December 17, 2011

From the Associated Press

The compromise budget bill approved by the U.S. House on Friday slashes funding for and prohibits any site preparation work on a controversial new $6 billion nuclear facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The spending bill appropriates $200 million for the project this fiscal year, $100 million less than the administration had requested. It also notes that “no construction activities are funded for the project this year,” and calls for a new report on the country’s capability for manufacturing “pits,” or the cores that power nuclear weapons.

 

For Immediate Release Nov. 21, 2011

Contact: Gerry Pollet, JD; Executive Director                             

(206)382-1014 / cell: (206)819-9015

 

The US Department of Energy (USDOE) informed Washington State today that it is not able to meet the court approved schedule it agreed to in October, 2010 for building the massive plant to turn liquid High-Level Nuclear Waste in leaky tanks at Hanford into a glass, referred to as the Vitrification Plant.

 

Heart of America Northwest, the region’s leading Hanford Clean-Up watchdog group had objected to the highly publicized court settlement in 2010 between the USDOE and State, under which the USDOE was allowed to take an extra 22 years – to the year 2040 - to empty massive leaky, decades old, Single Shell Tanks of High Level Nuclear Waste in exchange for what USDOE and Washington State said would be a court enforceable schedule to build the Vitrification Plant.

Nov 18, 2011  

By John Fleck
From the Albuquerque Journal

Members of a federal safety panel meeting in Santa Fe on Thursday expressed impatience with federal efforts to reduce nuclear safety risks at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

“We’re a little frustrated,” said Peter Winokur, chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. 

Winokur’s comments came during a public hearing at the convention center probing nuclear safety at the lab’s current facilities, emergency preparedness and plans for new buildings at the nuclear weapons design and manufacturing center. 

The following article discusses the MOX plutonium fuel program, which ANA opposes. Touching on several of the problems with the program, the Reporter quotes two ANA members, Tom Clements and Jay Coghlan.

Nov. 16, 2011

By Wren Abbott
From the Santa Fe Reporter

Los Alamos National Laboratory is doubling down on a project that helps create a controversial, highly reactive new fuel used in nuclear power plants. Beginning next year, LANL will create twice as much plutonium oxide, an essential component of mixed oxide, or MOX, fuel, which combines uranium and plutonium. 

MOX fuel is believed to have amplified the effects of the recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

Oct 11, 2011

By John Fleck

From the Albuquerque Journal

Cutting the federal budget seems all the rage in political circles these days.

The problem, as is becoming increasingly obvious, is that all that money is currently going to someone. Those people very much seem to want to continue to receive it or, if possible, get more.

As an example, consider the tug of war over money the Department of Energy is spending in southeastern New Mexico to dispose of its backlog of radioactive waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad.

Congressional budget cutters have proposed modest spending reductions. The project’s defenders have gone into hyperdrive.

ANA thanks the Santa Fe Reporter for their excellent feature article on toxic waste coming from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The following article quotes several ANA members and asks "Why are we expanding weapons production and cutting corners on environmental protection?"

Nov. 2, 2011

By Wren Abbott
From the Santa Fe Reporter

In the summer of 2010, an excavator lifted a 1940s-era radiation protection suit from a pit in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Technical Area 21. With it came two pickup trucks of the same vintage—one of which may have been involved in the famous Trinity nuclear test near White Sands—and a 30-foot-tall chemical mixing tank.

The successful excavation of Material Disposal Area B, the lab’s oldest waste site, disproved a commonly held belief: that comprehensive cleanup of radioactive waste at the lab was cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. The project cleared a 200,000 square foot area and removed 750,000 cubic feet of toxic waste that had lain dormant since World War II. It cost $110 million—a modest sum for a facility with an approximately $2 billion budget.

Unfortunately, Area B is one of 24 waste sites at LANL, which in 1944 started burying everything from uranium chips to contaminated dump trucks in unlined pits. More than half of the lab’s estimated 17 million cubic feet of remaining waste lies in Area G—the only disposal site where LANL continues to dump, and one it seeks to expand. Though Area G’s fate has been bandied about for decades, it has now reached a critical turning point.