After thousands of people took to the streets of the eastern city of Lianyungang to protest the prospect of a nuclear-fuel-recycling plant there—drawing a warning from Communist officials—the local government said is temporarily suspending site-selection work. wsj.com

A recently discovered cover-up of a mishap in a nuclear power plant about 200km west of Hong Kong has triggered concerns over a shortage of nuclear technicians that may threaten the safety of the plants, industry insiders said. scmp.com

The future of nuclear power generation in Europe, North America and most of the developed world is being decided on an English coastal headland called Hinkley Point. theglobeandmail.com

When the state of New York moved last December to require utility companies to provide 50% of their power through renewable sources by 2030, questions about nuclear power naturally arose. Six nuclear reactors at four facilities currently provide more than 30% of the state’s electricity — and more than half of its low-carbon source. Four of those plants were at risk of closure owing to simple economics: they have not been able to compete with cheap natural gas. nature.com

Part One of Two Parts:

       One of the biggest problems with nuclear power is what to do with all the spent nuclear fuel that has been piling up for decades. When spent fuel is removed from a reactor, it is put in the cooling pool for a few years to allow the most intense radiation to dissipate. The pools are filling up at the hundred nuclear reactors in the U.S. and, if the spent fuel cannot be removed from the pools, some reactors may have to close. There is a temporary storage system called dry cask storage in which spent fuel assemblies are placed in concrete and steel containers at the reactor site or other sites. Current dry casks are not adequate because they do not monitor the buildup of gases that might explode.

      The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA) stated that a geological repository was the best solution for disposing of spent nuclear fuel in a permanent underground geological repository where they will be no threat for thousands of years. The NWPA established guidelines for the selection of a site for a repository and procedures for licensing and construction.  The Department of Energy began collecting fees from the nuclear power industry for the storage of spent nuclear fuel that was supposed to begin in 1998.

       In 1987, a salt mine under Yucca Mountain in Nevada was selected as a possible site and detailed studies through the 1990s were conducted. In 2002, the DoE confirmed that Yucca Mountain was an acceptable site for a repository. Over the objections of officials and citizens of Nevada, the Bush administration moved forward with the preparation of a license application for the site with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. After six years of dealing with many technical, regulatory and legal problems, the license application was submitted in mid 2008.

        When Barack Obama was elected President in late 2008, he worked with Arizona Senator Harry Reid during 2009 to cancel the Yucca Mountain project. Part of the reason was political but part of the reason was that analyses raised the question of the possibility of ground water penetrating the repository. The project was official cancelled in 2010 and the DoE official withdrew its application from the NRC.      

      In August of 2013, the Federal Court of Appeals for The District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the NRC was legally bound to continue its review of the license for Yucca Mountain unless Congress intervened or allocated funds for the review ran out. Work that remained to be done included that completion of a final report on environmental and technical issues at Yucca Mountain. The last Safety Evaluation Report (SER) which was the final of five volumes of the NRC license review was completed and issued in January of 2015. The conclusion of the NRC review was that Yucca Mountain did satisfy all requirements for a geologically safe spent nuclear fuel repository. The report said that the repository should be able to safely isolate spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste for up to one million years.

      In March of 2015, the NRC Chairman told the U.S. Senate that an addition three hundred and thirty million dollars would be required in order to complete the Yucca Mountain used fuel repository construction licensing process. Work that remained included settling issues of the ownership and control of land around Yucca Mountain, the water rights in the area and a required environmental impact statement. The last SER also added fourteen conditions to the construction authorization. These conditions would require alterations in the design of the repository.

Please read Part Two

Yucca Mountain cutaway diagram:

 

China has a clear message for Britain: Dump a joint nuclear power project and you’ll pay the price. cnn.com

The High Court of Paris on 5 August rejected a request by EDF’s Central Works Council to suspend the final investment decision for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant project in the UK. Meanwhile, China’s ambassador to the UK has called for the UK government to make a prompt decision on the project. world-nuclear-news.org

Chinese officials are cracking down on protests over a nuclear-fuel-recycling project that has also raised alarms from the U.S. government. wsj.com

Exelon is to assume ownership and operation of Entergy’s James A Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant in upstate New York after the two companies reached an agreement worth $110 million following the state’s adoption of a Clean Energy Standard (CES) supporting the continued operation of nuclear capacity. world-nuclear-news.org

       I have blogged about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico before. The nuclear weapons waste facility is located in an old salt mine. It has been operating for over fifteen years and the operators have gotten sloppy. The are huge rooms that have been hollowed out and filled with barrels of waste from nuclear weapons research and development. When the rooms were filled, they were supposed to be sealed with thick concrete and steel doors. As time went by, the operators decided that steel doors were sufficient. Eventually, they dispensed with the doors altogether.

      Back in early 2014, there was an accident at the facility. A barrel of waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory exploded and released radioactive materials into one of the rooms that should have been sealed but wasn’t. The filtration system failed and particles of plutonium and americium were detected twenty miles from the facility. It turned out that the barrel exploded because at the LANL they changed the absorbent material in the barrel from inorganic to organic. Gases were generated which resulted in the explosion.

      When records were checked it turned out the record keeping had also gotten sloppy. The exact contents of the barrels in the room where the explosion occured were not listed in detail as required by procedural guidelines. They were able to ascertain that there were about seventy more barrels in the room that had the new absorbent and were at risk for exploding. Time had to passed in order for the room to cool off enough for repairs to be undertaken.

      While repairs were being made, the storage facility was closed. This resulted in a back log of barrels left at Los Alamos National Laboratory at risk for exploding. More barrels were sent to a low-level nuclear waste repository in Texas where they were monitored but not enclosed sufficiently to prevent the release of more radioactive materials if any of those barrels exploded.

     The Department of Energy promised that the facility would be open back in March of 2016. An audit by the GAO says that the DoE knew when they made that promise that there was less than a one percent chance that they would be able to meet it. Pressure to repair the facility quickly led to poor safety standards for the recovery work. In 2015, the DoE admitted that they would not have the WIPP repairs done before December of 2016 at the soonest. As a result of errors and incompetence in the repair process, there has been nine month delay and an increased cost of over sixty four million dollars. The total estimate for clean up and additional operating costs at the WIPP is now over three hundred million dollars.

       Skeptics are concerned, given what has happened to date, that the WIPP will not be able to open by December. If it does not open, further delays in the cleanup of contaminated sites will add millions of dollars to the ultimate cost.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has completed its final safety evaluation report (SER) for combined licenses for two proposed nuclear power units at the William States Lee III site. world-nuclear-news.org

Bolivia’s Nuclear Energy Agency (ABEN) and Russian nuclear power corporation Rosatom have signed contracts that officially launches the construction of a $300 million nuclear research and technology center that will advance Bolivia’s nuclear power ambitions. nuclearstreet.com

A $400 million cash payment by the U.S. to Iran early this year, a step toward resolving a dispute over a decades-old arms deal, wasn’t related to nuclear diplomacy occurring around the same time, a senior Iranian official said Monday. wsj.com

A recent editorial supports the decision by the PSC to ratify Gov. Cuomo’s Clean Energy Standard — particularly the State’s goal of achieving a 50 percent mix of New York’s electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030. syracuse.com

 

 

 

 

Pyongyang has accused Washington of aligning its nuclear forces closer to North Korea to increase its chances of conducting a pre-emptive strike, as Pacific Air Forces dispatched speedy and low-flying B-1B bombers to Guam for the first time in 10 years. rt.com

Eskom on Sunday defended its, and the government’s, controversial ambitions for nuclear power generation. “Recent global developments show that the world is increasingly moving towards nuclear power and that South Africa is on the correct path with its nuclear aspirations,” the parastatal said in a statement. iol.co.za

Despite heavy humidity and a light rain, antiwar activists gathered in the town center of Arlington, VA Saturday morning to protest nuclear weapons and commemorate the 71st anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. bostonglobe.com

On Monday, the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced the final development phase of the upgraded airborne nuclear bomb B61-12 prior to production, the first version of which is to be completed by 2020; earlier reports suggested that 20 of these modernized bombs are destined for Europe as a possible deterrent against Russia. globalresearch.com