ECA Update: January 31, 2013
Published: Thu, 01/31/13
Senators to Revive Nuclear Waste Plan Over House Objections
Geof Koss, CQ January 29, 2013 A group of senators pursuing legislative efforts to overhaul federal nuclear waste policy say they will press ahead despite opposition by House Republicans who want to see spent fuel buried at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said Tuesday that he and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., will resurrect language they included in the Energy Department's fiscal 2013 appropriations bill last year that would authorize a pilot program for moving radioactive waste from power plants to interim storage sites.
"This is, we think, a good position ... and we're going to move ahead with it," he said.
Feinstein and Alexander -- chairwoman and ranking member of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee -- had hoped to include the language in the continuing resolution (PL 112-175) currently funding the federal government, but it was left out after House supporters of Yucca Mountain objected.
One of the objecting House members, Illinois Republican John Shimkus, recently signaled that he would continue to oppose efforts to overhaul nuclear waste policy unless Yucca Mountain remains in consideration under a new strategy.
"No interim storage provision, I believe, will move without a connection to Yucca Mountain," he said last week, where he noted that he had made his position clear to Feinstein and Alexander during a December meeting that was also attended by Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich.
Alexander said he was sympathetic to the position of House members, given that Yucca Mountain remains the congressionally designated disposal site under a 1987 law (PL 100-203). However, he said they should accept what he and Feinstein have proposed or come up with a "better idea for it."
"I understand their position because the law is we should be using the Nevada site, but if we all just sit around and do nothing, nothing will happen," he said. "So Sen. Feinstein and I are going to move ahead and see if we can make some progress."
Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is drafting a comprehensive nuclear waste legislative overhaul, said she is stumped about how to move past the impasse over Yucca Mountain, which the Obama administration is attempting to shut down.
"I would hope that we can find a path forward, but it is one of the biggest obstacles that we face right now," she said Tuesday.
Murkowski planned to meet later Tuesday with Alexander, Feinstein and new Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to discuss the nuclear waste bill, which would implement numerous recommendations made by an expert panel commissioned by President Barack Obama after his administration moved to end the Yucca Mountain project.
Collectively, the four represent the top Senate authorizers and appropriators with oversight over the Energy Department. Wyden replaced New Mexico Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman, who retired at the end of the 112th Congress.
Murkowski said she hoped the four could unite behind a single bill, unlike in the last Congress, when Bingaman introduced his own legislation after disagreeing with the other senators over linkage between interim and permanent storage sites.
"I think that if we can do this on a bipartisan basis, we can gain some momentum here and perhaps finally move this issue forward because we haven't seen any progress on it in years," she said.
Wyden, whose neighboring state of Washington is home to vast quantities of Cold War nuclear waste stored at the Hanford site, praised both the group's earlier work and the recommendations of the blue ribbon presidential commission. However, like Bingaman, he said he wanted to make sure that interim storage sites did not become de facto permanent repositories.
"I do think the idea that some places are sort of default sites because they've already got significant waste is something that does not constitute good policy, and obviously I would have great concern about that," he said Tuesday.
Senate to Vote on Debt Deal
Billy House, National Journal January 31, 2013 The Democratic-controlled Senate is set to give final passage Thursday to a bill allowing the U.S. Treasury to keep borrowing money until May 19 and ward off the risk of default, putting off one battle as other fights loom with Republicans in upcoming weeks over automatic spending cuts and keeping the government operating.
President Obama is expected to sign the legislation to suspend the $16.4 trillion limit on federal borrowing, to give the White House and congressional negotiators more time to strike a broader deal on a longer debt-ceiling extension and other battles tied to reducing federal deficits.
The Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center has estimated that as much as $450 billion will be added to the federal debt through mid-May under the measure. But if the bill is not approved, the government is likely to default on its debt obligations as early as mid-February.
A senior Senate aide said the measure, which passed last week by the Republican-controlled House, is to be taken up in the early afternoon. A quartet of proposed Republican amendments will be addressed prior to the vote, but they are unlikely to be adopted.
Those amendments include one offered by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to ban sending F-16 fighter jets to Egypt, and another by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, dubbed the "End Government Shutdowns Act" to create an automatic stop-gap spending measure as a temporary substitute for appropriations bills not completed by the Oct. 1 start of a fiscal year. The aim is described by sponsors as a way to avoid "budget busting bills" being forced through Congress against the threat of a government shutdown. None are expected to be passed and attached to the bill.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was able to get the measure passed last week with a 285-144 vote. He and other Republicans did so while playing down the bill's main purpose - the debt-limit increase - and emphasizing instead its provision to force the Senate to pass a budget plan this spring for the first time in four years, or see lawmakers' pay withheld. In fact, the name they've given the measure is the "No Budget, No Pay Act."
In reality, Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., had already announced that the Senate would move a budget resolution through committee and to the floor this year.
To gain passage, Boehner also had to make several commitments privately to rank-and-file members that could eventually complicate the upcoming fiscal battles.
Those include a promise that House Republicans would in early March stick to cuts agreed to in the so-called sequestration process, to be split evenly between military and discretionary domestic spending, unless replaced by other spending cuts of equal size from other parts of the budget. Boehner also promised that a continuing resolution needed near the end of March to keep government running through Oct. 1 will limit additional spending.
Longer-term, Boehner also has committed to passing annual budget resolutions that would erase the nation's annual deficits within 10 years, beginning with the fiscal 2014 measure that House Republicans will pass this spring - something many experts say would be difficult to achieve without either adding new revenues or devastating entitlements and other spending.
Although the bill being voted on today would allow the government to keep borrowing until May 19, a Bipartisan Policy Center analysis of the legislation last week projects that the next time the debt ceiling will have to be raised again likely won't be until August.
Hagel supports nuclear arms cuts, then elimination Robert Burns, Associated Press January 29, 2013 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Chuck Hagel, the likely next secretary of defense, would be the first to enter the Pentagon as a public advocate for sharply reducing the number of U.S. nuclear weapons, possibly without equivalent cuts by Russia. He supports an international movement called Global Zero that favors eliminating all nuclear weapons.
That puts him outside the orthodoxy embraced by many of his fellow Republicans but inside a widening circle of national security thinkers -- including President Barack Obama -- who believe nuclear weapons are becoming more a liability than an asset, less relevant to 21st century security threats like terrorism.
"Sen. Hagel certainly would bring to office a more ambitious view on nuclear reductions than his predecessors," said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "While he would likely take a less dramatic position in office, it might not be a bad thing to have a secretary of defense question what nuclear deterrence requires today."
The customary stance of defense secretaries in the nuclear age has been that the weapons are a necessary evil, a required ingredient in American defense strategy that can be discarded only at the nation's peril.
Hagel, 66, takes a subtly different view -- one shared by Obama but opposed by those in Congress who believe disarmament is weakness and that an outsized American nuclear arsenal must be maintained indefinitely as a counterweight to the nuclear ambitions of anti-Western countries like North Korea and Iran.
Hagel argues for doing away with nuclear weapons entirely, but not immediately and not unilaterally.
In a letter to Obama two months after his former Senate colleague entered the White House in 2009, Hagel wrote that Global Zero was developing a step-by-step plan for achieving "the total elimination of all nuclear weapons," but with a "clear, realistic and pragmatic appreciation" for the difficulty of realizing that goal.
Dozens of prominent politicians, diplomats and retired military leaders signed the letter. One month later Obama spoke in Prague of "a world without nuclear weapons," while saying it might not happen in his lifetime. Obama declared that "as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it."
Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska whose nomination has drawn heated criticism for his past statements on Israel, Iran and gays, is likely to also face questions on nuclear issues at his Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for Thursday. A Vietnam war veteran, he served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.
The questions actually began last week at the confirmation hearing for John Kerry, Obama's nominee for secretary of state. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he found Hagel's affiliation with Global Zero "very concerning," and he worried that Hagel's views appeared to make him "very different than previous defense leaders."
Kerry said he believes Hagel is a realist on the topic of nuclear arms reductions. But he also acknowledged that when he first heard about Global Zero's central vision -- the elimination of all nuclear weapons -- "I sort of scratched my head and I said, 'What? You know, how's that going to work?'" But then he came to see this as nothing more than a long-range goal -- "it's not something that could happen in today's world."
Hagel, indeed, is thinking long term.
"Getting to global zero will take years," Hagel wrote in the March 2009 letter to Obama on behalf of Global Zero. "So it is important that we set our course toward a world without nuclear weapons now to ensure that our children do not live under the nuclear shadow of the last century."
Hagel stands out in this regard in part because history -- first the demise of the Soviet Union, then the rise of terrorism as a global threat -- has changed how many people think about the deterrent value of nuclear weapons. For decades after the birth of the atomic age in the 1940s the chief concern was controlling the growth, and later managing the shrinkage, of nuclear arsenals without upsetting the balance of power.
Today the thinking by many national security experts has shifted as the threat of all-out nuclear war has faded and terrorist organizations with potentially global reach, like al-Qaida, are trying to get their hands on a nuclear device.
"Hagel's views reflect the growing bipartisan consensus in the U.S. security establishment that whatever benefits nuclear weapons may have had during the Cold War are now outweighed by the threat they present," said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, which supports efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Hagel was co-author of a Global Zero report last May that proposed, as an interim step, reducing the U.S. arsenal to 900 weapons within a decade, with half deployed and the other half in reserve. That compares with a current U.S. stockpile of 5,000, of which 1,700 are deployed and capable of striking targets around the globe.
The report said these cuts could be taken unilaterally if not negotiated with the Russians or carried out through reciprocal U.S. and Russian presidential directives. It called the unilateral approach "less good" but feasible. At a later stage China and other nuclear weapons countries would be brought to the table for negotiations on further cuts on the path to global zero, it said.
The White House last year weighed options for substantial new cuts in the number of deployed weapons, possibly to about 1,000 or 1,100 and probably as part of a negotiation with Moscow. But a decision, following a lengthy review of U.S. nuclear targeting requirements, was put off prior to the November election. Officials and private experts close to the administration believe Obama will soon embrace those cuts.
Previous secretaries of defense have supported reducing the U.S. nuclear stockpile under certain circumstances and have paid lip service to the United States' commitment under the 1970 nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to eventually eliminate its nuclear arms. But none has pushed these ideas like Hagel has.
"It's historic," said Bruce Blair, a co-founder of Global Zero and a former Air Force nuclear missile launch control officer.
"We will have, if he's confirmed, a secretary of defense who's committed to the sharp reduction of nuclear weapons, leading down a path toward their elimination," Blair said in an interview last week. "I don't think any sitting secretary of defense has ever come anywhere close to Hagel's advocacy for this cause."
Leon Panetta, the current defense secretary, has not taken a public stance on future nuclear reductions.
Some Pentagon chiefs, like William Perry, became public advocates for eliminating nuclear weapons after leaving office.
At least one apparently harbored doubts about the conventional wisdom while still serving.
In his 1995 memoir, Robert McNamara, who served as President John F. Kennedy's defense secretary, wrote that by the time he entered the Pentagon in 1961 he had privately concluded that nuclear arms served no useful purpose. But he could not say that publicly, he wrote, because it contradicted established U.S. policy.
DOE to Address Small Businesses Barriers in Government Contracting at Waste Management Conference
EM News Flash
January 31, 2013
PHOENIX - EM and the DOE Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU) are working to address barriers that hinder small businesses from competing for prime contracts for work in the Cold War cleanup program.
To that end, OSDBU and EM are co-hosting a discussion led by a panel of diverse experts from DOE headquarters and leaders from small business companies. The panel dialogue will focus on input received from small businesses.
The panel will meet at 3:15 p.m. on Feb. 26 during the Waste Management Conference in Phoenix Feb. 24-28. Hosted by WM Symposia, the annual conference brings together experts from around the world to discuss management of radioactive material and related topics. During the session hosted by DOE, the panelists will interact with the audience as they describe strategies for achieving small business contracting objectives and mitigation of barriers that may affect small business contracting opportunities.
Panelists include OSDBU Deputy Director John Hale III; EM Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition and Project Management Jack Surash; Dade Moeller CEO Matt Moeller; and Wastren Advantage, Inc. President and CEO Steve Moore. Dade Moeller provides professional and technical services in environment, safety and health and quality assurance. Wastren Advantage provides solutions for
The Small Business Administration Decides to Hurt Small Businesses James Conca, Forbes January 27, 2013 Although a rose by any other name may smell just as sweet, the new way of how we define government support to small businesses may not pass the smell test.
For some strange and unknown reason, the Small Business Administration has changed how it defines government support of small businesses, which will inadvertently destroy many small businesses, especially those supported through the Department of Energy.
As with most BureauSpeak, this may a bit tough to follow - the SBA decided that government agencies need to increase their support to small businesses to 10% of their budget. Sounds good. Sounds like an increase. But it's not.
To get credit for supporting small businesses, government agencies like DOE and DoD will be forced to make that support be through prime contracts. Prime. As in Directly-To-The-Government. Not through subcontracts from an existing Prime. In fact, the agency will get no credit if the contract is a sub to an existing Prime, like most are with DOE.
Although I really support the SBA and think they do a wonderful job in general, the brainiac who came up with this idea knows nothing about the DOE. It is EXTREMELY difficult for a small business to be a DOE prime contractor.
It might work for the Department of Agriculture, but once the word plutonium enters a contract, things get a little weird.
And as you might expect, it gets a lot more expensive with a lot more paperwork. Throw in the Price-Anderson Act, the huge liability of working with radiation, beryllium and asbestos, the extensive training requirements, safety issues, QA audit requirements, and the host of accountants, lawyers and HR people needed to be a prime to DOE, and you can imagine that few small businesses could even submit a proposal to be a prime contractor to the Department of Energy.
Everyone in the field knows this. That's why most DOE support to small businesses is as subcontracts from an existing large Prime like Bechtel or Lockheed Martin - you know, the big guys that already have the legions of lawyers and accountants needed. Once the big guys have done all the work setting things up, it's much easier to get the actual small businesses on board, very much like supporting an intern or an apprentice.
And the Primes get a lot of credit for this, as they should, both with the government and with the local communities that are the real beneficiaries of this support. Often, the prime contracts include small business set-asides, or goals, that are tied to award fees. This is a time-proven system that works very very well.
DOE has done this for small businesses so capably that at the Hanford Site in Washington State, DOE provides over $500 million in subcontracts to hundreds of actual small businesses through its Primes, over 40% of DOE's budget at this site. Amazingly higher than any other government agency. The innovation, the breakthroughs, the educational benefits, all the things that thrive when real small businesses are supported by the government, have all thrived here because of this support.
However, only a fraction is through prime contracts to small businesses, so the SBA is unhappy, and most of this support won't count as support anymore. In fact, DOE's last SBA score card was an F (DOE gets an F), even though the previous year they got a B for just about the same support (DOE gets a B).
The DOE has tried to explain this to the SBA, tried to push back, and has held off the most egregious harm as long as it could. But word came down recently from above that the DOE better tow this SBA line or else! (Not sure how SBA could have this much power over DOE, but hey, I don't have the Org Chart.)
So only the biggest small businesses will be able to compete as a prime to DOE. Restructuring things to meet the new SBA rules will cut DOE support to small businesses even more (it takes a lot more money and time to put a prime contract in place and monitor it directly and that money will have to come from DOE's small business allocation itself). DOE will transfer most of this support from actual small businesses to only the biggest small businesses, e.g., those with almost 500 employees or almost $30 million/yr, depending upon which NAICS code is used.
Not really the Mom&Pop league.
And that's the unforeseen collateral damage of this policy. Real small businesses will be driven out wholesale, Mom&Pop companies will simply fold, especially those in the cities and towns where the DOE sites exist, that need them the most, and that grew up along with the DOE mission. Because SBA's new rules also don't care whether these businesses are local or not.
Small business support at this site with drop from about $500 million to maybe $200 to $300 million. There is an easy administrative fix to this problem. Subcontract dollars are as well-tracked as direct support. Just give the agencies credit for getting the support to small businesses regardless of the specific contractual vehicle.
I know someone sold the White House on this plan because it sounded like the government would increase support to small businesses. But it only sounds good to those who don't know this song.
McKeon, Smith Announce HASC Subcommittee Membership for 113th Congress
House Armed Services Committee Press Release
January 29, 2013
Washington D.C. - Today, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA) and Ranking Member, Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA), announced subcommittee members for the 113th Congress and made the following statements.
"Our Members serve as the backbone of the Armed Services Committee. I'm pleased with both the leadership and the expertise that our subcommittee chairmen bring to table. I expect that each of them will continue our strong record of bipartisanship, as we endeavor to fulfill our constitutional obligation to provide for the common defense," McKeon said.
"Our committee membership represents a diverse, cross-cut of the country with a wide range of expertise and experience," Smith said. "Together, over the coming months and years, we will work to ensure that the men and women of our armed forces have the tools and resources necessary to deter, confront and defeat threats wherever they may emerge.
"Led by a strong and seasoned group of Ranking Members, the subcommittees will each focus on an important portion of the overall defense budget and their respective areas of departmental oversight. Ranking Member leadership will be imperative to ensuring that the Department of Defense is deploying and utilizing resources as efficiently and effectively as possible," Smith said.
Below are the Subcommittee assignments for the 113th Congress:
Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities
Republican Members (10)
Mac Thornberry of Texas, Chairman
Jeff Miller of Florida
John Kline of Minnesota
Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania
Rich Nugent of Florida
Trent Franks of Arizona
Duncan Hunter of California
Chris Gibson of New York
Vicky Hartzler of Missouri
Joe Heck of Nevada
Democratic Members (8)
James R. Langevin of Rhode Island, Ranking Member
Susan A. Davis of California
Hank Johnson of Georgia
Andre Carson of Indiana
Dan Maffei of New York
Derek Kilmer of Washington
Joaquin Castro of Texas
Scott Peters of California
Military Personnel
Republican Members (8)
Joe Wilson of South Carolina, Chairman
Walter Jones of North Carolina
Joe Heck of Nevada
Austin Scott of Georgia
Brad Wenstrup of Ohio
Jackie Walorski of Indiana
Chris Gibson of New York
Kristi Noem of South Dakota
Democratic Members (6)
Susan A. Davis of California, Ranking Member
Robert A. Brady of Pennsylvania
Madeleine Z. Bordallo of Guam
David Loebsack of Iowa
Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts
Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire
Readiness
Republican Members (11)
Rob Wittman of Virginia, Chairman
Rob Bishop of Utah
Vicky Hartzler of Missouri
Austin Scott of Georgia
Kristi Noem of South Dakota
Randy Forbes of Virginia
Frank LoBiondo of New Jersey
Mike Rogers of Alabama
Doug Lamborn of Colorado
Scott Rigell of Virginia
Steven Palazzo of Mississippi
Democratic Members (9)
Madeleine Z. Bordallo of Guam, Ranking Member
Joe Courtney of Connecticut
David Loebsack of Iowa
Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii
Jackie Speier of California
Ron Barber of Arizona
Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire
Bill Enyart of Illinois
Pete Gallego of Texas
Seapower and Projection Forces
Republican Members (10)
Randy Forbes of Virginia, Chairman
Mike Conaway of Texas
Duncan Hunter of California
Scott Rigell of Virginia
Steve Palazzo of Mississippi
Rob Wittman of Virginia
Mike Coffman of Colorado
Jon Runyan of New Jersey
Kristi Noem of South Dakota
Paul Cook of California
Democratic Members (8)
Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, Ranking Member
Joe Courtney of Connecticut, Vice Ranking Member
James R. Langevin of Rhode Island
Rick Larsen of Washington
Hank Johnson of Georgia
Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii
Derek Kilmer of Washington
Scott Peters of California
Strategic Forces
Republican Members (10)
Mike Rogers of Alabama, Chairman
Trent Franks of Arizona
Doug Lamborn of Colorado
Mike Coffman of Colorado
Mo Brooks or Alabama
Joe Wilson of South Carolina
Mike Turner of Ohio
John Fleming of Louisiana
Rich Nugent of Florida
Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma
Democratic Members (8)
Jim Cooper of Tennessee, Ranking Member
Loretta Sanchez of California
James R. Langevin of Rhode Island
Rick Larsen of Washington
John Garamendi of California
Hank Johnson of Georgia
Andre Carson of Indiana
Marc Veasey of Texas
Tactical Air and Land Forces
Republican Members (13)
Mike Turner of Ohio, Chairman
Frank LoBiondo of New Jersey
John Fleming of Louisiana
Chris Gibson of New York
Jon Runyan of New Jersey
Martha Roby of Alabama
Paul Cook of California
Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma
Brad Wenstrup of Ohio
Jackie Walorski of Indiana
Mac Thornberry of Texas
Walter Jones of North Carolina
Rob Bishop of Utah
Democratic Members (11)
Loretta Sanchez of California, Ranking Member
Mike McIntyre of North Carolina
Jim Cooper of Tennessee
John Garamendi of California
Ron Barber of Arizona
Dan Maffei of New York
Joaquin Castro of Texas
Tammy Duckworth of Illinois
Bill Enyart of Illinois
Pete Gallego of Texas
Marc Veasey of Texas
Oversight & Investigations
Republican Members (6)
Martha Roby of Alabama, Chairman
Mike Conaway of Texas
Mo Brooks of Alabama
Walter Jones of North Carolina
Austin Scott of Georgia
Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma
Democratic Members (4)
Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts, Ranking Member
Rob Andrews of New Jersey
Jackie Speier of California
Tammy Duckworth of Illinois
U.S. To Bury Almost All Existing Nuclear Waste; Recycling Deferred At Least 20 Years
Jeff McMahon, Forbes January 28, 2013 There's little hope that the 70,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel dispersed across the United States will ever be recycled, according to a recent study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory--so nearly all existing waste will go into the earth.
In a study completed late last year, Oak Ridge officials determined that the U.S. is at least 20 years away from large-scale reprocessing of used nuclear fuel, if it decides to pursue such technologies. By then, they estimate, nuclear plants will have generated another 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel.
"Based on the technical assessment, about 68,450 (metric tons) or about 98 percent of the total current inventory by mass, can proceed to permanent disposal without the need to ensure retrievability for reuse or research purposes," Oak Ridge officials conclude in a report issued late last year. The remaining 2 percent should be reserved for research into storage and reprocessing technologies, the report advised.
The Oak Ridge report came to light this month when it was cited by the Department of Energy in a document revealing DOE's plan to seek a new permanent geologic waste depository. The country's previous depository, Yucca Mountain, was defunded by Congress and the Obama Administration in 2011.
The United States long opposed the reprocessing of used nuclear fuel because of terrorism and proliferation concerns, but DOE began researching new reprocessing technologies in 2005, and the Obama Administration has remained open to new technologies.
In 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told Congress "there is research that has to be done, again, because reprocessing has the potential for greatly reducing both the amount and lifetime of the waste and to extend the nuclear fuel."
At the time--before meltdowns and hydrogen explosions damaged spent fuel pools at Fukushima--the U.S. appeared more open to recycling processes like those employed in France.
After Fukushima, The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, co-chaired by Chu, adopted more cautious language about recycling: "no currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments--including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies--have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenges the nation confronts over at least the next several decades, if not longer."
But neither the Blue Ribbon report nor the administration's response close the door to reprocessing, calling it "premature for the United States to commit, as a matter of policy, to 'closing' the nuclear fuel cycle given the large uncertainties that exist about the merits and commercial viability of different fuel cycle and technology options."
Although reprocessing offers some benefits over long-term storage, few anti-nuclear activists embrace it.
"Recycling is a euphemism for reprocessing which is one of the worst polluters of the atmosphere and the ocean, and is a direct conduit to proliferation," said Mali Martha Lightfoot, executive director of the Helen Caldicott Foundation. "It is not really a solution to anything except how can the industry get more of our money. It also ups the ante for reactor accident danger, as in the case of Fukushima, because MOX fuel has plutonium in it."
Mixed-oxide or MOX fuel is recycled from nuclear warheads.
The United States' current inventory of domestic used nuclear fuel "is massive, diverse, dispersed, and increasing," according to the Oak Ridge report. Stored at 79 temporary sites in 34 states, it represents"a total of about 23 billion curies of long-lived radioactivity."
America's Nuclear Dumpsters
Geoffrey Brumfiel, Slate
January 30, 2013
While the rest of America spent January debating new gun control laws, one government agency announced its plans to expand the use of high-capacity magazines, assault weapons, and even fully automatic machine guns. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation's nuclear plants, is seeking the firepower not for securing the plants themselves, but to defend their nuclear waste.
Since America's commercial reactors started opening in the 1960s and '70s, nuclear waste has been piling up. At first, it was stored in spent fuel pools--swimming pools you'd never, ever want to swim in. That was fine for a time, but by the 1980s, the pools started to get crowded. So the utilities began putting old fuel rods in something they call dry cask storage, and I'll call nuclear dumpsters. They're big, they're white, and they're literally kept out back like the rest of the trash.
This system of nuclear disposal might seem a bit shortsighted. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years; the full life of a machine-gun-toting security guard is 80 or 90, tops. There's got to be a better solution. And here's the crazy part: There is. The scientists have proposed it. The environmentalists and the power companies agree on it. So why isn't America doing it?
The answer in one word: politics. When the nuclear plants were built, the utilities never wanted to take care of the waste long-term. That was going to be the job of the federal government. Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the feds were supposed to find a place to bury the old fuel for good. Deep geologic disposal (as it's known) was, and still is, considered the best long-term solution for nuclear waste.
The Department of Energy started considering a number of sites, including one in Washington, one in Texas, and one in Nevada. They were taking their sweet time doing scientific studies, so in 1987, Congress decided to choose for them. Jim Wright, the speaker of the House, was from Texas. Tom Foley, the majority leader, was from Washington State. That left Nevada. Under an amendment to the original act, Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was enshrined in law as America's nuclear landfill.
I've been to Yucca Mountain, and you could be forgiven for thinking it would make a great place for nuclear waste. It's in the middle of the desert, and the only signs of life for miles are a few trailers, a state prison, and a brothel. It's also right next to a patch of land where the government conducted underground nuclear weapons tests. There's plenty of spare tunneling equipment lying around. There have been some serious technical issues raised over the years, but the folks at the Department of Energy thought they could engineer their way around them.
But there is one problem no amount of engineering can fix: Almost everybody in Nevada hates the project. Around 75 percent of the state's citizenry opposed Yucca Mountain from the day it was forced on them by Congress, says Steve Frishman, a geologist who works with Nevada's Nuclear Waste Task Force. Opposing the waste dump "is still a litmus test for statewide elected office," he says.
National office, too. Harry Reid, now the powerful Senate majority leader, was a junior senator when Yucca Mountain was designated in 1987, and he has devoted his entire career to killing the project. And in a 2008 campaign speech in Las Vegas, President Obama promised to find "some place other than right here at Yucca Mountain" for the nation's nuclear waste. He went on to win the state.
After the 2008 election, Reid and Obama set to work killing the site with the same political zeal as the 1987 Congress that assigned it to Nevada. First, Reid slashed the funding for work at Yucca. Then in 2010, the Department of Energy announced it would withdraw its application for a license to store nuclear waste there.
But here's the really crazy part. At the same time that Obama killed Yucca Mountain, he assigned a bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel to look at the nuclear waste problem. Their conclusion was that deep geologic disposal was still the best option, but this time around, the feds should try to find a state and local government that actually want to host a giant nuclear waste dump. Getting local communities to buy into a nuclear waste repository isn't easy. Just this week, the Cumbria County Council in the United Kingdom voted down plans for a repository. But the strategy has worked in places like Sweden and Finland, and compared with the American solution of trying to force a dump on a politically weak state, it's a lot more sensible. Frishman, who's spent decades fighting Yucca Mountain, thinks it's the way to go. So does the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Washington lobby for the nuclear industry. And so does the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental organization. You get the idea.
There's only one problem: The 1987 law specifically names Yucca Mountain as the U.S. site for the nation's first nuclear waste dump. Legally, there is no other option. The Department of Energy can't even ask for a show of hands of other places that might want to take a nuke dump in exchange for jobs and benefits. Meanwhile, the NRC is being sued by two states and several utilities for letting the government withdraw its license for the Yucca site. (The plaintiffs are stuck with nuclear waste they want to ship away.) Since there is no technical reason not to consider Yucca Mountain, the lawsuit claims that the withdrawal breaks the law.
And thus we come back to those big, white nuclear dumpsters out behind the power plants. They aren't pretty, but until the politicians can work it out, they're the only option. Researchers think that they can last for decades. That's less than a single percent of the time it will take for most of the nuclear waste to decay, but it's still good news. At the rate Congress is going, we'll need all the time we can get.
Discussions On SRS Waste Clean Up Begin This Week Randy Key, WJBF.com January 28, 2013 Augusta, GA --
The Savannah River Site's Citizens Advisory Board (SRSCAB) met Monday to discuss clean up priorities this year. One of the topics the 25-member board discussed was nuclear waste removal at SRS.
Since the Yucca Mountain plans fell through in 2010, Chairman Don Bridges says members have continued to look at other ways to deal with waste clean up.
Nuclear materials have been housed at SRS for more than 40 years, and a decision on how to transport them could be reached within the year.
"That way, we could encourage more materials to come on site for processing, in some manner. You process it, you deal with it and then you send it off site," added SRSCAB chairman Don Bridges.
Discussions continue Tuesday from 8:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. at the DoubleTree Hotel off Perimeter Parkway, in Augusta.
Critics Fear $7B Price Tag for Savannah River Site Facility Sammy Fretwell, The State January 27, 2013 Jan. 27--Construction costs have skyrocketed by as much as $2 billion at the Savannah River Site's most ambitious project, a plutonium fuel factory that is years from completion and still in need of customers after more than a decade of planning, records show.
The mixed-oxide fuel factory will turn Cold War-era weapons-grade plutonium into material that can be used in nuclear power plants to make electricity. The facility, the only one of its kind in the U.S. and a cornerstone of an international nuclear arms agreement with Russia, is currently projected to cost $4.8 billion.
But the price tag could rise to nearly $7 billion when the federal government provides new cost estimates, according to a recent letter to the U.S. Department of Energy and those who track issues concerning the SRS complex near Aiken. The new cost estimates are expected this year.
An energy department report published last month shows that the mixed oxide fuel factory is in danger of falling behind schedule and costing more than anticipated. The DOE's Project Dashboard report gave the mixed-oxide factory complex a red rating, the most serious of three categories on the progress of agency construction projects.
Officials with the energy department referred questions to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a DOE division that is overseeing the project.
NNSA officials either declined comment or did not return telephone calls when asked about the costs and progress.
The security administration also refused a request by The State newspaper to tour the project site last week. The newspaper rarely has been turned down for visits to the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site, the federal nuclear weapons complex that is home to the mixed-oxide fuel plant. The fuel-making process is one of SRS's main new missions, now that nuclear weapons are no longer the site's focus.
It was not clear why the DOE and the security administration were hesitant to discuss the matter, but The State learned Friday that federal auditors have been at the Savannah River Site to look at the mixed-oxide fuel complex. Staff with the Government Accountability Office visited SRS Jan. 15-17, the GAO confirmed. The visit was part of an "ongoing assessment" of the mixed-oxide fuel plant, a GAO spokesman said.
Meanwhile, federal officials are scrambling to find a utility that will use the mixed-oxide fuel, commonly called MOX. The project's sole customer, Duke Energy, pulled out of the project in 2009. The Tennessee Valley Authority has expressed interest, but the federally owned company hasn't decided whether to burn MOX fuel at its atomic energy plants in Tennessee and Alabama.
"The MOX program may be both wasting taxpayer dollars and ultimately failing to reduce our stores of surplus weapons grade plutonium," U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in a Jan. 14 letter of concern to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
Markey, a long-time critic of MOX, asked the Department of Energy to provide updated cost estimates and a new timetable for completing the fuel factory. Project managers have said the 600,000-square-foot plant will be producing fuel by 2018.
"Even more troubling than these cost overruns are reports that NNSA lacks customers for the MOX product that is costing so much to produce," Markey's letter said.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and one of the MOX project's biggest boosters, is aware of the cost issues and "has repeatedly emphasized to DOE and the contractors, that with the attention this project gets, it needs to be run as the most efficient, well managed program in the government," according to an email Friday from his communications director, Kevin Bishop.
Bishop said Markey's questions are coming from "the most anti-nuclear member of the House." The MOX factory is important for the U.S. to comply with terms of its nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Russia, Bishop said.
Getting rid of atomic weapons
Both the U.S. and Russia have agreed to make 34 tons of surplus, weapons-grade plutonium unusable for nuclear bombs as part of the accord first discussed in the 1990s.
The Department of Energy chose the MOX plant to comply with terms of the agreement. President George W. Bush committed $3.8 billion toward the MOX plant in 2002 and construction began in 2007.
America's excess plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear bombs, will go toward the creation of mixed-oxide fuel and will no longer be of use for atomic bombs, according to plans.
"The public will benefit because 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium will be used to power their homes instead of used as nuclear warheads," Graham's office said in an email Friday to The State. "It is the ultimate turning swords into plow shares."
Graham and supporters of the MOX plant note that it will provide jobs and a new mission to SRS. About 1,000 people are expected to be employed at the plant, a contractor told South Carolina officials last month. The Savannah River Site now employs 10,000 to 12,000 people, but that number is down sharply from when SRS was at the peak of Cold War weapons production. Mixed-oxide fuel is regularly burned in European nuclear power plants, but not in the U.S. It is controversial in America because plutonium is deadly and takes centuries to decay. Uranium fuel is used in U.S. power plants. Uranium fuel has its own hazards but is not considered by critics to be as dangerous.
Rising costs and questions about the time it is taking to finish the MOX project aren't unique at SRS. The Department of Energy also is grappling with a multi-million dollar increase in the price of another SRS plant that will be used to neutralize high-level atomic waste now stored in more than 40 huge tanks at the site.
Some critics of the MOX plant say the U.S. should have chosen to mix the excess plutonium with nuclear waste and turn it into glass -- which is considered safer to store --rather than using plutonium for fuel in commercial reactors.
Sara Barczak, who tracks nuclear issues for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said costs and future use of MOX fuel verify "some fairly serious concerns with the mixed oxide fuel program."
Tom Clements, a longtime anti-nuclear activist with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, was more blunt in his assessment. He said today's rising costs reflect only current conditions. But the site has a history of cost questions, Clements said. Records that Clements said he has reviewed show the MOX plant, at one point in the past, was estimated to cost about $1.8 billion. Now, the project could cost as much as $7 billion, he said, referring to Markey's letter.
"If you look at spending on the MOX plant, you'd think we are rolling in dough and have no budget problems whatsoever," Clements said. "Nobody is minding the store on this."
Markey's letter to Chu, citing a report in the Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor publication, raised concerns about the eventual cost of the project. The Monitor, a Washington, D.C., publication that tracks nuclear weapons materials issues, said the cost could be as much as $2 billion more than now projected.
But congressional budget writers also expressed concern last year about both the construction costs and the annual operating costs. A Senate budget committee said the estimated annual operating costs for the MOX project have risen 200 percent in two years. The current estimated annual operating costs are about $500 million, the Senate committee said.
A House report reviewed by The State newspaper said the MOX plant could be up to $900 million more expensive than estimated and appears to be in jeopardy of overrunning its "projected completion date by months, if not years."
The plant is to be completed by 2016 and producing its first batch of fuel by 2018, MOX contractors said last month.
"Construction continues to slip behind schedule due to unanticipated complexity of the work, poor contractor performance, delays in procurements and the inclusion of additional work scope," the U.S. House budget report said. "The (DOE) is now reporting internally that the total project costs could be understated by as much as $600 million to $900 million."
Asking why
Why costs have risen isn't completely known.
But those familiar with the project say it's because of the difficulties of finding qualified subcontractors and retaining skilled workers, as well as the rising expense of nuclear materials.
Shaw AREVA MOX Services, the company managing the project for the government, declined to discuss the cost issues when contacted by The State. But the company's chief executive was optimistic during a presentation to the S.C. Governor's Nuclear Advisory Council last month in Columbia.
Kelly Trice, president of Shaw AREVA MOX Services, told the council he expects the first eight fuel assemblies to be produced in 2018. He said his company has heard from several utilities interested in using MOX fuel. And he noted that the Tennessee Valley Authority has signed an agreement expressing interest in using MOX.
Shaw AREVA officials say the MOX fuel could be offered at a discount to utilities.
Barczak, however, questioned whether the Tennessee Valley Authority would buy MOX fuel. The TVA is awaiting the results of a final environmental impact statement this spring to determine whether to buy MOX. The environmental study would weigh the risks of using MOX fuel at the company's Browns Ferry and Sequoyah atomic plants, both of which are aging.
"Do you really want to mess around with using an experimental fuel in an aged set of reactors?" she asked.
"TRU" Success: SRS Recovery Act Prepares to Complete Shipment of More Than 5,000 Cubic Meters of Nuclear Waste to WIPP DOE Press Release
January 29, 2013
AIKEN, S.C. - With the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding, Savannah River Site (SRS) continues to safely treat and dispose of radioactive waste created while producing materials for nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. The DOE site in Aiken, S.C., is safely, steadily, and cost-effectively making progress to analyze, measure, and then carefully cleanup or dispose of legacy transuranic (TRU) waste remaining at SRS.
Much of this funding supported massive efforts to certify, repackage, and prepare legacy TRU waste for shipment from SRS to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), DOE's deep geologic repository for the permanent disposal of defense-generated TRU radioactive waste near Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The WIPP Central Characterization Program, which characterizes the defense related TRU waste shipped to WIPP through the WIPP transportation program, is active at multiple DOE sites and involves contractor companies throughout the U.S. One area where SRS has excelled is the loading and shipping of the new TRUPACT-III transport casks. The new casks and inner containers take the degree of employee and public safety, plus the enhanced speed of waste disposal, to a whole new level of achievement. SRS is currently the only facility in the world using the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved TRUPACT-III package.
TRU waste consists of items normally found within an industrial setting that have become contaminated with radioisotopes that have a half-life greater than 20 years, such as plutonium. Typical examples would be tools, protective clothing, containers, rags, and other debris.
"My congratulations to those employees who have worked together through the years to safely prepare for shipment more than 5,000 cubic meters of contaminated legacy TRU waste since the start of recovery Act work at SRS for permanent disposal within the WIPP repository," said David Moody, DOE's Savannah River Operations Office Manager and former Manager of the DOE Carlsbad Office (CBFO), which has responsibility for WIPP and the National TRU Program. "As of January 7, a total of more than 1,400 shipments or 16,200 cubic meters of legacy TRU waste have been safely delivered from Savannah River Site and disposed at WIPP since WIPP became operational in 1999." Moody also noted that SRS set a record last year with their best annual performance to date - characterizing, repackaging, and shipping more than 1,600 cubic meters of legacy TRU waste to WIPP.
"The TRUPACT-III is one of our transport packagings which, combined with its Standard Large Box 2 payload, helps us in our legacy TRU waste disposal initiatives," said CBFO Manager Joe Franco. "As of mid-January 2013, after 13 plus years of operations, we've had more than 11,000 shipments safely transported 13,280,000 miles by WIPP drivers and have permanently disposed of more than 85,200 cubic
meters total of legacy contact-handled and remote-handled TRU waste. Diverse transport packagings like the TRUPACT-III are important to our ability to safely, compliantly, and efficiently reduce the nuclear waste footprint."
The use of the TRUPACT-III significantly reduces hours of manually inspecting, cutting, and working in a high-exposure and potentially dangerous work environment. SRS now has six of these transport packagings with four shipments to WIPP weekly.
Contingent upon the priorities across the Complex, completion of the 5,000 cubic meters is expected to take place late in 2013, shaving approximately nine years off the original DOE baseline plan for the SRS ARRA project.
Construction resumes on Hanford nuclear waste treatment plant David Kramer, Physics Today January 28, 2013 A massive project in the US to stabilize and store 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste has resumed following a several-week hiatus. The waste was left from cold war plutonium production at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Work on the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) had been halted last month in response to concerns raised by chief project engineer Gary Brunson. Brunson was, until he resigned a few days ago, the director of the WTP engineering division of the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection.
"Based on insight gathered from a number of leading scientific experts, [DOE] is now confident construction activities at the high-level waste facility can begin to be ramped back up," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Washington Governor Chris Gregoire in a joint statement released on 16 January. "Over the past several months, the Department of Energy and the State of Washington have worked together closely to ensure the Waste Treatment Plant is on a stable path to resolving the technical issues, completing construction, and beginning to treat waste in the coming years."
In a 19 December memorandum to Chu and other DOE officials, Brunson had urged that all work on the project be halted "to avoid further nuclear safety compromises and substantial rework within WTP." Brunson, who has not spoken publicly about his concerns, released his memo through the Seattle-based Hanford watchdog group Hanford Challenge. In an August 2012 memo that was also made public, Brunson had called for DOE to remove the project design responsibilities from Bechtel National Inc, the company that is also building the WTP. DOE's fast-track "design-build" management approach on the WTP allows construction to begin while the design process is still continuing.
Chu and Gregoire also announced that DOE is exploring whether WTP's waste treatment operations can begin sooner than 2019, the current proposed start date. That might be accomplished, they said, by bypassing the WTP's pretreatment facility, in which waste from Hanford's 177 underground tanks would be separated into low-activity liquid and high-activity solids for faster processing. Instead, all waste would be fed directly to the project's two vitrification plants, where the radioactive material is to be blended into molten glass for stable storage. Skipping a step would allow the plant to start operating sooner, while work could continue on the pretreatment facility, the largest of the four main structures that constitute the WTP.
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the cost of the project has jumped to at least $13.4 billion, more than triple its original 2000 estimate, and $1.1 billion higher than the DOE's last official estimate, in 2006. Completion has already been delayed eight years from its initial 2011 date, but GAO warns in a new report that "additional cost increases amounting to billions of dollars and schedule delays of years are almost certain to occur." Though DOE and Bechtel have blamed insufficient funding for overruns and delays, the GAO claimed unresolved technical challenges were the main culprit. The vitrification process will need to have perfect reliability over the plant's 40-year lifetime because maintenance or repair will not be possible once waste treatment begins, the report noted.
The GAO was critical of DOE's design-build management approach. Although DOE in 2010 prohibited the use of design-build for new first-of-a-kind facilities, it is grandfathering the approach in the case of the WTP. While construction of the WTP is currently more than 55% complete, the design is only about 80% complete. Industry guidelines, says the GAO report, suggest that design should be at least 90% complete before the construction of nuclear facilities begins.
The GAO recommended that DOE not resume construction on the WTP's pretreatment and high-level-waste facilities until the design is 90% complete and critical technologies are tested and verified as effective. In addition, Bechtel's preliminary documented safety analyses should comply with DOE's nuclear safety regulations. In response to the GAO report, DOE stated that it had provided Bechtel with sufficient technical and management guidance to produce a high-confidence design and baseline for the facilities.
Among the outstanding technical issues is whether waste sludge will clog the miles of pipes in the WTP. That could lead to the potential buildup of explosive hydrogen gas and the possibility of an accidental nuclear chain reaction.
That concern is heightened by the inadequate understanding of the exact composition of the wastes in each of the tanks. Bechtel has proposed to employ pulse jet mixers that use compressed air to mix the waste, but the technology has never been used for mixing wastes with high solid content like those to be treated at the WTP, according to the GAO. Bechtel is studying the possibility of building an additional facility to remove the largest solid particles from the waste before it enters the pretreatment facility. That would delay completion of WTP by several years and add billions more to its cost.
Uncertain federal budgets leave Hanford officials looking for flat budgets Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald January 25, 2013 The uncertain federal budget has Department of Energy officials in the Tri-Cities looking for flat or slightly declining budgets ahead.
"Flat is the new up," said Roger Snyder, manager of the Department of Energy Pacific Northwest Site Office, at the Tri-Cities Regional Economic Outlook conference in Kennewick on Thursday.
He has prepared for budgets for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland to have a slight downward drift, he said. His DOE office oversees work at the national lab.
Hanford's budgets could continue to be around $2 billion annually in the foreseeable future with some ups and downs, said Greg Jones, DOE's Hanford chief financial officer.
Not much was said at the conference about the possibility of sequestration in March and what that would mean for federal money for Hanford and PNNL.
Federal agencies were instructed in January to make plans for a reduced budget in case Congress does not amend the law and President Obama is required to issue a sequestration order to cut about $85 billion from spending nationwide in the fiscal year that began in October.
At Hanford, employment has dropped from about 10,000 workers to around 9,000 workers during about the last year. Although employment is down, it should be stable for the near future, with the usual adjustments based on the skills that are needed, said Greg Jones, DOE's Hanford chief financial officer.
The nuclear reservation, where plutonium was produced for the nation's nuclear weapons program, should continue to provide jobs out to 2050 or 2060, as environmental cleanup continues, he said. Work is under way to shrink the contaminated portion of the 586-square-mile site to a contaminated area at its center in 2015, but significant work will need to be done in central Hanford, he said.
In 2012, DOE contractors at Hanford spent $872 million on subcontracts, with almost half of that spent in the region, he said.
"It is a big engine for the local economy and that will continue," he said.
At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, with about 4,500 employees, 428 workers left in 2012, about half of those because of restructuring and realignment, Snyder said. At the same time, 185 new workers joined the lab, he said.
The fiscal 2012 budget was $1.032 billion, down from $1.101 billion the year before.
Throughout 2012 the lab looked at likely budget scenarios for this fiscal year and made spending and staffing adjustments based on those scenarios, said Greg Koller, spokesman for PNNL, after the conference. That left it well-positioned going into fiscal 2013 and it should remain in good shape if spending levels are maintained, he said.
"While everything looks flat, we are somewhat holding our breath to see what the budget brings," Snyder said.
The lab performs work for a wide range of agencies, including the Departments of Energy, Defense and Homeland Security. Uncertain federal budgets put customers on edge and that has a delayed effect on the lab as customers adjust spending, Snyder said.
The nation is operating on a continuing resolution through March 27 after Congress failed to pass a budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.If sequestration occurs, all agencies that receive federal funds, including the national labs, likely will be impacted, Koller said. However, it's unclear what the cuts could be or how they would be distributed across programs and projects within agencies for which PNNL provides research work, he said.
Georgia nuclear power plant could be Solyndra redux, report says
Mark Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor January 30, 2013 Construction of the first newly licensed US nuclear power plant in decades could become a "Solyndra-like" debacle thanks to billions in federal loan guarantees whose terms appear too weak to protect taxpayers, according to one group's analysis of internal documents released by the US Department of Energy.
The two-reactor $14 billion Vogtle plant being built in Georgia is seen as a test of the US nuclear industry's planned "renaissance" with a new nuclear reactor design and updated construction processes all aimed at cutting time and costs.
But two Massachusetts-based energy-consulting firms, Earth Track and Synapse Energy Economics, say the $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees backing the project were crafted with excessively favorable financial terms for the recipient companies, weak federal oversight, and possible political interference in the loan-guarantee process.
The two firms analyzed hundreds of Energy Department e-mails and financial documents released earlier this month to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), a green-energy watchdog group that won access to them in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Officials for the Obama administration and Southern Company, the company that will operate the plants, say there's nothing improper going on.
In their report, Earth Track and Synapse say the documents reveal:
"Despite widespread redactions, the documents released indicate significant problems with the DOE's loan guarantee process," said Doug Koplow, report author and founder of Earth Track in a statement.
Under the category of "political interference," the report cites one e-mail from DOE staff revealed tight timelines to "move our first nuclear power deal forward." Other e-mails showed direct contact between Vogtle project borrowers and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. And a 2010 e-mail from Jonathan Silver, then-executive director of loan programs at the US Department of Energy, noted that "We didn't deal with shaw" - the company slated to do much of the reactor construction - "The white house did."
The discussions represent "a potentially troubling blurring of financial risk review, political discussion, and potential modification of loan terms," the report says.
In a conference call, Mr. Koplow said there is no evidence of wrongdoing or any "smoking gun." But the e-mails do suggest, they say, that high level figures in the administration were in a position to exert political influence.
The Department of Energy was unable to respond by press time to a request for comment. But one administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said there's no impropriety in the documents.
"These are people who just don't like nuclear power," he says. "What they're doing is throwing out a buzz word, Solyndra, to get attention. Let's just throw out that word. They're throwing accusations out there, but these decisions were made on the merits by career officials. The idea that Secretary Chu would want to be monitoring this deal - there's nothing wrong with that."
Southern Company officials say the process is routine.
"Loan guarantees were developed to provide an incentive for new nuclear development in the U.S.," writes Tim Leljedal, a Southern Company spokesman in an e-mailed statement. "There continues to be constructive dialogue in the Vogtle 3&4 loan guarantee negotiations between the company and the Department of Energy. We are committed to financing options that will serve the best interests of our customers, and - as long as the terms and conditions of DOE loan guarantees serve those interests - we will continue pursue that option."
"Details of the ongoing negotiations remain confidential," he adds.
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