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June 9, 2010

Environmental News Service

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, June 9, 2010 (ENS) – San Antonio is creating a research institute devoted to sustainable energy with a $50 million infusion of capital from the city-owned power utility, CPS Energy.

Located on the campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio, UTSA, the new institute will investigate sustainable technologies applicable to the local area.

The creation of the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute was announced Tuesday by Mayor Julian Castro together with the CPS Energy Board of Trustees and UTSA officials.

"This is a bold step," said Mayor Castro, who serves as an ex-officio member of the Board of Trustees. "Ratepayers will get a more efficient utility, the city will get the economic development value of robust research and development in San Antonio, and the university will spiral ever more quickly to Tier One status."

The agreement calls for CPS Energy to invest up to $50 million over 10 years in the institute. The first two years’ investment will be $3.5 million, from funds currently allocated to research and development.

Future funding will be developed by the scope of the projects defined by the partnership and subject to annual approval by the Board of Trustees.

"The strength of the agreement with UTSA comes from the partners working together to set the agenda," said Charles Foster, chairman of the Board of Trustees.

"CPS Energy gets localized research, and UTSA gets a real-world laboratory by partnering with the community-owned utility. We will need this kind of information as we change with the energy industry," Foster said. "If we can help to develop it in our own community, based on our customers and our weather, then the information better serves our customers."

CPS Energy officials called it a strategic move that will help the utility invest ratepayer money wisely as utilities across the country are working to implement sustainable technologies.

"As we make the transformation from a traditional utility to one that is focused on providing competitively priced power in a sustainable way, we will look to the institute to help us develop a secure smart grid and to understand how our customers will interact with that new technology," said CPS Energy Acting General Manager Jelynne LeBlanc Burley.

UTSA President Ricardo Romo said, "We welcome this partnership with CPS Energy as it will not only make San Antonio one of the nation’s leaders in sustainable energy innovation, but also provide a significant boost to UTSA in its steady growth toward a research intensive university of Tier One status."

Energy policy expert Les Shephard, who this year joined UTSA from Sandia National Laboratories, will head the new institute.

"In the last two years UTSA has been aggressively hiring experts in the area of green energy research and this new agreement will accelerate the acquisition of top quality talent to San Antonio," said Mauli Agrawal, dean of the College of Engineering at UTSA, who was instrumental in persuading Shephard to join the university.

Shephard says the wealth of energy resources present in Texas makes San Antonio an ideal place for energy-related research and development, attractive to experts from around the nation, and poised to become a green energy research center.

In addition to CPS Energy, the San Antonio Water System has a conservation track record, Shephard observed. Other local academic and research entities with green programs include the Southwest Research Institute, as well as the Mission Verde Center, a city partnership with the Alamo Colleges and Texas A&M University’s Texas Engineering Experiment Station.

The San Antonio-based Southwest Workers’ Union, which campaigns for clean energy and environmental justice, has concerns about the selection of Shephard to head the new research center.

Because the low income communities of color the union represents are often the most impacted by dirty energy production in San Antonio and across the United States, the union’s climate justice organizer Marisol Cortez says, "We welcome UTSA and CPS’s joint efforts to research and implement alternatives to the city’s historical reliance on polluting industries like coal, oil and gas, and nuclear energy."

"Also for this reason," Cortez told ENS, "we have serious concerns about UTSA’s choice of Les Shepard to head the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute, as the former vice president of the Energy, Security, and Defense Technologies Division at Sandia National Laboratories."

"Given the legacies of environmental racism promulgated by the nuclear industry – from the bombing of the Western Shoshone nation to the sickness and death caused by uranium mining in the Southwest – Shepard’s selection unfortunately suggests UTSA and CPS’s very corporatized, militaristic, and technocentric vision of ‘green energy,’" she said.

Cortez says the union is "hopeful that the University of Texas at San Antonio will also organize a center on campus for community-based environmental justice research, bringing together students, faculty, and community members in collaboration on solutions that are as socially just as they are environmentally sustainable."

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2010. All rights reserved.

06/12/2010

By BETSY BLANEY
Associated Press/Dallas Morning News

Residents worried about environmental damage from nuclear waste and those eager for a way to bring jobs to the region spoke Saturday to a commission considering a plan to bury nuclear material from 36 other states in West Texas.

Rose Gardner, who lives just over the state line in Eunice, N.M., told the commission she found the plan "very scary." Gardner lives about 5 miles from where material from nuclear power plants, hospitals, universities and research labs could be buried. She told the commission she worried about her water well and pointed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the kind of disaster that could happen.

"We all know it’s the human error" that can’t be predicted, said Gardner, 52. "I want you to remember, I’m just across the state line."

The plan calls for workers’ clothing, glass, metal and other materials used at nuclear facilities to be disposed of at a site 30 miles west of Andrews. Currently, facilities store the waste at their own sites.

Opponents say the huge dumping ground will pollute groundwater and harm the environment. Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, the company that runs the site, contends it’ll be safe, and many local residents applaud expansion as a way to bring more jobs and prosperity to the West Texas scrubland.

One longtime Andrews resident said the city did an independent study on the site’s geology and found it adequate.

"We believe in the project, the company," said Russell Shannon, who’s lived in Andrews for 28 years. "Don’t let rumor and innuendo overshadow fact and evidence."

Another resident said talk of Waste Control Specialists duping uninformed county residents was wrong and people understood the issues.

"We’re not a bunch of cowboys out here," private engineer and Andrews resident Chad Tompkins said.

A small group of protesters carried signs before the meeting at the town’s high school. One read, "Think about our future."

Most of the about 150 people who attended the hearing were residents of oil-rich Andrews County and nearly all wore green T-shirts the town’s chamber of commerce provided that read, "We Support WCS".

Proponents in Andrews outnumber those against the low-level dump site, which has not yet been built. Approval of its design and precise location is pending from the state environmental regulators.

The Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission, which includes six members from Texas and two from Vermont, had been scheduled to vote Saturday on a proposed rule that would have allowed 36 other states to bury low-level radioactive waste near Andrews. But two weeks ago, several commissioners, both from Vermont and Texas, expressed concern about hearing public comment and voting at the same meeting.

One said he was concerned a vote was being rushed.

"This is a big deal worthy of careful consideration," said Bob Gregory. "I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to discuss."

A date for the commission’s next meeting has not been scheduled.

June 10, 2010

Karen Hadden, LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American Statesman

Texas is at risk of becoming the nation’s radioactive waste dumping ground. The Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission is pushing forward a rule that essentially invites 36 states to dump radioactive waste in Texas, and possibly international sources as well. The commission should instead limit waste to that generated by the two compact states Texas and Vermont. Financial and safety risks are being ignored in the rush to approve the rule, which has no volume or curie limits for waste.

Everything except the fuel rods of nuclear reactors could go to Waste Controls Specialists’ Andrews County dump. Nuclear reactors vessels, “poison curtains” that absorb reactor core radioactivity, and sludges and resins could all go to West Texas. In fact, there is not a single radionuclide that cannot go to a so-called low-level radioactive waste dump.

Exposure to radioactive materials can cause cancer, radiation poisoning, genetic defects and even death, depending on the type of radioactive material and the level of exposure. Tritium, found in reactor waste, remains hazardous for up to 240 years. Strontium-90 remains hazardous for up to 560 years, and Iodine-129 remains hazardous for 320 million years. How can we ensure that these materials will not contaminate water and soil during vast stretches of time?

Existing radioactive waste dumps across the country have leaked, and billions of dollars are needed for cleanup. Radioactive waste going to the compact site would be disposed of in trenches and covered with dirt.

The Andrews County site is geologically inadequate. In a rare move, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality staff recommended denying the radioactive waste dump license. When it became clear that the license would be approved, three long-term employees resigned in protest. An August 2007 TCEQ staff memo says “groundwater is likely to intrude into the proposed disposal units and contact the waste from either or both of two water tables near the proposed facility.” State law requires that groundwater "not intrude into the waste." The water table may be closer than 14 feet from the bottom of trenches. How many and which aquifers could become contaminated if there were leaks? Can we afford to find out the hard way? What liabilities could Texas incur?

Radioactive waste could travel by rail and on interstate highways throughout Texas. No one has analyzed whether Texas’ emergency responders are fully trained and equipped to handle accidents involving radioactive waste. Some Texas counties have no full-time professional fire departments, including Andrews County, where the dump is located, and Somervell and Matagorda counties, where Comanche Peak and South Texas Project nuclear reactors are located.

There is no room at the planned dump for radioactive waste from across the country. The Waste Control Specialists’ compact site is licensed for 2.3 million cubic-feet of waste. Texas and Vermont will need three times this amount of space to dispose of five existing reactors when they’re decommissioned. Vermont Yankee’s cooling tower collapse and recent tritium leaks led to a decision not to renew the nuclear reactor’s license. Decommissioning may come sooner than expected.

Is the commission trying to create a "volume discount" rate for dumping radioactive waste on Texas? Who would profit? Only a private company headed by a billionaire, while taxpayers would bear financial and safety risks. Other compacts have excluded “out of compact” waste. There is no legal reason that the commission cannot close the gate and no excuse for not doing so. The commission should switch gears and limit the Andrews County site to only Texas and Vermont waste.

Fifteen state representatives have asked the commission to delay the radioactive waste import rule vote. They want time to analyze the increased financial risks for taxpayers and the health and safety risks of transporting radioactive waste from across the country through major cities and small Texas towns.

It’s not too late. Citizens can urge elected officials to insist on limiting the site to the compact states, Texas and Vermont. The Commission’s Import Rule vote should be halted until waste limits are assured and the Legislature has a chance to analyze financial, health and safety risks to Texans.

If you don’t want Texas to become the nation’s radioactive waste dump, the time to speak up is now.

Hadden is executive director of the SEED Coalition.

6/2/10

By REBECCA SMITH
Wall Street Journal

Three months after the U.S. cancelled a plan to build a vast nuclear- waste repository in Nevada, the country’s ad hoc atomic-storage policy is becoming clear in places like Wiscasset, Maine.

Wiscasset doesn’t even have a nuclear-energy plant anymore. The Maine Yankee facility was shuttered back in 1996 after developing problems too costly to fix, and the reactor was dismantled early this decade. What’s left is a bare field of 167 acres cleared and ready for development—except for one thing.

Left behind are 64 enormous steel-and-concrete casks that hold 542 metric tons of radioactive waste. Seventeen feet tall and 150 tons apiece, the casks are protected by razor wire, cameras and a security force.

Spent nuclear fuel being stored at the San Onofre plant in San Clemente, Calif.
Southern California Edison

Casks like these are the power industry’s biggest hot potatoes. Their presence at a defunct reactor site like Wiscasset’s underscores the intractability of the nuclear-waste problem confronting the power sector and the failure of U.S. policymakers to find a permanent solution. Meant for temporary storage next to energy plants, these containers are now serving as de facto indefinite repositories around America.

The Energy Department has been legally obligated to relieve nuclear plants of radioactive spent fuel since February 1998, but hasn’t lived up to that requirement, because, quite simply, the government hasn’t found a permanent place to put it.

Any hope of an end to this impasse evaporated in March when the Energy Department notified the federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board that it wanted to drop plans for a federal repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

That meant that after three decades and more than $10 billion in expenditures, the Energy Department was giving up on its only candidate for permanent storage.

The department said it was time for a complete reassessment of the waste problem, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu pointed out that Yucca Mountain wasn’t big enough to meet current and future needs.

Stephanie Mueller, Department of Energy spokeswoman, said in April that nuclear energy has "an important role to play…to cut carbon pol lution and create new clean-energy jobs." She says the president and the energy secretary are looking to a new blue ribbon commission to recommend "a safe, long-term solution" to the waste problem within 18 months.

Instead of moving waste to a geologic vault, such as a mountain enclosure like Yucca capable of locking it away for thousands of years, the foreseeable future now belongs to temporary holding vessels such as the steel-and-concrete casks at Maine Yankee. Each is licensed to contain waste for 20 years.

Power companies are likely to rely on casks even more in coming years. About 80% of reactor sites in the U.S. intend to move used fuel to casks because their storage pools are filling up.

In New Jersey, Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. has built dry storage in Lower Alloways Creek. The utility this week started filling four casks there with waste from its power plant in Hope Creek; in September, the Lower Alloways site will begin receiving waste from a nearby Salem plant. PSEG wants enough storage "to last us 60 years," says Joe Delmar, a spokesman.

Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co.
Wiscasset, Maine.

Utilities have filed more than 70 lawsuits against the government accusing it of breach of contract because it hasn’t taken the waste. So far, $1.3 billion has been paid out. The Department of Justice estimates the liability will top $12 billion if a waste facility is not opened by 2020.

The current state of affairs "does not bolster the credibility of our government to handle this matter competently," says Dale Klein, a former Republican chairman of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Meanwhile, utilities continue to contribute $770 million a year to a Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for a permanent repository that now isn’t even on the drawing board.

In April, a group of utilities sued the federal government, demanding that these storage fees be suspended. Ellen Ginsberg, general counsel of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group, says, "We don’t want to pay any more fees until the government has a waste plan."

So far, more than 800 casks have been filled and they sit tucked away behind fences on reactor sites. They hold 14,000 metric tons of waste, an amount that is steadily growing. There is an additional 49,000 metric tons being held in spent-fuel pools, used fuel’s first stop after it leaves reactors. Each year, another 2,000 metric tons of nuclear reactor waste is created.

This waste mostly consists of fuel rods that are used to make the heat that’s converted into electricity in nuclear power plants. It’s highly radioactive and must be handled carefully by robotic machines when it isn’t stored in special radiation-blocking containers.

PSEG Nuclear
Lower Alloways Creek, N.J.

When fuel is removed from the reactor core, it’s stored in pools for several years to allow it to become cooler and slightly less radioactive. After five years or so, it’s able to be moved to dry casks that are filled with inert gas. Sensors keep track of their temperature and watch for radioactive leaks.

But casks, originally intended for transporting waste and not permanently storing it, aren’t an ideal solution, say industry experts and advocacy groups. One major concern is the adequacy of security to protect them from potential attacks.

"For most people, it’s out of sight, out of mind," says Ray Shadis, spokesman for the New England Coalition. His group fears casks could become terrorism targets. The group is calling for security changes at reactor sites, including burying casks or camouflaging them so they aren’t "open to line-of-sight targeting by anyone with a shoulder-mounted rocket," says Mr. Shadis.

The NRC says these worries are overblown but, as it doesn’t disclose security plans, it’s hard for outsiders to assess the adequacy. Casks "are very robust containers," says Raymond Lorson, deputy director of the NRC’s Division of Spent Fuel and Transportation.

Nevertheless, if spent fuel were to hit the atmosphere, it would pose a risk for anyone exposed to the radiation. Depending on the dose, it could result in injury or death, scientists say.

Used fuel is placed in helium-filled containers with two- to five- inch thick steel walls, welded shut. Those canisters are then wrapped in two feet or more of steel-reinforced concrete. Mr. Lorson says the NRC has conducted studies of "severe events"—which he won’t describe—and judged the casks hardy.

Cask makers say their products can withstand a direct hit from a commercial jet, so long as they aren’t hit by landing gear. The rest of the plane crumples on impact.

Even so, some utilities have taken steps to address safety. Entergy Corp., the owner of several nuclear plants, has erected an earthen mound to block visibility of its storage area at its Vermont Yankee plant.

Meanwhile, officials are considering extending the working lives of casks.

Nobody really knows how long casks can keep radioactive waste safely isolated, but casks are licensed for 20 years. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission now is considering upping the basic license to 40 years and allowing a 20-year extension. Fearing that 60 years may not be enough, the NRC recently asked staff to think about how utilities could manage waste safely for up to 120 years.

It would have been impossible to predict, 20 years ago, that dry casks would become so important.

In the 1960s, when the first commercial reactors were built, spent fuel pools were small because plant operators thought the federal government soon would relieve utilities of waste. A reprocessing plant that was to have taken used fuel and turned it back into useful fuel opened up in West Valley, N.Y., in 1966.

Then India conducted a nuclear weapons test in 1974, and reprocessing fell out of favor due to fears it could produce weapons- grade plutonium that might fall into dangerous hands.

In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which proposed the creation of two waste repositories, one in the eastern part of the U.S. and one in the west. The energy department looked at nine sites before culling the list to three, all in the west, a few years later.

By the mid 1980s, utilities started to store waste in casks while they waited for a federal solution.

Yet, by the end of the decade, the political situation had changed and the energy department was focused exclusively on sparsely populated Nevada for a waste repository.

The decision "eliminated a lot of the political opposition" elsewhere, says Mark Holt, a researcher for the Congressional Research Service.

With a storage solution approaching, utilities began paying money into a fund that was expected to cover transportation and storage costs.

Not surprisingly, opposition to Yucca Mountain erupted in Nevada, where politicians and residents complained they didn’t want their state to become the nation’s nuclear dumping ground.

"It reminded us of a painful episode of above-ground weapons testing when they told us it was absolutely safe to drop bombs 60 miles from Las Vegas. Just bring the kids inside and hose down the car, afterward," says Richard H. Bryan, former Democratic governor and U.S. senator for Nevada.

As time passed, utilities began to explore legal alternatives. Meanwhile, the NRC approved several designs for storage casks and the special storage areas that would hold them.

At the defunct Rancho Seco nuclear site in California, 21 casks hold waste that was supposed to have been removed by 2008.

Last December, the operator won a $53 million judgment against the U.S. government for storage costs from 1998 to 2003, although it hasn’t received a dime yet. The Energy Department has challenged the payment on the grounds that Rancho Seco’s operator, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, spent too much on the facility.

Einar Ronningen, superintendent of the Rancho Seco assets, says the utility is tired of the hassle. "We’d really like to be out of the nuclear business," he says, since all that’s left is the waste. "It continues to cost us millions of dollars a year to manage this site."

In March, the Obama administration moved in a direction long sought by Nevada officials. Mr. Chu, the energy secretary, said that, in effect, one of Yucca Mountain’s problems was that it was too small. It was only going to be licensed to hold 70,000 metric tons of waste and the power industry already is storing nearly 65,000 metric tons. In other words, it wouldn’t have been able to meet the needs of the next wave of plants, if they’re built.

At its first meeting, Mr. Chu urged the blue ribbon panel to consider a full array of options, including fuel reprocessing or construction of so-called fast reactors that burn the waste of conventional reactors.

With no hope for imminent relief, utilities are fending for themselves.

Southern California Edison once operated three reactors at the San Onofre site on the Pacific Ocean near San Clemente, Calif. It tore down the oldest in 1992, moved the waste to dry storage, and soon will seek license extensions for the two remaining units.

On a warm spring day, Ross Ridenoure, chief nuclear officer for SoCal Edison, gestures to the casks and notes that the largely empty pad offers "enough room for all the storage we’ll ever need." It’s reassuring, he says, just in case "there isn’t a federal solution for at least 20 years."

Write to Rebecca Smith at rebecca.smith@wsj.com

June 2, 2010

By Julie Patel
Orlando Sun Sentinel

The Public Service Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to require Florida Power & Light Co. to refund $13.9 million, including interest, to customers for costs related to a 2008 outage that left as many as 3 million Floridians without electricity.

That will offset fuel costs for customers next year by about 14 cents a month for those who use about 1,000 kilowatt hours.

About 950,000 Florida homes and businesses, including 596,000 FPL customers, lost power Feb. 26, 2008. The outage lasted several hours and was blamed on an FPL engineer, whose actions accidentally triggered the blackout. The incident tripped off two nuclear units at the Turkey Point plant near Miami, as they are designed to do for safety reasons.

FPL officials had agreed to give customers credit for $2 million in costs for replacement power after the first eight hours of the outage. But they argued that the company should not be responsible for covering millions more for replacement power during the time two nuclear generators were down — 158 hours and 107 hours. They said that would effectively punish the company for investing in nuclear power — a clean, reliable energy supply that does not depend on fossil fuels.

FPL spokesman Mayco Villafana said utility regrets the inconvenience caused to customers by the outage but "singling out nuclear outages … is neither constructive nor appropriate, particularly at a time when state and federal leaders are attempting to remove impediments to the construction of new nuclear plants."

The Office of Public Counsel, the state’s advocate for utility customers, disagreed. It recommended customers receive a $15.9 million refund because they had no control over the outage and they pay for the high cost of nuclear plants, including profits on them.

PSC staffers recommended FPL pay nearly $14 million, including interest and costs accrued when the nuclear generators were down. But they had said FPL should be allowed to charge customers for costs during 27 hours when the utility was making repairs required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on one of the nuclear generators.

Federal regulators announced in October that FPL will have to pay a $25 million fine for the blackout. FPL did not admit any wrongdoing but agreed to pay the fine to resolve the issue. In 2008, the commission ordered FPL to refund customers $6 million for another blackout, which was blamed on a utility contractor.

Julie Patel can be reached at 954-356-4667 or jpatel(at)SunSentinel.com.