***************************************************************** 05/13/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.117 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 Comment sought on waste plan 2 Outdated Thinking Is Holding Us Back (washingtonpost.com) 3 Fortunes rise for state's only nuclear plant as nuclear power 4 An Early Test of Nuclear Plant's New Private Ownership 5 Economic View: A Debate Is Renewed Over Nuclear Power 6 New meltdown-proof nuclear plants are possible, Entergy exec says 7 Oil, Gas, Coal And Nuclear 8 New England's nukes: Boosters, opponents weigh in on Bush's push 9 Bruce Power closes lease of two nuclear power stations near Kincardine, Ont. 10 Corps Halts Dredging Project Upon Discovery of Radioactive Material 11 IEA to advocate N-power for 1st time in 8 years 12 Bouquets and brick bats for nuke technology 13 River Bend to store spent nuclear reactor fuel 14 Nuclear highway *Spent fuel path through EJC * 15 NRC to investigate plant malfunction NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Army knew about radiation levels 2 The Age: Maralinga Diggers over limit after tests 3 Britain accused of lying over Australian A-bomb 'guinea pigs' 4 Rocky Flats limits security ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Comment sought on waste plan [deseretnews.com] May 13, 2001 Next month, the public will have a chance to comment on another Envirocare of Utah proposal to import more and hotter waste at its landfill in remote Tooele County. The proposal is to accept and dispose of so-called "containerized class A" wastes. Currently, Envirocare is permitted only for class A wastes that are not contained — primarily contaminated soils. The current request would require an amendment to the company's license to accept the contaminated soils that are so much more radioactive that they must be shipped in containers. It's a separate proposal from Envirocare's request to dispose of class B and C wastes — materials contaminated by nuclear-power plants, research labs and hospitals. They are significantly more radioactive. Though by volume they would constitute just a small percentage of Envirocare's business, they would boost the overall radioactivity of wastes disposed. The executive secretary of the Utah Division of Radiation Control (DRC) is reviewing comments on the last request and will make a final decision this summer. On this request, two public hearings, each at 7 p.m., will be held: + June 4, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, 168 N. 1950 West, Room 101. + June 7, the Tooele County Health Department auditorium, 151 N. Main. Written public comments can be submitted to Bill Sinclair, executive secretary of DRC, P.O. Box 144850, Salt Lake City, UT 84114-4850 or by e-mail to bsinclai@deq.state.ut.us. Comments must be received by 5 p.m. June 14. © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 2 Outdated Thinking Is Holding Us Back (washingtonpost.com) *By James A. Lake* Sunday, May 13, 2001; Page B03 The question I'm most often asked about nuclear energy is how we plan to deal with the wastes. The answer I give is this: The spent fuel from nuclear reactors may just be the best managed waste in the world. Unlike other energy technologies that can dump some of their wastes on the ground or in the air, nuclear plants manage every bit of theirs, and include an explicit charge for its safe, long-termdisposal in their power prices. The volume of high-level nuclear waste is not all that large: The total generated byAmerica's 103 nuclear plants during their lifetimes could be stacked less than 15 feet high in a space the size of a football field. Equivalent coal plants, by comparison, produce thousands of times more waste volume (albeit nuclear wastes are very hazardous and far more concentrated). Commercial high-level nuclear wastes are currently safely stored in spent-fuel pools and dry-storage casks at the plants where they were generated. The long-term U.S. government plan is to find and license a national underground repository. The Department of Energy has spent nearly $6 billion to research and test a deep geological site in the remote desert at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The nuclear industry has alreadycontributed $16 billion intothe nuclear waste fund that will pay for developing and operating the repository. The United States may be able to learn something, however, from France, Britain and Japan, where nuclear energy is a major component of electricity generation. These countries have the technology and political will to* recycle* spent fuel rather than throwing it away after a single use. This strategy extracts more energy from the fuel, while at the same time reducing the volume and radioactive lifetime of the wastes that have to be stored in the repository. Recycling, or reprocessing, essentially involves dissolving spent nuclear fuel and separating out the uranium, plutonium and certain other materials for re-use in the reactor. The remaining fission product wastes -- which remain radioactive fordecades or at worst centuries, as opposed to thousands of years for uranium and plutonium -- are then dissolved in melted glass for disposal and long-term storage in stainless steel canisters. In the late 1970s, the United States instituted a policy prohibiting the recycling of commercial nuclear fuel. President Jimmy Carter signed theoriginal directive in response to concerns that recycling was not economical and fears of the possible proliferation of nuclear materials and technology for non-peaceful purposes. That policy deserves to be revisited in light of today's technical and political realities. Three issues should be considered in choosing the "best" nuclear fuel cycle for the United States in the 21st century. • Economics: How does the cost of recycling spent nuclear fuel compare with the cost of ausing it only once before disposal? That is hard to know, in part because it is impossible tocalculate the ultimate cost of a geologic repository that might have to last thousands of years, and in part because we have little experience in commercial reprocessing. In the United States, the comparison is further distorted by the presence of large amounts of government-subsidized high-enriched uranium from former Soviet weapons programs, and because the U.S. policy places zero economic value on recycled plutonium. The French experience with reprocessing, though, may offer some answers. According to the French data, considering all factors from mining to disposal, the cost of recycling spent fuel is roughly the same as for using it once and then storing it permanently. So the economic tradeoff is approximately equal. But reprocessing has a potential bonus: There is up to 100 times more energy potential in nuclear fuel than is extracted in one cycle. Multiple recycling in future advanced reactors could thus offer significant advantages in sustaining low-cost nuclear fuel supplies for manygenerations -- particularly if the use of nuclear power expands substantially. • Environmental impact: Is it better to directly dispose of all our spent nuclear fuel in a geological repository that has to be designed and managed to provide barriers to the release of hazardous materials for thousands of years, or to reprocess it, recycling the plutonium and other fuel materials in the reactor and only disposing of the shorter-lived fission products? Certainly recycling can simplify waste disposal -- relatively speaking, it's a cinch to designstorage that can last for a few hundred years. In the recycle scenario, there would be far less plutonium and other long-lived materials to store in the repository. Multiple recycling, to extract the largest amount of energy from the fuel and minimize the net waste volume, would require development and deployment of a new class of fast burner reactors. This development work was also stopped in the United States in the late 1970s with the cancellation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project. Reactor and fuel cycle research and development needs to be reinstated to form a solid technical basis for future policy decisions. • Social responsibility: An often-raised concern about reprocessing is that the separated plutonium could be vulnerable to theft or diversion for nuclear weapons. It is worthwhile to note that no nuclear materials have ever been proliferated from commercial spent fuel, both because of the substantial cost and technical difficulty and because of strict oversight by the International Atomic Energy Agency. New technology may eliminate the proliferation concern entirely. An electrometallurgical process developed by Argonne National Laboratory separates uranium, plutonium and other fuel materials from the fission product wastes, but not from each other. Therefore, no weapons-grade material emerges from the process. Nuclear power, in one or more advanced states, holds great promise for the generation of abundant, clean and affordable electricity for the United States and the world. If spent fuel recycling can be made economical in the United States, and if advanced technology can respond effectively to the proliferation concern, then America may have an attractive new option for dealing with the growing need for clean energy, while at the same time improving the social acceptability and cost of our waste disposal strategy. *James Lake, a nuclear engineer specializing in reactor design and safety, is president of the American Nuclear Society, a not-for-profit scientific and professional organization.* © 2001 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 3 Fortunes rise for state's only nuclear plant as nuclear power gets a second look The Seattle Times: By Lynda V. Mapes *Seattle Times staff reporter* JIMI LOTT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Rudi Bertschi is scanned for radiation before entering the plant. Bertschi is chairman of the executive board of Energy Northwest, which operates the Columbia Generating Station. RICHLAND -- Chuffing away at a steady 1,200 megawatts, the Columbia Generating Station near the Hanford nuclear reservation produces enough power to light Seattle. Without air pollution and without killing salmon. It is the nuke in Seattle's back yard, the only one of five nuclear plants planned for the region that is in operation. The other concrete hulks dotting Washington from Satsop to Hanford were never finished. But Columbia, completed in 1984 at a cost of $3 billion, has become a reliable producer. It is a metaphor of the nuclear turnaround story. Both a nightmare and a laugh line of the '80s and '90s, nuclear power is serious business again. Costs of nuclear power are now competitive with coal and gas, once the power plants are built, and cleaner in terms of air emissions than both. Nuclear energy also is getting the first political boost since President Nixon from the Bush administration. And the nuclear-power debate has returned to the Northwest, a place that thought the issue was dead along with its bungled nuclear plants. As the region scrounges for kilowatts, the once unthinkable is under review: expanding the region's nuclear capacity. Energy planners are studying the viability of finishing construction of the dead plant next door to Columbia Generating Station, WNP-1, and firing it up. The debate will kick off in earnest this summer when the study is completed and open to public consideration. Back in 1992, the Columbia plant was a dog of the industry, down more often than it was up because of malfunctions and accidents. It was hastily built and sloppily run, and the cost to generate power at the plant was so high that regional power planners were ready to pull the plug. But after a change in management and a major repair campaign, the plant has turned the corner. Shut down for malfunctions five times in five days in times past, the plant now runs years without problems. While it used to work only 40 percent of the time, it now runs 80 percent of the time and is down only for planned outages, including one for refueling beginning next Friday. Thanks to better management and repairs, the cost of generation at Columbia has dropped from 5.8 cents a kilowatt hour in 1994 to about 2.5 cents today. That's competitive with the cost of coal generation (between 1.5 to 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour) and power from natural-gas plants (4 cents per kilowatt hour). Electricity on the spot market costs from 25 to 57 cents per kilowatt hour. Folks who work at Columbia have a new spring in their step; for the first time in years, they are proud to tell people where they work. Pillboxes and Glock 9s Cut over the Cascades, the Columbia River and then miles of open country in the state's sagebrush steppe, and the hulking concrete block that is the Columbia Generating Station appears. Amid the concrete cubes, domes and towers, it is heaped like a child's building blocks near the Hanford nuclear reservation. Pass the sign reading "Should you hear a steady three-minute siren you must evacuate immediately." Go past the triple row of razor wire; the bomb sniffer; the X-ray scanner; the radiation detectors; the concrete pillboxes for taking cover in enemy fire; the anti-terrorism nets; the steel riot shields on wheels in strategic hallway corners; through the steel doors with the sign: "Warning: Grave Danger"; past a 3-foot-thick concrete wall; a steel casing; and finally inside a 9-inch-thick steel-reactor vessel. There, packed in 12-1/2-foot-long zirconium fuel rods, are ceramic pellets the size of pinky digits, pregnant with the most powerful and poisonous fuel known to humans - uranium. Each pellet contains as much energy as a ton of coal, 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. The radioactive material is so lethal anyone running toward a hunk of it in the middle of a football field would die before he or she reached it. Fuel rods are stored in a shimmering pool of water 50 feet deep, along with every spent rod of fuel ever burned in the reactor. The water shields the surrounding environment from the fuel's neutron and gamma radiation. When the pool fills, more spent fuel will be stored in steel casks parked on concrete pads outdoors. A generator harnesses the enormous energy produced as atoms are split by subatomic particles in a continuous, controlled reaction deep within the reactor's core. The heat from the reaction boils water, which produces steam. The steam turns turbines that spin a generator the size of a locomotive. Its pulsing energy vibrates every surface in the control room of the reactor, with its backup tanks of oxygen hung on a rack by the door in case the air is rendered unbreathable. A half-dozen workers monitor the reactor's vital signs. A hexagon glows red on the control panel, showing the reactor is running pedal to the metal. The control room is part Oz and part insurance office, with guys in Dockers toiling under fluorescent lights. The security guard hidden in the back with a Glock 9 mm side arm, automatic rifle, gas mask and bank of surveillance monitors is a clue to the sensitive nature of their work. Today the staff is so zipped up a visitor putting on lip balm is met with a stern, "Sorry, I'll have to take that." A worker is concerned about even the remote possibility the salve could transport radiation beyond the reactor's walls. Electricity sizzles over high-voltage wires from the plant to the power grid, where it is purchased at cost by the Bonneville Power Administration for wholesale to utilities around the region. BPA carefully planned for the plant's upcoming monthlong refueling by purchasing replacement power, a sign of the plant's importance. Every kilowatt is needed. That's big news for a plant that during the 1990s was routinely fined for faulty operations by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which criticized the plant as one of the "worst under-performers" in the country. Remembering WPPSS Columbia Generating Station used to be known as WNP-2. It was just one more dark chapter in the region's gothic tale of nuclear woe, courtesy of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS), a regional consortium of public utilities nicknamed "Whoops." Formed by the Legislature in 1957, the consortium is funded by power revenues. WPPSS, now known as Energy Northwest, backed a series of five nuclear plants in the 1970s that foundered in a sea of construction mismanagement; falling demand for electricity spawned by recession; and skyrocketing debt. Two of the failed plants resulted in the largest municial-bond default in history when WPPSS could not repay the $2.2 billion debt owed investors who gobbled up WPPSS' tax-free municipal bonds. BPA is still on the hook for the $6.4 billion in debt for the other three plants, including Columbia Generating Station. BPA guaranteed the bonds floated by WPPSS to build three of the nuclear plants, promising to repay investors whether the plants ever produced a kilowatt of electricity. In return, BPA was to receive all of the power from the plants at cost for wholesale to its customers. Added to that financial disaster is the concern nuclear power causes anywhere: fear of radiation release, such as in the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island at Harrisburg, Pa. The country also has no permanent safe place for its nuclear waste. Even low-level radioactive waste is usually dangerous for up to 500 years. High-level waste remains lethal for millenniums. But the volume of waste produced is small. According to Energy Northwest, the amount of spent fuel produced to power Seattle for 60 years would fit in a 7-Eleven. And nearly all sources of energy have some environmental price: coal stokes global warming; natural gas heats the planet; hydropower has helped put the region's once legendary salmon runs on the endangered species list. The plant near Hanford has enabled the region to avoid an estimated $1.5 billion in expensive power purchases so far this year. An approximately $1 million study is under way by a consultant hired by Energy Northwest to scope the cost of completing WNP-1, the dead nuclear plant next door to Columbia Generating Station. Nationwide, 103 nuclear plants crank out about 20 percent of the nation's power. Plants across the country are applying to extend their federal licenses for another 20 years. The proposal in Washington is different: Energy Northwest is taking a look at reviving a plant - with a vintage 1960s design - that was never completed, let alone licensed for operation. The age of the design is not unusual; no new plant has been ordered in the U.S. since 1973. Energy Northwest engineers say completing WNP-1 and making it run is technically a "no-brainer." The plant was maintained in its mothballed state for 12 years, at a cost of about $5 million a year, until the Supply System decided to terminate it in 1994. It was to be cut up for scrap this year. The big question isn't technical feasibility, according to managers at Energy Northwest, but whether the economics make sense and if the region has the political stomach for a nuclear expansion. After so many years as the region's whipping boy, Energy Northwest officials show the relief of the pardoned convict to anyone open to nuclear power. "A lot of people don't even know there's a nuke plant in Washington," said Vic Parrish, CEO of Energy Northwest since 1996. "And they thought these nuclear plants were pretty much gone." "The faults of the past and the mistakes of the past are to be learned from. We are doing everything in our power to show we are different. It's `You are a convicted sinner.' Well, it's time to move on." *Lynda Mapes can be reached at 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com. * seattletimes.com home ***************************************************************** 4 An Early Test of Nuclear Plant's New Private Ownership May 13, 2001 By MATTHEW L. WALD Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times At Indian Point 3, a plant owned by the Entergy Nuclear Corporation, a worker is handed a radiation monitor after helping to refuel a reactor. [B] UCHANAN, N.Y., May 11 — It was Day 13 of the race to refuel the Indian Point 3 nuclear reactor, about 8 in the evening, and workers had succeeded in gently but swiftly removing all 193 uranium fuel rods, getting them to the spent fuel pool, performing maintenance on key parts, and then starting to move the assemblies back. They had done 20 when the towing cable came loose from the cart that carries the fuel. Now it was Day 14, and Rod Cavalieri, the outage manager, was watching a diver, dressed in deep- sea-style diving suit and covered in radiation monitors, work 23 feet under radioactive water to re-attach the cable. "We were about 6 hours ahead, and we lost 16 hours, so now we're down about 10 hours," Mr. Cavalieri said. "We'll make it up." At $850,000 for a day's worth of electricity — $9.83 a second — the calculation was of more than academic interest to him and to a crowd of other workers whose duties were interrupted by the cable failure. All stood inside the muggy containment dome, sweating slightly in two layers of gloves, coveralls, booties, helmet liners, hard-hats and safety glasses, the coveralls sealed with duct tape at the wrists and ankles, and radiation measurement devices hanging on plastic chains from their necks. When the Entergy Nuclear Corporation, of Jackson, Miss., agreed to buy Indian Point 3 fourteen months ago, it counted on being able to run the plant better than the New York Power Authority did. Now, management is getting its first test. The Power Authority's best-ever performance was in 1999, when it did the refueling job in 40 days, 19 hours. In 1997 it took 121 days. Entergy wants to do the job in 25 days this time, and in 20 the next. "We're like a pit crew in a Nascar race," said L.J. Olivier, Entergy's senior vice president for Indian Point. The change, part of a much- heralded revival in nuclear power, is part of Entergy's plan to keep the plant running more than 90 percent of the time; the Power Authority managed only 46 percent between the plant's first commercial electricity production, in 1976, and 1995, and about 85 percent since then. Outwardly, the plant is still in transition. The patches on the guards' shirts still say "New York Power Authority," although the coffee mugs say "I'm Entergized." But long-time employees (nearly all of whom remain because Entergy made few personnel changes) say that they are in a new era, in which they must work faster and smarter. The changes are focused on more than just speed; in an increasingly safety-conscious American culture, managers here agree that the nuclear industry is probably only one major accident away from extinction. And any plant could be doomed by frequent small incidents that caused shutdowns. So a major consideration in any work here is doing it well enough to let the reactor run uninterrupted until its next scheduled shutdown, set for spring 2003. Indian Point 3 (and Indian Point 2, which Entergy is supposed to buy from Consolidated Edison in July) are exemplars of the new hope for nuclear power: Old plants that never ran very well but are in areas of strong electricity demand and were bought by experienced operators who will try to turn them around and make them profitable, so that they will live out their 40-year licenses and then some. If all goes well enough, the operating experience of places like Indian Point could help lay the foundation for new nuclear plants; for now, though, Entergy would simply like to lay the foundation for two years of quiet, profitable operation. This has meant many changes. The control room, for example, once ran on a skeleton crew during outages; now it is overstaffed, so that no task is ever delayed for want of an operator's attention. Another change is in how operators plan to re-fill the reactor and nearby parts with water. They used to fill the fill the system, then jog the giant pumps, starting and stopping them, to force air bubbles to collect at the high points, so air could be bled off. This was vital because when the system is pressurized, any missed bubbles become dissolved oxygen when the system is pressurized, and oxygen causes rust. The old solution was to dump chemicals into the system to bind with the oxygen. This time, they plan to suck water back into the piping, so that there are no bubbles. They hope this will save wear and tear on the pumps, and shave about a day off the time needed to get running again. There have been setbacks, though. Early Tuesday morning, while all the fuel was in the spent fuel pool, the cooling system failed because of an electrical fault, and the temperature rose from about 150 degrees to about 155 before cooling was fully re-established within 40 minutes. At that rate, the pool was about 10 hours from the boiling point. Had it boiled, the fuel could have eventually melted down, and since it was outside the reactor vessel, it would have been a step closer to releasing its radioactivity to the environment. David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called 10 hours a "rather short recovery time." The Indian Point units, he said, are less capable than most other reactors to remove heat from the spent fuel pool, which contains all the fuel the plant has ever used, and more radioactive material than the reactor. Mr. Lochbaum is not convinced that the nation's 103 nuclear power plants, all ordered between 1974 and again, will run reliably in years to come. Since the beginning of 2000, eight plants have shut down unexpectedly because of problems with aging components, according to his review of Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents. One of those was Indian Point 2, where an aged steam generator tube sprung a leak in February 2000. At Indian Point 3, plant officials said that there were many ways to re-establish cooling in the spent fuel pool, including, as a last resort, simply turning on a fire hose and dumping more water in to make up for evaporation. But Robert J. Barrett, the vice president for operations, said the failure, while not a safety problem itself, demonstrated "a deficiency" to be addressed. The cooling system that failed was a backup system added by the Power Authority, he said, to allow shutting the main system for maintenance. But the add-on system's design was too prone to electrical failures, he said. The analysis of that failure was under way this afternoon, in a conference room with a handwritten "do not disturb" sign taped to the door. Elsewhere in the plant, technicians performed extensive maintenance, more thorough, managers said, than in the old days, because of a greater emphasis on running "breaker to breaker," from the time the electrical switch is thrown to connect the plant to the grid again to the time the plant is disconnected, in 24 months. "The old days are the old days," said Larry Moskowitz, a design engineer who has been at Indian Point for several years and was doing temporary duty at a fence surrounding the electrical generator. He and two other engineers, clipboards in hand, were checking off each object brought into and out of the area, to make sure that no one left so much as a washer or a pencil behind where it could cause damage. Next time, he said, he would use universal product code stickers and scanners instead. "We're a lot more aware of generating electricity now, and running well, breaker to breaker," he said. 2001 The New York Times Company| *****************************************************************