ECA Update: August 23, 2012
Published: Thu, 08/23/12
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Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to hold "Nuclear Waste Bill" hearing on September 12, 2012
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, 09:30 AM
The purpose of the hearing is to receive testimony on S. 3469, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2012.
The hearing will be webcast live on the Committee's website, and an archived video will be available shortly after the hearing is complete. Witnesses' testimony will be available on the website at the start of the hearing.
Congress Faces Stark Choices as Economy Approaches Year-End Fiscal Cliff, CBO Says
Nancy Cook, National Journal
August 22, 2012
The drumbeat about the magnitude of year-end tax and spending decisions continued on Wednesday, as the Congressional Budget Office released its updated economic and budget outlook for the next 10 years and its final forecast before the election.
Much of the country's economic future now hangs on the choices Congress makes in the six weeks following the election, when the Bush-era tax cuts and the payroll-tax holiday are set to expire; the across-the-board spending cuts to defense and nondefense programs will take affect; and the length of time under which people can collect emergency unemployment benefits will decrease.
This would shrink the deficit to an estimated $641 billion in fiscal year 2013, from its current estimate for FY12 of $1.1 trillion. That's roughly a $500 billion reduction in the deficit. The country has not seen such a steep drop in the deficit as a share of gross domestic product since 1969.
But, this same fiscal contraction would also lead to a significant recession, according to the CBO, with unemployment rising to as high as 9.1 percent by the end of 2013 and remaining above 8 percent through 2014. The CBO now projects that the underlying strength of the economy is slightly weaker than it previously estimated, and with such modest economic growth, it would take little to push the U.S. back into an economic downturn.
The alternative, of course, is for lawmakers to extend these tax and spending policies for some period of time, adding to the deficit but maintaining the slow, steady pace of the economic recovery. Under this scenario, the deficit would clock in at more than $1 trillion and revenues would be 16.3 percent of GDP for 2013, but unemployment would hover around 8 percent by the fourth quarter of 2013.
The only problem with this scenario is a level of debt so unsustainable that it would ultimately lead to a "fiscal crisis," said Douglas Elmendorf, director of the CBO. Under this scenario, the debt held by the public would climb to 90 percent of GDP by 2022. The country has not seen that scope of debt since the years just after World War II--and that's a level of debt that the CBO calls "unsustainable."
Elmendorf added that such rising levels of debt could hurt people's ability to save money; it would require the federal government to make larger and larger interest payments; and it would give the federal government less flexibility to respond to a future crisis, be it economic or security-related. Not only that, but it would require either huge tax increases or deep spending cuts, or some mixture of the two, Elmendorf added.
If lawmakers go over the so-called fiscal cliff at year's end, the CBO estimates that debt held by the public would decrease to 58 percent of GDP by 2022. Currently, the debt held by the public is 73 percent of GDP.
This updated forecast underscores the significance of the politics and policy of the lame-duck session--along with the nuanced, tough choices lawmakers will face. There's nothing new about the decisions confronting lawmakers, Elmendorf stressed, nor does Congress have to go down either stark path. "It's not an either-or choice for Congress," Elmendorf said. "There's an entire spectrum they have."
The unemployment numbers offer just one snapshot of the divergent paths that the economy could take based on lawmakers' actions. If they opt to go over the cliff, the unemployment rate will rise to as high as 9.1 percent by the end of 2013. If Congress puts off the tax and spending policy decisions, unemployment is expected to hit 8 percent by the fourth quarter of 2013--that's a difference of about 2 million American jobs, budget analysts say.
That's a stat that makes tax and budget issues suddenly seem quite relevant and real.
Senate rivals tussle over cuts to Los Alamos in Ryan budget
Zack Colman, The Hill
August 21, 2012
A Democrat running for an open U.S. Senate seat in New Mexico is trying to tie his Republican opponent to the budget plan of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and the cuts it would make to national laboratories.
Rep. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) says electing former Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) would be akin to green-lighting Ryan's plan, which his campaign said would slash funding for New Mexico's Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory by 10 and 17 percent, respectively.
The Heinrich campaign claimed Wilson has given her "implicit" support to the plan of Ryan, who has become a national political figure as Mitt Romney's running mate.
"Heather Wilson has made it clear that she would be a rubber stamp for the Romney-Ryan budget that ends Medicare as we know it and imposes deep cuts to New Mexico's national laboratories," Whitney Potter, a spokeswoman for the Heinrich campaign, said in a statement Tuesday.
That statement referenced Romney's scheduled visit to New Mexico on Thursday. Romney said he plans to lay out a "comprehensive energy plan" during a fundraiser there.
But Wilson told The Hill on Tuesday that she has "been very clear that I have concerns about the budget Congressman Ryan proposed 18 months ago," and voted against a version of it while serving in Congress in 2007.
"If I oppose something, that's now recorded as 'implicit'?" Wilson said.
"Had I been in the Senate and on the Budget Committee and the Ryan budget came over, I would have worked on getting an alternative," Wilson added, elaborating that she has worries about what the Ryan plan would do to Medicare.
The New Mexico Senate race has attracted plenty of attention from environmental and energy groups, especially since it would fill the seat left vacant by retiring Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
As of late July, a coalition of green groups had spent $1.5 million in ads attacking Wilson for her energy and environmental positions. That matched spending from GOP-affiliated groups for ads against Heinrich.
Wilson said that the Heinrich campaign's attempt to link her to the Ryan budget is meant to hide the Democrat's lackluster history of supporting the state's national labs.
She said the Democratic congressman fails to understand the value the laboratories provide, such as nuclear deterrence. The backing he has received from environmental groups further undermines his ability to be a staunch advocate for the labs, she said.
"Congressman Heinrich knows he is very vulnerable when it comes to support for our labs and our military bases," Wilson said. "So he'll say anything. Really, it's desperation."
Anti-nuclear activists question plan for shipping plutonium from warheads to New Mexico
Associated Press
August 22, 2012
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Nuclear watchdogs are fighting a proposal to ship tons of plutonium to New Mexico, including the cores of nuclear warheads that would be dismantled at an aging and structurally questionable lab atop an earthquake fault zone.
Opponents voiced their opposition at a series of public hearings that opened this week on the best way to dispose of the radioactive material as the federal government works to reduce the nation's nuclear arsenal.
The Department of Energy is studying alternatives for disposing of plutonium in light of federal budget cuts that have derailed plans for new multi-billion-dollar facilities at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The preferred plan under consideration calls for the shipment of 7.1 metric tons of so-called pits -- or cores -- of an undisclosed number of nuclear warheads now stored at the Pantex plant in West Texas to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site for disarmament and processing into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.
The plan also calls for another 6 tons of surplus plutonium to be buried at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M. That proposal has raised concerns about whether that waste would take up space needed for disposing of thousands of barrels of low-level radioactive waste that have been sitting for years above ground at a Los Alamos dump.
Potential threats from that waste drew attention when a massive wildfire lapped at lab property in 2011.
During the initial hearing Tuesday night in Los Alamos, activists questioned the safety of bringing more plutonium to the 1970s-era Los Alamos lab known as PF-4. A federal oversight board has said the facility remains structurally unable to safely withstand a major earthquake. The lab was built over fault lines that were later found to have the potential for more severe earthquakes than previously thought.
Additionally, the Defense Nuclear Safety Facilities Board recently said officials had significantly underestimated how much radiation would be released if there were a major earthquake and fire at Los Alamos.
Activist Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, said he couldn't understand why using the lab was a preferred option "when these very basic problems have not been resolved."
"We are talking about a very large new mission, a type of mission for which this building was not designed," he said during the hearing.
Mello said the government should simply look at ways to safely bury the plutonium.
David Clark, a chemist and plutonium expert at the lab, countered that the facility is ideally suited for the project.
"They are disassembling pits today," he said. "They are doing it right now. It is already part of the mission. ... They have the knowledge."
Clark said he worked at the lab for 10 years and has no concerns about safety. And like other top lab officials have said, the PF-4 building is where he would want to be in an earthquake, Clark said.
He said he was not allowed to say how many pits would be involved in the plan, or how much plutonium is currently handled at the lab. He believes that taking the surplus plutonium to PF-4 would have little impact on lab operations.
"This is not going to make a dent," he said.
Clark said the mission is to ensure the plutonium can never again be used in a nuclear weapon, so creating the so-called MOX fuel is the best option.
"MOX is a proven fuel that is used around the world, in a variety of reactors," he said. "Storing plutonium in glass or ceramic in canisters or underground will not reduce the global inventories. As a chemist, such waste forms may slow me down, but I can still recover the plutonium. The only one of these options that will destroy plutonium ... or make it unsuitable for weapons ... is to burn it in a nuclear reactor. "
Another hearing is scheduled Thursday in Santa Fe, and a third Tuesday in Carlsbad.
Romney to Unveil Energy-Jobs Plan in N.M.
Coral Davenport, National Journal
August 23, 2012
In 2008, Barack Obama famously made "green jobs" a campaign buzzword, pitching his clean energy plan as an economic engine that would create 5 million new jobs.
Now Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is doing the same thing--but with oil and gas jobs, instead of wind and solar jobs.
Both plans have merit as energy policy--but not as major solutions to the nation's 8.3 percent unemployment rate, economists say.
Romney on Thursday plans to roll out new details of his energy plan at a speech in Hobbs, N.M., in a 2012 battleground state home to hundreds of acres of oilfields drilled on federal land.
He'll make the case that aggressive new drilling will create up to 3 million jobs by 2020, while driving a robust economic recovery. He'll speak at Watson Truck & Supply, a trucking and oil-services company that manufactures drilling equipment, services oil rigs, and hauls heavy equipment.
The venue underscores one of the Romney campaign's chief economic arguments: that new drilling will create thousands of jobs on oil and gas rigs and millions of indirect jobs in industries such as construction and manufacturing--enough to provide a major jump-start to the entire U.S. economy and help restore the middle class.
But as with Obama's promise of green jobs, the reality is a lot more complicated.
Romney's energy plan boils down to six key proposals:
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Give states control over energy drilling on federal lands;
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Open new offshore areas to drilling, starting with the Virginia coast;
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Approve the Keystone XL pipeline to import tar-sands oil from Canada;
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Perform an assessment of all the nation's oil and gas resources;
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Streamline permitting for new drilling;
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Leave development of new energy technologies largely to the private sector.
In many ways, the plan simply revisits the longstanding Republican push to "drill, baby, drill"--and much of it reads like an oil-industry wish list. But in an election that's primarily about restoring the nation's stagnant economy and boosting jobs numbers, Romney--like Obama four years ago--is pitching his energy plan as a job-generating measure for economic recovery.
"If we develop these resources to the fullest, we will not only guarantee ourselves an affordable and reliable supply of energy, but also enjoy benefits throughout the economy," Romney's new energy proposal states. "Our trade deficit will shrink, our dollar will strengthen, and tens of billions of dollars will flow to the treasury. Perhaps most importantly we will experience a manufacturing resurgence that delivers more jobs and more take-home pay for middle-class families across the country."
To make the case for the plan, the Romney campaign relies on several recent reports and studies linking drilling and job development. Among the most frequently cited: a March Citigroup report concluding that aggressive new drilling could lead to the creation of 3.6 million new jobs and a 1.1 percent drop in unemployment by 2020. But economists say a closer look at the report raises a number of questions about Romney's claim that his drilling plan will resurrect the economy.
First, they note that the boom in drilling has come about not through any government action, but rather through development of new, so-called "fracking" technology that has unlocked new resources of natural gas, mostly on private land, much of it in politically important battleground states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
That drilling, which has led to a glut of cheap new natural gas, is likely to continue no matter which candidate becomes president. Obama, in his State of the Union speech in January, cited a similar report noting that the natural gas boom will create up to 600,000 new drilling jobs.
"Because that drilling is on private land, I don't see much changing between Romney or a second Obama term on this," said Charlie Ebinger, an energy expert at the Brookings Institution.
Even the rosiest energy-development scenarios probably aren't enough to dent the nation's unemployment rate in the next few years, because energy jobs--whether in fossil fuels or renewable sources such as wind and solar--are just a tiny sector of the economy. Out of the nation's 132 million jobs, the oil, gas, and coal industries employed about 790,000 people in July, or less than 1 percent of the nation's total employment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Adding 550,000 new drilling jobs over the next eight years would be good news, but not enough to move the needle on unemployment. So what about those other 2.5 million "indirect" energy jobs, which would also take nearly a decade to appear?
"There's a lot of hoopla going on there," said Ebinger. "Those numbers are making a lot of assumptions, based on a lot of multipliers."
Economists say that to keep the current unemployment rate of 8.6 percent from rising, the U.S. economy must create 150,000 to 200,000 jobs a month, and energy jobs are only one piece of the pie.
"If you want to create jobs, there are a number of more effective things you can do--building bridges, investing in education," said Hillard Huntington, executive director of the Energy Modeling Forum at Stanford University. "There are better strategies to create jobs than promoting renewable energy or forcing states to give up environmental regulations and expand oil and gas.
"Energy should not be a jobs issue," Huntington added. "The energy sector is an important sector, but it's a small sector and it's hard to imagine that it's going to transform the U.S. economy by itself."
Most of last jobs at Yucca Mountain project expire next month
Keith Rogers, Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 21, 2012
Sources close to the beleaguered Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project said Tuesday that jobs will expire in September for the last two dozen workers who transferred to another Department of Energy program amid hundreds of layoffs in 2010.
That would leave only 20 former Yucca Mountain Project workers - 15 at the Energy Department's North Las Vegas facility and five in the Washington, D.C., area - working on nuclear waste site options other than the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, said one source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"There was a small group who got positions for two years," the source said, referring to former Yucca Mountain Project workers who took jobs working on grant awards for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Barack Obama signed in 2009.
Calls to the group's supervisor at DOE's North Las Vegas offices weren't returned Tuesday.
The once-bustling multibillion-dollar effort to study and build a repository at Yucca Mountain for the nation's highly radioactive defense wastes and used fuel from commercial power reactors came to a halt in 2010 when the project's budget was zeroed out at the urging of Nevada's delegation and Energy Secretary Steven Chu suspended the effort to license the repository.
About 625 federal and contract workers in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., lost their jobs, retired or accepted other government positions.
Project officials had seen federal and contractor employee numbers climb to 2,750 in 2005, the peak year for the nuclear waste program. Budget cutbacks that paralleled the nation's economic downturn reduced the numbers to 1,400 in March 2009. One month later, the number of employees dipped to 800 and continued to fall to 625 in 2010 before the last layoffs occurred.
News of jobs expiring next month for two dozen former Yucca Mountain Project workers who transferred in 2010 with two-year extensions was mentioned in private conversations with former project workers during Tuesday's meeting at the Sawyer Building of the state Legislative Committee on High-Level Radioactive Waste.
During the meeting, former Gov. and Sen. Richard Bryan, who is chairman of Nevada's Commission on Nuclear Projects and a longtime foe of the Yucca Mountain Project, stopped short of declaring victory in the state's fight to keep DOE from entombing 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste in the volcanic-rock ridge.
"After 30 years I think we're on the cusp of victory," Bryan told the committee, chaired by state Sen. David Parks, D-Las Vegas.
"The concern that we have is the health and safety of Nevada," Bryan said.
He noted flaws with the Department of Energy selecting the Yucca Mountain site, where state scientists have warned of potential dangers from earthquake faults, volcanic activity and surface water infiltrating a maze of storage tunnels through porous rock. Should protective titanium drip shields fail and metal waste containers corrode, releasing deadly radioactive materials, the state's groundwater would be jeopardized.
"No other place in the world is there proposed to have a high-level nuclear waste site that is above the water table, in which the temperatures are intense, and we're relying upon the predictability of complex engineering to protect the site and contain that nuclear waste," Bryan said.
Robert Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said his office is braced for a change in the political climate that would put DOE or perhaps another agency on track to revisit Yucca Mountain for disposing nuclear waste.
"Nevada continues to prepare for restart of the licensing process," he said, referring to about 200 legal challenges the state has with the site's safety and repository design.
Those concerns are in addition to problems he sees with transporting the spent fuel assemblies to Yucca Mountain by truck and rail, not the least of which is the potential for sabotage and terrorism.
Roughly 220,000 residents in the Las Vegas Valley live within a half mile on each side of rail and truck routes, Halstead noted.
Nine out of 10 speakers during the public comment periods spoke against putting nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain or establishing reprocessing facilities near the site.
Mike Baughman, a consultant to Lincoln County, said the state shouldn't lose sight of the potential for receiving federal funds to oversee the project, should it revive.
"If you're watching Congress, if you're watching the courts, the Yucca Mountain Project is not dead," he said. "We just can't pretend it's not there."
Aiken County, SRNS establish energy materials research lab
The Times and Democrat
August 22, 2012
AIKEN- Aiken County and Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, (SRNS) have reached agreement on a corporately funded expansion plan that would add an additional 6,435 square feet of finished laboratory and support space to the county-owned Center for Hydrogen Research (CHR) facility located in Aiken County's Savannah River Research Campus adjacent to the Savannah River Site.
The CHR building will be re-designated as the Applied Research Center (ARC) in the future to more accurately reflect the diversity of research and development initiatives in the 60,000 square foot facility.
The Center for Hydrogen Research, which opened in 2006, currently houses the Savannah River National Laboratory's (SRNL) Hydrogen Technology Research Laboratory, a 24,400 square-foot lab complex primarily used for unclassified research into new applications for hydrogen technology, USC-Aiken research and small technology companies.
The expansion will be privately funded, via a $3,000,000 expenditure authorized by the Board of Directors of SRNS. Upon completion of construction, SRNL will lease the space. The Department of Energy has authorized an initial ten-year lease.
The expansion will add six new laboratories with flexible configurations to support growing SRNL research on advanced materials to support areas such as nuclear energy, energy storage materials and systems, solar energy materials, materials for wind and marine energy systems and carbon dioxide capture
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"This development further strengthens the good working relationship between SRNS, the National Laboratory and Aiken County," said Dwayne Wilson, President and CEO of SRNS. "All along, the intent of our company and our parent company organizations has been to strategically invest corporate dollars in ways that would enhance the National Laboratory's competitive position. This is a concrete example of that commitment."
Dr. Terry Michalske, Executive Vice President of SRNS and Director of SRNL, said the investment would yield multiple benefits to SRNL.
"This will add to what is already a first-rate laboratory complex at the county's facility," said Michalske. "In addition to providing us with new, contemporary research labs, the addition of more off-site laboratory space makes it that much easier for us to partner with universities and private companies. As we continue to grow our business in the clean energy arena, it's clear that there are tremendous opportunities to build research partnerships that will be good for the region. I believe that public / private partnerships are critical to our future, in terms of both facilities and of business development."
Ronnie Young, Chairman of Aiken County Council, said, "This is another step in furthering Aiken County's goal of creating jobs for the future through advancement of technology from the SRNL. We are very appreciative of the commitment and partnership of SRNS and SRNL as we grow jobs for the future. I appreciate the vision and hard work of the Economic Development Partnership in this initiative and the work of Ernie Chaput in overseeing this project. As partners with SRNS, I see great potential for the Energy Materials Research Laboratory as together with the Hydrogen Research Technology Laboratory we establish Aiken County as a technology leader."
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, is a Fluor partnership comprised of Fluor, Newport News Nuclear and Honeywell, responsible for the management and operation of DOE's Savannah River Site, including the Savannah River National Laboratory.
The Applied Research Center is a subsidiary of the Economic Development Partnership concentrating on economic development and job creation based on technology. The Center for Hydrogen Research promotes fuel cell and hydrogen technology through education, training and research and development.
Double-shell tank at Hanford might be leaking
Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald
August 18, 2012
Radioactive material has been found between the inner and outer walls of an underground double-shell tank at Hanford for the first time.
The discovery increases the concern that the inner shell of the tank may have leaked, indicating the deterioration of at least one of the 28 double-shell tanks that are needed to hold millions of gallons of waste for decades to come.
"If we determine there was a leak or a previous spill, it reinforces the urgency of emptying the tanks and completing the mission," said Tom Fletcher, Department of Energy assistant manager of the tank farms. "The tanks are not getting any younger.
Hanford has 149 leak-prone single-shell waste tanks that are being emptied into the newer double-shell tanks. The waste is planned to be held there until the vitrification plant under construction can treat the waste for disposal, with the tanks required to be emptied by 2052.
"This changes everything," said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge. "These tanks were supposed to last another 40 years, but that thinking has been superseded by this new reality."
DOE notified its regulator, the state Department of Ecology, of the issue last week, but it did not become public knowledge until Friday after Hanford Challenge obtained an email sent by DOE to the state.
The Department of Energy has not confirmed what the material is or where it came from, Fletcher said. DOE is investigating to determine whether waste leaked out of the inner shell of Tank AY-102 or the material came from another source, such as cross contamination from a pit with pumps or piping serving the AY Tank Farm where there could have been a spill.
It was discovered during video monitoring of the area between the inner and outer walls that was designed as an overflow space if the inner steel liner were to leak. A video camera was inserted down a tank riser that had not previously been used for visual examinations.
The video showed two side-by-side areas of contamination. One was a dry mound about 24 by 36 by 8 inches.
There was no contamination on the camera when it was removed, but a sample collected Aug. 10 showed the material was radioactive.
"This is fixed contamination on the floor. There is no liquid. There is no vapor," Fletcher said.
It presents no risk now to the public, workers or the environment, he said.
Tank AY-102 has a capacity of about 1 million gallons of waste but currently stores about 707,000 gallons of liquid waste and 151,000 of waste sludge. In total, the 177 underground tanks at Hanford hold 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous chemical waste from the past processing of irradiated fuel to separate out plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program during World War II and the Cold War.Tank AY-102, which went into service in 1971, is just past its designed service life of 40 years.
When the state was notified last week, it assumed there was some water in the space between the two tanks. DOE said there have been small amounts of water in the space in the past from rinsing monitoring equipment.
The news from DOE that the material was radioactive came as a surprise, said Cheryl Whalen, cleanup section manager for the Department of Ecology's Nuclear Waste Program.
"We're concerned," she said. "If anything happens to the DST's (double-shell tanks), it will be a difficult situation because we are very dependent on all the tanks for single-shell tank retrieval.
"If there is a leak in the inner shell of the tank, it is a slow leak, she said.
DOE's first step in its investigation is creating a historical timeline for the tank to determine what events, including in pits, could have affected it, Fletcher said.
Hanford workers have increased monitoring to make sure there is no change in conditions during the investigation. Cameras are being sent down twice a week, and the level in the tank will be checked every shift to make sure there is no indication of liquid leaking out of the inner shell. Samples also will be taken from both of the places that appear to have material between the inner and outer tanks.
Work is then planned to inspect all areas that are accessible between the inner and outer shells and to check to confirm no waste has made its way out of the outer shell.
Longer term, work will be done to determine if other double-shell tanks might also have similar issues and to explore ways to remove the material from between the shells, Fletcher said.
International experts explore rad-waste sites in Utah, Colorado
Judy Fahys, The Salt Lake Tribune
August 19, 2012
Moab - Norwegian Malgorzata Sneve was among the throngs of foreign sightseers touring Utah's redrock country recently.
Only for her and the other foreign travelers in her group, the hot spots on their itinerary were, well, hot -- nuclear facilities including a uranium mill and an assortment of radioactive cleanup sites left over from the Cold War and the uranium boom.
"It was great to come here to see practical applications [and how to] work with the community and to deal with radiation," said Sneve, a regulator who oversees cooperative programs at the Norwegian Radiation Protection Program and is part of a technology exchange group organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The 31 visitors represented 20 countries, all of them interested in finding better ways to manage their own radioactive wastes from mines and mills and other sites contaminated with materials left over from making bombs and electricity.
"The idea is to show people how we do remediation in the United States," said Russel Edge, a waste-safety specialist with the 165-member international organization, which co-sponsored the exchange with the U.S. Department of Energy. "Learning from each other is probably the most important part of the exchange."
The two-week tour and workshop included stops at the Mexican Hat Mill Site (cleaned up), the Monticello Mill Site (also cleaned up), the White Mesa Mill near Blanding and the Moab cleanup of the old Atlas Mill tailings (under way). Seeing those sites were radiation regulators from around the world, including France, Canada, Brazil Niger, Malawi, Kyrgyzstan, the Ukraine, Russia and Uzbekistan.
Edge, who worked on Utah and Colorado uranium cleanups before joining the IAEA in Vienna, said the tours would be especially helpful for nations that are building their waste-management programs. Seeing how it's been done in the United States will help the visitors find strategies and technologies for their own efforts.
On Wednesday, the group toured the cleanup of Charlie Steen's defunct uranium mill, a 16-million-ton heap of uranium-tainted waste that is being scooped away from the edge of the Colorado River, where it threatened to contaminate a drinking water supply relied on by more than 25 million people.
The foreign visitors took snapshots of the decontamination area, where dust and mud are hosed off the heavy equipment leaving the contaminated zone.
They watched heavy-duty cranes lift massive shipping containers onto the trucks that hauled the waste up the side of the mesa, where another big crane would load them onto rail cars that carry the waste 30 miles to a specially built disposal cell at Crescent Junction.
They were to visit the cell itself before heading to Grand Junction for more tours and workshops.
Don Metzler, who oversees the Energy Department's Moab cleanup, said he has taken part in technical exchanges like these since 1991. He's gleaned useful ideas and techniques from visits to Australia, Spain and Germany.
"So much of what we're doing in this project is something I saw done at another project internationally," he said.
Sneve noted that Norway has its own issues with radioactive waste but also offers expertise to neighboring countries struggling with Cold War legacy sites much like those in southern Utah.
"We have been working on similar problems in Russia for 17 years and in Central Asia for five years," she said.
A dozen Japanese sites proposed as nuclear cleanup storage candidates
The Japan Times
August 20, 2012
The government on Sunday named 12 sites it wants to survey as candidates for storing radioactive waste produced by decontamination operations around the Fukushima nuclear plant.
In a meeting with prefectural and municipal officials, the central government said it wants to conduct geological surveys for the project at the 12 new sites. Three towns near the plant are already being eyed for long-term facilities to store tainted soil and other waste generated by the decontamination work.
The 12 locations comprise two in town of Futaba, nine in Okuma and one in Naraha, the officials said.
The prefectural and municipal officials were asked to comply with surveys in those locations, but they declined to give immediate replies and agreed to discuss the matter among themselves.
Environment minister Goshi Hosono said after the meeting that the central government will be flexible about using other locations if they are presented.
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