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| | | published Wednesday, November 09, 2011 | 1486 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 Thursday, November 03, 2011 | 2182 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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| | | published Tuesday, September 13, 2011 | 1711 Views :: 0 Comments |
Sep 13, 2011
By John Fleck From the Albuquerque Journal
A pair of congressmen on the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee, including Albuquerque Democrat Martin Heinrich, are pushing to protect a proposed nuclear weapons budget increase from an increasingly likely Congressional failure to pass a federal budget Oct. 1.
In a letter Monday, Heinrich and Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, asked the Obama administration to declare an "anomaly" for the National Nuclear Security Administration's budget. NNSA is the prime funding source for Los Alamos and Sandia labs here in New Mexico, and the administration is asking for a big budget increase for the agency in the coming year.
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| | | published Friday, September 09, 2011 | 1189 Views :: 0 Comments |
Sept. 9, 2011
The Western Governors' Association (WGA) has compiled a white paper on nuclear waste transportation and storage. This white paper will be presented at the Sept. 13th Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future meeting in Denver, Co.
Highlights from the WGA white paper include:
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| | | published Wednesday, August 17, 2011 | 749 Views :: 0 Comments |
Aug 16, 2011
From the Carlsbad Current-Argus
CARLSBAD — Disposal operations in Panel 5 of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant underground repository are now complete, the U.S. Department of Energy announced this week.
The final shipment of contact-handled transuranic waste, or CH-TRU, was placed in the panel in July, according to a news release from the U.S. DOE Carlsbad Field Office.
The fifth out of a total of 10 panels in the WIPP underground configuration, the panel took two years to fill.
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| | | published Monday, August 15, 2011 | 1966 Views :: 0 Comments |
Aug 14, 2011
By Rob Pavey
From the Augusta Chronicle
They came, they toiled -- and now most of them are gone.
As the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act enters its final weeks, Savannah River Site's stimulus-funded cleanup projects are winding down.
"They're wrapping up this month, and next month," said Jim Giusti, a Department of Energy spokesman at the site.
The $1.6 billion windfall created or saved about 3,000 jobs and accelerated dozens of projects that might have languished for years before money became available to complete them.
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| | | published Sunday, August 14, 2011 | 2017 Views :: 1 Comments |
August 13, 2011
By Annette Cary
From the Tri-City Herald
The Department of Energy has taken a look at all the environmental cleanup yet to be completed at the Hanford nuclear reservation and come up with a big price tag: $115 billion.
That's what it projects will be required to finish environmental cleanup in about 2060 and then prevent any intrusion into areas, such as landfills holding radioactive waste, until 2090.
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