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| | | published Monday, December 12, 2011 | 874 Views :: 0 Comments |
The following article discusses the Hanford, WA nuclear waste treatment plant that ANA has long been concerned about. The article examines retaliation against Walt Tamosaitis, a whistleblower who ANA recognized at our 2011 DC Days awards reception. The piece also quotes ANA member, Tom Carpenter, a long-time Hanford watchdog.
December 11, 2011
By Shannon Dininny
From the Associated Press
The federal government says a one-of-a-kind plant that will convert radioactive waste into a stable and storable substance that resembles glass will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more and may take longer to build, adding to a string of delays and skyrocketing price tag for the project.
In addition, several workers at southeast Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation have raised concerns about the safety of the plant's design — and complained they've been retaliated against for voicing their issues.
The turmoil has some in the Pacific Northwest uneasy about the plant's long-term viability and fearful that a frustrated Congress could balk at paying more money for a project long considered the cornerstone of cleanup at the highly contaminated site.
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| | | published Friday, December 09, 2011 | 532 Views :: 0 Comments |
Representative Edward J. Markey U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 December 8, 2011 Dear Rep. Markey, On behalf of our 47 organizations and the members that we represent, we would like to express our gratitude to you for your principled call for reducing the amount of money that our country spends on nuclear weapons and related programs. In the letter that you signed on October 11 to the Supercommittee members about this issue, you expressed a view that—based on moral, security and fiscal grounds—our country can no longer justify current levels of spending on nuclear weapons programs. We endorse that position.
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| | | published Monday, December 05, 2011 | 754 Views :: 0 Comments |
Dec. 2, 2011
By William Hartung
From the Huffington Post
Your government is slated to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade to purchase, maintain and operate our massive nuclear arsenal. The costs include everything from new nuclear bombers, submarines and bomb factories to the huge but unknown costs of deploying and maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons.
It's an outrage that we are spending this kind of money on these outmoded and unnecessary systems at a time when deficit reduction is the order of the day. It is equally outrageous that our government will not tell us exactly how much we're spending on them -- and may not even be keeping track.
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| | | published Monday, November 28, 2011 | 742 Views :: 0 Comments |
This piece quotes long-time ANA member Don Hancock as he tries to explain some of the issues involved with federally funding nuclear waste cleanup.
Nov. 25, 2011
From The Republic
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Los Alamos National Laboratory is asking the state of New Mexico for more time to meet some mandated cleanup milestones as it faces shifting priorities and uncertainty about its environmental cleanup budget.
The northern New Mexico lab would be able to speed up the shipment of radioactive waste from lab property to a permanent disposal site if allowed to shift resources to higher priority work, George Rael, head of environmental management for the federal government's Los Alamos Site Office told the Albuquerque Journal (http://bit.ly/v5Ystc ).
The changes in lab cleanup priorities come amid discussion among the state, the lab and members of the public regarding the lab's 2005 agreement on environmental cleanup milestones.
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| | | published Friday, November 18, 2011 | 816 Views :: 0 Comments |
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.
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| | | published Thursday, November 17, 2011 | 641 Views :: 0 Comments |
Nov 17, 2011From the Albuquerque Journal
Facing intense budget pressure, the U.S. Department of Energy should consider the equivalent of the military’s base closure process for its sprawling research lab complex, an internal agency review has recommended.
Two of those labs are in New Mexico, where the Department’s nuclear weapons program is a major employer.
The Department of Energy spends more money in New Mexico than any other state – $4.1 billion in 2010, the most recent year for which numbers are available. That money supports some 20,000 workers at Los Alamos and Sandia labs, where U.S. nuclear weapons are designed, manufactured and maintained.
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| | | published Sunday, November 13, 2011 | 650 Views :: 0 Comments |
Nov 13, 2011From the Albuquerque Journal
LOS ALAMOS – From the fourth floor of the newest building on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium row, geophysicist Terry Wallace can see the Pajarito Fault three miles away.
The fault’s forested stair step, created in a series of earthquakes over the past million years, defines the base of the mountains rising to the west. It has also come to play a defining role in discussions of the major buildings along Pajarito Road, home to the lab’s main nuclear facilities. To the north, the lab’s Plutonium Facility is in the midst of a major retrofit because of concerns about earthquake safety. The work will not be done until 2020.
Up the road, lab officials are struggling to move out as quickly as they can from the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Building, an old nuclear lab not designed to modern earthquake standards. Below Wallace’s vantage point is the site of what lab officials hope will become, in the next decade, a major new plutonium lab.
Questions about earthquake safety surround all of the projects.
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| | | published Wednesday, November 09, 2011 | 721 Views :: 0 Comments |
This article, which exposes the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant's inability to meet it's performance milestones - and new strategy of simply doing away with performance metrics - features quotes and research from ANA's member group the Southwest Research and Information Center.
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.
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| | | published Tuesday, November 08, 2011 | 661 Views :: 2 Comments |
The following piece highlights the Department of Energy's habit of under-budgeting nuclear cleanup projects and features ANA member Gerald Pollet.
Nov. 6, 2011
By Annette Cary
From Tri-City Herald
Do not expect that the $115 billion estimated to be needed to complete environmental cleanup work at Hanford will be adequate to finish the job, according to the Hanford Advisory Board.
The board sent a letter to the Department of Energy and its regulators Friday saying that the estimate does not include cleanup work the board expects may be needed and also does not include fully developed cost estimates for some work.
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| | | published Thursday, November 03, 2011 | 929 Views :: 0 Comments |
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.
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