Yesterday, UCS sent a letter to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chairman Stephen Burns urging the NRC to quickly issue new versions of two outdated security documents that play a critical role in defining how nuclear plants can be adequately protected against terrorist attacks. allthingsnuclear.org

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was ready to talk to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration about nuclear weapons and Syria, saying the two countries could together solve many of the world’s problems. reuter.com

The U.S. Department of Energy is likely to miss another deadline under its 1995 agreement to remove nuclear waste stored in Idaho, according to information from agency and state officials. kboi2.com

Trump is a pathologically self-absorbed man, seemingly unaware that other people exist other than as irritants to his whims. He clearly relishes power, and the ability to lay nuclear waste to whole civilizations is the ultimate power. chicagotri

       I have blogged before about problems with thermal pollution from the Florida Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station which is owned by Florida Power & Light (FPL) and is located at the southern tip of Florida on Biscayne Bay. FPL is planning on the construction of two additional reactors at Turkey Point to be completed by 2030.

       The Biscayne and the Floridian Aquifers are two big aquifers under Florida which serve as the sources for drinking water for millions of Floridians. The lower part of the Floridian aquifer is known as the Boulder Zone. Currently, the state of Florida uses the Boulder Zone to dispose of untreated liquid waste. Environmentalists criticize this practice because of reports that say that contents of the Boulder Zone may leak into drinking water sources for millions of Floridians.

        Now FPL has stated their intentions to pump water contaminated with radioactive materials into the Boulder Zone. The water would include water from cleaning the reactors and what is called “radwater” or radioactive water. FPL claims that there will be no impact on the environment from their plans.

      The Citizens Allied for Safe Energy (CASE) watchdog group filed a legal petition late last November with respect to the FPL plan for dumping in the Boulder Zone. They demanded that FPL hold a public hearing to discuss their plan. FPL claims that their waste water in the Boulder Zone will be “hermetically sealed” and safe. CASE disputes that there can be any such “hermetically sealed” section of the Boulder Zone and that the FPL plans are a serious threat to drinking water in the area.

       The CASE petition cites environmental studies and statements by FPL engineers that say that dangerous radioactive materials cesium-137, strontium-90 and tritium could leak from the Boulder Zone and migrate into the Biscayne Aquifer. The Floridian Aquifer is under the Biscayne Aquifer and it is under pressure. This can force water up into the Biscayne Aquifer that supplies water to millions of people in Florida.

       There are tectonic faults under Biscayne Bay where Turkey Point is located that extend under the aquifers. Geological studies have shown that if there are waste water injection sites near those faults, the soil in that area could provide a migration path upwards from the Boulder Zone low in the Floridian aquifer to the upper level of Floridian aquifer which provides drinking water to millions of Floridians.

        FPL claims that they will be carefully monitoring waste water injection for any sign of leakage. However, public trust in FPL is at a low ebb since lawsuits were filed over the leakage of waste water from the existing Turkey Point reactors into Biscayne Bay. FPL denied that there were leaks and refused to take responsibility for them which necessitated the lawsuits and resulted in a lot of negative publicity.

      The petition from CASE was thrown out by the NRC because they said that the petition was filed too late. CASE has vowed to keep on fighting against the injection of waste water from Turkey Point into the Boulder Zone of the Floridian Aquifer. Unfortunately, it will be difficult to stop the FPL plans because the Republican Party dominates Florida politics and FPL is one of the largest donors to Republican state legislators. 

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The European Commission has approved the restructuring of France’s Areva group, ruling that the French government’s plan to grant a capital injection of €4.5 billion ($4.8 billion) into Areva does not breech European Union (EU) state aid rules. world-nuclear-news.org

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has cleared two more plants for restart based on preliminary safety assessments, Kyushu Electric Company’s Genkai Units 3 and 4, but their restart is not likely until sometime this summer, media reports indicate. nuclearstreet.com

Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a world without nuclear weapons at the UN on Wednesday and urged a multilateral system based on equality among nations large and small. scmp.com

In an ironic twist, fracking has been cited as a prime reason for shutting down New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plant, as cheap natural gas eroded the economics of generating nuclear power in the region.  forbes.com

       I have often blogged about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. It is one of the most radioactively contaminated places on Earth as a result of the casual disposal of waste from the manufacture of nuclear weapons for the U.S. military. The old Soviet Union was even more careless with disposing of waste from its nuclear weapons manufacture that the U.S. I have blogged about some of their sites before including the Mayak nuclear facility near the town of Ozyorsk in the southern Ural Mountains of Russia. A lake named Lake Karachay near the Mayak facility was used as a nuclear garbage dump.

       The World-Watch Institute based in Washington D.C. has identified Lake Karachay as the most radioactively polluted place on Earth. The reactors at Mayak were optimized to produce plutonium with little thought given to environmental contamination and damage to human health. Lake Karachay was near the Mayak facility and was chosen for disposal of high-level nuclear waste that was too “hot” to store in the underground storage vats at the facility. Originally, the Lake was only supposed to be a temporary place to store the waste until it cooled sufficiently so that it could be moved in the vats under Mayak. However, it turned out that the waste was still too radioactive to be moved even after it been cooling in the Lake for awhile.

       Lake Karachay was used as a nuclear waste dump between 1951 and 1957. In 1957, some of the underground vats exploded because their cooling system failed. A huge amount of radioactive material was dispersed over the countryside in what is referred to as the Kyshtym disaster. Following the disaster, whole villages had to be evacuated permanently. Three billion curies of high-level waste were moved from Lake Karachay to deep wells at other sites after the disaster.

       It is estimated that the bottom of the lake consists of eleven feet of radioactive sludge. In the 1960s, there was a drought and the level of the lake dropped, exposing portions of the polluted lake bed. Radioactive dust from the dry lake bed was blown over a wide area. It is estimated that over half a million people were exposed to radioactive materials from the Lake bed.

       Between 1978 and 1986, hollow concrete blocks were dumped into the Lake to prevent the contaminated sediment in the bottom of the lake from shifting. The Lake was originally about five hundred and forty thousand square feet. By 1991, the lake had shrunk to about one hundred and sixty thousand square feet.

       In 1994, a report stated that over one billion gallons of contaminated water had leaked out of Lake Karachay and was spreading out south of the Lake at a rate of two hundred and sixty-two feet per year, threatening lakes and rivers in the area with contamination.

       The Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union may have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but the terrible legacy of radioactive pollution resulting from the manufacture of nuclear weapons during the Cold War continues to damage the environment and threaten public health in many areas of U.S. and the countries that once made up the Soviet Union.

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The government of Western Australia yesterday granted environmental approval to Cameco Australia’s proposed Yeelirrie uranium project, subject to conditions that include measures to mitigate risks to underground fauna. world-nuclear-news.org

Moscow has swatted down a proposal by President-elect Donald Trump on nuclear-arms reductions, less than a day after the suggestion became public.  thedailybeast.com

Jeremy Corbyn yesterday dropped his longstanding opposition to Britain’s civil nuclear power industry before a crucial by-election on the doorstep of Sellafield. thetimes.co.uk

Portugal has accused Spain of stockpiling nuclear waste close to its border without evaluating the environmental impact, in a complaint filed Monday with Brussels. thelocal.es

       I have often blogged about the huge Hinkley Point C (HPC) project to build a couple of nuclear power reactors in Britain. The reason I keep revisiting this project is that so many different problems with nuclear power are wrapped up in it. Financing, international involvement, substandard parts, national security, cost overruns, and other issues can be found in discussions of the project. Members of the British parliament have recently asked the Secretary of State for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to clarify some aspects of the financial arrangements for HPC.

        In 2015, the British government announced that they would provide about two and a half billion dollars of support in the form of a guarantee for the HPC through their Infrastructure UK program. The European Union approved of the grant the previous year on the grounds that it was a legitimate way for the U.K. to meet goals for low-carbon power generation. Strangely enough, despite the existence of the guarantee, EDF, the financially troubled French-owned utility that is building the reactors for HPC said that if they failed to fulfill the contract due to financial problems, they would not call on the guaranteed money for help. The members of Parliament are justifiably confused about why the guarantee even exists if it will never by exploited.

      Part of the HPC agreement says that if the price of electricity generated by HPC rises above an average “strike price” for electricity, then the government will step in and pay the difference, referred to as “top up” payments. If the price of electricity generated by HPC falls below an average “strike price” for electricity, then the difference will be refunded to the consumers. Customer will not pay anything until the HPC reactors are operational.

       Currently, the strike price for electricity in the agreement is set at about one hundred and eleven dollars per megawatt hour. If a planned reactor is built at Sizewell, the strike price will fall to about one hundred and seven dollars per megawatt hour. The agreement fixes the cost to consumers of electricity from new generating sources regardless of market price.

       The HPC agreement strike price takes inflation into account by being indexed to the Consumer Price Index. The members of Parliament asked whether the index could “move down in the event of negative inflation, as well as up at a time of rising inflation.” They were told that that would be checked as well as the question of whether the HPC contract could be moved to the Retail Price Index instead of the Consumer Price Index to better reflect market conditions.

        The members of Parliament also wanted to know more about the “top up” payments. There are big differences between the estimates of the government contract negotiators and the estimates of the National Audit Office (NAO). (“The NAO scrutinizes public spending for Parliament. Its public audit perspective helps Parliament hold the government to account and improve public services.”)

       The government representatives said that their estimate of between thirteen billion dollars and twenty-five billion dollars was based on the “Green Book” which is a standard way for the government to estimate the cost of projects. In contrast, the NAO estimate of thirty-six billion dollars was based on the cost of borrowing money for projects. In essence, the government contract representatives were saying that the two numbers had been arrived at by two different methodologies that were used for different purposes.

       Although the HPC project contracts have been signed and the project is moving forward, there are still a lot of unanswered questions that are causing fierce debate within the government.

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The Russian government has confirmed that its 2010 agreement with Ukraine on building a third and fourth reactor at the Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant has been cancelled. According to a statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website for legal information on 13 January, the intergovernmental agreement was terminated on 12 May last year. world-nuclear-news.org

France’s nuclear regulator, the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN), has approved the restart of nine of the 12 reactors affected by the carbon concentration anomaly in the steam generator channel heads manufactured by Japan Casting and Forging Corporation (JCFC). The approval, which followed ASN’s examination of the results of inspections and technical demonstrations provided by EDF for the 900 MWe reactors, was announced on 12 January. world-nuclear-news.org

A court ruling in Finland has opened the door for a flight of Finnish investors from the Fennovoima nuclear plant project that is slated for Pyhajoki on the Hanhikivi peninsula on the country’s west coast on the Gulf of Bothnia. nuclearstreet.com

An IAEA team of experts has started an Integrated Nuclear Infrastructure Review (INIR)mission in Ghana. The mission will last eight days and it will evaluate the status of major infrastructure issues against the Agency’s Milestones Approach for the introduction of nuclear power. These issues include legal and regulatory frameworks, nuclear safety and security, radioactive waste management, human resource development, stakeholder involvement, the capacity of the electrical grid and several others. The evaluation of its infrastructure status will help Ghana in making a knowledgeable decision for its nuclear power program. iaea.org