Platts - Friday, June 06, 2008 http://www.platts.com ------------ NRC denies Nevada petition to disqualify law firm Washington (Platts)--5Jun2008 the agency to disqualify the law firm DOE had hired to defend its application for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. A commission memorandum and order said Nevada failed to show that a conflict of interest or other ethics concerns involving the firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius would impede NRC's ability to obtain "a full range of necessary safety or environmental information, or would otherwise threaten the integrity of our regulatory process." Nevada had asked the commissioners in April to disqualify the firm because the firm also represents several nuclear utilities suing the federal government over DOE's failure to begin disposing of utility spent fuel by a 1998 contract date. The state argued that DOE's hiring of the firm constituted a conflict of interest. A DOE Office of Inspector General investigation, done at the state's request, found no conflict of interest but criticized the department for its lack of documentation on the selection of the firm. ------------ NRC staff says Perry not sustaining performance improvements Washington (Platts)--4Jun2008 Perry has not sustained the performance improvements made before it was moved out of Column 4 of the agency's action matrix at the end of first-quarter 2007, NRC staff told the commissioners at a June 4 meeting. Column 4 is the performance category requiring the highest level of agency oversight short of being forced to shut down under Column 5. The staff's assessment prompted NRC Chairman Dale Klein to question whether the Ohio plant, operated by FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., had been removed from heightened attention too soon. James Caldwell, administrator for NRC's Region III, where Perry is located, said it appears plant workers did not "internalize" some of the fixes, which led to additional human performance issues. He said the staff would continue to monitor the plant's activities and recovery plan. Senior managers also discussed activities at Arizona Public Service Co.'s Palo Verde, which has been in Column 4 since December 2006. Southern Nuclear Operating Co.'s Farley was also mentioned as experiencing problems. The commissioners were briefed on Nuclear Fuel Services, whose performance issues were identified at last year's action review meeting, or AARM. That was the only nuclear materials licensee discussed at the commission briefing on the results of this year's AARM, which aims to flag performance problems or other issues at the senior management level. Internally, the agency established a task force to explore ways to attract and retain resident inspectors after finding the turnover rate had increased in 2007, said NRC Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation Director Eric Leeds. ------------ Uranium output met only 60% of world requirements: OECD agency Barcelona (Platts)--3Jun2008 World uranium production at the end of 2006 was 39,603 tonnes, meeting only 60% of world nuclear reactor requirements, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency said in a biannual report released Tuesday. World reactor requirements were 66,500 tonnes of uranium for the 435 commercial nuclear reactors in operation. The gap between uranium production and reactor requirements was made up through secondary sources, such as government and commercial inventories, dismantled nuclear weapons and the re-enrichment of uranium waste products, the Paris-based agency said in its study, "Uranium 2007: Resources, Production and Demand." The study -- more commonly known as the Red Book and produced in cooperation with the Vienna, Austria-based International Atomic Energy Agency -- said most secondary sources now are in decline and that, increasingly, new primary output will be needed to close the gap between uranium supply and reactor requirements. The Red Book estimates the identified amount of conventional uranium resources that can be mined for less than US$130/kg--or about the current spot price of $60/lb U308--to be about 5.5 million tonnes, up from 4.7 million tonnes reported in 2005. There is enough uranium known to exist to fuel the world's fleet of nuclear reactors at current consumption rates for at least a century, the study said, but long lead times to bring new mines into production means supply shortfalls could develop if production facilities are not implemented in a timely manner, it added. World nuclear energy capacity is expected to grow in a range between 38% and 80% by 2030 or from 372 gigawatts-electric in 2007 to between 509 GWe and 663 GWe by 2030. To fuel this expansion, annual uranium requirements are anticipated to rise to between 94,000 and 122,000 tonnes, based on the type of reactors in use today. Currently identified world resources of uranium are adequate to meet this expansion, the agency said in the study. The study also said that deployment of advanced reactor and fuel-cycle technologies could boost the long-term availability of nuclear energy from a century to thousands of years. --David Stellfox, david_stellfox@platts.com ------------ Survey says 21% of Americans would support hometown reactor Washington (Platts)--2Jun2008 Twenty-one percent of Americans would support a new nuclear power plant in their hometown, according to a survey released June 2 by investment bank RBC Capital Markets. This is up from 17% support in last year's survey, RBC said. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they would support an "alternative energy system in their hometown, including a wind or solar facility," 34% would support a clean coal technology plant, and 32% would support a liquefied natural gas facility. The survey of 1,007 online respondents was conducted May 17-23 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2%, RBC said. ------------ US DOE's Yucca Mountain application to be sent to NRC on Tuesday Washington (Platts)--30May2008 The US Department of Energy is expected to send a waste repository license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday, over two decades after the submission would have had to been made for DOE meet its original target of having a facility operational by January 31, 1998. An official with the DOE repository project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, confirmed the Tuesday submission, noting it would be sent to NRC for review 27 days before the program's self-imposed June 30 deadline. DOE has spent 20 years and more than $10 billion studying the desert site roughly 90 miles outside Las Vegas, the state's population center, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. If licensed by NRC, tunnels constructed deep inside Yucca Mountain will be used to dispose of 70,000 metric tons of utility spent fuel and defense high-level waste. The amount of waste disposed of there will climb higher if Congress lifts a statutory 70,000 mt cap as DOE and the nuclear power industry are expected to push for. Both say the site is capable of safely handling much more waste. Under contracts DOE signed with nuclear utilities in 1983, it was supposed to begin disposing of their spent fuel by January 31, 1998. DOE's latest target date for the start of repository operations -- 2017 -- officially fell by the wayside late in 2007 when Congress slashed the program's fiscal 2008 budget by 21%. DOE waste program director Edward Sproat now refuses to project when a facility might be ready, saying that date cannot be determined until Congress fixes the program's funding mechanism, though some projections have pushed that date out to the mid-2020s. The DOE program relies on budget allocations from Congress even though most of its funding comes from a federal trust fund lawmakers set up in 1983 to bankroll the project. Nevada, which has spent decades trying to kill the Yucca Mountain project, already has told an NRC advisory board it will file at least 650 contentions opposing the facility. The number is nearly five times the previous record of 138 contentions filed in the Private Fuel Storage licensing proceeding. The controversial Yucca Mountain project is the first repository planned above a water table and will be required by federal regulations, as drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency, to limit radiation releases for 1 million years. EPA, however, has not yet promulgated the standard, which has lingered in interagency review for more than a year. EPA initially planned to issue the radiation protection standard in late 2006. NRC, whose own repository licensing requirements must reflect the EPA standard, can consider the DOE application before an EPA standard is in place. The EPA standard, however, must be issued before NRC can license the facility. --Elaine Hiruo, elaine_hiruo@platts.com ------------ Palo Verde license renewal filing set for fourth quarter Washington (Platts)--30May2008 A license renewal application for all three Palo Verde units will be filed by Arizona Public Service Co., or APS, in fourth-quarter 2008, a company official told NRC in a May 15 letter that was released May 30. Dwight Mims, vice president of regulatory affairs and plant improvement for the three-unit Palo Verde station, told NRC that the upcoming submittal would be the second for a plant in the Strategic Teaming and Resource Sharing alliance, or Stars, of which APS is a member. Wolf Creek, one of the six Stars plants, filed its application in October 2006. The other Stars plants are Callaway, Comanche Peak, Diablo Canyon and South Texas Project. ------------