weil, The Washington Post April 21, 2012 George Cowan, 92, a pioneer in nuclear chemistry, patron of the arts, and persuasive, visionary and enterprising figure who brought imagination and analytical abilities to the solution of problems in areas from finance to foreign affairs, died April 20 at his home in Los Alamos, N.M.
Friends said his death followed a fall, the Associated Press reported.
After playing an important role in the development of the atomic bomb, Dr. Cowan spent years as one of the key figures at the nuclear research center at Los Alamos, where the bomb had been built.
He joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1949 and was a scientist and administrator there for 40 years.
In addition, Dr. Cowan was a kind of nuclear detective: More than 60 years ago, he used minute samples of nuclear debris, scattered by the winds, to help demonstrate to skeptical federal officials that the Soviet Union had tested its own atomic bomb.
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