ECA Update: July 9, 2012
Published: Mon, 07/09/12
No apologies from outgoing Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman
Zack Colman, The Hill July 5, 2012 LINK Though his leadership style wasn't always well received and might have been his undoing, outgoing Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko made no apologies Thursday at a media roundtable for the results it produced.
Jaczko, whose term is slated to end in June 2013, said Thursday at a Platts Energy Podium event in Washington, D.C., that he had planned to step down sometime before then anyway. An inspector general report that portrayed him as abusive to staff members and often at odds with the NRC's four other commissioners likely helped to expedite that timetable.
When asked whether he would have changed his relationships with his colleagues, Jaczko replied matter-of-factly that "yeah, I would make them better."
"I've never been the shy person. I've said on multiple occasions that I'm very passionate about what I do. ... I don't regret pushing for the issues that I've pushed for, and I believe in the end the commission made better decisions because of the leadership that I demonstrated during Fukushima, in the aftermath and the changes that we were looking to make."
Jaczko announced in May that he would resign his post, but would remain at its helm until his successor is put into place. The Senate last week confirmed George Mason University professor Allison Macfarlane to succeed Jaczko, clearing the way for him to leave.
The departing chairman candidly discussed on Thursday several topics regarding his tenure at the NRC and the future of that organization during the hour-long session.
Nuclear safety tinged most of his concerns, especially as the NRC attempts to implement lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi tragedy last March in Japan. Jaczko noted that many of those changes "were not always popular."
Power plant operators need to focus more on prevention rather than mitigation, Jaczko said, and more technical questions must be asked in the design process, stronger cyber defenses must be developed and security culture must evolve for that to happen.
Shifting to an emphasis on risk assessment will put the NRC in a better position to address safety issues, Jaczko said. That progress is still an area of concern -- a long-term plan from the commission will help to identify skill gaps, he said, adding that risk assessment is "clearly" an area that must improve.
"We've done all the easy things, which is we've identified the issues," the outgoing chairman said. "Now we have to actually go about addressing them. And I think that's going to be hard. It's going to take sustained focus and commitment. So I hope that the commission will continue to keep the pressure on."
If decision makers evaluate safety and design upgrades based on cost-benefit analyses, Jaczko warned, they will be less inclined to open their checkbooks. Although events like those at Fukushima are unlikely, they carry high consequences -- but too often an emphasis on the bottom line can discourage investments that would prevent those catastrophic events, he said.
"I don't see this being a significant or a prohibitive cost to operation," Jaczko said. "Sometimes I think we need to err on the side of looking at the consequences."
The NRC significantly reformed its safety posture during Jaczko's tenure, he said. Changes to reactor design regulations that started as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are continuing to be strengthened, and the fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi event will add another layer to those precautions, he said.
The commission also is moving forward with a plan on fire protection and will consolidate more of its staff in centralized locations to improve planning and communication, Jaczko said.
One issue that will outlast Jaczko's legacy is the Yucca Mountain nuclear disposal site. He said the NRC has "wrapped up our work on Yucca Mountain," but lawmakers have fought Jaczko and the NRC on that position.
The commission does not have "nearly enough money" to conduct "any meaningful proceeding" at the nuclear waste storage site, Jaczko said. Lawmakers from both parties have charged that the NRC chairman and the commission have exercised too much power to unilaterally shut down Yucca Mountain, adding that move would violate U.S. law.
The NRC contends it lacked the proper funding to continue its Yucca Mountain operations. House lawmakers responded last month by passing an Energy and Water appropriations bill amendment to give it an additional $10 million.
The U.S. District Court of Appeals decision last month to throw out the NRC's waste confidence standard might also affect the commission's licensing and renewal process, though not significantly, Jaczko said. Right now, it appears some renewals for storing spent fuel might face delays while skirting any facility operations changes, he said.
That court decision essentially rejected the more than three-decade logic that the NRC could oversee spent fuel storage, commenting that the NRC "has no long-term plan other than hoping for a geologic repository." It calls upon the NRC to determine the environmental and economic costs of not finding a repository for that spent fuel before licensing and re-licensing reactors.
"How I read the court is that we need to go back and re-analyze the ... environmental impact statement and redo that process," Jaczko said. "We know how to do that. We were in fact already on the way to do that for a much longer timeframe, we look to the next update of the waste confidence rule."
Lawmakers and policy planners must revive the search for safe ways to store used fuel rods from nuclear power reactors. The long-term solution favored by most experts, which we endorse, is to bury the material in geologically stable formations capable of preventing leakage far into the future.
But no politically acceptable site has yet been found, and leaving the used fuel rods at each reactor -- more than 62,000 metric tons had accumulated across the country by the end of 2009 -- seems increasingly problematic. At least nine states have banned the construction of new reactors until a permanent storage site is found or progress toward finding one is made.
The only potential permanent storage site examined so far -- at Yucca Mountain in Nevada -- has been blocked for more than two decades by technical problems, legal challenges and political opposition from the state.
President Obama pledged in the 2008 campaign to shut down the project, and his Energy Department withdrew its application for a license before the safety of the project could be evaluated. Mitt Romney said in a primary debate in Nevada that the state's people should have the final say. Even without a permanent disposal facility, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a "waste confidence decision" in 2010 that asserted that used fuel rods could be stored at power plants for 60 years after they close down. It also asserted that a permanent repository would be ready to handle such wastes "when necessary."
That decision was challenged in federal court, and last month a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the commission had failed to prepare an adequate analysis of the future risks, such as leaks and fires, if the used fuel rods end up being stored at nuclear plants indefinitely. That decision could slow the commission's ability to extend the licenses of existing plants or grant new licenses.
Ensuring that the commission will produce a more credible analysis should be a top priority for Allison Macfarlane, who was recently confirmed by the Senate and will lead the commission. She is a geologist, an expert on nuclear waste and served on a blue-ribbon commission for President Obama to look at ways to handle waste.
That group recommended the creation of one or more surface storage sites to accept used fuel rods from 10 reactors that have ceased operating. It would be easier to monitor and inspect the rods and cheaper to guard them in a central location. The group also urged that a permanent burial site be found through a "consent-based" approach in which states and communities might be offered financial incentives to accept the waste.
Those recommendations are sensible, and President Obama and Congress should work with the states to move that ahead. If nuclear power is to have a future in this country, politicians, scientists and industry leaders need to commit to finding a solution instead of just hoping that everything will somehow work out.
Sen. Maria Cantwell visits Richland to talk Hanford B Reactor park bill Michelle Dupler, Tri-City Herald July 7, 2012 LINK RICHLAND, Wash. -- Hanford's B Reactor and two other Manhattan Project sites could take a step closer to becoming part of a national park next week in Congress.
A bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings of Pasco, is set for consideration in the House Natural Resources Committee -- of which Hastings is the chairman -- Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C.
"I expect the committee will vote to favorably advance the bill to the full House for consideration," Hastings said in a statement. "A great many volunteers have been working for years to bring this idea into reality, and I'm pleased that progress is being made in the lawmaking process to preserve this amazing and important piece of our nation's history.
"A companion bill co-sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray had a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks in late June.
On Friday, Cantwell visited Richland to talk to Tri-City leaders about the bill and what a national park could mean to the community.
"Elevating B Reactor to a national historic park would expand visitor access and bring more tourism dollars to the local economy," Cantwell said at B Reactor tour headquarters.
"National parks are a proven job creator -- and giving Hanford this designation will help honor the history and sacrifice of those who labored here. Hanford's B Reactor tells an important chapter in our nation's history and deserves preservation as part of a new national historic park.
"The proposed park would tell the story of the start of the Atomic Age during World War II, including the role played by Hanford's B Reactor, which produced plutonium for the world's first nuclear bomb and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, which led to the end of the war.
Manhattan Project facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Los Alamos, N.M., also are proposed for inclusion.
At Hanford, the park could include not only B Reactor, but also eventually T Plant, which processed irradiated fuel to remove plutonium, and buildings left by early settlers forced to give up their homes, businesses and farms to make way for the top-secret nuclear project.
Buildings that Hanford and White Bluffs residents left that still stand include Hanford High School, White Bluffs Bank, the Bruggemann stone warehouse and the Hanford Irrigation District pump house.
Cantwell said getting the national historic park designation would elevate Hanford to the same status as other historically important landmarks.
"B Reactor deserves to be in the same space, the same historic context as Independence Hall, Valley Forge and Lincoln's birthplace," Cantwell said.
Kris Watkins, president of the Tri-Cities Visitor & Convention Bureau, said having B Reactor become a national park would be a boost for tourism in the region.
"This is huge, I believe, for the nation and for each one of the Manhattan Project communities," Watkins said. "Needless to say, our local community will gain from a national parks presence.
"Aaron Burks, owner of Monterosso's Italian Restaurant and Atomic Ale Brew Pub in Richland, said a national park would give visitors a way to experience the region's unique history.
"Visitors enjoy something unique," Burks said. "I have met countless visitors who come here for that reason. I have had many business visitors for (Hanford) cleanup. I'm confident many scientists around the world are wearing Atomic Ale T-shirts."
Richland City Councilman Bob Thompson said a national park would honor the story of the thousands of people who built a city in what was then Washington's remote desert and helped the nation win World War II.
"It's an absolutely amazing engineering feat that occurred," Thompson said.
Cantwell told the Herald it doesn't matter whether it's her bill or Hastings' bill that gets the votes first.
"Whichever one gets done first, we're happy," she said.
[Washington State] Lawmakers prod energy secretary on reactor project Michelle Dupler, Tri-City Herald July 8, 2012 LINK A bipartisan group of 30 state lawmakers has joined with much of Washington's congressional delegation in urging Energy Secretary Steven Chu to locate a small modular nuclear reactor project in the Tri-Cities.
The group of 21 Republican and nine Democratic members of the state House of Representatives, including 8th District Reps.
Larry Haler, R-Richland, and Brad Klippert, R-Kennewick, sent a letter to Chu last week expressing strong support for the reactor proposals currently under consideration by the Department of Energy.
Similar letters were sent by nine of Washington's congressional leaders in June, and by Gov. Chris Gregoire in May.
"We believe nuclear energy provides clean, reliable power," the letter said. "Tri-Cities offers not only a very skilled nuclear work force and a supportive community, but the Hanford site offers land, infrastructure and other essential resources that would provide significant cost benefits to developing and constructing this more modern, more reliable and safer reactor technology here in Washington state.
"The Department of Energy is considering proposals to award $450 million to support engineering, design certification and licensing for one or two small nuclear reactor designs over five years.
While the proposals are expected to come from firms developing the reactors, the Tri-City Development Council presented a proposal to DOE in Washington, D.C., in June on why the Tri-Cities should be considered for the initial use of one of the new reactors.
A small modular reactor could be used to supply the Hanford vitrification plant with the 70 megawatts of electrical power it will need when it starts treating radioactive waste left from the past production of weapons plutonium, according to TRIDEC. DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory also could require almost 30 megawatts of electricity by the end of the decade.
A small modular reactor in the Tri-Cities could help offset the loss of jobs as Hanford environmental cleanup progresses, the legislators' letter said.
"Federal policy currently provides that new economic development opportunities should be considered for communities that experience a downturn in federal employment. By this fall, Hanford will have experienced almost a 20 percent reduction in the cleanup work force of 2010," the letter said.
If manufacturing the small modular reactors is DOE's ultimate goal, it should remember that Washington leads the nation in exports to the Pacific Rim, the letter said.
"Considering the location of Washington state on the Pacific Rim and the potential of (small modular reactors) as an exportable product once they are fully developed, locating the development and commercialization of (small modular reactors) in the Tri-Cities area would eventually benefit not only the people of this state and country but of nations around the world," the letter said.
Small modular reactors that could produce 45 to 200 megawatts are being developed by several companies. They would be useable for small electric grids and locations that cannot support large reactors, offering utilities the flexibility to add more modules to scale up production if demand increases.
Among the legislators who signed the letter were Haler, Klippert and fellow Mid-Columbia Reps. Terry Nealey, R-Dayton, and Susan Fagan, R-Pullman, as well as House Minority Leader Richard DeBolt, R-Chehalis, and John McCoy, D-Tulalip, chairman of the House Technology, Energy & Communications Committee.
A couple of recent events at Hanford have raised our anxiety level.
First, we learned that measurements appear to show that the level of radioactive wastes in 52 of Hanford's underground tanks is rising.
The reason is a mystery, but it's possible that precipitation is getting into some of the waste tanks, raising concerns about the integrity of the steel shells.
Less alarming scenarios are possible. The surface of the tank wastes can be rough, with peaks and valleys inside the tanks. If measurements were taken in different spots, the discrepancies may reveal nothing more than the uneven nature of the wastes.
Hanford stores 56 million gallons of high-level radioactive and hazardous chemical waste left from the production of weapons plutonium. The tank farms have 28 newer double-shell tanks and 141 older single-shell tanks, some of which have leaked in the past.
An assessment of routine measurements of the single-shell tanks concluded that levels may be rising in 52 of the tanks, with changes ranging from a couple thousands of an inch a year up to an average of about three-quarters of an inch a year.
More testing needs to be done to determine why the measurements have changed over time, but even a reassuring explanation wouldn't justify complacency.
The cause behind the phenomenon might be a mystery, but the eventual fate of Hanford's tanks is not. Every one will fail, some of them catastrophically. The combined effects of gravity and corrosion make that a certainty.
It's why the other big news out of Hanford in recent weeks makes us uneasy.
The Department of Energy has decided to delay calculating a new cost and schedule for Hanford's vitrification plant until more technical issues are addressed.
Any delay in the start of operations means it will be that much longer before tank wastes begin to be turned into glass logs for permanent disposal.
It's essential to resolve questions about plant design and construction that could affect the safety and reliability of operations at the plant.
But it's impossible to remove all risk from the enterprise. The desire for perfection must be balanced against the certainty that failure to treat the tank wastes would lead to an environmental disaster for the entire Northwest.
DOE is preparing for large-scale tests to make sure waste in the plant's tanks will remain adequately mixed and that the plant can withstand the effects of erosion and corrosion.
t's understandable that DOE wants to await results of these critical tests before producing a new cost and schedule. The results could significantly alter both estimates.
But we worry that Congress could start looking for reasons not to continue footing the bill for construction.
Resolving the remaining technical issues and producing some reliable estimates for cost and schedule are imperative.
It's just as urgent to study the way technical issues have been addressed at the vit plant and adopt any lessons learned.
Of particular importance is whether concerns raised by employees could have been handled more effectively. Whether delays in addressing corrosion concerns, for example, further complicated efforts to revise the vit plant's cost and schedule is an important question.
Efforts are under way to improve the safety culture at the plant and ensure legitimate issues are resolved. Indications are that the effort is meeting with some success.
That's encouraging but it's a process that won't be complete as long as construction is under way.
The mystery at the tank farms is a stark reminder of why success is the only option.
A special investigative commission in Japan has issued a report that praises, explicitly or implicitly, several elements of nuclear safety regulation in the United States.
But a few hours after the report was released on Thursday, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who is about to step down, declared that the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns revealed a major gap in the American safety program. To whit: what happened at Fukushima technically did not violate American safety standards because the public suffered no major radiation exposure.
Yet the effect was clearly unacceptable because people will be uprooted from their homes for years or decades, the chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, noted.
That issue is potentially very important because some safety improvements are made on a cost-benefit basis. If the cost of lost real estate and wrenching displacements of people were factored in, for instance, additional safety improvements could be justified.
The Japanese report, described here by my colleague Hiroko Tabuchi, seldom explicitly cites the American example, but it endorses the United States approach to nuclear power in three areas.
The first is decoupling the missions of promoting nuclear technology and regulating it. In the United States, the Atomic Energy Commission was broken up in 1974, eventually becoming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy.
The commission also cited steps taken in the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that were not adopted in Japan. Some of those could be described as a Swiss Army knife approach to safety, requiring plants to stock portable equipment including generators, batteries, compressed air tanks, ladders, hoses and other multifunctional equipment to deal with events that cannot be fully foreseen, like damage from an airplane crash.
Japanese regulators resisted that approach, but had they stocked the Fukushima Daiichi plant with such equipment, "the accident may have been preventable,'' the report said. (Paradoxically, the American industry has been arguing since Japan's earthquake and tsunami that no big changes are needed here.)
And the report said that Japanese regulators and industry did not foster challenging, questioning approaches by insiders who could raise "what if" questions and prompt a rethinking of safety issues. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently instituted a "safety culture policy" that it says is meant partly to encourage such thinking.
The report called for extensive changes in Japan, but it's probably only a beginning. And while the commission found multiple problems with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner and operator of Fukushima Daiichi, it did not closely examine the operators of other Japanese reactors.
The summary, which was the only part released in English, did not give any indication of whether the cultural problems at Tepco would be present to any greater or lesser degree at other companies, although it seems likely that others operating similar equipment in the same system would have similar flaws.
But the outgoing chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, had a different message. He said that Fukushima showed that existing American regulations allowed the government and industry to "fool ourselves" into thinking that goals are adequately met.
And he asserted that the industry was trying to avoid some of the longer-term improvements ordered by the commission after the Japanese accident.
A year ago, a special commission task force on the Fukushima accident suggested improvements, and the commission divided those into three parts, Dr. Jaczko said. He said that the industry would like to scuttle the ones at the bottom of the list.
Speaking to reporters at a roundtable hosted by Platts, an energy news service, Dr. Jaczko also made a variety of predictions about the future of the industry.
When he was named to the commission a decade ago, he said, his biggest worry was that a problem existed that American engineers had not recognized - a lament echoed in the Japanese report about the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns. But now, he declared, the biggest threat is a cyberattack.
On another front, he said that American companies would probably not break ground on new reactors until they see how four new units now under construction in Georgia and South Carolina fare.
Dr. Jaczko also said that for now, a recent court decision that rejected the commission's policy on disposal of nuclear waste might not affect the operation of reactors but that it gives the commission more work to do.
A federal court ruled that the commission's "waste confidence doctrine," which essentially says that it is appropriate to extend reactor licenses or issue licenses for new ones because the lack of a repository for nuclear waste will eventually be solved, was not adequately researched.
Dr. Jaczko said the decision could delay decisions to extend the 40-year licenses of plants now approaching expiration. But commission rules allow plants to continue operating under their old licenses while the applications are reviewed by the agency, he pointed out.
Dr. Jaczko will serve until his successor, Allison M. Macfarlane, whose nomination was confirmed last month by the Senate, is sworn in. That could happen as early as Monday.
The National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Office of Secure Transportation (OST) is responsible for safely and securely transporting nuclear weapons, weapon components and special nuclear material for customers such as the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The demand for OST services is expected to increase significantly over the next 7 years as a result of current Presidential initiatives and international nonproliferation efforts. OST forecasts show an increase in mission demand through 2019. Due to the importance of OST's mission to safely and securely transport nuclear weapons, we performed this audit to evaluate the challenges OST faces in meeting future mission requirements.
We found that, while OST has successfully met customer shipping requests in the past and expects to have capacity to meet future requirements, it faces several significant challenges. These challenges include maintaining the reliability of existing equipment; ensuring that future Federal agent overtime levels are consistent with safe operations; and, validating essential resource planning data. Accordingly, management attention is needed to address these challenges to reduce the risk that OST will be unable to meet its future mission requirements. NNSA management concurred with the report's recommendations, proposed corrective actions and stated that these items will be used to continue improving NNSA's implementation of securing and safely transporting nuclear weapons. |
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