ECA Update: March 15, 2013
Published: Fri, 03/15/13
House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee planning nuclear waste hearing
ECA The House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee will hold a hearing on nuclear waste in the coming weeks, subcommittee chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) said on Thursday. A date for the hearing has not yet been set. The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository will reportedly be a focal point of the hearing.
ECA will provide an update when the hearing is formally announced.
March 19 Budget Hearing - DOE Office of Environmental Management House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee March 20 Oversight Hearing - Major Construction Projects of the Department of Energy House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Bogged down by amendments, Reid says the Senate will continue work on CR Monday Ramsay Cox, The Hill March 14, 2013 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) gave up on his goal of completing a bill to fund the government through the fiscal year by the end of this week.
"We're going to move forward with this bill on Monday," Reid announced on the Senate floor Thursday evening. "That's it for tonight."
Reid said leaders could not reach an agreement on the remaining 99 amendments to the $984 billion spending resolution that was negotiated by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and ranking member Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) gave up on his goal of completing a bill to fund the government through the fiscal year by the end of this week.
"We're going to move forward with this bill on Monday," Reid announced on the Senate floor Thursday evening. "That's it for tonight."
Reid said leaders could not reach an agreement on the remaining 99 amendments to the $984 billion spending resolution that was negotiated by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and ranking member Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).
In Break With 92-Year Tradition, Congress Will Kick Off Budget Process Niraj Chokshi, National Journal March 11, 2013 It's budget week on Capitol Hill--the start of an annual ritual, but one that this year bucks a nearly century-old tradition.
Over the next few days, Senate Democrats and House Republicans will unveil starkly different proposals for how to fund the government in the next fiscal year. It will be the first time since 2009 that the Senate majority party has released a budget proposal. The dueling congressional proposals will come as President Obama still has not yet set a date for the release of his budget blueprint. This year, in fact, will mark the first time that the Congress--and not the president--will kick off the budget process.
The modern executive budget process, requiring an annual White House budget submission to Congress, was established under the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. The law also created the agency that would eventually become the White House Office of Management and Budget. And, every year since then, according to the Library of Congress and The New York Times, the president's submission has represented the start of the budget process--until now.
The tradition was broken after the White House missed the early February deadline for sending the president's proposed budget to Congress. Missing that deadline is not unusual: Obama has done it three years running. And Presidents Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama were each late in submitting a budget in their first year in office, according to the Congressional Research Service. But letting Congress start the budget process has never happened in modern times.
The modern submission deadline was set in 1990 as some time between the first Mondays of January and February. Since then, the only other president besides Obama to submit a delayed budget after his first year in office was Clinton, according to a House Republican table that charted budget submissions back to 1923.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Friday blamed the delay on the nation's recent fiscal drama.
"We had a fiscal-cliff debate that lasted through the end of last year," he said, referring to the end-of-year fight over expiring tax cuts and impending spending cuts, known as the sequester. "Certainly, the [March 1] implementation of the sequester has affected the ability of the administration to put together our budget proposal. But that's something that people are hard at work on, and I think in the coming weeks we'll have some more details about the budget."
Long delays aren't totally unheard of, either. Reagan blamed a deficit-reduction deal that had been negotiated late in 1987 for a 45-day delay in his budget in 1988. Although the White House hasn't said when it will release the budget for the next fiscal year, some reports said the administration is looking at delivering it on April 8. If that's the case, it will have been more than 60 days past the deadline.
Debt Ceiling Looms Beyond Spending Fight Jonathan Strong, Roll Call March 12, 2013 Conservatives are privately debating how much space to give House leaders to follow through on promises made at their Williamsburg, Va., retreat in January, with a wait-and-see approach embraced by key veterans and a smaller movement of mostly newer lawmakers wanting to push leadership harder.
The divide is behind the mixed signals in the past week as Republicans provided a surprisingly unified vote on the continuing resolution followed quickly by bold threats by conservatives to bring down rule votes.
The debate has big implications for how Republicans will approach future spending showdowns such as the next debt ceiling increase and shows there are rumblings beneath the surface during a period of relative tranquility for the GOP conference.
A working group of five influential conservatives that includes Reps. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Tom Price of Georgia, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise of Louisiana is leading the wait-and-see school of thought, and its members helped whip the recent short-term debt ceiling increase.
Indeed, the March 6 RSC meeting turned into something of a rally for unity on the CR vote, according to lawmakers and aides present. In the resulting vote, only 14 Republicans voted against the bill -- surprising because Republicans were forsaking an opportunity to leverage further spending cuts or policy priorities.
In contrast, the rule vote earlier that day saw 16 GOP defections, a shockingly high number for what are normally party-line rule votes.
That tally was somewhat inflated: Some members planned to switch their votes if the rule was actually in jeopardy. Others, such as a trio of Georgia Republicans -- Reps. Jack Kingston, Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun -- may have been eyeing the effect of the vote on a Senate GOP primary in their home state.
Nevertheless, on the heels of a nine-vote defection on the Violence Against Women Act rule, the rebels showed real aggravation over leadership's unwillingness to use the CR as a vehicle to defund "Obamacare."
Leading the charge against the rule on the House floor was Rep. Matt Salmon, who has since vowed to try to bring down other rule votes if legislation will break the "Hastert rule" or increase spending without offsetting cuts.
The Arizona Republican is in his second stint in Congress; in his first he helped bring down then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, participating in a failed coup plot and then announcing on CNN after the 1998 elections that he carried the six votes necessary to deny Gingrich the speaker's gavel.
He first floated his "Salmon rule" plan at a Club for Growth conference in Palm Beach, Fla., this past weekend. Buzz from the event and other discussions has already led to something of a movement around Salmon as an emerging leader of the hard right.
"You've got a lot of outside groups who have been looking for the second coming of Mike Pence, [or] Jim DeMint, and right now he's looking like the guy who -- whether he wants it to be it or not -- he's probably going to be the guy the conservative outside groups rally to," said Erick Erickson, the radio host, television pundit and managing editor of RedState.com who keeps close tabs on the GOP conference.
While the two camps disagree, they're not fundamentally at odds. Even the group urging caution is watching Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, with some trepidation.
"I don't think we're necessarily in different camps, so to speak, I just think we have different ideas on how to get there. I'm a little bit more impatient," Salmon said.
In a surprising twist, some in the wait-and-see school have urged the more aggressive Republicans to tone it down by arguing that giving Boehner space one last time is providing rope to hang himself with -- the argument being that the next debt ceiling fight will convincingly demonstrate that Boehner is not up for the task when he inevitably caves.
While the budget fight will dominate the next several weeks, the debt ceiling, which will need to be increased by May 19, looms as a more significant and perilous battle.
But it is still not clear exactly what conservatives will want from the next increase, as they are just beginning to discuss the issue.
Rep. John Fleming, R-La., who voted against the CR rule but for the CR, said he won't be able to vote for a debt ceiling increase unless it is accompanied by a "balanced budget that is verifiable such as, for instance, the Ryan budget."
Given President Barack Obama's past positions and unlikeliness to agree to enacting a budget like that, Fleming predicted he will not be able to vote for the increase.
Salmon said he would like to see Boehner's original demand of dollar-for-dollar cuts equal or greater to the amount of the debt ceiling being increased but that he was open to significant entitlement reforms instead.
Erickson said in Williamsburg the working group was "told that they would get the debt ceiling to May or June and they would re-have this fight. And I don't see that they're going to extract any meaningful concessions on the debt ceiling fight again, at which point they'll look very foolish."
NNSA Defends Contract Extensions but Congressional Scrutiny Expected Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire March 12, 2013 The National Nuclear Security Administration is defending itself against charges that it renewed lucrative deals for undeserving contractors, but the issue is likely to come up at congressional oversight hearings in the coming months, sources say.
The semiautonomous Energy Department agency's Fiscal 2012 Performance Evaluation Reports, released on March 1, contain evidence that NNSA officials made exceptions that enabled the extension of contracts pertaining to at least two nuclear arms research laboratories, according to watchdog organizations.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico said last week that earning at least 80 percent of an "at-risk incentive award fee is the threshold for eligibility for a one-year contract extension" at NNSA sites. The firm that manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico "received only 68 percent of its possible at-risk award fee of $46.5 million for the last budget year, primarily because of cost overruns that ballooned a security project from $213 million to $254 million," according to a press releasefrom the organization.
Nonetheless, Neile Miller, then the agency's top award determining official and now its acting chief, overrode a decision by NNSA site personnel and granted Los Alamos National Security a waiver that extends its contract through fiscal 2018, the group said.
A similar situation occurred regarding the contract of a consortium -- consisting of Bechtel National, the University of California, Babcock and Wilcox, the Washington Division of URS and Battelle -- that manages the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the group said.
Lawrence Livermore National Security earned 78 percent of its "available at-risk incentive fee, still short of the gateway of 80 percent," the group said. "However, acting NNSA Administrator Neile Miller overrode that too, giving the lab contractor an extra $541,527 to help it meet the 80 percent mark and extending the management contract another year."
A separate release from the California-based Tri-Valley CAREs complains that the exception is noted in a "one-paragraph addendum" to the fiscal year report that "does not provide a rationale" for the waiver. The group called for "greater oversight of taxpayers' money and a more open and transparent contract process."
Nuclear Watch New Mexico cited the spiraling cost of the Los Alamos security system for its Technical Area 55 as one of a number of NNSA projects in which expenses have exceeded projections.
The organization said that to avoid future cost overruns, the government should emphasize conservative life-extension programs for nuclear warheads that do not involve the creation of new military capabilities. In addition to costing more, introducing "untested changes to existing nuclear weapons" could "erode confidence in their reliability," the group suggested.
Congress should also "pull the plug on exorbitant failed projects" such as Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility and an unfinished plant for turning nuclear-weapon plutonium into reactor fuel at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the group says.
Agency spokesman Josh McConaha defended Miller's decisions and suggested that the watchdog groups might be missing the bigger picture.
"Contractors are given multiple assignments each year and each is important," McConaha toldGlobal Security Newswire. "The ratings given the contractor must reflect all of the results for all of these activities and cannot be based on just one. Doing so would be short-sighted and leave out not just a lot of context, but a lot of important work."
A congressional staffer who follows the issue said, though, the concerns raised by the watchdog groups are "valid." The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said lawmakers will likely raise the matter during NNSA oversight hearings this year.
Congress has previously attempted to address lack of transparency and other issues between assessments for different NNSA sites.
The fiscal 2013 National Defense Authorization Act contains language requiring the NNSA administrator to "take appropriate actions to make available to the public, to the maximum extent practicable, contractor performance evaluations conducted by the administration of management and operating contractors of the nuclear security enterprise that results in the award of an award fee to the contractor concerned."
According to the law, the performance evaluations should be "in a common format that facilitates comparisons of performance evaluations between and among similar management and operating contracts."
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has also raised concerns about the extension of NNSA contracts for management of its facilities. Assistant Director Allison Bawden said last month that the inconsistent NNSA enforcement of contract terms could be problematic, the Nuclear Weapons Materials and Complex Monitor reported.
"What kind of message do these actions send to potential bidders on future ... contracts?" Bawden said. "Will they take the contract structures as seriously?"
Report: Security in nuclear-weapons facilities lacking Megan R. Wilson, The Hill March 13, 2013 The agency in charge of government oversight says that there is not an adequate "safety culture" surrounding America's nuclear weapons facilities.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Wednesday that says the Department of Energy (DOE) and its nuclear counterpart the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) continues to "face challenges" with safety oversight, despite of previous orders to improve it.
Coupled with its release, David C. Trimble, GAO's director of Natural Resources and Environment, testified before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations about the ongoing troubles of the agencies.
"DOE's and NNSA's work with nuclear materials such as plutonium and highly enriched uranium, nuclear weapons and their components, and large amounts of classified data require extremely high security," Trimble told lawmakers.
However, he continued, the agencies have had "a long history of poor security performance across the nuclear security enterprise... as well as ongoing struggles to sustain security improvements, including information security."
The report and Trimble's testimony stem from investigations following the intrusion of three people into a government lab next to a nuclear weapons facility last year.
While changes have been made to security - including upgrading alarm systems, beefing up armed guards and other safeguards - the "safety culture" inside these federal departments are still lacking, and in some ways worse than they were before.
In 2012, a GAO study reported that the Energy Department's safety reforms did not "fully address continuing safety concerns... in the areas of quality assurance, safety culture, and federal oversight and, in fact, may have actually weakened independent oversight."
The DOE and the NNSA, the new report said, are continuing to implement the GAO's recommendations and congressional oversight body pledged to keep watch of their actions.
Sen. Murray talks Hanford with energy secretary nominee Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald March 13, 2013 Washington, D.C. -- Sen. Patty Murray met Wednesday with Ernie Moniz, the nominee for energy secretary, and discussed Hanford and other issues that require strong leadership from the Department of Energy.
"First and foremost, we discussed the most pressing environmental cleanup issue in Washington state and our region: nuclear waste cleanup at the Hanford Site," she said in a statement.
"We walked through our existing federal obligations and discussed the importance of developing a comprehensive, long-term plan to treat the dangerous waste within limited federal resources," she said.
Fellow Democrat and new Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee has said that the state will not tolerate delays in addressing underground tanks leaking radioactive waste because of lack of federal money.
Murray also discussed with Moniz the vital role that the Bonneville Power Administration plays to meet the energy demands of the Northwest and the importance of a productive working relationship between the Pacific Northwest delegation and federal energy officials.
She said the meeting was productive.
SRSCRO Completes Study of Region's Role in Nuclear Fuel Cycle SRS Community Reuse Organization In June 2012, the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization (SRSCRO) commissioned a study to provide leaders in the five county region in South Carolina and Georgia represented by the SRSCRO with information necessary to determine what resources the region has available to participate in a national solution for managing the back-end of the fuel nuclear cycle.
The scope of the study was to help answer the following question: Should a five-county region surrounding the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site use its assets to help provide solutions to managing the nation's fuel cycle? If so, what are the terms and conditions under which we the community would agree to participate?
Timothy A. Frazier, Senior Advisor with the Washington government relations firm of Dickstein Shapiro LLP, headed the study. Frazier is a former senior Department of Energy official who served as Designated Federal Officer for DOE's Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC) on America's Nuclear Future. The study followed the BRC's call for a new, consent-based approach to siting future nuclear waste management facilities.
The study, along with an Executive Summary, was released publicly on March 13, 2013.
With the study now complete, the SRSCRO Board of Directors will consider its role in helping to develop a comprehensive plan aimed at building community consensus about hosting fuel cycle-related activities.
(See reports at link)
Comprehensive Fuel Cycle Research Study 02-19-2013
Executive Summary 2-19-2013
In U.S., nuclear energy loses momentum amid economic head winds, safety issues Steven Mufson, The Washington Post March 11, 2013 Two years after the tsunami that crippled Japan's Fukushima power complex, the U.S. nuclear industry is facing fundamental and far-reaching challenges to its own future.
Only five years ago, industry executives and leading politicians were talking about an American nuclear renaissance, hoping to add 20 or more reactors to the 104-unit U.S. nuclear fleet.
But today those companies are holding back in the face of falling natural gas prices and sluggish and uncertain electricity demand. Only five new plants are under construction, while at least that many are slated for permanent closure or shut down indefinitely over safety issues.
On Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reiterated its refusal to issue a license for a new unit at Calvert Cliffs, Md., that a French company had hoped to make the model for a fleet of reactors. A pair of reactors in Southern California are under scrutiny over whether a major contractor and a utility there concealed concerns about potential cracks in the tubes of a steam generator. And nuclear plants in Wisconsin and Florida are closing down because their owners said they cannot compete with less expensive natural-gas-fired electricity.
Industry officials still make the case for nuclear as a domestic source of energy that does not emit greenhouse gases. "Anyone concerned about global warming should acknowledge that if society seriously aspires to be anti-carbon, it also needs to be seriously pro-nuclear," Thomas F. Farrell, chief executive of Dominion Resources, said at a recent conference in Washington sponsored by the industry newsletter Platts.
But Caren Byrd, executive director of Morgan Stanley's global power group, said at the same conference that, on an economic basis, "it is hard to make the case for nuclear."
One illustration of that is a joint venture called UniStar, formed to build half a dozen identical nuclear units modeled on a new reactor planned at the existing Calvert Cliffs site. But the Atomic Energy Act bars foreign companies from having "ownership, control or domination" of U.S. nuclear plants, which became a problem in late 2010 when Constellation Energy gave up its 51 percent stake in the joint venture and left UniStar wholly owned by Electricite de France.
Since then, UniStar has been unable to find another U.S. partner. On Monday, the NRC reiterated that it would not issue a license to UniStar, which had asked the NRC to overturn the prohibition on foreign ownership.
Low natural gas prices are discouraging other nuclear investors and utilities. "The natural gas issue is terrific for the U.S. economy and energy mix," John J. Reed, chairman of Concentric Energy Advisors, said at a Platts meeting of nuclear executives. "It just isn't so good for those of you sitting out there today."
Dominion, the owner of the Kewaunee nuclear plant in Wisconsin, and Duke Energy, owner of Crystal River Unit 3 in Florida, recently announced plans to permanently close these reactors because of economic factors, even though the plants have licenses extending well into the future. Wind and natural gas are cheaper.
"It's a fantastic plant," Farrell said of the Kewaunee unit, which Dominion bought eight years ago. But it failed to renegotiate a power-selling agreement that expires at the end of the year and could not find a company willing to buy the plant. "Unfortunately, the economics just don't work," he said.
Meanwhile, safety issues are plaguing a handful of reactors, and three have been closed for more than a year.
NRC inspectors have kept two reactors at California's San Onofre complex closed since January 2012 amid an inquiry into whether the manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and perhaps the utility, Edison International, covered up the danger of cracks in the tubes of the reactors' steam generators.
The utility has denied any wrongdoing, pointing the finger at Mitsubishi.
Documents released Friday said that Mitsubishi and Southern California Edison, a subsidiary of Edison International, jointly investigated the problem of vibrations that could accelerate wear and tear in the steam generators before they were installed. And the documents, released publicly by the NRC after Mitsubishi redacted them to protect trade secrets, state that the companies did not change the design because it would have triggered a lengthy license amendment procedure with the NRC.
"Each of the considered changes had unacceptable consequences and the AVB Design Team agreed not to implement them," the document said.
San Onofre's Unit 2 was taken out of service Jan. 9, 2012, for a planned outage. Unit 3 was taken offline Jan. 31, 2012, after station operators detected a leak in a steam generator tube. The tubes had lasted about a year. The closures are costing Edison International hundreds of millions of dollars. Replacing the steam generating system could also cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The company has asked the NRC to allow Unit 2 to operate at 70 percent of capacity to reduce vibrations, but the NRC has not granted permission.
"Understanding the root cause . . . is a problem," NRC Chairman Allison M. Macfarlane said in an interview. "We are not going to let the plant restart unless we are sure it can operate safely."
The NRC has also been keeping an eye on a pair of new reactors the Southern Co. has been building at its Vogtle complex in Georgia. Financing costs were lowered sharply by a promise of a federal loan guarantee by the Obama administration and by a Georgia state law that allows Southern's subsidiary, Georgia Power, to pass much of the cost along to ratepayers while the plant is under construction. Most states require a power plant to go online before customers have to pay for it.
Within months, however, Southern said that as much as $900 million could be added to its subsidiary's share of the $14 billion cost. An industry consultant, who requested anonymity to preserve his business relationships, said that the contractor put too much space between steel rebar in the foundations at the heart of the new reactors. To resolve the problem, Southern said it created a 1,000-cubic-yard "mock-up" of the site where concrete would be poured.
"NRC inspectors have identified code compliance issues with the rebar design of the basemat and walls, which delayed pouring concrete for the 'nuclear islands,' or bases, of the reactors," Macfarlane said Feb. 28 in testimony before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. She said the problems were being resolved and that the companies were planning to start pouring concrete in March.
Despite the relatively stagnant growth of U.S. nuclear power plants, the industry has found ways to maintain its roughly 20 percent share of electricity generation. The NRC has issued 73 license renewals for plants, and operators have figured out ways to improve efficiency and add the equivalent of 24 new 1,000-megawatt units over the past 20 years, according to Farrell.
Many companies are also talking about the possibility of turning to smaller, cheaper reactors. Macfarlane said she expects an application for design certification in 2014.
The NRC is tightening up guidelines for existing U.S. plants as a result of the Fukushima disaster, adding safeguards and measurement devices for spent fuel pools; ordering hardened, more-reliable vents from containment buildings; and requiring greater emergency communications -- all areas that failed at Fukushima.
Utilities are already adding new backup generators at or near reactor sites to make sure power to plants does not fail as it did in Fukushima.
Some nuclear industry executives are already raising concerns about the cost of the post-Fukushima proposals, but Macfarlane plans to push ahead.
In December, she visited Fukushima.
"I was at loss for words," she said. "It was awesome in a way, but in the negative sense, to see these villages. Everything is there. The gas stations, little shops but nobody there, and weeds taking over parking lots. A nice garden with dry dead stuff. Weeds growing over the train tracks." At the nuclear site, she surveyed tsunami debris and "the rusting carcasses of overturned trucks."
Macfarlane said the lesson for the NRC might be to raise the level of the urgency it gives to considering rare events, including tornado hazards. "You might fold climate change into this," she said.
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