One of the concerns over nuclear power that I keep returning to is the incompetence and malpractice of corporations that are members of the nuclear industry. Over and over again, major nuclear corporations have been caught cheating on safety practices, equipment maintenance, construction standards, regulatory requirements, etc. on nuclear projects. Recently, Areva, a French-owned company that is a big player in the global nuclear industry was caught falsifying quality control reports on nuclear plant components from a foundry that it owns.

        CB&I Areva MOX is a joint venture of Chicago Iron & Steel and Areva. For the past sixteen years, CB&I Areva MOX (CAM) has been working on a contract in the U.S. for the DoE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).  CAM was retained to design, build and operate a facility near the Savannah River in Aiken, S.C. The purpose of the new facility is to combine weapons-grade plutonium and uranium into mixed-oxide nuclear (MOX) fuel for U.S. nuclear power reactors. The project is way behind schedule and way over budget. The work of CAM has been found to be “unsatisfactory” by the United States Department of Energy.

        In December of 2016, NNSA completed a project evaluation for the Savannah MOX plant. The evaluation says that CAM made “misleading” and “inaccurate” claims about the state of the project. CAM claimed that the project was seventy percent complete. However, a separate September 2016 report from the U.S. DoE says that the project is only twenty-eight percent complete. In their evaluation, NNSA said, “The contractor was unable to balance project technical baseline requirements with other elements of project performance, such as cost and schedule. The contractor lacked the fiduciary will to plan and execute work to fully benefit the project and taxpayer.”

      Tom Clements is one of the project’s harshest critics. He is director of the Savannah River Watch organization. He said that the NNSA evaluation was “devastating.” And added that he has “never seen an assessment like that. It all but calls them liars”

       The Savannah MOX project was a result of an agreement between Russia and the U.S. to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons by using the plutonium from dismantled warheads to create fuel for nuclear power reactors. Critics of the project say that the technology of using weapons-grade plutonium to make fuel is expensive and it does not eliminate the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation which was part of the original justification.

        The Savannah MOX project was originally budgeted at six hundred and twenty million in 1999 with a completion date in 2006. It is still at least a decade away from completion and the estimated cost has risen to seventeen billion dollars. It would have to be budgeted at a billion dollars a year at the least in order to be finished.

      South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is one of the fiercest champions of the Savanna MOX project which brings millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs to his state. He accused Obama of failing to honor the agreement with Russia and even held up the confirmation of Ernest Moniz as Obama’s Secretary of Energy over the fate of the project. Last October, Russia withdrew from the agreement to convert weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel.

       In President Obama’s proposed 2017 budget, he suggested that the Savannah MOX project be canceled. He requested cutting spending on the project from three hundred and forty-five million dollars to two hundred and seventy-five million dollars as the project was being wound down. In its place, Obama proposed a dilute and dispose process for dealing with the weapons-grade plutonium from dismantled U.S. nuclear warheads. With the change in Presidential administration that took place on  January 20, 2017, the fate of the Savannah MOX project is uncertain.

 

UK trade minister Liam Fox today reassured the country’s international partners that it remains committed to its nuclear power program as it leaves the Euratom Treaty. The government announced last month the UK intends to leave the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in explanatory notes to a bill it published authorizing Brexit. world-nuclear-news.org

Russia and Tajikistan yesterday signed an agreement on cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the Central Asian country. Tajikistan is mineral-rich and has some uranium deposits, but most of its electricity is hydroelectric, with a small part sourced from natural gas. world-nuclear-news.org

A top nuclear power industry lawyer in Britain said that international trade in nuclear fuel necessary to keep the country’s nuclear power plants operating could come to a standstill if the country severs ties with the Euratom treaty. nuclearstreet.com

The University of Manchester is to lead a consortium to build the next generation of robots that are more durable and perceptive for use in nuclear sites. phys.org

 

 

       The handling and disposal of nuclear waste is an enormous problem in the U.S. In addition to eighty thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, there is also a significant quantity of nuclear waste left over from the development of nuclear weapons. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation has a great deal of contamination in the soil where radioactive liquids were just dumped into the dirt. There are also a hundred and seventy-seven buried tanks containing fifty-six million gallons of nuclear and other toxic materials. Some of those tanks are leaking. The U.S. Department of Energy is constructing a waste treatment plant which will mix the waste with powder and melt the mixture into glass logs for burial.

      Technetium is a chemical element designated by the symbol “Tc” and an atomic number of 43. It is a shiny gray metal with properties similar to manganese. It is the lightest element which has only radioactive isotopes. Tc is produced naturally by fission of uranium or neutron capture by molybdenum. It is rare in nature and most existing Tc synthesized. It is used in industrial, chemical, biological and medical applications.

       Tc-99 is produced during the manufacture of nuclear weapons. It is estimated that there are about two thousand pounds of Tc-99 in the buried tanks at Hanford. Tc-99 dissolves easily in water and can be spread through the environment by groundwater. It is considered one of the major problems with cleanup at Hanford, especially in view of the leaking tanks. However, there is a problem with immobilizing the Tc-99 in the glass logs because some of the Tc-99 fed into the melter volatilizes and has to be captured and recycled back to the melter.

      Researchers at Washington State University led by John McCloy, associate professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and chemistry graduate student Jamie Weaver are studying the chemistry of Tc-99. The research was carried out at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Staff at PNNL,  the Office of River Protection and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated.

       Technetium-99 compounds are hard to work with and earlier research utilized other similar compounds in their laboratory tests. However, the researchers found that Tc-99 does not behave exactly like the substitute compounds. Especially compounds of sodium and technetium have some surprising behaviors involving solubility and vaporization which are relevant to their environmental impact.

       Understanding the details of the chemical behavior of dangerous radioactive isotopes such as Tc that are dangerous to the environment is critical to the cleanup at Hanford which is so far behind schedule and underfunded that the state of Washington has filed lawsuits to force the Department of Energy to commit to specific deadlines for completion of the cleanup.

Technetium:

 

Public Service Enterprise Group is still talking with New Jersey state lawmakers about financial incentives for its fleet of nuclear power plants, but it is not saying much about the discussions, although it is raising the prospect of the units closing. njspotlight.com

More U.S. nuclear reactors will close for refueling this spring than at any time in nearly two decades creating a power shortage that may lift beaten-down natural gas. bloomberg.com

Waste and water services giant Veolia has created a business unit that will focus on nuclear facility cleanup and radioactive waste treatment. environmentalleader.com

Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority started community dialogue on the country’s first nuclear power plant in Dabaa, Matrouh governorate on Saturday. egyptindependent.com

Credits in New York to keep nuclear generation online will not lower carbon emissions. utilitydive.com

With the world’s leading nuclear corporations facing bankruptcy due to ever escalating costs, ‘unconstructable‘ reactor designs and financing risks, there’s an easy way to finance the UK’s new nuclear power stations, writes David Toke: pin the cost onto taxpayers. As for schools, hospitals, pensions, housing, social care and other public services, who needs ’em? theecologist.org

The Treasury is facing calls to pour billions of pounds into a string of troubled new nuclear projects which threaten the UK’s energy supplies. telegraph.co.uk

THE Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NNRA) has appealed to the Federal Government to ensure the payment of its indebtedness to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), lamenting that the debt has been a stumbling block to the progress of nuclear sector in Nigeria. tribuneonlineng.com

Holtec International has won a contract for the turnkey supply of a dry cask storage facility at the Krško nuclear power plant in Slovenia. The value of the contract was not disclosed. world-nuclear-news.org

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued an operating licence to AUC LLC for the Reno Creek in-situ leach (ISL) uranium project in Campbell County, Wyoming. world-nuclear-news.org

South Africa’s stop-start nuclear energy project is on the move again, but it will have to overcome ferocious opposition from civic activists and even government officials. thenational.ae

AS uranium producers welcome the rally in the price of the nuclear fuel from its 12-year lows in December, a recent $US6.3 billion writedown of Toshiba’s nuclear reactor construction business — which has the Japanese company teetering on the verge of bankruptcy — is testament to the one big challenge that may stymie a renewed push for nuclear power in developed economies: cost. theaustralian.com.au