A UN court has thrown out cases brought by the Marshall Islands against the UK and others for allegedly failing to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. bbc.com

Japan has established a new organization tasked with managing its reprocessing of used fuel, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has announced. In a statement on 3 October, the ministry said the Nuclear Reprocessing Organization of Japan will be funded by the country’s power utilities to cover the cost of the reprocessing work. This is a mandatory requirement that replaces the previous expectation that utilities would voluntarily contribute to the reprocessing program. world-nuclear-news.org

British steelworkers have been betrayed, a union boss claims, as it was reported that a foreign firm will supply metal for the new fleet of nuclear submarines. telegraph.co.uk

Russia increased its deployed nuclear warheads over the past six months under a strategic arms reduction treaty as U.S. nuclear warhead stocks declined sharply, according to the State Department. During the same period, the United States cut its deployed nuclear warheads by 114, increasing the disparity between the two nuclear powers. freebeacon.com

       Vitrification is a process of combining radioactive materials with other substances including silicon to yield a glass log that can be permanently disposed of in a geological repository, insuring that the radioactive materials will not be leached out of the log by ground water. If vitrification is being used to dispose of spent nuclear fuel, one of the first steps is to dissolve the cladding materials of the fuel rods. This step often utilizes sulfuric acid or H2SO₄. The bisulfate ion or HSO₄ can remain in the solution and cause problems with further stages of processing.

       Researchers at Indiana University at Bloomington created a cyanostar macrocycle. A macrocycle is a ring of atoms that contains eight or more. The cyanostar is a five sided or star shaped molecule that has an affinity for anions or negatively charged molecular fragments or ions. These cyanostar macrocycles are easy to synthesize and were developed because they had potential use in trapping various types of pollutants inside the ring including borates, chlorates and phosphates.

       The Indiana researchers have discovered a “supermolecule” that may be able to aid in the removal of bisulfate from the vitrification solution. The supermolecule is a combination of two anions or monomers of bisulfate that form what is called a dimer.  Monomers are molecules that can be bound with identical monomers to form a chain that is referred to as a polymer or “many monomers”. When only two monomers are joined, it is called a dimer or “two monomers.”

       Dimers composed of two anions were thought to be impossible because the two negative ions should repel each other according to standard theories of electrochemistry. However, there are short range attractions that make the combination possible because they overcome the expected long range repulsion between the two negatively charged ions.

         Normally, monomers bond with what is called a covalent bond. This is created when an electron from each of the bonding monomers interact to create the bond. However the new supermolecular found by the researchers is based on many weak non-covalent bonds connecting two monomers. The bisulfate monomers mentioned above connect via a self-complementary, anti-electrostatic hydrogen bond.

        The Indiana researchers were trying to trap a single bisulfate monomer inside the cyanostar as proof of concept for using the cyanostar to capture bisulfate left over from sulfuric acid in processing spend nuclear fuel for disposal. They were surprised to find two bisulfate monomers inside each ring during their test. Trapping a dimer made of two bisulfate monomers inside each ring would be twice as effective as they were expecting for bisulfate removal from a vitrification solution. Vitrification is a promising method of encapsulating spent nuclear fuel waste for disposal and any improvement in the process is welcome.

        These cyanostar macrocycles will also be able to remove harmful phosphates, borates and chlorates from the environment. Phosphates from fertilizers run off land into bodies of water and cause environmental havoc by spawning massive algae blooms and killing huge numbers of fish.

Artist’s concept of cyanostar:

 

 

 

Electricity generated by nuclear power plants will jump from 2.6 trillion kilowatt hours to 4.5 trillion kilowatt hours in 2040, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), said the agency’s Annual Energy Outlook 2016 report released on Monday. nuclearstreet.com

U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Company said that it had reached an agreement with Ukraine’s National Nuclear Energy Generating Company, NAEK Energoatom, to strengthen ties in order to “enhance the safety and operations of Ukraine’s nuclear power fleet.” nuclearstreet.com

Canada’s nuclear-safety regulator is facing criticism from the country’s environmental watchdog for failing to prove it conducted adequate power-plant inspections and falling short on staffing levels. wsj.com

The nuclear industry is gradually recovering from its post-Fukushima slump, but excess capacity keeps uranium prices at record lows, forcing mining companies to mothball mines, slice costs and cut debt as they struggle to survive. reuters.com

 

       It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I am no fan of nuclear power. I think it has many more negatives than even fossil fuels which I also don’t like. It has saddened me to hear long time environmentalists pushing nuclear power as a good way to mitigate climate changes. Nuclear power is said to be carbon free but it is not. There is more carbon dioxide released in the construction, fueling, and decommissioning of a nuclear power plant over its lifetime than hydro, solar, wind or geothermal power plants. Another major issue with nuclear power is the fact that it takes years that we do not have to plan, license and construct a nuclear power plant. I have always said that sustainable alternative energy sources are a far better way to fight climate change. So how is alternative energy doing in competition with nuclear power?

       Two new reports from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) offer evidence that nuclear power is falling behind renewable energy sources in the race to replace fossil fuels.

        A British thermal unit (Btu) is the amount of energy that must be expended to raise the temperature of a one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. EIA latest Monthly Energy Review says that over the last six months biofuels, biomass, geothermal, hydropower,   solar and wind power have provided about five and one quarter quadrillion Btus of domestic energy production. ( A quadrillion is a one followed by fifteen zeros or a million billion.) Nuclear power provided four and two tenths quadrillion Btus. Thus alternative sources provided twenty five percent more Btus than nuclear sources. This energy provides heat, hot water and electricity for the U.S.

       FERC’s Energy Infrastructure Update says that the total installed U.S. capacity for hydropower, wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal in terms of sources producing more than one megawatt is about two hundred and sixteen gigawatts, or a little over eighteen percent of national capacity. Nuclear power’s installed capacity is a little over one hundred and seven gigawatts. This represents a little over nine percent. By this measure, these alternative sources have more than double the capacity of nuclear power in the U.S.

      In terms of actual generation of electricity, in the past seven months nuclear power generated about twenty percent of the electricity in the U.S. as opposed to about fifteen percent of the electricity in the U.S. provided by alternative energy. However, the share of electricity produced by nuclear power has remained about the same over the last ten years while alternative sources have grown by more than fifty percent and are projected to maintain strong growth in the future.

      It is possible that if trends continue, within five years alternative sources of energy could surpass nuclear power in terms of actual energy generation. The nuclear industry is working hard to obtain government subsidies in order to continue to compete in the marketplace with other cheaper alternative sources of energy. Such subsidies are a very bad idea and waste of public money. Let the market decide if nuclear power lives or dies.

The United States and South Korea are destined to “pay the price” for their decision to deploy an advanced missile defense system which will inevitably prompt a “counter attack”, China’s top newspaper said on Saturday. yahoo.com

The long goodbye: World’s first nuclear aircraft carrier going dark dailypress.com

Russia holds massive nuclear war exercise involving 40MILLION people as military tensions rise with US. thesun.co.uk

Rolls-Royce will in the “coming weeks” announce the consortium it has formed to launch a small modular reactor in the UK, a spokesman for the British company told World Nuclear News today. The consortium could provide a £100 billion ($1.28 billion) boost to the UK economy because the companies involved are either UK-owned or have a strong UK presence, the spokesman added. world-nuclear-news.org

 

 

       The Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station is located on the Deerfield River in the town of Rowe, Massachusetts. The plant operated from 1960 to 1992 and was shut down permanently in February 29 of 1992. The plant was demolished and decommissioned in 2007. There are still twenty seven tons of high-level radioactive waste in the form of spent nuclear fuel  in twelve dry casks at the site which require twenty four hour security.

       The economies of the communities around the plant used to benefit from the operating plant but that ended in 1992. However, the communities are still affected by the presence of the nuclear waste in the casks on the site.

      A U.S. Representative and a state senator recently toured the site in support of legislation being introduced in Congress to compensate local communities which have to host nuclear waste. The “Interim Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Compensation Act” would authorize up to one hundred million dollars for 13 towns spread from Illinois to Maine.

       “The federal government is obligated to provide mitigation costs to communities such as Rowe, considering that the Department of Energy failed to remove the waste as promised,” said the state senator who is a Democrat.

        The Nuclear Waste Act of 1982 mandated that a permanent national geological repository for spent nuclear fuel be operational by 1999. The project schedule slipped for the Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada and, in 2011, the project was cancelled. Now it appears that there will not be any national repository until 2050 at the earliest. This leaves tons of spent nuclear fuel piling up in the cooling pools of reactors all over the country. The only current choice to relieve the crowding in the fuel pools is dry cask storage on site or at temporary remote facilities.

       Nuclear plant operators were required to pay into a fund to finance a national repository which was suppose to open by 1999. Some of these plant operators are successfully suing the U.S. government for return of the funds that they paid. Unfortunately, the fund which reached thirty two billion dollars cannot be used for dry cast storage which is the only choice at present.

       The town of Rowe has less than four hundred residents. When the Yankee Rowe plant was operational, the company that operated the plant paid for the town’s police, fire and emergency response budgets as well as significant property taxes. The cost of public services now falls on the town’s taxpayers.

       Now the company which pays millions of dollars for security of the nuclear waste stored at the site of the old plant agrees that something should be done to help the town bear its share of the costs associated with the waste. One solution might be a national temporary spent fuel storage facility such as the one proposed by Waste Control Specialists to take four hundred thousand tons of spent fuel waste in west Texas. Something must be done soon because two thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel waste are being created every year in the United States.

Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station:

China apprehends that India will deploy the 36 nuclear-capable Rafale fighter jets to be acquired from France in the border regions of China and Pakistan to enhance its deterrence capability, a media report here said.  economictimes.indiatimes.com

Federal regulators say they’ve found there was a “substantial potential” for an accident that could have injured workers at the Westinghouse nuclear fuel plant near Columbia. insurancejournal.com

U.K. Royal Navy officers returning from a three-month patrol on a nuclear submarine have been ordered to turn themselves in after devastating a bar and cinema in a drunken rampage. rt.com

Russian and Chinese presence in Latin America has recently increased, accompanied by a notable Iranian interest. Over the past few months, Iran has been trying to earn more military and economic gains from the continent located in the western hemisphere. Iran’s interest in countries abroad is not recent, but what is very new is its pursuit after nuclear manufactures. Latin American affairs experts have gone as far as labeling the case of the continent as that of a Trojan horse staged by Russians, Chinese and Iranians and placed at the United States’ proximity english.aawsat.com

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