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All countries with well-established nuclear programs have found themselves requiring spent fuel storage in addition to spent fuel pools at reactors. Some, like the US, use dry storage designs, such as individual casks or storage vaults that are located at reactor sites; other countries, Germany for one, use away-from-reactor facilities. Sweden has a large underground pool located at a centralized facility, CLAB, to which different reactors send their spent fuel a year after discharge, so spent fuel does not build up at reactor sites. Dry storage tends to be cheaper and can be more secure than wet storage because active circulation of water is not required. At the same time, because dry storage uses passive air cooling, not the active cooling that is available in a pool to keep the fuel cool, these systems can only accept spent fuel a number of years after discharge.6

the most difficult part of the back end of the fuel cycle is siting the required facilities, especially those associated with spent fuel management and disposal. Siting is not solely a technical problem—it is as much a political and societal issue. And to be successful, it is important to get the technical and the societal and political aspects right.

France has had more success after failing in its first siting attempt in 1990, when a granite site that had been selected drew large protests and the government opted to rethink its approach to nuclear waste disposal entirely. In 2006, the government announced that it needed a geologic repository for high-level waste, identified at least one suitable area, and passed laws requiring a license application to be submitted by 2015 and the site to begin receiving high-level waste by 2025.

Canada recently rethought the siting process for nuclear waste disposal and began a consensus-based participatory process. The Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization was established in 2002, after previous attempts to site a repository failed. The siting process began with three years’ worth of conversations with the public on the best method to manage spent fuel. The organization is now beginning to solicit volunteer communities to consider a repository, though much of the process remains to be decided, including the amount and type of compensation given to the participating communities.

The United States had been working toward developing a high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada; this fell through in 2010, when the Obama administration decided to reverse this decision, citing political “stalemate” and lack of public consensus about the site. Instead, the Obama administration instituted the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to rethink the management of the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.8 The US can flaunt one success, though. The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), located near Carlsbad in southern New Mexico, is actually the only operating deep geologic repository for intermediate level nuclear waste, receiving waste since 1998. In the case of WIPP, it only accepts transuranic wastes from the nuclear weapons complex. The site is regulated solely by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state of New Mexico has partial oversight of WIPP through its permitting authority established by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The city of Carlsbad is supportive of the site and it appears to be tolerated by the rest of the state.9

After weathering the Fukushima accident, and given the current constraints on carbon dioxide emissions and potential for growth of nuclear power, redefinition of a successful nuclear power program is now required: It is no longer simply the safe production of electricity but also the safe, secure, and sustainable lifecycle of nuclear power, from the mining of uranium ores to the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. If this cannot be achieved and is not thought out from the beginning, then the public in many countries will reject nuclear as an energy choice.

Certain elements—including an institution to site, manage, and operate waste facilities—need to be in place to have a successful waste management program. In some countries, this agency is entirely a government entity, such as the Korea Radioactive Waste Management Organization. In other countries, the agency is a corporation established by the nuclear industry, such as SKB in Sweden or Posiva Oy in Finland. Another option would be a public– private agency, such as Spain’s National Company for Radioactive Waste or Switzerland’s National Cooperative for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste.

France, Canada, and Germany also have experienced a number of iterations of repository siting, some with more success than others. In the 1970s, Germany selected the Gorleben site for its repository; however, in the late 1990s, with the election of a Red–Green coalition government (the Greens had long opposed Gorleben), a rethinking of repository siting was decreed, and the government established the AkEnd group to re-evaluate the siting process. Their report outlined a detailed siting process starting from scratch, but to date too much political disagreement exists to proceed further.

the siting process must be established. This should include decisions on whether to allow a community to veto a site and how long that veto remains operational; the number of sites to be examined in depth prior to site selection and the number of sites that might be required; technical criteria to begin selecting potential sites; non-technical considerations, such as proximity to water resources, population centers, environmentally protected areas, and access to public transportation; the form and amount of compensation to be offered; how the public is invited to participate in the site selection process; and how government at the federal level will be involved.

The above are all considerations in the siting process, but the larger process—how to begin to select sites, whether to seek only volunteers, and so on—must also be determined ahead of time. A short list of technical criteria must be integrated into a process that establishes public consent to go forward, followed by many detailed studies of the site—first on the surface, then at depth. There are distinct advantages to characterizing more than one site in detail, as both Sweden and Finland have done. Multiple sites allow the “best” one to be selected, increasing public approval and comfort with the process.

he site needs to be evaluated against a set of standards established by a government agency in the country. This agency typically is the environmental agency or the nuclear regulatory agency. The type of standards will constrain the method by which a site will be evaluated with regard to its future performance. A number of countries use a combination of methods to evaluate their sites, some acknowledging that the ability to predict processes and events that will occur in a repository decrease rapidly with each year far into the future, so that beyond a few thousand years, little can be said with any accuracy. These countries use what is termed a “safety case,” which includes multiple lines of evidence to assure safe repository performance into the future.

Moving forward

Funding is one of the most central needs for such an institution to carry out research and development programs; the money would cover siting costs, including compensation packages and resources for local communities to conduct their own analyses of spent fuel and waste transportation, storage, repository construction, operations, security and safeguards, and future liabilities. Funds can be collected in a number of ways, such as putting a levy on electricity charges (as is done in the US) or charging based on the activity or volume of waste (Hearsey et al., 1999). Funds must also be managed—either by a waste management organization or another industry or government agency—in a way that ensures steady and ready access to funds over time. This continued reliable access is necessary for planning into the future for repository operations.

Notes

Nuclear wastes are classified in various ways, depending on the country or organization doing the classification. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) notes six general categories of waste produced by civil nuclear power reactors: exempt waste, very short-lived waste, and very low level waste can be stored and then disposed of in landfill-type settings; low level waste, intermediate level waste, and high-level waste require more complex facilities for disposal.

Sweden is currently the country closest to realizing a final solution for spent fuel, after having submitted a license application for construction of a geologic repository in March 2011. It plans to open a high-level waste repository sometime after 2025, as do Finland and France.

Some countries, such as Sweden, Finland, Canada, and, until recently, the US, plan to dispose of their spent fuel directly in a geologic repository. A few others, such as France, Japan, Russia, and the UK have an interim step. They reprocess their spent fuel, extract the small amount of plutonium produced during irradiation, and use it in new mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. Then they plan to dispose of the high-level wastes from reprocessing in a repository.

9. The Mediterranean

For years, there have been allegations that the ‘Ndrangheta syndicate of the Italian mafia has been using the seas as a convenient location in which to dump hazardous waste — including radioactive waste — charging for the service and pocketing the profits. An Italian NGO, Legambiente, suspects that about 40 ships loaded with toxic and radioactive waste have disappeared in Mediterranean waters since 1994. If true, these allegations paint a worrying picture of an unknown amount of nuclear waste in the Mediterranean whose true danger will only become clear when the hundreds of barrels degrade or somehow otherwise break open. The beauty of the Mediterranean Sea may well be concealing an environmental catastrophe in the making.

8. The Somalian Coast

The Italian mafia organization just mentioned has not just stayed in its own region when it comes to this sinister business. There are also allegations that Somalian waters and soil, unprotected by government, have been used for the sinking or burial of nuclear waste and toxic metals — including 600 barrels of toxic and nuclear waste, as well as radioactive hospital waste. Indeed, the United Nations’ Environment Program believes that the rusting barrels of waste washed up on the Somalian coastline during the 2004 Tsunami were dumped as far back as the 1990s. The country is already an anarchic wasteland, and the effects of this waste on the impoverished population could be as bad if not worse than what they have already experienced.

7. Mayak, Russia

3. Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan

6. Sellafield, UK

Located on the west coast of England, Sellafield was originally a plutonium production facility for nuclear bombs, but then moved into commercial territory. Since the start of its operation, hundreds of accidents have occurred at the plant, and around two thirds of the buildings themselves are now classified as nuclear waste. The plant releases some 8 million liters of contaminated waste into the sea on a daily basis, making the Irish Sea the most radioactive sea in the world. England is known for its green fields and rolling landscapes, but nestled in the heart of this industrialized nation is a toxic, accident-prone facility, spewing dangerous waste into the oceans of the world.

5. Siberian Chemical Combine, Russia

Mayak is not the only contaminated site in Russia; Siberia is home to a chemical facility that contains over four decades' worth of nuclear waste. Liquid waste is stored in uncovered pools and poorly maintained containers hold over 125,000 tons of solid waste, while underground storage has the potential to leak to groundwater. Wind and rain have spread the contamination to wildlife and the surrounding area. And various minor accidents have led to plutonium going missing and explosions spreading radiation. While the snowy landscape may look pristine and immaculate, the facts make clear the true level of pollution to be found here

4. The Polygon, Kazakhstan

Once the location for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons testing, this area is now part of modern-day Kazakhstan. The site was earmarked for the Soviet atomic bomb project due to its “uninhabited” status — despite the fact that 700,000 people lived in the area. The facility was where the USSR detonated its first nuclear bomb and is the record-holder for the place with the largest concentration of nuclear explosions in the world: 456 tests over 40 years from 1949 to 1989. While the testing carried out at the facility — and its impact in terms of radiation exposure — were kept under wraps by the Soviets until the facility closed in 1991, scientists estimate that 200,000 people have had their health directly affected by the radiation. The desire to destroy foreign nations has led to the specter of nuclear contamination hanging over the heads of those who were once citizens of the USSR.

The industrial complex of Mayak, in Russia's north-east, has had a nuclear plant for decades, and in 1957 was the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. Up to 100 tons of radioactive waste were released by an explosion, contaminating a massive area. The explosion was kept under wraps until the 1980s. Starting in the 1950s, waste from the plant was dumped in the surrounding area and into Lake Karachay. This has led to contamination of the water supply that thousands rely on daily. Experts believe that Karachay may be the most radioactive place in the world, and over 400,000 people have been exposed to radiation from the plant as a result of the various serious incidents that have occurred — including fires and deadly dust storms. The natural beauty of Lake Karachay belies its deadly pollutants, with the radiation levels where radioactive waste flows into its waters enough to give a man a fatal dose within an hour.

Considered one of the top ten most polluted sites on Earth by the 2006 Blacksmith Institute report, the radiation at Mailuu-Suu comes not from nuclear bombs or power plants, but from mining for the materials needed in the processes they entail. The area was home to a uranium mining and processing facility and is now left with 36 dumps of uranium waste — over 1.96 million cubic meters. The region is also prone to seismic activity, and any disruption of the containment could expose the material or cause some of the waste to fall into rivers, contaminating water used by hundreds of thousands of people. These people may not ever suffer the perils of nuclear attack, but nonetheless they have good reason to live in fear of radioactive fallout every time the earth shakes.

2. Chernobyl, Ukraine

Home to one of the world’s worst and most infamous nuclear accidents, Chernobyl is still heavily contaminated, despite the fact that a small number of people are now allowed into the area for a limited amount of time. The notorious accident caused over 6 million people to be exposed to radiation, and estimates as to the number of deaths that will eventually occur due to the Chernobyl accident range from 4,000 to as high as 93,000. The accident released 100 times more radiation than the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs. Belarus absorbed 70 percent of the radiation, and its citizens have been dealing with increased cancer incidence ever since. Even today, the word Chernobyl conjures up horrifying images of human suffering.

1. Fukushima, Japan

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami was a tragedy that destroyed homes and lives, but the effects of the Fukushima nuclear power plant may be the most long-lasting danger. The worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the incident caused meltdown of three of the six reactors, leaking radiation into the surrounding area and the sea, such that radiative material has been detected as far as 200 miles from the plant. As the incident and its ramifications are still unfolding, the true scale of the environmental impact is still unknown. The world may still be feeling the effects of this disaster for generations to come.

4. Brief Overview of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing (from June 16 hearing charter)  Nuclear reactors generate about 20 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. No new nuclear plants have been ordered in the U.S. since 1973, but there is renewed interest in nuclear energy both because it could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and because it produces no greenhouse gas emissions.  One of the barriers to increased use of nuclear energy is concern about nuclear waste. Every nuclear power reactor produces approximately 20 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste every year. Today, that waste is stored on-site at the nuclear reactors in water-filled cooling pools or, at some sites, after sufficient cooling, in dry casks above ground. About 50,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel is being stored at 73 sites in 33 states. A recent report issued by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that this stored waste could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Under the current plan for long-term disposal of nuclear waste, the waste from around the country would be moved to a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which is now scheduled to open around 2012. The Yucca Mountain facility continues to be a subject of controversy. But even if it opened and functioned as planned, it would have only enough space to store the nuclear waste the U.S. is expected to generate by about 2010.  Consequently, there is growing interest in finding ways to reduce the quantity of nuclear waste. A number of other nations, most notably France and Japan, ''reprocess'' their nuclear waste. Reprocessing involves separating out the various components of nuclear waste so that a portion of the waste can be recycled and used again as nuclear fuel (instead of disposing of all of it). In addition to reducing the quantity of high-level nuclear waste, reprocessing makes it possible to use nuclear fuel more efficiently. With reprocessing, the same amount of nuclear fuel can generate more electricity because some components of it can be used as fuel more than once.

The greatest drawback of reprocessing is that current reprocessing technologies produce weapons-grade plutonium (which is one of the components of the spent fuel). Any activity that increases the availability of plutonium increases the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.  Because of proliferation concerns, the U.S. decided in the 1970s not to engage in reprocessing. (The policy decision was reversed the following decade, but the U.S. still did not move toward reprocessing.) But the Department of Energy (DOE) has continued to fund research and development (R&D) on nuclear reprocessing technologies, including new technologies that their proponents claim would reduce the risk of proliferation from reprocessing.

The report accompanying H.R. 2419, the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2006, which the House passed in May, directed DOE to focus research in its Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative program on improving nuclear reprocessing technologies. The report went on to state, ''The Department shall accelerate this research in order to make a specific technology recommendation, not later than the end of fiscal year 2007, to the President and Congress on a particular reprocessing technology that should be implemented in the United States. In addition, the Department shall prepare an integrated spent fuel recycling plan for implementation beginning in fiscal year 2007, including recommendation of an advanced reprocessing technology and a competitive process to select one or more sites to develop integrated spent fuel recycling facilities.''

During floor debate on H.R. 2419, the House defeated an amendment that would have cut funding for research on reprocessing. In arguing for the amendment, its sponsor, Mr. Markey, explicitly raised the risks of weapons proliferation. Specifically, the amendment would have cut funding for reprocessing activities and interim storage programs by $15.5 million and shifted the funds to energy efficiency activities, effectively repudiating the report language. The amendment was defeated by a vote of 110–312.

But nuclear reprocessing remains controversial, even within the scientific community. In May 2005, the American Physical Society (APS) Panel on Public Affairs, issued a report, Nuclear Power and Proliferation Resistance: Securing Benefits, Limiting Risk. APS, which is the leading organization of the Nation's physicists, is on record as strongly supporting nuclear power. But the APS report takes the opposite tack of the Appropriations report, stating, ''There is no urgent need for the U.S. to initiate reprocessing or to develop additional national repositories. DOE programs should be aligned accordingly: shift the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative R&D away from an objective of laying the basis for a near-term reprocessing decision; increase support for proliferation-resistance R&D and technical support for institutional measures for the entire fuel cycle.''  Technological as well as policy questions remain regarding reprocessing. It is not clear whether the new reprocessing technologies that DOE is funding will be developed sufficiently by 2007 to allow the U.S. to select a technology to pursue. There is also debate about the extent to which new technologies can truly reduce the risks of proliferation.

 It is also unclear how selecting a reprocessing technology might relate to other pending technology decisions regarding nuclear energy. For example, the U.S. is in the midst of developing new designs for nuclear reactors under DOE's Generation IV program. Some of the potential new reactors would produce types of nuclear waste that could not be reprocessed using some of the technologies now being developed with DOE funding.

5. Brief Overview of Economics of Reprocessing

The economics of reprocessing are hard to predict with any certainty because there are few examples around the world on which economists might base a generalized model.  Some of the major factors influencing the economic competitiveness of reprocessing are: the availability and cost of uranium, costs associated with interim storage and long-term disposal in a geologic repository, reprocessing plant construction and operating costs, and costs associated with transmutation, the process by which certain parts of the spent fuel are actively reduced in toxicity to address long-term waste management.

Costs associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-powered plants could help make nuclear power, including reprocessing, economically competitive with other sources of electricity in a free market.

 It is not clear who would pay for reprocessing in the U.S.

Three recent studies have examined the economics of nuclear power. In a study completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, The Future of Nuclear Power, an interdisciplinary panel, including Professor Richard Lester, looked at all aspects of nuclear power from waste management to economics to public perception. In a study requested by the Department of Energy and conducted at the University of Chicago in 2004, The Economic Future of Nuclear Power, economist Dr. Donald Jones and his colleague compared costs of future nuclear power to other sources, and briefly looked at the incremental costs of an advanced fuel cycle. In a 2003 study conducted by a panel including Matthew Bunn (a witness at the June 16 hearing) and Professor Steve Fetter, The Economics of Reprocessing vs. Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, the authors took a detailed look at the costs associated with an advanced fuel cycle. All three studies seem more or less to agree on cost estimates: the incremental cost of nuclear electricity to the consumer, with reprocessing, could be modest—on the order of 1–2 mills/kWh (0.1–0.2 cents per kilowatt-hour); on the other hand, this increase represents an approximate doubling (at least) of the costs attributable to spent fuel management, compared to the current fuel cycle (no reprocessing). Where they strongly disagree is on how large an impact this incremental cost will have on the competitiveness of nuclear power. The University of Chicago authors conclude that the cost of reprocessing is negligible in the big picture, where capital costs of new plants dominate all economic analyses. The other two studies take a more skeptical view—because new nuclear power would already be facing tough competition in the current market, any additional cost would further hinder the nuclear power industry, or become an unacceptable and unnecessary financial burden on the government.

6. Background

Hundreds of stacks throughout the laboratory released unfiltered gaseous waste directly from plutonium-processing hoods. The LAHDRA Project Team has developed a system of priority indices and determined that between 1944 and 1966, plutonium was the most significant contaminant released. LAHDRA estimated that the total amount of plutonium released by LANL throughout its history, even with the improved filtering systems in later years, exceeded 170 curies. [...]

The waste discharge at LANL began in 1944 during the development of the atomic bomb. Due to time pressures, secrecy of the project, and general lack of knowledge at the time about the dangers of radioactive materials, the laboratory took poor precautions in its disposal of radioactive and other hazardous wastes during its early years of operations. Initially, the waste, in the form of liquids, drums and cardboard boxes, was released into the canyons or deposited into unlined pits completely untreated; poor records were maintained about the volumes and activities of these releases. By the 1960s, the waste disposal practices significantly improved and better records were kept. [...]

This report compiles the available information about the waste disposed of at each Material Disposal Area and into the three canyons, including any recent soil and water sampling results. Some of the sites with the highest deposits of radioactive contaminants include MDA’s C, G, and H with respective inventories of up to 49,679 curies, 1,383,700 curies, and 391 curies. Routine sampling of soil and water is regularly performed and radionuclide contamination above background levels is often found at the burial sites (e.g. TA-21). [...]

The potential for LANL-origin contaminants to reach the Rio Grande River may vary, depending on the underground formations and the types of waste disposed of at each disposal site. The potential may be quite large, as the 2006 Santa Fe Water Quality Report stated a “qualified detection of plutonium-238”was detected in Santa Fe drinking water supplies4. The US DOE has also reported the detection of LANL radionuclides in Santa Fe drinking water since the late 1990s5. Plutonium is the main ingredient in the core or trigger of the nuclear weapons that were developed and produced at LANL, and approximately 423,776 cubic feet (ft3) (12,000 cubic meters (m3)) of plutonium contaminated waste is buried in unlined disposal pits, trenches, and shafts at the LANL site. This early detection of plutonium in Santa Fe drinking water may be an indicator of an approaching plutonium contamination plume in Santa Fe groundwater. And of course, plutonium is only one of many LANL-origin contaminants. [...]

As previously discussed, information pertaining to the wastes disposed of by LANL is not always complete or fully available and so many of the types and quantities of waste disposed of at various LANL technical areas remain unknown.  [...]

Some very low level nuclear waste can go into landfill-type settings. But low level waste consists of low concentrations of long-lived radionuclides and higher concentrations of these short-lived must remain sequestered for a few hundred years in subsurface engineering facilities. Medium-and high-level wastes require placing hundreds of meters below the ground for hundreds of thousands of years in order to ensure public safety. Intermediate waste containing high concentrations of long-lived radionuclides, as high-level waste, including spent fuel reprocessing and fuel waste. Because they are extremely radioactive high level waste that emits heat. There is no repository for high level nuclear waste disposal wherever in the world.

All types of energy production, money is on the front end of the process and of waste management in the back end. Macfarlane argues, however, that a failure to plan for the disposal of waste can cause the most profitable front end of a company to collapse.

Nuclear fuel discharged from a light water reactor after about four to six years in the kernel. This should be cool, because the fuel is radioactively and thermally very hot to discharge, in a pool. Actively cooled with borated water circulated, spent fuel pools are approximately 40 feet (12 meters) deep. Water not only removes heat, but also helps to absorb neutrons and stop a chain reaction. In some countries, including the United States, metal shelves in spent fuel pools hold four times the originally planned amount of fuel. The plans to reprocess fuel have failed for both economic and political reasons. This means that today is more fuel pools from reactor cores, and the fuel endangers big radiation in the event of an accident-loss of coolant, as happened in Fukushima.

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant spent fuel has seven pools, one at each reactor and large shared swimming pool, dry storage of spent fuel on site. Initially, Japan had planned a brief period of storage of spent fuel in the reactor before reprocessing, but Japan’s reprocessing facility has suffered long delays (scheduled to open in 2007, the installation is not yet ready). This caused the spent fuel to build the reactor factory sites.

Countries should include additional spent fuel storage nuclear projects from the beginning, and not the creation of ad hoc solutions, after spent nuclear fuel has already begun to build. Storage location is a technical issue, but also a social and political.

The trouble is, those "temporary" pools have become pretty permanent and crowded, as utilities load them up with more fuel rods, squeezing them closer together

Since 1982, utility customers on the nuclear grid have paid $34 billion into a federal fund for moving the waste to some kind of permanent disposal site — something the federal government still hasn't done

65,000 tons of nuclear waste have piled up at power plants — waste that produces more radioactivity than the reactors themselves

"It is clear that we lack a comprehensive national policy to address the nuclear fuel cycle, including management of nuclear waste

Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the leading contender, until Nevada's residents said "not in our backyard."

In the meantime, utility companies like PG&E are stuck with the waste. During a visit three years ago, engineers at Diablo Canyon were preparing to move older waste from storage in pools to containers called dry casks. "The spent fuel pools were not built large enough to hold all the fuel from the original 40-year license life, so we had to find alternatives for safe storage," said Pete Resler, head of PG&E's nuclear communications at the time. The company is now using some dry casks — huge concrete and steel canisters to store older, less radioactive waste. Each is anchored to its own concrete pad.

"Each one of those pads is 7-foot-thick concrete with steel rebar reinforcement in it," Resler says. Those pads are there as an extra measure because Diablo is situated near two significant seismic faults. There are now 16 of these canisters sitting on the plant grounds, with plans to fill 12 more in the next couple of years

Though most agree that dry-casking is safer than leaving the fuel rods in pools of water, nobody's proposing it as a permanent solution. The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, told Sen. Feinstein's committee that it's the best we can do for now.

"Right now we believe that for at least 100 years, that fuel can be stored with very little impacts to health and safety, or to the environment," Jaczko said.

In the meantime, the Blue Ribbon Commission appointed by President Obama to find that way forward will issue another round of recommendations Friday

They're likely to include more stop-gap measures, while the holy grail of a permanent home for spent fuel remains decades away

DOE has not yet identified a preferred alternative for waste disposal, but a preferred alternative or combination of alternatives will be identified in the final EIS. Before making a final decision on disposal method or location, the agency would need to submit its findings to Congress and wait for legislative action.

EnergySolutions is also partnering with a company (Studsvik) that in presentations to our board last year vigorously lobbied against blending, saying that there were “not sufficient safeguards,” in place, and that this “does not solve the problem.” And, what will be the actual increase of the total radioactive dose at the site, since the blended material will be manipulated to be at the very highest level of Class A waste?

NOTHING happend to the fuel in the pools at Fukushima. I would like to see some evidence other than the word of an activist who frightens kids for a living to support Gunter’s rant about peices of fuel being ejected miles away. From the looks of that video, the fuel didn’t move an inch. There is also a poll associated with the article. The poll discloses that it is completely unscientific, since it allows anyone to vote and is not based on randomly selected participants. However, I think that the results as of 0315 this morning are pretty amusing since the antinuclear opinion piece has been posted for nearly a week.

95% disagree with “Beyond Nuclear”. Let’s make it 99% by Rod Adams on October 14, 2011 in Antinuclear activist, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Unreliables, Wind energy Share0 One of the more powerful concepts that I studied in college was called “groupthink.” The curriculum developers in the history department at the US Naval Academy thought it was important for people in training to become leaders in the US Navy learn to seek counsel and advice from as broad a range of sources as possible. We were taught how to avoid the kind of bad decision making that can result by surrounding oneself with yes-men or fellow travelers. The case study I remember most was the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion where virtually the entire Kennedy Administration cabinet thought that it would be a cakewalk. If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.Aside: Don’t we live in an amazing world? I just typed “Bay of Pigs groupthink” into my browser search box and instantly hit on exactly the link I needed to support the statement above. It even cites the book we used when I was a plebe in 1977, more than 33 years ago. End Aside. Not everyone, however, has the benefit of early leadership lessons about the danger of believing that a small group of likeminded people can provide actionable advice. Some of the people who are most likely to be victims of groupthink are those who adamantly oppose the continued safe operation of emission-free nuclear power plants. The writers who exclusively quote members of that tiny community have also fallen into the groupthink trap.  On October 8, 2011, the Berkeley Patch, a New Jersey based journal that regularly posts negative stories about Oyster Creek, featured an article titled Petitioners to NRC: Shut Down All Fukushima-Like Nuclear Plants . Here is a snapshot of the masthead, the headline and the lede. The article is a diatribe that quotes people on the short list of frequently quoted antinuclear activists including Paul Gunter, Michael Mariotte, Kevin Kamps, Deb Katz and Dale Bridenbaugh. The author faithfully reproduces some of their best attempts to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt using untruths about the actual events at Fukushima. For example, the article uses the following example of how antinuclear activists are still trying to spread the myth that the used fuel pools at Fukushima caught fire. Oyster Creek – the oldest nuclear plant in the United States – has generated over 700 tons of high-level radioactive waste, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear said. “Granted that some of that has been moved into dry cast storage, but the pool remains full to its capacity,” Kamps said. “And this was a re-rack capacity. Much later in terms of quantity of high level radioactive waste than it was originally designed for.” This represents 125 million curies of radioactive cesium-137 and the NRC has reported that up to 100 percent of the hazardous material could be released from a pool fire, Kamps said. “I would like to point out that Fukushima Daiichi units one, two, three and four combined in terms of the inventory of high level radioactive waste in their storage pools does not match some of these reactors I mentioned in terms of how much waste is in these pools,” Kamps said. “So the risks are greater here for boil downs and the consequences of a radioactive fire in these pools.” Fortunately, the people who are not a part of the antinuclear community are finally beginning to recognize their own strength and to realize that they do not have to remain silent while the lies are being spread. Here is how a knowledgable commenter responded to the above segment of the article: If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.

“It took a really extraordinary event for 95 percent of the people in the world to know about it,” he said. “If they know about Fukushima, they know about Mark 1 reactors exploding in the air and releasing toxic radiation across the world and they know that’s not a good thing. Something has to be done to make sure that never happens again.” I could not let that one pass without a comment; I am quite sure that Mariotte has once again fallen victim to the fact that he surrounds himself with people who echo his own prejudices. Here is my response.

Marriotte makes an interesting statement by he claiming that “95% of the people in the world” know about Fukushima. That statement might be true about the people in the United States, where advertiser-supported television news programs covered the events with breathless hype for several months. I am pretty sure that you would have a difficult time finding anyone in China, central Africa, the Asian subcontinent, South America or the Middle East who can even pronounce Fukushima, much less know anything about GE Mark 1 containments. Most of them would not even know that they should be worried about radiation because they have never been taught to be afraid of something that they cannot smell, feel, taste, or hear especially when it occurs at levels that have no chance of making them sick within their expected lifetime. Mariotte, Gunter, Kamps, Katz and Bridenbaugh are all members of a vocal, but tiny group of people who have been carrying the water of the fossil fuel industry for decades by opposing nuclear energy, the only real competitor it has. They are victims of groupthink who believe that their neighbors in Takoma Park are representative of the whole world.

Just before making this comment, I voted in the unscientific poll associated with the article. 95% say that Oyster Creek should keep on powering New Jersey homes and businesses. They are not impressed by the Beyond Nuclear FUD; they like clean electricity.

Today, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration is paying the French-government-owned-company AREVA to supervise the construction of a new, multi-billion dollar facility to convert excess weapons plutonium into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for use in civilian nuclear power reactors. (AREVA provided a less potent MOX fuel to Fukushima Daiichi Reactor Number Three last September that suffered a hydrogen explosion after the March earthquake and tsunami.) NNSA’s MOX plant is behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. It does not have any paying customers for its fuel if it is ever made. It will create its own new waste stream. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not licensed the plant, and SRS and DOE management are late reporting on the cost overruns.

He argued the "risk of actual harm from the development would be very low" but the villagers have brought in Richard Buxton, a Cambridge law firm that specialises in environmental and public law.

"Obviously the wider background is that the government is desperate to get this cheap dumping going ahead of the next lot of nuclear power stations coming online," said Clare Langan, a local villager and member of the King's Cliffe Waste Watchers campaign group.

Critics say the government wants to rush through the Augean plans aware that the the UK's only purpose-built low level waste repositary at Drigg in Cumbria is rapidly filling up.

The residents of King's Cliffe say it is unfair that their village would be the first to take radioactive material from the nuclear industry given they are 90 miles away from any power stations. They claim an underground water source runs from below the landfill site and that a number of springs, pools and streams in the village – mentioned in the Domesday Book – could be contaminated.

The "design-build" approach "is good if you're building a McDonald's," said Gene Aloise, the GAO's director of nuclear non-proliferation and security. "It's not good if you're building a one-of-a-kind, high-risk nuclear waste facility."The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal panel that oversees public health and safety at nuclear weapons sites, is urging Energy Secretary Steven Chu to require more extensive testing of designs for some of the plant's most critical components."Design and construction of the project continue despite there being unresolved technical issues, and there is a lot of risk associated with that," said Peter Winokur, the board's chairman. The waste at Hanford, stored in 177 deteriorating underground tanks, "is a real risk to the public and the environment. It is essential that this plant work and work well."

Documents obtained by USA TODAY show at least three federal investigations are underway to examine the project, which is funded and supervised by the Department of Energy, owner of Hanford Site. Bechtel National is the prime contractor.In November, the Energy Department's independent oversight office notified Bechtel that it is investigating "potential nuclear safety non-compliances" in the design and installation of plant systems and components. And the department's inspector general is in the final stages of a separate probe focused on whether Bechtel installed critical equipment that didn't meet quality-control standards.Meanwhile, Congress' Government Accountability Office has launched a sweeping review of everything from cost and schedule overruns to the risks associated with the Energy Department's decision to proceed with construction before completing and verifying the design of key components.

Everything about the waste treatment plant at Hanford is unprecedented — and urgent.The volume of waste, its complex mix of highly radioactive and toxic material, the size of the processing facilities — all present technical challenges with no proven solution. The plant is as big as the task: a sprawling, 65-acre compound of four giant buildings, each longer than a football field and as tall as 12 stories high.The plant will separate the waste's high- and low-level radioactive materials, then blend them with compounds that are superheated to create a molten glass composite — a process called "vitrification." The mix is poured into giant steel cylinders, where it cools to a solid form that is safe and stable for long-term storage — tens of thousands of glass tubes in steel coffins.

Once the plant starts running, it could take 30 years or more to finish its cleanup work.The 177 underground tanks at Hanford hold detritus from 45 years of plutonium production at the site, which had up to nine nuclear reactors before it closed in 1989. Some of the tanks, with capacities ranging from 55,000 gallons to more than 1 million gallons, date to the mid-1940s, when Hanford's earliest reactor made plutonium for the first atomic bomb ever detonated: the "Trinity" test at Alamagordo, N.M. It also produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in World War II.

More than 60 of the tanks are thought to have leaked, losing a million gallons of waste into soil and groundwater. So far, the contamination remains within the boundaries of the barren, 586-square-mile site, but it poses an ongoing threat to the nearby Columbia River, a water source for communities stretching southwest to Portland, Ore. And, while the liquid most likely to escape from the older tanks has been moved to newer, double-walled tanks, the risk of more leaks compounds that threat.

Lilliemark says she learned a lot about the risks of not dealing with the used fuel. And it changed her thinking. "I can't just close my eyes and imagine that the fuel is not here, because it is," she says.

Oskarshamn was one of two communities in eastern Sweden that stepped forward after nuclear waste officials asked for volunteers willing to let them start geologic testing. Charlotte Lilliemark, who lives about 12 miles north of the town, was just the kind of person a nuclear power executive would want to avoid. The former Stockholmer moved to the country to raise dressage horses and didn't want a waste dump anywhere near her

"I couldn't see anything that was positive," she says. But then local government officials asked her to lead a community advisory group. She says they told her: "We think you could contribute to the work — we need to open all the questions and be clear and transparent, and we want you to participate if you want to." And she did.

This spring, Swedish nuclear officials applied for a licensing application to build a geologic vault in the municipality of Osthammar, about a two-hour drive north of Stockholm. If they get it, the facility could open in 2025. "We believe that it will not create a stigma, but on the other hand create an interest in how to solve this very difficult issue that people in Japan and California and Germany must solve in one way or another," says Jacob Spangenberg, the mayor of Osthammar.

The community will see some financial benefits: Besides new jobs and infrastructure, Osthammar negotiated a deal with the company to receive approximately $80 million for long-term economic development if the repository is approved

Already the community gets money from a national waste fund to help it chart an independent course. It has retained technical consultants and hired five full-time employees. Spangenberg says Osthammar learned how to ask tough questions, press for conditions and also to keep cool.

Forty years ago, nuclear energy was actually regarded as something of a savior for our environmental dilemmas because it didn’t pollute.  And this was well before we were even thinking about global warming or climate change.  It also didn’t take up a great deal of space.  You didn’t have to drown all of Glen Canyon to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity.  Four reactors would equal a row of wind turbines, each one three times as tall as Neyland Stadium skyboxes, strung along the entire length of the 2,178-mile Appalachian Trail.   One reactor would produce the same amount of electricity that can be produced by continuously foresting an area one-and-a-half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in order to create biomass.  Producing electricity with a relatively small number of new reactors, many at the same sites where reactors are already located, would avoid the need to build thousands and thousands of miles of new transmission lines through scenic areas and suburban backyards. 

While nuclear lost its green credentials with environmentalists somewhere along the way, some are re-thinking nuclear energy because of our new environmental paradigm – global climate change.  Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity today.  President Obama has endorsed it, proposing an expansion of the loan guarantee program from $18 billion to $54 billion and making the first award to the Vogtle Plant in Georgia.  Nobel Prize-winning Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal about developing a generation of mini-reactors that I believe we can use to repower coal boilers, or more locally, to power the Department of Energy’s site over in Oak Ridge.  The president, his secretary of energy, and many environmentalists may be embracing nuclear because of the potential climate change benefits, but they are now also remembering the other positive benefits of nuclear power that made it an environmental savior some 40 years ago

The Nature Conservancy took note of nuclear power’s tremendous energy density last August when it put out a paper on “Energy Sprawl.”  The authors compared the amount of space you need to produce energy from different technologies – something no one had ever done before – and what they came up with was remarkable.  Nuclear turns out to be the gold standard.  You can produce a million megawatts of electricity a year from a nuclear reactor sitting on one square mile.  That’s enough electricity to power 90,000 homes.  They even included uranium mining and the 230 square miles surrounding Yucca Mountain in this calculation and it still comes to only one square mile per million megawatt hours

Coal-fired electricity needs four square miles, because you have to consider all the land required for mining and extraction.  Solar thermal, where they use the big mirrors to heat a fluid, takes six square miles.  Natural gas takes eight square miles and petroleum takes 18 square miles – once again, including all the land needed for drilling and refining and storing and sending it through pipelines.  Solar photovoltaic cells that turn sunlight directly into electricity take 15 square miles and wind is even more dilute, taking 30 square miles to produce that same amount of electricity.

When people say “we want to get our energy from wind,” they tend to think of a nice windmill or two on the horizon, waving gently – maybe I’ll put one in my back yard.   They don’t realize those nice, friendly windmills are now 50 stories high and have blades the length of football fields.  We see awful pictures today of birds killed by the Gulf oil spill.  But one wind farm in California killed 79 golden eagles in one year. The American Bird Conservancy says existing turbines can kill up to 275,000 birds a year.

And for all that, each turbine has the capacity to produce about one-and-a-half megawatts.  You need three thousand of these 50-story structures to equal the output of one nuclear reactor

, wind power can be counted on to be there 10 to 15 percent of the time when you need it.  TVA can count on nuclear power 91 percent of the time, coal, 60 percent of the time and natural gas about 50 percent of the time.  This is why I believe it is a taxpayer rip-off for wind power to be subsidized per unit of electricity at a rate of 25 times the subsidy for all other forms of electricity combined. 

the “problem of nuclear waste” has been overstated because people just don’t understand the scale or the risk.  All the high-level nuclear waste that has ever been produced in this country would fit on a football field to a height of ten feet.  That’s everything.  Compare that to the billion gallons of coal ash that slid out of the coal ash impoundment at the Kingston plant and into the Emory River a year and a half ago, just west of here.  Or try the industrial wastes that would be produced if we try to build thousands of square miles of solar collectors or 50-story windmills.  All technologies produce some kind of waste.  What’s unique about nuclear power is that there’s so little of it.

Now this waste is highly radioactive, there’s no doubt about that.  But once again, we have to keep things in perspective.  It’s perfectly acceptable to isolate radioactive waste through storage.  Three feet of water blocks all radiation.  So does a couple of inches of lead and stainless steel or a foot of concrete.  That’s why we use dry cask storage, where you can load five years’ worth of fuel rods into a single container and store them right on site.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Energy Secretary Steven Chu both say we can store spent fuel on site for 60 or 80 years before we have to worry about a permanent repository like Yucca Mountain

then there’s reprocessing.  Remember, we’re now the only major nuclear power nation in the world that is not reprocessing its fuel.  While we gave up reprocessing in the 1970s, the French have all their high-level waste from 30 years of producing 80 percent of their electricity stored beneath the floor of one room at their recycling center in La Hague.  That’s right; it all fits into one room.  And we don’t have to copy the French.  Just a few miles away at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory they’re working to develop advanced reprocessing technologies that go well beyond what the French are doing, to produce a waste that’s both smaller in volume and with a shorter radioactive life.  Regardless of what technology we ultimately choose, the amount of material will be astonishingly small.  And it’s because of the amazing density of nuclear technology – something we can’t even approach with any other form of energy

The White House initiative prompted NARUC and NEI to sue in March this year, arguing that the fee, which has been in effect since 1983, should be suspended because there was no justification for it.

In the latest filing, NARUC and NEI accuse the DOE of ignoring the size of the fund, the costs of the program it is intended to pay for, and the revenues already collected to pay those costs.

In their latest legal brief, filed on Oct. 20, and released by NARUC on Monday, the petitioners substantiate their claims that the DOE's determination in December 2010 to leave the fee unchanged is not in compliance with the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which requires the department to regularly assess whether the fees are too high, too low, or necessary at all.

"Rather than complying with the NWPA requirement to annually evaluate the costs of the nuclear waste disposal program and determine whether the fees that have been and are being collected from ratepayers and utilities offset those costs, DOE has concluded that it must continue collecting the same fee it has been collecting since 1983 because it cannot determine that too much or too little revenue is being collected," the brief said.

The owner of the UK's Magnox plants, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), has mandated the implementation of the 'Mini Store' option of managing its ILW. Under this option - which is more cost-effective than other options - the waste is placed in cast iron, self-shielding boxes weighing 18 tonnes and capable of holding almost three cubic-metres of waste. A concrete waste store approach had previously been chosen.

Once filled with waste, the Mini Stores can then be kept on-site or easily transported to another site for storage. When an ILW repository becomes available, the containers could simply be placed within it. The German nuclear industry has been using this method of ILW management for more than 20 years.

Jain was among the eight people who were affected by radiation poisoning. He, like the others, had been exposed to cobalt-60, which had leaked from an irradiation machine being dismantled in the area. Jain refused the Rs 200,000 (A$ 4,000) compensation offered to him by the government and is instead suing Delhi University, from whose labs the machine originated. The university had bought the gamma irradiation machine in 1970 but it had not been used since the mid-1980s.

In the last few decades, India has quickly become the world's dumping ground for all sorts of waste, including hazardous material like old electronic gadgets or 'e-waste'. A large force of both formal and informal workers is involved in the acquiring, processing, and managing of this waste, yet, experts say the necessary checks and balances are missing.

This radiation then shows up in the finished products made from recovered materials that are exported back to the world. In 2007, radioactive steel originating from India was found in Germany and later that year, French officials reported that buttons for elevators, which had been made from recycled steel from India were emitting radiation.

"Waste flows from rich to poor and that's the nature of that flow," says Sinha. "I find it slightly amusing to say that processing waste is perhaps an economic activity and it will add to your GDP. I get the sense from the government that they are quite comfortable about this waste coming in." He says they routinely turn a blind eye to many of the things that are happening in the industry, which could be potential threats not only for the people involved in dealing with this waste, but the ecology and the country as a whole.

What happens in India, however, will have global reverberations, warns Chaturvedi. "India is exporting all kinds of things, in addition to the people who're being exposed and getting on planes," she says. "I think the point is how India's own secrecy is making it pretty much a radioactive menace for the rest of the world."