Ambient office  =  123 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Shallot from Central Market = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 76 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
       Experts came to the hearing and told the members of the committee that unless the waste problem was dealt with, the decline of the nuclear industry in the U.S. would continue. Most of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. were built in the 1970s. Five plants will be shut down permanently by 2025. The construction of two new nuclear power plants in South Carolina were cancelled in 2017. The contractors ran way over budget and local rate payers are on the hook for over nine billion dollars. Two more new nuclear power reactors are currently under construction in Georgia. There are fights between contractors and court battles interfering with the completion of the project.
      The Murkowski bill calls for a new agency outside of Congress to pick a place for temporary spent nuclear fuel storage within in the next ten years. The biggest obstacle to any plan for spent nuclear fuel storage is the question of “consent.” Some local communities or Native American tribes would like the business and jobs that would accompany any storage site but politicians in Nevada, Utah and Tennessee have prevented such siting.
      Independent Maine Senator Angus King asked a very important question at the hearing. “What if every state says no? What do we do then?” Geoffry Fettus is the senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He agrees that the stalemate over spent nuclear fuel storage will continue until the question of consent is solved. He said, “We have a higher chance of states getting to yes if they don’t have to take the entire burden.” He suggested that the burden and cost of hosting a storage site should be split among several sites at different locations.
      West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin raised questions about how long spent nuclear fuel could be stored in dry casks. He also suggested that spent nuclear fuel might ultimate be recycled although the U.S. recently cancelled construction of a facility to recycle spent nuclear fuel. France and Japan reprocess spent nuclear fuel. France uses a process called vitrification to convert the spent nuclear fuel remaining after reprocessing into glass logs for burial in a geological repository.
       Congress has banned the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel since the late 1970s. This was done out of fear that the reprocessing could be used to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. This plutonium could be used to construct a nuclear bomb. Steve Nesbit is the head of nuclear policy for Duke Energy and the American Nuclear Society which represents nuclear scientists and engineers. He said that uranium is so cheap and available that reprocesses does not make sense economically.
       Nesbit said, “Used nuclear fuel is being stored safely today and poses no immediate danger to the public. However, the lack of progress on a geologic repository has endangered nuclear power’s potential to address our long-term energy and environmental goals.”
       Senator Murkowski closed the hearing with the hope that solutions for the political, legal, and technological problems would soon be found. Each year, more than two thousand two hundred metric tons of spent nuclear fuel are added to cooling pools and/or dry casks. The total amount of spent nuclear fuel stored in the U.S. today is approaching one hundred thousand tons.

Ambient office  =  93 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 143 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 144 nanosieverts per hour

Red potatoes from Central Market = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 113 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
       Congress has been wrestling with the question of what to do with spent nuclear fuel for decades. This week, the Senate waded into the swamp again. They want to find a way to avoid political squabbles that killed previous proposals. They are working on new legislation that would distribute the spent nuclear fuel to multiple storage sites. There are also new technologies being developed that might be able to help with the problem.
       Everyday, the U.S. Department of Energy provides two million two hundred thousand dollars to help national utilities cope with storing spent nuclear fuel. In 1982, a law was passed that instructed the federal government to collect the spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors and store it in a deep geological repository where it would be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. It will take this long for some of the radioactive isotopes to decay to the point where the spent nuclear fuel is no longer dangerous to people or the environment. The deadline for the completion of the repository was 1998.
       In 1987, an abandoned salt mine under Yucca Mountain in Nevada was selected for the national repository for spent nuclear fuel. Preliminary work was done to prepare the site until 2009 when the project was cancelled by the administration of President Obama with the support of the Nevada Congressional delegation. Part of the reason had to do with revised environmental impact statements that raised questions about the possible flow of ground water through the salt mine. The Trump administration took action to reconsider the Yucca Mountain site and even began working on licensing. However, Congress cancelled the request for funding to move forward.
      More than two decades after the 1998 deadline, there is still no place in the U.S. for the permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel. Spent nuclear fuel is first moved to cooling pools at the ninety-five commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S. After a mandatory five years in the cooling pools to let the hottest radioactive isotopes to decay, the fuel assemblies are moved to temporary storage in cylindrical steel and concreate dry casks on site if such storage is available. Otherwise, the spent nuclear fuel are left in the increasingly crowded cooling pools. Some pools are so full that if many of the fuel assemblies are not removed in the next few years from some pools, the reactors at the sites will have to be shut down. Obviously, thing cannot go on the way they have. Interest in investing in the nuclear industry will continue to decline as long as the spent nuclear fuel problem remains unsolved.
       Now there is a bipartisan Congressional push to work on the spent nuclear fuel problem. Alaskan Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski opened a hearing on the issue of spent nuclear fuel last Thursday in the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. She is the sponsor of a bill to create a new agency in charge of dealing with U.S. spent nuclear fuel. The bill also requires that local consent be a part of the decision-making process. Such local consent would be “insulated” from pressure by members of Congress. Local residents living near a selected storage site whether that site is temporary or permanent would have the right to some say in the siting even if they would not be able to veto it.
Please read Part 2

Ambient office  =  87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Garlic bulb from Central Market = 77 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 77 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)  
        A few U.S. nuclear power plants managed to get waivers from the NRC to continue operating with water above their temperature limit. The NRC claimed that those cases involved nuclear power plants whose temperature limits had been set with very pessimistically and operating at higher temperatures were not a problem. Scott Burnell is a spokesman for the NRC. He said, “No matter what avenue a plant takes in attempting to deal with water discharge heat limits … the NRC will only allow such actions if the evidence presented shows the plant will continue to operate safely and that people and the environment are adequately protected.”
       Rising temperatures are not the only way in which climate change is impacting nuclear power plants. More frequent and more serious droughts are reducing the levels of bodies of water used for cooling power plants to the point where plants have to reduce power generation. In some cases, large rivers no longer reach the sea and reservoirs are dropping to a few percent of their previous levels.
        The temperature of cooling water is not the only way in which environmental heat impacts nuclear plant operation. The temperature of the air inside a plant can become so hot that the staff cannot operate the plant. Last year, the heat wave in France was so serious that operators began spraying water on the outside of the reactor building to keep the interior of the building habitable. Under the impact of high air temperatures, U.S. nuclear power plants have often reduced their output between three and sixty percent.
        An analysis done in 2012 suggested that in the coming decades, climate change could cause a reduction in nuclear power generation by sixteen percent on average. The nuclear industry in the U.S. is under increasing competitive pressure from cheap natural gas and the falling prices of solar and wind power installations. Unlike other power sources, it severely stresses the hardware of a nuclear power plant to temporarily lower output. This, in turn, results in earlier and more frequent maintenance in an industry that is already struggling financially.
       Nuclear experts agree that rising temperatures and allowing nuclear power plants operating above set limits does not pose any immediate danger because very conservative margins were included in the original calculations for operation. Most of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. were built between the 1970s and 1990s. Modeling the impact of higher operating temperatures and allowable safety margins has improved since then. However, there is still concern. Lochbaum says, “For every 10 degrees that the temperature goes up, the lifetime of the electrical equipment is reduced quite a bit. Some of your safety equipment may then just fry.”
       So just when power demands rise in the summer for air conditioning, the nuclear power plants are going to be increasingly shut down because cooling water will be too hot even after the operating limits are raised. As climate change increases global temperatures, nuclear power plants will suffer the most in terms of wear, safety and partial shutdowns. This is just another issue that will plague the nuclear industry in the years to come and reduce the interest of governments, utilities and investors in paying for increasingly costly nuclear generated electricity.

Ambient office  =  95 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 82 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 133 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 83 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 67 nanosieverts per hour