Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, September 8, 2005
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Chemical & Engineering News
September 8, 2005
Nevada Sues NRC Over Yucca License
State claims federal agency has prejudged licensing process for nuclear waste facility
Glenn Hess
Nevada has filed a lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that accuses the agency of prejudging the outcome of the Department of Energy´s upcoming application for a license to open a nuclear waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada.
The suit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, charges that NRC unlawfully rejected the state´s March 1 petition challenging the so-called waste confidence rule. The regulation allows NRC to continue licensing new nuclear power plants and waste storage facilities with the expectation that a geologic repository for the disposal of nuclear waste will be available by 2025.
NRC´s 1990 rule was based on its determination that if Yucca Mountain were to fail to receive a license by a projected date of 2000, there would still be sufficient time—25 years—to locate, license, and construct an alternative repository. “The only way NRC can meet its requirement that a repository will be available by 2025 is to presume it will give Yucca a license,’ Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval says. “For an ostensibly impartial regulator to make that prejudgment is simply unlawful.’
An NCR spokesman says the commission is committed to a fair and comprehensive review of DOE´s license application, which the department plans to file in March.
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Salt Lake Tribune
September 08, 2005
NRC is unlikely to back Utah on N-waste protest
Friday vote: But Bennett notes the site still faces obstacles
By Robert Gehrke and Judy Fahys
The Salt Lake Tribune
Utah's leaders are offering little hope that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will reject a nuclear waste storage site in the state, as commissioners prepare to meet Friday on Utah's last remaining objection.
Friday's scheduled vote is whether to affirm a technical board ruling that the waste containers won't release too much radiation if a jet fighter crashes into them. Once that's done, commissioners would be free to sign off on Private Fuel Storage's license to store 44,000 tons of nuclear fuel on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, conceded Wednesday that a ruling against the state is probable.
"They just want to get it off their hands, and that's always been the case," Hatch said.
Sen. Bob Bennett said the storage site would still face many obstacles.
"I wouldn't be surprised if they vote to license the facility, but as I said all along, licensing the facility doesn't mean it's going to get built," he said.
Private Fuel Storage, a group of electric utilities, wants to store reactor fuel on the reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, until a permanent dump is built, presumably at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
PFS originally estimated the project's cost at $3.1 billion, with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars set to go to the 121-member Skull Valley band for leasing 820 acres for up to 40 years.
It was unclear Wednesday how far the NRC would go this week in deciding the PFS issue. It has tentatively scheduled a vote Friday on the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board's April ruling about the safety of the waste-storage containers.
If an F-16 jet fighter crashed into one of the nuclear casks, the board found, it would be highly unlikely the container would release worrisome amounts of radiation.
One board member, a nuclear engineer, dissented in the rare split vote of 2-1. Bennett said there is a rumor that the NRC may not take the vote because one of the five commissioners is "not quite ready."
PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said the companies are not expecting a final decision Friday, just a ruling on the containers.
"We're just watching the situation like everybody else," she said.
Utah Assistant Attorney General Denise Chancellor said the state is hopeful the commission will reject the container ruling.
She would not speculate on a final license decision.
"We'll have to wait and see," she said.
The state already has lost more than four dozen technical challenges to the project before the NRC.
"I never have a whole bunch of confidence" in the NRC decisions, said Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop. "If they rule in our favor, I'd be surprised and happy. If they do not rule in favor of the state, we still have some options. We plan on moving ahead on this issue."
If the license is granted, it would take several years for PFS to ink deals with utilities to transport and store the waste and to build the facility, which is essentially a concrete parking lot where long rows of concrete and steel casks containing the waste would be stored.
Jason Groenewold, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, which opposes PFS, said he expects that "the NRC will do whatever it takes to ensure the nuclear industry has a place to dump its waste."
He said it was disappointing the NRC did not look at the worst-case scenario - the impact on the public if waste were released from a container- and order a thorough plan for emergency response.
"That is frightening, given what we're seeing happen nationally right now," he said.
"What we're prepared to expect from the federal government is for them to put their heads in the sand and ignore the problem."
Hatch said while he will be disappointed if the NRC rules in favor of PFS, it is "just the beginning of the battle. . . . Once the proposal leaves the NRC, it becomes vulnerable to lengthy examination by the courts, as well as administrative actions, which we will pursue relentlessly."
Tribune reporter Thomas Burr contributed to this story.
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Scoop
September 08, 2005
Scientists Against Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing
Press Release: Arms Control Association
Scientists Say Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Still Unnecessary, Uneconomic, and Risky
(Washington, D.C.): Two leading scientists warn in an Arms Control Today article this month against embracing the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel as a solution for dealing with accumulating stockpiles of U.S. nuclear waste. Nearly three decades ago, the United States swore off reprocessing because it cost too much and put plutonium-a key material for building nuclear weapons-into circulation, leaving it vulnerable to theft. The authors argue that these rationales remain just as valid, if not more so, today.
In May, the House of Representatives called on the Department of Energy to prepare "an integrated spent fuel recycling plan for implementation beginning in fiscal year 2007, including…reprocessing." Supporters, led by Rep. David Hobson (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, say the need is imminent. They contend that, in the absence of reprocessing, the amount of spent fuel discharged by U.S. power reactors will soon exceed the legislated storage capacity of a spent fuel repository being built under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Steve Fetter and Frank N. von Hippel, however, point out that this is not the case. "Reprocessing does not eliminate the need for a repository, and there is no urgent need for additional repository capacity," they write. Fetter is a professor and dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and von Hippel is a professor of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
The two scientists further maintain that implementing the proposed reprocessing plan would be far more expensive than storing the spent fuel. They calculate that reprocessing the spent fuel for existing U.S. reactors would add roughly $2 billion annually to the cost of U.S. nuclear-generated electricity. This extra sum would have to be borne by the ratepayers or taxpayers if the federal government underwrites the project. In addition, Fetter and von Hippel estimate that the price of a kilogram of uranium would need to climb 12 times as high as it is today to make reprocessing cost effective. Uranium is currently the main material used in fueling U.S. nuclear reactors.
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Arms Control Today
September 08, 2005
Is U.S. Reprocessing Worth The Risk?
Steve Fetter and Frank N. von Hippel
Nearly three decades ago, the United States swore off the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel because it cost too much and put separated plutonium into circulation. Now, some in Congress want to launch a massive program to reprocess the spent fuel that has accumulated at U.S. power plants.
In May, the House endorsed report language calling on the Department of Energy to prepare “an integrated spent fuel recycling plan for implementation beginning in fiscal year 2007, including…reprocessing, preparation of mixed oxide fuel, vitrification of high level waste products, and temporary process storage.’[1]
Supporters, led by Rep. David Hobson (R-Ohio), chairman of the Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee, say the need is imminent. They point out that, in the absence of reprocessing, the amount of spent fuel discharged by U.S. power reactors will soon exceed the legislated storage capacity of the repository being built under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Moreover, Hobson has been persuaded that the Energy Department has developed “new reprocessing technologies that have the potential to minimize the…streams of radioactive waste products and also eliminate the presence of separated plutonium.’[2]
In fact, reprocessing does not eliminate the need for a repository, and there is no urgent need for additional repository capacity. Further, the new reprocessing technologies being examined by the Energy Department, if adopted, would make huge additional quantities of plutonium accessible for diversion by terrorist groups and would undercut the ability of the United States to oppose the spread of plutonium-separation technology to additional countries. Reprocessing also would be very expensive, increasing the costs of nuclear power in the United States by billions of dollars a year. Yet, the House vote took place without hearings being held. Given the high stakes involved, Congress owes the American people the opportunity for an open and informed debate on the issues involved.
Evolution of U.S. Spent Fuel Disposal Policy
Reprocessing is the generic term for the chemical processing of spent nuclear fuel. The method currently used is the PUREX (plutonium-uranium extraction) process, which was originally developed by the United States in the early 1950s to separate plutonium for nuclear weapons. The spent fuel assemblies are chopped into pieces, the fuel is dissolved in nitric acid, and organic solvents are used to separate the plutonium and uranium from the fission products (such as cesium-137 and strontium-90) and minor transuranic elements (neptunium, americium, and curium). The plutonium and uranium are then separated from each other and purified for use in fresh reactor fuel. The fission products and minor transuranics are mixed into glass and stored in a surface facility pending the availability of an underground repository.
Commercial reprocessing programs originated in the 1960s and 1970s when power reactor operators worldwide expected that plutonium would be needed to make start-up fuel for plutonium breeder reactors. These reactors would then fuel themselves and other reactors with the plutonium that reactors produce by transmuting the abundant non-chain-reacting uranium-238 isotope. It was believed that production of nuclear energy based on the much less abundant chain-reacting uranium-235 isotope would increase so rapidly that the world´s high-grade uranium ores would quickly be depleted, making a transition to the more uranium-efficient breeder reactors economical.
This expectation, however, was wrong, as U.S. and world nuclear capacity reached a plateau at one-tenth the level that had been projected for the year 2000, huge deposits of high-grade uranium ore were discovered in Australia and Canada, and both breeder reactors and reprocessing were found to be much more costly than had been expected.
Before these errors were generally recognized, reconsideration of U.S. reprocessing policy was triggered by India´s “peaceful’ nuclear explosion in 1974. The Indian nuclear device had been made using plutonium extracted from spent fuel using reprocessing technology provided by the United States.
The Ford administration reacted by opposing any further export of reprocessing technology, and the Carter administration put a hold on the licensing of commercial reprocessing facilities in the United States. The Reagan administration lifted the hold on U.S. reprocessing, but by then, U.S. reactor operators had realized how costly breeder reactors and reprocessing would be and had lost interest. The only commercial reprocessing facility to operate in the United States, at West Valley, New York, had closed in 1972 after a few years of troubled operation. The site is still the target of an ongoing, multibillion-dollar, government-funded radioactive waste cleanup project. Two other commercial reprocessing plants, at Morris, Illinois, and at Barnwell, South Carolina, were built but never operated.
Given that spent fuel had become a waste and not a resource, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) in 1982. In exchange for a modest tax of $0.001 per kilowatt-hour (about 2 percent of the wholesale cost of nuclear-generated electricity), the Energy Department would arrange for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel in geological repositories. In 1987, Congress specified that the first repository would be sited under Yucca Mountain. To make clear that the burden would not be Nevada´s alone, however, the amount of commercial spent fuel that could be placed in Yucca Mountain was limited to 63,000 tons “until such a time as a second repository is in operation.’ [3] U.S. reactors will have discharged this amount of spent fuel by 2008. The NWPA requires the secretary of energy to “report to the president and to Congress on or after January 1, 2007, but not later than January 1, 2010, on the need for a second repository.’ [4]
Given the widespread public abhorrence of radioactive waste, neither the Energy Department nor Congress has any appetite to look for a second repository site. Nor, given recent legal reverses in the Energy Department´s battle with Nevada over the licensing of the Yucca Mountain repository, do they seem interested in trying to raise the legislated limit on the amount of spent fuel that can be stored there. This has created the atmosphere of crisis that inspired Hobson to propose reprocessing spent fuel and recycling the uranium and plutonium it contains as a way out.
Yet, if the public and Congress understood the trade-offs being proposed, they would be much more frightened of the near-term dangers of nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation that come with plutonium separation than of the very-long-term (hundreds to thousands of centuries) danger of local, radioactive groundwater pollution that is the focus of the licensing battle over Yucca Mountain. It is important to devise the best possible long-term solution for the radioactive waste problem, but the near-term security, economic, and environmental costs of reprocessing and recycling must not be ignored.
Fortunately, there is plenty of time to look before we leap. As the American Physical Society´s Panel on Public Affairs recently pointed out:
Even though Yucca Mountain may be delayed considerably, interim storage of spent fuel in dry casks, either at current reactor sites, or in a few regional facilities, or at a single national facility, is safe and affordable for a period of at least 50 years. Further, any spent fuel that would be emplaced at Yucca Mountain would remain available for reprocessing for many decades.… There is no urgent need for the [ United States] to initiate reprocessing or to develop additional national repositories.[5]
The Costs of Reprocessing and Recycling
There is widespread agreement in the United States and abroad that reprocessing and recycling is significantly more expensive than storing spent fuel in an underground repository and buying fresh low-enriched uranium (LEU). This is because reprocessing is an expensive process and also because fabricating mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel containing the recovered plutonium mixed with depleted uranium is more expensive than buying the alternative, fresh LEU fuel.
Thus far, the only country to implement a comprehensive reprocessing and recycling program is France. However, in 2000, the French government concluded that even with the initial costs of its reprocessing and MOX fuel fabrication plants paid for, if France were to stop reprocessing in 2010, it would save $4-5 billion over the remaining life-time of its current fleet of power reactors.[6]
A study by Japan´s New Nuclear Policy-Planning Council recently estimated that the total extra cost for reprocessing 32,000 tons of Japan´s spent fuel (about half as much as U.S. reactors have discharged thus far) and recycling the plutonium would be about $60 billion.[7]
Three recent U.S. academic studies find that reprocessing and recycling would also be more expensive in the United States than directly disposing of spent fuel.[8] Although the estimated difference is a modest percentage of the price of electricity—about 3-5 percent—the total cost is large. For the current fleet of U.S. nuclear power plants, reprocessing spent fuel and recycling the recovered plutonium would add roughly $2 billion per year to the cost of U.S. nuclear-generated electricity. These extra costs would have to be passed along to ratepayers or to taxpayers if underwritten by the government.
It is sometimes argued that reprocessing will become economically attractive as the cost of reprocessing decreases or as nuclear power expands and uranium prices increase. At the average uranium price paid by U.S. reactor operators in 2004 ($33 per kilogram), our calculations indicate that reprocessing would have to cost less than $400 per kilogram of spent fuel in order to be competitive with direct disposal.[9] Yet, if the cost of building a new U.S. reprocessing facility were similar to those of facilities in France and the United Kingdom, the cost of reprocessing would be more than $2,000 per kilogram. [10] Even if reprocessing costs could somehow be cut in half to $1,000 per kilogram of spent fuel, the price of uranium would have to rise to nearly $400 per kilogram in order for reprocessing to be cost effective. It is extremely unlikely that world uranium prices will rise to this level in the next 50 years, even if nuclear power expands dramatically.
The PUREX process has been in use for more than five decades, and it seems unlikely that dramatic cost reductions could be achieved using this or the new more elaborate UREX+ reprocessing technology currently favored by the Energy Department. Indeed, increasingly stringent environmental and safety regulations could be expected to put upward pressures on costs. The experience at the new Rokkasho-mura reprocessing facility in Japan, where initial capital cost estimates more than tripled to about $20 billion, serves as a cautionary example.
A range of alternative chemical separation processes have been proposed over the decades. One that attracted support from the 2001 energy commission chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney is electrometallurgical processing, or “pyroprocessing.’ Recent official reviews have concluded, however, that such techniques are likely to be substantially more expensive than PUREX.[11] Thus, there is no reason to believe that economics will favor reprocessing.
Waste Disposal
Reprocessing and recycling, as currently practiced in France and planned in Japan, do not reduce the amount of repository area required for the disposal of radioactive wastes. The required area is determined not by the mass or volume of the wastes, which are very small in comparison to the mass and volume of the surrounding rock, but by the heat output of the wastes, which raises the temperature of that rock. Put simply, the more heat output, the more storage area that will be needed. Yet, if current reprocessing approaches are used, they would not significantly reduce the total heat output, and thus they would not significantly reduce the amount of repository area required per unit of electricity generated.[12]
Substantial reductions in repository requirements could be achieved only if all the long-lived transuranic elements in the spent fuel were separated and recycled repeatedly in reactors until they were fissioned. This separation-and-transmutation system would be even more expensive, however, than traditional reprocessing and single recycle as currently practiced in France.[13] If fast-neutron reactors or accelerators were used to transmute the long-lived radionuclides more efficiently, the cost would be even higher.[14]
No one knows how expensive a complete separation-and-transmutation system would be, because the technology has not been fully developed and demonstrated, but, in the early 1990s, the Energy Department commissioned the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to do a thorough study of the benefits and costs of separating and fissioning the long-lived transuranic elements in spent fuel. The 1996 report found that the benefits if any would be small, while the costs would be very high. “The excess cost for a [separation and transmutation] disposal system over once-through disposal for the 62,000 [metric tons] of [light-water reactor] spent fuel [approximately the amount currently slated for Yucca Mountain] is uncertain but is likely to be no less than $50 billion and easily could be more than $100 billion if adopted by the United States.’ [15]
If the licenses of most U.S. reactors are extended, as seems likely, the total amount of spent fuel discharged by current reactors will be about twice as large, and the extra costs of separation and transmutation would rise proportionately from $100 billion to more than $200 billion. If new reactors are built, the extra costs would be still larger. These costs would be in addition to those of the Yucca Mountain repository, which would still be needed for the disposal of the fission-product wastes.
Proliferation Implications
There are two proliferation concerns associated with reprocessing. First, reprocessing increases the risk that plutonium could be stolen by terrorists. Second, countries with reprocessing plants or separated plutonium could produce nuclear weapons before an effective international response could be mobilized.
Nuclear Terrorism
Plutonium is much more difficult than highly enriched uranium to make into a nuclear explosive, but it would not be impossible for terrorists to do so.[16] Terrorists could more easily use plutonium to make potent radiological weapons. The dispersal of 10 kilograms of plutonium-oxide aerosol 32 kilometers upwind from downtown Seattle would cause hundreds to thousands of additional cancer deaths as plutonium is deadly when inhaled. [17]
The plutonium in spent fuel is relatively inaccessible to terrorists because it is mixed with fission products, some of which—notably 30-year half-life cesium-137—emit penetrating gamma rays when they decay. The radiation dose rate one meter from a 50-year-old spent fuel assembly would be high enough to deliver a fatal dose within half an hour. [18] As a result, a spent fuel assembly, which contains about 4 kilograms of plutonium, will be “self-protecting’ by the standards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for more than 100 years. In contrast, the penetrating-radiation dose rate from separated plutonium is so low that it can be safely carried in a light airtight container.[19]
Reprocessing separates plutonium from the fission products, making it far more vulnerable to theft. Separated plutonium could be stolen from reprocessing or MOX fuel fabrication facilities or in transit between them. In addition, fresh MOX fuel could be stolen in transit or from dispersed nuclear reactor sites, and the plutonium could be separated from the uranium using straightforward chemical processes.
As already noted, the PUREX process was originally developed to separate pure plutonium for weapons. The current Bush administration therefore established an Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) within the Energy Department to come up with a more “proliferation-resistant’ reprocessing and recycle system in which pure plutonium would never be separated. The AFCI program has developed the UREX+ process, which would separate a mix of plutonium and neptunium. However, in a March 2005 hearing before Hobson´s subcommittee, AFCI Director William Magwood volunteered that “we´re not sure that it´s possible to use this chemical technology to separate the plutonium, in combination with a few other things, in a fashion that will make it both proliferation resistant and economically viable.’
The reason is quite obvious: neptunium is much less radioactive than plutonium and is itself a directly useable nuclear-weapon material. In fact, even if all of the other transuranic isotopes in spent fuel were separated and mixed with the plutonium, the gamma radiation dose rate from the mixture still would be only about 0.0001 of that from a 20-year-old spent fuel assembly and 0.001 the dose rate required to meet the IAEA´s self-protection standard.[20]
National Proliferation
For a government, the possession of a reprocessing plant would provide a quick route to a nuclear-weapon capability. Every country that has embarked on commercial reprocessing has accumulated a huge stockpile of separated plutonium. Plutonium separation by the civilian reprocessing industry has gotten so far ahead of plutonium recycling that the world stockpile of separated civilian plutonium has reached 250 tons and is still growing (see table 1). Using the IAEA´s conservative assumption that 8 kilograms is required to produce a first-generation nuclear bomb, this material represents more than 30,000 bomb equivalents—an enormous potential threat.
This is why the Ford and Carter administrations turned against commercial reprocessing. Given that the United States had been the leading promoter of reprocessing and plutonium breeder reactors for years, it was believed that the only way to turn other countries around would be to be able to say to them, “Reprocessing is neither necessary nor economic. We don´t do it. You don´t need to, either.’
In the years after India´s 1974 test, the United States was relatively successful in preventing or at least delaying the proliferation of reprocessing technology. France was persuaded not to complete the transfer of reprocessing plants to South Korea and Pakistan. A deal under which Germany would have transferred reprocessing and enrichment technologies to Brazil collapsed before the reprocessing technology was transferred. Further, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was established, whose members agreed to “exercise restraint’ in the transfer of reprocessing technology.
The only transfer of reprocessing technology after 1974 was to Japan, after Japan´s prime minister insisted that reprocessing was a “life or death issue.’ Today, Japan is the only non-nuclear-armed state that has an active civilian reprocessing program. Japan´s neighbors, China and South Korea, are concerned that this program would allow Japan to acquire and deploy nuclear weapons quickly if it ever decides that they are needed.
In his talk at the National Defense University on February 11, 2004, President George W. Bush called on the NSG to deny enrichment and reprocessing technologies “to any state that does not already possess full-scale, functioning enrichment and reprocessing plants.’ Many countries have denounced this proposal as a new form of discrimination by the nuclear-weapon states. A continued U.S. stance that reprocessing is neither necessary nor economic is likely to be more influential than a policy of “Do as I say, not as I do.’
The Future of Reprocessing
About 30 percent of the world´s light-water power-reactor spent fuel is being reprocessed.[21] Among the nuclear-armed states, France, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom have civilian reprocessing plants, and China is designing a pilot-scale reprocessing facility. The United Kingdom´s reprocessing plant, originally built with prepaid foreign reprocessing contracts, is expected to shut down by 2010 because of a lack of follow-on contracts but may shut down even earlier because of a recent accident. Russia reprocesses the fuel from first-generation domestic and East European power reactors in a plant that is old, subsidized, and has caused very serious radioactive contamination of the region.Thus, the future of reprocessing is unclear. In France, it appears to persist because of national pride, much as the Concorde supersonic-transport program did for decades after it was clear that it was a commercial failure. Japan´s reprocessing program is sustained by not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) pressures that have made interim storage of spent fuel politically difficult. The Japanese nuclear utilities responded by shipping their spent fuel to France and the United Kingdom to be reprocessed while Japan built its own reprocessing plant.[22] Japan has plans to recycle its 41 tons of already separated plutonium into reactor fuel, but these plans have thus far been set back by a decade as a result of NIMBY opposition from the local governments that host the reactors.[23] Russia´s reprocessing program is a relic from the Soviet era. The purpose of India´s reprocessing is to provide plutonium for its breeder-reactor development effort. That effort may be abandoned as it has been in the United States and Europe if, as a result of a July agreement between Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, India gains access to the world uranium market, from which it has been excluded because it is not a party to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
U.S. power reactors annually discharge about 2,000 tons of spent fuel containing more than 20 tons of plutonium, or about as much as is being separated annually worldwide.[24] The spent fuel already discharged by U.S. reactors contains about 600 tons of plutonium. In addition to licensing and building reprocessing plants and MOX fuel fabrication facilities, a comprehensive recycling program would require that essentially all U.S. reactors be re-licensed to use MOX fuel. According to the NAS report, it would take 70 percent of U.S. nuclear capacity 30 years to dispose of just half the plutonium and other transuranic elements in 62,000 tons of spent LWR fuel—approximately what the United States will have discharged in 2008.[25] This means that disposing of the transuranics in U.S. spent fuel would far outlive the current generation of reactors.
Some of the obstacles to such a program are shown by those encountered in a similar but far less ambitious plan that the United States and Russia agreed to in 2000. According to that agreement, beginning in 2007, each country will dispose of 34 tons of excess weapon plutonium at a rate of at least two tons a year. Each plans to dispose of its plutonium by fabricating it into MOX fuel and irradiating the fuel in power reactors (see "Plutonium Disposition Accord Reached"). The ground has not yet been broken for the proposed fuel-fabrication facilities, however, and most U.S. nuclear utilities have declined to use the plutonium fuel because of concerns about licensing problems.[26]
The difficulties that would be encountered in a more ambitious effort to fission all the transuranic elements can only be imagined. Given the history of abandoned nuclear projects, ranging from nuclear-powered aircraft to plutonium breeder reactors, it is not difficult to foresee that a multigenerational project to recycle and fission all the transuranic elements would be abandoned half completed and the country would be left with a much more costly radioactive waste and security problem, including the need to secure hundreds of additional tons of separated plutonium from theft.
Conclusion
Given the high economic and security costs of reprocessing, there should be some important reason for Congress to back—without serious consideration—such an intricate proposal, with its generations of reactors, reprocessing, and fuel fabrication plants.
The main purpose of the proposal to reprocess U.S. spent fuel seems to be to allow Congress and the administration an easy way to avoid the politically divisive problem of deciding either to expand the capacity of the Yucca Mountain repository or launching a siting process for additional or alternative geological storage.[27] Some U.S. nuclear energy advocates also believe that dealing with the spent fuel problem in a definitive manner is essential if there is to be a renaissance of nuclear power in the United States.[28] Yet, there is no technical fix for the spent fuel problem.
Fortunately, if Congress wants to deal with the problem of nuclear waste in a thoughtful way, it has time to do so. Spent fuel can be stored safely and economically for at least 50 years in dry-cask interim storage. That leaves plenty of time to clarify the future of nuclear power in the United States and to explore in an open and systematic manner the Yucca Mountain and alternative disposition options for the spent fuel discharged by the current generation of reactors.
Steve Fetter is a professor and dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and Frank N. von Hippel is a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University.
ENDNOTES
1. House Committee on Appropriations, Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill, 2006, 109th Cong., 1st sess., 2005, H. Rep. 86.
2. Congressional Record (May 24, 2005): H3859.
3. Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, sec. 114d.
4. Ibid., sec. 161.
5. Panel on Public Affairs, American Physical Society, Nuclear Power and Proliferation Resistance: Securing Benefits, Limiting Risk, May 2005, pp. 20, 22. The authors were among the nine authors of this report.
6. J-M. Charpin, B. Dessus, and R. Pellat, “Economic Forecast Study of the Nuclear Power Option,’ Paris, July 2000.
7. Based on New Nuclear Policy-Planning Council, Japan Atomic Energy Commission, “Interim Report Concerning the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Policy,’ November 2004.
8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “The Future of Nuclear Power,’ 2003; Matthew Bunn et al., The Economics of Reprocessing Versus Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003); The Economic Future of Nuclear Power ( Chicago: University of Chicago, August 2004).
9. Computed using assumptions that are favorable to reprocessing, including a 50 percent reduction in base-case waste-disposal costs.
10. Assumes a plant throughput of 800 tons of spent fuel per year for 30 years; an overnight capital cost of $6 billion, repaid at interest rates appropriate for a regulated private entity with a guaranteed rate of return; annual operating costs of $560 million per year; and standard assumptions about construction time, taxes and insurance, and contingency, pre-operating, and decommissioning costs. For a government-financed facility with very low cost, the corresponding cost would be $1,350 per kilogram. For an unregulated private venture, the cost would be $3,100 per kilogram. Economics of Reprocessing Versus Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, p. 213.
11. Office of Nuclear Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, “Generation IV Roadmap: Report of the Fuel Cycle Crosscut Group,’ Washington, DC, March 2001; Accelerator-Driven Systems and Fast Reactors in Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles: A Comparative Study, OECD/NEA 03109, 2002.
12. With spent fuel in the Yucca Mountain repository, the temperature of the rock between the tunnels would reach its peak about 2,000 years after the spent fuel is emplaced. If the plutonium were recycled in existing power reactors, much of it would fission, but some would be converted into other transuranic isotopes that contribute more decay heat in the first few thousand years.
13. The added complexity associated with the recovery of the minor transuranics would increase reprocessing costs, and the costs of fabricating them into fuel also would be greater because some of them are more radioactive than plutonium.
14. In current-generation power reactors, the chain reaction is sustained primarily by neutrons that are slowed down by a series of collisions with the light hydrogen nuclei in the water between the fuel rods. Such “slow’ neutrons are ineffective in fissioning some transuranic isotopes. This has generated a new rationale for introducing the fast-neutron reactors, which were formerly advocated for plutonium breeding. These reactors likely would be cooled by a liquid metal such as molten sodium or lead. Neutrons do not lose much energy when they collide with the heavy nuclei of these elements.
15. Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separation and Transmutation (National Academy Press, 1996), p. 7.
16. J. Carson Mark et al., “Can Terrorists Build Nuclear Weapons?’ in Preventing Nuclear Terrorism, eds. Paul Leventhal and Yonah Alexander (D.C. Heath and Co., 1987), p. 55. French and Japanese reprocessing advocates have argued for decades that the “reactor-grade’ plutonium in spent power-reactor fuel is not weapons usable because the fraction of the undesirable isotope Pu-240 is larger than in the weapons-grade plutonium that has been used in weapons programs. To be sure, the yield of a Nagasaki-type device would be reduced from the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT to as low as the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT because of the likelihood of premature initiation of the chain reaction by neutrons from the spontaneous fission of Pu-240, but that would still be a devastating explosion. J. Carson Mark, “Explosive Properties of Reactor-Grade Plutonium,’ Science & Global Security 4, (1993), p. 111. For countries, more modern weapon designs are insensitive to pre-initiation.
17. Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel, “The Hazard from Plutonium Dispersal from Nuclear-Warhead Accidents,’ Science & Global Security 2 (1990), p. 21. However, the individual chance of cancer death among the large exposed population would be only on the order of 0.1 percent.
18. W. R. Lloyd, M. K. Sheaffer, and W.G. Sutcliffe, “Dose Rate Estimates from Irradiated Light-Water-Reactor Fuel Assemblies in Air,’ UCRL-ID-115199, 1994. The IAEA “self-protection’ criterion is 1 Sievert (100 rems) per hour at 1 meter. The median dose for death within several weeks following exposure is about 5 Sieverts.
19. The primary radiological hazard from plutonium is from the alpha particles (helium nuclei) that it emits as it decays. These emissions can be blocked by a thin container but also make inhaled plutonium-oxide particles very dangerous.
20. Jungmin Kang and Frank von Hippel, “Limited Proliferation-Resistance Benefits From Recycling Unseparated Transuranics and Lanthanides From Light-Water Reactor Spent Fuel,’ Science & Global Security (forthcoming).
21. Most power reactors worldwide, and all in the United States are cooled by ordinary “light’ water, so named to distinguish it from the “heavy water’ used in a power reactor type developed by Canada. In heavy water, ordinary hydrogen is replaced by heavy deuterium, which captures fewer neutrons.
22. The local tax and job benefits from hosting a reprocessing plant are much greater than those from hosting an interim spent-fuel storage facility. This appears to have been a deciding factor for the sparsely populated and economically depressed Aomori Prefecture. The central government also has committed that no spent fuel assembly or container of vitrified high-level reprocessing waste will remain at the plant for more than 50 years.
23. In 1998, Japan expected that its first MOX fuel would be loaded into two reactors in 1999. IAEA, INFCIRC/549/Add. 1, March 31, 1998. In 2004 the two utilities involved did not expect to load the fuel before 2008. Citizens´ Nuclear Information Center, “Japanese Power Companies´ Pluthermal Plans: Recent Developments,’ May/June 2004.
24. France reprocessed about 1,050 tons of spent fuel in 2002, down from a peak of 1,650 tons of heavy metal in 1995. With the end of foreign contracts, its reprocessing rate is expected to decline further to about 850 tons per year. The average reprocessing rate at the United Kingdom´s LWR spent fuel reprocessing plant between 1998 and 2002 was about 700 tons per year. Japan´s reprocessing plant is scheduled to come into full operation at a capacity of 800 tons per year in 2010, the year that the British plant is scheduled to shut down. Based on its declarations of civilian plutonium stocks to the IAEA, between 1996 and 2002, Russia´s reprocessing plant averages less than 200 tons per year. India´s civilian reprocessing plants have a combined capacity of about 200 tons per year, but the concentration of plutonium in spent heavy-water-reactor fuel is about one-third of that in LWR fuel, which is about 1.2 percent at current burnups.
25. The NAS report estimated 18.6 GWe operating at 100 percent capacity factor with a full MOX load. Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separation and Transmutation, p. 79. We assume 1/3 core loadings and an average 80 percent capacity factor.
26. “More Reactors Needed for Disposition Under Revised Plan, DOE Says,’ Nuclear Fuel, March 4, 2002.
27. The MIT study, The Future of Nuclear Power, proposed consideration of deep borehole storage.
28. Every order for a new power reactor in the United States since 1974 has been cancelled.
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Las Vegas SUN
September 07, 2005
State balks at Yucca rules on water flow
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- New proposed Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules for the Yucca Mountain project match radiation exposure rules proposed last month but also specify how the Energy Department can measure potential water flow through the rock.
That's a problem, Nevada officials say, because the proposed rule for the planned nuclear waste repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas was issued without consulting any outside experts.
Water flow is a key issue in the state's fight against the mountain. If water moves through the rock, it can lead to corrosion on waste casks causing them to fail faster and contaminate groundwater with radiation.
"Infiltration is the whole ballgame," said attorney Joe Egan, who handles Yucca issues for the state. "They have just declared what that is; we don't think it is proper."
A 60-day public comment period will begin once the rule is published in the Federal Register, which will happen soon, according to the commission.
The state is likely to submit comments on the proposed rule. Egan said once it is finalized, if no changes are made, the state would evaluate whether to take legal action.
The NRC rules are important because the commission will use them to decide whether the department can store nuclear waste inside Yucca. The department expects to apply for a license next year.
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RedNova
September 07, 2005
Yankee, State Make Deal Over Dry Casks
With support from state regulators and a consortium of business interests, the owner of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is proposing a radioactive waste storage system intended to help keep the facility on line for at least six more years.
Anti-nuclear activists argue, however, that the Yankee storage plan does not adequately address existing safety issues involving used nuclear fuel rod's kept in pools at the Vernon plant. These critics, organized into a group called the New England Coalition, say they will urge the Public Service Board to impose stricter waste- disposal requirements when the Yankee proposal is reviewed later this year.
Specifically, the coalition wants the wastes now stored in spent fuel pools to be moved to the dry casks that Entergy Nuclear, the plant's owner, is proposing to install at the site along the Connecticut River. Yankee's containment pools may reach their storage capacity as early as 2007. And Entergy says its dry cask system would be sufficient to handle newly produced wastes through 2011.
"Spent fuel pools contain several hundred tons of the most deadly toxin known to man," says New England Coalition director Peter Alexander. "If exposed to air they will spontaneously ignite and spread a cloud of radioactivity over New England."
Vermont Public Service Commissioner David O'Brien says his department supports the dry cask proposal partly because of "legitimate safety concerns" related to the spent fuel pools. O'Brien notes that Entergy does intend to move some of the wastes from the pools to the steel-and- cement casks.
"The more you can put in the casks, the better," O'Brien says.
Entergy spokesman Larry Smith rejects claims that radioactive wastes are more dangerous in the pools than in the casks. "Wet storage and dry storage are equally safe," Smith says.
Yankee storage issues can best be resolved, Smith adds, through establishment of a national nuclear waste repository. A plan to build such a facility inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been stalled for several years.
O'Brien sees Entergy's proposal as a means of ensuring that Vermont Yankee remains in operation at least until 2012, when the plant's current license is due to expire. The commissioner points out that the electrical power produced by Yankee costs close to 4 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to a New England market rate of about 6 cents. "We want to be sure Vermonters continue to benefit from that rate," O'Brien says.
The same considerations have led the recently formed Vermont Energy Partnership to favor the dry cask storage plan. The group's members include public utilities, business associations, construction companies, ski resorts and Vermont's largest private employer: IBM.
"Vermont Yankee supplies one-third of the state's electrical energy, and we want that supply to remain available," says Paul Steidler, a spokesman for the partnership. Yankee's power is distributed around Vermont under contracts with the state's two largest utilities: Green Mountain Power and Central Vermont Public Service.
Experts regard dry casks as the preferred means of storing radioactive wastes, Steidler notes, adding that this storage method is used at many nuclear plants around the country.
Environmentalists generally agree that Entergy is making the right choice in seeking to move toward a dry storage system. The plan also finds favor among many environmentalists because of a conditional $2 million-a-year storage fee set by the State Legislature. Under a law adopted in the past session, Entergy would have to pay that amount into a state-sponsored renewable energy fund.
"If the Public Service Department gets smart about using this fairly modest amount of money, they can create a big ripple effect on behalf of renewable energy projects in the state," says Mark Sinclair, an attorney with the Montpelier-based Clean Energy Group. Sinclair says that a nuclear waste disposal fee adopted 10 years ago by Minnesota lawmakers produced such sizable gains for renewable energy that the state decided it no longer needed to rely on nuclear energy.
A similar outcome in Vermont would give the state more options when Entergy files an expected application to extend Yankee's operating license beyond 2012, Sinclair says.
But the $2 million annual storage charge will be levied on Entergy only if the Louisiana-based company gets permission from federal regulators to increase Yankee's power output by 20 percent. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is reviewing this so-called uprate proposal, which would enable Yankee to produce 110 additional megawatts, from its current output of 535 megawatts. A decision is not expected until sometime next year.
The New England Coalition and some Windham County residents have criticized the Democratic-controlled State Legislature for agreeing to a compromise that links payment of the $2 million fee to approval of Entergy's uprate proposal. Opponents of the power increase say the deal improves Entergy's prospects of prevailing in the uprate battle.
In a ruling issued in June, the NRC said it would not fine Entergy for initially failing to account for parts of two spent fuel rods. No records were kept on the fuel rod pieces that were placed in a containment pool in 1979. The pieces could not be located when an inventory was conducted last year, but they were eventually found to be still safely stored in the pool.
The NRC noted that Entergy, which purchased Yankee in 2002 from a consortium of New England utilities, did not own the plant when the fuel rod fragments were misplaced. And it was Entergy that discovered the mistake, the regulators added.
Vermont US Senator James Jeffords criticized the NRC's decision, saying the lack of a fine sends the wrong message to the nuclear power industry.
Copyright Boutin-McQuiston, Inc. Aug 01, 2005
Source: Vermont Business Magazine
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NRC
September 7, 2005
NRC Proposes to Change Regulations on Yucca Mountain to be Consistent With EPA Changes
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to amend its regulations to govern the U.S. Department of Energy´s (DOE´s) proposed high-level radioactive waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The amendments would adopt the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency´s (EPA´s) recently proposed revisions to its standards for radiation doses that could occur more than 10,000 years after waste disposal.
The Energy Policy Act requires the NRC to make its regulations consistent with EPA´s standards for Yucca Mountain.
The new EPA standards, published Aug. 22, would leave in place the current standard of a peak dose of 15 millirems for the first 10,000 years following disposal. After 10,000 years, the standard would be 350 millirems. These same EPA values would be contained in the revised NRC regulations.
The proposed NRC regulations also indicate that, in demonstrating compliance with the radiation dose standards, DOE must assess the effects of climate changes more than 10,000 years after disposal. The proposal specifies a range of values that DOE should draw from when representing these changes. The climate change analysis would be limited to the effects of increased water flow to the repository as a result of the change (up to approximately 6 times greater than would be expected today), and any resulting release of radioactive materials to the environment.
In addition, the proposed NRC changes specify that DOE should calculate radiation doses to workers at the Yucca Mountain facility using current scientific methods, in the same way that EPA is proposing for calculating doses for members of the public.
Interested persons may submit comments on the proposed NRC regulations within 60 days of publication of NRC´s proposed rule in the Federal Register, expected shortly. The comments should sent by mail to the Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff; e-mail to SECY@nrc.gov; or fax to the Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at 301-415-1101.
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Las Vegas SUN
September 06, 2005
Letter: Nuclear waste is inviting target
I am responding to Richard Rychtarik's letter of July 28, which was answered in part by the editorial "Energy bill falls short." It is disgraceful that the nuclear industry and fossil-fuel producers, now making record profits, are receiving subsidies in the billions.
Again I am lectured that I must be a realist and pragmatic and accept political expediency instead of sound science on Yucca Mountain. No! I also will never accept President Bush breaking his word during an election campaign. He promised sound science in 2000 and adherence to the court decisions without congressional interference in 2004. Nevadans should never accept that he will break his word.
Storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain after 9/11 is indefensible in the name of homeland defense. Thousands of targets of opportunity will be presented to terrorists as the waste is transported across the country. There are shoulder-held weapons that can burn through heavy tank armor and then have a secondary explosion to kill the crew. No container can resist this attack. Even if the container isn't hit, the truck or train will be destroyed, bringing up visions of Three Mile Island.
Nevadans have the power, as citizens, to stop Yucca Mountain. We must also use this power to encourage the media, print and visual, to tell the story.
Frank Perna
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BusinessWeek
September 5, 2005
Maybe In My Backyard
High fuel prices and global warming are making nukes an easier sell
By John Carey
Hobbled by images of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, staggering costs, and opposition from enviros and politicos, nuclear power once seemed destined to go the way of the dodo. "Just five years ago, utility executives were saying they wouldn't be caught dead even talking about a new plant," recalls Massachusetts Institute of Technology nuclear engineer Andrew C. Kadak. U.S. utilities were shutting reactors, and Germany planned to pull the plug on its facilities.
Today, nukes are on the verge of a global comeback. A new plant is under construction in Finland, the first in Europe since 1991. France, which already has 58 plants, says it will build 30 more. China plans to spend $50 billion on atomic energy construction by 2020. In the U.S., where 103 existing reactors have become cash cows, a dozen companies are seriously considering building new plants. And the energy bill signed by President George W. Bush on Aug. 8 has billions of dollars in subsidies. "Things have never looked better," says Dan R. Keuter, vice-president for business development at Entergy Nuclear (ETR ) in New Orleans.
What's fueling this resurgence? In a word, economics. Rising natural gas and coal prices are starting to make nukes look inexpensive. Another factor is global warming. Not only do new restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide increase the costs of fossil fuel-generated electricity, fears of climate change have softened opposition among some enviros. While the government must still solve problems of waste and security, says Steve Cochran of Environmental Defense, "given the challenge of climate change, the world needs to be open to every low carbon initiative -- including nuclear power."
Construction in the U.S. won't start tomorrow, however. There are still major uncertainties. Natural gas prices must stay high to make nukes economical. With increasing imports of liquefied natural gas, that's not a sure thing. Utilities must also convince Wall Street that the long delays and huge cost overruns that doomed N-power in the 1980s won't happen again.
As a result, companies say they won't order a new plant until they are sure they can get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a process expected to take four to five years. "At the very earliest, we are looking at construction starting around 2010," says Adrian Heymer, director of new plants deployment at the Nuclear Energy Institute. Since construction would take four to five years, electrons from the new nukes couldn't start flowing until 2014 or 2015 at the soonest.
It could be longer than that. John W. Rowe, chairman and CEO of Exelon Corp. (EXC ), believes that a new generation of reactors is essential. But even though Chicago-based Exelon is the nation's biggest nuclear utility, with 17 reactors, Rowe says the risks are still too great to order new plants now. "While the stars and moons are moving in the right direction, they're not there yet for us," he says.
FRUSTRATION FACTOR
The lack of immediate action frustrates Washington politicians, who crafted energy legislation that, among other things, was designed to make nukes nice again. The bill offers government loan guarantees so that banks won't demand a risk premium when financing new reactors, and a production tax credit. It also provides up to $2 billion to cover costs associated with regulatory delays. That's on top of changes Congress made to the licensing process in 1992. "For anyone who says there is still too much regulatory uncertainty, I have to question how serious they are," says one Senate staffer. Congress has "piled yet one more security blanket on the pile of blankets," he says.
Industry execs insist that new plants will be built, but say they are getting there one step at a time. "No one would make a decision to order a plant now," explains Michael J. Wallace, executive vice-president of Constellation Energy Group. The Baltimore utility and others, however, are already partway there. Entergy, Exelon, and Dominion have filed applications with the NRC to get three sites licensed for new reactors. Reactor makers Westinghouse, General Electric (GE ), and Areva, which is building the Finland plant, have filed or will soon file applications to get new designs certified by the agency. A group of eight U.S. power companies, called NuStart Energy Development, is working on applications for construction and operating licenses for the GE and Westinghouse designs.
Meanwhile, the public has become more accepting. The percentage of Americans who favor nuclear power jumped from 46% in 1995 to 70% in May, 2005, according to Bisconti Research. Some communities are actually backing new plants. In Calvert County, Md., where Constellation Energy has proposed adding a new reactor to an existing facility, "we are doing everything we can to see that kind of investment made in the county," says David Hale, president of the county board of commissioners.
There have also been technological improvements. The basic approach hasn't changed, but new designs are easier to build and operate -- and better able to handle problems. They are "more safe by an order of magnitude," says MIT's Kadak. The industry expects progress on the waste front as well. New radiation exposure limits proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency for the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada in early August could pave the way for the facility to eventually accept waste.
Add it up, and nukes no longer look like dodos. "What we are seeing is an economic change that is beginning to overwhelm the construction and licensing risks," says Thomas A. Christopher, CEO of Framatome ANP Inc., a unit of France's Areva. A new 1,000-MW plant is expected to cost at least $1.5 billion. That compares with $1.2 billion for a new coal plant or $500 million for a gas-fired facility, which is quicker to build. But utilities have learned to run reactors more efficiently, making existing nukes cheap producers of power.
Now they figure that with natural gas prices tripling and coal prices doubling over the past five years, new nuke plants will be gold mines. "What we have to do is build the first two to six plants and prove to Wall Street that we can do it on schedule," says Entergy's Keuter. If that happens, the mid-21st century could be a new Atomic Age.
By John Carey in Washington, with bureau reports
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Financial Times
September 05, 2005
Energy minister gets ready to feel the heat
By Thomas Catan
Malcolm Wicks has just taken delivery of his new Toyota Prius, the energy-saving hybrid car much favoured by Hollywood celebrities.
"It's only a small thing but in terms of cleaner energy or energy efficiency, we do need to engage public institutions in more of a debate about how they can use energy efficiently," the energy minister says in his Westminster office.
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Old Colony Memorial
September 06, 2005
Pilgrim is running out of room
Entergy to bury spent fuel in Plymouth if Yucca Mountain isn't used by 2012
By Daniel Axelrod
MPG Newspapers
Plymouth officials will have some pull after Entergy applies with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in January to relicense the Pilgrim nuclear power plant for 20 years beyond 2012.
Town officials and the public can influence the scope of the environmental impact study the utility must complete and raise concerns about how well some of the plant's aging technical systems work.
If the plant gets a new license, town officials can even negotiate a more lucrative annual tax payout deal. But one thing Plymouth's brass can't control is whether and when Entergy officials remove multiple tons of spent nuclear fuel.
All the nuclear fuel ever used to power the Pilgrim plant's boiling water reactor since 1972 is still at the plant cooling in a concrete pool full of water.
Spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste is temporarily stored above ground at 131 locations in 39 states.
That fuel is part of a decades-old controversy about whether Nevada's Yucca Mountain is the place to put it.
Plymouth officials visited Yucca Mountain
The Yucca Mountain Ridge sits on the edge of the nuclear weapons test site in Nye County Nevada, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and its population of nearly 2 million.
Over the years, military and government officials tested some 800 nuclear weapons at the site, which abuts Nellis Air Force Base. Death Valley is nearby over the California border.
Roughly 15 people live 12 miles south of the Yucca Mountain site in Lathrop Wells.
About 1,400 people live 18 miles to the south in the small farming community of Amargosa Valley.
Most jobs near Yucca Mountain relate to farming, tourism and the government.
Three years ago, chairman of the board of selectmen Kenneth Tavares, former selectman David Rushforth, former town manager Eleanor Beth and Pilgrim plant spokesman David Tarantino visited the mountain.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry-lobbying group, paid for the trip.
After receiving security clearance and safety training the town officials put on hard hats and earplugs and rode a mining train equipped with emergency respirators into the main tunnel under the mountain's ridge.
Town officials explored the 25-foot diameter 5-mile long U-shaped main tunnel 1,000 feet below the Yucca crest. The tunnel sits 1,000 feet above the water table.
Scientists work in several alcoves off that main loop and tests are performed in a 161/2 foot diameter roughly 2-mile long drift cut through the mountain.
At the time, the selectmen came away impressed and convinced Yucca Mountain is where the country's nuclear waste should go.
"I was very impressed by what had been done," Tavares said. "We toured all day with people who had worked on the construction, and they were telling us everything from how it had been constructed to why it was a safe place to be."
"The people we talked to were in favor of it, saying it was the place to be, but at same time there was a great deal of discussion in newspapers that senators and the governor didn't want it out there and didn't want it to be a desert dumping ground," Tavares added.
Water cooler chat or cover-up?
Critics of the government's plans to store the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain think the mountain's seemingly remote and secure looks are deceiving.
Michele Boyd is the legislative director of Public Citizen, a national non-profit public interest organization that, along with Nevada officials and a host of public safety and environmental organizations, sued the government to prevent the use of Yucca Mountain.
"The groundwater under Yucca Mountain is used for drinking and irrigation," Boyd said.
"One area that uses the water is an organic community called Amargosa Valley that's 20 miles away, which provides a huge amount of milk to the state."
Boyd is concerned about the accuracy of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) models about the amount of moisture that will penetrate the mountain and corrode containers of radioactive materials, the speed of groundwater in the mountain and the rock's ability to keep radiation from escaping.
Water underneath Yucca Mountain flows toward the Amargosa Valley and that water is the "vehicle most likely to move radioactive particles from a repository to the water table and on to contact with people and the environment," according to Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management's Web site.
Energy department officials' April announcement that they discovered e-mails written by U.S. Geological Survey employees that could have lead to data being falsified about Yucca Mountain are fueling Boyd's concerns.
According to an April Las Vegas Sun article, Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., released edited copies of the e-mails and various documents in which "employees discussed how to 'fudge' information, make things up and get around a Quality Assurance program in place to back up and document scientific work."
"The Investigator General's Office of both the DOE and the USGS as well as the FBI are checking to see if there was criminal activity along with the Work Force Subcommittee," Boyd said.
"But the problem is the DOE is doing an internal investigation about the ramifications of the falsification," Boyd said.
In May, Nevada officials released additional e-mails containing long conversations between DOE employees and contractors - documents the state officials claim support their position Yucca Mountain is unsafe for nuclear waste storage.
The Nevada officials found the e-mails after months of compiling documents from the Licensing Support Network.
That network is a database of DOE documents related to the Yucca Mountain project entitled a "Chronology of Selected Yucca Mountain Project E-mails," according to the Las Vegas Sun.
Nevada officials posted the e-mails they found on the state's Web site including correspondence sent from DOE employee Larry Rickertsen to Robert Andrews, Jean Younker and Thomas Statton in 1996.
One e-mail from Rickertson reads: "We have been able to get by NWTRB (Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board) reviews and other similar situations, but ... we will have severe difficulties when we get into the real arenas," the Las Vegas Sun reported.
"I am convinced that the data we have been using are not only uncertain, they are not even representative of the ranges that we will be able to defend when we get into those arenas," Rickertson wrote.
A year later Rickertsen wrote another e-mail to Jan Docka.
In it, Rickertsen wrote that it's impossible to show the doses of radiation released from the spent fuel containers - even with special drip shields designed to keep out moisture - would be less than the standard the EPA originally set of how much radiation individuals could be exposed to annually.
According to the Las Vegas Sun, another e-mail sent from government employee Bob Levich to Paul Dixon reads: "We CANNOT and CAN NEVER rely completely (or even mostly) on engineering barriers for protection of the public health and safety in a geologic repository system. If we try to do so, this program is dead! Just build concrete pads on Jackass Flats and shove the waste inside concrete bunkers.... It is ridiculous to completely rely on engineered barriers, the lifespan of which has never been tests for even tens or hundreds of years."
Indeed, Yucca Mountain critics think the government is trying to cover-up evidence and data that show the site isn't safe for nuclear waste.
Allen Benson, DOE Communications Manager for Yucca Mountain Project, said the DOE reviewed and tested the mountain and the validity of the e-mails' information and determining the mountain is safe for storage.
"We found these issues and we made them public, so I don't know what kind of cover-up others are talking about," Benson said. "And in a Congressional hearing the principal architect of the e-mails testified under oath that he falsified no information (about the mountain or its safety)."
"In terms of these e-mail issues, a couple of people were involved in venting, if you will, and my comments to the press at the time when all this came out, were this was water cooler chatter," Benson added.
Benson said the DOE took the e-mails very seriously.
"We're giving credence to these because we referred them to Inspectors General of Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior," Benson said.
Go put it in the mountain
More than 161 million Americans- including Plymouth's 56,000 residents - live within 75 miles of a nuclear waste storage facility.
In 30 years, U.S. utilities will produce 105,000 more metric tons of nuclear waste, roughly double the current amount in the U.S. today.
Government workers plan to put roughly 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and solid high-level radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain.
"Unfortunately with nuclear power there is no good solution," Boyd, of Public Citizen, said.
"We need a finite problem, not an infinite problem, so we need to stop making the waste and leave it where it is until we figure out a better solution.
Congress began planning for a nuclear repository in 1982, when it enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which directed the federal government to take charge of disposing the nation's nuclear waste.
Before choosing Yucca Mountain, scientists considered leaving spent nuclear fuel at current storage sites, burying it in the ocean floor, sticking it in salt flats, putting it in polar ice sheets and sending it into outer space.
According to the Office of Civilian Waste Management, experts ruled out the most of those options. Current sites don't have enough room. Waste put in salt flats would sink and be irretrievable, hot nuclear waste containers could melt polar ice sheets.
It would also be too expensive - and dangerous if there was an accident - to send nuclear waste into space.
Placing it deep underground in a geologic repository became government officials' favored waste disposal option.
The Congressional legislation in the early '80s created the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for the cost of fuel disposal.
"People paying electric bills have been paying a fee into a DOE fund and there's been somewhere between $18 and $20 billion collected by the federal government for the purpose of shipping and storing fuel," Entergy spokesman David Tarantino said.
Congress charged the DOE with selecting, designing and operating a repository, while the EPA must decide standards for protecting the environment from radiation.
Besides Yucca Mountain, the DOE recommended two others sites for study to President Ronald Reagan in 1986: the salt beds of Deaf Smith County, Texas and the basalt rocks of the semi-arid region of the Columbia Plateau in southeastern Washington stateknown as Hanford.
"Yucca Mountain was recommended by the U.S. Geological Survey because of the attributes the site possesses including a stable geology, a deep water table, no one lives there, it's a desert environment and ... it's remote," Yucca Mountain Project communications manager Benson said.
Congress later passed the Nuclear Policy Amendments Act of 1987, which directed the DOE to look only at Yucca Mountain.
"And we did look at it," Benson said. "We studied it, characterized it and in February of 2002 the (DOE) secretary recommended it to the president who recommended it to Congress."
If Yucca Mountain does become America's nuclear waste repository, the waste will be placed in concrete casks or canisters.
These containers will be laid horizontally on pedestals prior to closing or sealing the mountain.
Future generations will be able to potentially reuse or reprocess the spent nuclear fuel. NRC repository regulations require keeping the mountain open for at least 50 years as waste is placed inside and allowing individuals to open the mountain 100 or more years later.
The debate continues
Yucca Mountain's critics argue it's in an earthquake zone. They question how safe the mountain is because there are volcanic cones in the area. (See sidebar on page A7)
"There are questions whether there could be eruptions in the area that are unresolved because scientists haven't figured out the likelihood of volcanic activity," Boyd said.
"Magma could enter underground tunnels and cause canisters to fail, and of course earthquakes are obvious. They'll cause massive damage to facilities," she added.
Boyd said it's a myth that using Yucca Mountain will consolidate all America's waste in one space and make America safer.
"You can't move waste away from a site for five years, because it needs to cool, so there will always be waste all over (the country)," Boyd said.
"We'll have waste on site, waste at Yucca Mountain and waste on roads and rails (while it's transported to the repository), so instead of consolidating waste we will move it all over the country," Boyd said.
He wonders how quickly canisters of spent fuel would corrode at the site. Inevitably, some moisture will absorb into Yucca Mountain.
Nevada officials argue it's full of holes or faults from past earthquakes.
Some scientists favor using man-made barriers such as titanium drip shields to cover the spent fuel canisters to keep them from corroding as quickly.
"But there's still a lot of controversy around what chemicals are in the water that could corrode them," Boyd said.
Initially, the spent fuel's canisters will be so hot condensation won't necessarily form, but as they cool condensation could form and water could potentially drip on them, Nevada officials argue.
Benson said the DOE is considering drip shields.
"Even though you get five to six inches of rain each year and we're in a desert environment, some amount of moisture will penetrate the mountain and over the millennia we might want to make sure we'll use a drip shield," Benson said.
Boyd, however, thinks there are alternatives to the government transporting waste across the country and storing it in the mountain.
One common alternative idea to using Yucca Mountain is storing 40,000 of tons nuclear waste at an interim site in Utah.
"Right now we don't have a good solution, and we need to do more research, and we need to stop wasting money at Yucca," Boyd said.
According to U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., the price tag for Yucca is expected to climb to $60 billion or more.
So far, the enactment of the nuclear waste policy act cost $8 billion, while Yucca Mountain was $5 billion, according to Benson.
Berkley, along with other Yucca Mountain critics, thinks storing nuclear waste at the reactor sites themselves is the safest and most affordable solution for dealing with the nation's nuclear waste
"High-level nuclear waste is already being stored at nuclear power plants across our nation, and there is no reason why it cannot safely remain there for decades," Berkley wrote in a press release.
Berkley thinks the stakes are too high to transport nuclear waste across the country for burial in Yucca Mountain because terrorists might target the waste.
"The terrorist threat created by decades of waste shipments and the enormous likelihood of an accident involving nuclear waste make on-site storage the safest option for the nation's spent nuclear fuel," according to Berkley's press release.
"One accident or terrorist strike involving high-level waste would endanger lives and cause a catastrophe that would leave millions of dollars in damages and take years to clean up," Berkley said.
Berkley remains unconvinced Yucca Mountain is safe in light of USGS and DOE employee e-mails that surfaced in recent months questioning aspects of Yucca Mountain's safety.
"The latest allegations only compound existing deficiencies at the quality assurance program as identified last year by the General Accountability Office and outlined in its April 2004 report, 'Yucca Mountain: Persistent Quality Assurance Problems Could Delay Repository Licensing and Operation,'" Berkley said.
Benson dismissed critics' arguments.
"Yucca Mountain was formed 10 to 15 million years ago, and it's not a volcano; it's the result of volcanoes," Benson said.
"We did intensely study this, and when you stand on Yucca Mountain the cinder cones are moving away. The youngest one is 80,000 years old so if any new ones develop they're moving south and away," Benson said.
He thinks the radiation is going to stay safely in the mountain because its top is 5,000 feet above sea level.
Plus the waste would sit 1,000 feet under the top of the mountain and about 1,000 feet above the water table.
As far as safely transporting the waste, Benson said there's never been a major accident before.
"Everything would be convoyed safely," Benson said. "We've been moving this kind of material around country for a very long time, and we're confident in our ability to safely transport this material."
He added the nuclear material would be shipped over a period of 24 years in multiple shipments and not all at once.
"When you want to stop something you'll find every excuse you can to question it, but what are the alternatives (to Yucca Mountain)?" Benson said. "Nobody is coming up with any realistic or valuable alternatives."
Benson questioned whether Yucca Mountain critics have ulterior motives against nuclear power itself.
Benson added leaving waste at reactor sites isn't possible since many sites don't have room to store spent fuel rods, and they'd have to go off-line as a result.
Here in Plymouth, Entergy spokesman Tarantino said the Pilgrim plant has plenty of room to bury spent fuel rods in big dry caste storage after the spent fuel rod pool fills when the plant's license expires in 2012.
The plant sits on 150 acres of industrial-zoned land. Entergy owns another 1,600 acres of forestry land to the west of the plant.
"For however long the plant operates, we have sufficient room to store things, but that's not the desirable option," Tarantino said.
Yucca Mountain is located near the Ghost Dance and the Solitario Canyon faults.
But when it comes to earthquakes, Benson is quick to point out Yucca Mountain has already proven itself to be sturdy.
"In an earthquake, the motion is at surface," Benson said. "Back in '92 there was a 5.6 or 5.7 earthquake not far from Yucca, and there were scientists in a tunnel near the epicenter and they didn't even know an earthquake happened."
"All facilities will be built to withstand a 6.5 level earthquake at Yucca Mountain, and the University of Nevada will monitor seismic activity," Benson added.
So what's next?
For the last 10 years, Nevada officials sued the federal government on multiple grounds to stop the Yucca Mountain Project.
These lawsuits were merged into four different cases argued before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on Jan. 14, 2004.
Appeals' court judges dismissed all but one of state officials' claims, but ruled in favor of the Nevada official's radiation standards complaint.
The judges ruled that the length of time the EPA allowed the DOE to have for Yucca Mountain before higher levels of radiation leaked out and the amount of radiation allowed to be emitted were unacceptable.
The EPA originally had a 10,000-year standard for how long the mountain must contain most of the spent fuel's radiation, which didn't follow the standard required by Congress.
According to the EPA's original standard, the DOE would have to prove individuals were exposed to more than 15 millirems of radiation - or about the radiation of a chest x-ray - annually for 10,000 years.
However, Congress requires the EPA follow the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations, which determined Yucca Mountain should be able to contain radiation based on peak levels or what's emitted when the bulk of the radioactive waste is decayed.
Peak doses of radiation could come anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 years or more from the time the radiation is deposited in the mountain.
At the beginning of August the EPA announced it was keeping the standard that individuals only be exposed to 15 millirems annually from nuclear radiation for the next 10,000 years at Yucca Mountain.
The EPA retained that standard despite the fact it was thrown out by the federal appeals court last year because 10,000 was dubbed "arbitrary" and it didn't follow National Academy of Sciences Recommendations.
However, EPA officials said they'd create a different limit for how much radiation it's acceptable for individuals to be exposed to from 10,000 to 1 million years.
Individuals now can be exposed to 350 millirems per year for 10,000 to one million years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, argues the average American is exposed to 360 millirems of radiation from mostly natural sources, such as radon and other radioactive elements in the earth already.
Nevada officials wonder why the EPA would let Americans be exposed to 350 millirems more per year than the average exposure.
Medical and dental treatments, television sets and emissions from coal-fired power plants are also sources of radiation.
DOE officials are convinced Yucca Mountain is safe and sound, but Nevada officials and other Yucca critics will keep fighting the project.
Ultimately, NRC officials will decide whether the mountain is safe. They will consider and potentially issue the application for Yucca Mountain to be used as a repository.
The next step in the process is for the DOE to certify the licensing support network of millions of pages of material in support of the license application.
That could occur sometime within the next several weeks. Six months later the DOE will submit an application to NRC, which would determine whether the application is complete and docket it to be reviewed.
Then, by law, the NRC can review the application for up to four years.
If the application is approved, the NRC will issue a license to construct the facility at the earliest in mid- to late-2010 and construction could be finished by 2012, Benson said.
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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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