Yucca Mountain News Clips - Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
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Las Vegas SUN
July 28, 2003

Yucca shipping information on hold until 2006

By Mary Manning
<manning@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas SUN

An Energy Department official said the federal government will not be ready to reveal shipping routes or whether high-level nuclear waste will travel by rail or road until 2006, surprising those attending a Las Vegas meeting Friday.

Jeff Williams, DOE's acting director of transportation, said that a strategic plan on how the Energy Department will organize its spent fuel shipments is due out at the end of September, but the decisions on routes and methods will be delayed.

The National Academies of Sciences established a special panel to study the shipping of thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste nationwide. The 15-member panel met in Las Vegas Thursday and Friday.

The Energy Department is planning to start construction of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca by 2007 and moving the first spent fuel shipments there in 2010.

"What it means is they are holding 13 counties (in Nevada) hostage," state transportation consultant Robert Halstead said. "I am astounded that they are not ready to make a decision."

Although the nuclear industry and the state lean toward rail shipments, there are no tracks leading to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The DOE has estimated it would cost $1 billion to build a track to a Yucca Mountain repository. The state says it could cost up to $3 billion, Halstead said.

Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is located, is already feeling some economic impacts, county natural resources director Les Bradshaw said.

"Our whole future is overshadowed by this nuclear dump project," Bradshaw said, noting that banks have refused a loan to one local dairy because of the proposed nuclear repository. "We are feeling the impacts of stigma."

The counties and the state agree that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that will license a repository, should require the DOE to test transportation containers until they fail.

Remote and urban areas are ill-prepared to handle a radioactive emergency, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force Executive Director Judy Treichel said.

"The first responders are usually the people in the cars next to what happens and they sure aren't going to be trained," Treichel said.

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York Daily Record
July 28, 2003

Yucca Mountain: NRC issues final plan

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued the final version of a plan it would use to review an expected application from the Department of Energy to construct a high-level nuclear waste geologic repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Spent fuel from both Three Mile Island Unit 1 and Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station would eventually be shipped to the repository, which is designed to hold 70,000 metric tons of waste.

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UPI
July 28, 2003

Hydrogen gas a nuclear waste danger?

By Charles Choi
UPI Science News

NEW YORK, July 28 (UPI) -- Controversial new findings from an international team of scientists have renewed the debate over whether nuclear waste can absorb enough oxygen from water to produce explosive hydrogen gas.

The worry is not that nuclear waste canisters will detonate like dirty bombs after swelling with a Hindenburg's worth of hydrogen. The chemical reaction in question, if it happens at all, would take place over years. But experts think the prospect highlights just how much remains unknown about the mysterious element plutonium and how such uncertainty can effect attempts to handle and store it.

"Hopefully, if we can better understand how safe is safe enough with plutonium and have scientific backing of that, we could save money (and) spend money in the right place," actinide chemist Ken Czerwinski of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge told United Press International.

"We don't have a complete understanding of plutonium," Czerwinski said. "It's a very complicated material, and these issues are very serious. We need to get a handle on this material. It isn't going to just go away."

Plutonium is a silver-grey metal that weighs more than twice as much as lead. Discovered in 1941, the human-manufactured radioactive element was named after the planet Pluto, which in turn was named after the Roman god of the dead. In a certain form, plutonium is 10 times more toxic than any nerve gas. When inhaled, as little as 12 millionths of a gram can cause death within 60 days.

A handful of plutonium is capable of generating incredibly large amounts of energy. About two pounds is equivalent to 3,800 tons of coal. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 contained only about 12 pounds of plutonium. Between 1944 and 1994, the United States produced or acquired nearly 111.4 metric tons of plutonium, enough for more than 18,000 Nagasaki-sized bombs.

To reduce the danger of accidental explosion, when spheres of plutonium are removed from the hearts of atomic weapons for storage, they are cut up, powdered, reacted with oxygen and converted to plutonium dioxide, a substance scientists had thought was chemically stable. PuO2 was the compound of choice for the long-term storage of plutonium, showing no sign of reaction when exposed to air, physicist Axel Svane of the University of Aarhus in Denmark and colleagues note in a report in the July 25 issue of the journal Science.

Despite these precautions, early PuO2 storage cans developed problems. "There was some swelling," Czerwinski noted.

Chemist John Haschke, formerly head of Los Alamos National Laboratory's applied weapons research and development team in New Mexico, suggested plutonium dioxide could be chemically reacting with moisture sealed inside the container. Plucking oxygen from water would leave hydrogen gas -- the H2 of water's H2O. Hydrogen is the lighter-than-air gas used to float the Hindenburg, the infamous airship that went down in flames on May 6, 1937 in Lakehurst, N.J.

This chemical reaction became the center of much concern over the long-term storage of plutonium. Haschke and his colleagues suggested the amount of hydrogen in canisters in a few years could accumulate enough pressure to damage the containers.

"Potentially you could have an explosion from hydrogen gas as the worst-case scenario," Czerwinski said.

Yet, the theory remained controversial because attempts to prepare hyper-oxygenated plutonium failed. Now, new theoretical results from Svane and his colleagues in Britain and the United States lend weight to Haschke's suggestion.

When the scientists modeled electron behavior in plutonium dioxide, the molecules assembled into cubes. Based on their calculations, the investigators found plutonium could act as an electron reservoir, accommodating electron-loaded oxygen atoms right in the core of each cube. In their paper in Science, the researchers said the temperatures needed to trigger such a reaction could occur in plutonium-storage facilities.

Analytical chemist Mark Paffett of Los Alamos National Laboratory disagreed with the chemistry proposed. His research suggests instead that plutonium dioxide is far more chemically stable, with water molecules sitting atop the surface of the radioactive material and only occasionally releasing hydrogen.

"In practice, we haven't seen high pressures of hydrogen from these materials. We do see some hydrogen, but it's very, very low-content," Paffett said.

Still, Paffett found Svane's team's work intriguing. "The calculations are very interesting and useful. These are things I've been trying to get others to do," Paffett told UPI. "Hopefully this will raise more work and questions."

Paffett stressed storage procedures for plutonium dioxide are now very careful to bake out as much moisture and any other contaminants as possible at 1,742 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours before it is canned. Every 10 pounds or so of plutonium of dioxide is sealed inside a two-layer container that is welded shut with a chemically inert gas such as argon.

"We've done everything that's scientifically possible to mitigate this problem. Clearly you don't want to store plutonium dioxide with water," Paffett said.

Although hydrogen buildup from nuclear waste seems to pose no imminent danger, "the better we understand what would happen to plutonium dioxide in a radioactive waste depository, the better," nuclear physicist Frank von Hippel of Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., told UPI.

Czerwinski agreed. Plutonium dioxide currently is thought to be insoluble, but interaction with water or other chemicals could change that condition over thousands of years, he suggested.

"The more we scientifically understand the element, the more we can translate that to better policy decisions," Czerwinski said. For instance, scientists hope to burn plutonium-loaded elements as fuel, "but these questions about the chemistry need to be understood before we can decide."

A better understanding of how plutonium can release hydrogen could even help with the hydrogen-powered economy President Bush is proposing to replace fossil fuel dependence. "I'm not talking about plutonium catalysts, mind you," Czerwinski said. But investigations of plutonium could reveal how metals in general could generate the gas, he said.

"The obstacle I see to the future is that it's very difficult to get students trained in these areas," Czerwinski told UPI. Most chemistry classes in the country don't discuss heavy, radioactive elements such as plutonium, he said, "or don't talk about radiation generally. For students to actually work with an element like plutonium in a university setting is extremely rare."

Czerwinski also said he was concerned that "the age of the people at the national laboratories is only growing. "We're really trying to find replacements, and students just aren't getting the training."

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Hartford Courant
July 27, 2003

Audit Finds Money Wasted

Canister Designs For Nuclear Waste Cited

By Gary Libow, Courant Staff Writer

The federal Department of Energy has wasted millions by failing to coordinate the design of nuclear fuel storage canisters and transportation casks, an inspector general's audit has found.

The recently released audit criticized the Energy Department for spending about $13.8 million on three different storage canister designs that will be used to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel, including waste produced by commercial nuclear plants such as the Connecticut Yankee facility in Haddam Neck.

The audit, completed in June, found that workers at the department's Hanford site in Washington, as well as in the agency's naval nuclear propulsion and national spent nuclear fuel programs, simultaneously developed three different storage canisters.

"While there were site-specific reasons for some of this activity, we concluded that substantial cost reductions could be achieved through greater coordination and consolidation of these activities," the audit said. "Had the Department eliminated redundant canister development activities when the program began, a significant portion of the $13.8 million spent on [storage canister] design might have been avoided."

In addition, the audit discovered that the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and the naval reactors program were independently acquiring different transportation casks needed to eventually move the storage canisters of spent nuclear fuel to a proposed national repository.

Savings there, however, are still possible. "The opportunity still exists for the Department to avoid potentially redundant development activities for transportation casks by consolidating two development programs with an estimated combined cost of $9 million to $24 million," the report said.

Those responsible for the spent nuclear fuel said there were reasons for development of the different casks, including the size and nature of the waste to be stored and moved.

"The problem is all the fuel is different, different sizes, made of different types of material," said Kelley Smith, spokeswoman for Connecticut Yankee. "In the case of Connecticut Yankee, we have a licensed dual purpose system, one that is capable of storing the fuel and also transporting it."

In a written response, T.H. Beckett of the naval reactor program, disagreed the canister design work was redundant, citing the "unique requirements" of naval spent nuclear fuel. He said the program's individual design work reduced the number of required canisters by about 100, which would save the agency more than $30 million.

Beckett also said he generally agreed with the audit recommendation for better coordination. He said the naval program has begun working and exchanging information on canister design with the civilian radioactive waste management office.

The Energy Department owns and manages about 2,500 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel generated from research and development, plutonium production and naval reactors in the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.

The department plans to permanently store the spent nuclear fuel from those sources and from commercial nuclear plants at Yucca Mountain, an underground repository in Nevada, which is not expected to be available until 2010.

Until then, the government would consolidate its highly radioactive waste at three interim storage sites: Hanford in Washington, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

At Connecticut Yankee, spent fuel is scheduled to be transferred in the fall from an indoor pool to an outdoor storage complex until the material can be removed to Yucca Mountain.

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New London Day
July 27, 2003

Nuclear Power Industry May Stage A Comeback

By Sudeep Reddy

Dallas -- A few years ago, the nation's nuclear power industry seemed to be on a path toward steady decline.

The chance of a new U.S. nuclear power plant breaking through financial barriers and public opposition was so unlikely that the issue had dropped off the nation's political radar.

But today, the nuclear power industry is facing its best prospect for revival in a quarter-century, thanks to strong support from top legislators, newer technology and skyrocketing natural gas prices.

Government officials as powerful as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan are rallying for the development of new nuclear power plants, to promote energy diversity and fend off damage to the economy from upheaval in the natural gas markets.

For two decades, nuclear reactors have been the nation's second-largest source of electricity, behind coal. Their advancement in the 1970s helped eliminate oil as a major source of electricity generation, as dependency on oil imports rocked the economy.

With the nation increasingly dependent on natural gas today, and on the cusp of becoming a major gas importer, the nuclear power industry has gained support across the country in the name of the economy and energy security.

“I think it's likely that a new nuclear plant will be built somewhere in the U.S. within the next five to 10 years,’ said Wes Taylor, president of production at TXU Corp., Texas' largest utility.

“This country needs to build new power plants that use something other than natural gas,’ he said.

At least three utilities plan to seek permits for new nuclear reactors, and supporters in Washington are lining up to push the industry into a new era and prove the financial viability of nuclear power.

The U.S. Senate narrowly backed a plan in June to support the industry through loan guarantees, research funds and the permanent re-authorization of the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the liability of nuclear operators.

The financial assistance could cover up to half the project costs of the first new nuclear plants — through loan guarantees or lines of credit — at a cost of $14 billion to $16 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

But critics of nuclear power are up in arms over the financial backing of an industry that had been on track for a steady decline.

The Senate energy bill is “one of the most strongly pro-nuclear pieces of energy legislation since 1954, when the Atomic Energy Act was first passed,’ said Lisa Gue, an energy analyst at Public Citizen, the consumer-advocacy group.

“This is completely the opposite of the kinds of energy policies that we need to reorient our energy dependence toward safe, clean and affordable energy sources,’ said Gue, whose group calls for more investment in wind, solar and other renewable energy technologies.

Critics already are organizing opposition to the new plants. On her family farm in Mississippi, Martha Ferris said she had always felt uncomfortable about Entergy Corp.'s nuclear power plant 35 miles away. But when she learned of the company's plans for a new reactor, she went from being a quiet observer to a community activist.

“When people are confronted by the facts of nuclear waste and the vulnerable position it puts people in as a nuclear target, they are angry,’ she said. “It's so irresponsible, not just for the public now but for the generations ahead.’

Commercial nuclear power captured the public imagination half a century ago, with the promise of nearly limitless, low-cost power to feed the nation's growing appetite for electricity.

Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss famously proclaimed in 1954 that nuclear plants would someday provide electricity “too cheap to meter.’

But widespread political and public support reversed in the 1970s and 1980s as utilities lost billions of dollars on construction delays and plant cancellations. And the miraculous source of power turned into the nation's most expensive — and most controversial — way of generating electricity.

TXU's Comanche Peak, about 80 miles southwest of Dallas, carried the highest price tag. It took longer to build than any other nuclear plant in the country, starting up its second reactor in 1993, two decades after construction had started. The regulatory delays and public opposition added more than $10 billion to the final tab.

A new reactor hasn't been ordered in the United States since 1978. But nuclear power advocates say that the last two decades have brought a vastly different set of circumstances — enhanced safety records, far more efficient operations and sharply improved performance levels. The nation's 103 nuclear reactors operate at 90 percent of their capacity today, compared to 56 percent in 1980.

And even as the U.S. industry quieted, other countries built nuclear plants on budget and on schedule.

In a world that's increasingly concerned about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, nuclear power is the largest electricity source that doesn't pollute the air. Lawmakers around the world have embraced that aspect of nuclear power, even though critics bristle at the suggestion.

“There's certainly a level of disingenuity connected to the argument that nuclear power is clean,’ said Gue of Public Citizen. “To suggest trading carbon emissions for radiation risks is really to make a mockery of clean energy goals.’

Meeting the growing energy demand over the next two decades will require energy from a diverse set of sources, industry officials say.

“We don't just need more nuclear power plants — we need more wind, more solar, everything,’ said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group.

Even with the proclaimed benefits, the financial demands on nuclear projects could be the biggest barrier to expansion, analysts say.

Nuclear plants are some of the nation's lowest-cost electricity producers after paying off debt for several decades. But with the industry's credit collapse over the last year, few utilities could meet the capital requirements for new plants.

The credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's said in June that construction costs would be so high — even with the Senate incentives — that it would revisit the ratings on any company that moved ahead in building a nuclear plant.

Texas would not be a likely candidate for the first round of new plants. The state's two largest utilities — TXU and Houston-based Reliant Resources Inc. — are recovering from financial woes. And Texas' wholesale power market is flush with excess capacity, limiting the viability of a new nuclear power plant in a deregulated market.

But at least three utilities — Louisiana-based Entergy, Exelon Corp. of Illinois and Dominion Resources Inc. of Virginia — are considering new reactors at existing plants. The companies will receive financial support to test a new permitting process under the Energy Department's Nuclear Power 2010 initiative, a key part of the Bush administration's energy plan.

Entergy said it has not decided whether it will eventually move forward with construction for a second reactor at its Grand Gulf plant in Mississippi. It plans to file an application for a new plant this summer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but will decide later whether to proceed with construction.

The company announced its plans for a new permit in April 2002. The latest overtures from Congress could play a role in the decision, said Entergy spokeswoman Diane Park.

“We're certainly encouraged by the Senate's action on the provision for loan guarantees,’ she said. “That kind of move removes some of the uncertainty that would accompany a decision to build a new nuclear unit.’

To some Americans, the 1979 accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and the disastrous Chernobyl meltdown seven years later in the Ukraine still serve as reminders of the dangers from lax procedures or unexpected breakdowns.

Last year's rancorous debate over transporting and storing nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain underscored the public's sensitivity to nuclear plants and their byproducts.

Compared to coal and natural gas plants, liquefied natural gas terminals, windmills and other power sources, nuclear power plants and waste facilities are at the top of the pecking order for activists' opposition, said Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow for energy studies at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“My guess is that most people are most uncomfortable thinking about living near a nuclear facility,’ she said.

In Mississippi, Ferris said most residents near the Grand Gulf nuclear plant support Entergy, which has been a key source of jobs and tax revenue for Port Gibson and Claiborne County.

But she also has found others who share her concerns about terrorist attacks on nuclear plants or nuclear waste facilities, which have received threats over the last two years.

“I haven't seen a nuclear reactor withstand the test of being hit,’ Ferris said. “We don't know what would happen.’

Plant operators say that such fears are unfounded.

“In my opinion, nuclear power plants are the safest, most well-protected privately owned facilities in this country,’ said Taylor of TXU. “We have very, very robust security systems and security procedures both from an operational nuclear safety standpoint, as well as safe from threats of terrorism.’

Even if the push toward new nuclear plants stalls, analysts say, the debate could lead to a better public understanding of other options for addressing the nation's energy problems — such as drilling offshore or building new liquefied natural gas terminals.

“People want to be able to flick on a switch and get their electricity,’ Jaffe said. “We have to generate the electricity from something.’

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Las Vegas SUN
July 25, 2003

Science panel collects data about nuclear waste routes to Nevada

By Ken Ritter
Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A panel of scientists and academics focused Friday on how the federal government can safely ship radioactive waste across the country to a planned national nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

Nevada officials told a 16-member National Academies panel that the Energy Department's plan for shipping the nation's nuclear waste from 70 sites across the country to Yucca Mountain was too incomplete to assess.

"There is no plan," said Bob Loux, chief of Nevada's Nuclear Projects Agency that is working to stop the project. "No one can do any planning until they know the mode and the route."

Energy Department officials said a new administrator has been put in charge of developing the transportation plan by the end of the year. Gary Lanthrum, a former environmental office manager for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in Albuquerque, N.M., will take over Aug. 11, said Robin Sweeney, an official with the Yucca Mountain project in Las Vegas.

Ten members of the National Research Council panel spent Wednesday getting their first look at the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas that Congress picked last summer to store 77,000 tons of radioactive waste.

The entire group spent Thursday touring road and rail routes skirting the Las Vegas metropolitan area that could be used to ship casks containing spent nuclear fuel on the final leg.

They were trailed part of the way by protesters towing a trailer with a mock nuclear waste shipment container.

"There are understandable questions here about routes and modes of transportation," panel Chairman Neal F. Lane, a physics professor at Rice University in Houston, said during a break in Friday's hearing at the Crowne Plaza hotel.

"Our job is to understand and articulate what the risks are of transporting nuclear waste," he said.

Lane and study director Kevin Crowley said no conclusions have been made. The panel expects to issue a report in early 2005.

Shortly after that, the Energy Department plans to submit its application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for opening the Yucca Mountain repository in 2010. Plans call for 24 years of shipments to the ancient volcanic ridge at the western edge of the Nevada Test Site. The waste would be entombed in casks in tunnels 1,000 feet below the surface.

Lane said the panel was looking at risks from normal operations, accidents or sabotage - particularly through hub transportation cities.

"For the rail option," he said, "much of the material would come through Chicago, St. Louis or Ohio," he said.

A truck route charts a main Southeast interstate truck route from South Carolina through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Missouri, and a Northeast route from New York and Pennsylvania through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa.

The map, drawn from an Energy Department environmental report, shows the routes meeting at Interstate 80 in Omaha, Neb., and crossing Nebraska and Wyoming to Interstate 15 at Salt Lake City before heading into Nevada.

The Las Vegas meetings were the second of seven for the 16 panelists drawn from academic, engineering, consulting and policy fields. The National Academies provide technical research and advice on science, engineering and medicine issues.

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On the Net:

Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov/

Nevada opposition: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste

National Academies National Research Council Web site: http://www.national-academies.org

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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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