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AIKEN - Aiken County officials have filed suit against the federal government over its plans to pull the plug on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada.

The county is seeking a temporary restraining order to block plans to terminate the disposal site. At one point, more than 4,000 metric tons of waste from the Savannah River Site was to be shipped to Yucca Mountain.

"I am not sure of the reasoning. There's been a lot of talk about what Obama wants to do, but Obama has not said what his plans are. We just have to make our lawsuit or we'll become the depository."

The day after the Obama administration rejected a proposal for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline -- a move widely, if cautiously, applauded by environmental groups and advocates of renewable energy -- a new report highlights the destructive impact of fossil fuel consumption in the United States. The report, called Fueling Extinction: How Dirty Energy Drives Wildlife to the Brink, highlights the top 10 US species whose survival is most threatened by the development, extraction, transportation, and consumption of fossil fuels.

The report itself does not shy away from pointing its finger directly at the profit-driven aspect of the fossil fuel industry, nor its dependence on taxpayer-funded subsidies:

The animals (and one plant) highlighted by the group range from the relatively unknown and small Tan Riffleshell, a freshwater mussel found in only five rivers in the eastern US, to the large and majestic Bowhead Whale, believed to be among the oldest mammals on earth and the only whale that lives exclusively in arctic waters.  The other eight species examined in the report include: the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, the Graham’s Penstemon (a wildflower), the Greater Sage Grouse, the Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle, the Kentucky Arrow Darter, the Spectacled Eider, the Whooping Crane, and the Wyoming Pocket Gopher. Receiving the 'activist's choice award' from the voting members was the Polar Bear, chosen because it was "the species they were most concerned about."

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake. "Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure. The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have.  Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building .... WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR

[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters, to be released this Monday.  Click here to get the videos and the book.] Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station. The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

"Clean." "Green." What do those words mean? When President Obama talks about "clean energy," some people think of "clean coal" and low-carbon nuclear power, while others envision shiny solar panels and wind turbines. And when politicians tout "green jobs," they might just as easily be talking about employment at General Motors as at Greenpeace. "Clean" and "green" are wide open to interpretation and misappropriation; that's why they're so often mentioned in quotation marks. Not so for renewable energy, however.

people across the entire enviro-political spectrum seem to have reached a tacit, near-unanimous agreement about what renewable means: It's an energy category that includes solar, wind, water, biomass, and geothermal power.

Renewable energy sounds so much more natural and believable than a perpetual-motion machine, but there's one big problem: Unless you're planning to live without electricity and motorized transportation, you need more than just wind, water, sunlight, and plants for energy. You need raw materials, real estate, and other things that will run out one day. You need stuff that has to be mined, drilled, transported, and bulldozed -- not simply harvested or farmed. You need non-renewable resources:

Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

"They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"

A leading biophysicist has cast a critical light on the government’s reassurances that Americans were never at risk from Fukushima fallout, saying “we really don’t know for sure.”

When radioactive fallout from Japan’s nuclear disaster began appearing in the United States this spring, the Obama Administration’s open-data policy obligated the government to inform the public, in some detail, what was landing here.

Covering the story, I watched the government pursue what appeared to be two strategies to minimize public alarm:

Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on California's central coast has more than 1,300 tons of nuclear waste sitting on its back porch, waiting for pickup. The problem is, there's no one to pick it up

The 103 other reactors in the country are in the same bind — it has now been more than 50 years since the first nuclear plant was switched on in the United States, and the federal government still hasn't found a permanent home for the nation's nuclear waste

The two nuclear reactors at the plant generate steam that drives giant turbines, which in turn generate electricity that powers about 3 million households. Once the uranium rods that fuel the reactors are used up, they're removed and cooled down underwater, in temporary storage pools.

My views on the approach this Administration has chosen to take when it comes to terminating Yucca Mountain and setting the mission of the Blue Ribbon Commission are well known.  The Commission was formed so that the Obama Administration could put off decisions about nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel until after November, while at the same time illegally acting to shut down the national repository as quickly as possible

Congressman Doc Hastings’ (WA-04) Legislative Director presented his testimony to members of the Blue Ribbon Commission in the Tri-Cities today.  A complete copy of his testimony is attached below.

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, delivered a speech this week at the International V.M. Goldschmidt Conference in Knoxville.  Alexander serves on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and is the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority Congressional Caucus.  His remarks as prepared follow:

When

in a speech in Oak Ridge in May of 2009, I called for America to build 100 new nuclear plants during the next twenty years.  Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our pollution-free, carbon-free electricity today.  It is the most useful and reliable source of green electricity today because of its tremendous energy density and the small amount of waste that it produces.  And because we are harnessing the heat and energy of the earth itself through the power of the atom, nuclear power is also natural.

expert on technological risk and environmental change. Other contributors include fellow WSU sociologist James F. Short and Tom Leschine, director of the University of Washington School of Marine Affairs

"While scientific and technical analyses are essential, they will not, and arguably should not, carry the day unless they address, substantively and procedurally, the issues that concern the public." Source:  Washington State University A renewed federal effort to fix the nation's stalled nuclear waste program is focusing so much on technological issues that it fails to address the public mistrust hampering storage and disposal efforts.

Writing in the latest issue of the journal Science, 16 researchers from around the country say a special White House panel on high-level radioactive waste needs to focus more on the social and political acceptability of its solutions to succeed

While the House of Representatives is embroiled in a dispute over the 2011 budget, the Energy and Commerce Committee also is investigating a controversial budget move made two years ago – the abandonment of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.Late last week, committee chairman Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., mailed letters to the heads of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy demanding records related to the decision to end the project

The representatives said in a release that they initiated the investigation “after reviewing available evidence indicating there was no scientific or technical basis for withdrawing [Yucca Mountain’s license] application.”

For decades, the site beside a former testing ground for atomic weapons was to be the nation’s designated repository for high-level nuclear waste. Customers of utilities that use nuclear reactors paid a surcharge for the repository’s construction, but the 2010 federal budget cut off funding to the project and President Barack Obama has long voiced his opposition to it. A number of utilities have sued to recover the cost of dry storage for spent fuel at reactor sites after the 1998 deadline for the repository’s completion passed, and additional litigation soon followed the decision to abandon the project.

A team of US diplomats are expected to visit the Saudi capital of Riyadh to "discuss the possibility of moving forward on a nuclear cooperation agreement," a congressional aide said on the condition of anonymity, AFP reported. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a lawmaker from the Republican Party has criticized the move, saying that "its ties to terrorists and terror financing alone should rule it out as a candidate for the US nuclear cooperation." "I am astonished that the administration is even considering a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia," she added.

Washington and Riyadh signed a tentative agreement on developing civilian nuclear technologies in 2008. The Obama administration, like its predecessor, has sought to promote nuclear cooperation with allies. Washington also signed a nuclear cooperation deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2009. The deal meant that the UAE would renounce their plans to enrich and reprocess uranium in exchange of having the right to purchase the material from international suppliers. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has also been pursuing nuclear cooperation agreements with South Korea, Japan, France and Russia. In February, 2011, France singed a nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia, offering the kingdom nuclear know-how.

While President Obama still favors nuclear energy after the Fukushima disaster, the New England state of Vermont wants to scrap it altogether. The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is slated for shutdown in March 2012.

Nestel has already been arrested 11 times in protests against the reactor. She is a member of the "Shut it down!" group, which consists of 12 women from the ages of 40 to 92. They all have the same mission: to shut down Vermont Yankee, and in doing so make Vermont a nuclear power-free state. "We have a lot to do," says Nestel. "We are always going to have protests at the reactor and we will always let ourselves be arrested. We don't leave until we're arrested. But they always drop the charges because we're so well-liked in the community."

Since the reactor, identical in construction to the one in Fukushima, went on line in 1972, it has made headlines time and again. In 2007 a cooling tower collapsed due to shabby wooden girders. When in 2010 it was discovered that radioactive tritium had seeped into the groundwater from a pipe leak, the Vermont Senate voted by a large majority to close Vermont Yankee by 2012. Differing opinions among politicians and population

Energy leaders from Russia and America have made a "commitment to supporting the safe and secure expansion of civil nuclear energy" on the sidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency's General Conference.    Officials from the US Department of Energy and Russia's Rosatom signed what the US side called a "joint statement on strategic direction of US-Russia nuclear cooperation." US energy secretary Stephen Chu said it was a milestone for the two nuclear energy pioneers. They were long separated by their opposition during the Cold War, but now share a leading role in nuclear security and disarmament.

Chu said in his address to the conference that nuclear energy's role grows more valuable as we confront a changing climate, increasing energy demand and a struggling economy. "At the same time, Fukushima reminds us that nuclear safety and security require continued vigilance." He noted the agreements made by Russia and the USA to reduce their weapons stockpiles and the importance of the widest possible sign-up to the framework of international conventions supporting the safe use of nuclear energy.   Russian nuclear energy chief Sergei Kiriyenko focused comments on his country's efforts to help new nations enjoy the benefits of nuclear energy. Their entrance to the field raises "questions of nuclear safety, infrastructure, creation of licensing and safety oversight and development of a clear legal framework in accordance with the requirements and recommendations of the IAEA," he said.  

Kiriyenko noted Russia's cooperation towards nuclear build with Bangladesh, Belarus, Nigeria and Vietnam. "In the last year," he said, "we have proposed a new model of cooperation.. based on the principle of 'build-speak-operate'." The 'speak' component would refer to the lending of specific Russian expertise in the areas of law and regulation. This would come in addition to extensive and expanding lines of support from the IAEA. He said that "experience in this model confirms that this scheme can provide a higher level of safety and operational success."   The nuclear project in Turkey was said to be the first example of this mode of cooperation: Russia will build, own and operate a four-unit power plant at Akkuyu, supplying the state utility with electricity at a fixed price for at least 15 years. Rosatom will initially own 100% of the project and it intends to retain at least 51% in the long term.

Southern Co. is poised to end a three-decade freeze on nuclear development as the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission holds a final hearing today before granting it a license to build and operate two reactors. The stakes for Atlanta-based Southern are greater than its bottom line, Chief Executive Officer Thomas Fanning said during two interviews. If there is to be a nuclear revival in the U.S., Southern, the largest U.S. power company, must deliver the $14 billion project on-time and on-budget, he said.

“We’ve got to be successful,” Fanning said during an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. “This is the first, best shot for the nuclear renaissance in America.” Nuclear expansion ground to a halt in the U.S. as cost overruns, construction delays and a thicket of new regulations after Three Mile Island’s partial-meltdown in 1979 turned some plants into economic disasters, Ted Quinn, past president of the American Nuclear Society, said in a telephone interview.

A far worse accident at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station this March so far hasn’t derailed Southern’s project at Plant Vogtle south of Augusta, Georgia, as critics predicted. Southern is on track to license the plant by early 2012, provided the commission certifies design changes for the Westinghouse AP1000 reactors that will power Vogtle, said Scott Burnell, a commission spokesman, in a telephone interview.

Six months after the Fukushima disaster, the repercussions of history’s second-largest nuclear meltdown are still being felt, not only in Japan but around the world. Predictably, people are rethinking the wisdom of relying on nuclear power. The German and Swiss governments have pledged to phase out the use of nuclear power, and Italy has shelved plans to build new reactors. Public debate on future nuclear energy use continues in the United Kingdom, Japan, Finland, and other countries.So far, it is unclear what the reaction of the Korean government will be. Certainly, the public backlash to nuclear energy that has occurred elsewhere in the world is also evident in Korea; according to one study, opposition to nuclear energy in Korea has tripled since the Fukushima disaster. However, there are countervailing considerations here as well, which have caused policy-makers to move cautiously. Korea’s economy is often seen as particularly reliant on the use of nuclear power due to its lack of fossil fuel resources, while Korean companies are some of the world’s most important builders (and exporters) of nuclear power stations.

There are three primary reasons why nuclear power is safer and greener than power generated using conventional fossil fuels. First ― and most importantly ― nuclear power does not directly result in the emission of greenhouse gases. Even when you take a life-cycle approach and factor in the greenhouse gas emissions from the construction of the plant, there is no contest. Fossil fuels ― whether coal, oil, or natural gas ― create far more global warming.

The negative effects of climate change will vastly outweigh the human and environmental consequences of even a thousand Fukushimas. This is not the place to survey all the dire warnings that have been coming out of the scientific community; suffice it to quote U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s concise statement that climate change is the world’s “only one truly existential threat … the great moral imperative of our era.” A warming earth will not only lead to death and displacement in far-off locales, either. Typhoons are already hitting the peninsula with greater intensity due to the warming air, and a recent study warns that global warming will cause Korea to see greatly increased rates of contagious diseases such as cholera and bacillary dysentery.

The Obama administration provided a loan guarantee of $737 million to SolarReserve on Thursday to construct the first large-scale solar power plant that stores energy and provides electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The solar power project will be constructed in Nevada. (Note that BrightSource Energy is at a similar stage in the development of a larger solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert, receiving a DOE loan guarantee of $1.37 billion in February 2010 and $168 million from Google this April.)

The SolarReserve power plant utilizes what is called thermal energy storage to store heat collected from the sun, which is then utilized by the power plant to boil water and produce steam. The steam then turns a steam turbine which generates electricity. This is a how a solar thermal power plant generally works, but keep in mind that there are different types of solar thermal power plants, some of which are not steam.

This type collects heat and stores it in molten salt which is then circulated to the boiler. The boiler… boils water into steam which then rushes through a steam turbine.17,500 heliostats* focus or concentrate sunlight onto the collector at the top of a 640-foot tall tower until it reaches a temperature of 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nuclear power proponents claim: It has low carbon emissions. It is the peaceful face of the atom and proliferation problems are manageable. It is compact -- so little uranium, so much energy. Unlike solar and wind, it is 24/7 electricity. It reduces dependence on oil. Let's examine each argument.

1. Climate. Nuclear energy has low carbon emissions. But the United States doesn't lack low-carbon energy sources: The potential of wind energy alone is about nine times total US electricity generation. Solar energy is even more plentiful. Time and money to address climate change are in short supply, not low carbon dioxide sources. Instead of the two large reactors the United States would require every three months to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions, all the breathless pronouncements from nuclear advocates are only yielding two reactors every five years -- if that. Even federal loan guarantees have not given this renaissance momentum. Wall Street won't fund them. (Can nuclear power even be called a commercial technology if it can't raise money on Wall Street?) Today, wind energy is far cheaper and faster than nuclear. Simply put: Nuclear fares poorly on two crucial criteria -- time and money.

2. Proliferation. President Eisenhower spoke of "Atoms for Peace" at the United Nations in 1953; he thought it would be too depressing only to mention the horrors of thermonuclear weapons. It was just a fig leaf to mask the bomb: Much of the interest in nuclear power is mainly a cover for acquiring bomb-making know-how. To make a real dent in carbon dioxide emissions, about 3,000 large reactors would have to be built worldwide in the next 40 years -- creating enough plutonium annually to create 90,000 bombs, if separated. Two or three commercial uranium enrichment plants would also be needed yearly -- and it has only taken one, Iran's, to give the world a nuclear security headache.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline will carry oil from tar sands in Canada across the entire midwestern United States to Port Arthur, Texas. It could eventually transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day and without government funding of any kind has the potential to create 20,000 jobs starting early in 2012. The greens want President Obama to kill it of course; the political blindness and the wishful thinking that so frequently vitiates green policy proposals is fully on display.

I will only point to a study by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers: “Oil sands crude is six per cent more GHG intensive than the U.S. crude supply average on a wells-to-wheels basis.” Only 6 percent. Yes, that study comes from the oil industry; the green studies and the oil company studies are both suspect and need outside review.

the Washington Post want to throw the greens under the bus on this one. “Tar sands crude is not appealing; it is low-grade, it is hard to extract, it is difficult to refine and it produces a lot of carbon emissions. But if it is to be burned anyway, there’s little reason for America to reject it, as long as Keystone XL can transport it across the plains safely.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As part of the Obama Administration’s commitment to strengthen global nuclear nonproliferation efforts, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the availability of a reserve stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) for use as commercial nuclear power fuel. The stockpile was derived from down-blending surplus highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the U.S. stockpile.This new American Assured Fuel Supply (AFS) creates a vehicle for promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy without exacerbating nuclear proliferation risks. Through this plan, the U.S. is able to encourage wider use of nuclear power production at the same time as it meets U.S. nuclear disarmament obligations.

The AFS sets aside LEU down-blended from surplus U.S. weapons HEU to serve as a backup fuel supply for foreign or domestic reactors in the event of a supply disruption. Along with the International Fuel Bank to be administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the AFS gives nation states that are looking to nuclear power as a clean energy source an assured supply of LEU, decreasing the need to develop costly enrichment technology. Establishing this reserve will put confidence in the U.S. as a reliable supplier of nuclear fuel and should encourage other governments to see American nuclear vendors as preferable partners.“As more countries look to nuclear power as a low-carbon option for addressing growing energy demands, assuring a fuel supply without promoting proliferation sensitive technologies is a critical national security priority,” said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. “In addition to protecting fuel supplies for commercial power producers, the Assured Fuel Supply helps demonstrate our commitment to nuclear nonproliferation by eliminating surplus weapons uranium in a way that promotes the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”

The AFS reserve is modest in size and designed not to disrupt or replace market mechanisms. Rather, it is to be sold at market value in the event of demonstrated need after all other market options are exhausted.