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| | | published Monday, July 11, 2011 | 880 Views :: 0 Comments |
July 11, 2011
BY Tony Rutherford
From the Huntington News
HUNTINGTON, WV (HNN) – Depending upon your degree of ‘trust’ in government agencies, the revelations about dangers at the former Huntington uranium processing plant and the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant either border on disrespect or symbolize how the truth slowly ebbs out exposing even the best planned cover up.
Actually, Piketon, Ohio, atomic plant workers such as Owen Thompson and Vina Colley joined the ranks of whistleblowers long ago which eventually led to the unraveling of decades of denial.
Thompson had a special security clearance. He worked in the “E Area” of the huge diffusion facility. Between 1978-1979, he just followed order by driving a hay wagon to some already dug trenches. When the contents were dumped, he saw a green goo. Thompson also observed that the wagons , trucks and other tools were entombed.
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| | | published Saturday, July 09, 2011 | 1025 Views :: 0 Comments |
By Martin Schneider
From the Nuclear Weapons & Materials Monitor
The idea of broadly restructuring the Department of Energy is set to make a return engagement for the 2012 Presidential Election, with President Obama preparing to float the possibility of a new Department of Competitiveness that would include most of DOE as part of his reelection campaign, NW&M Monitor has learned. The proposal would consolidate the Department of Commerce with non-defense portions of the Department of Energy such as the Department’s loan office, Office of Nuclear Energy, Fossil Energy, and Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The National Nuclear Security Administration would be split off into a separate standalone agency. It remains unclear where the offices of Environmental Management and Legacy Management would end up under the proposal.
The merger, which has been proposed in a white paper by White House Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Jeffrey Zients, would seek to better position the United States to compete against other countries with state- controlled industry, while freeing up the disparate missions within the Department of Energy. Industry officials expect the proposal to enjoy support from Democrats and opposition from Republicans. John Bryson, the Obama Administration’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Commerce, is likely to begin floating the idea if he is confirmed by the Senate.
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| | | published Friday, July 08, 2011 | 693 Views :: 0 Comments |
July 8, 2011
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently solicited public comments on it's proposition for rulemaking on spent nuclear fuel reprocessing. ANA is firmly against reprocessing spent nuclear fuel or converting U.S. reactors to use Mixed Oxide plutonium fuel (MOX, which is the product of reprocessing). ANA took this opportunity to submit this comment opposing the rulemaking as an unnecessary use of tax dollars.
Even though the NRC official comment period ended on July 7th, the comment period was unusually short and our allies are still encouraging people to submit comments. Click here for resources to help you submit your own comment to the NRC.
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| | | published Wednesday, July 06, 2011 | 324 Views :: 0 Comments |
By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles
Times July 6, 2011, 5:59 a.m. Walter Tamosaitis, once a top engineer in the nation's nuclear
weapons cleanup program, has been relegated to a basement storage
room equipped with cardboard-box and plywood furniture with nothing
to do for the last year.
Tamosaitis' bosses sent him there
when he persisted in raising concerns about risks at the Energy
Department's project to deal with millions of gallons of radioactive
waste near Hanford, Wash., including the potential for hydrogen gas
explosions.
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| | | published Friday, June 24, 2011 | 497 Views :: 0 Comments |
June 24, 2011
By John Upton
New York Times
The world’s most-ambitious nuclear experiments have escalated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Federal researchers there are seeking to fuse some of the lightest atoms
in the universe to study — and hopefully harness — the type of energy
produced by hydrogen bombs and the sun.
The tests were delayed six months while safety devices were installed to
protect workers from radiation at the National Ignition Facility, a
stadium-sized laboratory that contains 192 lasers trained on a target
the size of a BB. The goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100
million degrees to fuse hydrogen atoms and release nuclear energy.
Scientists describe this process, which they hope to achieve next year, as the creation of a miniature star on earth.
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| | | published Tuesday, June 21, 2011 | 351 Views :: 0 Comments |
June 20, 2011
By Jenna Greene
The National Law Journal
In some ways, Carole Means' teenage years on a farm in southeastern
Washington state in the 1950s sound so wholesome, almost idyllic. She
ate homegrown fruit and vegetables, fish from the nearby Columbia River,
and drank milk from the family cows that grazed along its banks.
The
farm commanded a view across the river of the Hanford Nuclear
Reservation, the world's first full-scale plutonium reactor. Hanford
produced most of the material for the U.S. arsenal of nuclear bombs,
including the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. For local
residents, the plant was a source of pride — their unique contribution
to winning World War II — and of jobs, employing 50,000 people at its
peak.
It was also catastrophically toxic. Starting in 1944, the
plant silently released huge amounts of radiation into the air, water
and soil — sometimes intentionally, the government now admits.
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| | | published Tuesday, June 21, 2011 | 271 Views :: 0 Comments |
June 20, 2011
By Jeff Donn, AP National Writer Associated Press
LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Federal regulators have been working closely
with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors
operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those
standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The
Associated Press has found.
Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too
strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril,
according to records and interviews.
The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by
the NRC are significantly undermining safety — and inching the reactors
closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize the
future of nuclear power in the United States.
Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was
allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking
caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of
the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
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| | | published Tuesday, June 21, 2011 | 219 Views :: 0 Comments |
Press Release
Friends of the Earth/NC Warn/AP1000 Oversight Group
June 16, 2011
Durham, NC – In a legal motion filed today, watchdog groups pressed the
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to terminate the approval
process for the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design.The groups said that a
growing list of mistakes and omissions – and a 19th version of the
experimental design filed just this week by the company – prove that the
“rulemaking” process to approve the everchanging design is legally
“null and void.”
The groups called on the NRC to immediately release Revision 19 and all
supporting documents and insisted that the design review cannot go
forward until the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident are fully
taken into account. They also called for NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko to
finally release the uncensored version of a November dissent by the
NRC’s lead structural engineer, who has said Westinghouse took shortcuts
that could cause the outer shield building to shatter due to natural or
deliberate impacts.
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| | | published Thursday, May 05, 2011 | 1061 Views :: 0 Comments |
May 5, 2011
By Donna Deedy with Michael Grabell,
From ProPublica
In the late 1990s, U.S. policymakers approved a plan to turn plutonium
from nuclear weapons into fuel for commercial reactors. The first-of-its
kind plant [1], now being built in South Carolina, was intended to
reduce the Cold War stockpile and the threat of nuclear material theft
while supplying the country’s energy needs.
More than a decade later, the mixed oxide fuel [2] (MOX) plant is
running into mounting troubles [3], including long delays, soaring costs
and the lack of utilities committed to use the new fuel in their
reactors.
But there’s another aspect of the story that has received little
attention. Two of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safety reviewers
for the project say the NRC has taken shortcuts on safety to avoid
delaying the construction. Work on the facility was allowed to begin,
they say, before some of the most essential questions were fully
answered. They have been particularly concerned about the danger of
chemical explosions, the adequacy of the ventilation and radioactive
waste disposal systems and the way the plutonium will be tracked as it
is processed.
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| | | published Monday, April 25, 2011 | 2586 Views :: 0 Comments |
April 22, 2011
MEDIA ADVISORY:
Contact Glenn Carroll, Nuclear Watch South, 404-378-4263
Atlanta, GA: The federal register today published an opportunity for
public hearing about proposed changes at the MOX plutonium fuel factory
already under construction at Savannah River Site. Shaw Areva MOX
Services (SHAMS) has filed a request to redesign the factory for which
construction authorization was given in 2005 by the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. Construction began in 2007 and is supposedly 40%
complete despite its unfinished design and unlicensed operation.
Plutonium disposition watchers see SHAMS request to redesign the mammoth
project as a desperate attempt to salvage a beleaguered U.S. Department
of Energy (DOE) program that was recently spotlighted by Union of
Concerned Scientists as "The Factory to Nowhere." Nuclear Watch South
and others have a legal intervention before the NRC where the groups’
legal challenges to the adequacy of SHAMS’ plutonium accounting program
were recently accepted for a public hearing.
The troubled MOX plutonium fuel program is over 10 years behind schedule
and costs have ballooned from $1 billion to $5 billion. The program
proposed to convert up to 50 metric tons of excess U.S. weapons
plutonium into reactor fuel as a so-called safeguards method was
delivered a game-changing setback with the failure of MOX plutonium fuel
tests in Duke Power reactors in 2008 and the subsequent withdrawal of
Duke from the controversial MOX program.
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