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| | | published Thursday, February 02, 2012 | 164 Views :: 0 Comments |
for immediate release: Thursday, January 26, 2012
for further information, contact: Bob Schaeffer: 239-395-6773 Katherine Fuchs: 202-544-0217, ext. 2503 local contacts listed at end of advisory
The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future report released today received mixed reviews from groups that monitor sites where large quantities of radioactive waste are stored. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) said major flaws in the report include the Commission’s “failure to advocate prompt removal of commercial spent fuel from reactor cooling pools with placement in hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS) to safeguard commercial spent fuel at nuclear power plants.” ANA and hundreds of community groups had told the Commission that HOSS could protect the heavily reactive material for the decades needed to develop a scientifically sound and publicly acceptable waste disposal program.
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| | | published Monday, September 12, 2011 | 973 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 Sunday, August 14, 2011 | 1095 Views :: 0 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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| | | published Sunday, August 14, 2011 | 1072 Views :: 0 Comments |
ANA has been closely monitoring the situation reported on in the following article, which quotes ANA member Tom Carpenter and refers to 2011 ANA Whistleblower Award winner Walt Tamosaitis. We've strongly been urging Congress to require complete testing of Hanford's mixers and support the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in their Hanford oversight.
Engineers and scientists say equipment being installed by Bechtel Corp. at the Hanford site in Washington state poses risks, but the Energy Department is letting work continue.
August 14, 2011
By Ralph Vartabedian
From the Los Angeles Times
The Energy Department has asserted that Bechtel Corp. underplayed safety risks from equipment it is installing at the nation's largest nuclear waste cleanup project, according to government records.
A federal engineering review team found in late July that Bechtel's safety evaluation of key equipment at the plant at the Hanford site in Washington state was incomplete and that "the risks are more serious" than Bechtel acknowledged when it sought approval to continue with construction, the documents say.
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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 Friday, June 24, 2011 | 797 Views :: 0 Comments |
June 24, 2011
By Rob Pavey
The Augusta Chronicle
It could be decades before technology advances to the
level where large-scale recycling or reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel
could replace the need for a permanent, safe repository, according to a
subcommittee of President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission.The draft report, issued today, comes at a time when
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is gathering information on how to
license commercial reprocessing facilities that—at least in
theory—could be housed within federal facilities such as Savannah River
Site.
Economic development groups have touted SRS as a
potential site for a reprocessing program, which would bring the benefit
of jobs and money with such a new mission. However, reprocessing could
also bring more nuclear waste to South Carolina.
Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the U.S.
Energy Department became responsible for finding disposal solutions for
spent nuclear fuel. In addition to 70,000 tons of spent fuel stored in
dozens of sites, the nation’s 104 commercial power reactors are
generating an additional 2,000 tons each year.
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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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| | | published Monday, April 25, 2011 | 1279 Views :: 0 Comments |
April 17, 2011
By Tim Smith
From the Greenville News
The continuing crisis at a Japanese nuclear reactor may affect the
future of a $5 billion South Carolina plant designed to turn nuclear
weapons material into reactor fuel for electricity.
The huge construction project at the Savannah River Site is an ambitious
attempt to get rid of dangerous nuclear weapons plutonium by turning it
into something called mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX, as part of a
nonproliferation agreement with Russia.
One of the stricken nuclear reactors in Japan contains MOX, and the
crippled plant has raised fears that it could release dangerous
plutonium into the atmosphere, which could escalate the crisis.
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| | | published Tuesday, April 12, 2011 | 1020 Views :: 0 Comments |
April 4, 2011
From Agence France Presse
WASHINGTON — US anti-nuclear groups Monday condemned a project to build a
plant where plutonium from weapons would be reprocessed into fuel for
nuclear power plants, saying the plan was costly, dangerous and would
benefit mainly the French group, Areva.
A mixed-oxide, or MOX, plutonium reprocessing plant that is being built
in South Carolina has become "an expensive effort that enriches
contractors, led by the French government-owned company Areva," Tom
Clements of Friends of the Earth said at the launch of a report by an
anti-nuclear alliance.
"In my opinion, it is primarily because of Areva's influence inside the
Department of Energy that the US is pursuing a plutonium fuel program
and it's because of Areva's influence that there's a push for the US to
also reprocess commercial spent fuel to remove plutonium, like France
does," he said.
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