ECA Update: December 18, 2012
Published: Tue, 12/18/12
Sen. Inouye Dies; Who Will Replace War Hero Chairman In Dual Appropriations Roles?
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., AOL Defense December 17, 2012 WASHINGTON: Daniel Inouye is dead. Who will succeed him? Well, it might be a "she."
It is callous, even ghoulish, that we media have started speculating on who will succeed one of the nation's most respected Senators within four hours of his death, but that's Washington for you. As the condolences and eulogies pour in from Inouye's former colleagues, they're also quietly thinking about who takes up his place, or rather places, as chairman both of the Senate Appropriations Committee -- the most powerful committee in the Senate -- and of the appropriations subcommittee on defense -- the most powerful panel on the committee.
Inouye was a lifelong public servant and a war hero, one who lost his right arm earning the Medal of Honor no less, but he was also an old and ailing man who had a dangerous fall a month ago and who had been hospitalized since Dec. 6. You would imagine that someone, if not several someones, had a succession plan for two such critical positions. But this is the Senate, where collegiality still trumps efficiency much of the time.
Just three days ago, when an anonymous Democratic colleague murmured to the Hill newspaper that it might be time for Inouye to step down, senior Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller furiously rebuked the suggestion as "outrageous," "cowardly," and "a new low." So no one will speak up publicly, or even anonymously, any time soon. And with the 113th Congress just weeks from taking office, no one will take anything but temporary measures before the New Year anyway.
Looking ahead, however, the official order of seniority puts Vermont's Patrick Leahy next in line, followed by Iowa's Tom Harkin. But that's the order of seniority both for the defense subcommittee and for the committee as a whole, and it's unlikely that either man will take both jobs as Inouye did.
So what we're looking at is a complex game of musical chairs. To take over the full Appropriations Committee, Leahy would presumably have to give up his current chairmanship of Judiciary, a powerful position that might be too painful to part with. Harkin would have to give up HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions), which is not quite as big a sacrifice but still hurts.
Whichever man doesn't take the full committee could take the defense panel as a consolation prize, but they both already chair other appropriations subcommittees they'd have to give up for that (Foreign Operations for Leahy, Education for Harkin). Frankly neither Senator has been that active on Defense Appropriations this year, which hardly suggests a passion for the position.
So that brings us to the third-ranking Democrat on Appropriations: Maryland's Barbara Mikulski. Unlike either Leahy or Harkin, she has no other full-committee chair she'd have to give up to take the helm of Appropriations as a whole. To take the defense panel, meanwhile, the subcommittee chair Mikulski would have to give up is Commerce, Justice, & Science, which is no huge sacrifice.
Also unlike her more senior male colleagues, Mikulski has been very active on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, showing up for nearly as many hearings as Inouye himself. In fact, Mikulski once took Inouye's place as chairman, at his request, when the aging Hawaiian had to be absent for "unexpected" (and unspecified) reasons at a March hearing on the Navy.
It's too much to tout this as a trial run for Inouye's heir-apparent. More likely Mikulski was simply the most senior committee member who was actually bothering to go to that particular hearing. But as Woody Allen once said, 90% of life is showing up -- even in the US Senate.
Whoever takes whichever job, he or she will have big shoes to fill. Rest in piece, Daniel Inouye. Aloha.
2014 budget already delayed David Rogers, Politico December 16, 2012 The year-end budget impasse is being felt already in 2014.
The White House confirmed to POLITICO Sunday that it has deliberately slowed preparations for President Barack Obama's fiscal 2014 budget until it has a better fix on the current talks with Republicans in Congress.
The customary late November pass-backs from the Office of Management and Budget--telling federal agencies what resources they can expect to get in the the president's request--have been put on hold. "Yes. OMB has held off on pass-backs to agencies to determine if adjustments will be needed based on the current negotiations," an administration official said after POLITICO asked about the delay.
The likely result is the 2014 budget itself will also be later--possibly slipping into March when a stop gap spending bill to keep the government running for the current fiscal year is also slated to expire.
At one level, the self-imposed pause by OMB makes sense given that so much is up in the air right now. But it also shows how disruptive the impasse has become, sending out ripples that impact a wider circle of government.
House-Senate talks over a five-year farm bill are caught in the same quandary. Differences remain over the commodity and nutrition titles, but negotiators also seem reluctant to make the necessary compromises until they see a clear path for the bill to move forward.
A veteran of many farm bill debates, Mary Kay Thatcher, a chief lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau, told POLITICO that a deal is "entirely doable, positively doable" before Christmas. But at this stage no one is certain of the outcome, creating the real threat of a spike in milk prices after Jan 1 when the current dairy provisions expire.
A draft government-wide omnibus spending bill for the current fiscal year is in the same fix. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees are anxious to move but without some breakthrough, agencies will continue to operate under an outdated--and often inefficient-- continuing resolution approved as a temporary measure in September.
At the same time, history has to smile a little bit at the latest gambit to move a disaster aid bill through in these closing days.
The Senate this week takes up the $60.4 billion package which includes tens of billions in emergency community development, transit, and Army Corps of Engineers funds for states like New York and New Jersey recovering from Hurricane Sandy. And since spending bills typically begin in the House, an old shell had to be found as a vehicle.
In this case it will be HR 1, the very same, budget-cutting continuing resolution that began this Congress in February 2011 and set the stage for the great government shutdown crisis that spring.
Like an old car it's been kept on blocks in the Senate for this moment--- and now will be rolled out to carry the disaster aid package to the House.
Boehner Tells House GOP He's Moving to Plan B Chris Frates and Billy House, National Journal December 18, 2012 House Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday told Republicans he would open a second track to avert the fiscal cliff and keep taxes from rising for "most" Americans.
Defense bill hits home stretch Carlo Muñoz, The Hill December 17, 2012 House and Senate defense lawmakers are on the cusp of wrapping up a key piece of legislative business before Congress heads home for the holidays.
Congressional conferees and their staffs are nearly finished on a compromise version of the Pentagon's budget plan for fiscal 2012. A final draft of the legislation could arrive on President Obama's desk as soon as this week.
Getting the department's spending blueprint finalized by Congress was one of several legislative priorities laid out by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for the lame-duck session on Capitol Hill.
Concerns on Capitol Hill over whether Congress was in danger of not passing a Department of Defense authorization bill during this legislative year were quashed earlier this month, when the Senate finally approved its version of the $631 billion spending package.
The unanimous Senate continued the chamber's record of successfully passing a Pentagon budget bill uninterrupted for the last 51 years, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said after passage.
At the time, many defense legislators had hoped a final defense bill would reach the White House last week.
However, the process hit a snag in the lower chamber when House members postponed a key vote to move the defense bill to conference.
The delay, due to parliamentary issues surrounding provisions in the Senate's bill that could be considered "revenue originators," pushed congressional approval of the compromise bill into this week.
While the legislation is expected to wrap up this week, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle remain at loggerheads in the ongoing debate in Congress on how to avoid sequestration and the so-called "fiscal cliff."
Both sides have made progress, most recently with President Obama meeting with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) last Thursday on Capitol Hill. While both men remained mum on what was discussed during their powwow, each side agreed that time was quickly running out to find a bipartisan solution.
Democrats remain fixed on their calls for tax increases on Americans in the top tax brackets as a way to avert the $1.2 billion in automatic budget cuts set for January, under the White House's sequestration plan. Nearly half of those cuts will be taken out of defense coffers.
However, Republicans are adamant that any tax increases must be paired up with deep cuts in spending for various social welfare and entitlement programs.
For their part, top defense industry executives last week pressed GOP lawmakers to strongly consider tax increases in order to spare the cuts to the Pentagon budget reductions, which they argue would devastate the U.S. defense sector.
"We may not get a grand bargain in the next 28 days," Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush said, but added that there was "no reason" the White House and Congress could not come together and draft the framework to stop sequestration.
While Congress continues to wrangle over a sequestration solution, the White House is reportedly near a decision on their pick to lead the Pentagon.
A formal announcement naming former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as the administration's pick to replace soon-to-be outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta could arrive as soon as next week.
Hagel, who currently serves as the president of the Atlantic Council, has undergone the White House's vetting process for the top job at the Department of Defense and is awaiting President Obama's final approval for the Pentagon nomination, Bloomberg reported last Thursday.
Hagel was brought to the White House on Dec. 4 to discuss the possibility of taking Panetta's post after the Pentagon chief announced earlier this year that he would likely be leaving the department.
Hagel, former DOD policy chief Michele Flournoy and current Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter were the top three finalists to be Panetta's successor at DOD. He was also rumored to be at the top on Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz) list of defense chiefs during his failed presidential bid in 2008.
Come January, Another Try on Nuclear Waste Matthew L. Wald December 18, 2012 The incoming chairman of the Senate Energy Committee suggests that the Energy Department should stop billing utilities more in waste disposal fees than the department is actually spending on addressing nuclear wastes. And he wants the department to pay for moving some of the wastes out of spent fuel pools at the nation's highest-risk reactors and into dry casks.
Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, will take over as the committee's chairman when Congress begins its new session next month. In an interview on Monday, he pointed out that the department collects about $750 million a year in waste disposal fees at the rate of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated by the reactors that feed those utilities. Yet the government is spending nearly nothing, he noted.
That's partly because the Obama administration pulled the plug on a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles from Las Vegas in the Nevada desert, in its 2009-10 budget request.
Mr. Wyden said the committee would have to take a broad look at the issue of the Energy Department's nuclear waste fund. "The utilities are obviously unhappy they're paying the money,'' which is being "hijacked" for other purposes, he said -- namely, deficit reduction. The fund now has a balance of $25 billion. "There is a lot of frustration" about the money and the lack of progress, he said.
Collecting money at the same rate at which it is being spent has precedents. "That is how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is funded," Mr. Wyden pointed out. Most of the commission's budget comes from licensing fees.
The electric power industry has been pressing for cuts in the fees, as have some state officials who regulate the utilities. Whether Congress will go along is not clear, but every part of the nuclear waste question is now on the table.
The waste disposal fees were enshrined as law in the 1980s and are the last surviving element of a three-decade-old national consensus that the Energy Department should evaluate candidate sites, pick the best one and build a repository for nuclear wastes there. (Congress eventually told the department not to bother looking beyond Yucca Mountain -- an idea that seemed to meet with the approval of everybody outside Nevada for a long while.)
A blue-ribbon commission that President Obama appointed after shelving the Yucca Mountain plan recommended starting over and searching for a new site in a process based on the host state's consent, as opposed to forcing a repository on an unwilling Nevada.
That implies that a permanent repository is many years into the future, possibly beyond the lifetimes of many of the reactors now operating. Dominion said in October that it would close its Kewaunee nuclear plant in Wisconsin. And with the current glut of natural gas, more closings seem possible, which means leaving the wastes behind -- "stranded," as Mr. Wyden put it -- at the sites of defunct reactors.
Meanwhile, as the second anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan draws near, some members of Congress say it is time to reduce the risk posed by spent fuel by moving some of it to dry casks.
Alison Macfarlane, who took over as chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June, expressed support for that step before assuming her post but has not pressed it lately. Mr. Wyden proposes examining the reactors on a case-by-case basis, focusing on those with a boiling water design of the type used at Fukushima, to consider which ones should have their spent fuel pools partly emptied.
As for the search for a permanent burial site, Mr. Wyden said the government should be looking for volunteers but that the site would have to be technically suitable. He also said he would like to explore separating the military wastes from the civilian wastes, and perhaps sending them to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, which is located in a salt deposit near Carlsbad, N.M. The repository is now used for plutonium-contaminated materials but not high-level waste.
The military wastes have been dear to Mr. Wyden's heart for 30 years: many of them are in leaking tanks at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington, across the Columbia River from his home state of Oregon. But those wastes would have to be solidified before they could be buried, and the Energy Department has had great difficulty doing that.
Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, a Democrat who is head of the committee until the end of the lame duck session, has already introduced a bill to reform the process of picking a site, but action is unlikely this year. The lame duck session has failed so far to deal with its central task, a budget and tax compromise.
Nikki Haley appoints Rep. Tim Scott to Senate Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post December 17, 2012 South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) announced Monday that she will appoint Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) to the Senate.
Scott will replace Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who is leaving the chamber in January to head up the conservative Heritage Foundation.
"It is with great pleasure that I am announcing our next U.S. senator to be Congressman Tim Scott," Haley said. "I am strongly convinced that the entire state understands that this is the right U.S. senator for our state and our country."
Sen.-designate Scott, 47, will become the only African-American currently serving in the Senate and the first black Republican to serve in the upper chamber since the 1970s. He will also be the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction.
Scott, in his remarks after Haley, emphasized fiscal conservatism and praised DeMint and the people who made him the person he is today -- most importantly his mother.
"I am thankful for a strong mom that understood that love sometimes comes at the end of a switch," Scott said.
His selection is little surprise, as his name quickly rose to the top of most people's lists mere hours after DeMint announced he was going to resign. There are plenty of ambitious Republican politicians in South Carolina, but Scott made sense for the appointment for a whole host of reasons, including his close relationships with Haley and DeMint and his ties to both the conservative base and the party establishment.
Scott's new Senate seat will be up for a special election in 2014, when the final two years of DeMint's term will be at stake, and in 2016, when a full six-year Senate term will be up. It remains quite possible that he could face primary opposition.
Haley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will also be up for reelection in 2014, making it a huge year in the state's politics. Scott's House seat, meanwhile, will be up for grabs in a special election to be held in mid-2013.
"This is a day that's been long in the making in South Carolina," Graham said. "And I'm glad to see it come."
DeMint added: "I can walk away from the Senate with confidence knowing that someone is replacing me who is better than I am. I can tell you, Tim, you've inspired me from the moment I saw you speak in public."
Scott was first elected to the House in 2010, winning an open seat after defeating the son of longtime Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), the former segregationist who held the state's other Senate seat for nearly 50 years until 2003.
He will become just the seventh African-American to serve in the Senate and the first black senator from the South since the 1880s.
Only three black senators have been voted into office by their constituents: Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.), Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) and now-President Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The others were elected by their state legislatures (before direct election of U.S. senators began) or appointed.
Haley, the state's first Indian-American governor and first female governor, said she picked Scott because of his merits and not his racial identity.
"It is important to me, as a minority female, that Congressman Scott earned this seat," Haley said. "He earned this seat for the person that he is. He earned this seat with the results he has shown."
Four other Republican were on Haley's short list as of last week: Rep. Trey Gowdy, former state attorney general Henry McMaster, former state first lady Jenny Sanford and Haley appointee Catherine Templeton. Sanford notably is the ex-wife of former governor Mark Sanford (R), whose fast-rising political career was thwarted when he admitted to an affair with a woman in Argentina.
Scott said he expects to assume his new office on Jan. 3.
For more on Scott, check out the National Journal's profile of him from earlier this year.
Colleen Hanabusa favorite for Daniel Inouye seat Alex Isenstadt, Politico December 17, 2012 After Sen. Daniel Inouye's death, attention is expected to focus quickly as Democratic Rep. Colleen Hanabusa as his possible successor.
Hanabusa was elected to the House in 2010 after spending more than a decade in the Hawaii Senate. Over the span of her career, Hanabusa established herself as a close ally of Inouye, a Democrat and political giant in Hawaii.
Inouye's final wish was for Hanabusa to be appointed to his seat, a message he conveyed to the governor in a letter delivered at 11 a.m. Hawaiian time Monday, according to the late senator's office.
Hanabusa fell short in a May 2010 special election to fill the seat Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat, vacated to run for governor that year, but she won a full term in the general election. She is currently the longest-serving member in the state's House delegation -- her soon to be colleague, incoming Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, has yet to be sworn in.
Other possibilities include former Democratic Rep. Ed Case, Lt. Gov Brian Schatz and former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann.
Under state law, Abercrombie must name a member of Inouye's party to serve until 2014, when a special election would be held. The winner of the election would serve until 2016, when Inouye's term expires. The state Democratic Party will present the governor with a list of at least three candidates to choose from.
Democratic officials say they expect Abercrombie to move quickly to name Inouye's successor.
Two formidable former GOP officeholders are seen as potential contenders for the seat in 2014: former Gov. Linda Lingle and former Rep. Charles Djou. Both fell short in the November elections -- Lingle ran for Senate, while Djou lost a House bid.
Op-ed: Create a Manhattan Project National Historic Park at Hanford Clarence Moriwaki, Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association December 16, 2012 The National Park Service has an important job: protecting glorious, beautiful places, promoting patriotism and telling stories of American struggle and courage, mistakes and tragedy.
The Park Service has developed several sites that commemorate the history, decisions and moral questions raised during the World War II era. The USS Arizona, Manzanar, Minidoka, Bainbridge Island and Rosie the Riveter sites all memorialize a small part of the American World War II story.
Another momentous chapter of World War II is waiting to be told.
A bipartisan congressional bill would create a new Manhattan Project National Historic Park at Hanford; Los Alamos, N.M.; and Oak Ridge, Tenn. The park plan deserves our support.
On Dec. 6, 1941, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Engineering District in Central Washington, which would in time become known as the Manhattan Project. It helped create the first two atomic bombs.
When the Hanford Engineer Works claimed 40,000 acres in the Columbia Basin, my father, a farmer, was forced to leave and find work elsewhere. He later served as a U.S. Army sergeant in the Military Intelligence Service during the postwar occupation of Japan.
It was a bittersweet tour. While he met and married my mom there, he also learned that his father and perhaps six of his 13 siblings were likely among the more than 100,000 people who perished at Hiroshima, a result of the Manhattan Project's bomb.
Some believe a Manhattan Project National Historic Park would glorify nuclear warfare. As someone who lost family because of the atomic bomb, I agree that there is no glory in the first and only use of atomic weapons.
However, the Manhattan Project is an important chapter of American history, and I believe we should recount all parts of our heritage, even the painful moments.
We cannot rewrite history -- nor should we cast blame, guilt or shame. But we cannot sweep historic events under the rug either.
During World War II, many difficult decisions were made, and equally difficult moral questions were raised. Concentration and death camps were formed in Europe. Barely two months after the Pearl Harbor attack, an executive order by President Roosevelt set in motion the creation of 10 Japanese American concentration camps.
On March 30, 1942, 227 Bainbridge Islanders became the first of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, more than two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, to be forced into concentration camps.
With six days notice, they arrived at the Eagledale Ferry Dock and became the first community to enter California's Manzanar War Relocation Center. Later, most were reassigned to the last barracks at Idaho's Minidoka War Relocation Center, becoming emblematic bookends of the Japanese American incarceration story.
I helped generate support to make the Eagledale site a national memorial. In 2008, our efforts reached a milestone, when Congress and President George W. Bush approved the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Memorial, making it a satellite unit of Minidoka National Historic Site, managed by the Park Service.
The Park Service has done an extraordinary job to share the sad American chapter of Japanese American incarceration. If authorized by Congress, I believe it would do the same to tell the complex history of the Manhattan Project that created the world's first two atomic bombs.
The bill is sponsored by U.S. Reps. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, Chuck Fleishmann, R-Tenn., Ben Lujan, D-N.M., and Michael Grimm, R-N.Y.
World War II claimed more than 60 million lives, left vast physical and emotional scars and destruction across the globe, and shaped the destiny of nations for future generations.
Perhaps the beginning inspiration for the potential Manhattan Project National Historic Park could be found in the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial's maxim: "Nidoto nai yoni" or "Let it not happen again."
Clarence Moriwaki is president of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association and a regional council member of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Designing a Process for Consent-Based Siting of Used Nuclear Fuel Facilities: Analysis of Public Support Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Carol L. Silva, Kerry G. Herron, Evaristo "Tito" Bonano, and Rob P. Rechard; The Bridge on Social Sciences and Engineering Practice U.S. policies for long-term management of used nuclear fuel (UNF) have been placed on hold in the wake of the Obama administration's decision to withdraw the license application for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. After President Obama declared that the Nevada repository specified in the 1987 Amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was "unworkable," he directed Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to charter the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (BRC) to formulate recommendations for a new approach to the management of UNF. One of the major conclusions of the BRC was that prior policy efforts have not garnered sufficient trust and confidence from the public or the prospective host state. To address these concerns, the BRC's recommendations, delivered in January 2012, included the following key elements (BRC, 2012):
Given the importance of public trust and confidence to a sustainable and successful UNF management process, the focus of this article is on likely public perceptions and response to the BRC's core recommendations. Our findings are based on data collected by the National Security and Nuclear Policies (NSNP)4 project, which has measured public perceptions and beliefs about nuclear energy and the management of UNF annually since 2006. In a previous article in this journal (Jenkins-Smith et al., 2012) we addressed how policy and facility design considerations for UNF management relate to public acceptance.
In this follow-up article, we present findings from the June 2012 NSNP survey related to public understanding of current UNF management practices and investigate potential public reactions to the principles of consent-based siting recommended by the BRC. We measure (1) levels of public support for permanent and interim storage concepts, (2) credibility and perceptions of bias in institutional risk assessments, and (3) what constitutes "consent" for siting UNF facilities and how and when it may be granted and withdrawn. Our goal is to assess how readily the BRC's proposals might garner broad public support during the initial stages of policy development.
Rising radiation at SC nuclear dump prompts cleanup talk but no action Sammy Fretwell, The State December 16, 2012 COLUMBIA, SC -- Radioactive pollution is getting worse on parts of South Carolina's nuclear-waste dump near Barnwell, but state regulators say cleaning up the contaminated groundwater isn't in their plan.
Tritium continues to exceed federal safe drinking-water standards in and around the 41-year-old burial ground that has come to symbolize South Carolina's historic willingness to accept the nation's garbage. In some spots tritium levels are higher today than they were five years ago.
But the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control says the site is stable overall and no one is drinking the polluted water. So for now, the agency has no plan for a tritium cleanup. The dump's operator, Energy Solutions, agrees.
Pumping tritium out of groundwater or from a radiation-tinged creek would possibly contribute to air pollution as the tritium was expelled, state regulators said. At the same time, excavating waste from the dump could be more dangerous than leaving it in place, state regulators said during the Governor's Nuclear Advisory Council meeting last week.
"It's not likely you would dig into that because you would be exposing individuals to radiation," said Susan Jenkins, who heads DHEC's infectious and radioactive waste division. "That is not something we would probably want to do."
Since the low-level nuclear-waste dump opened in 1971, tritium has leaked from unlined burial pits, contaminated groundwater and trickled into a creek a half-mile away. The dump closed to the nation in 2008 but still is open for South Carolina and two other states' waste. A small neighborhood that relies on wells is just downhill from the creek, although Jenkins said radioactive material is not polluting the wells.
Jenkins said her agency has discussed a cleanup that would rely on "phytoremediation." That involves planting trees with long tap roots to suck up the tritium-polluted water. But no decision has been made on that idea, she said.
While groundwater cleanups can cost millions of dollars, at least one federal agency has taken on the challenge in South Carolina because of the threat of tritium.
The Savannah River Site, a federal nuclear-weapons complex next to the Barnwell site, has pumped tritium from water in some places and installed barriers to control the spread of pollution, said Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy.
The department also has used plants to absorb tritium from water on the SRS property, he said. Giusti said such decisions are usually dictated by comparing the cleanup cost to how serious the contamination levels are.
Bob Guild, a lawyer who is suing the state on behalf of environmentalists to require improved disposal practices at Barnwell, said DHEC should follow DOE's lead and remove the threat from the state-owned nuclear-waste dump. He said Energy Solutions of Utah, the dump's operator, should be responsible for the cost.
"The burden should be on them to stop the contamination," Guild said.
Energy Solutions spokesman Mark Walker, whose company acquired long-time site operator Chem-Nuclear several years ago, said the pollution levels don't warrant a cleanup.
During the meeting Thursday, DHEC's Jenkins presented data showing that tritium levels are rising at seven key points at the Barnwell site, while falling at nine others. At 11 other monitoring wells, there has been no trend recently, she said. In an interview Friday, she characterized the site as stable.
Among the data:
Tritium is a fast-moving radioactive pollutant that has been linked to certain forms of cancer in people who drink water containing large quantities of the material. But it also can indicate the flow of more toxic contaminants that are expected to move in groundwater later. Substances such as uranium and plutonium are among those.
Environmentalists who attended Thursday's meeting said the tritium pollution is a continuing concern. Among those was nationally known singer Jesse Colin Young, a founder of the 1960s-era folk-rock group the Youngbloods.
"I have to admit I was a little horrified by the tritium plume," said Young, who lives in the Aiken area.
The 235-acre nuclear-waste dump, which began operating in 1971, for decades took the nation's low-level atomic garbage. At the time it closed to the nation in 2008, the Barnwell County site was the only atomic-waste landfill that took all classifications of low-level waste from across the country.
The Legislature closed the site to all but South Carolina and two other states, New Jersey and Connecticut. For years, the state Legislature, under pressure from Chem-Nuclear, had continued to push back closure dates for the site because of the revenues generated for state government for dumping atomic waste.
Situated in the soggy ground of central South Carolina, the Barnwell dump sprang leaks not long after it opened. Tritium seeped into groundwater from unlined trenches.
State regulators assured the public for years that the site posed no danger to drinking water or the nearby Savannah River. But the agency never released data showing the extent of the pollution or where it was located until The State newspaper challenged the department in 2007.
Pollution maps released by the agency at the time showed that some contamination at the Barnwell dump exceeded that of the nearby Savannah River Site, which typically deals with much higher levels of radiation in waste material. The newspaper also identified a small neighborhood downhill from the leaking dump that had not been mentioned by state regulators in public meetings.
Today, the site still disposes of waste in much the same way it always did, although some improvements have been made to try and keep rainwater out of the trenches. It takes tritium about 120 years to break down completely in the environment.
DOE report on Hanford cleanup draws fire from citizens group Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald December 16, 2012 KENNEWICK -- Hanford Challenge has joined criticism of the Department of Energy (DOE) for spending eight years on a comprehensive study of cleanup of Hanford's radioactive tank waste without coming to a decision on how to treat all of the waste.
The report does not meet legal requirements, the citizens oversight group said.
Federal law requires the DOE to select its preferred cleanup methods in environmental-impact statements such as the newly completed Final Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement, according to Hanford Challenge.
"The failure of the Energy Department to declare a cleanup preference for vitrifying much of Hanford's radioactive waste is an irresponsible waste of time and taxpayer money," said Tom Carpenter, Hanford Challenge executive director.
The study and resulting document, which Hanford Challenge counted at about 10,000 pages, cost $85 million.
The Seattle-based group also is questioning one of the conclusions reached in the document, a recommendation that once 149 underground tanks are mostly emptied, they remain in the ground.
The 1 percent of waste that could be left in the tanks plus the estimated 1 million gallons of radioactive waste that leaked from the tanks in the past will continue to contaminate the soil, the groundwater and the Columbia River for thousands of years without a more complete cleanup, according to Hanford Challenge.
"Priority must be placed on remediating leaked contamination to protect the groundwater and Columbia River," Carpenter said. "It will be expensive. However, protecting current and future generations, the Columbia River and ecosystem of the Hanford Reach is well worth it."
All the waste that has leaked from the tanks to the soil beneath them cannot be cleaned up if at least some of the tanks are not removed from the ground, Carpenter said.
At a Web-based briefing for the Hanford Advisory Board last week, Carpenter questioned the legality of not making a decision on how to treat all 56 million gallons of tank waste in the environmental study. The waste is left from past production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear-weapons program.
The $12.2 billion vitrification plant under construction may be able to treat as little as one-third of the low-activity waste in a reasonable time, and 90 percent of the waste in the tanks is expected to be separated out and classified as low-activity waste.
The final report on the environmental study considers grouting the waste, using steam reforming to treat it, expanding the waste-treatment plant to vitrify all the waste or using bulk vitrification to glassify the waste in large blocks the size of land-sea shipping containers.
However, the report does not pick a preferred alternative.
The DOE has not publicly addressed the question of whether it was legally required to choose a method.
Instead, it sent the Tri-City Herald a statement saying that "DOE believes it is beneficial to further study the potential cost, safety and environmental performance of alternative treatment technologies."
The Hanford Advisory Board in June recommended that DOE discontinue efforts to study bulk vitrification, grouting and steam reforming for tank waste treatment.
Washington state also does not support waste-treatment methods that do not vitrify the waste, saying all would produce waste forms that would release more radioactive material into the environment than vitrified waste forms.
The study analysis clearly supports expanding the vitrification plant by adding a second Low Activity Waste Facility as the only environmentally protective option for supplemental treatment, according to the state Department of Ecology. It also said the report was incomplete without a recommendation for a treatment method.
Hanford Challenge called the decision to leave up to 1 percent of the difficult-to-retrieve waste in the tanks, add grout and bury the tanks in place a "disappointment."
If that happens, previously leaked waste beneath the tanks and the remaining 1 percent of the waste eventually would contaminate the Columbia River, it said, based on information in the study report.
The study report agreed that "past leaks are major contributors to potential long-term groundwater impacts."
The DOE responded to Hanford Challenge's concerns with a statement saying that leaving tanks in place may require soil removal or treatment.
The soil is contaminated to 225 feet deep below some tanks, in part because of past practices of discharging contaminated liquids, according to the study report. But in other places, the contamination is not as deep.
The report mentions options such as technologies that dry out soil between the ground surface and the groundwater, which could help keep contamination from spreading. In addition, other new ways to sequester the waste beneath the ground's surface without digging it up could be considered.
However, there are uncertainties about the effectiveness of using advanced technologies on contaminated areas, particularly with the size of contaminated areas unknown, the study report said.
The DOE recommended against digging up the tanks, based on worker safety and technology concerns, according to the study report.
DOE drafts study on borrow pits Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald December 17, 2012 The Department of Energy is proposing digging up an additional 14 million cubic yards of sand and gravel at Hanford to use as fill material.
It has prepared a draft study proposing expanding nine existing borrow pits closest to where the fill will be needed and adding one new borrow pit. Together they would provide sand and gravel over 10 years. The study does not address borrow pits for silt and soil.
The additional fill material is needed because environmental cleanup work, primarily near the Columbia River, has turned up previously unknown contaminated areas. In addition, other areas have had more contamination that expected.
Near the former C Reactor, soil has been dug up as deep as 85 feet to remove chromium, a chemical once added to reactor cooling water to prevent corrosion.
Contaminated soil is taken to the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility, a lined landfill in central Hanford for waste contaminated with hazardous chemical or low-level radioactive waste. The clean fill material is needed to backfill the excavations and to allow native vegetation to be replanted.
By expanding multiple borrow pits, the distance sand and gravel would have to be hauled would be reduced and greenhouse gas emissions would be minimized, according to the report.
The borrow pits will be recontoured to "blend stably and naturally with adjacent areas in a pattern that is both aesthetically pleasing and that would support healthy establishment of native (plant) communities" when they are closed, the report stated.
Among the largest expansions would be 35 additional acres of borrow pit up to 121 feet deep near the 100 D Reactor, where chromium-contaminated soil in the area is expected to be dug up to near groundwater. The borrow pit there now covers 64 acres.
The new borrow pit would be between the K and N reactors and would cover 30 acres and be up to 124 feet deep.
The additional area added among all the borrow pits would total 187 acres, bringing the total borrow pit area to 704 acres.
The study, an environmental assessment, is posted at www.hanford.gov. Comments may be sent until Jan. 14 to borrowareaEA@rl.com or Paula Call, NEPA Document Manager, Borrow Area Expansion EA, Department of Energy, P.O. Box 550, Mailstop A2-15, Richland, WA 99352.
Notice of Availability of the Final Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement for the Hanford Site, Richland, Washington DOE Federal Register Notice December 14, 2012 SUMMARY: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announces the availability of its Final Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement for the Hanford Site, Richland, Washington (Final TC & WM EIS, DOE/EIS-0391), prepared pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This final environmental impact statement addresses all public comments on the Draft TC & WM EIS, which was issued in October 2009, and identifies DOE's preferred alternatives.
Savannah River Site Offering Public Tours Associated Press December 17, 2012 AIKEN, S.C. (AP) - South Carolina's former nuclear weapons complex is again offering the public an opportunity to tour the facility.
Starting Monday, members of the public can sign up for the Savannah River Site tours that begin in January. Organizers say they're offering 22 free driving tours in 2013, with about 1,100 openings. Sign Up Here http://www.srs.gov/general/tour/public.htm Guests will be given an overview and safety briefing before the four-hour tour. Savannah River officials say visitors can learn about how the U.S. Department of Energy has used the site and what happens there now. The 310-square-mile site once produced plutonium and tritium for atomic bombs. Work there is now focused mostly on research and cleaning up areas of the site contaminated during weapons production and sealing off former reactor sites with concrete. |
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