ECA Update: September 10, 2012
Published: Mon, 09/10/12
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Nuclear Waste Bill Hearing on September 12
ECA
ECA
ECA will provide written testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee regarding its upcoming hearing on S. 3469, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2012 (the "Bill"). ECA will release its testimony on the date of the hearing, September 12, 2012.
Although the Bill is not expected to pass this year, it will be the beginning of the Senate legislation that will likely be introduced in the next session of Congress. Below is additional information on the hearing, including how to view the live and archived webcast.
Full Committee Hearing: Nuclear Waste Bill (September 12, 2012; 9:30 AM)
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
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.
Witness Panel 1
Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft
Co-Chairman
Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, Washington, D.C.
Co-Chairman
Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, Washington, D.C.
Dr. Richard A. Meserve
President
Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, D.C.
President
Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, D.C.
Dr. Peter B. Lyons
Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy
U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, D.C.
Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy
U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, D.C.
Witness Panel 2
Mr. Henry B. Barron
President and Chief Executive Officer
Constellation Energy Nuclear Group, LLC, Baltimore, MD
President and Chief Executive Officer
Constellation Energy Nuclear Group, LLC, Baltimore, MD
Mr. Geoffrey H. Fettus
Senior Attorney, Nuclear Program
Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, D.C.
Senior Attorney, Nuclear Program
Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, D.C.
NRC Directs Staff to Conduct Two-Year Environmental Study and Revision to Waste Confidence Rule
NRC Press Release
September 6, 2012
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today directed the agency's staff to develop an environmental impact statement (EIS) and a revised waste confidence decision and rule on the temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel. The EIS and rule, which are in response to a June 8 ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, are to be completed within 24 months.
In a Staff Requirements Memorandum, the Commission directed the staff to "proceed directly" with development of the EIS and a revised waste confidence rule to satisfy the deficiencies the Appeals Court found in the NRC's 2010 waste confidence revision. The Commission said the staff should draw on the agency's "long, rich history" with waste confidence determinations as well as work performed by other agencies, such as environmental assessments, technical studies and reports addressing the impacts of transportation and consolidated storage of spent fuel.
The Appeals Court ruled that NRC should have considered the potential environmental effects in the event a permanent repository for disposing of spent fuel is never built, and found other deficiencies with the agency's consideration of leaks and fires involving spent fuel pools.
"Resolving this issue successfully is a Commission priority," said NRC Chairman Allison M. Macfarlane. "Waste confidence plays a core role in many major licensing actions, such as new reactors and license renewals. I applaud my fellow Commissioners for their swift action in setting a path forward to resolve the Court's remand, and we have confidence in the staff's ability to meet this demanding deadline."
"Waste confidence" is a generic finding that spent nuclear fuel can be safely stored for decades beyond the licensed operating life of a reactor without significant environmental effects. It enables the NRC to license reactors or renew their licenses without examining the effects of extended waste storage for each individual site pending ultimate disposal.
On Aug. 7, the Commission issued an Order that NRC will not issue licenses dependent on the waste confidence rule - such as new reactors and renewal of existing reactor operating licenses - until the Court's remand is appropriately addressed. That Order remains in effect.
The Commission directed the staff to "provide ample opportunity for public comment" on the EIS and rule, even while looking for ways to make the EIS and rulemaking process more efficient. It said the staff should form an inter-office team of the agency's most-accomplished environmental experts to develop the EIS and resolve comments "with the urgency that this matter deserves."
The NRC's Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, which has regulatory responsibility over spent fuel storage and disposal, has established a Waste Confidence Directorate to develop the waste confidence EIS. The new directorate will be headed by Dr. Keith I. McConnell, currently deputy director of the Division of Waste Management and Environmental Protection in the Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs.
The Commission's SRM, a staff paper outlining options to address the Court's ruling (COMSECY-12-0016), and the Commissioners' vote sheets with comments, are available on the NRC website (http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/comm-secy/2012/2012-0016comscy.pdf).
CR Vote Expected on Thursday
National Journal Need-To-Know-Memo
September 10, 2012
National Journal Need-To-Know-Memo
September 10, 2012
House Republicans plan to vote on Thursday on a continuing resolution that would cover the costs of federal operations through April. The Senate is expected to take up the measure the following week. House Republican leaders have no interest in an election-eve shutdown threat, and they have already agreed to continue current federal funding levels set in last summer's Budget Control Act. Attempts to amend the measure, including GOP proposals averting mandatory cuts known as "sequestration" or tax increases scheduled for January, are unlikely to derail an agreement, which is well ahead of the Oct. 1 expiration for the current funding.
White House misses sequestration deadline; DoD will see 11% cut
Stephen Losey and Andy Medici, Federal Times
September 7, 2012
The Obama administration has missed a key deadline to submit a report on how it would implement $109 billion in across-the-board budget cuts scheduled to take effect Jan. 2.
The administration was supposed to send to Congress by Sept. 6 detailed information on every account that would be affected under sequestration, including how much money would be cut from every program, project and activity level.
But that day, the administration told Federal Times the report will come "late next week." The administration said it needed more time to address the complex issues involved in planning for sequestration.
Washington is hungry for details on how the government plans to absorb these cuts, which are required by last year's Budget Control Act unless Congress and the administration agree on a path to reducing budget deficits by $1.2 trillion through 2021. Congress last month passed the Sequestration Transparency Act mandating the report. But there have been few official details released so far.
Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said at a conference Sept. 5 that the Pentagon would have to cut 11 percent of its budget next year. And the across-the-board nature of these cuts would be "devastating," he said, and leave the Defense Department with almost no flexibility.
Sequestration "doesn't allow us to prioritize," Kendall said, according to a Pentagon release. "It doesn't allow us to find the things that are least important to us. It doesn't allow us to avoid some of the damage that will be done by this kind of a mechanism."
Kendall said any budget-cutting plan the Pentagon could prepare would be irrelevant.
"If we have a budget, there are roughly 2,500 lines in that budget, and we have cut each of them [by] about 11 percent," Kendall said.
And because sequestration was designed to hit Defense and non-defense agencies' budgets equally, other agencies also would likely face roughly 11 percent cuts next year.
The cuts would even hit the Pentagon's war-fighting operations in Afghanistan, Kendall said. And they would be in addition to $487 billion in cuts the department is already making over the next decade.
Obama has said he plans to use what little flexibility exists in the sequestration rules to exempt military personnel from sequestration cuts, which will force the cuts to fall harder on other areas. About 108,000 Defense civilian employees could lose their jobs next year if sequestration takes effect, according to a report last month by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
On Sept. 6, the office of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, posted a blog asking if Obama would comply with the transparency law and release the report on time.
"The administration has repeatedly ignored requests from Congress for sequester information, even as top officials admit the defense cuts the White House demanded -- in an effort to ensure the president wouldn't face another debt limit vote before the election -- would jeopardize our national security," Boehner's office said. "Now it's time for President Obama to obey the law he signed and tell the American people how he plans to implement (or replace) these devastating cuts."
Job losses, furloughs
All in all, sequestration could lead to 270,000 lost federal jobs throughout the government, and the furloughs of thousands more.
"And that's just the first installment," said Doug Criscitello, a former chief financial officer at the Housing and Urban Development Department and current managing director at Grant Thornton. "There's nine of them [years of cuts]. Imagine taking cuts of that magnitude for nine years [through 2021]. You'd essentially eliminate discretionary spending."
Stan Collender, a former congressional budget staffer who now works at the public relations firm Qorvis Communications, said procurement, research and development, operations and maintenance will also take steep hits at Defense.
The Pentagon will likely look for any possible flexibility to scale back its contract spending, while avoiding contract breaches that could draw financial penalties, Collender said. That will likely mean a steep reduction in the number or size of new contracts, he said. And if the Pentagon has the option of buying fewer units for certain contracts or not renewing multiyear contracts, he said they will probably take them.
Criscitello said the delay of the report may be a sign that it will be fairly substantive, requiring more work.
But Collender suspects the unfortunate political timing of its due date -- the same day as Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention -- also may have been a factor in the administration's decision to delay it.
"I don't think we can discount the fact that the administration probably would prefer this to not come out over this weekend, where it'll compete with reactions to the convention and the [Sept. 7] unemployment report," Collender said. "They'd prefer to not have people ask, 'What about sequestration and the fiscal cliff?'"
All agencies affected
Sequestration will also have a wide-ranging impact on other government agencies and programs.
Ellen Murray, assistant secretary for financial resources at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a letter to Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that the automatic cuts would have "profound consequences" on the department's ability to provide critical services.
Sequestration would hinder HHS efforts to reduce health care fraud and recover improperly spent money -- saving $1.50 for every dollar spent, according to Murray.
Automatic cuts would also force HHS to downsize or cut clients from a variety of programs, including:
These cuts, projected by the Congressional Budget Office, would limit HHS' ability to fund research programs and would eliminate 2,300 new and competing research grants, according to Murray.
The Food and Drug Administration could also see its budget cut by $200 million -- which would mean slower drug approval times, Markey said in a statement.
Jon Adler, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said the automatic cuts will lead to furloughs, equipment shortfalls and hobble the ability of law enforcement to keep people and property safe.
"Sequestration will inevitably turn our fortified castle into a wavering house of cards," Adler said in an interview.
Federal law enforcement officers have already been affected by hiring freezes and increased attrition due to budget cuts.
"How does a man or woman who risks their lives for their country get categorized as wasteful government spending?" Adler said.
Bruce Moyer, government relations counsel for the Federal Bar Association, wrote in a blog post that sequestration would impede U.S. Marshals Service efforts to provide adequate security for courthouses across the country.
Sequestration would result in "a significant reduction in court security personnel" and would delay needed upgrades and improvements in courthouse security systems, he wrote.
Waste-Plant Dispute Builds
Andrew Morse, The Wall Street Journal
September 9, 2012
The U.S. Department of Energy is slowing construction of a facility to process the country's largest accumulation of radioactive waste, amid an increasingly acrimonious dispute about the design and safety of the $12.2 billion project.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu visited the Hanford site in southeast Washington state last week, which department officials said was part of efforts to assess the safety of the nuclear-waste complex. Mr. Chu was accompanied by an expert panel he assembled following a trip in June to the plant after concerns were raised about the safety culture at the facility.
Mr. Chu and the experts are reviewing the safety of rooms that will hold radioactive waste as it is processed at the vast complex, which will cover 65 acres and house four nuclear facilities, in addition to other components.
For decades, the government used the 586-square-mile Hanford site to produce plutonium for atomic weapons, including the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II. The work turned the land into one of the most toxic areas in the U.S., so after the Cold War, the DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency and the state set out to clean it.
Hanford's problems were highlighted last month when a DOE official who oversees engineering at the plant faulted the primary contractor, Bechtel National Inc., for problems, concluding that the company was "not competent" to serve as the facility's chief designer.
Frank Russo, who manages the project for Bechtel National, a unit of Bechtel Corp., said many of the issues raised by the DOE official, Gary Brunson, are old and that the company had worked to fix problems. "All of them had been addressed at one time or another," Mr. Russo said.
Separately, the DOE last month discovered radioactive material between the walls of one of the site's newer double-shelled waste-storage tanks, which are designed to be superior to older single-shell tanks. The threat of leaks has been a concern for decades: In the past, according to a project website, one-third of the 177 underground tanks have experienced leakage of toxic material.
The DOE has enhanced monitoring of the double-shelled tank and has declared that it is stable.
Concerns over key parts of the facility are slowing construction, because the facility is being designed as it is built; as design issues crop up, building has to slow until those issues are addressed.
The issues are raising concerns of a delay in the opening of a project that has attracted the ire of environmentalists, federal lawmakers and even its own workers. The range of concerns include the safety and cost of the plant, as well as risks that radioactive sludge could seep into the nearby Columbia River.
On Aug. 29, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, wrote to Mr. Chu asking that he explain why the plant's schedule was at risk. Ms. Gregoire sought a meeting with Mr. Chu while he was at the site, but the two weren't able to coordinate their schedules, her spokeswoman said.
Expected to start full operations in 2022, the plant would separate and process 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste. The waste would then be turned into glass logs--a form that makes it less likely to spread through the environment--that would be stored at the site. The plant is expected to operate for roughly 40 years.
The facility, called the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant has been the subject of controversy for years. Managers on the project have raised concerns about the design, as well as the safety culture at the project. Employees have brought lawsuits against Bechtel National.
One issue highlighted by Mr. Chu involves the design of a set of 18 rooms that will hold waste as it is treated for processing. The rooms, called "black cells" because workers won't be able to enter them when the plant is running, were to be built with limited monitoring equipment. The DOE now is considering whether more instruments should be incorporated to monitor how the waste is settling, and whether openings should be larger so machinery, such as robots, could be sent in.
As a result, the government has slowed work on pretreatment and high-level radioactive waste facilities, said David Huizenga, a senior DOE adviser. Construction of two other buildings, a lab and a low-activity waste facility, are continuing on schedule, he said. The agency isn't fundamentally "changing or questioning the design" of the plant, Mr. Huizenga said.
Tom Carpenter, the executive director of Hanford Challenge, a group that has expressed concerns about the plant's design and that has been skeptical about the progress of construction, says resolving design issues takes on a new urgency following the discovery of the radioactive material last month. "I want this plant to work," Mr. Carpenter said. "We have no Plan B."
DOE wants changes to Hanford Advisory Board
Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald
September 9, 2012
The Department of Energy is changing the rules for the Hanford Advisory Board, to the dismay or anger of most of its board members.
Initially, that would include term limits for members representing some Hanford employees on the board and the general public.
However, DOE Hanford officials and DOE Headquarters officials are continuing talks on additional changes to the board, with the wish for changes driven by officials in Washington, D.C., rather than at Hanford. DOE declined to say what other changes are being discussed.
"A promise was made to the board four years ago. The promise was not kept," said Jeff Luke, who represents non-union, nonmanagement employees on the advisory board.
The Hanford Advisory Board was formed almost 19 years ago, before policies were made that cover DOE boards across the nation.
In 2008, the Hanford board agreed to a revised charter after two years of discussions with DOE, after DOE unilaterally imposed term limits.
The compromise reached did not have the term limit language, which some board members said then appeared to be an attempt by some in DOE to get rid of members with opinions it disliked. DOE said then that changes were needed to meet legal and policy requirements, but ultimately allowed the board to continue operating differently than more recently formed advisory boards.
The board considers Hanford issues and then reaches consensus on what it believes DOE and its regulators should be doing. It's fought for issues such as better worker protection from contaminants and cleaning up environmental contamination rather than leaving it in place with engineered caps to keep it from spreading toward groundwater.
Board members misunderstood what the promise was in negotiations four years ago, said Cate Alexander, the designated federal officer for the eight Environment Management Site Specific Advisory Boards, which includes the Hanford board. She attended the Hanford Advisory Board meeting Thursday and Friday in Kennewick.
Term limits were taken off the table earlier but that did not mean "never," she said. Some federal officials believe some turnover on the board is needed, she said.
There is a large community in the Tri-City with full-time jobs and who are raising families who cannot be involved, and ethnic, racial and gender diversity can benefit boards, she said.
"I cannot emphasize how much people from underrepresented communities contribute to a board," she said.
Other boards have a tremendous orientation process and a greater sensitivity to a range of technical knowledge, she said.
The Hanford Advisory Board continually is called out as a technical board, but that is not the case, said Ken Niles, who represents the state of Oregon on the board.
Members with a technical background are the minority he proved with a show of hands, and the rest of members have had to learn about technically complex issues, he said.
The board is diverse by its structure, which is different from newer boards, said members.
Seats are assigned to groups representing interests, such as Hanford-area cities and governments, organized labor, public health, regional environmental and civic groups, universities and area tribes. Those groups pick their own members, which DOE approves.
However, among the 32 seats on the board are seats for the public-at-large and Hanford workers, which have no group to pick them and are targeted for new limits of three two-year terms.
For the Hanford worker seats, which are restricted to nonunion and union members, the members and alternate positions include workers who have been on the board since 1997, 2006, 2011 and 2012.
Most board members and alternates are expected to devote 20 hours a month to the board, but many devote more time. The positions are not paid and only some costs are reimbursed.
"I have a wife at home with Alzheimer's," said Keith Smith, a public member of the board with a reputation for advocating for the safety of workers. "I would not be sitting here if I did not think it was important."
Rebecca Rubenstrunk, one of the alternates for four public seats, said she had not heard anything specific from DOE about what it believes is wrong with the diversity of the board.
"I'm skeptical of just rotating people in and out in the name of diversity," she said.
Others pointed out that about a third of the board is female, it has seats reserved to represent the tribes and it has a range of ages.
The board has been unsuccessful in recruiting Hispanic members, but that has not been for lack of trying, said Dennis Faulk, the Environmental Protection Agency Hanford program manager, and several board members.
Evening meetings could increase diversity, Alexander said. Now the board typically meets in series of daylong sessions, usually in the Tri-Cities, to reduce travel costs since the board's region includes all of Oregon and Washington.
Board members pointed out that Hanford is the nation's largest environmental cleanup site, and what works for much smaller sites may not work at Hanford, where there is so much complex information for board members to understand and discuss.
"The Hanford Site is so unique, why would the board not be unique?" Niles said.
DOE appears to be "cherry picking" which policies it wants to enforce, he said. For instance, DOE policy is not to control the board, he said. Policy also requires providing money to the board for technical assistance, which DOE is not doing, he said.
The change to term limits caught some board members by surprise, and there was no chance to vet a message to DOE through the usual process that starts with crafting it in committee.
But board members adapted a letter written by Liz Mattson, who represents Hanford Challenge on the board, with members agreeing to its content, although some said they could not support the written advice since it was not developed through the usual process.
DOE should not impose term limits but work with the board if it wants changes, the board said. Solutions to provide diversity could include looking at attendance to see if seats could be opened up, adding another board position for the public or encouraging groups represented on the board to consider diversity as they choose new members for the advisory board.
DOE to Extend Savannah River Nuclear Solutions Contract at Savannah River Site to September 2016
EM Press Release
September 6, 2012
The current contract provides for management and operations of Savannah River Site and is scheduled to end July 31, 2013. By exercising the option to extend the term of the contract, DOE and SRNS will continue uninterrupted management and operation activities defined in the contract.
The missions of the Office of Environmental Management (EM) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) include; continuing nuclear cleanup, long-term nuclear materials management, and support to the nuclear weapons stockpile and nonproliferation requirements.
Saltstone facilities resume operation at SRS
Teddy Kulmala, Aiken Standard
September 6, 2012
The saltstone facilities at the Savannah River Site have restarted operations following a nine-month planned improvement outage, Savannah River Remediation said in a statement on Thursday.
The facilities process and dispose of decontaminated salt solution, reducing the risk of potential contamination in the environment.
According to Steve Wilkerson, waste treatment manager for SRR, improvements to the facilities will provide a new and more reliable system to process larger amounts of decontaminated salt solution needed for future tank closure operations.
"We expect the Saltstone facilities to be even more robust as we position the Site for continued success in closing waste tanks," Wilkerson said. "The improvements will support a 24/7 work schedule, which will be necessary when the Salt Waste Processing Facility begins operations."
The improvement outage began in December 2011, and culminated a year in which the facility processed nearly 1.5 million gallons of waste. Saltstone has processed more than 10 million gallons of low-level salt waste since beginning operations in June 1990, according to a statement. Terrel Spears, assistant manager for Waste Disposition Project for the Department of Energy-Savannah River Operations Office, said Saltstone needs to operate reliably.
The saltstone facilities will experience less downtime between runs because system improvements were made to eliminate the buildup and solidification of grout inside the system, something that causes an outage of four to six weeks at the facility, according to Dave Olson, SRR president and project manager.
"In the past, between runs, we would experience blockage in the process lines due to grout solidifying in the system," Olson said. "The new reliability improvements are expected to eliminate any unnecessary downtime and will support the liquid waste operations' long-term salt processing goals, which in turn will support our tank closer initiative."
The nearly $8 million in improvements will position the saltstone facilities for continuous operations and up to 12 million gallons of salt solution per year when the Salt Waste Processing Facility begins operations.
Green groups oppose shipping hot waste to SRS
Sammy Fretwell, The State
September 7, 2012
Environmentalists spoke out Thursday against sending highly radioactive waste from commercial power plants to the Savannah River Site near Aiken for storage.
The federal government has been trying to decide what to do with spent fuel created by the nation's 104 atomic energy plants since President Barack Obama chose in 2009 to abandon the Yucca Mountain, Nev., disposal site.
One option is temporarily storing the toxic refuse at federal sites such as SRS, a sprawling nuclear weapons complex with limited public access, until a replacement to Yucca Mountain opens.
But environmentalists say interim disposal could too easily become permanent. At the very least, it could take decades before a replacement facility would open, they say. Planning for Yucca Mountain dates to the mid-80s. More than $10 billion was spent on the project, much of the money coming from utilities that would send radioactive spent fuel there. Utilities, which relied on ratepayers' money, now want to be reimbursed.
At Thursday's Governor's Nuclear Advisory Council meeting in Columbia, representatives of four conservation groups said South Carolina should resist any federal plan to use SRS for disposal, even if the plan is considered interim.
"For too long, South Carolina has shouldered a disproportionate share of our country's nuclear waste," said Debbie Parker, a representative of the Conservation Voters of South Carolina. "We cannot endorse any negotiations that imply consent ... for SRS to serve as an interim site for consolidation of commercial nuclear waste storage or for reprocessing."
Representatives from the state Sierra Club, the S.C. Coastal Conservation League and the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability also spoke out.
The alliance's Tom Clements said behind-the-scenes discussions now are occurring among state leaders to allow the disposal in exchange for some type of jobs initiative. He did not name anyone, but said "it's time for those in on these discussions to reveal what they are up to" and tell the public.
The advisory council did not take any action Thursday. The council, as its name says, provides advice to the governor on nuclear matters.
A spokesman for Gov. Nikki Haley said the final resting place for spent fuel should be Yucca Mountain. Republicans have been trying to reverse Obama's decision and open Yucca Mountain. The president canceled the Yucca Mountain project after years of complaints from Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, who said dumping waste in his state would hurt the environment.
Haley is "dedicated to keeping South Carolina from becoming a permanent home for this nation's unprocessed nuclear waste," spokesman Rob Godfrey said in an email to The State newspaper. "The solution to the waste problem we face is a mountain in Nevada. The experts at the Savannah River site can process and stabilize this waste, but its final home should be Yucca Mountain."
Environmentalists said storing spent nuclear fuel could increase the cry for a reprocessing plant. Reprocessing is supposed to render used fuel available for reuse in commercial plants, but conservationists say it creates more waste and threatens the landscape.
"Our country stands at a nuclear waste crossroads," the conservation league's Ryan Black said. "The political failure to develop Yucca Mountain has only complicated this issue further. But Yucca's demise should not dictate that South Carolina bear the burden, yet again, of our nation's radioactive waste."
Green groups say used nuclear fuel, while dangerous, can be safely kept in casks at existing power plants, rather than shipping it to an interim site while the debate over a permanent facility rages. Of the nation's 104 reactors, South Carolina has seven at four places. SCE&G is building two more reactors at its Jenkinsville power plant.
SRS nuclear growth "biological," but what does it eat?
Rob Pavey, The Augusta Chronicle
September 6, 2012
A mysterious, cobweblike growth with a fondness for Savannah River Site's spent nuclear fuel has been identified - but not formally named.
"We did a genetic analysis and found a diverse population of mostly bacteria," said Christopher Berry, the senior technical adviser of the Savannah River National Labortory.
The "white, stringlike" substance was first observed in October among old fuel assemblies submerged in the site's L Area basin, where nuclear materials from foreign and domestic research reactors are stored and guarded.
Although the growth was deemed harmless, its ability to thrive and spread in such an unusual environment prompted a more detailed analysis.
"We were able to identify a large portion of the bacteria making up the cobwebs, but there were certainly some where the DNA sequencing came back as unknown," Berry said.
Although rare, bacterial colonies have been observed in a few nuclear environments, including a Canadian reactor and at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, where a growth developed in the site's spent fuel basin after its 1979 accident.
Scientists at SRS still have one more local mystery to solve.
"Right now we are trying to figure out what these bacteria are using for food," Berry said. "In other words, what is their carbon source?"
Water in which spent fuel is stored is carefully filtered, treated and deionized to prevent anything that might contribute to corrosion - a perennial concern in nuclear waste storage.
If its food source can be identified and eliminated, the bacteria - and the cobwebs - might be more easily controlled, Berry said.
"We found no evidence it contributes to corrosion," he said. "But visually, they want to get rid of it."
Amid Partisan Bickering, Everyone Agrees: ARPA-E Is a Fascinating Experiment
Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
September 9, 2012
Last week, the New York Times reported on an exciting new energy project that is scheduled to begin testing off the coast of Oregon in early October. A company called Ocean Power Technologies is going to lower a 260-ton generator into the Pacific ocean, just 2.5 miles from the shore, in order to capture renewable energy from waves. The buoy generator will link up to the grid and, if it works, could generate enough electricity to power 1,000 homes.
Like many new experiments in renewable energy, the Oregon project was partially funded by a grant from the Department of Energy. In previous decades, the Department of Energy drove basic research by operating giant government-funded labs, but under the leadership of Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu, the agency has transformed itself into something different: the biggest, greenest venture capital firm in the world.
After receiving an unprecedented surge in funding for renewable energy courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Chu set to work hiring big names from the nation's top research laboratories, in order to staff a new agency called ARPA-E, modeled after DARPA, the R&D wing of the Pentagon. In just three years, ARPA-E has made more than 180 investments in basic research projects in renewable energy, and that's in addition to grants issued by the Department of Energy proper, like the one that funded the Ocean Power Technologies project in Oregon.
Michael Grunwald, a veteran reporter for TIME Magazine, is the author of The New New Deal, a new book that details the history of the much-maligned American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly referred to as the Stimulus bill). In preparing to write The New New Deal, Grunwald did extensive research on the Department of Energy's Stimulus-funded quest to uncover an energy alternative to fossil fuels. Recently, I talked to Grunwald about his new book and the "silent green revolution" that is currently underway at the Department of Energy.
The New New Deal is a narrative about President Obama and his $800 billion stimulus bill, but it also has an argument. Can you quickly lay out the argument, and specifically how it relates to research and clean energy?
Grunwald: Sure. The argument is that everything you think you know about the stimulus is wrong. It was not a pathetic failure. It helped prevent a second depression and end a brutal recession in the short term; it was a huge down payment on Obama's campaign promises to transform the U.S. economy for the long term. But clean energy was the real outlier, getting $90 billion when the U.S. had been spending just a few billion a year. There were unprecedented investments in wind, solar, and other renewables; energy efficiency in every imaginable form; a smarter grid; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; electric vehicles; the factories to build all that green stuff in the U.S., and yes, clean energy research.
That money has really launched a silent green revolution. For example, the renewable electricity industry was on the brink of death after the 2008 financial meltdown; the Spanish wind developer Abengoa had shut down its U.S. projects, and turbines were literally rusting in the fields. The day the stimulus passed, Abengoa announced it was investing $6 billion in U.S. wind farms. When Obama took office, we had 25 gigawatts worth of wind power in the U.S., and the official federal energy forecast called for 40 gigs by 2030. It's now 2012, and we already have 50 gigs. The stimulus also jump-started the smart electric grid. It created an advanced battery industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch. And so on.
That money has really launched a silent green revolution. For example, the renewable electricity industry was on the brink of death after the 2008 financial meltdown; the Spanish wind developer Abengoa had shut down its U.S. projects, and turbines were literally rusting in the fields. The day the stimulus passed, Abengoa announced it was investing $6 billion in U.S. wind farms. When Obama took office, we had 25 gigawatts worth of wind power in the U.S., and the official federal energy forecast called for 40 gigs by 2030. It's now 2012, and we already have 50 gigs. The stimulus also jump-started the smart electric grid. It created an advanced battery industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch. And so on.
In the book you describe a new federal agency, ARPA-E, a stimulus-funded incubator for alternative energy technologies that is the brainchild of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Can you describe how ARPA-E came into being?
Grunwald: The stimulus didn't create vast new armies of government workers at alphabet agencies like the WPA or CCC; ARPA-E was its only new agency, with a staff the size of a major-league baseball roster. But it's a really cool agency, the kind of place where Q from the James Bond movies would want to work. It actually had its roots in the Bush administration, when Chu served on a National Academy of Sciences panel on American competitiveness that released a report called Rising Above the Gathering Storm; one of its recommendations was an energy research agency modeled on the legendary DARPA at the Pentagon. The idea was to finance out-of-the-box, high-risk experiments, like an early-stage venture capital firm. Congress authorized it, but never gave it money to launch until the stimulus.
The early days at ARPA-E were pretty insane. Its first couple of employees had to put out its first solicitation, and it was inundated with 3700 applications for its first 37 grants, which crashed the federal computer system. But they attracted an absurdly high-powered team of brainiacs: a thermodynamics expert from Intel, an MIT electrical engineering professor, a clean-tech venture capitalist who also taught at MIT. The director, Arun Majumdar, had run Berkeley's nanotechnology institute. His deputy, Eric Toone, was a Duke biochemistry professor and entrepreneur. Arun liked to say that it was a band of brothers; I like to think of it as a $400 million Manhattan Project tucked inside the $800 billion stimulus.
ARPA-E has spent a lot of money on the search for new biofuels, in particular a special algae-based biofuel brought about by a synthetic, high-efficiency version of photosynthesis. What distinguishes these fuels from corn-based fuels, which are often criticized as being as wasteful as fossil fuels?
Grunwald: As you may know I'm a biofuels skeptic. I wrote a TIME cover story titled "The Clean Energy Scam" that sounded the first big warning that farm-based biofuels--not just corn ethanol but palm oil, soy biodiesel, and anything else that used arable land--were ecological disasters in the making. When we put food in our gas tanks, we end up pillaging carbon-storing wetlands and rain forests to grow more food. But the stimulus included massive investments in second-generation biofuels made from farm waste, municipal trash, and other feedstocks that don't need farmland.
ARPA-E is also investigating more futuristic biofuels. I tell a story in my introduction about how Chu was skeptical of photosynthesis. It's been working pretty well for the last 3.5 billion years, but Chu thought it was too inefficient to make fuel. So the ARPA-E brainiacs started thinking about it, and invented an entirely new scientific discipline that they've dubbed "electrofuels," essentially trying to genetically re-engineer exotic microbes that absorb energy without photosynthesis to produce fuel. It's pretty wild. They had no idea whether this stuff would actually work, but at last year's ARPA-E summit Majumdar held up a vial of electrofuel created in a North Carolina lab that has already powered a jet engine. Now the question is whether this kind of thing could be mass-produced at an affordable cost. As one of the ARPA-E guys told me: Now we know it works. We just don't know if it matters.
What other game-changing technologies have come out of ARPA-E?
Grunwald: It's still early, of course, and part of the excitement is that nobody knows which experiments will change the energy game. ARPA-E is financing projects to test better and cheaper batteries, more efficient air conditioners, new carbon capture and sequestration technologies, alternatives to rare-earth materials, and so on. Maybe electrofuels that bypass photosynthesis will be the next big thing; there's also a program that will try to manipulate photosynthesis to create Frankenplants that excrete crude oil. Most of the projects are going to fail, but a few success stories could transform the entire energy economy.
So far, more than a dozen ARPA-E-funded companies have already attracted follow-up venture funding. They're very excited about 1366 Technologies, which has developed a new solar manufacturing process. Basically, instead of slicing silicon ingots like salami, which is a difficult way to make wafers and wastes a lot of silicon dust, they're creating the wafers directly from liquid silicon like pancakes, which could cut the price of solar panels by a third. The other big winner so far is Envia Systems, which has developed the world's most powerful lithium-ion battery; it could slice $5000 off the cost of the second-generation Chevy Volt. But there are all kinds of exciting projects: lithium-air batteries that could put lithium-ion out to pasture someday, wind turbines shaped like jet engines, electric transformers the size of a suitcase instead of a kitchen, laser drilling technology that could cut costs of geothermal wells as well as petroleum wells. We'll see what pans out.
Is there a precedent for this kind of thing? Is there a history of government-funded basic research driving innovation in energy?
Grunwald: Yes, and one of the frustrations for Chu and other American scientists has been watching technologies developed in the United States with federal assistance--photovoltaic solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, modern wind turbines--drift abroad, both on the manufacturing side and the adoption side. Government investment played a huge role in jump-starting the info-tech and bio-tech industries, and it's already playing a huge role in clean-tech.
And who ended up getting political credit for those successes?
Grunwald: If anyone, it was probably whoever happened to be holding the scissors at the ribbon-cutting. That's the nature of blue-sky research. The stimulus poured $10 billion in NIH, and already driving some exciting breakthroughs in cancer research, Alzheimers, genomics, and much more. But it's not like Obama is getting any credit. You invest in research because it's the right thing to do.
One of the arguments for serious government investment in alternative energy is the relative dearth of private sector investment in alternatives to fossil fuels. What does the R&D scene look like for alternative energy in the private sector?
Grunwald: Well, before the stimulus, it was abysmal; biotech firms like Amgen and Genentech had larger R&D budgets than the entire energy sector. And the Energy Department's research budget had dropped 85% in constant dollars over three decades. The stimulus helped jump-start new industries, like the smart grid, but I think it's too early to say whether the public and private sectors will continue to invest in the R&D side.
You make a persuasive case that under Steven Chu the Department of Energy shifted from a typical government agency to something like a venture capital firm. Let's talk about Solyndra, the failed solar company and $500 million black eye for the Recovery Act, and the Department of Energy. Was Solyndra an outlier?
Grunwald: It wasn't an outlier and it wasn't a scandal. It was a loan that went bad, something that happens to any lender. If the clean-energy loan program--which was created during the Bush administration to encourage investment in innovative green enterprises--had a perfect record, that probably would indicate it was making overly conservative loans that didn't require public assistance.
A few reminders about Solyndra: It was an incredibly innovative company with an entirely new approach to solar, and it attracted $1 billion in private capital. The Bush administration selected it from among 143 applicants for the program's first loan; it didn't quite get completed before Bush left office, but it was at the top of the pile when Obama took over, and Republican investigators found nothing in the 300,000 pages of documents they subpoenaed to suggest there was anything hinky or political about the decision to award the loan. The company had an impressive customer list, from Frito-Lay to Southern California Edison, and its revenues were soaring when it failed. Its problem was a spectacular drop in solar prices, which was terrible for its business model as a manufacturer, but great for the U.S. solar industry, which has increased installations 600 percent since the stimulus passed.
Again, it was inevitable that some of these loans would fail; as one White House official pointed out to me, some students who get Pell Grants end up drunks on the street. But it's not like the Obama administration just invested in Solyndra. A review led by John McCain's finance chairman found that overall, the $40 billion loan portfolio is doing fine; it's got reserves to cover half a dozen Solyndra-style failures, and it's financing the world's largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world's largest solar farms, America's first cellulosic biofuel refineries, and much more. The larger point is that the stimulus isn't really picking winners and losers in the traditional sense; it's picking the game of clean energy, and financing thousands of different entrepreneurial and technological approaches to the problem, so that the market can pick the winners and losers. For example, the stimulus created a domestic advanced battery industry for electric vehicles from scratch, financing 30 different factories, a classic case of industrial policy. But it also financed all kinds of biofuels that will compete with electric vehicles, and more fuel-efficient internal combustion engines, and research into lightweighting, and so forth.
The larger goal is to reduce our dependence on foreign petro-thugs, our carbon emissions, and our vulnerability to price shocks, while creating millions of jobs in new industries of the future. There ought to be great debates about that. But we've been stuck in an imaginary debate about crony capitalism and waste.
Do you worry about the political and institutional resilience of ARPA-E? The conventional wisdom is that the Department of Energy got locked into this Cold War driven lab structure, with these big national labs sucking up all the funding and becoming dedicated to prolonging their own existences more than anything else. ARPA-E was designed to be more nimble, and to operate more like a dynamic VC firm. But along with the downsides of the lab system, there are some serious upsides---in particular, the labs are big job creators in particular states, they have powerful connections and important people care about them. That gives them a kind of political and institutional resilience that I'm not sure ARPA-E will have.
Grunwald: It's a legitimate fear. But so far, ARPA-E may be the only creation of the stimulus that Republicans don't hate. It got follow-up funding at a time when dozens of other traditionally bipartisan line items--unemployment benefits, middle-class tax cuts, health IT, and so forth--became partisan political footballs because Republicans wanted to kill everything in the stimulus. Mitt Romney constantly attacks Obama's green energy policies, but he has said he supports ARPA-E. And he did have a similar venture fund when he was governor of Massachusetts; it had some Solyndra-type failures, but it also financed a company that became BigBelly Solar, which makes awesome solar-powered garbage compactors. Thanks to the stimulus, BigBellies are becoming quite common in national parks and major cities.
I know that battery technology has been a huge focus for the Energy Department---is the stimulus bill going to give us iPhones that last a week on a single charge?
Grunwald: ARPA-E has very specific targets for electric vehicle batteries, and Envia is hitting them. But you never know what you're going to find. One stimulus-funded company that's gotten a lot of bad press is A123 Systems, which had some big problems with its batteries for the Fisker Karma, and is now getting taken over by a Chinese firm. But while he was working on A123's batteries, the MIT scientist who founded the company, Yet-Ming Chiang, got an idea for an innovative "flow battery" that could someday store power for the entire grid. He got an ARPA-E grant, and he's raised some follow-up VC cash. Another stimulus-funded company, Solazyme, is using algae to make fuel. It's already supplying the Navy's Green Fleet, but it's just getting started, and it doesn't have the kind of scale to compete on a level playing field with fossil fuels. But Solazyme recently went public, because it's using the same technology to make anti-aging creams, which it can sell for about 1000 times the price of fuel. And those revenues could buy it time to cut its fuel costs.
In the book you note that the Department of Energy, which had a $1.2 billion dollar budget for renewables and efficiency, received a $16.4 Billion infusion as a result of the Recovery Act. That's an enormous increase. What kinds of issues did the Department of Energy run into when it came time to spend these huge, budget-multiplying infusions of cash?
Grunwald: If I can indulge in a bit of self-promotion, I think your readers will really enjoy this part of my book. I think The New New Deal is a great yarn, and the fly-on-the-wall stuff inside the White House and the halls of Congress have gotten a lot of press. But some of my favorite scenes take place in the bowels of the department, where Chu and a McKinsey partner try to shake up a sclerotic bureaucracy to ramp up 144 programs to stimulus speed, where one of the founders of SunEdison tries to shake up a flailing weatherization division known as "The Turkey Farm," where Rahm Emanuel pitches a fit about the slow pace of the smart grid. Some of the stories sound like real-life Dilbert cartoons. But some of them are quite inspiring.
Obviously it takes time to convert the insights of fundamental research into scalable technologies. When do you expect the benefits of ARPA-E to trickle out to the public?
Grunwald: I think they should start to trickle out over the next few years. For example, 1366 has already "graduated" from ARPA-E to a loan guarantee; now it's building its first factory. If Obama is reelected, he should have some fun breakthroughs to celebrate in his second term. And I suspect that if Romney wins, he'll be only too happy to take credit for the celebrations on his watch.
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