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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a final rule incorporating the Environmental Protection Agency's radiation protection standards for the proposed high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., for the period beyond 10,000 years and up to 1 million years. The rule, to be published soon in the Federal Register, makes NRC's regulations for the repository in 10 CFR Part 63 consistent with the EPA's revised standards, as required by law. The EPA's final standard was issued Sept. 30, 2008. The EPA's revised standards and the NRC's rulemaking were required by the July 9, 2004, ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which overturned EPA's earlier standard that limited the compliance period to 10,000 years. EPA published its proposed revisions Aug. 22, 2005, and NRC published a proposed rule adopting EPA's revisions and requesting public comment on Sept. 8, 2005. The Federal Register notice with NRC's final rule includes the NRC staff's responses to public comments on the proposed rule, as well as a regulatory analysis of the final rule. The final rule retains EPA's standard dose limit for individuals of 15 millirem for the first 10,000 years after disposal and adopts EPA's 100 millirem dose limit for the period after 10,000 years and up to 1 million years. It will be posted on the NRC Web site here: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fedreg/notices/. The rule will become effective 30 days following publication.

For the past 25 years the U.S. has burned through $10.4 billion looking for a home for nuclear waste. We thought we had one in Yucca Mountain, but popular, political and scientific support for that location has crumbled. In Obama's budget he slashed the funding for the mountain to zero. And now there's no plan for nuclear waste. In addition to the headache of figuring out what to do with the waste, if the measure is approved, the government should prepare itself for a bunch of lawsuits:

A 20-year-old telegram has heated up Germany's debate over nuclear power in the run-up to parliamentary elections later this month. The telegram seems to substantiate charges that politicians in the government of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl pressured scientists to recommend an old salt mine as a potential site for long-term nuclear waste storage. The debate is part of a larger controversy over whether or not the country should phase out its nuclear power by 2022, as current law stipulates. The country's two center-right parties, which have a slight lead in the latest polls, have said they want to let the country's nuclear power plants run up to a decade longer. The country's three, main, left-leaning parties support the phaseout. As many as 50,000 people attended a march against nuclear power in Berlin last weekend. The long-running controversy over the site will seem familiar to observers of the debate over the proposed nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain, which has been defunded by the Obama Administration. Germany, like the United States, has no long-term disposal site for high-level radioactive waste.

It is among the nastiest substances on earth: more than 14,000 tons of highly radioactive waste left over from the building of the nation's nuclear-weapons arsenal. As the Obama administration and Senate leaders move to scuttle a proposed repository for the waste in Nevada, the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, along with federal facilities in Idaho and South Carolina, could become the de facto dump sites for years to come. After spending $10 billion to $12 billion over the past 25 years studying a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, President Barack Obama is fulfilling a campaign promise to kill it as a site for the repository. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada also stands to benefit, as he faces re-election next year and Nevada residents adamantly oppose the project.

Minnesota regulators have signed off on Xcel Energy's plan for the future, which could include expanding generation capacity and storage at one of its nuclear power plants. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission approved the plan on Thursday. It covers how the utility proposes to meet demand for power 15 years into the future, and what specific steps it will take in the next five years. The plan includes increasing generation capacity and dry cask storage at the Prairie Island nuclear plant near Red Wing.

Copeland and Allerdale councils who have both "expressed an interest" in the possibility of hosting a repository have joined the group known as the West Cumbria partnership for Managing Radioactive Waste Safely. The partnership also includes the West Cumbria Sites (nuclear) Stakeholders Group, the Cumbria Association of Local Councils and local trades unions.

A change in the national strategy for the long-term storage of nuclear waste is raising concern among environmental groups and raising legal issues for DTE's plans for a new reactor south of Detroit. Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada has been designated as a final resting place for nuclear waste collected throughout the United States. And for the past 20 years, utility customers across the nation have been chipping in to a fund to transform the mountain into a repository. Despite 25 years of study the Obama administration has indicated Yucca Mountain is no longer an option. That means that for the foreseeable future, Michigan's nuclear plants must continue to store the waste on-site, usually within a few miles of the Great Lakes.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 4-0 today to uphold the decisions of three Construction Authorization Boards (CABs) conducting a hearing on the Department of Energy's application to build and operate a high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The Commission's decision includes several rulings, including a rejection of most of the NRC staff's appeal of several admitted contentions, or arguments, as well as the rejection of two Nevada contentions challenging DOE's managerial competence and institutional integrity. DOE submitted its application June 3, 2008; on Sept. 9, 2008, the NRC staff determined that the 8,600-page application contained sufficient technical information for the agency to docket it and initiate its comprehensive safety review. The NRC announced an opportunity to participate in a hearing in October 2008, and the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel created three CABs to examine the 317 contentions filed by 12 petitioners, including the states of Nevada and California, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and other parties. The Yucca Mountain application, minus some classified portions, is available on the NRC Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/waste/hlw-disposal/yucca-lic-app.html.

"Greenpeace said it had obtained partly classified documents which prove that Gorleben should not have been used as a nuclear waste site. The environmental activist group Greenpeace said on Wednesday that it had obtained official documents, which prove that the salt mines in the German town of Gorleben should not have been used as a disposal site for nuclear waste. "There was never a scientific selection procedure that concluded the salt mines in Gorleben would be the best choice," Greenpeace nuclear expert Mathias Edler told reporters at a press conference in Berlin. "Geological criteria for a nuclear disposal site in the salt mines played a minor role." Greenpeace said the more than 12,000 pages of partly classified documents, which date back to the mid-1970's, are from the Lower Saxony state chancellery, environment ministry, and the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources. "

The explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is being described as caused by a "hydrogen build-up" The situation harks back to the "hydrogen bubble" that was feared would explode when the Three Mile Island plant in 1979 underwent a partial meltdown. The hydrogen explosion problem at nuclear power plants involves a story as crazy as can be. As nuts as using nuclear fission to boil water to generate electricity is, the hydrogen problem and its cause cap the lunacy. Eruption of hydrogen gas as a first reaction in a loss-of-coolant accident has been discussed with great worry in U.S. government and nuclear industry literature for decades.

Want to know what a top-secret truck moving "special nuclear materials" around the country looks like? Check out this photo, which comes from a blog at the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle. The photo was released after a Freedom of Information Act request from an environmental group. "It's big and blue - and rumbling down an interstate near you. But if you were parked next to a nuclear warhead at the gas station, would you know it?" writes Chronicle reporter Robert Pavey. The Chronicle covers the Savannah River Site (SRS), a big-bomb producing facility back in the day, by which I mean the Cold War era. The Chronicle just published a series of stories on SRS's critical role in disposing of plutonium from about 10,000 dismantled bombs. So what does this top-secret transporting of nuclear materials have to do with New Mexico? Patience, patience.

Want to know what a top-secret truck moving "special nuclear materials" around the country looks like? Check out this photo, which comes from a blog at the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle. The photo was released after a Freedom of Information Act request from an environmental group. "It's big and blue - and rumbling down an interstate near you. But if you were parked next to a nuclear warhead at the gas station, would you know it?" writes Chronicle reporter Robert Pavey. The Chronicle covers the Savannah River Site (SRS), a big-bomb producing facility back in the day, by which I mean the Cold War era. The Chronicle just published a series of stories on SRS's critical role in disposing of plutonium from about 10,000 dismantled bombs. So what does this top-secret transporting of nuclear materials have to do with New Mexico? Patience, patience.

"Study: Fukushima storage pool was vulnerable to aftershocks Previous ArticleResponse overwhelming for Fukushima decontamination workshops Next ArticleIAEA: Cleanup of low contaminated areas will be ineffectual October 15, 2011 By TATSUYUKI KOBORI / Staff Writer Aftershocks of the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake could have significantly worsened the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant in the weeks after the disaster, according to a government simulation. The storage pool in the No. 4 reactor, which had its building's roof blown off after a hydrogen explosion on March 15, was vulnerable to an aftershock and might have started leaking radioactivity within three hours of a hypothetical aftershock, the study found. Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the plant, initially said the pool was sturdy enough to withstand aftershocks, but Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization analysis completed at the end of June but only released on Oct. 14 says radioactive substances could have been discharged 2.3 hours after a temblor knocked out the pool's cooling system. "