***************************************************************** 07/23/07 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 15.171 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 Reuters: U.S., Canada, Mexico vow energy tech co-operation 2 UPI: Baluyevsky: U.S. BMD plan from 'past era' 3 US: MiamiHerald.com: Despite nickname, Florida's a laggard in harnes 4 UPI: Russian hints at threat to U.S. allies 5 RIA Novosti: Five steps for preventing a new Cold War 6 Comment is free: Hawks rule the roost NUCLEAR REACTORS 7 [southnews] NUCLEAR POWER ON SHAKY GROUND 8 IPS-English INDIA/US: Nuke Deal - Breakthrough or Bad Bargain? 9 [NYTr] Japan: Nuclear Power on Shaky Ground 10 US: [NYTr] LA Times Edit'l: No to Nukes 11 US: [NYTr] Rattling the Reactor: Quakes, Fires and Leaks 12 New Statesman: Nuclear: The risks remain 13 TheStar.com: Pickering woes fuel debate 14 BBC NEWS: UN experts to assess Japan plant 15 US: Chattanoogan.com: TVA Dealing With One Of Driest Periods In Its 16 US: baltimoresun.com: Constellation nuclear plans in fiscal peril -- 17 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Expand nuclear energy 18 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Nuclear nasties 19 Guardian Unlimited: IAEA to visit Japan's damaged nuclear plant 20 EnergyBiz Magazine: Japan's Nuclear Blunder 21 InTheNews: Govt tests nuclear water 22 US: Reuters: American acceptance of nuclear power grows | U.S. | 23 Reuters: Japan accepts IAEA checks, nuclear policy on track 24 Asia Times: India's US nuclear deal in last straight 25 Manila Standard Today: Subic eyes nuke plant site 26 US: UPI: Next generation nuke plant designs sought 27 US: Fortune: Going nuclear - 28 AFP: UN to inspect Japan radiation site - 29 US: Los Angeles Times: No to nukes - 30 www.bbj.hu: Bulgaria calls six energy companies for plant bid 31 The Hindu: Sinha opposes nuclear deal 32 MIT News Office: Americans Warming to Nuclear Power - MIT Survey - 33 Hindustan Times: Germany seeks consensus in NSG on Indo-US N-deal- 34 Hindustan Times: India and the US script nuclear deal- 35 asahi.com: More damage found at TEPCO plant - 36 asahi.com: Nuke plants ill-equipped for fires - 37 The Hindu: Government begins selling nuclear deal 38 The Hindu: CPI(M) to study details 39 Daily Yomiuri: N-plant likely to stay shut for long time NUCLEAR SECURITY 40 US: Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: A classified mess NUCLEAR SAFETY 41 US: KCRG-TV9: Former Ames Lab Workers may get Compensation | 42 US: NAS: Project: Evaluation of Quantification of Margins and Uncert NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 43 US: NRC: News Release - Region I - 2007-041 - NRC Seeks Additional 44 First Read: Oh-eight (D): Yucca Mountain politics 45 US: DOE: DOE to Weigh Alternatives for Greater Than Class C Low-Leve 46 US: NRC: NRC to Hold Public Meetings in Casper, Wyo., and Albuquerqu 47 RGJ.com: Mixed messages, ambivalence on Yucca policy not acceptable 48 US: DOE: PEIS for disosal of GTCC LLW PEACE US DEPT. OF ENERGY 49 Hanford News: PNNL appointment 50 Hanford News: DOE to cut Washington Closure's pay 51 courier-journal: Lawmakers back plan for Paducah plant work 52 LA Daily News: Not too late 53 Knoxville News Sentinel: Officials at ORAU defend process 54 Business Report & Journal: Controversial Report States SRS Could Bec 55 Oak Ridger: Nuclear theft charges surprise neighbors, leaks bother f 56 Oak Ridger: DOE concerned that ORNL wrongly named in incident - 57 LocalNews8.com: Are Coming Or Going At The INL? ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Reuters: U.S., Canada, Mexico vow energy tech co-operation Mon Jul 23, 2007 5:55PM EDT By Allan Dowd VICTORIA, British Columbia (Reuters) - Canada, the United States and Mexico pledged to co-operate on developing energy technology on Monday in an agreement that could reduce trade barriers to alternative energy development. The countries' top energy officials, who signed the five-year deal following a meeting on Canada's Pacific Coast, said it should also promote joint research in areas such as nuclear energy and renewable fuels. Promoting renewable and more energy-efficient technology will increase North America's energy security and help the environment, the officials said. The countries agreed in 2001 to promote energy security in the region, but a new pact was needed to provide a "formal framework" to resolving issues such as ownership of intellectual property rights, the officials said. "There are barriers that don't allow us specifically to share technology or work on the same projects, while this will allow us to do that," said Gary Lunn, Canada's minister of natural resources. "We've developed some amazing technologies ... but the real challenge is to take them to deployment or commercialization," Lunn said after the meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Georgina Kessel, Mexico's secretary of energy. Canada and Mexico are major energy exporters to the United States, but officials said the meeting did not deal with specific supply-related issues or projects such as Canada's oil sands. The meeting dealt only "in general terms" on issues such as regulatory approval of pipelines that would bring oil and gas from Alaska and northern Canada to major southern markets, Lunn and Bodman said. The officials also said they remained committed to aligning energy efficiency standards for consumers goods, including power demands for home computers operating in "stand-by" mode. Continued... ***************************************************************** 2 UPI: Baluyevsky: U.S. BMD plan from 'past era' United Press International - Security & Terrorism - Briefing Published: July 23, 2007 at 5:10 PM MOSCOW, July 23 (UPI) -- Russia's top general has described U.S. BMD base plans for Europe as belonging to "a past era." The Bush administration's determination to build a ballistic missile defense base with 10 interceptors in Poland and a radar installation to direct them in the neighboring Czech Republic in the next few years was "logical, but only under a logic that belongs to a past era," four-star Army Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, the chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, told reporters in Moscow last week, RIA Novosti reported. "During that era (of the Cold War), there were ideological grounds (for building such installations)," Baluyevsky said, according to the report. "Today, there is no such confrontation, but the ideas of that era seem to be alive and well. This is where the logic breaks," Baluyevsky said. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top government ministers and military leaders have reacted with fury to U.S. plans to push ahead with building the BMD bases. The Bush administration says the bases are not aimed against Russia but are essential to protect the United States and Western Europe from the future threat of Iranian nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Russian leaders have rejected these arguments. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 3 MiamiHerald.com: Despite nickname, Florida's a laggard in harnessing sun - 07/23/2007 - By KRISTI E. SWARTZ The Palm Beach Post * http://www.pbpost.com WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- The sun can do more for Florida than reliably attract millions of vacationers and winter residents. Its rays can help power homes and businesses. Its heat can warm water for people to cook and take showers. Nearly every other state has made a move to take advantage of this by combining a no-excuses attitude with millions of dollars to make solar power a part of the energy mix. But not Florida. Home to an internationally known center for solar energy research, the Sunshine State has done little to make the most of the star that provides its nickname. Critics argue the state actually has too many clouds too often to make solar energy work and that it's still cheaper for utilities to produce - and consumers to pay for - energy that comes from conventional power plants. Renewable-energy supporters think that's laughable. "It's so off-base," said Bob Reedy, director of the solar energy division at the Florida Solar Energy Center, based in Cocoa. Craig Williams, executive director of the Altamonte Springs-based Florida Renewable Energy Association, calls the too-cloudy argument a smokescreen. "It definitely has the potential to supply our needs many times over once it gets down to the right price," Williams said of solar power. "If we install in large quantities, we can bring back the electric car, take care of our transportation fuel problems, solve the global warming problem, solve the foreign oil problem and take care of coal mining and nuclear waste." That's a tall order. But there are signs that Florida might at last be turning its face toward the sun. Gov. Charlie Crist is pushing the state to use more alternative energy and will work with lawmakers to get more done. The world's No. 1 market for solar power is Germany, which even its tourist Web site acknowledges is cloudy. In the United States, the state with the second-most aggressive solar policy after sunny California is heavily industrialized New Jersey, home to chemical plants and often-gray days. "If Germany can be the biggest solar market, then Florida can catch up," said Gwen Rose, solar advocate with the San Fransisco-based nonprofit Vote Solar. Florida does get less direct sun than Arizona and California, home to the nation's largest solar array. But what Florida lacks in light it can make up in heat, researchers say. Solar water heaters would cut 25 percent off someone's monthly electric bill and reduce the amount of energy used in that house 20 percent. The systems aren't cheap - they cost between $3,000 and $4,000, compared with $300 for a standard water heater - but federal and state governments offer tax breaks, and the energy is free, Williams said. What's more, they last between 25 and 30 years, he said. "Your energy cost is going to offset the cost," Williams said. Florida Power & Light Co. is building a 150-kilowatt solar array in Sarasota, and 58 of its 4.4 million residential and business customers use photovoltaic panels, spokesman Mayco Villafana said. The utility has installed solar panels on the Miami Science Museum and on elementary, middle and high schools, with more projects on the way. The science museum uses the electricity to run its animal hospital. Its success will determine how much solar energy it will be able to use for another project downtown, President Gillian Thomas said. "We think it's fascinating," Thomas said. "It's all part of our new, long-term push for green energy." Stephen Berg is trying to bring a 175,000-watt photovoltaic system to the garage of the City Center project in downtown West Palm Beach. The solar cell system would shade the cars on top of the garage and is expected to generate about 30 percent of the electricity for the building, said Berg, who runs Go Sun Solutions, a West Palm Beach-based solar energy Web site. The solar cells would be provided by a Chinese manufacturer Berg declined to name. The city commission will vote July 9 on the deal, which could cost between $400,000 and $700,000. "This company looks like they are generous enough to break into the solar market," Berg said. Some of the upcoming projects, as well as the solar array in Sarasota, are tied to FPL's green power program, Sunshine Energy. FPL has pledged to build 150 kilowatts of solar energy for every 10,000 customers that pay an additional $9.75 each month for the program. "There seems to be a lot of interest out there," said David Bates, who manages the Sunshine Energy program. But when people start talking about forcing solar to be a significant part of the energy mix, that's when the grumbling starts. "What you have heard from the environmental movement is that we can get there through renewables or we can get there through offsetting the energy that we are demanding today," Villafana said. "And what we are saying is that they (renewables) will not get you there." Utility regulators recently told FPL it couldn't build a 1,980-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Glades County. If FPL wanted to build an equivalent power plant using solar, the photovoltaic panels would have to cover half of Miami and not be hampered by clouds or hurricanes, Villafana said. Even the nation's largest solar farm, which covers 2,000 acres in California's Mojave Desert, produces only 300 megawatts of power. It is partly owned by FPL Energy LLC, sister company of solar-shy FPL. What other states are doing, however, is requiring their utilities to get a portion of their energy from solar. Nearly half have tacked a small fee onto consumers' monthly utility bills to create what's known as a public benefits fund to promote renewable energy and keep solar panels and other energy-saving products cheap. Most of the states - 37 - let utilities reimburse consumers for any excess power they generate from solar, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Florida's utility regulators are studying the concept, known as net metering. "Unless Florida can get fair value for the solar it's producing, you're not going to see a market," said Rose, whose Vote Solar is a grass-roots organization that lobbies state governments to create policies for a successful solar market. "Solar has this chicken-or-egg problem: The cost is high because demand is low, and demand is low because the cost is high." Information from: The Palm Beach Post, http://www.pbpost.com Copyright 2007 Miami Herald Media Co. ***************************************************************** 4 UPI: Russian hints at threat to U.S. allies United Press International - Security & Terrorism - Briefing Published: July 23, 2007 at 6:32 PM MOSCOW, July 23 (UPI) -- A Russian official last week hinted at threatening states hosting U.S. BMD systems. RIA Novosti reported Thursday that an official it described as "a source in Russia's Defense Ministry" said nations allowing ballistic missile defense facilities to be based on their territories were not helping their own security, but were placing their own countries and those of neighboring states at risk. The comments appeared to be referring to U.S. plans to build a BMD interceptor base in Poland over the next three years and an accompanying radar tracking facility for the interceptors in the neighboring Czech Republic. RIA Novosti said the Russian defense official informed it that these BMD plans of the Bush administration could also cause major environmental problems as the destruction from intercepting an intercontinental ballistic missile would be widespread. "Should a U.S. anti-missile intercept a ballistic or other type of missile in Europe, substantial tracts of land would be affected in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, and a number of other states. Radioactive elements will be dispersed across these countries' territories," the Russian defense source told RIA Novosti. "Europe, Alaska, naval components, and space-based tracking, control and communication systems -- all of these are elements of the U.S. missile defense system," the source said. "What is of primary importance is the sheer fact that a global missile defense infrastructure is being created around Russia," he said. The RIA Novosti report was published only three days after four-star Army Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, chief of staff of the Russian Armed Forces, told reporters in Moscow that Poland and the Czech Republic should consider the dangers their governments were exposing them to by agreeing to host the U.S. BMD bases. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 5 RIA Novosti: Five steps for preventing a new Cold War Opinion & analysis - 14:56 | 23/ 07/ 2007 MOSCOW. (Sergei Rogov for RIA Novosti) - Many pundits, when analyzing Russian-U.S. relations, have been talking about the return of the Cold War. I beg to differ - all the more so after the two presidents met in Kennebunkport. I see five pluses in this context. First, after a long absence, the words "strategic partnership" returned to Vladimir Putin's vocabulary. He mentioned it as an idea that could become reality if we managed to coordinate our strategic positions. George W. Bush called Russia a "significant international player" and "solid partner." Of course, some people may brush all this aside as politesse, but I still think it is important that both presidents talked about potential partnership, especially in the midst of no-holds-barred ideological and propaganda campaigns on both sides. Putin emphasized again that we shared common democratic values and were moving toward the same goal. Bush spoke in much the same vein. Neither side backed down from its positions, but there was no talk about ideological incompatibility. To sum up, the prospect of strategic partnership emerged on the basis of national interests and democratic values. We haven't heard anything like this for a long time, either in the media or at the official level. This is the first plus. The second plus was the Russian-U.S. decision to begin serious talks on the follow-up to START-I. This is vital because if negotiations to do not continue, what will happen with the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT)? Up to now, the U.S. has refused to talk about new international commitments on verification, for one. How can we discuss ceilings on deployed warheads if we don't know what these are? How can we check their presence? If SORT does not enter into force, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty will become pointless because there will be no limits on strategic offensive and defensive weapons. What will happen with tactical nuclear weapons? Agreements which prohibit one class of nuclear weapons and allow all others are devoid of any sense. The talks will be very difficult because all previous treaties on offensive nuclear arms control did not consider the number of warheads - they only registered the number of carriers that could deliver a certain number of warheads. SORT is all about warheads and does not even mention carriers. But how will we know where warheads are deployed and how many? These talks are not likely to be completed by the current presidents because they will soon leave office. They could, however, begin the talks. If their successors start the talks from scratch in 2009, they will have very little time left - START-I expires in December 2009. Moreover, if Bush and Putin reach an agreement, which is not impossible, we can seriously hope to come to terms on the follow-up to START-I. I believe that the beginning of these talks is a major gain. There is one more point. The START-I force level is 6,000 warheads; START-II had 3,000-3,500 but never entered into force, while SORT's ceiling is 1,700-2,200. But if we agree on the counting rules, we can negotiate a reduction schedule. For instance, we could agree to cut the number of warheads to 3,500 by 2010 and to 2,500 by 2011 with a view to approaching the SORT levels. After the Putin-Bush meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed a very short statement about "their intention to carry out strategic offensive reductions to the lowest possible level consistent with their national security...." Thus, it will be possible to lower the level from 1,700-2,200 and have no more than 1,500 warheads by 2015. This is a very serious opportunity which allows the talks to continue. It is linked with the third issue, notably, the Declaration on Nuclear Energy and Nonproliferation. The presidents discussed both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Prospects here are very good, and cooperation is possible not only between the United States and Russia, but also with third countries, for instance India. I think this is a very interesting direction. After the accident at Three Mile Island, the Americans did not develop nuclear energy for more than three decades and have problems with nuclear fuel. Despite lobbying against cooperation with Russia, there is hardly any alternative to it. The Americans may find themselves in a predicament when the agreement on weapons-grade uranium expires because half of their nuclear power stations are already adjusted to accept Russian fuel. Iran is the fourth case in point. Bush called Russia a "solid partner" in this context. When the United States failed to resolve the North Korean problem single-handedly, it had to agree to multilateral talks with China as a go-between. The situation with Iran is much the same and here Russia can be a mediator. We can cooperate with the Americans even if we are dead set against a military solution. Judging by Bush's statement on this score, the Russian and U.S. positions are coming closer. The Iranian issue is linked with anti-ballistic missile (ABM) problems. Here I see the fifth plus. The Russian-U.S. discussion of building a defense against medium-range missiles is developing into talks rather than an exchange of mutual recriminations. For the first time, Bush made it very clear that if the United States and Russia sent a joint message to Iran, it would have to respond to it. I believe that he was referring not only to a diplomatic message but also to ABM cooperation. I think it will be another 20 years before Iran has intercontinental ballistic missiles. But the real threat is posed only by medium-range missiles, which, in theory, could carry an Iranian warhead in five years. This is a threat to us, too - six countries have a total of 400 medium- and short-range missiles along our border. Can we cooperate with the United States in ballistic missile defense? What do 10 ground-based interceptors, which are supposed to be deployed in Poland, have to do with this effort? Any medium-range missile defense system would have to be tested using the appropriate type of missiles, but both the United States and Russia destroyed their medium-range missiles as part of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Hence, we must start serious talks with the Americans on an ABM system. We offered them the Gabala radar - our first card. They agreed to take it but want to continue with their own plans. Then Putin pulled out a second card - the new-generation modular Voronezh-M radar near Armavir, in southern Russia. We can build a radar station in a year or even sooner, while it will take the Americans four years to deploy their radar in the Czech Republic. Unlike Gabala, the Voronezh-M is dual-purpose and can be also used for targeting. Finally, there is a third card - we can offer the United States our systems for the destruction of medium-range missiles, for instance, S-400s, which can deal with ballistic missiles of any range. Each side could form a security zone for which it will be responsible; NATO could join in. All we need is trust and an honest approach. Despite the difficulties in Russian-U.S. relations, both presidents have acknowledged their strategic partnership and agreed to hold talks in four directions (three military and one civilian). There is strong reason to hope that there will be no Cold War while they are in power. They have bequeathed to their successors the potential for cooperation. The chill in Russian-American relations is not yet over, but a new Cold War is much less likely. This is a no small gain. Sergei Rogov is director of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti. RIA Novosti ***************************************************************** 6 Comment is free: Hawks rule the roost guardian.co.uk/commentisfree > Peter David Without renewed international effort to make sanctions bite, an American military strike on Iran is becoming more, rather than less, likely. Peter David July 23, 2007 5:30 PM | Printable version Fuelling discontent: Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at a ceremony at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Photograph: Hasan Sarbakhshian/AP. Given the bloody mayhem in Iraq, and the clamour in Washington to bring the boys home from a failing war, it may seem hard to believe that any sane western policymaker could be contemplating yet another attack on another, much bigger, Muslim country. But as Iran moves inexorably closer to learning how to build an atomic bomb, the danger that America or Israel will attack its nuclear sites is now acute. As the Economist argues in a special report this week, Iran is now within fingertip-touch of mastering the dark arts of nuclear enrichment. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, it could by the end of this month have as many as 3,000 centrifuges spinning at the underground plant it built secretly at Natanz, south of Tehran. Most experts say that if these ran at full speed and high efficiency for a year, they could make enough nuclear fuel for a crude atomic bomb. Making a workable weapon would take more time. But even the cautious IAEA now reckons that if it wanted to Iran could become a nuclear-weapons state within three years. Iran's denial that it has this aim is belied by the obstinacy with which it has defied two unanimous resolutions from the UN security council, ordering it to suspend enrichment and applying economic sanctions. The fact that Russia and China removed their previous protection of Iran and supported these resolutions shows how worried even Iran's friends and trading partners are. But the sanctions are not working. Despite rising inflation and unemployment, the introduction of petrol rationing, and the European Union's offer of extensive economic help if Iran stops enrichment and comes clean about its nuclear ambitions, the centrifuges spin on. An American or Israeli military attack on Iran would not be mad. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's fire-breathing president, has reminded the world that hostility to the Jewish state is hardwired into Iran's revolutionary DNA. Ayatollah Khomeini called it the duty of every Muslim to reverse the sin of Israel's creation. And, unlike the case of Iraq, there would be no question this time of false intelligence: the world is worried about the existence of facilities Iran boasts about openly. Nor would there be any question of following up air strikes with an invasion: with a population of more than 70m, Iran is just too big for that. A case can therefore be made that a military attack would be better than allowing a self-proclaimed theocracy to acquire nuclear weapons. This is not a private fantasy harboured only by George Bush and Dick Cheney: all America's front-running presidential candidates, Democrats as well as Republicans, say that they would also contemplate a pre-emptive strike if sanctions fail. Such an attack would, nonetheless, be a huge and dangerous gamble. The Economist's special report argues strongly against it, not least because the prickly and beleaguered revolutionaries currently presiding over a hardline crackdown on dissent in Iran would feel compelled for their own political survival to strike back. And Iran has the means. It could fire hundreds of missiles at Israel, harry American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and choke off the world's tanker traffic through the vital Strait of Hormuz. It is difficult to imagine any happy ending to this crisis without two immediate changes of policy. The first is that Russia and China need to join the west in a new and much sharper sanctions resolution, directed not at Iran's people but at the financial interests of the regime's clerical leaders and the economic empire of their protectors, the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The second is that America needs to overcome a phobia that goes back to the embassy hostage crisis of 1979 and promise Iran not just non-belligerency, but normal relations, once it reassures the world about its nuclear ambitions. A deal of this kind would require a painful adjustment of ideology in Washington and Tehran alike. But the alternative, for both countries and for the Middle East, is otherwise bleak. For the Economist's full report on Iran, go here. And to hear an interview with Peter David on issues raised in this special report, go here. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007. Registered in England and Wales. No. 908396 Registered office: Number 1 Scott Place, Manchester M3 3GG ***************************************************************** 7 [southnews] NUCLEAR POWER ON SHAKY GROUND Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:31:06 -0500 (CDT) Japan is ready to accept United Nations inspectors to check the world's biggest nuclear power plant after a powerful earthquake last week caused radiation leaks and renewed fears about nuclear safety, the country's nuclear safety agency said on Monday. Japan's nuclear industry - which supplies about one-third of the country's electricity needs and is central to its efforts to battle global warming - has been tarnished by cover-ups of accidents and fudged safety records. The Japanese government had first told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it did not need help for now, but then came under pressure from local authorities to allow inspections. NUCLEAR POWER ON SHAKY GROUND / No price too high to pay for safe nuclear plants The Yomiuri Shimbun This is the second installment of a three-part series examining how earthquake-prone Japan can coexist with nuclear power plants, a concern that has surfaced in the wake of the July 16 earthquake in the Chuetsu region of Niigata Prefecture--the first temblor anywhere in which a fault line ran beneath a nuclear power plant. Following last Monday's earthquake, the asphalt-paved grounds of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture bulge and sag, blocking people's path. Immediately after the Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake occurred, Shizuo Suda, deputy manager of the fire prevention division at Kashiwazaki Fire Department, entered the plant to inspect an electric transformer that had caught fire. After observing the scene, Suda became very concerned about the possibility of a secondary disaster occurring. He had never imagined that an earthquake would bring about such terrible destruction, and he thought to himself that if oil leaked from an underground pipe and ignited, there would be no remedying the situation. Suda's report to the Kashiwazaki municipal government indicating the seriousness of the situation at the plant prompted the municipal government to issue an emergency order to TEPCO instructing it to shut down the plant. Yumio Ishii, president of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, said Friday: "I strongly feel we were lucky the disaster wasn't worse than it was. The quake-resistance standards for nuclear power plants definitely need to be reviewed." The late Nobu Kitamura, a prominent geologist and professor emeritus at Tohoku University, conducted research into faults across the country in the 1960s and '70s. He once described the Japanese archipelago, which is situated in a seismogenic zone, as follows: "If I throw a stone from here to there, countless faults lie underground in the space between. That's where Japan is located." Last Monday's quake, in which fault lines directly underneath the nuclear power plant shifted, showed Kitamura's description was no exaggeration. Japan is the only country located on four plates edging toward each other and many fault zones. Among 31 nations and regions that have nuclear power plants, Japan is the most at risk of being hit by earthquakes. Japan introduced nuclear power technology from Europe and the United States 50 years ago. The history of Japan's nuclear power industry has been a struggle against earthquakes. Inside a nuclear reactor, control rods designed to serve as brakes move between nuclear fuel rods that are assembled precisely spaced apart. If the spacing changes even slightly due to an earthquake, the control rods will cease to function as brakes. Japan Atomic Power Co.'s Tokai nuclear power station in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, is the nation's first commercial nuclear power plant. A graphite reactor, imported from Britain, a nation that not face the threat of serious earthquakes, was used for the power plant. At the time of introducing the reactor, questions regarding its quake-resistance capabilities were voiced by many experts, forcing the company to make changes in the construction plan, including improvements to the graphite layers surrounding the fuel rods. The technology for light water reactors, which was used in many plants later, was imported from the United States, which has seismogenic zones on its Pacific Coast. Although those reactors were designed for optimum quake resistance, the United States is blessed with many choices for locating its nuclear plants, so it does not have to worry so much about making its nuclear plants capable of withstanding very strong quakes. Japan, however, had to develop the strictest quake-resistant standards for its nuclear power plants. But the tremors of the Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake exceeded those standards. Seismic research has advanced significantly in the past half century. But it was only after the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 that active faults in various regions earned serious attention. Also, it was not until the 1980s that understanding of the process of liquefaction began to deepen. Seismology is still developing, and quake-resistance standards for nuclear power plants always need to be reviewed. It is said that the cost of building one nuclear power plant in Japan is 300 billion yen--the highest in the world--as expenses for quake-resistance measures are high. In the electric power industry, many are reluctant to adopt strict antiseismic measures, saying costs will skyrocket if standards are made rigorous. Mitsumasa Hirano, chief secretary of the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization said, "People have become to understand the uncertainty of seismology, and the social perception toward risk has changed since the Great Hanshin Earthquake." Electric power companies have been making efforts to balance cost and safety in setting quake-resistance standards for nuclear power plants, but it is not acceptable to delay the implementation of antiseismic measures simply because doing so will be expensive. (Jul. 23, 2007) http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070723TDY01002.htm ***************************************************************** 8 IPS-English INDIA/US: Nuke Deal - Breakthrough or Bad Bargain? Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:50:55 -0700 ROMAIPS NA AP DV EN SC NU NR INDIA/US: Nuke Deal - Breakthrough or Bad Bargain? Praful Bidwai NEW DELHI, Jul 23 (IPS) - After tortuous negotiations spread over four days in Washington, the United States and India have reported ”substantial progress” on a bilateral agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation, but said they would now ”refer the issue to our governments for final review.” However, the deal, also known as the ‘123 agreement' because it will amend Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act, is unlikely to find broad consensual acceptance either in India or the U.S. So wary are the two governments about announcing a breakthrough that they have given no details of the agreement's contents, and in particular about its acceptance of India's right to reprocess fuel burned in imported reactors and continuity of fuel supplies from the U.S. in case India conducts a nuclear test. The agreement is soon to be placed before India's Cabinet Committee on Security. It is due to be put up before the U.S. Congress for an ‘up-and-down' or yes-or-no vote without amendments. Under Indian law, it need not be ratified by Parliament. The deal became possible only with intervention by U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and talks between the National Security Advisers of the two countries, as well as high-powered delegations of diplomats and technical experts. Looming large over the talks was the presence of India's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman Anil Kakodkar. Although Kakodkar did not participate in the negotiations, he was continually consulted to ensure that his concerns about the deal are met. Kakodkar is known to be less than happy with the deal, and has orchestrated opposition to it through his former colleagues. According to media reports, the 30 page-long agreement, reached after 300 working hours of talks, only ‘partly' concedes India's right to reprocess spent fuel to be used in its fast breeder reactor programme. India has all along insisted on such a full-fledged ‘right' -- strongly contested by non-proliferation advocates in the U.S. Indian negotiators are believed to have offered to build a dedicated reprocessing facility for imported fuel and to place it under safeguards (inspections) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This proposal is proving controversial in India, but the U.S seems to have accepted it. It is not known if this carries any conditions. On the second contentious issue, that of guarantees of U.S. nuclear supplies if India conducts a nuclear explosion, it has been agreed that the U.S. can demand a return of equipment and material exported to India. But this has reportedly been hedged in with clauses that call for a Presidential review of the circumstances in which India conducts a test, as well as technical conditions calculated to prevent a sudden and complete suspension of nuclear cooperation. Both the U.S. Atomic Energy Act and a special legislation passed last December by the U.S. Congress, called the Henry J. Hyde U.S.-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act 2006, mandate a cessation of nuclear cooperation in case India conducts a test. Under the new agreement, such cessation will not be sudden. ”The Indian side obviously did some tough bargaining,” says Achin Vanaik, a political scientist and independent nuclear analyst. ”The critical question now is how the two main lobbies opposed to the deal react. There is, first, the nuclear scientists' lobby which is allergic to any external inspections. There is also the hawkish political right, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which wrongly holds that the deal will cap India's nuclear weapons capability.” Some nuclear scientists, such as A.N. Prasad, former director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, and A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, have attacked the proposal to create a dedicated reprocessing facility on the ground that its operations will be controlled by foreign agencies and that it will raise the processing costs. Yet others, including two former AEC chairmen, have demanded amendments to the Hyde Act. However, the U.S. insists that the 123 agreement cannot substantially differ from the Hyde Act. ”It is not clear if the nuclear scientists' lobby can be brought around to supporting the agreement in its present form,” argues M.V. Ramana, a researcher with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore. ”If a majority of its constituents remain hostile to the agreement, political opposition to it will grow.” Adds Ramana: ”Many of the arguments of this lobby are self-serving and reflect xenophobia and a reluctance to accept any kind of scrutiny, including IAEA inspections. However, there is some validity in the argument that a dedicated reprocessing facility will raise costs. But that is something India can live with. The trouble is that this lobby wants to have its cake and eat it too: it wants India to be treated on a par with the nuclear weapons-states recognised by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 197 0, although India is not a party to it.” BJP leaders have already declared that they oppose the Hyde Act and the 123 agreement in its present form. Observers close to India's Left parties believe that they are unlikely to support the agreement, and will want to hold down Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to various commitments he made in Parliament. As for the U.S., non-proliferation experts and political leaders, especially from the Democratic Party, oppose any deal that exempts India from U.S. laws and effectively legitimises its nuclear arsenal while diluting the global norm against the spread of nuclear weapons. Says Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, if the U.S. agrees to allow India to reprocess imported spent fuel, ”it would still be next to impossible to ensure that U.S. technology and material would not be used directly or indirectly to support or facilitate India's unsafeguarded weapons-related plutonium reprocessing activities ...(A reprocessing facility) would further free up India's limited fuel supplies for weapons purposes.” Kimball argues that this would be the fourth major departure from the U.S. laws and policies. The first happened in July 2005 when the Bush administration agreed to drop its longstanding policy of restricting nuclear cooperation with states that have nuclear weapons, or have tested them, and refuse to allow full-scope IAEA safeguards. The second departure took place when the Bush administration gave up its demand that India suspend production of fissile material for weapons purposes. The third happened in March 2006 when the U.S. urged India to include in its list of ‘civil' nuclear facilities slated to be put under safeguards reactors falling in its fast breeder programme; ”but again, India refused and the U.S. side went along”. Unless the 123 agreement is rejected by the Indian cabinet, or fails to win Congressional ratification, which seems highly unlikely, the arms controllers would have to take their battle to other fora which must approve the deal before it gets come into effect: the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers' Group and the IAEA. ***** + POLITICS: Doomsday Clock Ticking Faster - in Asia (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36245) + Like Mushrooms - IPS special coverage (http://www.ipsnews.net/new_focus/nuclear/index.asp) + Doomsday Clock (http://www.thebulletin.org/doomsday_clock/timeline.htm) (END/IPS/AP/NA/NU/NR/SC/DV/EN/NR/PB/RDR/07) = 07230718 ORP001 NNNN ***************************************************************** 9 [NYTr] Japan: Nuclear Power on Shaky Ground Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:02:46 -0400 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by Dave Muller (southnews) The Yomiuri Shimbun - Jul 23, 2007 http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070723TDY01002.htm NUCLEAR POWER ON SHAKY GROUND No price too high to pay for safe nuclear plants This is the second installment of a three-part series examining how earthquake-prone Japan can coexist with nuclear power plants, a concern that has surfaced in the wake of the July 16 earthquake in the Chuetsu region of Niigata Prefecture--the first temblor anywhere in which a fault line ran beneath a nuclear power plant. Following last Monday's earthquake, the asphalt-paved grounds of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture bulge and sag, blocking people's path. Immediately after the Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake occurred, Shizuo Suda, deputy manager of the fire prevention division at Kashiwazaki Fire Department, entered the plant to inspect an electric transformer that had caught fire. After observing the scene, Suda became very concerned about the possibility of a secondary disaster occurring. He had never imagined that an earthquake would bring about such terrible destruction, and he thought to himself that if oil leaked from an underground pipe and ignited, there would be no remedying the situation. Suda's report to the Kashiwazaki municipal government indicating the seriousness of the situation at the plant prompted the municipal government to issue an emergency order to TEPCO instructing it to shut down the plant. Yumio Ishii, president of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, said Friday: "I strongly feel we were lucky the disaster wasn't worse than it was. The quake-resistance standards for nuclear power plants definitely need to be reviewed." The late Nobu Kitamura, a prominent geologist and professor emeritus at Tohoku University, conducted research into faults across the country in the 1960s and '70s. He once described the Japanese archipelago, which is situated in a seismogenic zone, as follows: "If I throw a stone from here to there, countless faults lie underground in the space between. That's where Japan is located." Last Monday's quake, in which fault lines directly underneath the nuclear power plant shifted, showed Kitamura's description was no exaggeration. Japan is the only country located on four plates edging toward each other and many fault zones. Among 31 nations and regions that have nuclear power plants, Japan is the most at risk of being hit by earthquakes. Japan introduced nuclear power technology from Europe and the United States 50 years ago. The history of Japan's nuclear power industry has been a struggle against earthquakes. Inside a nuclear reactor, control rods designed to serve as brakes move between nuclear fuel rods that are assembled precisely spaced apart. If the spacing changes even slightly due to an earthquake, the control rods will cease to function as brakes. Japan Atomic Power Co.'s Tokai nuclear power station in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, is the nation's first commercial nuclear power plant. A graphite reactor, imported from Britain, a nation that not face the threat of serious earthquakes, was used for the power plant. At the time of introducing the reactor, questions regarding its quake-resistance capabilities were voiced by many experts, forcing the company to make changes in the construction plan, including improvements to the graphite layers surrounding the fuel rods. The technology for light water reactors, which was used in many plants later, was imported from the United States, which has seismogenic zones on its Pacific Coast. Although those reactors were designed for optimum quake resistance, the United States is blessed with many choices for locating its nuclear plants, so it does not have to worry so much about making its nuclear plants capable of withstanding very strong quakes. Japan, however, had to develop the strictest quake-resistant standards for its nuclear power plants. But the tremors of the Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake exceeded those standards. Seismic research has advanced significantly in the past half century. But it was only after the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 that active faults in various regions earned serious attention. Also, it was not until the 1980s that understanding of the process of liquefaction began to deepen. Seismology is still developing, and quake-resistance standards for nuclear power plants always need to be reviewed. It is said that the cost of building one nuclear power plant in Japan is 300 billion yen--the highest in the world--as expenses for quake-resistance measures are high. In the electric power industry, many are reluctant to adopt strict antiseismic measures, saying costs will skyrocket if standards are made rigorous. Mitsumasa Hirano, chief secretary of the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization said, "People have become to understand the uncertainty of seismology, and the social perception toward risk has changed since the Great Hanshin Earthquake." Electric power companies have been making efforts to balance cost and safety in setting quake-resistance standards for nuclear power plants, but it is not acceptable to delay the implementation of antiseismic measures simply because doing so will be expensive. * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 10 [NYTr] LA Times Edit'l: No to Nukes Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:26:36 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by Ed Pearl [I've never see a stronger editorial from a major newspaper. -ed] Los Angeles Times - Jul 23, 2007 http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-nuclear23jul23,0,378363.story?coll=la-opinion-center Lead Editorial No to nukes It's tempting to turn to nuclear plants to combat climate change, but alternatives are safer and cheaper. JAPAN SEES NUCLEAR POWER as a solution to global warming, but it's paying a price. Last week, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake caused dozens of problems at the world's biggest nuclear plant, leading to releases of radioactive elements into the air and ocean and an indefinite shutdown. Government and company officials initially downplayed the incident and stuck to the official line that the country's nuclear plants are earthquake-proof, but they gave way in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Japan has a sordid history of serious nuclear accidents or spills followed by cover-ups. It isn't alone. The U.S. government allows nuclear plants to operate under a level of secrecy usually reserved for the national security apparatus. Last year, for example, about nine gallons of highly enriched uranium spilled at a processing plant in Tennessee, forming a puddle a few feet from an elevator shaft. Had it dripped into the shaft, it might have formed a critical mass sufficient for a chain reaction, releasing enough radiation to kill or burn workers nearby. A report on the accident from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was hidden from the public, and only came to light because one of the commissioners wrote a memo on it that became part of the public record. The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. No U.S. utility has ordered a new nuclear plant since 1978 (that order was later canceled), and until recently it seemed none ever would. But rising natural gas prices and worries about global warming have put the nuclear industry back on track. Many respected academics and environmentalists argue that nuclear power must be part of any solution to climate change because nuclear power plants don't release greenhouse gases. They make a weak case. The enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste ensure that ramping up the nuclear infrastructure will be a slow process - far too slow to make a difference on global warming. That's just as well, because nuclear power is extremely risky. What's more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks. Glowing pains Modern nuclear plants are much safer than the Soviet-era monstrosity at Chernobyl. But accidents can and frequently do happen. The Union of Concerned Scientists cites 51 cases at 41 U.S. nuclear plants in which reactors have been shut down for more than a year as evidence of serious and widespread safety problems. Nuclear plants are also considered attractive terrorist targets, though that risk too has been reduced. Provisions in the 2005 energy bill required threat assessments at nuclear plants and background checks on workers. What hasn't improved much is the risk of spills or even meltdowns in the event of natural disasters such as earthquakes, making it mystifying why anyone would consider building reactors in seismically unstable places like Japan (or California, which has two, one at San Onofre and the other in Morro Bay). Weapons proliferation is an even more serious concern. The uranium used in nuclear reactors isn't concentrated enough for anything but a dirty bomb, but the same labs that enrich uranium for nuclear fuel can be used to create weapons-grade uranium. Thus any country, such as Iran, that pursues uranium enrichment for nuclear power might also be building a bomb factory. It would be more than a little hypocritical for the U.S. to expand its own nuclear power capacity while forbidding countries it doesn't like from doing the same. The risks increase when spent fuel is recycled. Five countries reprocess their spent nuclear fuel, and the Bush administration is pushing strongly to do the same in the U.S. Reprocessing involves separating plutonium from other materials to create new fuel. Plutonium is an excellent bomb material, and it's much easier to steal than enriched uranium. Spent fuel is so radioactive that it would burn a prospective thief to death, while plutonium could be carried out of a processing center in one's pocket. In Japan, 200 kilograms of plutonium from a waste recycling plant have gone missing; in Britain, 30 kilograms can't be accounted for. These have been officially dismissed as clerical errors, but the nuclear industry has never been noted for its truthfulness or transparency. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained six kilograms. Technology might be able to solve the recycling problem, but the question of what to do with the waste defies answers. Even the recycling process leaves behind highly radioactive waste that has to be disposed of. This isn't a temporary issue: Nuclear waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. The only way to get rid of it is to put it in containers and bury it deep underground - and pray that geological shifts or excavations by future generations that have forgotten where it's buried don't unleash it on the surface. No country in the world has yet built a permanent underground waste repository, though Finland has come the closest. In the U.S., Congress has been struggling for decades to build a dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but has been unable to overcome fierce local opposition. One can hardly blame the Nevadans. Not many people would want 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood or transported through it on the way to the dump. The result is that nuclear waste is stored on-site at the power plants, increasing the risk of leaks and the danger to plant workers. Eventually, we'll run out of space for it. Goin' fission? Given the drawbacks, it's surprising that anybody would seriously consider a nuclear renaissance. But interest is surging; the NRC expects applications for up to 28 new reactors in the next two years. Even California, which has a 31-year-old ban on construction of nuclear plants, is looking into it. Last month, the state Energy Commission held a hearing on nuclear power, and a group of Fresno businessmen plans a ballot measure to assess voter interest in rescinding the state's ban. Behind all this is a perception that nuclear power is needed to help fight climate change. But there's little chance that nuclear plants could be built quickly enough to make much difference. The existing 104 nuclear plants in the U.S., which supply roughly 20% of the nation's electricity, are old and nearing the end of their useful lives. Just to replace them would require building a new reactor every four or five months for the next 40 years. To significantly increase the nation's nuclear capacity would require far more. The average nuclear plant is estimated to cost about $4 billion. Because of the risks involved, there is scarce interest among investors in putting up the needed capital. Nor have tax incentives and subsidies been enough to lure them. In part, that's because the regulatory process for new plants is glacially slow. The newest nuclear plant in the U.S. opened in 1996, after having been ordered in 1970 - a 26-year gap. Though a carbon tax or carbon trading might someday make the economics of nuclear power more attractive, and the NRC has taken steps to speed its assessments, community opposition remains high, and it could still take more than a decade to get a plant built. Meanwhile, a 2006 study by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research found that for nuclear power to play a meaningful role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the world would need to build a new plant every one to two weeks until mid-century. Even if that were feasible, it would overwhelm the handful of companies that make specialized parts for nuclear plants, sending costs through the roof. The accelerating threat of global warming requires innovation and may demand risk-taking, but there are better options than nuclear power. A combination of energy-efficiency measures, renewable power like wind and solar, and decentralized power generators are already producing more energy worldwide than nuclear power plants. Their use is expanding more quickly, and the decentralized approach they represent is more attractive on several levels. One fast-growing technology allows commercial buildings or complexes, such as schools, hospitals, hotels or offices, to generate their own electricity and hot water with micro-turbines fueled by natural gas or even biofuel, much more efficiently than utilities can do it and with far lower emissions. The potential for wind power alone is nearly limitless and, according to a May report by research firm Standard & Poor's, it's cheaper to produce than nuclear power. Further, the amount of electricity that could be generated simply by making existing non-nuclear power plants more efficient is staggering. On average, coal plants operate at 30% efficiency worldwide, but newer plants operate at 46%. If the world average could be raised to 42%, it would save the same amount of carbon as building 800 nuclear plants. Nevertheless, the U.S. government spends more on nuclear power than it does on renewables and efficiency. Taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear industry amounted to $9 billion 2006, according to Doug Koplow, a researcher based in Cambridge, Mass., whose Earth Track consultancy monitors energy spending. Renewable power sources, including hydropower but not ethanol, got $6 billion, and $2 billion went toward conservation. That's out of whack. Some countries - notably France, which gets nearly 80% of its power from nuclear plants and has never had a major accident - have made nuclear energy work, but at a high cost. The state-owned French power monopoly is severely indebted, and although France recycles its waste, it is no closer than the U.S. to approving a permanent repository. Tax dollars are better spent on windmills than on cooling towers. * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 11 [NYTr] Rattling the Reactor: Quakes, Fires and Leaks Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:50:51 -0400 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit CounterPunch - Jul 19, 2007 http://www.counterpunch.org/hoffman07192007.html Rattling the Reactor: Quakes, Fires and Leaks at the World's Largest Nuke By RUSSELL HOFFMAN On July 15th, 2007, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake killed 9 people and damaged the Kashiwazaki nuclear power generating station, the world's largest nuke facility. No one knows when the facility will reopen. More than a dozen separate leaks of radioactive materials have been reported, some going offsite via air and water. Approximately four hundred drums of so-called "low-level" radioactive waste toppled over (of more than 22,000 such drums located at the site). At least 40 of the toppled drums lost their covers when they fell over. Plant officials are now claiming the earthquake was larger than any they had planned for at the facility. Previous earthquakes produced wildly differing Richter Scale values, when measured at different spots at one Japanese nuke facility. So who knows what the reactors might have really experienced, or what they can really withstand? Four reactors were operating at the facility at the time of the quake. All four automatically SCRAMed when the jarring started. A "SCRAM" of a reactor is a violent, sudden, dangerous stoppage which causes enormous wear and tear (and sometimes causes leaks). The other three reactors at the facility were already shut down "voluntarily, for inspection" when the quake hit. Lucky, that. The facility produced about 7% of Japan's electricity, so undoubtedly the Japanese power companies will cause energy shortages and blackouts while the reactors remain closed, so that the Japanese people are fooled into thinking they MUST have MORE NUKES! Indeed, many more nukes are planned in Japan, as well as in America and elsewhere. And not one is truly "earthquake-proof," and most have never been given a reality check. Kashiwazaki's 8,212 megawatts of total generating capacity is enough for about 16 million homes in Japan (or for about half that many homes in America). So, just when hospitals, pumping stations, and individuals desperately needed power to recover from the earthquake, NONE was being delivered by the facility. Reports now say over 50 separate problems occurred at the facility because of the earthquake, including burst pipes and cobalt-60 and chromium-51 being released in gaseous form, but not including delayed reporting (which aggravated and endangered citizens). Several hundred gallons of radioactive liquid spilled into the Sea of Japan. The highest reported volume leaked was about 600 gallons. But early, widespread reports assured the public there were NO radioactive leaks. Early reports of no leakage were wrong and, as usual, have been replaced with reports of "minimal leakage" with "no danger to the public." In America, the Curie quantity (or, just as useful, the Becquerels) released is almost NEVER given to the public after an accident. However, reportedly "90,000 Becquerels of radioactivity" were released, so evidently the Japanese have a leg up on us for honest nuclear accident reporting in THAT department. (A Becquerel is one radioactive decay per second.) But the Becquerels alone is still not enough -- people also need to know the actual isotopes that were released (for example: strontium-90, iodine-131, cesium-137, etc.), since only then does one begin to have the ability to express, in concrete terms (i.e., numerically), the true danger from any specific accident. The number of gallons of diluted liquid, at some unspecified level of radioactivity, of some unspecified isotope of some unspecified element, tells you almost nothing. A fire at the facility kept local firefighters busy for several hours, as it spewed thick, terrifying black smoke into the air. But the real danger from a nuclear reactor accident -- radioactive poison -- is INVISIBLE. In some news reports, the fire was blamed for causing the leak (before it became "leaks"). If this is true in some way, it would be cause for concern in itself, since the fire was apparently in the switchyard, at the tail end of the operation, generally not considered part of the nuclear side of the plant. The feared tsunami never came. Nuclear power plants worldwide are NOT protected against reasonably foreseeable tsunami wave heights. The Japanese should be especially able to realize the insidious nature of radioactive poisons, since the effects of DNA damage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki still continue to this day, and could be carefully measured. But of course, the power companies don't want you to think about this, and government also won't fund proper research, probably in part due to pressure from American corporate and government interests. All those "special interests" don't want Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be properly studied, because of the effect such studies would have on the debate about the dangers of "Low Level Radiation." Many pro-nukers STILL CONTEND that "LLR" might be healthy -- like a vitamin or nutrient! (Similarly, the DNA damage in plants, animals, or humans in the area around Chernobyl is seldom carefully investigated.) Japan dodged a bullet THIS TIME, but disaster awaits those who do not learn from history. Japan can SURELY get along fine without nuclear power -- don't believe any other story! Modern technology CAN solve virtually ALL of humanity's environmental problems, but it requires reason and balance. Not all technology is good. There is no minimum threshold -- all ionizing radiation exposure carries with it some risk of cancer, leukemia, heart problems, genetic damage and other "health effects." The local mayor in Japan has forbidden any immediate restart of any of the Kashiwazaki reactors (in America, he would probably not be allowed to do that). May they NEVER open! [Russell D. Hoffman, a computer programmer in Carlsbad, California, has written extensively about nuclear power. His essays have been translated into several different languages and published in more than a dozen countries. He can be reached at: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com] * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 12 New Statesman: Nuclear: The risks remain Rebecca Harms Published 23 July 2007 Incidents involving reactors in Germany and Japan have again demonstrated the dangers of nuclear power, writes German Green MEP Rebecca Harms Ever since atom splitting has been used to generate energy, its risks and dangers have been controversial at least. And since the disastrous accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, this debate has in reality been settled in Europe: The majority of the continent's citizens are against this technology. Proponents of nuclear fission have been trying to jump on the climate change bandwagon to resuscitate nuclear power after decades of stagnation. Unfortunately, some UN climate change strategists, as well as parts of the European Commission, have bought into the nuclear lobby's arguments. While we clearly need to reform our wasteful and polluting energy industry to meet today's energy and environmental challenges grasping at even more dangerous straws cannot be the answer. Even if the Germans, Swedish and Japanese live under the illusion that their own facilities are by comparison the safest, the operators of atomic facilities have often only avoided a repeat of the Chernobyl disaster by a hair's breadth. Only a couple of weeks ago in the end of June thick clouds of smoke poured out of a transformer in the nuclear power plant in Krümmel, Germany. The statement of operator Vattenfall claiming the fire in the transformer had no effect on the reactor itself proved to be misleading. The same day the reactor in Brunsbüttel, a Vattenfall reactor as well, had to be shut down due to network problems. Both incidents were assigned the lowest problem classification in the Vattenfall report – “N” for normal. Also in last year’s incident in the Swedish Forsmark reactor Vattenfall tried to gloss over the seriousness of the situation. The Vattenfall policy of downplaying the actual problems, releasing information only bit by bit and even releasing wrong information is irresponsible and leaves one wondering what else they might be hiding. Only a couple of days after the incidents in Germany the worldwide biggest nuclear power plant Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Japan made it to the headlines. An earthquake had caused a series of problems, including a fire in a transformer, a leak in a cooling pond and the damaging of a number of barrels containing nuclear waste. Also here the operator delayed communicating the real scale of the problems to the public. The incidents have shown that nuclear energy is not the modern high technology sector portrayed by the industry itself. Aging reactors, the disability to prepare for natural disasters and a safety culture that is at least questionable pose a permanent risk to the population. It is wrong to try and counteract the risk of global warming through an expansion of nuclear energy and the consequential nuclear risks. Promoting nuclear as a sustainable energy source, as the nuclear lobby in Brussels and elsewhere is trying to do, is misleading. Any technology that can produce such devastating consequences as those in 1986 from the Chernobyl disaster can never be sustainable. Nuclear energy is a high risk technology. We can lull ourselves into a false sense of security by trying to forget about past catastrophes. However, the fact that there has not been another accident with a core meltdown since Three Mile Island does not mean that it will never happen again. Every year there are thousands of incidents, occurrences and events in nuclear installations and, simply because there was no catastrophic radioactive leakage, the world reacts as if there was no problem. The permanent risk of a core meltdown is a strong argument against the use of nuclear power. The lifetime extension of nuclear power plants heightens the risk of a major accident considerably. Are we going to find a solution to dispose of nuclear waste safely for thousands or even millions of years? This question does not only still lack an answer, it goes far beyond imagination. Every country using nuclear power could build a nuclear bomb if it decided to do so. These dangers are no less terrifying given the challenges of climate change. Only a strategy which finally makes energy companies, ministers and citizens abandon the energy production fix will help fight against climate change. Conservation and efficiency must become priorities in energy supply and use worldwide. Only Negawatt instead of Megawatt and the swift expansion of renewable energy sources can put the brakes on climate change. German MEP Rebecca Harms represents is a leading campaigner against nuclear power. Before going into politics she was a gardener. She is vice-president of the GREENS/EFA Group, spokesperson of the Green German MEPs * © New Statesman 1913–2007 ***************************************************************** 13 TheStar.com: Pickering woes fuel debate comment - Jul 23, 2007 04:30 AM Ian Urquhart It has not been a good summer for that distinctively Canadian invention, the CANDU nuclear reactor. At the Pickering nuclear plant, two CANDU reactors that had recently been refurbished – at a cost of more than $2 billion – have been down for maintenance all summer. And last week a third Pickering reactor was taken offline for repairs. With two others permanently mothballed because the cost of refurbishing them was considered prohibitive, that means just three of the eight CANDU reactors at Pickering are now churning out megawatts for Ontario's power-hungry households and industries. This sorry performance comes at a time when the operator of the Pickering plant – government-owned Ontario Power Generation – is pondering whether to invest billions in the refurbishing of four more Pickering reactors to extend their life spans. And it also occurs when the provincial government is trying to decide what technology to buy for the next generation of nuclear plants to replace the existing ones. The choice is between: CANDU, the heavy-water reactor, described as "the crown jewel" of Canadian technology by its owner, the federal government's Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL). A light-water model produced by three competing French, American and Japanese/American firms. Underscoring this choice is a nondescript office building just two kilometres down Brock Rd. from the Pickering nuclear plant, where Areva Canada is headquartered. Areva is a giant nuclear firm owned by the French government. Armand Laferrčre, the amiable Frenchman who heads up Areva Canada, says he takes no pleasure from CANDU's recent problems at Pickering. But then he quickly adds: "I would take the opportunity to emphasize that the product we deliver does not need any mid-life refurbishment and does not need any outages longer than 32 days." Moreover, continues Laferrčre, light-water reactors have a 60-year life span, about twice the apparent limit for CANDU. "That's the reason most of the markets right now are going to light water," he says. "I don't see heavy water gaining market share in the future compared to what it has now." Indeed, while the nuclear industry is undergoing a revival around the world as governments opt for energy solutions that are free of greenhouse gas emissions, AECL and CANDU do not appear to be sharing in the bounty. The last sale of a CANDU reactor was to China more than a decade ago. Still, AECL is a major domestic employer, with 4,000 direct employees, including 1,100 engineers, and 850 other technical professionals. Overall, an estimated 30,000 jobs at 150 companies are dependent on CANDU reactors. Mindful of this, Laferrčre counters that Areva would mostly call on the same people to build and operate its light-water reactors. "There is no way that we would be a threat to employment," he says. Furthermore, Areva is talking to the federal government about forming a partnership with AECL. (Ottawa is also in discussions with Areva's American competitor, General Electric.) If Areva partnered with AECL, says Laferrčre, "It would mean that the Canadian industry, which is an excellent one and in Ontario, especially, a rather large one, would get a foothold into the technology that sells best in the world, which is the light water, while retaining its specialized skills in heavy water." Every new problem at Pickering adds fuel to this argument. Ian Urquhart's provincial affairs column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at iurquha@thestar.ca © Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2007 | ***************************************************************** 14 BBC NEWS: UN experts to assess Japan plant Last Updated: Monday, 23 July 2007, 08:28 GMT 09:28 UK By Chris Hogg BBC News, Tokyo The plant suffered more than 50 malfunctions because of the quake Japan has decided it will allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to check its damaged nuclear plant. Last week the Japanese government rejected an offer from the IAEA, but this decision has now been reversed. Meanwhile the company that runs the nuclear plant in Niigata has said it may not even be able to begin checks of the reactor cores until September. Safety checks When the IAEA first offered to dispatch experts to inspect the damaged plant, Japan said they were not needed. It said Japanese officials could handle the safety check on their own. But local officials in Niigata asked the government to reconsider. They said bringing in outside experts would help to damp down rumours that the radiation leaks last week had been more serious than the plant's operators had admitted. Now ministers in Tokyo have changed their mind. The inspectors will be allowed in. Both sides are describing the mission as an opportunity to share information with the international community - a face-saving formulation. Japan says it hopes other countries will benefit from the lessons learned. But from the plant's operators, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, there is more evidence of just how long this might take. Safety checks on the reactors probably will not begin before September, they said, because contaminated water that has leaked inside one reactor needs to be cleaned up first and dozens of other problems need to be fixed. A spokesman for the company said they had had their hands full dealing with the problems caused by the earthquake last week. * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 15 Chattanoogan.com: TVA Dealing With One Of Driest Periods In Its History 7/23/2007 - by Dana Wilbourn Photo by Dana Wilbourn Gene Gibson, manager of water supply and special projects for TVA, speaks to the Chattanooga Engineers Club. Click to enlarge. Gene Gibson, manager of water supply and special projects for TVA, told the Chattanooga Engineers Club on Monday how TVA is managing during the current drought in the Tennessee Valley. Mr. Gibson said that the six-month period from January to June has been one of the driest in the history of TVA. TVA has been conserving reservoir water since February, he said. The only releases of water have been for navigation and water supply purposes. By just maintaining minimum flows, TVA releases 12 billion gallons of water daily through Kentucky Dam into the Ohio River. Rainfall and runoff this year is 50% to 60% below normal, he said. The tributary dams currently have just 78% of the normal amount of water stored behind them. The reservoirs on the Tennessee River from Knoxville to the confluence of the Ohio River are near normal simply because these are navigable reservoirs and TVA is required to maintain flows for navigation, water supply and water quality, he said. Mr. Gibson said that TVA is maintaining a nine-foot navigation depth in the main river, which is the required minimum. Normally, he said, TVA tries to keep an 11-foot navigation depth or greater. Barge companies have been warned that any barge drafting more than nine feet may drag the bottom. TVA’s power generation has also been impacted by the drought, Mr. Gibson said. TVA has reduced hydro generation to conserve water and the coal-fired and nuclear plants have had to increase usage of the cooling towers to avoid thermal derates at these plants, he said. Over four million people depend on the TVA water system for their water needs, said Mr. Gibson. Unfortunately, in a drought water usage increases because people start watering their yards and washing their cars, he said. Besides conserving water, Mr. Gibson listed several other actions TVA is taking because of the drought: TVA is monitoring the drought, its impacts and water quality TVA is coordinating its system operations TVA is participating in a Tennessee Valley Water Partnership TVA is making bi-weekly conference calls with all seven valley states TVA has developed a long-term drought management plan TVA is maintaining contacts with all water utilities in the valley TVA is providing public information on drought conditions and its impacts Mr. Gibson said he has two big concerns about the future of water supply in the Tennessee Valley. First, he said, is the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. Over 200 million gallons per day flow from the Tennessee River into the waterway, he said, for navigation purposes on the waterway. The waterway is not now authorized for water supply. Any legislation that authorizes the waterway as a water supply source could dramatically change the amount of water being drained away from the Tennessee Valley, he said. Secondly, Mr. Gibson cited a study by Auburn University. He said that the study recommends a massive irrigation project for northern Alabama to grow fruit and vegetables. The study says that large crops in California, where water supply is scarce, could be displaced to northern Alabama if adequate irrigation could be supplied. Both of these scenarios are what he calls inter-basin transfers (IBT). There are currently 22 small IBTs in the TVA service area, he said. Collectively, they result in just 11 million gallons per day leaving the TVA region and flowing to another. That number is small, he said, and can be put into context when compared to just one lock-through at a TVA dam. One lock-through, he said, uses between 10 and 20 million gallons, depending on which lock is being used. Small IBTs are not a problem, Mr. Gibson said, big IBTs are. There are no official applications for large IBTs, he said, but informal discussions are ongoing. Mr. Gibson said that TVA’s water system is not used primarily for generation of electricity. The system, he said, was designed for navigation and flood control. Power generation is a by-product. Other uses of the TVA water system include water supply, water quality and recreation. Recent rains have helped, Mr. Gibson said, but they have not brought an end to the drought. The 10 tributary reservoirs are still between five feet and 28 feet below median levels. news@chattanoogan.com (423) 266-2325 © 2004 Site designed and copyrighted by HD ***************************************************************** 16 baltimoresun.com: Constellation nuclear plans in fiscal peril -- Sun photo by Doug Kapustin, August 18, 2005 Constellation Energy Group has been planning to build a second nuclear reactor in Lusby for more than two years. The company might not get crucial financing without federal loan guarantees. By Paul Adams | sun reporter July 23, 2007 Constellation Energy Group's bid to be a leader in the nuclear industry's revival might be derailed if Bush administration officials don't back off of a proposal to cut the scope of loan guarantees approved by Congress, company and industry officials say. Michael J. Wallace, who heads Constellation's nuclear business, said bankers won't finance the company's half-dozen proposed nuclear reactors unless the Energy Department agrees to back 100 percent of the debt rather than the 90 percent the agency has offered. The outcome of the Energy Department's deliberations could have far-reaching effects on Maryland utility customers. Constellation wants to build a $5 billion reactor next to its Calvert Cliffs nuclear station in Lusby, which proponents say could alleviate the state's growing electricity shortfall and help lower utility bills. Nearly 30 percent of Maryland's electricity comes from outside the region and is subject to "congestion" charges on transmission lines -- significant factors in the recent 70 percent rate increase that hit Baltimore Gas & Electric customers. It also could determine the future of Constellation's plans to develop similar reactors for utility buyers nationwide through a partnership announced Friday with Electricite de France SA of Paris. Constellation's concerns are supported by five major investment banks, which say dozens of nuclear plants proposed industrywide are unlikely to be built without major changes in the loan program. "We remain firm that without a full loan guarantee as provided in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, it is going to be very difficult -- if not impossible -- to finance these units," said Caren Byrd, an executive director with investment bank Morgan Stanley. Lenders say investors will be reluctant to buy unsecured debt in nuclear projects after several high-profile financial disasters in the late 1970s. Many still recall what happened to the Shoreham nuclear power plant in Long Island, N.Y., which was completed in 1984 but never operated because of public opposition and regulatory obstacles. Cost overruns, regulatory hang-ups and widespread opposition from environmentalists dogged the industry throughout the 1970s, contributing to the cancellation of dozens of proposed reactors and resulting in more than $17 billion in after-tax write-offs industrywide. A spokeswoman for the Energy Department said it is taking the industry's concerns into consideration and will make a final decision on the scope of loan guarantees this year. Until then, the utility industry's plans to build the first new nuclear reactors in a generation are on hold. Nuclear power has been promoted by energy companies as a way to generate large amounts of electricity without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, though many environmentalists still are opposed. More than 30 plants have been proposed industrywide since the 2005 energy bill was signed into law. The projects must win regulatory approval, which no energy provider has attempted in decades. Constellation has been laying the groundwork for its proposed Calvert Cliffs addition for more than two years. It has begun the license application process, placed orders for key components and secured $300 million worth of tax breaks from Calvert County if the reactor is built. Constellation shareholders will pay out of pocket for 20 percent of the project's cost, or about $1 billion by some estimates. But the rest will have to come from lenders, who are reluctant to gamble billions of dollars on an industry that has atrophied since the Three Mile Island accident near Middletown, Pa., in 1979 increased public opposition to new reactors. "We haven't done this for 25 years, so there's reluctance on the part of lenders as to how all of the risks are going to be organized," Wallace said. General construction costs have climbed 30 percent over the past few years, and finding skilled engineers and manufacturers who can make the required components will prove difficult, said Paul Joskow, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and director of its Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Many of the companies that produced parts used in existing nuclear reactors have gone out of business or been acquired over the years. The energy bill was designed to kick-start the industry by requiring the government to provide loan guarantees for the full 80 percent of project costs that Constellation and other energy companies will have to borrow. But they say the Energy Department's initial proposal would cover just 72 percent. The remaining 8 percent -- or about $400 million on a $5 billion project -- would be unsecured debt, which comes with a higher interest rate. Bankers Morgan Stanley, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Citigroup Global Markets, Credit Suisse Securities LLC and Lehman Brothers have said the inclusion of unsecured debt would make it nearly impossible for lenders to sell the loans in the secondary market, which is essential in such deals. Government-backed debt is typically bought by pension funds and other cautious investors, who would balk at taking a risk on the unsecured portion of the financing. "We are concerned that the proposed rule is not workable," the five bankers wrote in comments submitted to the Energy Department. Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, counters that Wall Street routinely finances businesses that are considered just as risky. "Their claims that the [Energy Department's] proposed package is not finance-able are just not correct," said Bradford, who is now vice chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which opposes the loan provisions for nuclear power. "They want taxpayers to take 100 percent of the debt risk." Environmental groups agree, saying nuclear energy should have to compete with other forms of energy for investment dollars. Many complain that the disproportionate focus on nuclear energy comes at the expense of financing for other renewable energy options that could be just as effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. "These subsidies go to some of the best-performing companies on Wall Street," said Tom Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The most economically efficient way to address the global-warming problem is to cap carbon emissions and let the alternatives compete on a level playing field." The Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group, counters that the industry will have to build dozens of new reactors in the next 20 to 30 years in order to meet rising energy demand without adding to greenhouse gases. "Without this [loan program], we think it's going to be hard, if not close to impossible, to build substantial numbers of new nuclear plants," said Richard Myers, vice president of policy development for the group. Related Links * Constellation Energy Group Photo Congressional leaders have criticized the Energy Department and Office of Management and Budget for offering a loan program that appears less generous than what was called for in legislation. Both houses of Congress have held hearings on the matter, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers have called on the White House to intervene. "There is a lot of frustration among members of Congress about the way the Department of Energy and Office of Management and Budget have implemented the loan program," said Matt Letourneau, Republican communications director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "Specifically, the amount that the federal government will guarantee is not consistent with what Congress intended." Some legal and industry experts say that many plants will be built even without a more generous loan program. Regulators and politicians in Florida, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana have told utilities that they will be allowed to recover nuclear development costs through rate increases for customers, which makes financing easier to obtain. Power generators in those states operate under traditional regulation rules, which assure them a guaranteed rate of return on investments. "I know that there are plants that are based on an economic analysis that does not incorporate ... the loan guarantees, and those plants will probably go forward without regard to what happens at" the Department of Energy, said Charles Whitney, an Atlanta attorney specializing in energy issues. But power generators in deregulated states, such as Maryland, cannot recoup their costs from electricity ratepayers and are not guaranteed a profit on their investments. It's unlikely any plants will be built in those states without loan guarantees, industry experts said. "In states in the Northeast and Midwest that have competitive market models, I think the loan guarantees are essential," said Joskow, the MIT economist. "The markets are just so volatile and keep changing, and it's very hard to get debt financing for these projects." paul.adams@baltsun.com The Baltimore Sun | ***************************************************************** 17 Salt Lake Tribune: Expand nuclear energy Article Last Updated: 07/21/2007 10:08:59 AM MDT We are still debating if expansion of nuclear energy is necessary to meet electrical energy needs while the world moves ahead ("Global warming heats up the nuclear option," Tribune, July 15). Pacific Rim countries are making massive investments in new nuclear plants to satisfy their energy demands for their growing economies. China has purchased and will operate in 2013, four nuclear plants that equal the entire Utah electrical power output. France, with 79 percent nuclear generated electricity, plans a new generation of plants. Western European nations that previously restrained nuclear plant development are reconsidering previous policies because they see no alternatives to control climate changes. Environmentalists assure us that wind and solar sources can provide the electrical power we will need in the next decades despite the fact that at present 103 U.S. nuclear plants provide over 76 percent of our emission-free electricity. There are no viable options for limiting greenhouse gases without nuclear energy. Renewable energy sources should play their role, but technical realities and our absolute dependence upon electricity to power our homes, businesses and industries will demand expansion of U.S. nuclear energy. Gary Sandquist Salt Lake City ***************************************************************** 18 Salt Lake Tribune: Nuclear nasties Article Last Updated: 07/23/2007 12:21:13 AM MDT Choosing nuclear power to generate electricity is like sunbathing for vitamin D while ignoring cancer. The generation stage may be somewhat ?clean,? but stages on both ends are incredibly dirty. Apparently some on the governor's commission and some legislators have conveniently forgotten the human cost of uranium mining and the extreme threat of high-level radioactive waste. Both are inescapable components of nuclear power. Utah can and should be a leader in renewables, not part of a much bigger problem. We can't choose nuclear power and hope away its nasty side effects. Bob Archibald Sandy ***************************************************************** 19 Guardian Unlimited: IAEA to visit Japan's damaged nuclear plant Justin McCurry in Tokyo Monday July 23, 2007 Earthquake damage outside Japan's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant. Photograph: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images Japan has decided to allow international inspectors to visit the nuclear power plant damaged in last week's earthquake, as fears grow for the safety of the country's nuclear power industry. The government had initially turned down an offer of help from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but changed its mind a day later amid pressure from local officials and rising anxiety among residents living near the plant in Kashiwazaki, Niigata prefecture. Last Monday's earthquake, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale and killed 10 people and injured more than 1,000 others, also exposed the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant's lack of preparedness. Plant officials reported more than 50 problems caused the quake, including minor radiation leaks and a fire that took almost two hours to put out. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), has been criticised for failing to deal with the blaze and for initially under-reporting the size of the radioactive leaks. Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, said Tokyo would cooperate with IAEA inspectors in the hope that other earthquake-prone countries could learn lessons from the Kashiwazaki debacle. "It will be important for Japan and the IAEA to work together and to analyse the results carefully," he told reporters. "We will cooperate with the IAEA and will probably be making the inspections together." He said no date had been set for the inspections, but one report said four IAEA officials would arrive early next month. It will be the first time they have been to Japan since two workers were killed in an accident at a uranium reprocessing plant in Tokaimura in 1999. The Kashiwazaki plant - the biggest in the world in terms of capacity - will remain closed indefinitely and Japan's other 54 nuclear power stations have been ordered to carry out emergency safety checks. Pressure for a visit by the IAEA inspections was strongest among residents in Kashiwazaki, despite Tepco reassurances that the radiation leaks were minor and pose no threat to their health or the environment. The local government sent a petition calling on the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to allow the inspectors in, citing concern about possible damage to local tourism, farming and fishing if public unease about safety continues. The economy and trade ministry, meanwhile, has ordered 11 power firms to improve firefighting measures at their plants after an investigation revealed that they were not properly equipped to tackle blazes. Most did not have firefighting personnel on duty around the clock and six did not even have a hotline to their nearest fire station. The Nikkei business newspaper reported that the plant's closure could cost Tepco at least $1.6bn - halving pre-tax profits forecast for the current fiscal year - if the damaged plant does not reopen by the end of next March. Tepco warned of possible power cuts if a heatwave this summer generates extra demand for electricity. Useful links Japan Today Asahi.com Far Eastern Economic Review Fuji News Network Japan Times Kyodo News Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 20 EnergyBiz Magazine: Japan's Nuclear Blunder July 23, 2007 Ken Silverstein, EnergyBiz Insider Editor-in-Chief The Japanese nuclear industry is under fire. The sector there has been attacked for years for documented lax safety procedures. But it was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that set off radiation leaks and flames that is prompting the latest surge of scrutiny. A central question is whether the recent malfunctions and cover-ups in Japan will have an effect on the nuclear renaissance that is underway in the United States. It's unlikely. Certainly, the accident gives opponents the ammunition they need to continue to wage battle against the industry. But it also gives proponents some fodder. Notably, despite being hit with a huge quake, little damage was suffered and certainly not enough to cause danger to the environment or to human life. Nevertheless, Tokyo Electric Power Co. can be faulted for taking too long to report broken pipes, radioactive water leaks and a small release of radioactive material into the air. It was not until hours later when smoke and fire were seen at a transformer site near the plant that the utility made a public statement, noting that 315 gallons of radioactive water had made its way into the Sea of Japan, although it said such amounts were negligible. The company also said that small quantities of cobalt-60 and chromium-51 were released via smokestacks but that the level of toxins would not cause any harm. "I believe that nuclear power plants can only be operated with the trust of the people," says Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in a press conference in Tokyo, about 160 miles south-east of Niigata prefecture, where the earthquake occurred. "If something happens they need to report on it thoroughly and quickly. We need to get them to strictly reflect on this incident." Japan, which has no domestic oil and gas industry, generates about a quarter of its power through nuclear energy from 55 separate facilities. The nation is also one of the most susceptible places to earthquakes with experts giving it a 90 percent chance of getting hit with a major temblor in the next 50 years. That potential, along with the fact that accidents have plagued the industry, re-enforces to opponents that nuclear power is unsafe. In fact, two nuclear workers in 1999 died in a fuel processing plant accident while another four died in 2004 from a similar misfortune. Meantime, Tokyo Electric admitted in 2002 to falsifying records and covering up problems since the 1980s. That caused it to temporarily shut down its 17 nuclear plants. "This fire and radioactive leakage reminds us yet again of the serious threats posed by nuclear power," says Jan Beranek, Greenpeace International Nuclear Campaigner. "There is a real risk in Japan, and globally, of larger earthquakes and other natural disasters, as well as of terrorist attacks that could lead to far more serious nuclear accidents." Nuclear power undermines the real solutions to environmental challenges, he adds, by eroding the resources necessary to build out the renewable energy sector. Bad PR Kashiwazaki-Kariwa -- where the latest mishap took place -- is the world's largest nuclear plant in power output capacity. It generates 8.2 million kilowatts of electricity and by comparison, the United States' largest nuclear generator at Palo Verde, Ariz. produces 3.88 million kilowatts, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. During the earthquake, three of the seven units that make up the Kashiwazaki facility were down for repair. Only one of those reactors, designed by General Electric and similar to ones found in the United States, suffered a leak. The functioning units at the time, which were automatically shut down during the incident, must undergo government safety inspections before they will be allowed to return to operation. About ten people were killed and another 900 injured, all earthquake-related and none of them because of any leaks at the nuclear facility. Despite the event, Japan remains committed to nuclear power. Roughly 13 nuclear reactors are under construction there and officials say that nuclear will play an even bigger role than it does now because of the country's commitment to greenhouse gas emissions reductions. "Personally I think a nuclear power plant is the safest place you could go in an earthquake," Hisashi Ninokata, a nuclear engineering professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, told Reuters. "That's how much care they take over construction." That's overstated to illustrate a point. Still, proponents of nuclear power maintain that it's not only safe but also necessary as the world grapples with dwindling oil and gas supplies as well as to how to combat climate change. Nations around the globe are interested in prospective nuclear technologies. The difference between the so-called Very High Temperature Reactors and current designs is that the future ones will operate three times the temperature of today's light water reactors. That results in a more efficient use of fuel and the ability to create hydrogen in the process. All of that makes the proposition a lot more economically attractive. Meantime, those future reactors will be cooled by helium gas and not water. That means that the reactors rely on gravity to flush water through the system in the event of emergency. Therefore, the odds of any leaks and subsequent meltdowns are close to zero, say advocates of the design. Sophisticated engineering is one matter. Simple public outreach is quite another. Witness the effect of Three Mile Island on the global nuclear industry. While no one was hurt or injured because of the recent incident at the Japanese facility, the nuclear operator there failed to promptly notify the public of all known facts and it has therefore undermined confidence in the whole nuclear movement. It probably won't be enough to derail the industry's forward momentum. But the bad publicity won't help as the industry works to regain its footing and develop new plants. More information is available from Energy Central: Steering Tokyo Electric - Katsumata Charts Course, EnergyBiz, March/April 2006 The Rebirth of Nuclear, EnergyBiz, May/June 2007 For more on this topic, visit the Energy Central Generation Technologies Topic Center. Respond to the editor: energybizinsider@energycentral.com Copyright © 1996-2007 by CyberTech, Inc. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 21 InTheNews: Govt tests nuclear water Monday, 23 Jul 2007 08:22 Government fields opinions on nuclear power The government is today stepping up its consultation on its energy white paper, including whether nuclear power stations should be built or not. As part of the 20-week consultation period, 12 regional stakeholder events will be held to gauge views on Britain's future energy needs. Energy minister Malcolm Wicks is today attending the first such meeting in Newcastle where the opinions of green groups, energy companies, businesses, consumer groups, unions, faith groups and academies will be heard. Speaking ahead of his visit, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) minister described finding a sustainable energy solution for the UK as "one of the biggest challenges of our time". "The government's energy white paper sets out a range of responses, including increased energy efficiency, carbon capture and storage and more renewable generation such as offshore wind farms," he said. "This is a big decision with consequences either way. It's critical that we listen to all the views and get it right." The white paper has already proved controversial after then prime minister Tony Blair voiced his support for a new generation of nuclear power stations in a speech earlier this year ahead of the opening of the consultation period. Published in May, it sets targets of cutting CO2 emissions by 60 per cent within the next four decades, with "real progress" expected by 2020. © 2007 Advertise | Privacy | Terms of Use ***************************************************************** 22 Reuters: American acceptance of nuclear power grows | U.S. | Mon Jul 23, 2007 4:09PM EDT By Scott Malone BOSTON (Reuters) - As the price of oil rises, so has the number of Americans who believe nuclear energy is an acceptable source of power, although the pro-nuclear camp is still a minority, a study showed on Monday. The survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found 35 percent of people in the United States favored increasing the nation's reliance on nuclear energy, up from the 28 percent who held that view five years ago. The 35 percent who wanted to increase nuclear power usage exceeded the 28 percent who wanted to reduce its use, it said. Concerns about how to safely store nuclear waste were one of the main factors influencing those who remain reluctant to expand nuclear operations, said Stephen Ansolabehere, the MIT political scientist who conducted the March survey of 1,200 people across the country. "That uptick is favorable, but it's not a huge transformation. It's not like we've gone from a solid majority against to a solid majority in favor," Ansolabehere said. "The level of discomfort with the technology has a lot to do with what is the big unsolved problem both at the elite level and at the public level -- which is how do you handle the waste?" The survey found only 28 percent of U.S. residents believed nuclear waste could be stored safely. The finding comes at a time when officials in Washington and the power industry are calling for a "nuclear renaissance." The 100 U.S. nuclear reactors are approaching the end of their lifespans, and power industry officials have said a wave of construction will be needed to keep nuclear's current share of 20 percent of the nation's electricity supply. Merchant power company NRG Energy Inc. is planning to build a plant in Texas that would be the nation's first new nuclear power facility in about three decades. Industrial conglomerates including General Electric Co., Hitachi Ltd., which have joined forces in the nuclear business, and Toshiba Corp. are stepping up their efforts to capitalize on the potential building boom. © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 23 Reuters: Japan accepts IAEA checks, nuclear policy on track Mon Jul 23, 2007 6:11AM EDT By Chisa Fujioka TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will work with United Nations inspectors to check the world's biggest nuclear power plant after a powerful earthquake last week caused radiation leaks, but a fundamental shift in its nuclear energy policy is unlikely despite renewed fears about nuclear safety. Japan had told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it did not need help for now, but on Monday it said it would allow inspectors into the quake-hit Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant after it came under pressure from local authorities to do so. Japan's nuclear industry -- which supplies about one-third of the country's electricity needs and is central to its efforts to battle global warming -- has been tarnished by cover-ups of accidents and fudged safety records. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said joint studies on nuclear safety would help other quake-prone countries as well as Japan. "It will be important for Japan and the IAEA to work together and to analyze the results carefully," he told a news conference. "We will cooperate with the IAEA and will probably be making the inspections together." An nuclear safety official said no date for the IAEA checks had been set, but the Nikkei business daily reported that four IAEA inspectors would visit site as soon as early August. Fears about the safety of Japan's nuclear industry have been revived by leaks of water with low-level radiation from Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s (TEPCO) plant in the northwestern city of Kashiwazaki, hard hit by the 6.8 magnitude quake. The plant was shut down automatically in the quake and will remain closed indefinitely for safety checks, and the government has ordered other nuclear plant operators to make strict safety checks. Continued... ***************************************************************** 24 Asia Times: India's US nuclear deal in last straight Jul 24, 2007 By Siddharth Srivastava NEW DELHI - A final version of the India-United States nuclear deal, called the 123 Agreement, has been sealed, though the contents of the 30-page document have not been revealed, indicating that there could still be some political space to be covered, even if the technical details seem to have been sorted out. Top Indian officials and a host of high-level US administration personnel have been engaged over the past week to thrash out the disagreements that have stalled the pact so far. The agreement will allow US companies to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India. A joint communique was issued in Washington that said the discussions were "constructive and positive", and both Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, and Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon "are pleased with the substantial progress made on the outstanding issues". "Both the United States and India look forward to the completion of these remaining steps and to the conclusion of this historic Initiative," the communique said, without specifying whether the "remaining steps" are just the political clearance or whether there is still technical ground to be covered. In what has been a deliberate exercise, senior unnamed officials have been quoted in various media forums as saying that the text has been "basically finalized", but the document cannot be divulged. Deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey said: "It [final agreement] will have a full review, I'm sure, by appropriate committees and members of Congress, as well as by you guys [Indian] and other interested members of the public." The three-day talks extended to an extra day on Thursday and then into Friday. The two sides will now refer the issue to their governments for final review. Despite the bipartisan support in the US Congress for the nuclear deal, there are many who still oppose it. India and US have been trying to iron out the nuclear pact with a flurry of officials traveling to and fro in the recent past. There are reports of give-and-take to accommodate each other's apprehensions and laws. In what could still turn out to be the precursor to the grand finale, over the past week top people, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, considered as one main power center, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates popped on various occasions to meet Indian officials. Others involved included national security advisers Stephen Hadley and M K Narayanan. One key person was India's atomic energy chairman, Anil Kakodkar, who must have closely studied the scientific details. His presence is crucial to win the nod from the scientific community in India, which would have been averse to just bureaucrats handling the draft. It is now expected that Rice will visit New Delhi in August or September for the political event associated with the agreement, though it would be premature to assume anything until all details are out in the open, discussed and sealed. In India, the left parties, used to enjoying the trappings of power without any responsibility, will closely study the fine print and are sure to find faults, given their dislike for anything connected with the US. The Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has called for the setting up of a joint parliamentary committee to oversee the "agreement" and report back to Parliament, which could turn out to be another endless and protracted cycle of discussions and finger-pointing. The contentious issues relate to New Delhi's right to conduct another nuclear arms test without the US breaking civilian relations and India's right to reprocess spent fuel and be assured of permanent fuel supplies. It would be politically suicide if New Delhi cedes any of the above conditions to be legally binding, while it would be difficult for Washington to steer the agreement through Congress for a final up-and-down vote, given existing laws that prohibit nuclear testing. Apart from the cabinet ratifying the agreement, the next steps for India involve negotiating a safeguards agreement with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and an endorsement of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, which sets the rules for global nuclear commerce. Along with the civilian reactors, the IAEA will have to be provided access to the separate facility for reprocessed fuel to satisfy the international community that it is not used for military purposes. Washington has been pushing for the final blueprint as the Bush administration is keen to highlight the achievement before it runs out of its term. The Manmohan Singh-led Congress government faces general elections in the summer of 2009 and would also like to show off the nuclear deal as a part solution to India's power woes, without compromising its military program. Even as officials met in Washington, Manmohan said in New Delhi that the negotiations were in the "last leg", but he did not predict by when the agreement would be firmed up. It is interesting to note that the discussions in Washington were led by a team of officials considered to be Manmohan's men, with the political strata of the Foreign Ministry kept out. The nuclear deal was signed in March 2006 and seeks to allow India access to international civilian nuclear power know-how despite not being a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is widely seen as the standout achievement of President George W Bush and Manmohan. Bush visited India in March last year. A powerful lobby in the US wants the nuclear deal sealed, since it opens the way for nuclear power business and massive arms deals. New Delhi, too, has been defending the deal, with the safeguards in place. Several high-powered US business delegations with representatives of top nuclear firms have been visiting India to study the prospects of nuclear business worth an estimated US$100 billion, of which US firms expect at least $30 billion. India is expected to purchase weapons worth up to $10 billion each year over the next decade as part of a massive modernization exercise, including the single-largest fighter jet deal for $10 billion, for which US companies Boeing and Lockheed Martin are bidding. Due to the new strategic levels in the US-Indian relationship, US firms are considered frontrunners to win the deal, given the expectations of Washington. New Delhi recently signed a slew of military purchases from the US. Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist. (Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) © Copyright 1999 - 2007 Asia Times Online (Holdings), Ltd. Head Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East, Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110 ***************************************************************** 25 Manila Standard Today: Subic eyes nuke plant site By Elaine Ruzul S. Ramos The Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority is looking at re-developing the 300-hectare Bataan Nuclear Power Plant property in Morong, Bataan as a potential investment site in the absence of a large tract of available land within the Subic Freeport. SBMA administrator Armand Arreza said the agency was studying the type of development fit for the mothballed nuclear plant property. He said the completion of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway project would bring in more investments into the Bataan growth corridor but the agency had limited land resources to offer to prospective investors. The controversial nuclear power plant sits on a 3.57-square kilometer government reservation at Napot Point in Morong. Construction on the plant began in 1976 and was completed in 1984 at a cost of $2.3 billion. The plant, with a Westinghouse light water reactor, was designed to produce 621 megawatts of electricity. But the plant’s construction was stopped in 1979 following the Three Mile Island accident in the United States. A subsequent safety inquiry into the plant revealed over 4,000 defects. It was built near major earthquake fault lines and close to the then dormant Pinatubo volcano. The project’s debt repayment became the country’s biggest-single obligation. Successive administrations had looked at several proposals to convert the plant into an oil, coal, or gas-fired power plant but all were not less economically attractive than the construction of new power stations. The facility has been dormant. Arreza said the cove portion of the property was ideal for tourism development. “We are studying how to get investments to go there,” said Arreza, adding one option was to convert the property into an economic zone with SBMA administering it. SBMA is the administrator of the Subic Bay Freeport, one of the investment hubs in central Luzon, along with the Clark Special Economic Zone administered by the Clark Development Corp. Arreza said the limited public lands in the Freeport was a constraint to the inflow of new investments in that growth corridor. He said the agency was proposing the conversion of public lands along the expressway into economic zones, whose administration could be divided between the agency and Clark Development Corp. He said if all the public lands were converted into ecozones, investments would pour into that growth area, anchored on Subic as prime shipping and ports center and Clark, which has the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport. The public lands could also be administered by the Philippine Economic Zone Authority. “What we need is an enabling legislation to have lands along the Subic-Clark corridor under any of these agencies so there would be uniform incentives and these idle lands may be developed into industrial estates. I am hoping the incentives and administration would be in line with ours,” said Arreza. Manila Standard Today - Philippine News & Views Online Monday, July 23, 2007 ***************************************************************** 26 UPI: Next generation nuke plant designs sought United Press International - NewsTrack - Science - Published: July 23, 2007 at 4:03 PM WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy is looking for industry teams to help conceptually design the department's "Next Generation Nuclear Plant." The Energy Department's Idaho National Laboratory is conducting the program that seeks to use cutting-edge technology in building a high temperature reactor capable of producing hydrogen, electricity and/or process heat. Officials said such a nuclear power plant would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enabling nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels in the petrochemical and transportation industries. "Proceeding with conceptual design for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant brings the Department of Energy another step closer to developing this advanced new technology," Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Dennis Spurgeon said. "Through this effort, (the department) will foster a public-private partnership to complete this development and spur the commercial scale deployment of advanced clean and safe nuclear energy as quickly as possible." Expressions of interest, to be submitted by Aug. 20, will be used to identify a qualified pool of candidates to provide future engineering and design services, officials said. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 27 Fortune: Going nuclear - August 6, 2007 The industry is gearing up to build its first new plants in decades. But are we comfortable with that? Join Fortune's David Whitford on a road trip into America's nuclear future. By David Whitford, Fortune editor-at-large July 23 2007: 10:33 AM EDT (Fortune Magazine) -- "We were at heightened security - we were at red," recalls Al Griffith, spokesman for the utility that owns the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire. It was a Friday night, Griffith continues: March 21, 2003. One day after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The whole country was on red alert. In Seabrook fog lay heavy on the marsh. Just before 9 P.M., something out there, something deep in the darkness, triggered the "perimeter intruder detection system." At nearly the same moment, on the opposite side of the 900-acre complex, an unfamiliar vehicle approached a checkpoint. When armed guards waved the vehicle down, the driver suddenly reversed direction. Plant security, confronting what it now believed to be a simultaneous incursion by two unidentified intruders, tripped the alarm and declared a "security event." Local police sealed the exits. The armed heavies from the Seacoast Emergency Response Team arrived in force. "It was craziness," says Griffith, who was out drinking with friends that night when his pager went off. "Total lockdown." Griffith, besieged by media calls, didn't sleep for three days. Four years later the identity of the marsh intruder remains a mystery, although authorities have narrowed the list of suspects. It was a "heron or turkey or some damn thing," says Griffith. And the occupants of the suspicious vehicle? Two skittish underage kids on a beer run who somehow missed the turnoff to DeMoulas Market Basket, then panicked and fled. Listening to Griffith's story, I'm not sure whether I should feel reassured or alarmed. What I do know is that 54 years after President Eisenhower envisioned a future in which the awesome power of the atom would "serve the needs rather than the fears of mankind," a lot of us are still spooked. Griffith's own mother is so unnerved by what her son does for a living that she refuses to set foot inside the plant, which, by the way, has a visitor center, a nature trail, and a museum frequented by schoolchildren. "We have found in demographic studies that particularly older Americans - they associate nuclear, the 'N word,' with explosion, with bombs, with war," says Griffith. "It's a difficult branding issue." The July 16 earthquake in Japan, which caused a fire at the largest nuclear-power complex in the world, tipped over barrels of contaminated material, and spilled hundreds of gallons of low-level radioactive water into the sea, reminded us that it's not just branding - the product has flaws. Factor in all that, plus the daunting economics of nuclear power and the still-unsolved puzzle of how to safely dispose of nuclear waste, and you begin to understand why it's been more than three decades since the last successful attempt to license and build a nuclear power plant in the U.S. got underway. It may surprise you to know that nuclear power has stayed with us all these years, stubbornly clinging to about a 20% share of U.S. electricity generation - about the same as natural gas but lagging far behind coal at 50%. (Globally, nukes have a 16% market share.) And while no new plants have come online since 1996 (construction began on that one in 1973), suddenly we're hearing lots of talk about a nuclear revival - or "renaissance," as the boosters call it. In June, Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), told a fired-up gathering of industry leaders in Atlanta that he's expecting applications for 27 new reactors over the next two years. "There is no serious opposition," says Tony Earley, CEO of Detroit's DTE Energy (Charts, Fortune 500), which hopes to file at least one of those applications. "This train is moving." A lot of the push is coming from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which is stuffed with generous subsidies for nuclear power and other alternatives to fossil fuels. Among them: billions of dollars in tax credits, loan guarantees, and insurance to cover licensing delays. Big corporations know which way the political wind is blowing. Texas power utility TXU (Charts, Fortune 500) won support from environmentalists for a $32 billion buyout deal in February in part by scrapping plans to build a fleet of coal-fired generating plants and pledging instead to build as many as five jumbo nuclear plants. GE (Charts, Fortune 500) and Hitachi, meanwhile, have created a multibillion-dollar partnership to build reactors, betting not only on power-hungry Asia but also on new thinking in the U.S. "It's hard to believe simultaneously in energy security and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions without believing in nuclear power," GE CEO Jeff Immelt told reporters in July. "It's just intellectually dishonest." Probably the earliest a new reactor could come online in the U.S. is 2015, and even that seems optimistic. There is plenty of opposition, despite what Earley says. And anything could happen over the next decade or so to knock the train off its track. A terrorist attack on a nuclear facility anywhere in the world would halt all progress overnight. So would another Chernobyl. But right now the momentum is swinging nuclear's way. Among the many green-light factors: rising natural-gas prices; soaring electricity demand; the looming prospect of a carbon tax; a new, streamlined regulatory process; and growing acceptance by environmentalists that nuclear energy, which emits no greenhouse gases, could have a vital role in saving the planet. This developing story has continental sweep, a huge cast of characters, multiple moving parts. So much of what we think we know we haven't reexamined in years. If we're going to try to reconcile nuclear power's cloudy past with the industry's bright vision of the future, we need to see for ourselves. Road trip, anyone? Pausing now at a stoplight on Highway 1 as I'm leaving the Seabrook plant, I consult the GPS, turn the wheel of my little SUV toward the setting sun, and go. Already I have lots of questions. Who has the skill and know-how to build all those new plants? Where will we put them? How are we going to pay for them? Is the technology really safe? What about the waste? I'm just getting started. Two weeks, I figure this'll take. Seven thousand zigzaggy miles through America's nuclear past, present, and future. The most important lesson I will learn: Things are not always as we remember them. How bad was Three Mile Island? I'm on the river road south of Middletown, Pa., when I come upon a handsome blue historical marker commemorating "the nation's worst commercial nuclear accident." (You haven't lived until you've beheld a roadside monument to an event that occurred during your lifetime.) Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station is right there across the road, the iconic towers rising from a fern-shaped island in the Susquehanna River. Reminds me of the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower. Similar hyperboloid sweep, but that's not what's so striking. It's the weirdness - the sudden, disorienting displacement of a familiar mental image, derived from 1,000 pictures, by the thing itself. Those towers carry a lot of symbolic weight, almost none of it appropriate. There's nothing specifically nuclear about them, for one thing. They're just cooling towers. A lot of coal-fired electricity plants use the same technology. That engine roar coming from the towers that sounds like a giant waterfall? That's all it is, water falling: 200,000 gallons per minute at about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, but not radioactive. And that's just water vapor coming out of the tops, of course, not poisonous smoke. What's more, the towers played no part in the accident, even if they did wind up on the cover of Time. That whole drama began and ended several hundred feet away inside the Unit 2 containment building - starting before dawn on March 28, 1979, and unfolding over several days - and yes, it was undeniably scary and bad. There was an explosion inside the building, a partial meltdown of the reactor core, purposeful venting of radioactive gases, and a voluntary evacuation covering five square miles. The PR was inept, inflaming public fears. (Strange but true: The China Syndrome was playing in first-run theaters that week. As the tension builds, a nuclear engineer tells Jane Fonda that a meltdown could render an area "the size of Pennsylvania" uninhabitable.) The cleanup took 14 years and cost $1 billion. Unit 1, while undamaged, did not reopen until 1986. Unit 2 is a sarcophagus, still highly radioactive, sealed tight until somebody figures out what to do about the remnants of hot fuel scattered around the basement of the containment building. But guess what? No one died at Three Mile Island. No one even got hurt. Hard evidence simply does not exist that any living thing, animal or vegetable, was significantly harmed by the small amount of radiation released during the accident. Even in the most extreme cases, the exposure was less than anyone living in the area receives from natural sources. Eric Epstein, head of the citizen's group Three Mile Island Alert, whom I met for lunch at Kuppy's Diner in nearby Middletown, is certainly no fan of nuclear power, which he describes as a "very expensive economic adventure" and an "economic boondoggle." "They're still married to hubris," Epstein rails. "They can't get past their own arrogance." So where does Epstein live? Twelve miles from the plant. "I like the area," he says, shrugging his shoulders. "I encourage people to move here." The other thing you can't pin on Three Mile Island is the blame (or credit, depending on your point of view) for halting the expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. In 1974, President Nixon predicted we'd have 1,000 commercial nuclear reactors operating by the end of the century. Not even close. No more than 250 were ever ordered, only 170 filed for permits, just 130 opened, and 104 remain. What happened? Construction delays, cost overruns, high interest rates, systemic safety issues, a whole lot of no-nukes protesters, and a surprising dropoff in electricity demand, all of which predate 1979. Three Mile Island didn't kill the nuclear dream. It was just another nail in the coffin. Can the industry be trusted? On to Washington. David Lochbaum is a respected critic. He was smitten at an early age by the magic of the atom. He has thrilling childhood memories of visiting the world's first nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, in the shipyard at Newport News, Va., and hearing about all the cool peacetime projects that his dad was working on at Westinghouse, like plutonium-powered artificial hearts and floating nuclear power plants. None of those projects came to fruition, but no matter. "It seemed nuclear had a lot of promise," says Lochbaum. "I wanted to follow that up." Trained as a nuclear engineer, Lochbaum spent 17 years working in nuclear power plants across the South. What finally ruined it for him, he says, was the industry's lackadaisical attitude toward safety. When his bosses didn't respond to his concerns, he went to the NRC. When the NRC failed to act, he took the issue to Congress as a whistleblower, and in 1996 he crossed over to the other side, becoming director of the Nuclear Safety Project with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Washington, D.C. I met him in his cramped office on H Street, working well past dark one Thursday evening. Behind his desk is an old wall map labeled "Nuclear Power Reactor Sites in the United States - March 1979." Still largely accurate, I can't help but notice. Lochbaum says he'd never have taken this job if UCS were an abolitionist outfit, but unlike Greenpeace, for instance, UCS is not opposed to the idea of nuclear power. Its concerns are more practical: that we'll ask too much of nuclear and it will fail to deliver for any number of reasons - political protests, disappointing technology, terrorism. UCS's bottom line: We should focus society's resources on renewables, conservation, and efficiency, not nuclear. Especially, Lochbaum would argue, given the nuclear industry's propensity to screw up. Lochbaum said something to a reporter in June 2001 that he thinks "in hindsight was probably bad judgment." But it was clearly revealing. The question had to do with plant security - how a terrorist might cause trouble. "Buy a comfortable chair," Lochbaum riffed. "Buy a big-screen TV. Buy plenty of snacks and beverages. Sit back and watch sports while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry undermine safety until they cause an accident." In other words, Lochbaum says, "it's not the antinukes, it's not an overzealous regulator that's been the industry's worst nightmare - it's themselves." While he believes most plants are run "very well" (Lochbaum's favorite nuclear operator is Dominion (Charts, Fortune 500), with two plants in Virginia and one each in Connecticut and Wisconsin), he sees a "widening gap between the haves and have-nots." His suggestion: more regulation and more enforcement. Can we build them fast enough? Next day, right around the corner at the Nuclear Energy Institute, I ask the industry's chief lobbyist, Alex Flint, what he thinks of Lochbaum's prescription. Good for the industry? Flint, who wears an impressive power suit and a bright-yellow tie, peers at me through thin-rimmed glasses for several long seconds. "My guys have over $100 billion worth of capital tied up in nuclear plants," he says finally. "They're concerned about the vagaries of overzealous regulators." He goes on: "We're going to submit combined operating and licensing applications at the end of this year for a number of plants. We estimate it'll take 42 months to get through the licensing process. We estimate it'll take us 40 months after we get the license to bring a plant online and actually start getting revenue." The only way that works, he says, is with a "broad base of support for nuclear power where we don't care who is in office one year or any other year. The industry has a time line that's longer than most politicians' time lines." In fact, that consensus may already exist, thanks to the complex politics of global warming. Flint doesn't line up with environmentalists on every issue, but on climate change he's a true believer. ("I won't let my wife buy a beach house because I don't believe the water level will stay where it is until I get the mortgage paid off. That's my personal view.") So if Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton want to talk about nuclear power as a solution to global warming, Flint is happy to have that conversation. Bottom line: Flint, who was majority staff director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee when the Republicans were in control, says the last time he tried to count the hard-core antinukers in Congress, "I couldn't get to 20." Even Al Gore is wavering. Gore pointedly ignored nuclear power when he addressed ways to reduce carbon emissions in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, but in March he told a House committee hearing, "I'm not an absolutist in being opposed to nuclear. I think it's likely to play some role." Flint knows that nuclear power all by itself can't solve the climate crisis. The industry will be hard-pressed to simply preserve its global market share as electricity production booms over the next half-century, much less steal share from fossil fuels. In the U.S. alone, according to a new study by the Council on Foreign Relations, given the age of the existing nuclear fleet, "the replacement rate would be on the order of one new reactor every four to five months over the next 40 years." This in an industry that's been dormant for 30 years, at a time when commodity prices for steel and concrete are soaring, and when qualified welders are almost as hard to find as nuclear engineers. "I get very frustrated with people who say it takes too many nuclear plants to solve our climate problems," says Flint. "It takes a lot fewer nuclear plants than it does other technologies." Any way you look at it, he says, the investment required to meet the projected growth in demand for electricity in the U.S. is on the order of $750 billion to $1 trillion. "So the greatest issue for me is, How is that investment going to be made? Is it going to be made in coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar? Yes, it takes a lot of nuclear power plants, but it takes a lot of anything." What's the worst that could happen? Turns out we had a near miss not long ago in the Midwest. I leave D.C., heading west and north, up through West Virginia and into western Pennsylvania, over the spine of the Appalachians. PENNSYLVANIA PRESENTS THE FUTURE OF COAL, the billboard says, CLEAN, GREEN ENERGY. And here and there, up on the ridgelines, stand small clusters of wind turbines, like scouts in an advancing army. Next day I arrive in Oak Harbor, Ohio, then head for the shoreline of Lake Erie. At the turnoff to Turtle Creek Marina I pull over by the side of the road and just sit for a while, staring at the cooling tower that looms above the Happy Hooker bait shop. Unless you live around here, or in Toledo, 30 miles west, or possibly in Cleveland or Detroit, both less than 90 miles away, the name Davis-Besse may not mean anything to you. That's just lucky. During a refueling outage at Davis-Besse in 2002, employees discovered a "large cavity" about the size of a football in the head of the pressurized vessel that houses the reactor core. The cause of the cavity was later traced to leaks in nozzles that penetrate the interior of the vessel head. The water in the nozzles was slightly acidic. When it evaporated, it left behind boric acid, which over time ate through the 6 1/2-inch-thick carbon-steel head all the way down to 1/4-inch-thick stainless-steel cladding. As the hole widened, the internal pressure on the cladding intensified. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab have since determined that if the plant had continued operating, the cladding ultimately would have burst. (Plant owner FirstEnergy (Charts, Fortune 500) says it would have found the leak in time to take "appropriate steps.") Had the cladding burst, the core would probably have suffered a meltdown, releasing about the same amount of radioactivity as at Three Mile Island - only this time it would not have been contained. "They came very close to an accident that would have been much worse than Three Mile Island and not as bad as Chernobyl," says Lochbaum. "You don't ever want to be in a place where those are your bookends." Both the leakage and its corrosive effects were known issues. The industry committed in 1989 to investigate such leaks. Yet somehow Davis-Besse escaped detection until it was almost too late. What's more, in April 2000 an NRC inspector was handed a truly ugly photograph of the Davis-Besse reactor vessel head covered in acidic crud. No one saw it again until after the accident. The episode cost the utility company around $600 million. Can the no-nukes movement regroup? Sunday afternoon in Bexley, Ohio, east of Columbus. I'm standing on a quiet, tree-canopied street at the top of Harvey Wasserman's driveway, waiting for him to come outside, meanwhile reading the bumper stickers on his cars: BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED; CELEBRATE DIVERSITY; THE DEATH PENALTY IS DEAD WRONG. Makes sense. Three decades ago Wasserman was a leader in the Clamshell Alliance, the grassroots movement that delayed the opening of the Unit 1 Seabrook nuclear reactor for many years while making sure Unit 2 was never completed. Today, it happens, is the 30th anniversary of a landmark Clamshell victory - the release of 550 demonstrators who had spent two weeks locked up in New Hampshire armories. It was a huge win for the burgeoning movement. Wasserman was at Seabrook that day, handling communications with the press. Now he's a college professor, an author, a father of five daughters, and a Volvo driver living in the suburbs, but the fire still burns. "I was present at the creation of the antinuclear movement," Wasserman tells me by way of introduction, once we're settled at a picnic table. "I actually coined the phrase 'No nukes.' It came through my typewriter." His opposition to nukes has not wavered since he was living on a Massachusetts commune in 1973 ("All those stories you've heard about hippie farms are true"), helping lead his first successful protest. "Not safe," he says now, "not economical, not green, not a solution to global warming." He gleefully searches for another phrase. "We have been trying for 30 years to drive a stake through the heart of this industry, but it doesn't seem to have one!" In his book Solartopia!, Wasserman envisions a clean-energy future in which all our energy needs are satisfied by solar, wind, hydro, and biofuels. "If we put our minds to it, we could have all of that before they bring the next nuke online," he says. "The finances are going in the opposite direction of the nuclear power industry. Where do you find on Wall Street people lining up to invest in nuclear plants? No one can simultaneously argue for a free-market economy and for nuclear power. You can't! You cannot do nuclear power without massive federal subsidies. It's just not going to happen." Before I leave, Wasserman has one more point to make: "I do intend to make it as difficult for them as possible. I will tell you that the antinuclear network is very much intact. It's a geezer battalion - I'm 61." He is silent for a moment, remembering. "In '77, I was 31. It was just so much fun. Some people are actually looking forward to doing it again. Those of us who can still walk will be back in droves, with our kids. This is not going to be a walk in the park for these guys." Who will build them if they come? Follow the Ohio River in the direction the current flows, all the way to the toe of Indiana, through Evansville and into tiny Mount Vernon, past the Civil War statue on the village square (a Union soldier; across the river he'd be a Reb) and out the other side of town, and you come to BWXT's Mount Vernon facility, the only factory in America that can still build large-scale nuclear components. GE and Westinghouse used to do a lot of that kind of work too, building complex reactor vessels from massive forgings born in the steel mills of eastern Pennsylvania and shipping them worldwide. Both have since shed their nuclear manufacturing divisions and today focus on design. That leaves BWXT, and in time it will have to go to Japan Steel Works for its forgings. When the bottom fell out of the market in 1978, the Mount Vernon plant went from employing 1,400 people to a ghost factory, ultimately allowing its coveted "N" security stamp - required for nuclear work - to expire. It got the stamp back a year ago, and already things are picking up. Right now Mount Vernon is working on two 60-ton replacement reactor heads for PG&E's Diablo Canyon facility in California. Plant manager Michael Keene and his boss Rod Woolsey, VP of the nuclear division, take me on a tightlipped tour of the factory floor, refusing to say much about the gleaming steel reactor vessels - some as big as circus elephants, others more like whales - I observe along the way. "Government" is all I can get out of them. Workers circulate on bicycles. No hardhats, which seems odd. Until I grasp that if anything in this pantheon topples, it will flatten my whole body, not just my head. Back in D.C., BWXT lobbyists are working hard to juice the order flow, angling for legislation that would open up foreign markets to U.S. manufacturers and pushing for someone to stand up on the national stage and articulate a thrilling goal say, 30 new nuclear plants by 2030. Pointing out that much of the domestic nuclear industry is down to at most a single supplier for every major type of component, they're also asking for tax credits to train new workers and tax incentives on capital improvements. "If we can't do this type of blue-collar work," BWXT's chief lobbyist, Craig Hansen, told me, "we might as well throw our hands up and say we are no longer a manufacturing country." His pointed warning: "We may exchange one form of energy dependence for another form of energy dependence." What will happen in an emergency? I'm following another river road, this one tracking the Mississippi near Hahnville, La., 20 miles west of New Orleans in what used to be rice and sugarcane country. Now it's an industrial zone. There's a big Union Carbide chemical plant in Hahnville, and right next door, a nuclear plant, Entergy's Waterford 3 reactor, and outside Waterford 3, a hair-raising public-information billboard, headlined WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN AN EMERGENCY AT WATERFORD 3? "If there is a problem, state and parish officials will decide how severe it is. Most problems will not affect you. If the experts decide there is a serious emergency, however, you may have to protect yourself. Stay as calm as you can. You will have some time to take the needed steps. Remember that nuclear plants do not explode. "Do not use your telephone. Do not call or go to your children's school. Cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief or other cloth. Close the windows and doors if you are in a building or car. "What if you are told to SHELTER IN PLACE? Go inside your house or some other building. Stay inside until your radio or TV says you can leave safely. Keep your pets inside. "What if you are told to evacuate? Get your family together and prepare to leave. Pack only what you will need most." Reading that, my heart goes out to Ann Jupiter, who has lived in the shadow of Waterford 3 since it was built in 1985. "It's always scary," she told me when I stopped to visit. "When it ain't doing nothing, it's scary." What's it really like inside a nuclear power plant? More than halfway through my journey now, crossing Texas today from Bay City on the gulf to the New Mexico border, I'm thinking about all the nuclear plants I've seen so far - a total of 14 reactors in nine states - and what I've learned. I've learned that nuclear power is concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard but that Illinois has more nuclear plants (11) and generates more nuclear power (nearly 95 million megawatt-hours) than any other state. I've learned that nuclear plants are almost always off someplace by themselves, which makes sense. People don't want to live next to one if they can help it. Animals don't care, though. In fact, animals find a lot to like wherever there's a nuclear plant, starting with the absence of human beings. Plus nuclear plants don't make a lot of noise. They don't poison the air with dirty smokestacks, the way coal plants do. They don't kill birds, the way wind turbines sometimes do. No wonder so many nuclear plants are surrounded by nature preserves. I've learned that the inside of a nuclear plant is all cramped corridors and shiny floors and exposed pipes. That you have to wear earplugs in the turbine room and a hardhat almost everywhere, but that the earplugs go in your pocket and the hardhat comes off when you and your escort knock on the control room door and ask permission to enter. Nothing dangling - that's the rule in the control room - and nothing that might fall off our head and trip a switch that's better left untripped. I've learned about the etymology of SCRAM, an acronym reportedly coined by Enrico Fermi, who presided over the world's first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942. Fermi stationed a colleague, Norman Hillberry, next to the rope used to raise and lower the control rods, with an ax. Hillberry's job, if called upon, was to chop the rope with a single swing, immediately halting the reaction. Hillberry's title, the story goes, was Safety Control Rod Ax Man. I didn't see any axmen in the control rooms I visited, but I saw plenty of red SCRAM switches - same thing. Sometimes they're labeled "RX Trip." Give one a 45-degree clockwise yank, and the control rods plunge into the core and the reactor shuts down in seconds. I've learned that since Three Mile Island, every nuclear plant in America has at least two inspectors from the NRC onsite at all times. They have the best passes available, offering free run of the plant, anytime, anywhere. And since Three Mile Island, I've also learned, every control room operator spends a week in training and testing at regular intervals in a customized simulator room, identical in every detail to the control room where the operator works. I've learned that a nuclear plant is like a refrigerator it hums along pretty well all by itself, with minimal human intervention, except when you have to shut it down. Then you have a lot of work to do. I've learned that spent fuel rods are stored in 40 feet of water; that while a fuel-rod pool room is technically an RCA (radiation-controlled area), you can walk right up to the edge of the pool and look down in there and gaze upon the fuel rods in their honeycomb tombs, hot and glowing from the radiation still in them, and not worry about getting sick. But if you were to tumble into the pool and dive down to the bottom and touch one, you'd never make it back to the surface. Will we have to rely on a foreign source of fuel? I arrive around lunchtime in tiny Eunice, N.M.? Pretty bleak, this place, at least to my Eastern eyes: all pump jacks and natural-gas lines, otherwise not so much as a bump on the landscape. "It's good when it's good" is how Brenda Brooks from nearby Hobbs assesses the local economy, "and it's really bad when it's really bad." Which helps explain Brooks' new job. She's director of communications and community affairs for Urenco, a European consortium that's building the first advanced fuel-enrichment plant in the U.S., just 4 1/2 miles east of Eunice. The hope in the U.S. is that the new factory will help lessen our reliance on foreign sources of enriched uranium, much of which now comes from Russia. The hope in Eunice is that it will bring a measure of economic stability to the region, once it's up and running in 2009 and employing 300 people. Already, says Brooks, there are hundreds of construction workers on site, most of them living in overstuffed trailer parks in Eunice and Hobbs. Community resistance was minimal, but Urenco was taking no chances. The company flew community leaders to the Netherlands to see an identical plant that has been operating safely for years. "There's a day care across the street, and there's nobody running around with four legs and horns growing out of their forehead," says Brooks. "It's all cool." Where will we store the waste? The Yucca Mountain tour starts here in Las Vegas, at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. "There is a billion or two dollars' worth of science studies, but there's no nuclear waste out there," says Allen Benson, publicity director. Benson has been here 11 years, so he has given this rap a few times before. Says there's room at Yucca Mountain for "70,000 metric tons" of nuclear waste. (Which tells you something right away. It tells you that the origins of this hoary federal program date all the way back to that hopeful period when it seemed possible that Americans might be persuaded to convert to metric weights and measures. He means 77,000 regular tons.) "Whatever happens with nuclear power, nuclear renaissance, what have you," says Benson, "we currently have about 55,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel already, which something has to be done with." Absolute best-case scenario: Waste starts arriving in 2017. "That means everything occurs as we need, we get the appropriations we need - but it does not account for litigation. There will be litigation. We have no illusions about that." Nye County, the vast chunk of desert mountainscape that encompasses not only Yucca Mountain but also a former nuclear bomb test site, is not the issue. Nye County has been cashing Energy Department tax-equivalency checks for years - in 2007 it got $11.25 million, or about one-third of its operating budget. But nine other counties are contiguous to Nye including Las Vegas County - and the law says they all get their say. Already the NRC has built a dedicated facility in Las Vegas, out near the airport, just to host the hearings. Those get underway late next year. The costs so far are staggering: About $9 billion since the inception of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1983. But that's just the beginning. What Benson calls the "total system life-cycle cost" - covering final regulatory approval, complete construction, the transport of radioactive waste to the site, and the storing of said waste in such a way that all interested parties are satisfied that it won't be disturbed for at least 10,000 years - that total stands at $58.5 billion. "We're working on a revised total-cost analysis," says Benson. "It will be higher." Yucca was supposed to begin receiving waste in 1998. When that didn't happen, the utilities were forced to make other plans. Existing spent fuel pools, like the ones I've seen, are at about 80% of capacity and projected to reach 100% by 2015. The next option is what's known as dry cask storage - basically, burying the spent fuel rods onsite. And Plan B, if Yucca Mountain never gets approval to begin receiving waste? There is no Plan B. The drive to Yucca Mountain from Las Vegas in the Energy Department van takes about two hours. We park at the north entrance to the tunnel, don hardhats, and poke our heads inside. It's U-shaped, I'm told, and five miles long, but we venture just far enough to escape the heat. According to the plans, one day this tunnel will be the path down which sealed canisters of radioactive waste travel to their final resting place 1,000 feet below the ridgeline of the mountain. Construction of the tombs, however, has yet to begin, pending licensing approval. Other than testing, all progress at Yucca has been stalled since 1997. What can a convert teach us? Stewart Brand is a greenie from way back. Creator of the Whole Earth Catalog in his hippie days. Taught a generation about organic farming and composting toilets and how to live off the land. His house is a tugboat in San Francisco Bay, but his office is in a flowery, forested nook in Sausalito, Calif. Brand greets me all dressed in black, right down to his sandals - that's his style. White hair, what's left of it. Blue-gray eyes. A reading chair in the corner of his office and a grandfather clock. Many shelves of books, meticulously organized. Knows right where to find the ones he wants, pulls them out while we talk, drops them on the table, thunk. "What did you think of Yucca Mountain?" he wants to know. Weird, I say. Dickensian. Probably doomed. "Depending on how you count it, somewhere between $6 billion and $13 billion has been thrown down that rat hole," he says, and for that he blames ... himself. "Me and my fellow environmentalists," he means, "who said you've gotta prove that this is absolutely, perfectly safe for 10,000 years. You can't do scenarios for 10,000 years - everything flies apart. One hundred fifty or 200 years from now, humanity will either be pretty much unrecognizable, hovering around in terms of communication and starting to speciate new kinds of Homo sapiens, or if not that, we'll be back in the Stone Age, in which case a bit of radiation in Nevada is the least of our problems. So the whole thing, I think - not entirely intentionally - was set up as a self-defeating proposition." There are alternatives. Brand got involved a couple of years ago with Canada's national debate on what to do about its nuclear waste. The solution Canada came up with? Rather than stash it for 10,000 years, put it away for 175 years, specifically seven generations. "Basically put it there while we think about it," says Brand. "See what other options come along. Each new generation of nuclear reactor is safer and cheaper and smaller and smarter than the previous one, and that will probably continue. Likewise whatever we might want to do with the spent fuel." Brand, if you haven't figured it out, is a convert. Or in his words, a "mild nuclear proponent." For Brand, the only real issue is global warming. And nuclear power, he believes, may be our best option. "From coal you get carbon dioxide. Billions of tons of carbon dioxide. The difference in consequence is enormous. In the context of carbon dioxide, suddenly spent fuel looks pretty good." Brave nuke world? The end of my journey brings me all the way back to the beginning, to the Idaho National Laboratory in southern Idaho. It was here, on Dec. 20, 1951, that Walter Zinn, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, fired up Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 and illuminated a string of four 75-watt light bulbs; the next day he lit the whole building. That was the first time atomic power had ever been used to generate electricity. Today EBR-1 is a tourist attraction. Not a very popular one - only about 5,000 visitors a year - but here it is, the original reactor vessel (you can stand on the head; it was decommissioned in 1964), the control room (retro, of course, but so are the new ones), and a string of replacement bulbs the tour guide assures me look just like the originals. High on the wall behind the reactor, preserved behind glass, are the chalk signatures of the 17 scientists and one janitor who were present that day. Afterward one of the scientists, Reid Cameron, climbed back up the ladder and sketched a crude illustration to go with the list of names, something he thought emblematic of their achievement. I can't make it out at first. Some kind of wild-eyed creature whose breath is the wind. Turns out it's the devil. Over the years Idaho Lab scientists have designed and built 52 test reactors. Three are operational today, including the largest test reactor in the world. The mood at the lab these days is more hopeful than it's been in decades. Phil Hildebrandt, who's working on so-called Generation IV reactors - far-off technology that's safer, more reliable, and more versatile (with potential applications in the coming hydrogen economy) than anything that's out there today - says, "This is not unlike what we did 55 years ago with the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania. It's where government and the commercial world partner to develop things that are difficult for the commercial world to develop by itself." Kathryn McCarthy, 45, a staff scientist at the lab since 1991, would be happy just to see one new plant built before she retires. "I'm sort of from that generation where we haven't done anything real," she says. "I've done lot of things on paper, a lot of testing. But to actually see that move to the next step and have a plant come online would be a huge deal, it really would." Flying home that night, I'm thinking about what I've learned. I'm remembering what Stewart Brand said when I left him in Sausalito. Two important things. To his old friends in the antinuke movement, "Don't let up for a minute. Keep bearing down. But take in hand the other things that need to happen besides solar and wind and biofuels to actually get ahead of a problem that is already far ahead of us." And to his old enemies? "I'm sorry. I was wrong, you were right. I'm sorry." RESEARCH ASSOCIATE Patricia Neering From the August 6, 2007 issue © 2007 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ***************************************************************** 28 AFP: UN to inspect Japan radiation site - Mon Jul 23, 12:54 AM ET TOKYO (AFP) - Japan will let UN inspectors visit its largest nuclear plant in hopes of easing international concern after an earthquake caused a radiation leak, officials said Monday. The government has told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) it can send a mission to the plant around 250 kilometres (150 miles) northwest of Tokyo. "In the interest of offering information, Japan will have talks with the IAEA as soon as possible about accepting its inspectors," said Yasuhisa Shiozaki, the chief government spokesman. "It is important to cooperate and discuss with the IAEA how to ensure safety after an earthquake this powerful," he told reporters. Masahiro Yagi, an official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, said the IAEA's objective would be "sharing information with the international community rather than pure 'inspections.'" The 6.8 Richter-scale earthquake on July 16 killed 10 people, destroyed hundreds of homes and caused a fire for hours at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), later said radiation leaked. The company said the amount was far too small to pose a health hazard but has come under criticism for initially underreporting radiation levels. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has called for transparency and offered the assistance of the UN watchdog -- best known in Japan for its inspections of arch-rival North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. The governor of Niigata prefecture, where the plant is located, has called for the assistance of the IAEA, saying it would help prevent the spread of rumours that the radiation leak was more dangerous than thought. Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 29 Los Angeles Times: No to nukes - 10:04 PM PDT, July 23, 2007 A WARMING WORLD It's tempting to turn to nuclear plants to combat climate change, but alternatives are safer and cheaper. JAPAN SEES NUCLEAR POWER as a solution to global warming, but it's paying a price. Last week, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake caused dozens of problems at the world's biggest nuclear plant, leading to releases of radioactive elements into the air and ocean and an indefinite shutdown. Government and company officials initially downplayed the incident and stuck to the official line that the country's nuclear plants are earthquake-proof, but they gave way in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Japan has a sordid history of serious nuclear accidents or spills followed by cover-ups. It isn't alone. The U.S. government allows nuclear plants to operate under a level of secrecy usually reserved for the national security apparatus. Last year, for example, about nine gallons of highly enriched uranium spilled at a processing plant in Tennessee, forming a puddle a few feet from an elevator shaft. Had it dripped into the shaft, it might have formed a critical mass sufficient for a chain reaction, releasing enough radiation to kill or burn workers nearby. A report on the accident from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was hidden from the public, and only came to light because one of the commissioners wrote a memo on it that became part of the public record. The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. No U.S. utility has ordered a new nuclear plant since 1978 (that order was later canceled), and until recently it seemed none ever would. But rising natural gas prices and worries about global warming have put the nuclear industry back on track. Many respected academics and environmentalists argue that nuclear power must be part of any solution to climate change because nuclear power plants don't release greenhouse gases. They make a weak case. The enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste ensure that ramping up the nuclear infrastructure will be a slow process — far too slow to make a difference on global warming. That's just as well, because nuclear power is extremely risky. What's more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks. Glowing pains Modern nuclear plants are much safer than the Soviet-era monstrosity at Chernobyl. But accidents can and frequently do happen. The Union of Concerned Scientists cites 51 cases at 41 U.S. nuclear plants in which reactors have been shut down for more than a year as evidence of serious and widespread safety problems. Nuclear plants are also considered attractive terrorist targets, though that risk too has been reduced. Provisions in the 2005 energy bill required threat assessments at nuclear plants and background checks on workers. What hasn't improved much is the risk of spills or even meltdowns in the event of natural disasters such as earthquakes, making it mystifying why anyone would consider building reactors in seismically unstable places like Japan (or California, which has two, one at San Onofre and the other in Morro Bay). Weapons proliferation is an even more serious concern. The uranium used in nuclear reactors isn't concentrated enough for anything but a dirty bomb, but the same labs that enrich uranium for nuclear fuel can be used to create weapons-grade uranium. Thus any country, such as Iran, that pursues uranium enrichment for nuclear power might also be building a bomb factory. It would be more than a little hypocritical for the U.S. to expand its own nuclear power capacity while forbidding countries it doesn't like from doing the same. The risks increase when spent fuel is recycled. Five countries reprocess their spent nuclear fuel, and the Bush administration is pushing strongly to do the same in the U.S. Reprocessing involves separating plutonium from other materials to create new fuel. Plutonium is an excellent bomb material, and it's much easier to steal than enriched uranium. Spent fuel is so radioactive that it would burn a prospective thief to death, while plutonium could be carried out of a processing center in one's pocket. In Japan, 200 kilograms of plutonium from a waste recycling plant have gone missing; in Britain, 30 kilograms can't be accounted for. These have been officially dismissed as clerical errors, but the nuclear industry has never been noted for its truthfulness or transparency. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained six kilograms. Technology might be able to solve the recycling problem, but the question of what to do with the waste defies answers. Even the recycling process leaves behind highly radioactive waste that has to be disposed of. This isn't a temporary issue: Nuclear waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. The only way to get rid of it is to put it in containers and bury it deep underground — and pray that geological shifts or excavations by future generations that have forgotten where it's buried don't unleash it on the surface. No country in the world has yet built a permanent underground waste repository, though Finland has come the closest. In the U.S., Congress has been struggling for decades to build a dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but has been unable to overcome fierce local opposition. One can hardly blame the Nevadans. Not many people would want 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood or transported through it on the way to the dump. The result is that nuclear waste is stored on-site at the power plants, increasing the risk of leaks and the danger to plant workers. Eventually, we'll run out of space for it. Goin' fission? Given the drawbacks, it's surprising that anybody would seriously consider a nuclear renaissance. But interest is surging; the NRC expects applications for up to 28 new reactors in the next two years. Even California, which has a 31-year-old ban on construction of nuclear plants, is looking into it. Last month, the state Energy Commission held a hearing on nuclear power, and a group of Fresno businessmen plans a ballot measure to assess voter interest in rescinding the state's ban. Behind all this is a perception that nuclear power is needed to help fight climate change. But there's little chance that nuclear plants could be built quickly enough to make much difference. The existing 104 nuclear plants in the U.S., which supply roughly 20% of the nation's electricity, are old and nearing the end of their useful lives. Just to replace them would require building a new reactor every four or five months for the next 40 years. To significantly increase the nation's nuclear capacity would require far more. The average nuclear plant is estimated to cost about $4 billion. Because of the risks involved, there is scarce interest among investors in putting up the needed capital. Nor have tax incentives and subsidies been enough to lure them. In part, that's because the regulatory process for new plants is glacially slow. The newest nuclear plant in the U.S. opened in 1996, after having been ordered in 1970 — a 26-year gap. Though a carbon tax or carbon trading might someday make the economics of nuclear power more attractive, and the NRC has taken steps to speed its assessments, community opposition remains high, and it could still take more than a decade to get a plant built. Meanwhile, a 2006 study by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research found that for nuclear power to play a meaningful role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the world would need to build a new plant every one to two weeks until mid-century. Even if that were feasible, it would overwhelm the handful of companies that make specialized parts for nuclear plants, sending costs through the roof. The accelerating threat of global warming requires innovation and may demand risk-taking, but there are better options than nuclear power. A combination of energy-efficiency measures, renewable power like wind and solar, and decentralized power generators are already producing more energy worldwide than nuclear power plants. Their use is expanding more quickly, and the decentralized approach they represent is more attractive on several levels. One fast-growing technology allows commercial buildings or complexes, such as schools, hospitals, hotels or offices, to generate their own electricity and hot water with micro-turbines fueled by natural gas or even biofuel, much more efficiently than utilities can do it and with far lower emissions. The potential for wind power alone is nearly limitless and, according to a May report by research firm Standard & Poor's, it's cheaper to produce than nuclear power. Further, the amount of electricity that could be generated simply by making existing non-nuclear power plants more efficient is staggering. On average, coal plants operate at 30% efficiency worldwide, but newer plants operate at 46%. If the world average could be raised to 42%, it would save the same amount of carbon as building 800 nuclear plants. Nevertheless, the U.S. government spends more on nuclear power than it does on renewables and efficiency. Taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear industry amounted to $9 billion 2006, according to Doug Koplow, a researcher based in Cambridge, Mass., whose Earth Track consultancy monitors energy spending. Renewable power sources, including hydropower but not ethanol, got $6 billion, and $2 billion went toward conservation. That's out of whack. Some countries — notably France, which gets nearly 80% of its power from nuclear plants and has never had a major accident — have made nuclear energy work, but at a high cost. The state-owned French power monopoly is severely indebted, and although France recycles its waste, it is no closer than the U.S. to approving a permanent repository. Tax dollars are better spent on windmills than on cooling towers. Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times ***************************************************************** 30 www.bbj.hu: Bulgaria calls six energy companies for plant bid 23 Jul 2007 bbj.hu State utility NETC invited six European utilities to file initial bids for a 49% stake in a planned €4 billion ($5.5 billion) nuclear power plant. Bulgaria has contracted Russia's Atomstroyexport, controlled by gas giant Gazprom, to build two 1,000-megawatt reactors at the Danube river town of Belene. The plant is expected to come online after 2014. The new plant aims to compensate for the closure of two 440-megawatt reactors last year and restore Bulgaria's position as a leading power exporter in Southeastern Europe. Italy's Enel, Germany's E.ON and RWE, Czech CEZ, France's EdF and Belgium's Electrabel, owned by French utility Suez, should file their offers by October 1, NETC said. “The six firms will be allowed to carry out a due diligence and file initial bids that will be used as a basis for negotiations with NETC,” the Bulgarian utility, which will keep the majority stake in the plant, said in a statement. NETC said Spain's Endesa, Swiss energy firms EGL and Atel and the Bulgarian unit of Belgian copper refiner Cumerio have expressed interest in acquiring stakes lower than 25% in the new plant. The four companies could be invited to place initial offers if needed during the talks with the six short-listed bidders and only upon their and NETC's approval, the utility said. NETC has said it plans to pick a strategic partner to own and operate the Belene plant by the end of the year and wrap up the deal next February. It has opened a tender to find a lead manager to arrange the financing of the plant. It has also said it expected the new investor to help it secure the funds by either offering a corporate guarantee or by signing long-term power purchase agreements that will help it receive better debt conditions. (energia.gr) ***************************************************************** 31 The Hindu: Sinha opposes nuclear deal Monday, Jul 23, 2007 Yashwant Sinha Bangalore: The former External Affairs Minister and BJP leader, Yashwant Sinha, on Sunday opposed the proposed nuclear deal between India and the United States. Speaking at the inaugural session of the party State executive meeting in Bangalore, Mr. Sinha remarked that with this accord, the U.S. would control India’s nuclear production and usage. “The weapons which we had created under A.B. Vajpayee’s leadership are being handed over to the U.S.,” he said and noted that senior scientists were opposed to the proposed nuclear deal. “Act against terrorism” Expressing concern at the fact that a “peaceful” city like Bangalore, known for its excellence in IT and other knowledge-related fields, is becoming an “international terrorist centre,” Mr. Sinha, who is also in charge of the party’s Karnataka affairs, urged Deputy Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa to take stern action to nip terrorism in the bud. The BJP leader reminded the Centre that it was its responsibility to handle terrorism. Though the State Government had a role in initiating action against such activities, it was the Centre which should curb terrorism, he argued. He alleged that the UPA Government had a “soft attitude” towards international terrorism because of an “appease-all” policy. Mr. Sinha expressed shock over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement that Pakistan was also a victim of international terrorism alongside India. “How can a hunter become the target?” he asked. “The impact of this Presidential poll will be felt in the 2009 Parliamentary election and the Congress will have reason to regret,” BJP leader M. Venkaiah Naidu remarked while addressing the party State executive. Though the BJP lost the Presidential poll, it was actually a moral victory for the party, he said as the BJP had put the Congress in the dock. Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the ***************************************************************** 32 MIT News Office: Americans Warming to Nuclear Power - MIT Survey - massachusetts institute of technology Anne Trafton, News Office July 23, 2007 CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Americans' icy attitudes toward nuclear power are beginning to thaw, according to a new survey from MIT. The report also found a U.S. public increasingly unhappy with oil and more willing to develop alternative energy sources like wind and solar. Moreover, the national survey of 1,200 Americans' opinions on different types of energy indicated growing concern about global warming -- but an apparent reluctance to pay to fight it. Professor Stephen Ansolabehere, the MIT political scientist who conducted the survey through Knowledge Networks, a consumer information company, said he hopes that tracking Americans' attitudes toward energy will help policy-makers decide how to chart the United States' energy future. "We're trying to understand what public policy in the U.S. should do to encourage new kinds of energy development or different patterns of energy consumption," Ansolabehere said. The report, "Public Attitudes Toward America's Energy Options: Insights for Nuclear Energy," was recently published by MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. Ansolabehere conducted a similar survey in 2002 as part of the MIT study, "The Future of Nuclear Power." In the five years since the last survey, public preferences have remained fairly stable, but the percentage of people who want to increase nuclear power use has grown from 28 percent to 35 percent. That increase in popularity is likely due to concern over global warming caused by carbon emissions from fossil fuels, Ansolabehere said. The Bush administration has been pushing to expand nuclear power, which doesn't produce carbon dioxide, but Americans are still concerned about storing nuclear waste. Nearly 40 percent oppose the proposed storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., and only 28 percent agree that "nuclear waste could be stored safely for long periods of time." Because of those concerns, "getting the public behind a serious expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. is going to be difficult," Ansolabehere said. While Americans have some doubts about nuclear power, they are more opposed to oil, which has dipped below nuclear as the least popular fuel source. In the 2007 survey, 74 percent wanted to decrease oil use, compared to 56 percent in 2002. "People have really turned on oil in a big way," said Ansolabehere, a trend he attributes to rising prices and growing concern over the United States' oil dependency. "People say, if not for our oil dependency, we wouldn't be in Iraq," Ansolabehere. Also, rising prices at the gas pump provide a daily reminder of the high cost of oil. Not surprisingly, cost is one of the primary factors that people consider when making their energy choices, along with perceived environmental harm. Coal, which is seen as cheap but harmful, is unpopular. The survey shows that people have an accurate idea of how much oil, gas, coal and nuclear power cost, but they tend to underestimate the costs of alternative sources like wind and solar. Ansolabehere found that people strongly favor using more wind and solar power, until they are told that they are more expensive than traditional energy sources. "People have a sense that wind and solar are a solution for now, as opposed to a solution for the future," he said. The survey also found that even though concern over global warming has been rising in the past five years, that doesn't translate to a willingness to pay to combat the problem. When people are asked how much more they would pay for their electricity to counteract global warming, the average answer is $10 more on their monthly electric bill. The amount needed would likely be closer to $25, Ansolabehere said. That shortfall can be partly explained by the difficulty of visualizing the impacts of global warming, he said. "It's something that will affect not this generation, and not the next generation, but the generation after that," he said. "Willingness to pay is going to be a big obstacle." Ansolabehere said he also suspects that many people don't associate electricity generation with burning of fossil fuels, because the generation process is so removed from the home. As people learn more about different types of energy and the costs and benefits of each one, it will be informative to see how their views change, said Ansolabehere, who plans to re-do the energy survey every few years. The report was funded by MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. Photo / Donna Coveney Stephen Ansolabehere in MIT's Power Plant Facility Enlarge image MIT home news office 77 massachusetts avenue 617-253-2700 room 11-400 cambridge, ma 02139-4307 newsoffice@mit.edu ***************************************************************** 33 Hindustan Times: Germany seeks consensus in NSG on Indo-US N-deal- July 21, 2007 Press Trust Of India Germany on Monday said it would try to "forge a consensus" within the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on the Indo-US civil nuclear deal. "It's not an easy task (to forge a consensus) given India's consistent refusal to join NPT regime. But we also understand India's security situation in which it has to operate," its ambassador to India Bernd Muetzelburg said while talking to reporters on the sidelines of a lecture on Indo-German relations. India would have to approach the NSG for fuel supplies, once the nuke deal with US is sealed. Germany has realised that "the deal has ended India's nuclear isloation and has brought it to the mainstream," the ambassador said. The ambassador however spoke about the usefulness of the non-proliferation system, calling it "the only way to move forward." He further appreciated New Delhi for moving closer to addressing the concerns on the same front and said India had a good record in fulfilling its non-proliferation objectives. "We are happy that India has moved closer to our position on nuclear non-proliferation", he said. Expressing solidarity with New Delhi on the issue of terrorism, the ambassador said "we are united with India in condemning all forms of terrorism." Citing "Islamic fundamentalism" as "most dangerous", he underlined India's "special responsibility" in combating it, as it was a home to the second largest population of muslims in the world. ***************************************************************** 34 Hindustan Times: India and the US script nuclear deal- Nilova Roy Chaudhury, Hindustan Times New Delhi, July 21, 2007 It went down to the wire, but after four days of intense negotiations, Indian and US officials have agreed on a text for the 123 Agreement that substantially meets Indian concerns on reprocessing spent fuel, assured nuclear fuel supplies and crucially, the right to test a nuclear device. The agreement will herald the resumption of bilateral civil nuclear collaboration after a three-decade break, after India was outlawed from the international nuclear community for its â€peaceful nuclear experiment’ in 1974. The actual agreement has not been made public because it has to go back to the Union Cabinet in New Delhi and the US Congress in Washington for “final review.” The announcement and signing of the agreement is likely at the level of foreign ministers after political approvals. That is likely when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits India in August or early September, a high-level government source told HT. The deed is done Final frontier The announcement and signing of the agreement is likely at the level of foreign ministers after political approvals. That is likely when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits India in August or early September. The 123 text The US would assist India in pushing the NSG to approve a one-time waiver, so India can begin nuclear commerce with the 45 member countries. “We have finalised the text of the 123, but the document cannot be divulged until the CCS (Cabinet Committee on Security) okays it,” a senior official involved in the talks told HT from Washington. “There is agreement on two of the major outstanding issues: reprocessing of spent fuel and assured nuclear fuel supplies for the lifetime of a reactor. On future testing, there has been a compromise by the Americans by which if India should test, the US administration and the President would have to take a call,” said Lalit Mansingh, former Indian ambassador to the US. The US is bound by the terms of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, “but what has been agreed upon is not automatic suspension and return of all American nuclear supplies, should India test, but taking into account the circumstances of testing, if any,” Mansingh said. He said that India had declared a voluntary moratorium on testing in 1998, and the Americans realised that India would not need to test unless its own security is compromised by another nuclear weapons state testing. The significance of the talks and the urgency to conclude these negotiations was apparent from the level of representation of participating officials. Not only did Burns and Menon head their delegations for the four days of meetings from July 17-20, National Security Advisor MK Narayanan and Indian Ambassador Ronen Sen and Menon met with Vice President Dick Cheney, Rice, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and US NSA Stephen Hadley. Chairman of the Department of Atomic Energy, Anil Kakodkar, and his deputy RB Grover were also on hand for all the technical details that required sorting out. India’s High Commissioner to Singapore S Jaishankar and his US counterpart Richard Stratford, involved in the dialogue since its inception two years ago, were also present. ***************************************************************** 35 asahi.com: More damage found at TEPCO plant - 07/23/2007 THE ASAHI SHIMBUN Last week's earthquake caused more damage to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Niigata Prefecture than officials first realized, according to operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO). It said oil leaks and structural damage were found at five more transformers, not just the one at the No. 3 reactor that triggered a fire. The fire apparently started when the transformer's copper conductor came into contact with other metal, igniting oil used as electric insulation. Meanwhile, the transformer at the No. 1 reactor shifted from its base during the temblor and some of its wiring to became disconnected. In transformers at reactors No. 1, 2, 4 and 7, barriers set up for preventing oil spills tilted or sank because of the temblor. Transformers at six of the plant's seven reactors were damaged in the quake, according to TEPCO. The transformers at the No. 5 reactor were not damaged. Reactors 2, 3, 4 and 7 were running when the main temblor hit at 10:13 a.m. on July 16. Operations were suspended at the No. 1, 5 and 6 reactors because they were undergoing inspections at the time. While government guidelines require that reactors are secured to bedrock, requirements are less strict for peripheral facilities such as transformers. Experts said this explained the many problems with transformers during the quake. Niigata prefectural government officials who inspected the plant the following day said it was "simply by chance" that a fire broke out only at the transformer of the No. 3 reactor.(IHT/Asahi: July 23,2007) ***************************************************************** 36 asahi.com: Nuke plants ill-equipped for fires - 07/23/2007 THE ASAHI SHIMBUN Ten of the nation's 11 companies that operate nuclear power plants are not even equipped to fight a fire in their nuclear facilities, according to a government investigation. The nation has 55 nuclear plants. The investigation was ordered after a transformer at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture caught fire following the July 16 earthquake. Officials said the companies did not have firefighting squads on duty around the clock and would have to summon such personnel if a fire broke out at night or during a holiday period. Also covered by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry investigation was the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Rokkasho in Aomori Prefecture. Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) was criticized for not acting speedily to extinguish a fire at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility on July 16. Kashiwazaki Mayor Hiroshi Aida ordered an emergency stop of operations at the plant. TEPCO also revealed that radioactive materials leaked into the air and the Sea of Japan. The plant will need central government approval to resume operations. The ministry discovered that full-time firefighters were on duty around the clock only at the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant operated by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. Although the other plants operated by 10 utilities had in-house fire squads, they did not have specialists on duty around the clock. Other than TEPCO, the electric power companies in question are: Hokkaido Electric, Tohoku Electric, Chubu Electric, Hokuriku Electric, Kansai Electric, Chugoku Electric, Shikoku Electric, Kyushu Electric and Japan Atomic Power Co. Not all had chemical fire engines on their premises, the ministry found. The reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Tohoku Electric's Onagawa plant, Chubu Electric's Hamaoka plant, Kansai Electric's Mihama plant and Japan Atomic's Tsuruga and Tokai plants had one chemical fire engine each on the premises. Investigators found that six companies had no hotlines at any of their plants, while Tohoku Electric had one hotline, at its Onagawa plant. The ministry's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency on Friday instructed the 11 operators to ensure they have firefighting personnel and chemical fire engines in place. It also ordered them to install hotlines linked to local fire departments and hold drills with local fire authorities. The ministry also has begun reviewing quake-resistance standards for various devices that are at risk of catching fire as well as fire-extinguishing equipment at nuclear facilities. The magnitude 6.8 earthquake damaged water pipes used by the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant's fire-extinguishing system. That meant there was not enough water to put out the fire at the transformer. In a related development, the industry ministry set up an in-house taskforce last week to deal with an expected surge in power demand in the Tokyo metropolitan area this summer. It also requested TEPCO, which estimates power demand will reach some 61.1 million kilowatts between late July and August, to make every effort to ensure a steady supply of power this summer now that operations at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant have been suspended. It also instructed TEPCO to ask each of its large clients to economize on the use of electricity.(IHT/Asahi: July 23,2007) * The Asahi Shimbun Company ***************************************************************** 37 The Hindu: Government begins selling nuclear deal Tuesday, Jul 24, 2007 Special Correspondent CCPA to examine details NEW DELHI: The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) is scheduled to meet on July 25 to examine the details of the nuclear agreement reached between Indian and American negotiators last week in Washington. The leader of the Indian delegation, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, returns to the capital late on Monday night and will brief the CCPA on what has been accomplished in Washington. Besides the five designated members of the Cabinet Committee on Security — the Prime Minister, External Affairs Minister, Home Minister, Finance Minister and Defence Minister — the CCPA includes four major political faces of the coalition Government — Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, Railway Minister Lalu Prasad and Road Transport Minister T.R. Baalu. First step A CCPA endorsement is deemed the first step towards grafting as large as possible political and parliamentary support. On Monday morning, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh began the process of crafting a political consensus on the agreement. According to sources in the Prime Minister’s Office, Dr. Singh briefed Congress president and United Progressive Alliance chairperson, Sonia Gandhi, on the deal. Briefs Mishra Dr. Singh also communicated the broad outlines of the “breakthrough” to Brajesh Mishra, former National Security Adviser, who continues to advise the former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on security matters. Mr. Mishra’s views are respected and valued by the Manmohan Singh establishment. The Prime Minister also briefed Sitaram Yechury, a senior CPI(M) leader. The Left parties have been most sceptical of the proposed nuclear deal. Meanwhile, the Foreign Secretary, Shivshankar Menon, began an intensive exercise to brief and explain informally the nuances of the Washington agreement to senior journalists. According to PMO sources, the Prime Minister proposes to make a suo motu statement in both Houses of Parliament in the monsoon session. According to these sources, the Government is prepared to have a debate on the deal in Parliamen t as it feels the Washington agreement has addressed most of the concerns voiced by the critics. Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the ***************************************************************** 38 The Hindu: CPI(M) to study details Monday, Jul 23, 2007 Special Correspondent NEW DELHI: The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Sunday said it would formulate its stand on the outcome of the nuclear talks between India and the U.S. after studying the details. In a statement, the party’s Polit Bureau said the civil nuclear cooperation with the U.S. could be based only on the assurances given by the Prime Minister in the August 17, 2006, statement in Parliament and by not accepting those provisions of the Hyde Act, which were contrary to India’s interest. CPI national secretary D. Raja said the Government would have to come to Parliament with details. Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the ***************************************************************** 39 Daily Yomiuri: N-plant likely to stay shut for long time The revelations of the extent of the damage to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant have made it impossible for Tokyo Electric Power Co. to draw up a specific schedule for the resumption of operations at the plant. Sixty-three problems have been discovered so far at the plant, which was heavily damaged by the Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake a week ago. The nuclear reactor cores, which are the most important part of a nuclear reactor, have not been inspected yet. However, the inspection can only be undertaken next month at the earliest. TEPCO is discussing whether it is possible to visually inspect the cranes using a remote-control camera. Revalidation of the facilities' antiseismic capacities poses bigger problems than any inspection and repair of facilities. After analyzing the seismic wave pattern in the latest earthquake, TEPCO will have to recreate the quake through a computer simulation to learn how the plant's buildings and other facilities were rocked by the quake. TEPCO must confirm whether the facilities can stand a bigger earthquake than the one that hit last week. By checking TEPCO's report and listening to the opinions of experts, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency of the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry will decide whether to allow TEPCO to resume operation of the power plant. Three reactors at the Onagawa nuclear power plant of Tohoku Electric Power Co. in Miyagi Prefecture, which was hit by a stronger than anticipated for earthquake in August 2005, were finally allowed to be restarted this month after operations were suspended for about two years. © The Yomiuri Shimbun. ***************************************************************** 40 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: A classified mess Today: July 23, 2007 at 7:31:26 PDT Alleged theft of material is a sign the government needs to increase nuclear security A worker cleaning up a uranium processing plant was charged last week with stealing sensitive material and trying to sell it to a foreign government, and federal officials quickly congratulated themselves for being "vigilant" in protecting the nation's security. Instead of pats on the back, federal officials should be embarrassed. This is just the latest, and possibly the most minor, of recent security breaches suffered by the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration. The accused, 65-year-old Roy Lynn Oakley, was part of a crew cleaning up an Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility in Tennessee. The facility once was used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Oakley allegedly took non-radioactive material and hardware used in the enrichment process and called the French Embassy trying to find a buyer. He later allegedly tried to sell the material to an undercover FBI agent. Federal officials say what Oakley is accused of taking is not the "crown jewels" of the nuclear program. Nonetheless, the material included some complex filters that are part of the enrichment process, which might be helpful to a rogue nation eager to build a nuclear weapon. Oakley's attorney, Herb Moncier, said his client, a laborer assigned to break up non-radioactive rods to prepare them for disposal, was just trying to make some money off "trash." Federal officials, however, see this as a federal case, with one official crowing that it shows the "strength" of the security system. If the security really was strong, how did a laborer walk away from the supposedly secure facility with such sensitive material? This case is just a part of a troubling pattern of security lapses at government facilities over the last several years that have led to the thefts of caches of classified documents and bomb-making materials. Given that there is a history of problems with security at nuclear facilities, and federal officials persistently warn of potential terrorist attacks, we wonder when the federal government is going to listen to its own warnings and do something about nuclear security. All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 41 KCRG-TV9: Former Ames Lab Workers may get Compensation | AMES (AP) - A federal agency is recommending former employees who renovated the Ames Laboratory decades ago be added to an existing list of workers who were likely exposed to radiation. Laurence Fuortes, a University of Iowa professor, says those who helped renovate Wilhelm Hall beginning in 1955 may've been exposed to residual thorium -- a highly radioactive element. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommended adding those workers to the group of scientists and other lab employees who were deemed highly exposed to radiation between 1942 and 1955. Former employees may be eligible to apply for federal compensation, based on criteria the U.S. Department of Labor sets. Story Updated: Jul 23, 2007 at 1:21 PM CDT KCRG / Cedar Rapids TV Co. ***************************************************************** 42 NAS: Project: Evaluation of Quantification of Margins and Uncertainty (QMU) Methodology Applied to the Certification of the Nation's Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Project Title: PIN: DEPS-L-06-03-A Major Unit: Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences Sub Unit: RSO: Rowberg, Richard Subject/Focus Area: Project Scope In accordance with Section 3116 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2007, P.L. 109-364, an ad hoc committee will provide an independent assessment and evaluation of the Quantification of Margins and Uncertainty (QMU) Methodology employed by the national laboratories for assessing and certifying the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. Specifically, the study committee will evaluate the following: (1) The use of the quantification of margins and uncertainty methodology by the national security laboratories, including underlying assumptions of weapons performance and the ability of modeling and simulation tools to predict nuclear explosive package characteristics. (2) The manner in which that methodology is used to conduct the annual assessments of the nuclear weapons stockpile. (3) How the use of that methodology compares and contrasts between the national security laboratories. (4) Whether the application of the quantification of margins and uncertainty used for annual assessments and certification of the nuclear weapons stockpile can be applied to the planned Reliable Replacement Warhead program so as to carry out the objective of that program to reduce the likelihood of the resumption of underground testing of nuclear weapons. In assessing the QMU methodology, the study committee will examine the interplay between existing and planned experimental and related activities of the directed stockpile work and the science and technology campaigns and application of the QMU. The objective of this analysis is to determine whether the data provided for the use of the QMU methodology and related quantitative computer simulations are adequate to make the assessments necessary to certify the reliability and safety of the stockpile. This additional element will also recommend how QMU can support the stockpile stewardship program's goals to capture and preserve the nation's core intellectual and technical competence in nuclear weapons. Project sponsored by NNSA of the Department of Energy. Approximate start date is March 2, 2007. The study will produce two reports one interim report and one final report. Project Duration: 21 months Provide FEEDBACK on this project. Contact the Public Access Records Office to make an inquiry or to schedule an appointment to view project materials available to the public. Committee Membership Meetings Meeting 1 - 05/04/2007 Meeting 2 - 05/17/2007 Meeting 3 - 08/13/2007 Reports Reports having no URL can be seen at the Public Access Records Office Email: info@nas.edu ***************************************************************** 43 NRC: News Release - Region I - 2007-041 - NRC Seeks Additional Information on Shieldalloy Decommissioning Proposal Search Options Index | Site Map | FAQ | Facility Info | Reading Rm | New | Help | Glossary | Contact Us Protecting People and the EnvironmentUNITED STATES NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION * About NRC o The Commission o Statutory Authority o Strategic Plan o Budget &  Performance o Organization & Functions o Locations o History o Values o Policy Making o Radiation Protection o How We Regulate o Grants o Civil Rights o   * Nuclear o Operating Reactor Locations o Reactor Quick Links o Power Reactors o Non-Power Reactors o Operating Reactors o Operator Licensing o New Reactor Licensing o Reactor Safety Research o Advisory Comm (ACRS) o Decommissioning of Nuclear Facilities o   * Nuclear o Fuel Cycle Facility Locations o Uranium Mill Locations o Material Quick Links o Special Nuclear Material o Source Material o Byproduct Material o Med, Academic & Ind Uses o Fuel Cycle Facilities o Source Materials Facilities o Transportation o Materials Research o Advisory Comm (ACMUI) o Decommissioning of Nuclear Facilities o   * Radioactive o Waste Quick Links o Low-Level Waste o High-Level Waste o Uranium Mill Tailings o LLW Disposal o HLW Disposal o Spent Fuel Storage o Spent Fuel Transport o Waste Research o Advisory Comm (ACNW) o   * Nuclear o NRC Responsibilities o Domestic Safeguards o Radioactive Material Security o Facility Protection o Nuclear Material Control o International Safeguards o Information Security o Emergency Resp to Terrorism o &; * Public Meetings o Public Meeting Schedule o Commission Schedule o Conferences & Symposia o Documents for Comment o Brochures & Fact Sheets o Involving Stakeholders o Info Quality Guidelines o Rulemaking Process o Current Rulemakings o Licensing o Enforcement o Hearing Process o Hearing Applications o   Home > Electronic Reading Room > Document Collections > News Releases > 2007 NRC NEWS U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region I 475 Allendale Road, King of Prussia, Pa. 19406 www.nrc.gov CONTACT: Diane Screnci (610) 337-5330 Neil A. Sheehan (610) 337-5331 E-mail: opa1@nrc.gov NRC SEEKS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON SHIELDALLOY DECOMMISSIONING PROPOSAL Printable Version The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has requested additional information from Shieldalloy Metallurgical Corp. (SMC) on a decommissioning proposal for SMC’s facility in Newfield (Gloucester County), N.J. The proposal was submitted last year and the NRC notified the company on Oct. 18, 2006 that it had sufficient information to begin its review. In a letter sent earlier this month, the NRC identified 72 questions requiring additional information from SMC in order for the agency to complete its review. SMC has 120 days to answer the request. Should the information not be provided within the specified timeframe, the NRC may suspend or terminate its review of the plan. The results of the agency’s safety review will be documented in a Safety Evaluation Report. Among the areas in which more information is being sought are the current radiological condition of the site; geological and hydrological factors that would enter into the NRC’s consideration of the proposal; and SMC’s plan to construct an engineered barrier over waste material at the site, including the technical justification for its design. In addition, the NRC staff is asking for information pertaining to such matters as cost/benefit considerations of the SMC proposal, the effect of the proposal on the local economy and the institutional control of the site for the next 1,000 years. Environmental issues related to the decommissioning proposal are also being evaluated by the NRC staff. That review will be documented in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The NRC staff anticipates holding a public meeting in Newfield in 2008 to solicit public comments on a draft EIS. Located at 35 South West Blvd., the Newfield facility was used for smelting and alloy production from 1940 through 2001. One of the raw materials used by the company was a niobium ore called pyrochlore, which contains uranium and thorium and is subject to NRC licensing requirements. The majority of the radioactive material remaining at the site consists of slag generated during production operations and dust from baghouses. Under its decommissioning plan, Shieldalloy has proposed consolidating all of the materials containing uranium and thorium into a single pile on a portion of the site’s storage yard, and then shaping, grading and covering it with an engineered barrier. The focus of the NRC review is to determine if the proposed decommissioning plan meets the agency’s requirements for protecting public health and safety and the environment. That would include ensuring that no member of the public would receive exposure to radiation from the material in excess of allowable regulatory limits. The remainder of the site could be released for unrestricted use, provided that the company could demonstrate there was no residual contamination above allowable levels. Shieldalloy’s decommissioning proposal is available on the NRC web site through its ADAMS document system, at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html ====================================================================== NRC news releases are available through a free list server subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Privacy Policy | Site Disclaimer Monday, July 23, 2007 ***************************************************************** 44 First Read: Oh-eight (D): Yucca Mountain politics Web MSNBC First Read Chuck Todd, NBC Political Director Posted: Monday, July 23, 2007 9:07 AM by Domenico Montanaro BIDEN: New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith is smitten with Biden. “If I had ever met Sen. Biden, I'd have given him a big hug; he's so handsome, and the best foreign-policy expert in the Senate. He'd make a great Hillary running mate.” CLINTON: Here’s the latest Washington Post/ABC poll, which has Clinton with a double-digit lead over Obama. While we're skeptical of declaring anything about this primary campaign before Labor Day, one can't help but notice the progress Clinton is making in every poll that's been released over the last month. This latest national poll only reaffirms her frontrunner position. The lone downside? It will make the eventual closing of the gap over the next few months seem newsier than perhaps it is. Come on, did you really think that MoDo was NOT going to weigh on the gender fight between Clinton and Edwards? Still, we'll admit, we expected something a bit saltier. Since so many in the media made a big deal out of the fact that a woman lost the presidential race in France earlier this year, does that mean we'll see the same level of coverage of India's historic election of a woman? More evidence that Clinton is using her Senate seat to help her presidential bid? She's calling for congressional hearings on Yucca. That should be popular among Nevada Democrats -- and frankly all of Nevadans should she become the nominee. Here's what Nevada political guru Jon Ralston wrote in his Friday evening "Flash" about Clinton's call for hearings: "I'm as cynical as anyone on Yucca, but those are some of the strongest words any candidate has ever made on the dump. Call it pandering. Call it smart politics. But she is on the record now and should she win, if she keeps her word, the dump is dead, right?" The Portsmouth Herald curtain-raises Clinton's next New Hampshire trip (which begins tomorrow) that will focus on the issue of climate change. EDWARDS: The Sunday New York Times checked in on Edwards' campaign in Iowa, noting that he does not have an organizational advantage -- as Obama has more offices and Clinton has an equal number. Clearly neither Clinton nor Obama is ceding Iowa to Edwards, which in some ways is a good thing for Edwards. If he wins, it's more meaningful. Ask Mitt Romney what it's like to run in Iowa unchallenged. Raleigh News & Observer's Christensen puts the Elizabeth Edwards transformation in context. "Four months ago, the question was whether John Edwards could carry on his presidential campaign because his wife Elizabeth's cancer had returned. Last week, Edwards' campaign managers were fielding questions about whether Elizabeth had become the dominant voice of the campaign." The Los Angeles Times added its voice to the poverty tour and found mostly positive things to say about the tour. OBAMA: The Illinois senator reaffirmed his support for an early New Hampshire primary, complaining only about the plethora of Red Sox fans. The Sunday New York Daily News reported on Obama’s and Clinton’s addresses to the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights group. “Obama stressed how the struggles of blacks and Hispanics are inextricably connected” and “Clinton stressed her long record with Hispanic issues, recounting how she traveled to Texas 35 years ago to register Hispanic voters.” Said Obama on immigration, per the Washington Times: “’Find out how many senators appeared before an immigration rally last year. Who was talking the talk, and who walked the walk -- because I walked…I didn't run away from the issue, and I didn't just talk about it in front of Latino audiences.’" Remember that PAC/527 that supports Obama in California? The Boston Globe writes about it. "The Globe interviewed a number of specialists in campaign finance who said they could think of no other example of a major PAC being set up specifically to work for the election of a candidate during a presidential primary, aside from PACs set up to draft candidates or established by the politicians for themselves." Why haven't others popped up like this for other campaigns? © 2007 MSNBC.com ***************************************************************** 45 DOE: DOE to Weigh Alternatives for Greater Than Class C Low-Level Waste Disposal July 20, 2007 WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced that it will evaluate disposal options for Greater Than Class C (GTCC) low-level radioactive waste (LLW) generated from the decommissioning of nuclear power plants, medical activities and nuclear research. DOE delivered to the Federal Register this week a Notice of Intent (NOI) to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which will evaluate how and where to safely dispose of GTCC LLW that is currently stored at commercial nuclear power plants and other generator sites across the country. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires DOE to report to Congress on its evaluation of safe disposal options for this commercial waste. The NOI includes a list of the preliminary disposal options for analysis in the EIS, describes the inventory of waste to be analyzed, identifies dates and locations of public meetings, and invites public comments on the proposed scope of the EIS. GTCC waste is commercial LLW generated from activities conducted by Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensees and stored at sites where it is generated throughout the United States. DOE estimates the total stored and projected quantity nationwide of the GTCC LLW to be 2,600 cubic meters. GTCC LLW is grouped into three general waste types: (1) activated metals, which come from the maintenance and decommissioning of nuclear power plants; (2) radioactive sealed sources that are no longer used, including irradiation of food and medical purposes; and (3) miscellaneous waste, such as contaminated equipment from industrial research and development. In addition to the GTCC LLW, DOE intends to include in the EIS evaluation certain LLW and transuranic waste that is generated from DOE activities, which may not have an identified disposal path, and has characteristics similar to GTCC LLW. This DOE waste is estimated to be 3,000 cubic meters. Regulations require that GTCC waste be disposed of in a geologic repository unless alternate proposals for its safe disposal in a NRC licensed facility are approved by the NRC. DOE will evaluate a range of disposal alternatives in preparing the EIS to meet the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. In addition, DOE will submit a Report to Congress after the final EIS is complete and await Congressional action before making a decision on the disposal alternative or alternatives to be implemented by DOE as required by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The EIS will evaluate a range of disposal methods and locations that include: (1) geologic disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository; (2) enhanced near-surface disposal at the Hanford Site, Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge Reservation, Savannah River Site, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant vicinity, or a generic commercial location; and (3) intermediate depth borehole disposal at the same locations identified in (2). The EIS will consider these alternatives individually and in combination. DOE invites public review and comment on the proposed scope of the EIS and other information presented in the NOI during a 60-day comment period, which begins on Monday, July 23, 2007. Comments are on September 21, 2007. All comments received during the public scoping period will be considered in preparing the GTCC EIS. To encourage public participation in the GTCC EIS process, DOE will host scoping meetings, as follows: August 13 Carlsbad, NM August 14 Los Alamos, NM August 22 Oak Ridge, TN August 23 North Augusta, SC August 27 Troutdale, OR August 28 Pasco, WA August 30 Idaho Falls, ID September 4 Las Vegas, NV September 10 Washington, D.C. Additional information on Greater than Class C waste and the Notice of Intent are available on the Greater than Class C EIS Information Center. Media contact(s): Megan Barnett, (202) 586-4940 U.S. Department of Energy | 1000 Independence Ave., SW | Washington, DC 20585 1-800-dial-DOE | f/202-586-4403 ***************************************************************** 46 NRC: NRC to Hold Public Meetings in Casper, Wyo., and Albuquerque, N.M., on Generic Environmental Study of Uranium Recovery Operations News Release - 2007-087 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov www.nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is seeking public comment for a “generic environmental impact statement” (GEIS) the agency intends to develop for uranium recovery operations, including in-situ leach (ISL) recovery facilities and conventional mills. The NRC is expecting numerous applications for new uranium recovery operations in the next two to three years. This GEIS is intended to address the common issues associated with environmental reviews of ISL and conventional milling facilities located in the western United States. Because there are environmental issues common to both types of facilities, the NRC staff will be addressing these common issues generically to aid in a more efficient environmental review for each separate license application, if and when these applications are submitted. Members of the NRC staff will hold public meetings Aug. 7 in Casper, Wyo., and Aug. 9 in Albuquerque, N.M., to discuss the scope of the GEIS. Members of the public will be invited to comment on environmental issues that will be addressed in the GEIS, including land use, public and occupational health, waste management, water resources, air quality, historical resources and others. The meeting in Casper will be held at the Parkway Plaza Hotel and Convention Center, 123 West E Street. The Albuquerque meeting will be at the Hilton Albuquerque, 1901 University Blvd. N.E. Both meetings will be from 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. NRC staff will hold an informal open house to meet members of the public from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. before each meeting. More information about the GEIS will be published shortly in the Federal Register. The agency will also be accepting written comments on the scope of the GEIS. Comments should be addressed to Chief, Rules Review and Directives Branch, Mail Stop T-6D59, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C., 20555-0001; or by electronic mail to nrcrep@nrc.gov NRC news releases are available through a free list server subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Monday, July 23, 2007 ***************************************************************** 47 RGJ.com: Mixed messages, ambivalence on Yucca policy not acceptable Editorial Posted: 7/22/2007 PATRICK CUMMINGS/RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL Gov. Jim Gibbons said that he is opposed to the Department of Energy’s use of state water in its drilling project and that if he could legally stop it, he would. Serve 'green' objectives before profit motive SNAPSHOT TOPIC: DOE drilling OUR VIEW: Opposition to storing the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada should continue. A successful anti-Yucca Mountain policy calls for an unambiguous and united front, whether it concerns water, construction or transportation plans, or opinions about the potential utility to one county of a facility to store high-level nuclear waste in the state. As far as most people knew, officials in Carson City and at state agencies, and members of the Washington delegation, including Gov. Jim Gibbons during the 10 years he was in Congress, were unanimous. Opposing the U.S. Department of Energy plan to store the nation's nuclear waste in the Nevada desert has been a statewide priority since the beginning. It should remain so. The years-long opposition campaign has been one of lobbying, unearthing faulty science and uncovering fraud. Engineering problems went to court and transportation routes were rebuffed. Now, two puzzling events emerge. The governor made a decision that would allow the federal government to use state water to conduct ground studies at the dump. And a Nye County appointee to the Nuclear Projects Commission wasn't as opposed to the dump as would be expected. Fortunately, the appointee's soft spot for Yucca Mountain came to light. (It isn't a "dump," she said, but a "resource"; it is "absolutely going forward, so we might as well plan accordingly.") She wisely resigned. That bit of business was handled, but then there is the problem of the feds' unauthorized use of state water. A 2003 court agreement limited the Energy Department's water usage, and consistent with it, the state water engineer issued a cease-and-desist order in June. Later, however, the stay was lifted to let the DOE continue drilling for the next month, while two phases of a drilling project are completed. Information gathered from the drilling could be used to advance Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing. The DOE's actions comprise a total affront. If water is to be used for any purpose, it should be to keep the feds from accumulating information to support licensing. And the actions of officials who declare their opposition should be clear and should not waffle. Officials in Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is located, may be "proud ... of having something to do with developing the storage facility," but the prevailing opinion statewide is that it is not wanted in Nevada and should not be transported through Nevada. The court order should have been enough to keep the DOE out of the state's water affairs. Lifting a stay weakens the policy and opens the door to further violations. The governor's hand in these events says the state is ambivalent about Yucca Mountain and sends the message that resistance depends on who sits in the Governor's Mansion. Mixed messages are not acceptable. That Nevadans will not break ranks is the only message that DOE officials should hear. Story Chat Gibbons Doesn't Want the Dump Sun Jul 22, 2007 6:45 pm Governor Gibbons wasn't siding with the DOE or the nuclear industry when he supported the decision of the State Engineer to allow water use for scientific drilling at Yucca Mountain for only 30 more days. One can argue that the State Engineer and the Governor were protecting the interests of a small Nevada-based drilling contractor who would have lost money, and probably would have had to lay-off Nevada workers, if the drilling program was curtailed due to the State Engineer cutting off water use for the project. The Nevada-based drilling company probably bid on the job for a given number of drill holes to be completed over a specified period of time. It's likely that the contractor invested in equipment to be able to perform under the contract. It's also likely that they would have had to hire additional Nevada-based staff to do the job. While Governor Gibbons does not support Yucca Mountain, he probably felt it necessary to support the State Engineer's decision to extend the DOE another 30 days to complete the drilling. If fact, Governor Gibbons did the right thing in helping a small Nevada business to complete a contract. Why should a Nevada-based business get punished for being in the middle of the Yucca Mountain dispute? Before criticizing the Governor, everyone should keep in mind that the extension is only for 30 days to complete the current drilling phase. I think the recent diatribe against Governor Gibbons by Senator Reid was completely uncalled for. I think the Governor and the State Engineer should be commended for doing what they could to protect a Nevada-based small business from financial harm from having been in the middle of the Yucca Mountain dispute. Reader Comment Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:37 am I don't trust the governor. He has shown himself to be dishonest and willing to take money from special interests and willing to sell his vote. gov Fibby may be taking money under the table from the nuke industry to get the dump built in NV. What else would make him change his mind? © Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Gannett Co. Inc. Newspaper. ***************************************************************** 48 DOE: PEIS for disosal of GTCC LLW FR Doc E7-14139 [Federal Register: July 23, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 140)] [Notices] [Page 40135-40139] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr23jy07-39] DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY Notice of Intent To Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the Disposal of Greater-Than-Class-C Low-Level Radioactive Waste AGENCY: Department of Energy. ACTION: Notice of Intent To Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. SUMMARY: The Department of Energy (DOE) announces its intent to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for the disposal of Greater-Than-Class- C low-level radioactive waste (GTCC LLW). GTCC LLW is defined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 10 CFR 72.3 as ``low-level radioactive waste that exceeds the concentration limits of radionuclides established for Class C waste in [10 CFR 61.55].'' GTCC LLW is generated by NRC or Agreement State-licensed activities (hereafter referred to as NRC-licensed activities). DOE proposes to evaluate alternatives for GTCC LLW disposal: in a geologic repository; in intermediate depth boreholes; and in enhanced near surface facilities. Candidate locations for these disposal facilities would be: the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in Idaho; the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico; the Nevada Test Site (NTS) and the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada; the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina; the Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) in Tennessee; and the Hanford Site (Hanford) in Washington. DOE will also evaluate disposal at generic commercial facilities in arid and humid locations. In addition, DOE proposes to include DOE LLW and transuranic waste having characteristics similar to GTCC LLW and which may not have an identified path to disposal (hereafter referred to as GTCC-like waste) in the scope of this EIS. DOE's GTCC-like waste is owned or generated by DOE. The use of the term ``GTCC-like'' does not have the intent or effect of creating a new classification of radioactive waste. DOE invites public comment on the scope of this EIS during a 60-day public scoping period. During this period, DOE will hold public scoping meetings to provide the public with an opportunity to comment on the scope of the EIS and to learn more about the proposed action from DOE officials. DOE issued an Advance Notice of Intent (ANOI), 70 FR 24775 (May 11, 2005), inviting the public to provide preliminary comments on the potential scope of the EIS. This Notice of Intent (NOI) includes a summary of the public comments received on the ANOI. DATES: The public scoping period starts with the date of publication of this NOI in the Federal Register and will continue until September 21, 2007. DOE will consider all comments received or postmarked by September 21, 2007 in defining the scope of this EIS. Comments received or postmarked after that date will be considered to the extent practicable. Public scoping meetings will be held to provide the public with an opportunity to present comments on the scope of the EIS and to learn more about [[Page 40136]] the proposed action from DOE officials. The locations, dates, and times for the public scoping meetings are listed in the ``Public Scoping'' section under SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION. ADDRESSES: Written comments on the scope of the GTCC LLW EIS or requests to speak at one of the public scoping meetings should be sent to: James L. Joyce, Document Manager, Office of Regulatory Compliance (EM-10), U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, DC 20585-0119. Telephone: (301) 903-2151. Fax: 301-903- 4303. E-mail: gtcceis@anl.gov. Written comments on the scope of the GTCC LLW EIS and requests to speak at one of the public scoping meetings can also be submitted through the Web site at http://www.gtcceis.anl.gov. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: To request further information about the EIS, the public scoping meetings, or to be placed on the EIS distribution list, use any of the methods (fax, telephone, e-mail, or Web site) listed under ADDRESSES above. For general information concerning the DOE NEPA process, contact: Carol Borgstrom, Director, Office of NEPA Policy and Compliance (GC-20), U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, DC 20585-0119. Telephone: 202-586-4600, or leave a message at 1-800-472-2756. Fax: 202-586-7031. This NOI will be available on the internet at http://www.eh.doe.gov/nepa . Additional information on the GTCC LLW EIS can be found at http://www.gtcceis.anl.gov . SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Background GTCC LLW is defined by NRC in 10 CFR 72.3 as ``low-level radioactive waste that exceeds the concentration limits of radionuclides established for Class C waste in 10 CFR 61.55.'' In 10 CFR 61.55, the NRC defines classes of LLW as A, B and C by the concentration of specific short- and long-lived radionuclides, with Class C LLW having the highest radionuclide concentration limits. Consistent with NRC's and DOE's authorities under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (as amended), the NRC LLW radioactive waste classification system does not apply to radioactive wastes generated or owned by DOE and disposed of at DOE facilities. However, DOE owns and generates LLW and transuranic radioactive waste with characteristics similar to GTCC LLW and that may not have a path to disposal. For the purposes of this EIS, DOE is referring to this DOE waste as GTCC-like waste (the use of the term ``GTCC-like'' does not have the intent or effect of creating a new classification of radioactive waste). DOE proposes to evaluate alternatives for the disposal of both GTCC LLW and DOE GTCC-like waste in this EIS. Section 3(b)(1)(D) of the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985 (LLRWPAA) assigns the responsibility for the disposal of GTCC LLW to the Federal Government. The LLRWPAA specifies that the GTCC LLW covered under Section 3(b)(1)(D) is to be disposed of in a facility licensed and determined to be adequate by the NRC. DOE is the federal agency responsible for the disposal of GTCC LLW. This responsibility was described in a 1987 report to Congress, Recommendations for Management of Greater-Than-Class-C Low-Level Waste (DOE/NE-0077), U.S. Department of Energy, February 1987. The report can be obtained by contacting the Document Manager listed under ADDRESSES above or from the Web site at http://www.gtcceis.anl.gov. The September 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent threats have heightened concerns that terrorists could gain possession of radiological sealed sources, including GTCC LLW sealed sources, and use them for malevolent purposes. Since 2003, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued three reports on matters related to the security of uncontrolled sealed sources, including the Department's progress in developing a GTCC LLW disposal facility.\1\ In addition, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains several provisions (e.g., sections 631, 651, and 957) directed at improving the control of sealed sources, including disposal availability. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ These GAO reports are entitled Nuclear Security: Federal and State Action Needed to Improve Security of Sealed Radiological Sources, GAO-03804 (August 6, 2004); Nuclear Nonproliferation: DOE Action Needed to Ensure Continued Recovery of Unwanted Radioactive Sources, GAO-03-438 (April 15, 2003); and Nuclear Security: DOE Needs Better Information to Guide Its Expanded Recovery of Sealed Sources, GAO-05-967 (September 2005). These reports can be found at http://www.gao.gov/. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Because of its technical expertise in radiation protection, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will participate as a cooperating agency in the preparation of this EIS. NRC will be a commenting agency. Energy Policy Act of 2005 Reporting Requirements Section 631 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires the Secretary of Energy to: provide Congress with notification of the DOE office with responsibility for completing activities needed to provide for safe disposal of GTCC LLW; submit a report to Congress containing an estimate of the cost and schedule to complete an EIS and record of decision (ROD) for a permanent disposal facility for GTCC LLW; and prior to making a final decision on the disposal alternative or alternatives to be implemented, submit to Congress a report that describes all alternatives considered in the EIS. In meeting these requirements thus far, DOE has named the Office of Environmental Management as the lead organization having responsibility to develop GTCC LLW disposal capability and has submitted a report to Congress dated July 2006 on the estimated cost and proposed schedule to complete the EIS. Types and Estimated Quantities of GTCC LLW and DOE GTCC-like Waste GTCC LLW may generally be categorized into the following three types: sealed sources, activated metals, and other miscellaneous waste (e.g., contaminated equipment). Sealed sources are typically small, high-activity radioactive materials encapsulated in closed metal containers. They are used for a variety of purposes including irradiating food and medical products for sterilization, detecting flaws and failures in pipelines and metal welds, calculating moisture content in soil and other materials, and assisting in the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. Activated metal wastes are primarily generated in nuclear reactors during facility modifications and decommissioning. There are 104 operating commercial reactors in the United States and an additional 18 that have been closed or decommissioned. The activated metals consist of internal nuclear components that have become radioactive from neutron absorption. These components include portions of the reactor vessel and other stainless steel components near the fuel assemblies. Other miscellaneous waste includes all GTCC LLW that is not activated metals or sealed sources. This waste includes contaminated equipment, debris, trash, scrap metal and decontamination and decommissioning waste from miscellaneous industrial activities, such as the manufacture of sealed sources and laboratory research. DOE GTCC-like waste includes some sealed sources owned or generated by DOE activities; activated metals including reflector materials from research reactors as well as other miscellaneous waste owned by DOE or generated by DOE activities that has characteristics similar to GTCC LLW and may not have a path to disposal. [[Page 40137]] Most of the DOE GTCC-like waste consists of transuranic waste \2\ (a DOE waste category) that may have originated from non-defense activities and therefore may not be authorized for disposal at WIPP under the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Land Withdrawal Act of 1992 and has no other currently identified path to disposal. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \2\ Transuranic waste is radioactive waste containing more than 100 nanocuries of alpha-emitting transuranic isotopes per gram of waste, with half-lives greater than 20 years, except for: (1) High- level waste; (2) waste that the Secretary of Energy has determined, with the concurrence of the Administrator of EPA, does not need the degree of isolation required by the 40 CFR Part 191 disposal regulations; or (3) waste that the NRC has approved for disposal on a case-by-case basis in accordance with 10 CFR Part 61. PAGE --------------------------------------------------------------------------- DOE estimates a total inventory (existing and projected to be generated) of approximately 2,600 cubic meters of GTCC LLW and approximately 3,000 cubic meters of GTCC-like waste. A small percentage of this waste is mixed waste (i.e., radioactive waste that contains a hazardous component subject to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act). Table 1 shows estimated quantities of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste that DOE proposes to analyze and is based on the report entitled Greater-Than-Class C Low-Level Radioactive Waste Inventory Estimates, (DOE, July 2007). This report updates the 1993 inventory estimates contained in the report entitled Greater-Than-Class C Low-Level Radioactive Waste Characterization: Estimated Volumes, Radionuclides, Activities, and Other Characteristics, DOE/LLW-114, Revision 1 (Sept. 1994), which served as the basis for inventories in the ANOI. Copies of both reports are available by contacting the Document Manager listed under ADDRESSES above or at http://www.gtcceis.anl.gov. Table 1.--Inventory Summary of Estimated Quantities of GTCC LLW and DOE GTCC-like Waste a -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total stored and projected ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Volume in Waste type In storage Projected cubic Activity\b\ Activity Volume Activity meters MCi Volume m\3\ \b\ MCi m \3\ \(b)\ (m\3\) MCi ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------ GTCC LLW: Activated metal......................................... 58 3.5 810 110 870 110 Sealed sources.......................................... (\c\) (\c\) 1,700 2.4 1,700 2.4 Other \d\............................................... 76 0.0076 1.0 0.00023 77 0.0078 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total GTCC LLW...................................... 130 3.5 2,500 110 2,600 110 DOE GTCC-like waste: Activated metal......................................... 5.0 0.11 29 0.82 34 0.93 Sealed sources.......................................... 8.7 0.013 25 0.030 34 0.043 Other \d\............................................... 860 11 2,000 19 2,900 30 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total DOE GTCC-like waste........................... 870 11 2,100 20 3,000 31 =========================================================================================== Total GTCC and GTCC-like waste.................. 1,000 15 4,600 130 5,600 140 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- \a\ Values have been rounded to two significant figures. \b\ Radioactivity values are in millions of curies (MCi). \c\ There are sealed sources currently possessed by NRC licensees that may become GTCC LLW when no longer needed by the licensee. The estimated volume and activity of those sources are included in the projected inventory, notwithstanding the lack of information on the current status of the sources (e.g., in use, waste, etc.). \d\ Other GTCC LLW and DOE GTCC-like waste includes contaminated equipment, debris, trash, scrap metal and decontamination and decommissioning waste. Purpose and Need for Action As shown in Table 1, NRC and Agreement State licensees have generated and continue to generate GTCC LLW for which there is no permitted disposal facility. DOE is responsible for the safe and secure disposal of GTCC LLW covered under Section 3(b)(1)(D) of the LLRWPAA, including determining how and where to dispose of these wastes. In addition, DOE owns or generates certain LLW and transuranic wastes with characteristics similar to GTCC LLW that also may not have an identified path to disposal. Proposed Action DOE proposes to construct and operate a new facility or facilities, or use an existing facility, for the disposal of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste. DOE would then close the facility or facilities at the end of each facility's operational life. Based on the EIS analysis, DOE expects to make a decision on the method(s) and location(s) for disposing of GTCC LLW and DOE GTCC-like waste. A combination of disposal methods and locations may be appropriate based on the characteristics of the waste and other factors. Alternatives Proposed for Evaluation The GTCC EIS will evaluate the range of reasonable alternatives for the disposal of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste, together with a no action alternative. The NRC regulations at 10 CFR 61.55(a)(2)(iv) define GTCC LLW as that waste which would require disposal in a geologic repository as defined in 10 CFR Part 60 or 63, unless proposals for an alternative method of disposal are approved by NRC under 10 CFR 61.55(a)(2)(iv). Although NRC regulations state that GTCC LLW is generally not acceptable for near surface-disposal, the NRC recognizes in 10 CFR 61.7(b)(5) that ``there may be some instances where waste with concentrations greater than permitted for Class C waste would be acceptable for near-surface disposal with special processing or design.'' Therefore, the disposal methods DOE proposes to evaluate in the EIS include deep geologic repository disposal, intermediate depth borehole disposal, and enhanced near-surface disposal. For deep geologic disposal, DOE intends to analyze disposal at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a proposed geologic repository to be licensed under 10 CFR Part 63. DOE will also evaluate deep geologic repository disposal at WIPP in New Mexico. Identification of [[Page 40138]] the proposed Yucca Mountain repository for analysis in the EIS is based on the 10 CFR 61.55 regulations, which identify disposal in a geologic repository licensed under 10 CFR Part 60 or 63 as an acceptable method for the disposal of GTCC LLW. Identification of WIPP is based on its characteristics as a geologic repository, although not subject to NRC licensing as a geologic repository under 10 CFR Parts 60 or 63. DOE does not plan to evaluate an additional deep geologic repository facility because siting of another deep geologic repository facility for GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste is impractical due to the cost, time, and the relatively small volume of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste. DOE also intends to evaluate disposal of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste in a new intermediate depth borehole facility and enhanced-near surface facility at existing DOE sites and generic commercial locations. The DOE sites considered for analysis include INL in Idaho, LANL in New Mexico, WIPP vicinity (either within the WIPP Land Withdrawal perimeter that is under the jurisdiction of DOE, or on government property in the vicinity of WIPP), NTS in Nevada, SRS in South Carolina, ORR in Tennessee, and Hanford in Washington. Identification of these sites for potential analysis is based on mission compatibility (these DOE sites currently have waste disposal operations as part of their mission) and physical characteristics of the sites such as hydrogeology and topography. In addition, DOE intends to evaluate a generic enhanced near surface and intermediate depth borehole commercial disposal facility under both arid and humid conditions in the EIS. In a Request for Information in the FedBizOpps on July 1, 2005, DOE solicited technical capability statements from commercial vendors that may be interested in constructing and operating a GTCC waste disposal facility. Although several commercial vendors expressed an interest, no vendors have provided specific information on disposal locations and methods for analysis in the EIS. Including a generic commercial facility in the EIS would allow DOE to make a programmatic determination regarding disposal of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste in such a facility. Should one or more commercial facilities be identified at a later time, DOE would conduct further NEPA review, as appropriate. DOE intends to evaluate each of the GTCC waste types (i.e., sealed sources, activated metals, and other waste) individually and in combination for each of the disposal alternatives, taking into account the characteristics of the waste types and other considerations (e.g., waste volumes, physical and radiological characteristics, and generation rates). For example, GTCC LLW containing transuranic radionuclides with longer half-lives may require greater isolation or other special measures to protect against potential inadvertent human intrusion, whereas GTCC LLW containing radionuclides with shorter half- lives may require less extensive measures. DOE will also consider volumes and time periods when wastes would be generated and require disposal. In the GTCC LLW EIS, DOE will describe the statutory and regulatory requirements for each disposal alternative and whether legislation or regulatory modifications may be needed to implement the alternative under consideration. In summary, DOE proposes to evaluate the alternatives listed below: Alternative 1: No Action--under this alternative, current and future GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste would be stored at designated locations consistent with ongoing practices, such as storage of GTCC LLW activated metals at nuclear utilities; Alternative 2: Disposal in a Geologic Repository at WIPP--under this alternative, DOE would dispose of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste at WIPP; Alternative 3: Disposal in a Geologic Repository at Yucca Mountain--under this alternative, DOE would dispose of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste at the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository; Alternative 4: Disposal at a New Enhanced Near-Surface Facility-- under this alternative, DOE would dispose of GTCC LLW or GTCC-like waste at a new enhanced near-surface facility at INL, LANL, WIPP vicinity, NTS, SRS, ORR, and Hanford, or a commercial facility should such a facility be identified in the future; Alternative 5: Disposal at a New Intermediate Depth Borehole Facility--under this alternative, DOE would dispose of GTCC LLW or GTCC-like waste at a new intermediate depth borehole facility at INL, LANL, WIPP vicinity, NTS, SRS, ORR and Hanford, or a commercial facility should such a facility be identified in the future. Identification of Environmental Issues DOE proposes to evaluate disposal technologies at various DOE and generic commercial locations for the construction, operation, and closure of a facility or facilities for the disposal of GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste. DOE proposes to address the issues listed below in the process of considering the potential impacts of the proposed disposal alternatives. Potential impacts on air, noise, surface water and groundwater. Potential impacts from the shipment of GTCC LLW and GTCC- like waste to the disposal site(s). Potential impacts from postulated accidents. Potential impacts on human health, including impacts to involved and non-involved site workers and members of the public. Potential impacts to historical and cultural artifacts or sites of historical and cultural significance. Potential disproportionately high and adverse effects on low income and minority populations (environmental justice). Potential Native American concerns. Short-term and long-term land use impacts. Long-term site suitability, including erosion and seismicity. Potential impacts to endangered species. Intentional destructive acts. Compliance with applicable federal, state, and local requirements. Irretrievable and irreversible commitment of resources. Cumulative impacts from past, present and reasonably foreseeable actions. This list is not intended to be inclusive, and we invite interested parties to suggest other issues to be considered, including aspects of the waste inventories presented in Table 1. Summary of Public Comments on the Advance Notice of Intent In 2005, DOE issued an ANOI, 70 Fed. Reg. 24775 (May 11, 2005), inviting the public to provide preliminary comments on the potential scope of the EIS. DOE received comments on the ANOI from: the states of Nevada, Oregon and Washington; the Sacramento Municipal Utility District; the New England Coalition; the Sierra Club; the Nuclear Energy Institute; and the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board. The major scoping issues identified in the comments are summarized below, along with DOE's response. EIS General Scope: Commenters questioned the need for the EIS, assuming that GTCC LLW would be disposed of in the proposed Yucca Mountain repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste. Some commenters favored the inclusion of DOE's GTCC-like waste along with GTCC LLW generated from NRC-licensed activities in the EIS, while [[Page 40139]] other commenters recommended restricting the scope of the EIS to GTCC LLW analyzed in the Yucca Mountain EIS (DOE/EIS-0250, February 2002) or to waste generated from NRC-licensed activities. Still other commenters questioned the basis for projecting the GTCC LLW volume to 2035 and 2055. Response: GTCC waste is LLW, not high-level waste or spent nuclear fuel; nevertheless, DOE has identified the proposed Yucca Mountain repository as one of the sites to be analyzed in the EIS for GTCC LLW as a disposal alternative, as well as other appropriate sites, in accordance with 10 CFR Part 61. Under the LLRWPAA, DOE is responsible for disposing of this waste, and because such disposal would be a major federal action, DOE is required by the Council on Environmental Quality regulations that implement NEPA to complete an EIS analyzing the range of reasonable alternatives for this action. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 also requires DOE to take actions related to the preparation of an EIS for GTCC LLW. DOE plans to include its GTCC-like waste that may have no path to disposal, as well as waste generated from NRC or Agreement State licensed activities, and to identify where economies of scale may be achieved in using the same disposal methods and locations. DOE has identified the estimated GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste volumes based on the best available data. DOE has changed the projections to 2035 and 2062 to include the 20-year license renewal that commercial reactors may receive plus an additional 6-year ``cooling period'' before commencing reactor decommissioning activities. Thus GTCC LLW and GTCC-like waste estimates are projected through 2035, except for GTCC LLW activated metals estimates, which are projected through 2062, based on anticipated nuclear reactor decommissioning schedules. Waste Disposal Alternatives: Commenters stated that DOE should identify its criteria for including sites considered in the EIS as potential disposal locations and criteria for selecting the technologies and disposal methods to be evaluated. Response: DOE has identified its basis for the disposal locations and disposal methods proposed for analysis in the EIS under ``Alternatives Proposed for Evaluation'' in this Notice. Waste Inventories: Commenters stated that the inventory data provided in the ANOI should be updated. Response: DOE has updated the inventory data as shown in Table 1. DOE will incorporate other appropriate inventory data that may become available during preparation of the EIS. Resource Areas Proposed for Analysis: Commenters suggested a number of subjects that DOE should include in the EIS impact analyses. Response: DOE's list of subjects proposed for evaluation in the EIS under ``Identification of Environmental Issues'' in this NOI responds to those comments. Concentration Averaging: Commenters raised questions about DOE's potential use of ``concentration averaging'' in which, for example, the activity of one component is averaged over the volume or mass of waste to identify applicable waste classification standards. Response: For the purposes of analysis in the EIS, DOE would use guidance in the Branch Technical Position on Concentration Averaging and Encapsulation, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington DC, January 1995, to determine when LLW is greater than Class C as defined at according to 10 CFR Part 61. Regulatory Requirements: A number of commenters discussed the need to address compliance with regulatory and other legal requirements in the EIS. Response: The EIS would describe applicable regulatory and other legal requirements and consider the extent to which the alternatives analyzed meet those requirements. Public Scoping Interested parties are invited to participate in the public scoping process to provide their comments on the proposed disposal alternatives for analysis in the EIS and the environmental issues to be analyzed. The scoping process is intended to involve all interested agencies (federal, state, county, and local), public interest groups, Native American tribes, businesses, and members of the public. Public scoping meetings will be held at the following locations and times: Carlsbad, New Mexico: Pecos River Village Conference Center, Carousel House, 711 Muscatel Avenue, Carlsbad, New Mexico, Monday, August 13, 2007, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Los Alamos, New Mexico: Hilltop House Best Western, La Vista Room, 400 Trinity Drive, Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tuesday, August 14, 2007, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Oak Ridge, Tennessee: DOE Oak Ridge Information Center, 475 Oak Ridge Turnpike, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Wednesday, August 22, 6 p.m.--9 p.m. North Augusta, South Carolina: North Augusta Community Center, 495 Brookside Avenue, North Augusta, South Carolina, Thursday, August 23, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Troutdale, Oregon: Comfort Inn & Suites-Columbia Gorge West, 477 NW Phoenix Drive, Troutdale, Oregon, Monday, August 27, 2007, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Pasco, Washington: Red Lion Hotel, Gold Room, 2525 N 20th Avenue, Pasco, Washington, Tuesday, August 28, 2007, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Idaho Falls, Idaho: Red Lion Hotel On The Falls, Yellowstone/Teton Rooms, 475 River Parkway, Idaho Falls, Idaho, Thursday, August 30, 2007, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Las Vegas, Nevada: Atomic Testing Museum, 755 E. Flamingo Road (Just East of Paradise Road), Las Vegas, Nevada, Tuesday, September 4, 2007, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Washington DC: Hotel Washington, Washington Room, 15th and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW., Washington, DC, Monday, September 10, 1 p.m.- 5 p.m. During the first hour of each scoping meeting, DOE officials will be available for informal discussions with attendees. During the formal part of the meeting, the public will have the opportunity to provide comments orally or in writing. The presiding officer will establish procedures to ensure that everyone who wishes to speak has a chance to do so. Both oral and written comments will be considered and given equal weight. Issued in Washington, DC on July 17, 2007. James A. Rispoli, Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management. [FR Doc. E7-14139 Filed 7-20-07; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P ***************************************************************** 49 Hanford News: PNNL appointment This story was published Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 the Herald staff * Dennis Wester, of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has been appointed director of the lab's radioisotope program. Wester will be responsible for the program's technical leadership and business development for both government and private sector clients. The program's focus is on isotope production, applications research and providing technical support to the Department of Energy. Wester has an extensive background in chemistry and related fields and his research includes processing radioisotopes for medical use and assistance in nonproliferation and radiopharmaceutical programs. * Professional communicators at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have earned awards in two international competitions. Donna Austin-Workman, Carol A. Elledge, Judith Graybeal, Bill Hanf, Launa Morasch, Shannon Neely, Kathy Neiderhiser and Dave Payson received APEX Awards for Excellence for outstanding achievement in graphic design and editorial content. Brittney Drollinger, David Hachigian, Nathan Johnson, Kristin Manke, Andrea McMakin, Shannon Neely, Darcy Richardson and Anna Tensmeyer earned Hermes Gold Creative Awards for excellence in the concept, writing and design of traditional materials and programs and emerging technologies. © 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 50 Hanford News: DOE to cut Washington Closure's pay This story was published Monday, July 23rd, 2007 Annette Cary, Herald staff writer Washington Closure Hanford could lose $1 million in pay after failing to have a required safety plan in place this spring for its work to clean up Hanford along the Columbia River. Since Washington Closure started the work nearly two years ago "there have been a number of incidents," according to a letter to Washington Closure from the Department of Energy. It said DOE believes there is a direct correlation between the incidents and the contractor's lack of progress in implementing a formal safety plan, called an Integrated Safety Management System. "(DOE) is concerned that in some circumstances fee and schedule considerations could be taking priority over good work practices," the letter said. The letter, which discussed a fee reduction, was sent by former Richland Operations Office Manager Keith Klein on April 23, but came to light when it was mentioned in a recently released Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board weekly staff report. The letter said Washington Closure's payment would be reduced by not less than $1 million. However, it also said that mitigating factors such as performing work safely until the safety plan is in place by a new deadline of Oct. 30 would be considered in determining the amount of the reduction. This spring, Washington Closure notified DOE it would not meet a May 26 deadline for having the safety plan in place and asked for an extension until Oct. 30. Chuck Spencer, the contractor's new president, said in an interview then that he planned to delay high hazard work until he believed Washington Closure had the rigorous systems in place to do the work safely and correctly. That included work to clean up the 618-7 burial ground in Hanford's 300 Area just north of Richland. It may contain drums of uranium chips or zircaloy shavings that could be flammable if the drums have leaked water or oil. Spencer estimated about 10 percent of work was being deferred and workers were instead doing more lower-risk work. Spencer replaced Pat Pettiette as president of Washington Closure at the start of the year after a series of problems along the river corridor. Since arriving, Spencer has emphasized the need to develop comprehensive work protocols and follow them closely. In September 2006, DOE deducted $100,000 from Washington Closure's pay for a series of electrical safety problems. The next month, the Environmental Protection Agency fined DOE $120,000 for its handling of chemical spills during work done by Washington Closure to remove pipes that once carried sodium dichromate. In October, an independent review ordered by DOE found strong indications of a hostile work environment and a chilling effect that might interfere with worker and environmental safety. Then in the week before Spencer was named to lead Washington Closure, it was discovered that compaction testing records had been falsified at the environmental Restoration Disposal Facility and that radioactive tritium had been tracked out of a radiological work area elsewhere. The problems at the landfill led EPA to fine DOE $1.4 million. Washington Closure will be ready with its safety plan Oct. 30, said spokesman Todd Nelson. Spencer realized that there would be consequences to delaying certification of the plan, but believed it was more important to develop a good safety system, Nelson said. The contractor has brought in numerous trainers and additional staff to work on the project, Nelson said. Procedures are being reviewed and, if needed, rewritten. The contractor is training staff to make sure procedures are in place to do work safely, to follow procedures and to promote an atmosphere where questions and concerns about safe work are raised and addressed immediately. DOE will look at several factors as it determines how much fee to withhold. It will look at whether there were any significant injuries, exposures, contaminations, occurrences or environmental releases between this spring and when the safety plan is verified. It also will be looking for evidence that cost savings and completing cleanup assignments in the contract are not compromising safety or protection of the environment, according to the letter from Klein. "Protection of the public, workers and environment continues to be the most critical element of successful work performance," Klein wrote. "Your success in implementing ISMS (Integrated Safety Management System) is critical to restoring our confidence that WCH will be able, over time, to further improve the efficiency and productivity of our cleanup efforts while setting new standards for safety and quality, the true measure of success of this contract for both of us." DOE also has significantly increased its oversight of Washington Closure to ensure its safety program meets DOE expectations, said DOE spokeswoman Colleen French. That included adding another facility representative to monitor Washington Closure in the field. © 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 51 courier-journal: Lawmakers back plan for Paducah plant work courier-journal.com > Local News Monday, July 23, 2007 Company seeks feds' OK for re-enrichment idea By James R. Carroll jcarroll@courier-journal.com The Courier-Journal WASHINGTON -- For years the canisters of depleted uranium stored in Paducah have been considered simply waste. Now, however, those canisters could be key to keeping the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, with its roughly 2,200 employees, open beyond its planned closing in 2012 or 2013. The price of uranium is soaring, in part because of a temporary supply shortage and the widespread belief that nuclear power may be making a comeback given rising energy costs. And the United States Enrichment Corp., the private company that runs the Paducah plant, is proposing to the Department of Energy that some of the depleted uranium hexafluoride in its 39,000 storage canisters be re-enriched -- that is, made usable again. Uranium is used in generating nuclear power, and the enrichment corporation estimates that its proposal could produce as much as $1 billion in sales. "The DOE can make money, the plant can get money, and the community can get more work -- so tell me where the downside is on this," said Paducah Mayor William Paxton. But the host of potential government players who could get involved in the decision -- as well as questions about sharing the proceeds from the sale of re-enriched uranium -- make prospects for a deal uncertain. Rep. Ed Whitfield, the Republican congressman whose 1st District includes the plant, is interested in the re-enrichment plan and said speeding the talks along is critical. "We have a window of opportunity that won't be there forever," he said. Whitfield and Kentucky's two Republican senators -- Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning -- have asked the Energy Department to ensure that "any plan pursued be in the best interests of the Paducah community, the plant's workforce and the taxpayers." "We also believe that any plan to re-enrich the uranium stored at the … plant should require that this work be conducted in Paducah," the three lawmakers wrote in a June 6 letter to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher has asked Bodman to meet with him, local officials and USEC representatives to discuss the company's proposal. No date for a meeting has been set. Energy Department spokeswoman Megan Barnett said the agency is developing policies on the sale of re-enriched uranium that would govern proposals such as USEC's. The company has not submitted a formal plan to the department. But both sides have been in discussions about reprocessing the depleted uranium, USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said. Whitfield said he thought Congress would likely review any such agreement. The Paducah plant and its sister facility in Piketon, Ohio, which closed in 2001, have produced more than 551,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride, called tails, over four decades of operations enriching uranium for use in weapons and nuclear power plants. Normal tails are about 0.23 percent uranium-235. But some of the tails produced by Paducah and Piketon run anywhere from 0.35 to 0.45 percent, Stuckle said. Natural uranium ore coming out of the ground is about 0.71 percent uranium-235, and it has to be enriched to 4 or 5 percent to be usable. Depending on what the Energy Department wants, the depleted uranium could be re-enriched to either 0.71 percent or taken up to 4 or 5 percent, Stuckle said. In the enrichment process, the uranium hexafluoride is heated, converted to gas and then passed through a series of filters. It is then condensed back into a liquid form, at which point it cools and returns to a solid. As recently as six years ago, uranium ore was trading on commodities exchanges at $7 a pound, making tails unattractive for costly re-enrichment. But the price of the ore has since soared to as much as $138 a pound and is now at about $130. USEC President John Welch said in a May letter to a key House committee chairman that "the time is right to begin to re-enrich these … tails." "Although there is significant interest in international uranium mine expansions and new mining capacity, it is likely to be several years before this additional supply will be available to meet the needs of our utility customers, and tails re-enrichment can meet this near-term need," Welch wrote to Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Dingell, however, has said he views the proposal as a "bailout" of a company that has been mismanaged. His committee has asked the Government Accountability Office to assess the proposal, and its report is due next month. Stuckle said a contract with the Energy Department "would provide financial value for DOE and provide some financial value for us, which would help us increase our cash flow for our operations." Paducah is the only American facility that could re-enrich the depleted uranium. Robert Ervin, president of United Steelworkers Local 550 in Paducah, which represents workers at the plant, said reprocessing uranium could extend the life of the plant. But he cautioned that there are many different scenarios for how much time the USEC proposal would buy the plant. It mainly depends on how much depleted uranium is reprocessed and at what rate, he said. "Whatever happens to the cylinders, Paducah has to benefit," he said. Paxton, the Paducah mayor, said some of the revenue from the reprocessing should go to area economic development initiatives that could help soften the impact of the plant's closing. Reporter James R. Carroll can be reached at (202) 906-8141. Copyright 2005 The Courier-Journal. ***************************************************************** 52 LA Daily News: Not too late Payouts, land cleanup are the right thing for Santa Susana Article Last Updated: 07/22/2007 06:42:46 PM PDT THERE is no statute of limitations on doing the right thing. And when it comes to the legacy of the contamination of the former Rocketdyne site between Simi Valley and Chatsworth, the right thing is a full cleanup and adequate reparations to the victims of the contamination. Both of those these came closer to fruition last week. The U.S. Department of Energy said it would stop the controversial cleanup at the former nuclear research site and take another look at doing the job right. And on the same day, California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to get payouts for workers at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory where rocket and nuclear research was conducted from the late 1940s. The proposed Santa Susana Fair Compensation Act of 2007 would allow employees and their families who worked at the field lab for at least 250 days and developed a serious illness as a result of exposure to the radiation or toxins at the site to receive compensation of between $150,000 and $250,000. If it passes, it would go a long way toward doing the right thing for people who were injured by working for the lab - a site that had 10 nuclear reactors, one partial meltdown, and an open-air pit where workers burned radioactive and chemical waste. As for the decision by the DOE to stop demolition of buildings at the field lab and take the time to fill out an environmental impact statement, the right thing wasn't the agency's decision. It was precipitated by a court order. The DOE had planned to just leave 99 percent of the contaminated soil at the field lab site - a fact that alarmed environmentalists, local residents and lawmakers. But in May, a judge ordered the agency to stop its version of a cleanup and conduct a full cleanup before the land was deemed safe for use. It was the right thing to do for land that will one day be developed for human use. Doing the right thing in regards to the Santa Susana Field Lab has been decades in the making - it was nearly 20 years ago that the Daily News exposed how contaminated the site was. While fixes have been slow in coming, it's never too late to do what's right. ***************************************************************** 53 Knoxville News Sentinel: Officials at ORAU defend process Dose reconstruction must balance needs of claimants, federal client By Frank Munger (Contact) Monday, July 23, 2007 OAK RIDGE — At the controversial core of the government’s compensation program for sick nuclear workers is a process known as dose reconstruction. For thousands of claims filed under Part B of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, dose reconstruction is what determines whether cancer victims — or their surviving relatives — collect any money. Some claimants, after waiting months or even years only to find out their claims have been denied, have compared dose reconstruction to a slow tour of hell. If a case requires an analysis of a worker’s career radiation exposure, the Department of Labor refers it to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. NIOSH is responsible for determining if the radiation was likely to have caused the cancer in question. However, a team headed by Oak Ridge Associated Universities does the actual dose-reconstruction studies, and ORAU officials strongly defended their work. ORAU President Ron Townsend said the team, which includes multiple contractors, has done an amazing job, considering the technical difficulties, intense political pressure and a general rush to get results. “I think it is the single greatest professional challenge I’ve ever encountered — period,” Townsend said in a recent interview. Townsend acknowledged that the project got off to a rough start after ORAU received the contract in September 2002. Hardly any cases were completed the first year while contractors put together an infrastructure for the work and built a base of knowledge on each of the government nuclear facilities involved in the program, he said. “To start out, quite frankly, we didn’t get very good performance ratings (from NIOSH),” Townsend said. “Because they wanted us to move faster.” After that slow start, the team has made consistent progress and accelerated the results while maintaining the scientific credibility of the work, ORAU officials said. As of late June, the team had completed dose reconstruction for 19,600 claims, including those associated with Oak Ridge workers. The Department of Labor, which has final say-so, had made decisions on nearly 17,000 of them. Of the claims that have gone through dose reconstruction, more than 30 percent have been approved for compensation for work-related cancers, said Richard Toohey, who oversees ORAU work on the program. That is far higher than the 5 percent that scientific experts predicted at the front end of the program, based on earlier studies of radiation and cancer, he said. Contrary to what many people believe, the dose-reconstruction process gives the claimant the benefit of the doubt at every stage of the evaluation, Toohey said. “In my humble opinion, the whole process is claimant favorable,” he said. If there’s any question about the radiation dose a person received in a particular job, the claimant is given the highest amount considered possible for that site, Toohey said. Low exposures to radiation, which historically have been rounded down to zero in official records at the nuclear facilities, are corrected or given the maximum amount during the dose reconstruction, he said. In some earlier studies of nuclear workers, a worker’s exposure to background radiation at the site was not considered or was even subtracted from an individual’s overall workplace exposure. In dose reconstruction, however, that amount is added to the individual’s dose because researchers recognized that radioactive emissions from the facilities might have elevated the background levels there. The claimants also get a benefit when the overall results are analyzed, Toohey said. In order for someone to qualify for compensation, the results must show it’s at least as likely as not that radiation caused a person’s cancer — a 50 percent likelihood. However, Toohey said there’s a bar of uncertainty in that analysis, and the decisions are made at the far end of the bar to favor the claimants. After ORAU and its partners, MJW Corp. and Dade Moeller & Associates, complete their analyses on a case, the information is forwarded to NIOSH. If the percentage for cancer causation falls just short of 50 percent, based on the dose information, there are usually additional discussions to make sure there’s no missing data that could help the claimant qualify for compensation, Toohey said. “If it’s less than 45 percent, it’s done,” the ORAU official said. “If it’s between 45 and 50, we get together with NIOSH and really try to sharpen the pencil more.” The five-year contract for dose reconstruction is due to expire later this year, and ORAU recently submitted a bid to continue the work in support of the compensation program. Townsend said he assumes there will be competition for the contract with NIOSH. About 200 people currently work on the project, he said. When ORAU assumed the role in late 2002, there were 8,000 cases awaiting dose reviews, officials said. During the first year, the backlog grew to 12,000 cases, they said. Toohey said a milestone was reached in December 2003, when the ORAU team began completing dose reconstructions at a rate faster than new ones arrived. At peak, the team was doing between 160 and 200 a week, he said. Currently, there are about 3,000 in the queue, and that’s stable, he said. The contractor team does about 60 analyses each week, and about 60 new ones come into the system, he said. According to Toohey, there are about 300 cases left in the system that are more than a year old, and that’s considered progress from the early days —when many of the applicants waited years for their results. “It’s a tough balance,” Townsend said. “We’re highly sensitive to meeting the needs of the claimant in a timely and fair way, but also meeting the needs of our client (NIOSH) to do things as fast as we can. There’s a balance between scientific goodness and the speed at which we can do things. My view is we have walked this balance very well.” Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329. © 2007, Knoxville News Sentinel Co. Posted by gaultes on July 23, 2007 at 11:22 a.m. (Suggest removal) Dr. Townsend does not address either the absolute accuracy or precision of the dose estimate. Often the limit of error with a 95 % confidence exceeds the magnitude of the measurement. This makes the resulting estimate highly speculative, i.e., almost totally subjective. © 2007 Knoxville News Sentinel ***************************************************************** 54 Business Report & Journal: Controversial Report States SRS Could Become Largest U.S. Repository of Nuclear Waste Monday, July 23, 2007 By Stephen Sacco TBR Staff The Savannah River Site (SRS), a federal nuclear facility on the Savannah River in Aiken, S.C., could become the largest repository of radioactive waste in the United States - and possibly one of the largest in the world - if it is chosen as the location of a new federal program, warns a report issued by a former senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The DOE disputes the report, and a senior official DOE calls into question its scientific credibility, but the report states that residents in the area of the river should be concerned about possible changes at the plant. GNEP The program in question is President Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which was announced in February of 2006 by the DOE. It calls for the United States and its partners to assist with the energy demands of developing nations through the use of nuclear energy, while discouraging nuclear weapons proliferation. Participating nations would agree not to pursue technologies that would aid in nuclear weapons production - namely spent fuel reprocessing and uranium enrichment. "This is a voluntary program that would allow other nations to enjoy the benefits of nuclear power without feeling they had to develop technologies that could be used for other than peaceful means," said Dennis Spurgeon, assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the DOE. This means that both U.S. and foreign spent nuclear fuel (of the participating nations) would be transported to and reprocessed at a site in the United States. The Bush administration believes GNEP will help with the energy needs of the world while curbing nuclear weapons proliferation and global warming. SRS Being Considered SRS and a site near Barnwell, S.C., are two of 11 sties, in eight states, being considered as U.S. locations for the processing of the spent fuel. According to an SRS press release, the site could be the location of one or more of the three facilities associated with the project - an advanced research facility, a site for reprocessing/recycling of nuclear fuel and a "recycling reactor." SRS was used during the Cold War for manufacturing of nuclear materials. Since then it has been involved in extensive cleanup and other smaller projects for the DOE. Spurgeon said that choosing sites will take a while and that a "generic" environmental assessment is not expected to be finalized until roughly a year from now. After that, a site-specific assessment, which is already underway for SRS, would have to be completed. A group called the Central Savannah River Area Community Team (CSRA) is working on a site-specific assessment. The group is comprised of Washington Group International, which contracts with DOE to manager SRS, and the French company AREVA Inc., which wants to build the expanded facility. The facility will bring up to 5,000 construction jobs for five years, 4,000 operating jobs and over $100 million in state taxes annually, according to CSRA. Report Claims Program Could Be Dangerous Robert Alvarez, a former DOE senior policy advisor in the Clinton administration and now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, has issued a report warning that the site chosen for reprocessing could become the location of the largest amount of "lethal high-heat radioactivity in the United States." He believes that SRS is the most likely location for the program. The site is near a port and has a water supply - elements Alvarez said are very attractive to the DOE. "This is magical thinking about nuclear waste," Alvarez said in reference to GNEP. "Anybody living on the Savannah River should be concerned." Alvarez claims that a similar program was proposed during his tenure at DOE but a study by the National Academy of Science (NAS) found the program impractical. "The (NAS) concluded it would cost $500 billion (in 1996 dollars) and take 150 years to accomplish," he said. "And I said 'that's it,' but here it is again." He said the program could endanger the water source. Alvarez explains that the word "recycling' sounds good but said what the DOE is actually proposing is taking nuclear fuel rods and chemically separating the radioactive elements. "This is creating multiple waste streams," he said. Many of these elements - which Alvarez said the DOE estimates would still be radioactive after 300 years - would be disposed of using shallow burial, according to Alvarez. Surgeon disputes these claims. "A recycling facility takes spent fuel and recycles the most long-lived radioactive elements so that they can be used (for energy production) and reduces the amount of waste that needs to be stored," he said. Surgeon said that some low-level waste would be stored in shallow burial. "But that is just what that is - low-level waste, and low-level means low-level,' he said. Saying otherwise, he claimed, was an "attempt to mislead." Alvarez contends that reprocessing "releases large volumes of radioactivity into the environment." In fact, he said that reprocessing releases more radioactivity into the environment, by a factor of several thousand, than a nuclear reactor. Spurgeon questions what Alvarez means by "large volumes" of radioactivity. "Modern (nuclear) reactors have very little emissions," he said. "People living right next to (a nuclear reactor) have been found to be exposed to no more radiation than if they had received an x-ray at the dentists." France and Japan Shortly after GNEP was announced, the DOE entered into an agreement with France and Japan to collaborate on developing the technology for the program, according to a DOE press release. France and Japan have been leaders in the nuclear industry. Alvarez said that he believes France and Japan would be the big financial winners if the GNEP program moves forward. Many of the designs for new nuclear reactors are coming from Westinghouse, which was purchased by Toshiba for $5.4 billion in 2006. Also in 2006, Spencer Abraham, former secretary of energy in the Bush administration, was named chairman of the French state-owned energy company AREVA Inc. Funding Congress has yet to approve the funding for GNEP, according to Spurgeon. The Bush administration is supporting the program and has requested $405 million for GNEP in fiscal year 2008. Software © 2007 The Business Report & Journal 340 Eisenhower Dr. . Suite 240 Savannah, GA 31406 912.351.9122 Software © 1998-2007 1up! Software, All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 55 Oak Ridger: Nuclear theft charges surprise neighbors, leaks bother feds - Story last updated at 12:12 am on 7/23/2007 By: Duncan Mansfield | Associated Press KNOXVILLE — Six months after federal agents raided Roy Oakley’s home in rural Roane County, neighbors say they were surprised to learn Oakley had been charged with trying to sell uranium enrichment equipment from a nuclear cleanup site to an undercover FBI agent. “It is hard to believe,” said Charles Rayburn, who has lived across the street from Oakley for a decade in Midtown, a small community about 40 miles west of Knoxville. “I just think he probably got money-happy or security up there wasn’t too good,” Rayburn said, referring to the shuttered K-25 uranium enrichment site in Oak Ridge, now called the East Tennessee Technology Park, where the 65-year-old Oakley worked as a contract laborer. Oakley was detained after FBI and Department of Energy agents surrounded his modular home and collected boxes of materials, including his computer, in January. But an arrest warrant wasn’t issued until a sealed indictment was returned by a Knoxville grand jury late Wednesday. Oakley turned himself in Thursday on two counts charging him with possessing and peddling uranium enrichment hardware to an FBI agent posing as a representative of the French government. Each count carries up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. Oakley’s lawyer, Herb Moncier, contends the equipment was no more than old pipes that Oakley was assigned to break apart by hand for disposal. Asked if Oakley was in debt, the attorney joked, “maybe to me.” Prosecutors consider the equipment a classified “appliance” under the Cold War-era Atomic Energy Act. “We say they are trash,” Moncier said before Oakley’s trial was set for September and he was released on $25,000 bond. Rayburn remembers seeing SWAT officers running across his field to the Oakley’s house. He thought it was a drug bust or meth raid, not espionage — though the government said no secrets or equipment from Oakley reached foreign hands. Oakley, who has been moved into seclusion by his lawyer to keep him away from the media, and his wife Jane Oakley acted as though nothing had happened after the raid, Rayburn said. “His wife worked out in the yard and he would go take care of his rental houses and stuff,” Rayburn said. “He was going to church and everything. He was a good fellow.” The Oakleys made a similar impression on another neighbor, Jacqueline Ross, who has rented a home from them for the past year. “Well, they are wonderful,” she said. But Ross didn’t want to say more. “I don’t want to add to any speculation about them,” she said. About 2,500 people work at the 800-acre East Tennessee Technology Park, a 125-building complex that produced highly enriched uranium for weapons and commercial reactors from 1945 to 1985. Since the operation closed in 1987, the site’s primary activity has been cleanup so it can support an industrial park. The facility is separate from two other active DOE operations in Oak Ridge created as part of the bomb-building Manhattan Project of World War II — the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dennis Hill, spokesman for ETTP contractor, Bechtel Jacobs Co., said Oakley was hired from a Laborer’s International Union of North American union hall on Oct. 4, 2005, and worked at the site until he was “terminated for cause” on Jan. 31, apparently related to the raid a few days before. He may have worked at the site earlier for other contractors, Hill said. Oakley had a low-level security clearance, DOE-Oak Ridge spokesman John Shewairy said. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said Oakley had no previous criminal records. An Associated Press online search of federal civil and bankruptcy court records didn’t turn up any cases involving him. Federal authorities in Tennessee were concerned about a different kind of security in the aftermath of a flood of error-filled national media accounts about Oakley’s case Thursday before the indictment was unsealed. “Quite obviously there was a leak,” said Special Agent Richard Lambert, head of the Knoxville FBI office. “I am not happy about that, nor is the U.S. Attorney (Russ Dedrick).” The FBI’s Washington headquarters “is aware of it” and may investigate through its Office of Professional Responsibility, Lambert said. He said he was certain the leak didn’t originate in Tennessee. “It probably came out of Washington,” he said. Dedrick refused comment. But of the many initial errors by the media — several had Oakley working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one even had him living at the lab — Dedrick said, “It was amazing.” | © 2004 The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 56 Oak Ridger: DOE concerned that ORNL wrongly named in incident - Story last updated at 12:11 am on 7/23/2007 By: John Huotari | john.huotari@oakridger.com Initial reports on Thursday suggested that an Oak Ridge National Laboratory employee was charged with stealing classified information about enriching uranium to sell to foreign governments. But the reports were incorrect; the employee actually worked for Bechtel Jacobs Co. at the East Tennessee Technology Park. The U.S. Department of Energy took steps to correct the information, spokesman John Shewairy said Friday. He said the erroneous information implicated employees who had nothing to do with the alleged theft. “Of course, that’s a huge concern to us,” Shewairy said. He said DOE’s workers are expected to have high integrity, and he hopes people understand that the federal agency’s workers are “fine, upstanding” people. “You never like to see this type of activity happen,” Shewairy said, referring to the alleged theft by Roy Lynn Oakley, 65, of Roane County. John Huotari can be contacted at (865) 220-5533. | © 2004 The Oak Ridger | Conditions of Use ***************************************************************** 57 LocalNews8.com: Are Coming Or Going At The INL? Idaho Falls, Pocatello - We are taking a closer look the future of jobs at the Idaho National Laboratory. It's a topic that affects all of us in eastern Idaho because of the tremendous impact of the site on our economy. The bottom line is when jobs go up at the INL it's good economic news for all of us. When employment goes down, it's bad news. Here are some statistics that show why. With some 7200 employees, the INL is by far the largest employer in eastern Idaho. In fact, it's the third largest employer in the state, behind the state government and Micron. The site accounts for nine percent of employment in eastern Idaho. State tax revenues by the INL and its employees approach 85-million dollars. John Walsh has worked at the INL since 1980. He was there during the 80s and 90s when the INL employment was more than 12,000 workers dedicated largely to nuclear research and development. "We had three or four or five different reactors doing tests. That was the major work area for us," said Walsh. In the mid-90s, employment started dropping as focus shifted more to clean up of waste left by 50 years of research. The state insisted spent fuel and other waste be moved out of the state. But after the turn of this century, with increased concern about dwindling energy supplies, there was a renewed interest in nuclear power and the Department of Energy named the INL the lead lab for nuclear research and development. "We're the key player for them and our mission is to build the preeminent nuclear research facility not only in the U-S but globally as well," said Mark Holubar, INL Human Resources Director. Holubar says that bodes well for new jobs at the site. "With the nuclear renaissance and people are looking to us to lead that in many areas. There's the next generation of nuclear power and there's global initiatives we have a part of, work that's done here, so as those grow and develop over the years, we think jobs will come, how many I don't know, thousands, you know that's a big number. It all depends on how the funding goes," said Holubar. But before we get too excited about increase employment at the site, we have to remember there are some two thousand people there working on a clean-up project that won't last forever. "This is a project and a contract and there will be a finite time for this contract," said CWI Spokesman, Erik Simpson. Simpson says their contract for cleanup ends in five years. So will that suddenly mean two thousand fewer jobs at the INL? "You know, we have a very good relationship with INL, which is run by Battelle Energy Alliance and certainly the goal is as our work goes away we hope that our skilled work force can then work for Battelle Energy Alliance," said Simpson. Over the past 27 years, John Walsh has seen ups and downs in employment at the INL. He's optimistic about the future. "We have the capabilities here that can help this region, the country and even the world solve problems from energy, finding new renewable resources, protecting the environment, developing national security technologies, I think we have a lot to boast about and though we try to be modest we think we are a tremendous asset for this region and for this country," said Walsh. So what's the bottom line when it comes to future jobs at the site? No one we spoke with would make any precise prediction on numbers, because year to year it all depends on what Congress allocates for funding. But the general feeling is that clean-up jobs will go down, nuclear research jobs will go up, leading to level employment or even moderate growth in jobs at the site. All content © Copyright 2000 - 2007 WorldNow and KIFI. 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