We have all seen movies where they thought that they had killed the monster when suddenly it pops up again. It was generally believed that the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository in Nevada had been permanently cancelled and, to abuse the metaphor, it was dead. Now it seems that reports of its death may have been premature. Recently a federal appeals court has decided to resurrect the beast.

          The Yucca Mountain site was chosen by Congress in the early 80s as the location for a permanent deep geological repository to house the spent fuel from the nation’s nuclear reactors. The State of Nevada and its elected representatives were strongly opposed to the decision. Harry Reid, the Nevada Senator who became the Senate Majority Leader fought against the project and managed to prevent the appropriation of some of the required funding. When Obama was running for the presidency, he promised to cancel the project which he did soon after he was elected. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission halted work on a review of the site after Obama cancelled the project. Eleven million dollars allocated for the study was never spent. Work began to find another site for a deep geological repository but it was estimated that no such site would be operating before 2048.  

          On August 13, 2013 the Federal Appeals court for the District of Columbia ruled 2 to 1 that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission exceeded its authority when it stopped work on the review of the Yucca Mountain site in response to the orders of the Obama administration. The case was brought by the States of Washington and South Carolina which have military nuclear waste that they intended to send to Yucca Mountain. The majority opinion was based on the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. Judge Kavenaugh said that allowing the executive branch and agencies such as the NRC to disregard federal law would be a violation of that separation. He ordered the NRC to proceed to spend the remaining eleven million dollars on continuing the halted site review. The dissenting judge said that the site review would be a waste of money because eleven million dollars would not be sufficient to reach a conclusion of whether or not the site would be a safe place to store spent nuclear fuel. Harry Reid said that the court’s decision was meaningless.

         The NRC had gone to a great deal of effort to carry out the review including the construction of a special courtroom in Nevada and a special computer link back to NRC Headquarters in Washington, D.C. to facilitate access to thousands of documents regarding the project. The courtroom has been dismantled and the computer link has been taken down. The NRC completed most of the work on the first stage of the project focusing on a Safety Evaluation Report. One volume of the projected five volumes of the Safety Report has been completed and published. The other four volumes were issued as technical reports with no official conclusions. It might be possible for the NRC to use the remaining eleven million dollars to complete and publish the full Safety Evaluation Report but the Safety Evaluation is only one part of the review process.

              The current head of the NRC is a geologist who had strong reservations about the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site before the project was cancelled. Congress is currently debating legislation to facilitate the search for another repository site. The Department of Energy withdrew its application for a license to construct the repository soon after Obama cancelled the project. Although Yucca Mountain has temporarily been given a new lease on life, I am afraid that it will soon be dead once and for all.

Yucca Mountain.PNG

The entire St. Louis metropolitan region would be threatened with radioactive smoke if the fire at the Bridgeton Landfill were ever to reach the nuclear waste in the nearby West Lake Landfill. stlouis.cbslocal.com

The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale. uk.reuters.com

A radiation expert says that the enormous amount of contamination flowing from Fukushima will probably imperil entire Pacific Ocean. Youtube.com

The Unit 3 reactor at Connecticut’s Millstone nuclear plant shut down unexpectedly Friday after the water level dropped in a steam generator. nuclearstreet.com

Ambient office = .067 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .138 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .101 microsieverts per hour

Locally baked ciabatta bread from local grocery =  .123 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .129 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .124 microsieverts per hour

August 14 2013 charts.PNG

I have mentioned the problems the nuclear industry in South Korea (S.K.) are having with fraudulent parts replacement in previous posts. Today I am going to drill down into the South Korean scandal in more detail. For years, S.K. has depended on nuclear power for about one third of their electricity. Unfortunately, an unholy trinity of nuclear power companies, nuclear equipment suppliers and nuclear equipment testing companies has been recently been revealed that threatens the S.K. use of nuclear power.

          Last April, an official investigation was started after authorizes received a tip from an anonymous source revealing information about illegal practices. Some officials at a testing company have been indicted by prosecutors for faking safety tests on parts intended for installation in nuclear power plants. There is a state-owned company that designs nuclear power plants. Some of the officials at that company were indicted for taking bribes from testing companies in return for accepting substandard parts. Recently more nuclear parts suppliers had their offices raided. And even more companies may be pulled into the search. Investigators are working their way through over one hundred thousand test certifications from the past decade to find out which are fraudulent.

          To date, investigators have found that testing companies skipped some sections of mandatory tests, forged test data to meet requirements and even issued certification of safety for parts that had actually failed the tests. Investigations have revealed that the suspect components are installed in fourteen out of the twenty three nuclear power plants in S.K. This amounts to concerns with two thirds of their nuclear plants. At first, the government said that the thousands of parts that had not met requirements were not important because they were installed in peripheral and non-critical systems. Then three plants had to be closed because questionable parts had indeed been installed in critical places. More plants may have to be closed as the investigation proceeds. A nuclear engineer in S.K. has said that so far only the tip of iceberg has been revealed.

          The S.K. government has consistently told their citizens that nuclear power was safe and they were in no danger. The public is becoming increasingly concerned about the truth of that position as more and more problems have been revealed. The closing of the three reactors has prompted the government to ask the citizens of S.K. to conserve energy during a particularly warm summer which has further corroded the public confidence. In addition, the S.K. government has been promoting the export of nuclear technology to other countries as one of the solutions to a cooling of S.K. economy. These problems with part certification could be a public relations disaster for S.K. companies trying to sell S.K. nuclear technology abroad.

         The investigators blame the problems they uncovered on the highly centralized and poorly regulated S.K. nuclear industry. There is one state owned company that runs all the nuclear power plants. Another state-owned company designs and builds all the nuclear power plants. People retiring from these state-owned companies often move on to the suppliers and testing companies or, in some cases, investin suppliers and testing companies. In the S.K. culture, personal ties are very important and can sometimes overrule adherence to laws and regulations. In addition, there is the ever present problem of corruption and the lure of bribes. The investigators refer to the situation in the S.K. nuclear industry as an “entrenched chain of corruption.” The targeted companies have promised to institute new practices to root out corruption and improve testing and certification. However, such promises have proved empty in the past and I have little confidence that they will be honored in the future.

Korea NCCS.JPG

Will the Unit 1 reactor at Fukushima become a future tourist spot? japantoday.com

Contaminated groundwater accumulating under the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has risen two feet above the protective barrier and is now freely leaking into the Pacific Ocean. rt.com

Alaska fishermen and fish consumers shouldn’t be concerned about the new disclosures of radioactive water leaking into the Pacific Ocean near the site of the hobbled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, according to an ocean chemist and a spokeswoman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. heraldnet.com

The Fukushima disaster is ongoing and unstoppable. rense.com

Ambient office = .112 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .102 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .080 microsieverts per hour

Canned roasted peanuts from Costco =  .077 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .147 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .139 microsieverts per hour

August 13 2013 charts.PNG

       I have blogged before about the U.S. Department of Energy’s permanent defense related nuclear Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. It is located about twenty six miles from Carlsbad, New Mexico in an area that contains several other nuclear facilities. It is the only permanent deep geological nuclear waste repository in the United States since the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain Repository project in Nevada a few years ago. The WIPP is the third deep geological nuclear repository in the world and the only one currently operating after Germany closed two deep repositories because of unforeseen problems.

         The USDOE started studying the New Mexico site in 1973. The area is an ancient salt deposit left from a dried-up sea. The salt formation is capable of some motion and deformation but scientists think that such plasticity might help seal off cracks and crevices created during the construction of the WIPP. Test wells were drilled and the specific location for the WIPP in the salt deposit was moved a number of times as a result of the tests. In 1978, the New Mexico Environmental Evaluation Group (EEG) was created to oversee the WIPP and the group double checked the DOE work to ally public fears over the construction of such a facility.

          In 1979, Congress authorized the construction of the WIPP.  At that time, the type of waste that would be stored at the WIPP was redefined from “high temperature” to low level waste known as “transuranic.” This includes tools, clothing and machinery that is contaminated with man-made elements during the processing of uranium and plutonium. Such waste is not as dangerous as nuclear reactor byproducts but it still remains radioactive for around twenty four thousand years. Changing the type of waste that could be stored at the WIPP allowed a loosing of the rules and a speed up of work. Even so, the regulations were far more stringent than had originally been proposed. There was a delay in the initial tests of waste storage cause by public concern, but testing did begin in 1991. The facility could not be opened for waste storage until Congress gave its approval in 1993. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was given final authority over the WIPP. In 1994, Sandia National Laboratory was charged by Congress with running a final series of tests and evaluations of the site in accord with the EPA regulations. In 1998, the WIPP was declared ready to receive waste. The first shipment of waste arrived in 1999.

          Tons of waste in steel containers have been moved from various nuclear defense laboratories and production facilities to the WIPP since 1999. The fifty six storerooms are about two hundred feet long and the whole facility is about two thousand feed underground. Over three million cubic feet of transuranic wastes are currently stored at the WIPP. The sixth set of rooms is rapidly filling up and new set of seven rooms has been completed and will start receiving waste this summer.

           There has been an attempt to ship transuranic waste from buried tanks at Hanford to the WIPP. There is a prohibition in place at the WIPP against receiving the contents of the buried tanks at Hanford. The fear is that the contents of the tanks are not well known and that if there is any liquid in the shipments from Hanford, the ability of the WIPP to safely and permanently contain its transuranic waste will be compromised. Hanford authorities have tried to reassure the WIPP that there will be no liquids in the waste they want to ship but the WIPP has still declined to accept Hanford waste.

Casks containing waste arrive at WIPP:

WIPP waste arrival.JPG

China, Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and others are going to want to know just how out of control this newly revealed radiation emergency is at Fukushima.  youtube.com

While Michigan residents enjoy the benefits of the surrounding Great Lakes, Ontario waterfront residents ponder the idea of becoming the final resting spot for Canada’s nuclear waste, and it has local legislators and environmentalists concerned.  nuclear-news.net

Zimbabwe mining ministry says that no deal has been signed on supplying uranium for Iran’s nuclear program. Foxnews.com

Cuts to conventional armed forces risk making the UK’s nuclear deterrent ineffective, a former deputy head of the military has warned. scotsman.com

Ambient office = .079 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .109 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .102 microsieverts per hour

Banana from local grocery store =  .121 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .145 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .113 microsieverts per hour

August 12 2013 charts.PNG

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will investigate the finances of three nuclear reactors owned by Entergy Nuclear. rutlandherald.com

The United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons are being dismantled under its disarmament obligations. matthewaid.tumblr.com

How Cold War nuclear testing once made orbit unsafe for Apollo. arstechnica.com

A debate over the rising cost of building a first-of-its-kind nuclear plant in Georgia will be pushed far into the future. thenewstribune.com