Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, March 27, 2009
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Las Vegas SUN
March 26, 2009
Some suggest NM area could replace Yucca Mountain
The Associated Press
Longtime Carlsbad Mayor Bob Forrest recalls the days when no one wanted to take the federal government's radioactive waste except his southern New Mexico community.
Ten years after it opened, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, commonly known as WIPP, remains the government's only radioactive waste dump.
But now, Forrest says, the climate for all things nuclear has changed, and communities across the nation are fighting for projects.
Forrest himself believes the vast, 250 million-year-old salt beds that house WIPP east of his community of about 25,000 could store high-level nuclear waste such as that once destined for the Yucca Mountain project the Obama administration is apparently abandoning.
Such a repository would be separate from WIPP, he said.
WIPP, excavated 2,150 feet below the surface of the desert, is designed for so-called transuranic waste generated by the nation's defense work _ such things as plutonium-contaminated rags, tools or clothing. Although it takes some defense waste that's so radioactive it's handled by robotic machines, high-level and commercial nuclear waste are prohibited.
Some worry that could change as the nation looks for a place to put nearly 60,000 tons of highly radioactive fuel rods generated by the nuclear power industry.
For two decades, Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert northwest of Las Vegas was the focus of government plans for such waste. But earlier this month, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Yucca Mountain no longer is viewed as an option.
Instead, Chu said the administration believes used reactor fuel can remain at power plants while a comprehensive plan for disposal is developed. He hopes to have a recommendation from a special panel on alternatives to Yucca Mountain and long-term disposal before the end of the year.
Forrest said Monday he has high hopes of making the Carlsbad area "the next Yucca Mountain" and will lobby for such a project. It would be separate from WIPP in another part of the salt beds.
"The community's ready, the timing couldn't be better. ... I think the stage is right to move forward," Forrest said.
He believes Carlsbad would be behind the idea _ unlike Nevada was with Yucca Mountain.
Polls conducted by Nevada newspapers consistently showed most Nevadans opposed the project, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., vowed to starve it of funds.
"If you don't have the community support you can't get to first base," Forrest said. "That's the key to our success (with WIPP) but it didn't happen overnight."
State Environment Secretary Ron Curry said there will always be some who want to expand WIPP's mission, but noted Gov. Bill Richardson ordered the state Environment Department to modify WIPP's permit to ensure high-level reactor waste isn't stored at the site.
Curry does not favor a Yucca Mountain-type facility, even if it's not part of WIPP.
"The federal government must abide by the promise it made to New Mexicans more than a decade ago and focus on WIPP's original purpose to dispose of only transuranic waste," he said. "We will vigorously oppose any attempt to expand or alter the mission of WIPP to allow high-level waste."
Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, a longtime WIPP watchdog, said the idea of burying high-level defense waste or nuclear fuel at WIPP keeps coming up _ despite being prohibited by the land withdrawal act that authorized the permanent repository.
He said the administration's recent actions over Yucca Mountain have raised concerns, but he believes New Mexicans would fight any attempt to put such a repository in the state.
Waste that would go into a Yucca Mountain-type dump "is orders of magnitude different (from WIPP) in terms of the order of radioactivity, in terms of the physical heat generated," he said. Hancock also said scientific studies that came up during hearings over WIPP demonstrated salt was unsuitable for such waste.
Roger Nelson, chief scientist for the DOE's Carlsbad field office, said if Yucca Mountain is to be replaced, the nation should consider disposal in salt.
Nelson said that doesn't mean WIPP.
"WIPP has a mission. It's been designed and legislated and authorized," he said. "If Congress or any other agency wanted to change WIPP, it would jeopardize this mission that is working so well."
There are other places _ the formation where WIPP lies covers thousands of square miles that are virtually contiguous into central Kansas, "so there's a lot of real estate for a salt repository in the U.S.," he said.
From the beginning of the nuclear age in the 1940s, scientists studied what to do with radioactive waste that remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Early ideas included sending it on a rock to the sun or burying it in deep sea subduction zones.
Eventually, they turned to salt beds.
"The safest way to isolate something that you don't want for a very, very long time is find an ancient salt formation and put your waste in the middle," Nelson said. "Salt is still there for a very good reason, it has not been eroded away. It's indicator of hydrological stability. The same hydrological barriers that protect the salt will protect the waste."
Still, some critics have argued for years the WIPP site is the wrong place.
Concerns over water leaching into the salt were raised in numerous hearings on the repository over the years; the DOE eventually dismissed them. But Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping scheduled a news conference in Albuquerque on WIPP's 10th anniversary Thursday to release a hydrological report that argues the conceptual groundwater model used to assess the WIPP site was fatally flawed.
Forrest has proposed advertising in major newspapers that Carlsbad has a solution for nuclear power waste. In recent years, Carlsbad has competed for, but lost, projects to make fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.
"It's been a lifesaver for us, and there's a lot of potential for more projects," the mayor said. "As long as we keep safety as the No. 1 issue, I think the sky's the limit."
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Reno Gazette-Journal
March 26, 2009
Nevada in a good position to stop Yucca project
Catherine Cortez Masto
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said this month that the proposed Yucca Mountain site is no longer an option for storing highly radioactive nuclear waste.
For the first time in the 20-year battle against the proposed Yucca Mountain waste repository, Nevada is in a favorable position to stop the project once and for all.
Nevada has a friend in the White House. President Barack Obama has proposed drastic budget cuts for the program and has expressed his commitment to finding better alternatives for addressing the nuclear waste problem.
The federal government finally is being realistic and respectful of the scientific findings concerning the Yucca Mountain site. While I am optimistic that we will see the demise of the project, we cannot relax our efforts until a comprehensive, binding decision is reached.
In the meantime, the administrative proceedings continue to move forward.
The Department of Energy has filed a license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The state has responded with its own serious legal contentions. My office is committed to meeting our state’s current obligations in the NRC licensing process and in pending litigation before the federal courts.
Yet there are a few individuals who suggest Nevada should drop its case against DOE in exchange for monetary benefits.
Despite what these Yucca proponents say, there is no money available for so-called benefits.
The proponents cite provisions in federal law that supposedly offer money to Nevada in exchange for reversing its 20-year position. These provisions have long since expired.
At a time when the federal government has finally questioned the viability of the project and is searching for better alternatives, why would Nevada reverse its 20-year position and pursue a strategy to chase money that is no longer available or explore a reprocessing option in Nevada that is scientifically and practically unsound by any reasonable account?
While I agree that there must be a national dialogue on the environmentally and scientifically appropriate method for the safe disposal of nuclear waste and that Nevada should play a role in that dialogue, the reprocessing option in its current form would not work for our state.
Nevada is the driest state in the nation and is not the place to site a water-intensive nuclearwaste recycling facility, thousands of miles from nuclear-waste-generating power plants. Does it really make sense to place a nuclear reactor reprocessing facility that generates millions of gallons of liquid highly radioactive waste in the major earthquake zone underlying Yucca Mountain? Or, for that matter, transport nuclear waste to the remote Nevada desert for recycling and then transport it again to where it will be used?
Until a final decision is reached terminating the Yucca Mountain project, we should not let ourselves be distracted from our responsibility to our state and future generations of Nevadans. We should not be distracted by false hopes of minimal monetary benefits that are no longer viable under federal law.
My office will hold DOE to the requirements of the law. Now, more than ever, Nevada is poised to stop the Yucca Mountain beast once and for all. Until that time, we must continue to rise to the challenge.
• Catherine Cortez Masto is Nevada’s attorney general.
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Reno News & Review
March 26, 2009
Overcome fear of a nuclear Nevada
By Amanda Williams
More than most, Nevada is a state that was founded upon one idea: opportunity. Over time, Nevada has come through many circumstances and trials, and yet it has found ways to overcome adversity by way of new opportunity. It is bothersome to me that we are not following those same ideals today.
Nevada became a state in order to secure enough electoral votes to help Lincoln win the presidency. This state’s motto isn’t “Battle Born” for just any reason. Nevada came into existence on Oct. 31, 1864, because, at the time, the United States was a war-torn country, and it needed all of the Union allies it could find. Lincoln found an ally in Nevada, a way to help secure his win in the upcoming elections.
As time passed, Nevada developed as a state. It was always a bit different from the rest of the states in the country. In 1931, Nevada was hurting. It had no real means of a steady economy, and the Depression was barreling toward it. So what did the Nevada government do in 1931 to help ease the pain of the Depression? Well, one of the main things was legalize gambling. Thus Nevada began to develop as the entertainment state, and people came from all around the world to test their luck in the casinos.
It was President Harry S. Truman who stated, “Then we came to the great gambling and marriage destruction hell, known as Nevada. To look at it from the air it is just that—hell on Earth. … Such places should be abolished, and so should Nevada.” Truman had harsh feelings toward Nevada, to say the least. But I believe it was because Truman never understood what Nevada was all about. He saw it as an abomination, but it was truly a developing area that was advanced for those times.
Nevada may have been hell to President Truman, but the Battle Born state was just that, a state that grew out of war, and it would fight to stay afloat. But Nevada currently seems to be losing that founding value. The state isn’t taking advantage of opportunities, and fear is clouding the judgment of the politicians involved.
Nevada is suffering from a rather large economic crisis. Experts tell us this isn’t a depression, it is only a recession, but it is time that Nevada reestablish its true nature. In times of need, we need to become resourceful, and Nevada has something the rest of the country wants, a place to store nuclear waste. Nevada has the means and can use this to our advantage.
Bring in this so-called waste. Store it here. And then charge the people who want it stored here. This state can be resourceful once again and make money off an unlikely source to help us get through a hard economic period. We need to get over our fear of what may happen, and embrace what we do know. Right now Nevada needs the money, and we have a way to make money, we just need to stop living in fear.
The Yucca Mountain project has been very controversial for many years now. Some people want it, some people don’t, and there are others who are just scared because they don’t know any better. This could be a great thing for Nevada for the time being and down the road. When scientists find something better to do with nuclear waste, then we can move it out of Nevada. Even though political maneuvering in Washington, D.C., is attempting to pull this opportunity from our fingertips, the issue will re-emerge—maybe with the next administration—because this country needs to solve its nuclear waste problem. This is a money making opportunity—one that Nevada needs to jump on now before we are told we have to store the waste here anyway, and then we’ll make no money off of the situation.
This state grew as the “Battle Born” state for a reason, and it is time that Nevada shows the country exactly why we deserve the motto.
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Center for Media and Democracy
March 26, 2009
Wisconsin's Balance of Power: The Campaign to Repeal the Nuclear Moratorium
by Diane Farsetta
Wisconsin law sets two conditions that must be met before new nuclear power plants can be built in the state. One is that there must be "a federally licensed facility" for high-level nuclear waste. In addition, the proposed nuclear plant "must be economically advantageous to ratepayers."
It's a law that the nuclear power industry doesn't like. Given the near-death of the planned waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, and the estimated $6 to $12 billion cost (pdf) of building one nuclear reactor -- not to mention the lack of interest from private investors and the tanking economy -- Wisconsin's law effectively bans new nuclear plants in the state, for the foreseeable future.
Earlier this year, the major U.S. industry group Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) registered four lobbyists in Wisconsin. NEI is lobbying state legislators on issues related to "nuclear generation ... engineering education and other issues related to state policies on energy, job creation, and environmental law," according to disclosure forms.
It's the first time that NEI has had lobbyists in Wisconsin since at least 1996, though the group has organized public and media events here, especially in recent years. As it does on the national level, NEI argues that building new nuclear power plants would bring good jobs to Wisconsin while helping reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions, especially from coal-fired power plants. NEI's foray into Wisconsin politics is logical and not at all surprising -- until you compare it to the group's apparent lack of interest in other states with similar laws.
Moratorium nation
Wisconsin passed its moratorium on new nuclear plants in 1983, the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a similar measure in California. While the federal government decides "how to build and operate nuclear plants," the Supreme Court found that California's restrictions were allowable, as "Congress has not required States to 'go nuclear.'"
California still bans new nuclear plants, until there is "a demonstrated technology or means for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste." The size of the state and its growing energy needs led the trade publication Nuclear News to call California (pdf) "critical, not just for the economic prospects of the nuclear industry but for the environmental impact on and energy supply adequacy for the nation's most populous state."
Yet NEI doesn't have a single lobbyist in California. There are local people and groups who want to repeal the state ban. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has tried repeatedly, through the legislature and through a ballot initiative campaign, even setting up a group called Power for California. However, NEI's involvement has been minimal. When the Fresno Nuclear Energy Group held its first public event in 2007, NEI's high-profile spokesman, former Greenpeace activist turned industry PR consultant Patrick Moore, was the main attraction.
It's not just California and Wisconsin. More than a dozen states effectively ban new nuclear power plants. Minnesota law simply says the state will not approve "the construction of a new nuclear-powered electric generating plant," though a bill to repeal this language has been introduced. Connecticut has a moratorium similar to California's. Before West Virginia can consider a nuclear plant, there must be a waste facility "proven safe, functional and effective" over two years, and nuclear power must be "economically feasible." In Oregon, voters must approve all nuclear projects, and no nuclear plants can be built until there is a federally-licensed "adequate repository for the disposal of the high-level radioactive waste."
Kentucky not only requires a high-level nuclear waste facility "in actual operation" by the time the new plant would require it, but also wants to know "the cost of [waste] disposal ... with reasonable certainty." (A bill to remove these restrictions is working its way through Kentucky's legislature.) Maine and Massachusetts also require an operational waste facility. Montana voters must approve building a nuclear power plant, its "radioactive materials" must "be contained ... with no reasonable chance of intentional or unintentional escape or diversion," and its owner must post a bond worth 30 percent "of the total capital cost of the facility," to ensure adequate funds to close the plant. Illinois requires either a federally-approved waste disposal strategy or the state legislature's approval for the project. New Jersey law necessitates a "safe ... proposed method for disposal of radioactive waste material." In Pennsylvania, a nuclear plant can only be built if it provides a cheaper alternative to coal plants, or if the energy needs cannot be met by coal.
Of all these states, NEI has lobbyists in just three. Michael McGarey, of NEI's Washington DC office, is registered in Kentucky, where he reported lobbying expenditures in March 2008 and February 2009. McGarey's also a registered lobbyist in Pennsylvania, where he was active in early 2007. Then there's Wisconsin, where NEI recently registered four lobbyists: McGarey, two other DC-based employees and a Madison lawyer. That's not bad for a state where, even if the moratorium were repealed, "its [energy] demand growth may still be too modest to encourage new reactor projects," according to Nuclear News.
Madison's pro-nuclear environmentalist
NEI's man in Madison is Frank Jablonski, an attorney who specializes in environmental and consumer issues. He recently testified before two state legislative committees, urging them to repeal Wisconsin's moratorium. "Jablonski is the former general counsel of Wisconsin's Environmental Decade, the group now known as Clean Wisconsin," reported the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. At the same hearing, the current "head of energy policy" for Clean Wisconsin, a local environmental non-profit, "cautioned against expanding nuclear power in the state."
Jablonski readily fits the "environmentalist who just happens to support nuclear power, much to the chagrin of their environmentalist colleagues" framing. NEI knows how well this storyline appeals to reporters. It's been wildly successful in presenting NEI consultants Patrick Moore and Christine Todd Whitman as environmentalists who just happen to support nuclear power, and the NEI-funded and Hill & Knowlton-organized Clean and Safe Energy Coalition as "a large grassroots coalition that unites unlikely allies." (To its credit, the Journal-Sentinel described Moore, who also addressed the joint committee hearing, as the head of "an energy coalition funded by the Nuclear Energy Institute.")
Jablonski registered as an NEI lobbyist in February 2009, but previously supported nuclear power. At a March 2008 conference in Madison, Jablonski gave a talk titled, "Changing climate and changing understandings: Paths to new opinions on nuclear energy" (pdf). His profile for the event describes Jablonski as "formerly a member of the Sierra Club" who "recently crossed from the 'anti' to 'pro' side of the nuclear power debate." While still an "anti," Jablonski wrote in a 1995 op/ed column that "Wisconsin's low [electricity] costs were achieved largely because of laws and regulatory actions that the utilities adamantly opposed, such as the nuclear power moratorium."
"Back in the early 2000s or thereabout, I decided that it was necessary to at least think about whether nuclear should be a possibility, given the circumstances that we're facing and what the scientists have told us about climate [change]," Jablonski told me. After three years of research, "I now favor the use of nuclear energy, its expansion and its further development." His relationship with NEI began at the March 2008 conference where Jablonski gave a pro-nuclear talk. "At that meeting, there were people from the Nuclear Energy Institute, and I hooked up with them," he explained. As an NEI lobbyist, he's met with state legislators and staffers "on both sides of the moratorium issue, to provide my perspective as an environmentalist who changed his position on nuclear."
Asked how he discloses that he's an NEI lobbyist, when speaking publicly about nuclear power, Jablonski got defensive. "The NEI stuff is public record," he said, referring to Wisconsin's online registry of lobbying records. Although he describes himself as "an environmentalist who changed his position on nuclear," Jablonski speculated that "the reason that people focus on that environmental angle is because that's what makes it more arresting or interesting." With regards to the recent legislative hearing, Jablonski said, "When I did my testimony, it was invited. ... Did they mention that I was with NEI, in their list of stuff? I didn't even look."
What about his 1995 contention that Wisconsin's moratorium on new nuclear plants helps keep state electricity costs low? Jablonski says that's no longer true, because "the cost overruns that nuclear facilities experienced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when things went to hell for the business" are a thing of the past. That may be news to Finland, where work on a major nuclear reactor is more than three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, leading to legal disputes.
"We're not lobbyists"
Yet Jablonski's and his colleagues' lobbying is only one facet of NEI's efforts to change Wisconsin's law. Patrick Moore has visited the state at least twice, in the past four months. While in Madison for a November 2008 energy conference, Moore told me that the state's moratorium is "a bit too stringent and restrictive. ... I really do think it needs to be reworded, so that what we have is a requirement that the used nuclear fuel is safely and securely managed into the future." That can be achieved, he argued, by storing waste at nuclear plant sites for up to 300 years or until it can be reprocessed -- or, as Moore called it, "recycled" -- and again used to fuel reactors.
Moore also met with local media, resulting in two anti-moratorium editorials from the Wisconsin State Journal in less than a week. "It should already be clear to lawmakers that the state can no longer afford to rule out the construction of nuclear power plants in Wisconsin," began the first column. The editorial went on to praise Moore, who it simply identified as an "environmental policy consultant."
Moore must have been pleased. "I don't think it's a problem" when media outlets don't disclose his paid work for NEI, Moore told me. "Really what matters is that my support for nuclear energy is communicated." (Moore also told me he supports developing Alberta's tar sands, a particularly dirty source of oil, but that the extraction should be powered by "small nuclear plants" instead of natural gas, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.)
In late February, NEI sent another branch of its PR arsenal to Milwaukee and Madison. Clean Energy America is "a group of nuclear energy experts who volunteer their time to raise awareness about the benefits of nuclear energy as a clean, reliable and affordable source of energy," according to its website. The site discloses that Clean Energy America is an NEI program. However, describing its participants as "volunteers" is a bit of a stretch. As Clean Energy America's Darren Gale and John Williams explained to me, they're paid for the time they give to the program by their employers, while travel, lodging and other expenses are covered by their employers or NEI.
Like Moore's and Whitman's Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, Clean Energy America is funded by NEI and coordinated by a public relations firm. In Clean Energy America's case, the firm is Smith & Harroff. The Virginia-based firm has long worked for the nuclear power industry. In the 1980s, it set up a "nuclear industry speakers bureau" for Westinghouse, which later became NEI's "Energy America Program." The PR firm's website describes that program as "'truth squads' of scientists and engineers ... trained by Smith & Harroff to work with the media, then dispatched all over the country." Darren Gale drew a direct line from that earlier effort to Clean Energy America. "They did this twenty-five years ago," he told me. "So this is really the second time that the industry has set up a speakers program like this."
Clean Energy America speakers visited six states in the program's first six months, including Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina. "The timing [of the visits] is usually associated with issues that a state might have, or a region might have," especially in "places that are actively discussing the new plant potentials," according to Gale. "The timing with Wisconsin is really around the moratorium," he said, but "please don't confuse us with lobbyists." Williams added, "When an issue [about nuclear power] pops up in the news, we like to be there to provide answers to questions." During their Wisconsin visit, Williams and Gale went on talk radio shows, met with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and spoke on the UW-Madison campus.
Wisconsin as stepping stone?
Legislative attempts to repeal Wisconsin's moratorium on new nuclear plants in 2003, 2005 and 2007 all failed, but the political ground on the issue has shifted. Last year, Governor Jim Doyle's Task Force on Global Warming came out in support of modifying the law. Their proposed changes would allow new nuclear power plants, if they meet "Wisconsin needs at a cost that is reasonable and advantageous to customers in comparison to alternatives," considering the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the nuclear waste plan is "economic, reasonable, stringent, and in the public interest" (pdf).
A bill to implement the task force's recommendations, including the changes to the moratorium language, is currently being drafted. Since it will be part of a package supporting energy efficiency and renewables, and isn't an outright repeal, it's likely to enjoy wider support than the earlier bills.
There are also new players lobbying to repeal or amend Wisconsin's moratorium. Not only will NEI be actively involved for the first time, but a new industry coalition called "Clean, Responsible Energy for Wisconsin's Economy" recently formed to lobby in support of the task force's recommendations. Its members include Alliant Energy, the Wisconsin Energy Corporation and Xcel Energy. Then there are the usual suspects who lobbied in support of the previous moratorium repeal bills, such as Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group and labor unions representing electrical and construction workers.
NEI may see Wisconsin as its best chance to finally get rid of a state moratorium. Madison-based NEI lobbyist Frank Jablonski speculated that the industry group may be focusing here because "the politics are more polarized in California," while the Wisconsin legislature has "a number of either open-minded or pro-nuclear Democrats." Moreover, NEI considers Wisconsin a "favorable" state, because it has "legislation in place that helps secure financing." However, its annual Wall Street briefing, delivered on February 12, 2009, did not place any potential new nuclear plants in the state (pdf, page 17).
If Wisconsin amends or repeals its moratorium, it may help the nuclear industry convince other states to relax their restrictions, whether or not new nuclear plants are built here. But first, the people of Wisconsin will have their say, and the debate may be more contentious than NEI anticipates.
--Diane Farsetta is the Center for Media and Democracy's senior researcher.
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Philadelphia Inquirer
March 26, 2009
Marlton executive is bullish on nuclear waste
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer
Engineer and CEO Krishna "Kris" Singh has a surprisingly sunny view of nuclear waste. Sure, it could kill a person from a few feet away, and stay radioactive for a million years, he said, but someday we'll learn to harness the energy in it.
Oil was worth little before someone invented the engine, he added. And platinum was just a bothersome by-product of silver mining to the Spanish colonists. "Every material has its time," he said.
Singh, 61, has made his career out of such optimism. His Marlton company, Holtec, has devised several unique systems for one of the hardest jobs on the planet - storing spent nuclear fuel - used to some extent at 80 of the country's 104 plants.
He is now working toward a new generation of storage materials based on nanotechnology - the study and manipulation of materials at invisibly small scales. And he has just donated $20 million to the University of Pennsylvania to create one of the country's biggest centers for this fast-growing field.
Nuclear power is one of the many industries that Singh predicts will be transformed by nanotechnology. He's looking to the field to help design novel material to better protect people from the 60,000-some-odd metric tons of spent fuel stored in the United States - at least until it becomes the new platinum.
"I'm a materials-metals guy," Singh said. "I've always wished we had better materials. Nanotechnology-based materials are going to be like the plastics of tomorrow - changing the way we make and build everything."
Singh came to Philadelphia from India in 1968, and finished his Ph.D. at Penn. His role in nuclear power began when a policy change nearly shut the country's plants.
Until the late 1970s, the long, thin uranium rods that fueled nuclear power plants were partly recycled. The various components were separated out in what was called reprocessing. That left them with some waste as well as usable uranium and weapons-grade plutonium.
But by the mid-1970s, the United States already had enough plutonium bombs to destroy the world 100 times over. The Ford administration prohibited reprocessing of nuclear fuel to help stem the worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons, Singh said.
But plants lacked the capacity to store used rods if they weren't reprocessed. "It could have forced all the nuclear power to shut down," Singh said. "Without reprocessing the fuel, the plants would get constipated."
With current technology, nuclear power is a wasteful process - the fuel rods becoming "spent" within a few years even though they are still highly radioactive.
When they go into the reactor, the fuel rods are made of uranium; up to 5 percent is the fissionable form known as U235. Put in close proximity to one another, a chain reaction starts in which the nuclei of uranium atoms are split into smaller pieces, releasing energy as well as fast-moving particles called neutrons, which hit and break up more uranium nuclei.
After some three to six years in the reactor, more than half of the U235 atoms have been split, creating daughter products, many of them exotic radioactive isotopes with half-lives from seconds to thousands of years.
Some of those reaction products are called "poisons" because they slow down the fission process. Once infused with enough poison, the rods are considered spent, though they are still capable of more energy-producing fission.
Traditionally, plants could keep a few spent rods in swimming-pool-sized tanks. The rods had to be kept far apart because they could still shoot neutrons at one another, and trigger more fission.
In the early 1980s, Singh devised a way to fit more rods into the pools safely. The trick was to separate the rods with neutron-blocking shielding - aluminum spiked with boron carbide.
Those shielding "racks" allowed plants like Limerick and Three Mile Island to store the rods much closer, he said, but they also had to be designed to survive earthquakes, plane crashes, and other disasters.
Singh's designs led to between 17 and 20 patents - he isn't sure of the exact number. The company also makes casks for what is called dry storage - where the rods were dried and sealed inside metal canisters.
While there are three competitors out there, Singh's storage technology is used to some extent in all the nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania and most plants across the country.
His company recently contracted with the Ukrainian plant at Chernobyl to put its reactor into dry storage.
The privately held business, which employs more than 500 people, could continue to grow. Trade groups are declaring a nuclear renaissance prompted by concerns over foreign oil dependence and greenhouse-gas emissions. And on-site storage will have to keep growing if the United States continues to reject plans to consolidate the nation's nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.
Some scientists see a growing danger. "If you do it right, then it can be made pretty safe for an interim period," said physicist Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But they're still not doing it right."
For him, the right way is dry storage, while the wrong way is to use shielding racks to "cram more fuel rods into the pools." The more rods in the pool, the greater the danger if it turns out that the racks don't hold up to an earthquake or some act of terrorism, he said.
Still, he said, "reprocessing" and then recycling would be much worse because it would separate out weapons-grade plutonium.
"You're basically doing the terrorists' job for them," he said. In England, they still reprocess their fuel and are now stuck with hundreds of metric tons of unwanted plutonium.
Singh said he had occasionally had to hire security to protect his employees from protesters. One group descended on company headquarters during the 2000 Republican convention, carrying a fake cask with the sign "Mobile Chernobyl."
Singh says the advantages of nuclear power outweigh the dangers - especially in light of problems with fossil fuels. And nuclear technology will advance. That's why he is devoting part of his company to nanotechnology.
For example, he said, it is looking at the way tiny "nanoparticles" can improve the process of powder metallurgy. Metals made that way look solid, but between grains are invisibly small spaces. Being many times smaller, nanoparticles can fill in those cracks and crevices like mortar between bricks.
It's not just that scientists are working with such small particles, said Penn engineering dean Eduardo Glandt. It's that they can manipulate matter on an atomic scale. "We can play like an Erector Set with atoms."
Nanotechnology is what Glandt calls the next great technological wave - one of three strands of innovation along with biotechnology and information technology.
Singh's $20 million donation will go toward a new nanotechnology building at 33d and Walnut Streets. Planned for completion in 2012, the $80 million Singh Center could make Philadelphia a leader in nanotechnology, Glandt said.
One of Penn's strengths is in combining nanotechnology with biology - looking at new ways to diagnose disease and deliver drugs, he said. And one dream is an imaging and diagnostic device that a patient could swallow, transmitting critical images and data as it travels through the body.
But nanotechnology is a fussy science, requiring dust-free, vibration-free clean rooms. It's not impossible to do that in West Philadelphia, Glandt said.
Singh said he had no plans to slow down his own brainstorming. A few years ago, he devised a system for storing waste underground. The idea is about to be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he said. But he often doesn't know whether such an idea will find buyers.
"My job is to make a fair guess as to what the world needs," he said. "Then I go to work and bring it to them."
--Contact staff writer Faye Flam at 215-854-4977 or fflam@phillynews.com.
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American Spectator
March 26, 2009
Carter Energy Solutions, Part II
By William Tucker
"We know the right thing to do," President Obama said about renewable energy at his press conference Tuesday. "We've known the right choice for a generation. The time has come to make that choice and act on what we know.…We have achieved more in two months for a clean energy economy than we have done in perhaps 30 years."
Thirty years. Let's see, that would be 1979, right? Hmmm… wasn't that the year -- yes, that was when Jimmy Carter finally got his Grand Energy Plan through Congress, setting us the road to corn ethanol, the Synthetic Fuels Corporation and a host of other harebrained schemes.
Carter Redux, that's the only way to describe the Obama Administration's approach to energy. After thirty years out of power, the purveyors of the Solar and Renewable Utopia are back. We're going to develop windmills, make solar panels affordable, and redesign buildings so they use only half as much energy -- in theory, at least. The subtext, of course, is this -- we won't have to deal with coal, nuclear or any of those other nasty technologies that aren't "clean and renewable."
So what's wrong with this picture? Well, the problem is that thirty years hasn't changed the laws of physics. Things like the intensity of sunlight or wind power keep intruding. Nuclear power has two million times the energy density of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are again ten times as dense as wind and solar. Multiply it out and that comes to a factor of twenty million. How does this manifest itself? Well, in the amount of land that will be required to collect all that solar and wind energy before we can begin using it.
All this came home to me again the other night while I was watching a DVD of Thomas Friedman's "Green is the New Red, White and Blue" special, which ran on the Discovery Channel. At one point, Friedman finds a hydrogen car running on fuel cells and producing zero emissions. The cars costs a million dollars to build but don't worry, he says, mass production will improve that. Then he goes to a hydrogen filling station in California, run by Honda and asks them to fill 'er up. "Where do you get the hydrogen," he asks. The Honda officials show him a solar panel about a block long right next to the station. Friedman's enthusiasm wanes, however, when he learns about the flimsiness of solar energy. "These solar panels," he says, "measuring 700 square feet, take a week to generate enough hydrogen to fill one fuel tank."
Anything solar immediately runs into the same problem. There just isn't that much energy there to begin with. In January 2009 three leading solar researchers, writing in Scientific American, proposed that by 2050 American get all its electricity from solar panels in the Southwestern desert. All we would require would be 46,000 square miles -- about one-third of New Mexico, the fifth largest state. Al Gore repeated this proposal before the Senate Energy Committee in February, although he managed to reduce the requirements to 10,000 square miles, based on the untested claims of Ausra, a California company that hasn't yet built anything but in which he is probably investing. Vaporware doesn't just apply to computers, you know.
Yet all this is being put into effect in California right now. With a renewable portfolio standard demanding 20 percent renewables by next year and 33 percent by 2020, just about anybody with rats on a treadmill can sell electricity to the state's utilities right now and be guaranteed a profit. Right now fourteen thinly funded companies are furiously drawing up plans to fill the Mojave Desert with solar installations, knowing the utilities will have to buy anything they generate.
That's why California Senator Dianne Feinstein announced last week that she is introducing a bill to set 600,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management holdings in the Mojave Desert off-limits to solar projects. "Such development would violate the spirit of what conservationists had intended when they donated much of the land to the public," she said. "It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem," added David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy, which originally dedicated some of the land to the BLM.
Hmmm…endangered species? Environmental impact? Didn't anybody ever think of these things before? Yet such environmental objections are inevitable. A thermal solar station requires 50 square miles to generate the same 1000 megawatts (MW) you can get from a mile square coal or nuclear plant. And that's only when the sun shines! A photovoltaic plant will require 75 square miles. A wind farm takes 125 square miles and then only generates electricity 30 percent of the times. To be assure of anything near constant output you probably have to cover 500 square miles in diverse locations. The Nature Conservancy -- which is supporting nuclear -- calls this "energy sprawl." It's a great term. I wish I'd thought of it myself.
Just to pile on, though, here's another consideration. One of the biggest problems with solar panels is that they accumulate dust, dirt and sand, which reduce their efficiency by considerable amounts. Existing installations have to be washed down every few weeks with water. Has anybody thought of where in the middle of the desert you're going to find enough water to wash down 10,000 square miles of solar panels?
The one path not being pursued by the Obama Administration, of course, is nuclear energy. That would be too easy. All we'd have to do is admit that the purveyors of "clean and renewable energy" are living in a fantasy world. Once that was done, we could employ current technology, use the existing electrical grid, and skip all the business of flagellating ourselves about all the harm we do to the planet. We could put tens of thousands of construction workers to work, cut through bureaucracy (we'd have to give up the five-year reviews by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), and let Silicon Valley go back to building computers instead of thinking they can solve the world's energy problems.
Granted, Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, who spoke at the press conference Monday afternoon, did say something about developing "safer and more efficient nuclear technologies," but that's always the way. Safe and acceptable nuclear energy is always somewhere over the horizon. In fact, the technology we've got now is already safe and efficient. We just have to use it. Energy Secretary Steven Chu spoke for the Administration two weeks ago, however, when he cancelled Yucca Mountain. The move wasn't really that significant, since reprocessing nuclear fuel makes much more sense. (See "There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste," Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2009) But it speaks volumes about what to expect form the Obama Administration on nuclear power.
Jimmy Carter's Presidency was brought down by his failure to deal with the energy problem. After four years of floundering around with oil price controls and "alternate energy" Carter was overwhelmed by world events.
Is the Obama Presidency headed down the same road? I wouldn't bet against it.
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World Nuclear News
March 26, 2009
Support for reprocessing and action on waste
A clear majority of US citizens would support recycling and reprocessing of used nuclear fuel, according to a new opinion poll which also found good all-round support for nuclear.
The survey - conducted by Bisconti Research and GfK NOP on behalf of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) - found that 84% of respondents thought that nuclear energy will be important in meeting the USA's future energy needs. The same percentage of those questioned also supported the relicensing of existing reactors, proving they meet federal safety standards.
On general questions it was found that over two-thirds of US citizens support nuclear energy, with the majority of people considering nuclear power plants to be safer now than at the time of the Three Mile Island accident 30 years ago.
Sixty-nine percent of respondents said that they favour the use of nuclear energy as one way of generating electricity in the USA, with 30% saying they strongly supported its use. Just 12% of people said they strongly opposed the use of nuclear energy.
The survey also found that 62% of people agreed that the USA should definitely construct more nuclear power plants in the future, compared with 34% opposed to this.
With regards to the safety of the country's nuclear power plants, 76% of people said they considered them to be safe and secure, as opposed to 21% who did not. 83% of respondents said that they thought the plants are safer now than when the Three Mile Island accident happened on 28 March 1979. 46% said that safety had improved a lot since then, while 12% said that safety was about the same. Only 4% said they thought nuclear plants were now less safe.
Waste and recycling
While most people (63%) said that nuclear waste could safely be stored at plant sites until moved to a permanent disposal facility, 80% of those questioned thought it more appropriate for the waste to be stored at one or two volunteer sites where it can be stored more securely and efficiently.
Even though the Obama administration has said that it will not proceed with the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada, 77% of respondents thought the government should continue to develop the facility as long as it meets federal regulations. In addition, 89% of those questioned said that a panel of independent experts should be established to advise President Obama and Congress on how best to manage the country's nuclear waste over the long term. The high rates of response to both questions indicate a strong desire to see the issue of radioactive waste settled.
Some 83% of people also said they supported US plans to recycle used nuclear fuel rods in order to generate more electricity and reduce the amount of waste to be disposed of. Just 13% are opposed to this plan.
The telephone poll of 1000 adults across the country was conducted between 12 and 15 March.
Ann Bisconti, president of Bisconti Research, commented: "The strong public support shown for nuclear energy - and the fact that support is being sustained at levels as high as they have been in the 26 years that I have been conducting public opinion research on this topic - indicates a real change. The levels of support found for nuclear energy in recent months really are unprecedented."
She added, "The poll found that the public is more concerned today about jobs, economic growth and energy independence than about global warming and air pollution. Clearly though, they see nuclear power as one of the ways to address all these challenges."
The publication of the NEI poll results closely follows those of a survey by the Gallup polling organisation. That poll found that some 59% said they somewhat or strongly favoured the use of nuclear energy in the USA as a means of generating electricity. This, Gallup said, is the highest level of support ever found in its polls.
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Las Vegas SUN
March 25, 2009
Letter: An alternative to Yucca Mountain
Gary Sandquist
Because the Obama administration has apparently ended governmental support of Yucca Mountain as a disposal site for spent nuclear fuel, it is necessary to examine alternatives. In a paper titled “The Future of Atomic Energy” dated May 27, 1946, Enrico Fermi (designer and builder of the first nuclear reactor at Stagg Field) wrote:
“The content in fission energy of uranium is roughly 3,000,000 times that of an equal weight of coal, If only .7 per cent of the uranium is utilized, the practical uranium to coal ratio will be about 20,000. These figures point to the great importance of devising methods for the complete utilization of the energy of uranium.”
Spent nuclear fuel can be stored safely for decades or more at the plant, and this is what nuclear electric utilities have done.
Perhaps the alternative, as the Nobel Laureate, Fermi, wisely observed, is that spent nuclear fuel should be completely utilized for its fission energy content. The 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel planned for Yucca Mountain should be tapped for its full energy content, equivalent to more than 100 billion tons of coal, but without greenhouse gases and environmental emissions.
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Pahrump Valley Times
March 25, 2009
Importing water a theme as county board seated
By Mark Waite
PVT
The newly-appointed Nye County Water District Board met for the first time last week and took care of administrative business, but the underlying theme seemed to be to devise a way to import water into Pahrump and protect Nye County from actions by other water authorities.
Members appointed by the Nye County Commission include: Tonopah Town Manager James Eason; Dan Harris; former county Commissioners Roberta "Midge" Carver and Bobby Revert; Bob Cameron; Donna Lamm and Tim McCall.
"This has been a long time coming, the formation of this water authority," Nye County Commission Chairman Joni Eastley said in her introductory remarks. "I'm sure that it's not lost on anybody what's happening with the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
"They're doing what they think they need to do to obtain money for a thirsty community, and we're going to do what we need to do to make sure that we stay on an even footing with all water authorities to protect our resources."
The board can enter into contracts, incur indebtedness, issue bonds, apply to sell or buy water rights, construct infrastructure, import and store water and enter into agreements with government or corporations.
Nye County water rights attorney George Benesch said the district will be similar to the Virgin Valley Water District, Moapa Valley Water District and Las Vegas Valley Water Authority.
"But there are some major differences," Benesch said. "You are autonomous to a certain extent but you do serve at the pleasure of the commissioners. More importantly, decisions of this board are appealable to the board of county commissioners."
He added, "Any tax this group may decide to levy in the future will be done through the county."
Bob Coache, deputy state engineer for Southern Nevada, gave a primer on his office, in which he mentioned three times suggestions on importing water.
The first groundwater law in Nevada was enacted in 1913, the first comprehensive law was passed in 1939, Coache said. Groundwater restrictions first came into effect in Pahrump in 1941; by 1970 Pahrump was closed to irrigation.
The first well drilled in Pahrump was in 1910. Today there are over 10,000 domestic wells with 60,000 acre-feet of ground water rights, Coache said.
After the Spring Valley case, which revolved around an application by the Las Vegas Valley Water Association to import water from around Ely, the state engineer's office changed its regulations on intervening for interested parties, Coache said. Now those intervening requests can only be made during the 30-day public comment period following the publication of the application notice for water, he said.
"Interbasin transfer, which is what you guys want to do, is not a new idea. It started all the way back in 1873 when they were bringing water to Carson City," Coache said.
"You cannot change the point of diversion from one hydrographic basin to another. If your well is going to be in that basin when you get your permit, that's where that well stays. So if you guys acquire water rights from somebody, from some ranch or some outfit, that well stays there. You pipe that water out of that basin."
A water district has to justify the need for water, which Coache said should be easy for Pahrump to do, since it's overappropriated with three times as much acre footage in water rights as annual recharge, the valley is growing, there's no future supply and there's a conservation plan.
The Nye County Water District would have to show it wouldn't negatively affect future growth in a groundwater basin by taking water from it, he said.
Board members elected Carver interim chairman. Cameron was elected the interim vice chairman. Permanent officers will be elected after bylaws are adopted.
The district will be run out of the Nye County Nuclear Waste Repository Project Office in Pahrump. NWPRO Director Darrell Lacy suggested the water board could tap into some of the expertise of his office, which has hired scientists to conduct water studies to oversee the Yucca Mountain Project for years.
The water district will use a $167,000 budget from money left over in a federal earmark for a Pahrump groundwater study, to last through the rest of 2009.
"The district will develop its own source of funding shortly," Assistant County Manager Pam Webster said.
Revert suggested rotating meetings around Nye County. The next meeting was scheduled for April 27 at the Beatty Community Center.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
March 25, 2009
Ty Cobb: Transform Yucca Mountain into reprocessing project
For more than 20 years now, the state of Nevada has been fighting the now technologically obsolete concept of long-term storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Just this month, Energy Secretary Steven Chu suggested that Yucca is no longer an option, doing so without providing viable alternatives to the nation's nuclear waste quandary. Given the investment to date in the Yucca Mountain repository site, perhaps the best alternative would be not to scrap everything and start over, but to "bury" the concept of Yucca as a dump and transform it into a reprocessing project.
To use an analogy to show how antiquated the government's current waste burial policy is, if you were to purchase a new car, you wouldn't turn it in to the junkyard when the gas tank was drained. But that's what is done now with the nuclear material that powers our electrical generation plants -- once we have used it a single time, the plan is to bury it deep underground for millennia.
Under my plan, the government and nuclear industry would reprocess the waste to eliminate as much as 90 percent of the material. This process creates material that may be reused in our nuclear plants, calls for interim storage in place of long-term burial, and creates a cutting-edge research-and-development facility at Yucca.
A reprocessing project can play an important role in stimulating the creation of new jobs. With the state's current blanket opposition to Yucca, we have lost thousands of jobs and billions in investment due to the slashing of the Yucca budget. In exchange for "accepting" (reprocessing) the waste, Nevada would still receive compensation from the $20 billion Nuclear Waste Fund that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act provides for in the form of annual payments and infrastructure improvements. At the same time, the research center also could become a site for the exploration and testing of advanced R&D on energy issues, which would employ hundreds of scientists and technology experts.
In addition to jobs for pre-construction, construction and operation of the facility, thousands of jobs would be created in support and ancillary industries. Nevada would have the opportunity for new nuclear and renewable energy projects to provide cheap, environmentally friendly domestic energy for Nevada, which would mitigate our growing reliance on fossil fuels.
This month, I introduced a bill in the Assembly that would call for a serious discussion of this proposal as well as demand that the federal government "put up or shut up" by putting a firm offer on the table for Nevada's compensation. Some in our state believe that halting Yucca is our only priority. I simply cannot agree that storing nuclear waste at various sites around our country represents a safer alternative. For me, that option is simply a terrorist's dream!
If you agree with me on the need for an intellectual exchange of views regarding this innovative approach to solving the vexing problems of nuclear waste disposal, then I urge you to let your legislators and media outlets know that you want this proposal considered, discussed and evaluated.
--Ty Cobb is a member of the Nevada Assembly representing Washoe County District 26.
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Middletown Press and Journal
March 25, 2009
TMI's legacy: better training, closer public scrutiny
by Rachel Swick, Debra Schell, and Garry Lenton
In the spring of 1979 the whole world knew who Bob Reid was. He was mayor of Middletown, the town in danger of being wiped out by a nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island.
On March 28, 1979, a combination of mechanical and human errors resulted in the partial meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island. The story dominated nightly news casts for weeks and brought journalists from all over the world to town.
The event, which sparked a voluntary evacuation, remains the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.
Three decades later, Reid is still mayor, but the world might be surprised to find that he’s not a skeptic of nuclear power.
To the contrary. Reid is supporting Exelon Corp.’s application to keep the surviving Unit 1 reactor running until 2034.
“I’m sorry that it happened in Middletown, but a lot of good came of it,” he said. “The accident helped the nuclear field learn ways to operate nuclear plants better. I support the relicensing of TMI and groups like TMI Alert, who look over the shoulder of the plant.”
TMIA is a watchdog group that monitors plant performance and frequently intervenes by filing requests with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has oversight responsibility for commercial nuclear reactors.
Lower Swatara Township Commissioner Franklin Linn was in office during the accident, too. And like Reid, he tolerates the nuclear plant in his backyard.
“I remember I was scared as hell,” Linn said. But now, he added, “I have faith in the whole program.”
Since the accident, the owners of the plant - first GPU Nuclear, then Exelon - have improved operating safety and communications with local officials, he said.
“That [accident] woke us up [to the fact] that we didn’t have a plan to evacuate people,” Linn said. “It got local government to get their act together.”
“It completely woke up the nuclear industry and the world,” said Jim Wealand, Middletown fire chief and a worker at TMI at the time of the accident and until about three months ago.
Middletown resident Dolores Stichter, who lived through the event, is less confident about the future.
“I thought surely the NRC got the message and they would take care of everything,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Then I went to a meeting ... about the [re]licensing of the plant. At that rehearsed meeting I finally saw how wrong I was.”
The agency, she wrote, seemed to be going through the motions, rather than listening to the concerns expressed by local residents.
Stichter is not opposed to nuclear power, but she will not support construction of new nuclear plants until the federal government establishes a place to store high-level nuclear waste.
The U.S. Department of Energy has spent millions on a permanent dump site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The Obama Administration, however, has said it would oppose the location.
Former Middletown resident William E. Stoffel of Palmyra, who experienced the accident firsthand, also supports nuclear power. He would even welcome the creation of a new reactor at Three Mile Island, something plant officials say is not likely, as long as there is stringent oversight of the industry.
“TMI must be watched very carefully by all of us all of the time,” he said.
--Garry Lenton: 944-4628, or garrylenton@pressandjournal.com
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Forbes
March 25, 2009
Reinventing Nuclear Power
Jonathan Fahey
A fusion-fission hybrid reactor could produce clean electricity and remove dangerous nuclear waste from the planet. If it ever works.
The light of 192 lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility travels more than a half-mile through a stadium-size building toward its target. Along the way, the beams are amplified, shaped and focused into the world's most powerful laser, capable of delivering power in a pulse that lasts 20 billionths of a second and peaks at 500 million megawatts.
The target of all of this fury is tiny--a gold capsule the size of an extra-strength Advil. The goal is to mash the contents of the capsule, a BB-size pellet of hydrogen frozen to nearly absolute zero, until the hydrogen atoms fuse into helium and release a gush of energy. This fusion is the same reaction that takes place in the center of the sun and stars, and at the business end of a nuclear bomb.
"NIF is by far the biggest hammer in the world right now," states Peter J. Wisoff. A former Space Shuttle astronaut who now runs the laser's operations, 50 miles east of San Francisco, Wisoff retains a no-nonsense demeanor from his days making sure people returned to Earth safely. His current job may be harder. Wisoff will try to use NIF's $3.5 billion hammer, which took 12 years to build and was just completed in March, to ignite for the first time on Earth a controlled fusion reaction.
If NIF succeeds, it will be a transcendent moment for science. But this is more than just a race for a Nobel Prize: Fusion's powerful pull is that it has the potential to turn a modest amount of seawater into a large supply of clean energy. NIF's plan to use fusion for energy is especially dramatic. NIF scientists have proposed building a reactor that uses both fusion and fission to deliver clean energy and nearly eliminate nuclear waste from the planet.
Generations of scientists have been frustrated by fusion's complexities. There are elaborate experimental fusion reactors all over the globe, and they have made steady but achingly slow progress toward a controlled, self-sustaining burn. Eight nations, including the U.S., are cooperating to build a $15 billion reactor in France scheduled to be completed in 2016. Its own chief scientist says reaching the goal will require a miracle.
NIF's director, the outspoken Edward Moses, is undaunted. He dismisses all previous attempts at fusion as lighting the edge of a pile of wet leaves. "Poof, and then it's out," he says. "We're going to burn the pile. We are on the edge of burn."
The National Ignition Facility was conceived in response to a nuclear-weapon test ban signed by George H.W. Bush in 1992. The Department of Energy's national laboratories were charged with trying to understand bomb physics in such exquisite detail that weapon performance could be modeled accurately without blowing anything up.
This is still the laser's primary mission. Astrophysicists will also use it to try to re-create the conditions at the center of supernovas, to understand how the elements that make up our solar system--and our bodies--are created.
But energy could be NIF's greatest legacy. Fusion is the process of forcing the nuclei of atoms so close together that they fuse into a nucleus of a new element. (Fission, of course, is the opposite: energy produced by splitting nuclei.) The new, fused nucleus weighs less than the original two. With a bow to Einstein's famous law, the lost mass is transformed into energy, mostly in the form of a torrent of energetic neutrons (NIF's tiny reaction produces 10 quintillion--10 with 18 more zeros--in 10 trillionths of a second).
Nuclei repel one another powerfully. For fusion to occur, they have to be submitted to high temperatures and pressures. That's where NIF's lasers come in. They compress a pellet of a type of hydrogen found in seawater by a factor of about 40,000, like squashing a basketball to the size of a pea. The pressure and heat produced, greater than 100 million degrees and 100 billion times the pressure of the Earth's atmosphere, cause fusion.
The precision that is required seems far-fetched. There are 60,000 control points that help guide the light from the lasers to the target. That fleeting pulse, a 20-nanosecond flash, can't arrive at once or the tiny round target will warp, making ignition impossible. Imagine trying to collapse that basketball while keeping it round and not letting any air out.
The laser pulse, then, has to be shaped. The first light to hit must deliver only about 1% of full power. The power then oscillates, decreasing slightly before increasing in steps that last between 10 and 100 trillionths of a second. And all 192 lasers must produce the same shaped pulse in the same trillionths of a second. "Our conditions are ten times the temperature and ten times the density of the sun, and we're getting there in billionths of a second," says John Lindl, NIF's chief scientist. "It's not just making a flamethrower--it's making a precise flamethrower."
If NIF's aim is true, the fusion it sparks will produce enough energy to sustain the reaction and fuse all of the fuel--the sought-after "burn."
Then comes the hard part: Using this technique to make energy. NIF has proposed building a prototype energy reactor that would use both fusion and nuclear fission. A fusion chamber would be surrounded by a blanket of fissionable material, like nuclear waste, that would serve as an additional fuel source.
This helps address the drawbacks of both fusion and fission. Even if NIF's lasers achieve burn, they will be extraordinarily inefficient, producing only 1% of the energy needed to fire the lasers. NIF scientists think they can improve efficiency dramatically but not enough to make fusion energy alone feasible. Fission, meanwhile, produces nasty waste. Moses says that together with emerging laser amplification technology that is less power hungry, and the huge energy gain from the fission reaction, a combo reactor would deliver 200 times the energy it consumes. It would work by using the neutrons from fusion to help turn nuclear waste into nuclear fuel and then burn it until almost none is left. Today's nuclear reactors are fueled by uranium that is partially "enriched." Still, only 3% of the fuel's energy is used. Left behind is the unusable uranium and other radioactive by-products that the nation has yet to figure out what to do with.
With the blended reactor, the neutrons from fusion reactions would wedge themselves into the nuclei of this waste, making them unstable enough to split and produce heat. NIF scientists estimate the leftover waste would require only 5% of the space of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. A heat exchanger running through the whole thing would collect heat from the fusion reaction and the fission reaction and run a turbine, capable of producing one to two gigawatts of power, about the same as today's nuclear power plants. Moses imagines having a demonstration plant running by 2020 and commercial technology by 2030.
First, he has a long line of hurdles to clear, beyond just making the laser more efficient. NIF can fire at full strength only once a week, or else the laser light will fry the optics. For the reactor to work, it would need to fire ten times a second. This would require much better and stronger optics, the likes of which have yet to be invented. Also, it would require several hundred million new targets a year. Now held in gold capsules, they'd have to be made more cheaply. And a process has to be invented that can insert these targets of hydrogen, which must be kept frozen to a few degrees above absolute zero, ten times a second.
Says NIF chief scientist Lindl: "If we've learned anything, we've learned nature isn't going to give this up easily."
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U.S. News & World Report
March 25, 2009
Trying to Make Nuclear Power Less Risky
Backers of thorium say it is safer, and generates less waste, than uranium
By Kent Garber
Thorium is a slightly radioactive element, a cousin of uranium. For the past four decades, in fits and starts, researchers have been testing it as a potentially attractive competitor to uranium as a source of nuclear fuel. Within the nuclear community, it's won a small, devoted following. Up to now, it's had little commercial impact.
Today, however, thorium is getting a serious second look from some powerful global players. With interest in nuclear power soaring, thorium is being re-examined as a potential solution to—or at least a palliative for—some of the industry's daunting problems, particularly the production of hazardous radioactive waste. Advocates say that adding thorium to a nuclear reaction would help reduce the volume of nuclear waste that is produced and help prevent civilian nuclear fuels from being converted into weapons-grade material.
With nearly three dozen nuclear reactors under construction worldwide and at least 50 more in the planning stages, world leaders are facing mounting pressure to ensure that any nuclear expansion occurs as safely and cleanly as possible.
So, could thorium, which is found in the sandy beaches of India, Australia, and the United States, be part of the answer? Some politicians certainly hope so. So do many foreign governments. In the United States last fall, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch introduced a bill requesting $250 million for thorium research and development. Abroad, the Indian government is banking on thorium-run nuclear plants to meet its growing energy needs. Russia, France, the United Arab Emirates, and others also have expressed interest.
Of course, there's at least one big catch: At the moment, thorium isn't ready for wide commercial use. But on paper and in laboratory tests, it looks like a sleek upgrade from uranium. It's consumed much less quickly in a reaction, so it has the potential to slice in half the volume of waste that's produced. And unlike uranium, it doesn't produce plutonium that can be used in weapons. This could help allay fears, particularly in Washington, that developing countries might use civilian nuclear energy programs as a pretext for developing nuclear weapons.
Contaminated. Thorium's advantage comes partly from its atomic chemistry. In a typical reactor, the fuel is enriched uranium, which is a mixture of two types of uranium. One, U-235, can be ripped apart to release energy. The other, U-238, is heavier, more plentiful, and, in a nuclear reactor, yields a specific type of plutonium that can be isolated and used to make nuclear bombs. In advanced thorium-fuel reactions, however, something different happens. Plutonium is still produced, as is U-233, which can also be used for weapons. But so many other types of plutonium are formed, and so much toxic gamma radiation is released, that the final products are "contaminated," meaning that it's incredibly difficult—if not impossible—to isolate the plutonium or uranium and make a bomb out of them.
Then there's the waste advantage. A longtime political lightning rod, the issue of nuclear waste disposal is part of the reason that it has been three decades since a new nuclear plant received approval for construction in the United States. The federal government's decades-old plan to build a waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada seems all but dead now, with the Obama administration recently saying that Yucca "is not an option." Thorium can't eliminate the problem, but it could help reduce the amount of waste that would need disposal. On average, experts say, a thorium fuel rod could stay in a reactor twice as long as a uranium one.
Blend. The most promising design being developed is a blend containing thorium and a small amount of uranium to help kick-start the reaction. Research is ongoing, and approval by the U.S. government remains at least several years off. But some surprising international partnerships are already yielding promising developments.
One leading company, Thorium Power, based in Virginia, has been working with Russian researchers since the early 1990s to commercialize thorium (with the blessing of the U.S. government, of course). For the past five years, Thorium Power has been testing its fuel design—a thorium-uranium blend designed to be more proliferation resistant—in a research reactor at Moscow's Kurchatov Institute. It's now examining the results, says Thorium Power's CEO, Seth Grae, and over the next few years plans to test the fuel in a commercial reactor. Eventually, it wants to seek approval from the Russian government to market the technology. "A few years ago, I would have ticked off several risk factors that are now behind us," Grae said. "This is now at a very advanced stage."
Yet even if the research is successfully completed, there's the question of who would want to use it. In India's case, thorium could be particularly attractive, because the country has some of the world's largest thorium reserves but limited access to uranium. Other countries that are working to build civilian nuclear programs, such as the United Arab Emirates, might also find thorium easier to obtain.
In the United States, there has been less enthusiasm for thorium. Experts say that U.S. uranium supplies are ample enough to last at least through the end of the century, and uranium is still relatively cheap, despite recent price jumps. "From the perspective of utilities, they like things that work the way they are," says Felix Killar, senior director at the Nuclear Energy Institute. "Unless somebody comes to them with a really good explanation for why they should go this way, they are not running and saying, 'Yeah, we will do this.' " On the other hand, if thorium does become viable, utilities wouldn't have to alter their operations much; it can be used in existing reactors without major changes.
For now, many in the industry are more focused on reprocessing unconsumed uranium and plutonium from used fuel and reusing it. "There is a lot of energy potential left in spent fuel, and that requires reprocessing," says Regis Matzie, chief technology officer at Westinghouse, one of the country's top nuclear reactor manufacturers. "The path we are going down is to put the waste in a repository, but the smartest technical solution would be to reprocess the fuel."
Reprocessing, of course, is linked to proliferation fears because it involves separating plutonium from the spent fuel, and the procedure has been banned in the United States since the 1970s. The Bush administration made a serious attempt to reverse that policy, but Congress pushed back hard. With nuclear energy generating new interest in Washington these days, thorium's backers may find a more receptive audience.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 24, 2009
Reid's nuclear waste meeting with energy official delayed
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- A meeting at which Sen. Harry Reid and Energy Secretary Steven Chu were expected to reconcile competing plans for a nuclear waste commission has been rescheduled for Friday, according to the Senate majority leader's office.
The meeting had been set for Monday, but Chu is at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York for an announcement about economic stimulus funding for Energy Department laboratories.
The nuclear waste meeting was changed to accommodate Chu's travel schedule, according to Reid's office.
The officials are expected to discuss plans to form a study commission because of the Obama administration's desire to examine alternatives to storing the radioactive material at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Chu has been moving to form such a commission, while Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., have introduced a bill for congressional leaders to make appointments to the group.
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Platts
March 24, 2009
US senators worry nuke waste plan could leave government liable
Washington (Platts)--23Mar2009
The US government could be liable for roughly $30 billion in damages if it were to abandon the Department of Energy's high-level nuclear waste repository project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the Sentate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is warning.
The panel's so-called views and estimates letter to the Senate Budget Committee contains the views of committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the panel's senior Republican, on the preliminary budget blueprint for fiscal 2010 that President Barack Obama unveiled last month. Obama is expected to introduce his detailed budget request next month. All committees are required to submit their assessments of the budget requests to budget committees in the House and Senate each year. The energy committee's March 12 views and estimates letter was released on Friday.
In his preliminary proposal, Obama said he would provide the controversial repository program only with enough funds to answer the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's questions during the NRC licensing review of DOE's application to build a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
"The president's budget blueprint proposes to abandon further work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository," Bingaman and Murkowski said in the joint letter. Abandoning that program, they said, would leave the US with no way to dispose of spent fuel from nuclear power plants, spent fuel from the Navy's nuclear ships and submarines, and high-level radioactive wastes from DOE defense programs.
They reminded the Budget Committee that federal courts earlier found the government to be in partial breach of contract with electric utilities, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, after DOE failed to begin disposing of spent reactor fuel by a 1998 contract date. "[T]he government could be held liable for much larger sums, including the repayment of over $16 billion in fees collected from the utilities and nearly $14 billion in interest, if the court find the government to have totally breached the contacts as a result of abandoning work on the Yucca Mountain repository," the senators said.
More than $700 million a year is collected from nuclear utility customers to bankroll the DOE repository program. Only a fraction of the annual collection is spent on the program. The balance goes into the Nuclear Waste Fund, a federal trust fund, which now totals roughly $22 billion.
The repository that DOE wants to build at Yucca Mountain, roughly 95 miles outside Las Vegas, would consist of a network of tunnels built deep within the mountain to dispose of at least 70,000 metric tons of radioactive waste. The facility would have to meet NRC and US Environmental Protection Agency limits for 1 million years on radiation doses from the facility.
--Elaine Hiruo, elaine_hiruo@platts.com
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StandardNET
March 24, 2009
An alternative to Yucca Mountain
Since the Obama Administration has apparently closed Yucca Mountain as a disposal site for spent nuclear fuel, it is necessary to examine alternatives. In a paper entitled "The Future of Atomic Energy" and dated 27 May 1946, Enrico Fermi (designer and builder of the first nuclear reactor at Stagg Field) wrote,
"The content in fission energy of uranium is roughly 3,000,000 that of an equal weight of coal. If only .7% of the uranium (i.e., natural abundance of U-235) is utilized, the practical uranium to coal ratio will be about 20,000. These figures point to the great importance of devising methods for the complete utilization of the energy of uranium."
Spent nuclear fuel can be stored safely for decades or more at the plant, and this is what nuclear electric utilities have done.
Perhaps the alternative is, as the Nobel Laureate, Fermi, wisely observed, spent nuclear fuel should be completely utilized for its fission energy content. The 70,000 MT of spent fuel planned for Yucca Mountain should be tapped for its full energy content equivalent to more than 100 billion tons of coal, but without greenhouse gases and environmental emissions.
Gary Sandquist
Professor Emeritus, University of Utah
Salt Lake City
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Victorville Daily Press
March 23, 2009
Why don't the enviros embrace nuclear power?
Steve Williams
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week regarding the proposed storage of nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nev., author William Tucker makes the claim that there is no such thing as nuclear waste.
He was responding to the Obama administration's decision - via Secretary of Energy Steven Chu - to cut all but the most rudimentary funding to Yucca and be content to allow spent fuel rods to sit in storager pools and dry casks at reactor sites. Chu, in announcing the decision, said the storage at Yucca is "no longer an option."
The left, which views nuclear energy in the same light it views vouchers for public schools (dangerous, in a word), was clearly ecstatic. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, editorialized Thursday that (Chu's) move "probably would delay some pending applications for construction of nuclear plants, and may even stop some. That's all to the good. Nuclear power is much too risky and expensive to be seen as a reasonable solution to climate change (global warming)."
How risky is nuclear power? Almost not at all. The only two significant accidents in nuclear power's history are a nuclear reactor accident in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine in 1986, which caused 56 direct deaths and an estimated 4,000 extra cancer deaths among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed people.
The other, of course, was at Three Mile Island in 1979. An investigative commission concluded after the fact that "there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects."
Yes, the deaths cause by Chernobyl were terrible, but considering the number of nuclear power plants in the world - at the moment there are more than 400, and they produce about 17 percent of the world's electricity - the danger, as related to other power producing industries, is clearly insignificant.
Particle pollution from coal-fired power plants, for instance, are estimated to cause over 30,000 deaths in the United States each year. And we all have heard countless times about the dangers of carbon monoxide and emissions from internal combustion engines and oil-fired power plants as major pollutants.
Which gets us back to Mr. Tucker's point. He dismisses Yucca's importance by saying it was "only made necessary by our failure to understand a fundamental fact about nuclear power: There is no such thing as nuclear waste."
He says it is all useful and can be reprocessed except for a tiny amount of U-235, the fissionable isotope whose breakdown provides energy in the nuclear power plant generating process. The rest is U-238, so common that it makes up 1 percent of the earth's crust.
France, which Mr. Tucker notes completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains - from 30 years of generating 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy - beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
He thinks Yucca's shutdown is a good thing, because it will focus America's attention on recycling nuclear waste.
If the enviros had any sense at all - and if they feared global warming (um, climate change) as much as they say - they would embrace nuclear power as the globe's, and humanity's, great savior.
Nuclear power is readily available (it costs much more than it should simply because of the legal and environmental maneuvering undertaken to prevent permits for construction of nuclear power plants), is not an emitter of any dangerous pollution at all, and puts solar and wind power to shame because it is so efficient and constant.
The fact that they don't is yet more evidence that they live in a strange, selfish little world of denial, confused about the earth and science, and full of hate for human progress.
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Daily Cardinal
March 23, 2009
State not ready for more nuclear power
By: Ryan Dashek
While nuclear power has its benefits, Wisconsin should continue its moritorium on nuclear reactor development.
This coming Saturday will mark the 30th anniversary of the Three Mile Island reactor incident in Pennsylvania, the largest nuclear accident in America. Although no one was directly injured from the accident and the radiation released, nuclear technology has since made great strides toward increasing safety. Nuclear power—relatively clean, efficient and cheap—is currently providing approximately 20 percent of Wisconsin’s power, with three working plants in the state, including the small reactor found on UW-Madison’s campus.
However, the Three Mile Island accident stirred up debate among lawmakers all over the nation, as well as Wisconsin. In 1983, a new Wisconsin state law effectively created a moratorium on the building and development of any new nuclear reactors. Recently though, with President Obama’s goals of creating “green jobs” and reducing carbon emissions, lawmakers now consider nuclear power a viable alternative to the current use of fossil fuels. Now, debates on relaxing the moratorium have begun to spring up across the state.
Nuclear power, though a safe and reliable source of energy, still creates large amounts of nuclear waste each year. Currently, there is no truly safe way to dispose of this waste. However, new methods are being developed to dispatch it without any risk of contamination to the environment. Although Wisconsin must consider nuclear power in the future, until technology has yielded an equally safe and economical solution, the Wisconsin moratorium on nuclear power should hold.
Proponents of relaxing the moratorium have pointed to the low costs, the ability to reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuels and overall reliability of nuclear power. Of course, perhaps the most relevant argument in the current debate is the massively reduced carbon emissions of nuclear power plants. Since no fossil fuels are directly used in the nuclear process, no carbon is released. According to Patrick Moore, co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, nuclear power “accounts for nearly 75 percent of all U.S. emission-free electric generation.” Thus, a heavier reliance on nuclear-generated power would provide a much cleaner alternative to current fossil fuels and would allow the United States, as well as Wisconsin, to achieve the 60 to 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, the current national goal.
However, the environment is also central to the debate against nuclear power. Nuclear reactors also generate radioactive waste, which, if allowed to seep into the environment, has a multitude of negative impacts. Several methods of disposal currently exist, but unfortunately, all are temporary. To add to this problem, the closest solution to permanency was just put on hold by Obama’s current budget, which effectively halts all development on the Yucca Mountain waste repository. The Yucca Mountain site, which is located near a 1950s site for atomic testing, is considered the safest spot in the United States to store radioactive waste for a long period of time, though it still carries several risks—including the fact that radioactive wastewater can run through the mountain faster than previously believed.
Even if Yucca Mountain is utilized, the radioactive waste still needs to travel by rail to get there, and that in itself provides several opportunities for accidents and spills to happen. Thus, there is no truly safe way to dispose of nuclear waste products. Current technology does provide a glimmer of hope, however, as several nations have begun recycling waste and using it to provide even more energy. This has its obvious perks, though radioactive byproducts are still produced, but with a substantially lower radiation levels. Nuclear waste products, it seems, are unavoidable. When sufficient technology does emerge to eliminate—or at least greatly reduce—the threat posed by the byproducts of reactors, Wisconsin and the entire nation need to jump on the opportunity to employ more nuclear power plants.
The state’s moratorium on nuclear power is understandable and even desirable, and until science has provided a safer solution to radioactive byproducts, Wisconsin residents need to focus on other alternatives to the current global warming crisis. Although reaching our goal of reducing carbon emissions to a fraction of what we use today may seem near impossible without nuclear power, we can still focus on other solutions, such as wind, solar power and environmentally cleaner cars. Hopefully, new technology will emerge soon to take care of the waste issue with nuclear power, as the benefits it could bring to the state are immense.
--Ryan Dashek is a junior majoring in biology. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
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Global Security Newswire
March 23, 2009
Search Begins for Nuclear Waste Storage Options
The Obama administration's decision to drop a plan to store nuclear power plant waste in an underground repository in Nevada has renewed consideration of alternative ways to dispose of the highly radioactive material, the Salt Lake Tribune reported yesterday (see GSN, March 13).
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced this month that the administration would create a blue-ribbon commission to offer waste storage solutions besides the two-decade-old plan to put it in Yucca Mountain (see GSN, March 12).
Alternative plans include reprocessing the waste to remove its plutonium, which could then be used again in nuclear power reactors. Environmental and nonproliferation activists have historically opposed reprocessing, arguing that it creates new, more dangerous waste and produces weapon-usable materials. U.S. Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah), however, told the Tribune that he believes reprocessing can be conducted safely.
Other alternatives include a variety of storage options, such as reinforcing existing storage facilities at the power plants where spent fuel is currently stored in cooling ponds and other containers; consolidating the waste at a single, but temporary, repository; or moving it to a variety of small facilities around the nation.
In any case, a decision should be pursed quickly, said one analyst.
"Right now ... the pools are just monumental dirty bombs waiting to be blown up," said Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, an antinuclear group (Burr/Fahys, Salt Lake Tribune, March 22).
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New York Times
March 23, 2009
Energy Secretary Serves Under a Microscope
By John M. Broder
WASHINGTON — As a physicist, Steven Chu has seen atoms suspended in a powerful laser beam and DNA stretched out in a vacuum chamber.
But in his new job as energy secretary, Dr. Chu is observing phenomena he never saw in the science laboratory.
At a recent Senate hearing, for example, he witnessed a junior cabinet member (himself) being systematically dissected by a senior senator (John McCain).
Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, was unhappy when Dr. Chu affirmed the Obama administration’s intention to suspend work at a planned nuclear waste site in Nevada. “What’s wrong with Yucca Mountain, Dr. Chu?” he demanded repeatedly as Dr. Chu tried to explain.
“I think we can do a better job,” Dr. Chu finally replied.
For a slight, soft-spoken Nobel laureate, Washington has been an initiation that he has likened to being “dumped in the deep end of the pool.” Dr. Chu, 61, was chairman of Stanford’s physics department and ran a national research laboratory. But in addition to being verbally slapped around by Mr. McCain, he has been forced to backtrack on some ill-informed comments about OPEC and ordered to spend quickly tens of billions of dollars in stimulus money with virtually no top-level help.
Dr. Chu is still mastering skills like ducking a tough question from a reporter and delivering the all-purpose “I’ll get back to you on that.”
He has admitted his naïveté on certain policy questions, like OPEC production quotas, and is still getting used to the scrutiny that comes with a cabinet job.
“I didn’t appreciate how much of a public figure you become,” Dr. Chu said in an interview recently in Milwaukee, where he spent the day talking to scientists about biofuels and touring a home that was being weatherized under a local program.
President Obama has assigned Dr. Chu to carry out some of his central priorities: wean America from dependence on fossil fuels, rebuild the nation’s electrical grid and address the challenges of climate change.
The science part of his job is the most rewarding, Dr. Chu said. On his visit to Milwaukee, he visibly brightened when one University of Wisconsin researcher told him about a local entrepreneur who was turning the waste products from cheesemaking into ethanol, which was then blended with gasoline at a nearby convenience store.
“Does he drop some off at the liquor store on his way?” Dr. Chu asked impishly.
A few hours later, wearing khakis frayed at the cuffs and brown, thick-soled professorial shoes, he dutifully traipsed through the small house that was getting new insulation and appliances to cut the owner’s electric bills. When he emerged, five news cameras were set up on the lawn. But to his relief, most of the questions went to Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, who had accompanied him on the tour.
Asked later what part of his job he liked the least, Dr. Chu said: “The fact that I’m constantly being told that I have to be careful what I say to the press and in public. I can’t speculate out loud anymore. Everything I say is taken with total seriousness.”
Yet as he takes on one of the toughest policy and management challenges in government, Dr. Chu brings certain assets that none of his peers or predecessors have had: a Nobel Prize, a YouTube following (for his lectures on climate change) and an unofficial theme song (“Dr. Wu” by Steely Dan). He is a major celebrity in Taiwan, where scientific achievement is rewarded with rock star status. He is a member of Academica Sinica, Taiwan’s most distinguished scholarly society, as was his father.
Dr. Chu is struggling to get his arms around one of the most perplexing and intractable bureaucracies in Washington and to efficiently — and carefully — disperse $39 billion in funding from the stimulus package. Most of the department’s top appointed positions, including deputy secretary, remain unfilled, leaving him largely reliant on career staff members to manage 114,000 employees and contractors and a budget that has more than doubled this year. The task at times appears overwhelming, and some in Washington quietly wonder if Dr. Chu is in over his head.
Karen Harbert, president of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, praised Dr. Chu’s academic credentials, calling him Mr. Science. But she suggested that the main decisions on energy and climate change policy were being made at the White House by a small team led by Carol Browner, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Is he secretary of energy or secretary of research and development?” Ms. Harbert asked.
Dan Leistikow, the Energy Department’s director of public affairs, said that Dr. Chu was a scientist, not a politician, and should be given a little time to adjust.
“A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration,” Mr. Leistikow said.
Dr. Chu came to Washington after serving as director of the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a civilian research organization with 4,000 employees and a $600 million annual budget. Before that, he was a professor and research scientist at Stanford and Bell Laboratories. He shared the 1997 Nobel in physics for his work on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light.
He comes from a family of academic overachievers. His father emigrated from China to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and retired as a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. His mother studied economics in China and at M.I.T. One brother, Gilbert, is a professor of medicine and biochemistry at Stanford; the other, Morgan, is a highly regarded intellectual property lawyer in Los Angeles. Dr. Chu once described himself as the academic black sheep of the family.
Morgan Chu said of his brother, “He’s acclimating very well, all things considered.” He added, “He has a wonderful set of skills for the job — an unbending respect for discovering the unvarnished truth and a willingness to challenge established dogma.”
Matt Rogers, an energy expert with McKinsey & Company whom Dr. Chu brought in last month to help speed the pace of Energy Department spending, said it would be a mistake to dismiss Dr. Chu as just a science geek. “He is a kind man; he is a nice man,” Mr. Rogers said. “But he is not a patient man. People are going to have to take a deep breath and realize they’re going to be moving at a much quicker pace than they were used to.”
Dr. Chu said he had been frustrated by the job vacancies and the glacial pace of his department. He is eager, he said, to get on with what he sees as his main task: finding and financing the scientific breakthroughs that will end the nation’s dependence on carbon-based fuels and solve the climate change problem.
Borrowing an analogy from the world of physics, he said that in Washington, Newton’s first law — a body in motion tends to stay in motion — does not apply. “In a bureaucracy, if you start something in motion, it either stops or gets derailed,” he said. “You have to keep applying force.”
He intends to keep applying that force, he said, because it could help solve the world’s energy and climate change problems.
“If we don’t spend this money wisely and invest in new technology that addresses these challenges,” he said, “we will have failed the country. We will have failed the world.”
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Lahontan Valley News
March 22, 2009
FALLON - The Churchill County Commissioners met Wednesday and discussed or took action on the following items:
By Christy Lattin
Old Business A — Amendment to the Armstrong Teasdale contract for legal representation in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing proceedings for the Yucca Mountain Project. Rex Massey said the amendment was needed because it was difficult to estimate one year’s costs for Armstrong Teasdale’s services and additional costs for expert witnesses were incurred. He also recommended covering $10,000 in costs for Mineral County which would be repaid next year. After April, all work done by Armstrong Teasdale will be pre-approved. Unanimously approved.
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Salt Lake Tribune
March 22, 2009
After Yucca: America's homeless nuclear waste
By Thomas Burr And Judy Fahys
Every year, the nation's 104 nuclear plants create about 2,200 tons of nuclear waste and stow it in storage containers beside cooling towers across America.
In Idaho. In Massachusetts. In Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Louisiana, California, New Mexico -- at 120 locations in 39 states a total of 66,000 tons of used but still dangerously radioactive fuel are stored in concrete containers under the open sky.
And now it has nowhere else to go.
The plan for two decades was to bury it in volcanic rock under Yucca Mountain, a hundred miles from Las Vegas.
But President Barack Obama opposes the repository and has slashed funding for it in his budget proposal.
"Both the president and I have made clear that Yucca Mountain is not a workable option and that we will begin a thoughtful dialogue on a better solution for our nuclear storage waste needs," Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate budget panel recently.
Concerns about transportation safety, earthquakes, water contamination and its proximity to millions of Nevadans have stalled the repository's completion after two decades and billions of dollars of study and construction.
Some even contend that the Yucca Mountain project is dead.
Chu, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is proposing a blue-ribbon commission to study America's options for dealing with the waste, though prying open that debate again is unlikely to yield a quick solution.
"There is no backup plan in place," the Congressional Research Service said last month.
There is no shortage of ideas, however. And all of them provoke controversy.
Some groups want to reprocess the waste. Some propose a few interim storage areas across the country. Others insist the nation needs a single permanent site for the waste -- maybe in Utah.
Nuclear plants had planned to hand over their waste to the U.S. Energy Department a decade ago, when Yucca Mountain was originally set to open. Delays have forced utilities to keep the waste at reactor sites.
Two plant operators, Yankee Atomic Electric Co. and Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., have waste at three decommissioned plants.
Spokesman Bob Capstick says the companies' sole reason to exist now is babysitting that waste, 59 containers lined up on two fenced-in blacktop fields and guarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Capstick hopes work continues on Yucca Mountain even as the Obama administration explores other options.
"It doesn't make sense to eliminate Plan A," Capstick says, "and not have a Plan B."
Chu said last week that short-term storage on-site at reactors can "buy us some time" while the nation decides a future solution for the waste. Besides mentioning reprocessing as a possibility, he deferred other options to the future blue-ribbon commission.
"I don't want to presuppose what this panel will say and do, but these are some of the things that we want to at least put on the table," Chu said.
Another home » One possibility is finding permanent storage elsewhere.
The U.S. Energy Department released a report in December detailing the hunt for a second repository in addition to Yucca Mountain. The likeliest places, the report said, included the sites originally on the list before Yucca was selected.
The original list proposed in the 1980s includes two locations in Utah of bedded salt, Lavender Canyon and Davis Canyon, both abutting Canyonlands National Park. Other potential sites could be in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas or Washington state.
Yet another possible solution advocated by some nuclear companies is central, temporary storage.
That was the idea behind the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation site in Tooele County, about 25 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to hold nuclear waste for up to 40 years, the site stalled after the Bureau of Indian Affairs refused to back the project lease and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management denied a right of way for a railroad spur to the site.
John Parkyn, chairman and chief executive of Private Fuel Storage LLC, a consortium of eight nuclear utilities that partnered with the Skull Valley band for the temporary storage, doesn't rule it out as an option.
"It's never stopped. It's going through the legal process," says Parkyn, who used to run the Dairyland Power Cooperative, which spent millions annually to store waste at a Genoa, Wis., power plant that hasn't operated since 1987.
Reusing nuke waste » Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, says the clear solution to the nation's nuke waste overflow is reprocessing.
He points to France and Great Britain as models. The United States can deal with the weapons-grade plutonium created in reprocessing, he says.
Nuclear security "doesn't seem to be that big of concern," in the nations with reprocessing, Bennett adds. "And I think Americans can control it as much as the British and the French can."
Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions, a nuclear waste company, acquired the license to use the British reprocessing technology in 2006, and proposed several new reprocessing projects during the Bush administration. Steve Creamer, the company's CEO since 2004, was involved in an earlier plan -- which never got off the drawing board -- to create a temporary spent nuclear fuel storage site on state lands dubbed "Plan B."
Beyond Nuclear is a group that opposes new reactors and wants current plants shuttered. It says the best alternative right now is "hardening" on-site storage, which includes securing the dry casks holding the waste to protect them from terrorist attacks and accidents.
Kevin Kamps, the group's radioactive waste watchdog, says transporting the waste and creating "nuclear waste parking lot" dumps is problematic. Even more scary, he says, are the burgeoning pools of radioactive material building up at nuclear plants.
"Right now," he says, "the pools are just monumental dirty bombs waiting to be blown up."
Anxious for solutions » David Wright, president of the Nuclear Waste Policy Coalition, an ad hoc group of utilities and regulators in 31 states, says reprocessing and additional storage are ideas worth exploring. But, since waste isn't a problem that's going to go away, answers are needed soon.
"If the political will is there to solve the problem, you will solve the problem," Wright says.
Like others watching the latest developments with Yucca Mountain, Steven Kraft of the Nuclear Energy Institute insists that the Yucca Mountain project isn't dead. The Obama administration has budgeted $288 million this year for licensing, he notes. "They haven't killed it."
"Hopefully, Yucca Mountain will survive," he adds. "But if it doesn't, then this blue-ribbon panel, hopefully, they will come up with some other disposal facilities."
"It's not the end of the world," Kraft says.
"You've got a problem. Now you've got to solve it."
--tburr@sltrib.com, fahys@sltrib.com
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Abilene Reporter-News
March 22, 2009
The viability of future nuclear reactors
By Mike Sadler
Guest Columnist
In my column that appeared in this newspaper on Feb. 22, I discussed the energy plans promoted by Gov. Rick Perry, T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore. None of these energy plans mentions nuclear fission energy. Although 20 percent of our nation's electricity is generated by nuclear fission power, no new nuclear power plants have been commissioned in this country since the 1980s. Public opinion shifted and investors became reluctant after the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. This option is being re-evaluated, even by some staunch environmentalists. Nuclear power plants emit no particulates, sulfur, nitrogen oxides, mercury or CO2 (not counting the fossil fuel required to run the machinery for mining and transporting uranium).
The main arguments against nuclear fission power are the possibility of catastrophic release of radioactivity in case of an accident (e.g., Chernobyl), the possibility of nuclear fuel (particularly plutonium) winding up in the wrong hands and the need to provide storage for long-lived nuclear wastes. These issues should be addressed.
The nuclear power industry has an enviable safety record. No loss of life has ever occurred due to the malfunction of a nuclear power plant in the U.S. Chernobyl was the crowning achievement of the former Soviet Union. The Chernobyl reactors had inadequate containment structures, ostensibly to provide access for the extraction of plutonium for nuclear weapons. The accident did not occur in the normal operation of the plant but by overriding the control systems in preparation for a test. With modern controls and procedures, the probability of an accident is reduced to a minuscule level. A bomb-like explosion of a reactor is an absolute impossibility since the enrichment of the fuel is below that required for a nuclear warhead.
Nuclear proliferation is a real concern. All reactors using enriched uranium for a fuel produce plutonium as a byproduct. Since plutonium is a different chemical element, it is more easily separated to make bomb-grade material compared with the enrichment of fissile uranium-235 from natural uranium (which is more than 99 percent nonfissile uranium-238). A nuclear explosive device can be made from about 20 pounds of plutonium-239, easily carried in a briefcase. Tight control of both nuclear fuel and plutonium-laden nuclear waste is obviously necessary (and achievable).
Nuclear waste disposal is, as yet, an unsolved problem. Most spent nuclear fuel is presently stored on site near the reactors. Yucca Mountain has been designated as a spent fuel repository, but that is not acceptable to a majority of Nevada residents. Being a swing state, Nevada thus far has been very successful in extracting promises from politicians not to transport nuclear waste there.
The most dangerous radioactive isotopes are long lived (thousands of years) and absorbed readily by biological organisms. Examples are strontium-90 (like calcium), iodine-131 and cesium-137. An interesting possibility is to transmute such waste via nuclear reactions to other (benign) nuclides. This process requires bombardment from nuclear reactors or accelerators. A promising source for the bombarding particles are fast neutrons from the fission process itself.
Present-day reactors use a moderator to slow down the energetic (or fast) neutrons produced in fission reactions. Future reactor designs, called Generation IV, would use these fast neutrons and eliminate the moderator. The fast neutrons have a lower probability for initiating fission reactions, but the fissions that are produced have a higher neutron yield. With more excess neutrons, it is possible to produce more (fissile) plutonium-239 from (nonfissile) uranium-238. The amount of plutonium produced can exceed the amount of (fissile) uranium-235 that is consumed. Such "breeder" reactors could extend the uranium supply by about a factor of 100.
At first glance, it might seem that Gen-IV (or fast or breeder) reactors would be undesirable because of the increased production of plutonium and nuclear waste. But fast reactors could be safer, more reliable, more resistant to proliferation and produce less waste. The main reason is that the spent fuel could be reprocessed and transmuted (or "burned") using the excess neutrons as the bombarding particle required to initiate nuclear reactions. If burner reactors were built near existing ones, they could "burn" their waste on site. The amount of waste that would eventually be shipped to a storage facility would be greatly reduced, decreasing the possibility of it being dispersed due to an accident or sabotage. The possibilities that future nuclear reactors could both breed more fuel than they consume as well as burn their own waste may seem too good to be true, a violation of some fundamental physical law. It is indeed possible, and the technology is within our grasp.
Why not investigate the possibility of replacing the inactive power plant on Lake Fort Phantom Hill with a modern nuclear fission reactor?
--Mike Sadler is a physics professor at Abilene Christian University.
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Gainesville Sun
March 22, 2009
Editorial: Yucca breakdown
The Obama administration announced this month that it will not use the high-level nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nev.
That facility was designed for and capable of storing highly radioactive material. And it is engineered to hold this dangerous material without leaking for 10,000 years.
Cost to U.S. taxpayers: about $10 billion. (Did we mention that the site, selected by Congress 22 years ago, is ready to accept material, but sections still remain unfinished?)
Obama’s new energy secretary, Steven Chu, told a Senate committee that the facility at Yucca Mountain is no longer an option for the nation’s nuclear waste storage.
There are now more than 100 nuclear reactors in the nation.
The site was supposed to start accepting their waste more than 10 years ago. But the president made it a campaign promise to shut down the site.
And last year, Nevada, which hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996, voted for Barack Obama.
There is no reason not to use Yucca Mountain other than politics. It is properly designed and constructed for that purpose. Asked at the Senate hearing to cite any problems with Yucca Mountain, Chu said, “I think we can do a better job.
So what is the administration’s alternative plan for high-level nuclear waste? It doesn’t have one. Chu says a plan will be developed.
The energy secretary didn’t mention what this decision means for the nation.
So instead of going to the underground Yucca Mountain facility — specifically designed to handle spent nuclear fuel — the nation will continue to spread it around to some 120 above-ground sites around the nation.
It means that we get to keep the nation’s dangerous, highly radioactive plutonium supply in facilities that were never designed or built for long-term storage of this material.
In addition to surplus plutonium, Yucca Mountain was supposed to accept the spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear reactors. That high-level radioactive waste is accumulating at commercial nuclear power plants and other reactors across the nation.
Because the White House is unwilling to use the only facility in the nation appropriate for the storage of this material, this high-level nuclear waste will be stockpiled at inappropriate facilities in communities across the country.
As The New York Times recently reported, the courts have already awarded about $1 billion to utility companies that have had to store their wastes after signing contracts with the federal government to take it.
Moreover, the nuclear industry has said it may seek the return of the $22 billion that it paid the Energy Department for the establishment of a waste repository.
Obama and Chu need to reconsider this decision. The nation’s residents — more than 161 million of them live within 75 miles of a storage site — should demand it.
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Athens Banner-Herald
March 22, 2009
Obama should embrace nuclear energy
By Jeff Lewis
If President Barack Obama is serious about so-called global warming and reducing carbon emissions, he would embrace safe, clean nuclear energy.
But nuclear power suffered a serious setback recently when the president imposed a ban on the disposal of spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. That move alone could have a chilling effect on the construction and development of additional nuclear energy power plants in the United States.
Instead, the Obama administration should encourage nuclear energy in our nation so we become less dependent on foreign oil and fossil fuels. If Obama is serious about being a "green" president, he would immediately remove another federal barrier to more nuclear power - one that prohibits the recycling of spent nuclear fuel.
Former President Jimmy Carter imposed this barrier on the recycling of spent fuel in 1977, a move that has contributed to the slowdown of construction of nuclear plants. Meanwhile, nations such as France and Japan have quickly surpassed us by adopting policies to recycle used fuel.
Ninety-six percent of spent fuel can be recycled to produce additional energy, creating more electricity from the spent rods that now sit in cooling ponds or in storage casings in places such as Georgia's two nuclear facilities, Plant Hatch in Baxley and Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro.
For three decades, our nation has stuck its head in the sand when it comes to aggressively pursuing nuclear energy. Nuclear power provides only 19 percent of electricity in the United States.
Yet in France, 75 to 80 percent of electricity is generated at nuclear power facilities. There are 59 nuclear reactors for 62 million French residents, or almost one reactor for every million residents. In the United States, we have 104 reactors, one for every 3 million people. The United States opened its last reactors 20 years ago, one of them in Georgia.
Beginning in the 1970s, France decided it would aggressively pursue nuclear power, with its few carbon emissions. As a result, France has one of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions in the world. France also has avoided becoming a pawn in the geopolitical turmoil of Middle Eastern oil. France recycles spent fuel, burned uranium and plutonium to produce new fuel, according to the French Atomic Energy Commission. It even recycles fuel for its neighbors Belgium, Great Britain and Switzerland.
In our country, meanwhile, utility consumers such as Georgia Power customers have been charged a monthly fee by the federal government for years for the operation and storage at Yucca, although no waste ever has been sent there. Local protesters prevented the opening of that storage facility. Georgia consumers have been charged about $500 million during 30 years, and if Yucca is closed, they are due a refund.
Of all the talk about wind power, solar, natural gas and even traditional energy forms such as coal or hydropower, only nuclear power can produce the amounts of electricity we need for a state of more than 9 million and growing. This is a world that relies 24 hours a day on computers, medical devices, electronics and other power-consuming gadgets, and that isn't going to change.
In 2008, presidential candidate Obama said nuclear power was not off the table. In his energy plan for the nation, he wrote, "Nuclear power represents more than 70 percent of our noncarbon-generated electricity. It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power as an option."
If Obama truly doesn't want to eliminate nuclear power as an option, he will counter his Yucca decision by repealing the Carter ban on recycling fuel, which will make our power plants more efficient. We need as much as energy we can get.
• Jeff Lewis served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1993 to 2008, where he chaired the House Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications Committee.
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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
March 22, 2009
Three Mile Island: 30 years of what if ...
By Bonnie Pfister
SWATARA TOWNSHIP — One spring day 30 years ago, Mary Osborn rose early to share breakfast with her husband before he left for an out-of-town construction job. At his car just before 6 a.m., he called her name.
"He said, 'Come out here and smell the air.'" Osborn recalled. "Sometimes we could smell the chocolate from the Hershey's factory, or the cows up on the hill." She walked outside and was struck immediately by a sharp metallic tang.
"The air was still. There were no birds. Usually at that time of year, they're chattering away in the morning," Osborn said. "All we could smell and taste was metal."
Seven miles away on the Susquehanna River, the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history was underway at Three Mile Island. On March 28, 1979, worker mistakes compounded equipment malfunctions, triggering a partial meltdown of the reactor core in Unit Two. For five frightening days, state officials, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the plant's owner, Metropolitan Edison Corp., struggled to halt the meltdown.
Confusing and contradictory statements to the public sowed fear, which gave way to panic. Already on edge from the debut days earlier of "The China Syndrome," a film about a nuclear plant disaster, about 200,000 residents evacuated their homes.
A commission appointed by President Jimmy Carter later declared the health impact minimal although the stress on residents was "quite severe." Many studies found the accident did not increase cancer rates. A few concluded the opposite.
Dramatic reversal
The meltdown spawned a powerful anti-nuclear movement that sidelined the industry for decades. Unit Two never reopened after a $1 billion cleanup, although adjacent Unit One, now owned by Exelon Corp., produces power for 800,000 homes in three states.
Improvements in plant design and worker training, along with a reconsideration of nuclear power as a cleaner alternative to coal-generated electricity, have led to a dramatic reversal in the past several years. Thirty plants are planned for the United States, and Monroeville-based Westinghouse Electric Co. has secured billions of dollars in design contracts.
For many residents in south-central Pennsylvania, however, distrust and skepticism lingers.
"It was a traumatic moment, a mark on our lives," said Pattie Longenecker, a farmer living three miles from the plant. "You will never hear a person who got sick, or a parent of a sick child, who doesn't question whether the illness was related to that incident."
The meltdown began at 4 a.m. on a Wednesday. Pumps in the plant's turbine building stopped feeding water to a steam generator in the reactor building of Unit Two. Coolant stopped flowing to the reactor core, where uranium was heated to 600 degrees. The reactor shut down, but pressure continued to build in its concrete housing.
A safety valve opened to relieve the pressure but remained stuck, even though indicators showed it to be closed. Cooling water flowed out of the valve for hours, causing the nuclear fuel to overheat. Plant operators, relying on instruments that didn't reflect the situation, compounded the problem by reducing the flow of coolant to the core.
The metal tubes holding nuclear pellets ruptured, and the core began to melt. Toxic xenon, krypton and iodine gases escaped into the atmosphere at levels too high for the plant's radiation monitors to measure.
'Chaotic situation'
Ten miles north in Harrisburg, Gov. Dick Thornburgh — on the job for just 72 days — was at a breakfast meeting with Democratic lawmakers to discuss his proposed budget. At 7:50 a.m., he was interrupted by a phone call from his emergency management director.
"He said there'd been an accident, but he had no more details," Thornburgh, a native Pittsburgher who later became U.S. Attorney General, said in a recent interview. Lack of timely, accurate information turned out to be one of the principal challenges in the days ahead.
"We were plagued with the fact that the utility was not terribly forthcoming ... and oftentimes wildly swung from telling us more than they knew to less than they knew," Thornburgh said. "It was a pretty chaotic situation."
If such a radiation release occurred today, Exelon Corp. officials say 96 sirens in a 10-mile radius would wail, alerting residents to turn on their TVs and radios. Residents likely would be advised to stay inside with their windows closed.
But no such community emergency plan existed back then, said Robert Reid, mayor then and now of Middletown, the nearest large town to the plant. Reid, who emerged as the most visible local elected official during the crisis, said he had initiated meetings for such a plan upon taking office a year earlier. But the process was still in its nascent stages and MetEd reacted with condescension, he said.
"They never came into town and said, 'We want to work up an emergency plan with you," Reid said. That would have suggested that an accident was possible. "They always guaranteed that no accident could ever take place at a nuclear plant. Communications (were) very, very poor."
Initial calm
So as the sun rose and the metallic odor dissipated, locals flung open their windows to one of the season's first sunny days. After her daughter Leslie, 9, left for school, Mary Osborn took her son Nicholas, 2, to a neighbor's house to play in the yard with several other toddlers. Although she stood in the shade of the garage, both she and her son's faces and hands had turned red by the time they returned home an hour or so later. Today she believes that was erythema, a symptom of radiation exposure.
The day after the meltdown was relatively calm, residents recall. At a news conference that evening, a federal official went so far as to say the threat was over. Thornburgh was unconvinced.
"I didn't know at the time that wasn't totally correct," he said. "But it seemed to be an unusually rosy assessment."
About 8 a.m. Friday, emergency management helicopters swirled over the cooling towers of damaged Unit Two, taking radiation readings. Unbeknownst to emergency officials, Metropolitan Edison had chosen that time to vent the built-up radioactive gases into the atmosphere.
The readings were more than three times what an average American is exposed to in a year. An NRC executive mistakenly believed the readings had been taken downwind in residential communities, and called for an immediate evacuation. Radio and TV stations spread the word before officials realized the mistake.
"All hell took loose," Thornburgh said. He struggled to clarify matters to the public, and later that morning called for a limited evacuation of pregnant women and small children living within a five-mile radius of the plant. But by then, nearly everyone was on the move.
Panic strikes
Reid recalls lining up buses along Main Street in front of Middletown Borough Hall that morning.
"People were leaving town in droves. There were long lines of traffic, and people hollering 'Watch the town! Watch my house!' " he said. "The bank branch manager told me they had to send for money a couple times. One man had $85,000, and he wanted it all, cash money."
More panic struck Saturday when rumors circulated that a hydrogen bubble inside the reactor vessel could soon explode. The absence of oxygen in the vessel made that impossible, and the hydrogen slowly abated, but fears of a nuclear holocaust did not begin to subside until Carter arrived on Sunday to tour the hobbled power plant. Five days later, on Friday, April 6, Thornburgh gave the all-clear.
Back home after nine days, Mary Osborn toweled off her son following a bath and found a wad of his hair in the tub. "You could see his scalp, where before you could not," she said. In the months to come, neighbors would share similar stories.
Surveys by residents in the region found hundreds of people who said they experienced the metallic taste, reddened skin, hair-loss and vomiting — all symptoms consistent with high-level radiation exposure. Osborn keeps an album of local photos taken from those years: a poodle born without eyes, a two-headed calf; images of plants that grew with flattened stems, or extra blooms.
Conflicting opinions
The NRC estimates 2 million people were exposed to radiation averaging one-sixth the amount from a chest X-ray. The effects on people and the environment were "negligible," it said.
A 1997 analysis by epidemiologist Steven Wing at the University of North Carolina, however, found that lung cancer and leukemia rates downwind of the accident were two- to 10-ties higher than those upwind. While those cases might not have been caused by radiation releases from the plant, Wing thinks it's worth further study.
The meltdown at Three Mile Island is "frequently raised as the example that no one has ever been hurt by a nuclear accident in the United States," Wing said. "I think there's strong evidence to suggest that people were hurt."
The plant operator and its insurers paid at least $82 million in publicly documented compensation to residents for loss of business revenue, evacuation expenses and health claims, said Eric Epstein, an activist with Three Mile Island Alert, a nuclear watchdog group founded in 1977. He and other residents estimate much more was paid in confidential claims. A 16-year legal battle to bring a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 2,000 residents ultimately was rejected by federal judges.
The Unit One reactor resumed operating in 1985, and residents say they recognize it is here to stay. Three Mile Island Alert has opted not to oppose Exelon's application to relicense the plant through 2034.
But many locals say no new reactors should be built until the government comes up with a long-term solution for waste storage. President Barack Obama's newly proposed budget offers no money to use Nevada's Yucca Mountain, and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu says the controversial location is no longer an option.
"The waste is the bottom line," said Helen Hacker, 82, of Etters, seven miles northwest of Three Mile Island. Nine neighbors along her road died of cancer, as did her daughter Patty Burkholder, two days after her 40th birthday. "I do blame it on the radiation. I hope that the government will see the truth. They should think carefully about what to do with the waste."
--Bonnie Pfister can be reached at bpfister@tribweb.com or 412-320-7886.
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Deseret News
March 21, 2009
The winners and the losers
Winner: It may have escaped your attention several days ago, what with all the economic turmoil raging in the news, but the new energy secretary has made it clear that Nevada's Yucca Mountain will not be taking any spent nuclear-fuel rods — not in the immediate future, and not ever. The administration is working on a new comprehensive plan for dealing with nuclear waste. To Utahns, who would have seen tons of highly radioactive waste traversing the state's highways en route to Nevada, this is good news, indeed.
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Las Vegas SUN
March 20, 2009
IBLV editorial:
Remaining defiant
Nevada must keep up Yucca fight
Nevada is finally making significant progress in its decadeslong fight to prevent the federal government from building a dump for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
President Barack Obama has made good on a campaign promise by stripping funding for the dump in his budget and has announced that the time has come to look for alternative ways to dispose of the radioactive material.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., came up with a great idea to search for those alternatives through a bill they introduced last week that would create a nine-member blue ribbon commission. The commission, which would include five Democratic and four Republican appointees, would have two years to make recommendations to Congress on alternatives to a Yucca Mountain repository.
Topics that would be explored by the commission would include dry-cask storage at reactor sites, reprocessing of the waste and security issues associated with temporary storage. Reid said the commission would help the nation “take a critical step away from the failed Yucca Mountain policy.”
But Nevada cannot yet give up its fight.
There is still the Energy Department’s pending licensing request before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a permanent dump at Yucca Mountain. The nuclear power industry, while conceding lately that a Yucca repository looks grim, has not totally withdrawn its support.
That is why the Nevada Legislature should continue to fully fund the dump opposition effort through the state’s Nuclear Projects Agency and should provide the attorney general’s office with the money it needs to cover legal costs.
Nevadans can taste victory in this hard-fought battle against the dump, but the fight is not over yet.
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Las Vegas SUN
March 20, 2009
Carson City Briefs:
By Cy Ryan
After auditing the Nevada Nuclear Projects Commission, investigators recommended an independent review be done of 33 contracts and subcontracts and more than $28 million in federal funding spent on scientists, other experts and the law firm Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch.
Auditors found multiple contracts for similar functions.
For example, there were three contracts on transportation issues. The state agency also contracts with a public relations firm, while the law firm subcontracts with a public outreach firm. In addition, the Nuclear Projects Office and the law firm hire contractors to monitor other contractors.
Former agency chief Bob Loux maintained the contracts were necessary because of specialized scientific and legal issues. But the auditor said no independent review of the contracts has been done.
Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch has been paid more than $24 million in federal and state funding for the fight against the Yucca Mountain project since 2002, and its lawyers have been designated as special deputy attorneys general.
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Reno News & Review
March 20, 2009
Future kill
By Bob Fulkerson
Randi Thompson and the Cobb family want to sell Nevada’s future, trading nuclear waste for a mythical pot of gold. They are starting a group to bring a reprocessing facility to the moribund Yucca Mountain site. This is either amazingly uninformed and naïve or a last-ditch attempt by the commercial nuclear power industry and its allies in Nevada to salvage something from the rapidly sinking nuclear waste dump program. Here are a few reasons:
• If Yucca is unsuitable and unsafe as a repository site (which it is), it is even more unsuitable and dangerous as a reprocessing site. Yucca Mountain and the Nevada Test Site are located in what the U.S. Geologic Survey has designated as a major earthquake zone. Waste reprocessing facilities are the last things you want to locate in areas prone to earthquakes because of the extremely hazardous, toxic and long-lived nature of the materials generated and stored there.
• Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is an extremely water-intensive process, unsuitable for arid, water-starved southern Nevada. It’s no coincidence that nuclear weapons facilities (i.e., operations that rely on reprocessing to obtain weapons grade nuclear materials) were located near abundant water sources (i.e., Hanford, Wash.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.)
• Even if Yucca were an acceptable site geologically and hydrologically, a reprocessing facility thousands of miles away from the reactors that provide the spent fuel and that would reuse the reprocessed fuel would require tens of thousands of shipments of deadly spent fuel for as long as the facility was in existence. To be feasible, any reprocessing facilities must be located in proximity to reactor locations, primarily in the eastern part of the country.
• Reprocessing, unfortunately, is not yet economically or politically feasible. Bringing spent fuel into Nevada ostensibly to be reprocessed at Yucca Mountain is nothing more than a nuclear industry Trojan horse. Once that waste has been moved out of reactor locations in other states and is in storage in Nevada, there will be absolutely no incentive to do anything with it—certainly not investing billions of dollars in reprocessing technologies that are not economically sustainable and that have serious nuclear proliferation issues (i.e., large amounts of plutonium and other bomb-grade materials that result). Yucca will become a defacto above-ground storage site.
• Reprocessing is far from a “clean” technology. Chemically reprocessing spent fuel results in a highly toxic and very-difficult-to-manage, highly corrosive liquid, highly radioactive waste stream, and vast amounts of lower level nuclear wastes.
Nevadans have fought long and hard to defeat the ill-conceived and dangerous Yucca Mountain nuclear dump project. Why on earth would we now, when that boondoggle is finally on its way to oblivion, want to propose using the site for something that’s even more dangerous and environmentally damaging?
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USA Today blog
March 20, 2009
Obama did not play politics in Yucca Mountain decision
Bruce H. Breslow, Executive director, Nevada Agency For Nuclear Projects - Carson City, Nev.
USA TODAY's criticism of President Obama for abandoning the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain project for a nuclear waste repository is based on misconception ("Responsibility? Yucca choice squanders $8B investment," Our view, Nuclear power debate, Tuesday).
(Money drying up: President Obama’s budget would dramatically scale back funding for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada./ 2003 photo by Bob Riha Jr., USA TODAY)
The editorial stated that politics was the reason the Yucca Mountain project was declared dead.
Politics is the reason that Nevada's Yucca Mountain was chosen in the first place. Nevada had little political clout when the repository site was chosen in 1987. No other state wanted it then, and none wants it now.
The Department of Energy has spent $8 billion on the site. It anticipated spending $88 billion more to build the project.
The fundamental problem is that the DOE picked a bad site.
There was more rainwater in the mountain, which promotes corrosion, than the department expected.
The water also was moving faster toward the groundwater supply than expected, which violated DOE criteria. Instead of abandoning the site, the department abandoned its criteria.
To haul all of the nation's waste thousands of miles through major population centers and insert it inside a leaky mountain with corrosive groundwater, earthquake faults and within a volcanic field is to turn one's head on the problem, not to solve it. The president is right.
Let science catch up and find a permanent solution to nuclear waste, while it is stored safely at the sites that produce it, instead of creating a permanent problem for the next 100,000 years.
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NRC
March 20, 2009
Atomic Safety & Licensing Boards to Hold Yucca Mountain Pre-Hearing Sessions in Las Vegas, March 31 – April 2
Three Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety and Licensing Boards will conduct oral arguments in the Yucca Mountain proceeding in Las Vegas from March 31 through April 2 on the standing of petitioners and the admissibility of their proposed contentions.
These oral arguments are part of the adjudicatory proceeding on the Department of Energy’s application for authorization to construct an underground geologic repository for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. DOE submitted the application to the NRC on June 3, 2008.
Each board consists of three judges, two with legal expertise and one with technical expertise. The three boards will consider and rule upon the admissibility of approximately 320 proposed contentions filed by 14 petitioners. These boards will consider only the standing of the petitioners and the admissibility of the contentions. The merits of any admitted contentions will be considered at a later time.
The sessions will be held at the NRC’s Las Vegas Hearing Facility, Pacific Enterprise Plaza, Building 1, 3250 Pepper Lane, Las Vegas, beginning at 9 a.m. each day. Each board will hear arguments for one day, and will try to complete the day’s proceedings by 5 p.m.
Media wishing to cover the pre-hearing sessions are strongly encouraged to register in advance with NRC’s Office of Public Affairs in Rockville, Maryland, by calling (301) 415-8200. Pre-registration is essential for television media, as space inside the hearing room is limited. Photographers (video or still) will not be permitted to move around the hearing room while the boards are in session. ASLB judges will not grant interviews. No interviews of other participants shall be permitted inside the hearing facility. Two brochures on the Las Vegas Hearing Facility – one for media and one for the general public – will be available on the NRC’s Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/.
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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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