Switzerland voted in a referendum yesterday to approve a revision to the country’s energy policy that promotes the use of renewable energy sources and energy conservation. The revised Federal Energy Act also prohibits the construction of new nuclear power plants. World-nuclear-news.com

Chairman of Ohio’s House Public Utilities Committee Bill Seitz has closed down the hearing that was exploring the possibility of setting up financial support for FirstEnergy’s two nuclear power plants in the state. Reportedly, FirstEnergy is continuing efforts to revive the discussion, which FirstEnergy Chief Executive Officer Chuck Jones said is “not a bailout.” World-nuclear-news.com

US President Donald Trump has told Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Bbc.com

Workers this weekend finished installing a protective cover over a partially-collapsed tunnel that contained radioactive waste on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the U.S. Department of Energy said Monday. Abcnews.go.com

 

A panel charged by the U.N. General Assembly has presented a draft that could lead to a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, although none of the countries that possess them participated in its writing. Washingtontimes.com

Westinghouse’s bankruptcy has jeopardized the fate of the only two nuclear plants to begin construction in the United States in about 30 years, SCANA’s Summer plant and the Vogtle reactors being built in Georgia by Southern Co.’s Georgia Power. Utilitydive.com

French state-controlled utility EDF on Monday denied a media report that it had a secret plan to push back by 25 years a target to reduce the share of nuclear power generation within France’s overall electricity mix. Reuters.com

In 1980, Oregon’s voters approved a moratorium on the financing and construction of nuclear power plants in Oregon until two conditions are met: First, that a permanent repository for extremely dangerous and long-lived high-level nuclear waste is established by the federal government and is licensed to operate and accept the waste from a proposed plant. And second, that voters approve the new, proposed plant in a statewide vote. Oregonlive.com

Authorities at Washington state’s Hanford nuclear waste site are investigating a possible leak after discovering radioactive material on a worker’s clothing. The discovery follows an incident early last week in which a site tunnel collapsed, sparking fears of radiation exposure. Cnn.com

The newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron is busy assembling his cabinet these days, but it looks like he made a misstep in his choice for the country’s new energy minister.  The-american-interest.com

Ohioans sent a letter to Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos imploring him to save imperiled two nuclear power plants by including them in his company’s green energy portfolio. Dailycaller.com

Jeremy Corbyn refused to promise Labour would keep all four Trident submarines on Saturday as the party’s nuclear stance descended into chaos. Telegraph.co.uk

       I have been blogging lately about the railroad tunnel cave in at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The ceiling of an old railroad tunnel containing highly radioactive railway cars and contaminated waste spontaneously collapsed. The U.S. Department of Energy had been warned for decades that the intense radiation was weakening the structure of the tunnel and that a cave in was inevitable.

        It turns out that Hanford is not the only national nuclear waste site that is having problems with underground nuclear waste storage. It has just been reported that there has been a cave in at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) during excavation of nuclear waste.

       The accident occurred in the nuclear landfill called the Subsurface Disposal Area (SDA) at the INL. The site contains radioactive waste from nuclear research at the INL during the 1950s. During the 1950s and 1960s, the site received nuclear waste from nuclear weapons research and development at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver, Colorado. Spent nuclear fuel was also sent to the SDA from commercial power reactors for decades.

        Eventually the State of Idaho sued the Federal government to stop the shipments of spent nuclear fuel and to clean up the SDA. The Federal government is bound by a legal agreement signed in 1995 to remove all transuranic waste from the INL. Transuranic wastes include plutonium, americium and other highly radioactive elements that lie above uranium in the periodic table and are man-made.

       An excavator was digging inside a large building at the ninety seven acre SDA when the side of the pit collapsed. The entire two acre excavation site is enclosed in a soft-sided building designed to prevent any escape of any radioactive materials. At the time of the collapse, the depth of the excavated pit was about twenty one feet.

       The operator of the excavator stayed inside his sealed cabin for an hour and a half while his crew made sure that it would be safe for him to climb out of the pit. The excavator cab has its own air supply and the rest of the crew working at the site have respirators to protect them from airborne radioactive particles.

       Ed Simpson is with Fluor Idaho, the contractor hired to clean up the Subsurface Disposal Area. He reported that there was no radiation released into the environment and that no one was injured in the accident. He said “Our crews had been exhuming waste for about 30 minutes when a portion of the pit wall where the excavator was operating sloughed off and the excavator slid into the pit. We’re working on a path to remove the excavator from the edge of the pit and basically make some additional enhancements to protect the operators and the excavators from this point forward.”

       Flour Idaho procedures call for excavators to never be closer to the side of the pit they are working on than two feet. The excavator that slid into the excavation was more than four feet from the edge of the pit before it collapsed so correct procedures were being followed. Fluor Idaho is studying the cause of the accident and may revise their procedures to stay further from the edge of a pit being excavated.

The manifestos of the three leading political parties in the UK contain few direct references to nuclear power. The documents were published this week as part of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat campaigning ahead of the general election on 8 June. Their campaigns have been dominated by the prospect of two years of Brexit talks with the European Union. World-nuclear-news.com

The Ohio Senate yesterday held its first hearing on legislation supporting the continued operation of the state’s nuclear power plants, while a House committee suspended its own hearings on the same legislation. Meanwhile, business and community leaders, conservationists and scientists have written to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos calling for nuclear to be included in the company’s definition of “renewables” to help keep Ohio’s nuclear power plants operating. World-nuclear-news.com

Voters in Switzerland on Sunday will have the option of banning nuclear power in the country and appear poised to do so, according to voter surveys. The binding resolution pits nuclear power against subsidies for renewable energy sources, leaving out the option that the two industries can compliment each other. Nuclearstreet.com

French utility EDF (EDF.PA) is set to gain unconditional approval from the EU competition authorities for its plan to acquire a controlling stake in ailing nuclear power engineering group Areva’s (AREVA.PA) reactor business, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday. Reuters.com

       One of the biggest problems with nuclear power is how to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel produced by nuclear power reactors. One solution is to reprocess the fuel to recover uranium and plutonium which can be used to make more nuclear fuel but can also be used to make nuclear weapons. Nuclear fuel reprocessing is complex and dangerous. Another solution is to store it in a deep geological repository which is a good solution except that there are only a few national repositories and this solution is not available for most of spent nuclear fuel.

       A temporary solution is to store the spent nuclear fuel in dry cask currently made of steel and concrete. This is a solution that has been adopted by some nuclear plant operators. The canisters can either be stored on the same site as the reactors or they can be transported to an interim storage facility. It is hoped that such canisters can last at least a hundred years by which time it is hoped that a better alternative for disposal will have been found and implemented.

        Holtec International is an equipment supplier for the nuclear power industry. They manufacture dry casks. They have plants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Orrville, Ohio and Camden New Jersey. In January of this year, Holtec announced a new fuel basket for fast track decommissioning. Fuel baskets hold the spent fuel assemblies in the dry casks.

        The new baskets are made of Metamic HT which is an aluminium boron carbide metal matrix composite. The baskets are welded with a technique called friction-stir welding. This type of welding is superior to conventional welding and does not have the distortion typical of a regular weld. The new baskets have over ten times the thermal conductivity of conventional stainless steel fuel baskets. This means that instead of waiting seven years for spent fuel to cool enough to be transported, the fuel will typically be cool enough in two and one half years. Holtec estimates that a closed nuclear power plant site could be restored to its original condition in about five and a half years.

       Ukraine currently has fifteen nuclear power reactors which provide about half of its electricity. They pay Russia about two hundred million dollars a year to remove, transport and reprocess their spent nuclear fuel.

       In 2004, Energoatom, the Ukrainian nuclear power agency, contracted with Holtec to build a Central Spent Fuel Storage Facility (CSFSF). The project was repeatedly stalled due to the political instability in Ukraine but work resumed in 2014 after things calmed down. In 2015, it was announced that the technology necessary to construct the dry casks would eventually be transferred to Ukraine’s Turboatom under a memorandum of understanding between the two companies and Energoatom. The contract was amended in 2016 to have the CSFSF built at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Initial plans call for the CSFSF to store spent nuclear fuel from three Ukrainian nuclear power plants: Khmelnitsky, Rovno and South Ukraine. Ultimately, Holtec will deliver ninety four dry cask storage systems to Ukraine by 2020.

        In early May of this year, Energoatom officials took a tour of Holtec’s Orrville plant. The President of Energoatom said “We’re very pleased with what we saw. The quality of the individual items of equipment that have already been manufactured by the American specialists for our order convincingly demonstrates that Ukraine will receive one of the most modern and safest storage facilities for used nuclear fuel in the world.”