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| | | published Monday, September 12, 2011 | 961 Views :: 0 Comments |
Sept. 12, 2011
By Rob Pavey From the Augusta Chronicle
The National Nuclear Security Administration is more than six months late on its annual status report to Congress on the mixed oxide fuel project at Savannah River Site.
The document, mandated under the 2003 National Defense Authorization Act, was due Feb. 15 and was to include updated details on the $4.8 billion project’s construction progress and completion schedule, among other things.
Critics of the project say the delay is another sign the government’s program to dispose of surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear bombs could be facing more problems.
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| | | published Friday, August 26, 2011 | 383 Views :: 0 Comments |
Aug 26, 2011
By Laura Zuckerman
From Reuters
SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Firefighters struggled on Thursday to control a fast-growing 28,000-acre wildfire raging within several miles of spent nuclear fuel stored at a U.S. Energy Department lab in the high desert of eastern Idaho.
The growth and intensity of the blaze, the nation's largest active wildfire, prompted the Idaho National Laboratory to order a key facility on the 890-square-mile site evacuated of all nonessential personnel, lab officials said.
The Materials and Fuels Complex, about 38 miles from Idaho Falls, consists of facilities for handling, processing and examining spent nuclear fuel, irradiated materials and radioactive wastes, according to the lab's website.
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| | | published Tuesday, August 09, 2011 | 374 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 8, 2011
By Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler From the New York Times
FUKUSHIMA, Japan — The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate.
Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.
The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.
But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.
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| | | published Friday, August 05, 2011 | 414 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 5, 2011
By Annette Cary
Tri-City Herald
Environmental cleanup of Hanford and other
Department of Energy sites risk becoming less of a priority under a
reorganization of DOE oversight of that work, according to Rep. Doc
Hastings, R-Wash.
After Energy Secretary Steven Chu made the DOE reorganization official
Tuesday, Hastings sent him a letter Thursday asking for answers.
"I write today to express my ongoing concerns with the department's
reorganization that moves the Office of Environmental Management under
the under secretary for nuclear security," he wrote.
Chu said in a memo Tuesday that moving that office plus the Office of
Legacy Management and the chief of nuclear safety and staff under the
office of the undersecretary for nuclear security will "capitalize on
the expertise that exists throughout the department on project
management, nuclear materials and waste, and nuclear safety and
security."
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| | | published Friday, August 05, 2011 | 363 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 4, 2011
By Annette Cary
Tri-City Herald
RICHLAND -- After 10 and a half years, the $12.2 billion Hanford
vitrification plant is 60 percent complete, by the calculations of
Department of Energy contractor Bechtel National.
The milestone includes engineering, procurement, construction and start-up and commissioning-related activities.
“Woohoo!” was the reaction of the regulator for the project, the
Washington State Department of Ecology, as summed up by Dan McDonald,
the project manager for Hanford waste treatment.
“We’re very pleased with the progress,” he said. Hitting
the 60-percent mark positions work to continue the transition from the
design and build phase of the massive project to the commissioning and
operating phase, he said.
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| | | published Friday, August 05, 2011 | 862 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 4, 2011
By Peter Geoghegan
Guardian.co.uk
Sellafield Mox nuclear fuel plant to close. It's a headline that generations of Irish environmental activists,
and government ministers in Leinster House, never thought they would
see. After just 10 years of operation – and at the cost of a vertiginous
£1.4bn to the British taxpayer – the mixed-oxide fuel plant nestled on
the edge of bucolic west Cumbria is to be decommissioned.
Sellafield
has long been an emotive issue in Ireland. At just 128 miles from
Dublin, the plant is within spitting distance of Ireland's densely
populated eastern seaboard. The Irish Sea is now the most radioactively contaminated in the world, while in the wake of 9/11 concerns about a terrorist attack on the plant briefly gripped the Irish popular imagination.
Unsurprisingly then, yesterday's announcement that the Mox plant is to cease operation has been welcomed by Irish activists,
many of whom have been involved in decades-long campaigns opposing the
facility. However, the closure is anything but the end of Sellafield's
nuclear story.
Last October, the environment secretary, Chris
Huhne – in a volte-face from previous Lib Dem energy policy – announced
that eight new nuclear power plants are to be constructed across
Britain. Only last month it was confirmed that Sellafield is to be the
site of one such new reactor, to be built by 2025. It is widely expected
that additional employment at the new facility will at the very least
replace the 600 job losses announced yesterday.
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| | | published Friday, August 05, 2011 | 783 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 4, 2011
By Lynn Horsley
The Kansas City StarA
majority of Kansas City council members sponsored a resolution today to
derail a citizens’ initiative against a new weapons plant in south
Kansas City. The resolution responds to an initiative
petition by the KC Peace Planters, who gathered enough signatures to put
a measure on the November ballot in Kansas City. The proposed ballot measure asks voters to
prevent the manufacturing of non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons
at a plant being built at 14500 Botts Road. The group would like to
turn the plant into a “green manufacturing” facility, possibly for wind
energy. But council members John Sharp and Scott
Taylor introduced a resolution today that declines to put the measure on
the November ballot. The resolution is co-sponsored by Mayor Sly James,
Mayor Pro Tem Cindy Circo and council members Jan Marcason, Dick Davis
and Scott Wagner.
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| | | published Monday, August 01, 2011 | 374 Views :: 0 Comments |
July 30, 2011
By Annette Cary
From the Tri-City Herald
The draft report making recommendations on the future of the nation's nuclear waste released Friday by the Blue Ribbon Commission was met with concerns and criticisms by those with Hanford interests.
They feared at best the draft report's recommendation could lead to high-level radioactive waste remaining at Hanford longer, and at worst that more waste could be shipped to Hanford or that Hanford's own waste would remain at the site indefinitely.
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| | | published Friday, July 29, 2011 | 649 Views :: 0 Comments |
The following op-ed was written by ANA's Tom Clements and published on July 29, 2011 by South Carolina's The State newspaper. Tom is active with ANA member group Nuclear Watch South.
In 2007, the Legislature closed the Barnwell low-level radioactive-waste facility to unconstrained national access. The hard-fought victory seemed to have ended indiscriminate nuclear dumping in our state, but it may have only been a lull in the fight.
A much larger nuclear waste threat is looming. Much of the nation’s 65,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel now stored at reactor sites across the country could be brought to South Carolina for “interim” storage and reprocessing. The prospect of becoming the new Yucca Mountain spent-fuel dump surely will be rejected by many South Carolinians, but the federal government’s plans threaten to leave us holding the nuclear waste bag nonetheless.
A blue ribbon commission, established by President Obama in January 2010 after the unraveling of plans for a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, is charged with recommending the fate of spent fuel. Those recommendations, expected to be issued today, also will address the deadly high-level waste at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken.
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| | | published Friday, July 22, 2011 | 523 Views :: 0 Comments |
July 21, 2011
By Peter Behr From Environment & Energy Daily
The Energy Department proposes to have its agencies and the Defense Department purchase the initial output of the first few small modular reactors as part of DOE's plan to accelerate development of the new reactor models, DOE's top outside advisers were told yesterday.
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